Outside the Charmed Circle
Hello, beautiful creatures. Catchy title up there, huh? I was going for a tongue-in-cheek, Buzzfeed-meets-Cosmo vibe. Yeah, I realize that’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes, but it amuses me, and if we can’t laugh a little, we might as well pack up our ritual gear and go catch a movie or something. (Hey, Black Panther opens this weekend!) But, really enough screwing around, pun intended. We’ve defined sex, magic, and sex magic, and discussed a few tangential-but-relevant issues related to each. It’s time to get down to brass tacks. After all, what’s the point of magic you don’t actually do?
First, though, I should apologize in advance for any misapprehensions the title might give. When I say “easy,” what I meant was that these steps are easy to outline. In practice, they may be much more difficult, depending on who you are and what your background has been. Sex magic is powerful, empowering, and downright fun, but like all magic, it’s also work. Sometimes that work is damned difficult, and sometimes it’s “chop wood, carry water.”
So, without further ado, here are the Three Easy Steps to Learning Sex Magic.
1. Know what you want to do.
This is likely the easiest step of the three, which makes it a good place to start. If you’re reading this, odds are pretty good that you already have a technique (or techniques) of magic you favor, and while not all magical techniques are ideal for every application, most practitioners find that the tools they have to hand can be adapted for most uses. (If you don’t, or if the whole subject of magic is still kind of new to you, I encourage you to read the section below, “A Quick Word for Magic Newbies”.) As in any working, the question comes down to knowing, clearly and unambiguously, what you want to accomplish. For instance, let’s posit a hypothetical situation: you’re currently unemployed, or underemployed, and you’d like to change your job fortunes. You may have a specific job in mind, or you may just want a solid job that earns more than you’re making now.
What I’ve found in my working is that, just as bakers struggle to balance the “light” and “flaky” qualities of their pie crusts, spellcraft requires a balance of specificity and simplicity. Aiming for a particular job has the benefit of making your spell quite specific, but this seeming simplicity can actually work against you, as it limits the number of paths by which your will can manifest. On the other hand, declarative statements like “I want a good job” are easy to hold in mind and offer a broader array of paths to manifestation, but “good job” is a pretty vague concept unless you spent a while building up what you mean by those words. As ever, putting in some time discerning what you actually want and need is a solid investment in the success of your working.
2. Know how you like to have sex.
I’m not going to whitewash things: for many of us, this will be the hardest step. Modern culture has invested a considerable amount of energy, time, and money in convincing us we don’t actually understand our own sex lives, then selling us solutions or compensations for those perceived failings or shortcomings. I don’t mean that in a conspiracy-theorist way, either. As I mentioned previously, the advice columns of “women’s magazines” and Internet forums reveal the dizzying extent to which shame, confusion, ignorance, and dysfunction inform the average American’s understanding of sex. Pagans, polytheists, and occultists are in no way excluded from this observation, no matter how “sex-positive” and “body-positive” we like to think ourselves. Many people simply don’t know what “good sex” is, because they’ve never learned what they like, what feels good for them.
One possible solution to this problem is to take things back to first principles. You’re the one who knows your body best—you’ve lived every day of your life in it, after all—so you’re the most reliable teacher on the subject of what feels good to you. If you don’t know what pleases you, stimulates your eros, and brings you to orgasm, the obvious answer is to explore the sensations of your body to find out.
Yes, I’m talking about masturbation. (Those of you who need to giggle, go ahead. I’ll wait.)
Masturbation is often our first exploration of our own sexuality, and the shame associated with it in various cultures is of a piece with the shame around all culturally-unsanctioned sexuality. In other words, it’s both how we learn about our bodies and how we learn that our culture despises our bodies. This is heartbreaking… but it’s also remediable. If, like so many of us, you’ve spent your adult life not really being in touch with your body and your sexuality, this is an excellent time to spend some time getting to know yourself. Your body is yours: it’s the physical manifestation of you. Love yourself, own your own power and form, and treat yourself well.
For those of us interested in sex magic, it’s worth noting that masturbation is also a classic, time-honored technique of working, so much so that it’s often the first practical technique addressed in books on the subject. And speaking of sex magic…
3. Use your sexuality to empower your magic.
Once we know what we want to do and how we want to do it, the logical final step is to do it. Easy, right?
Well, yes and no. In theory, the principle of using the erotic energy generated by your sexual activity to bolster the power of your working is pretty straightforward. In practice… well, one of the wonderful things about sex is that it can generate pleasure, even ecstasy, and this can be as much a hindrance to successful magic as it can drive it. Not to put too fine a point on this, but a full-tilt orgasm can make it awfully hard to hold a coherent thought in your head, much less to focus your magical will on a predetermined goal. Some folks can manage it with nary a hitch, whilst others of us may need some practice to get it right. The nice thing is that even failed spell launches can still involve a lot of pleasant sensations, and might even end with an orgasm.
The quick-and-dirty outline of the stages that I go through in any sex-magical working are as follows:
- calm the mind
- set the space
- envision the goal
- raise the power
- focus the will
- release the power
- open the space
How one chooses to do any of those stages is a matter of taste and efficacy; some folks want a full formal circle casting to set the space, while others make do with a few candles, some incense, and a Sade CD. For some, the raising and release of erotic power is a steady incline towards orgasmic climax, while for others it’s a gentle rise to a plateau of pleasure and desire without a specific climax. The details aren’t as important as the process, and how the process serves to get you to the place where your sexuality and your magical will can work in tandem.
So, there are my three “easy steps” to learning sex magic. Yes, these are a gloss on the full scope of the subject, and yes, these steps are overly simplistic. This is a topic that could be written about at some length. Hell, you could write a book on the subject of sex magic… and, as a matter of fact, quite a few people already have. My intent with this article isn’t to write the definitive work on sex magic (in 1400 words? Seriously?), but to introduce the topic and, maybe, demystify the process just enough to help a few of you realize your own interest and potential for sex magic.
And speaking of which…
A Quick Word for Magic Newbies
Much of what I write here is geared towards folks who’ve been practicing some form of magic for a while, and this column is emphatically no exception. If you’re new to magic, well, this column might not be the best place to start learning how to do it… but then again, it might be. Sex magic is certainly one of the simplest forms of magic to learn; it’s as close to us as our own skin, and requires no tools. I intend to write another piece specifically about “sex magic for beginners,” but if you’d like to start exploring in the meantime, the steps I’ve described and the format mentioned above are enough to get you started.
Until next time, dear ones, be good to yourselves. ♥
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