Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #549675 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
Nancy Watson is a follower of Dion Fortune and a student of England's foremost metaphysician Murry Hope. This text is aimed at readers of any spiritual persuasion, who want to learn how to practice magic safely and effectively on a solitary basis, and serves as a good introduction to magic. Watson discusses the principles that underlie magical practice to help readers create rituals to fit their own particular needs. Topics covered include affirmations, visualizations, spiritual practices, folk magic and ritual - stressing safety procedures and ethics to prevent magical experiments backfiring.

Customer Reviews

Excellent resource for putting magic to work in your life.
I found this book easy to read, understand, and use for practice. It is well written and gives easy guidence especially for those just beginning to explore magic. It is not limiting to one group or practice. This is a good feature for those who define their god or goddess slightly different from any other they have read or heard or seen. The author encourages the user to develop their own skills beyond mimicing those of others. She starts simply and leaves lots of room for expansion into complex spells and rituals. This book will especially touch those who are more logical and practical and doubt the powers of the universe. I have had a whole new world of happiness, power, and possibilities open up to me after completing this text. Harming none do thy will. Good Luck.

Amazing intro to magic. Highly recommended.
This is *the* book that got me started in magic. I had long been interested, but had never found a book that presented magic in a way that I could believe in. Watson does so.

Her method is to use an architectural metaphor for magic, dividing it into Spiritual, Mental, Emotional, and Physical planes; Spiritual magic deals with gods, Mental with thoughts, Emotional with feelings, and Physical with physically acting out ritual. One may work on one or many levels at once.

One of the best things about this book is that Watson fills it to the brim with autobiography. One gets far more about reading how a person discovered and used a technique in their life than from reading about the technique in the abstract.

Though Watson works out of a vaguely Golden Dawn-ish tradition, she is quite eclectic and encourages her readers to be. She makes the point that magic can be extremely simple -- nothing but writing down one's goal -- or extremely complex, and that a student of the occult should find for themselves what rituals, symbols, and gods they can work comfortably with.

Once again: an excellent work; I recommend it highly. Read it and it will give you a context for all the rest of the reading on magic you do.

P.S. Watson spells it correctly: "Magic," not "Magick."

A solid basis for any spiritual path
This is a wonderful book that covers what most other handbooks don't - Why magic does, and sometimes doesn't work. Instead of handing out a bunch of pre-packaged spells, this goes into the mechanics of what goes into a good ritual, and most importantly, how to practice safely. It was my first book, and I would highly recommend it for anyone new to spiritualism, as it does not pick any one path over another. Rather it gives good guidelines for finding the path that's right for the reader. A definate jewel amidst the morass of fluff-bunny garbage on the occult bookshelves!