Magical tales 1, spells for money

There are stories I haven't told you yet. Actually there are a lot of stories I haven't told you yet. For all that this blog is over 1200 posts old, there's a lot of older stuff I never got around to. Maybe some day I'll scan through to see if there are stories that I promised one day and never told—and then tell them. Wow, completeness. What an idea.

But in some cases it's not just laziness or indolence. In some cases I feel genuinely funny telling the stories. Of course, that's why I have the blog in the first place: so I can tell true stories without having them traced back to me later. So here goes.

I've mentioned several times now that I've started following John Michael Greer. He writes about a lot of things, including politics and magic. And I'd noticed that several times he mentioned casually in passing that it's a bad idea to do magical spells to ask for money to drop into your lap. So one day last fall I sent him a question asking why.

I know someone that I think may be doing some kind of magic for money to drop into her lap. (Haven't confirmed yet, but from circumstantial evidence.) [Of course I was talking about Wife.] I know you have said this is generally a bad idea -- I mean, as opposed to doing magic that some venture turn out successfully, which is different. Have you ever written a full post explaining the likely consequences? If yes, can you please point me to it? If no, what are they?

His reply was straightforward:

That's one of the classic mistakes beginners in magic make, until they get enough instant karma to teach them why it's a bad idea. What happens is this. If you do magic to get money without earning it, your intention implies that someone else ought to earn money and not get it. That guides the blowback straight to your door. Everyone I know who tried this kind of magic ended up suffering a sudden financial loss -- their job went away, or their investments took a nosedive, or their car got totaled and the other guy's insurance refused to pay, or something like that. It's as reliable as tomorrow's sunrise.

If you want to do magic to become wealthier than you are, on the other hand, that's easy. Do workings to help you find opportunities to make money, and then follow through on them. You'll have to work for it, but you can do very well indeed that way.

Fair enough. I contacted Wife, asked her if she was doing such magic (She said, "If you were in my situation, wouldn't you?"), and sent her this information. I told her I had stumbled randomly across it on the Internet.

But I also started to think about it. In the first few years of our marriage, Wife used to do spells or prayers like that very regularly. (You remember that Wife used to be Wiccan, right?) After a few years, she let them taper off. I never kept a log of when she did such spells and when she didn't, but I have a rough, general idea.

Also, Mr. Greer regularly claims that magic is an empirical science. He claims that you should be able to trace cause and effect in magical workings. So I thought about it, and tried to figure out if we had experienced the kinds of sudden, unexpected financial losses that he talked about. Here's what I came up with.

1984: Wife and I marry. We both start graduate school, at the same place.

1985: Wife's graduate department accidentally screws up her paperwork, with the result that she loses her funding. 

1986: Wife interrupts a burglary. For various reasons she decides she has to drop out of school and leave town. I take a leave of absence (that later becomes permanent) to follow her. Wife gets a well-paying job right near the new town where we settle. A month later, she's fired. She gets a second job doing something similar, also paying pretty well if not quite as much. After two weeks, she's fired. (Finally she gets a third job, with a 37-mile commute. I get a job.)

1987: The heat in our apartment goes out in February. (Strictly speaking, this is the landlord's expense.) Later, we move. At this point we are both driving old hand-me-down cars from our parents. Her car dies. After a lot of searching we buy her a new car. Then my car dies.

1988: We buy me a cute little second-hand VW Bug. Then its reverse-gear breaks. For several months, until we can afford to get it fixed, the only way I can back up is to put the car in neutral and push. Good thing it's a VW. 

Also this year (I think it was the same year!), Wife decides we need a chest freezer in our garage. That way we can buy meat in bulk, you see, because it's cheaper-per-ounce that way. So she buys the chest freezer. Then she plunges into an orgy of shopping, and fills the whole thing with meat. A little later, we are doing some kind of work in the garage that requires temporarily unplugging the chest freezer ... and we forget to plug it back in. All the meat spoils. The stench is so overpowering there is no way to clean the freezer. There's a construction site across the street, and we get their permission to toss the whole works―freezer, meat, and all―into their dumpster. I have no records to tally up how much money went straight down the tubes because of that foolishness.

1989: Wife gets a new boss, whom she hates, and leaves her job. (I forget if he fires her or she just quits.) She gets a new job that she hates even more. Also my job is thrown into tumult. The contract is being changed at a high level; and even though my role is pretty insignificant, I somehow get caught in the gears. In the end I learn enough diplomacy fast enough to save my job, but my two co-conspirators both lose their jobs with extreme prejudice.

1990: Wife is admitted to another graduate school in a new town, so she quits her job and we have to move. My car is totaled on the freeway. I "borrow" my grandfather's car. Its radiator explodes, and I borrow another old car from my parents.

1991: I don't remember. There was probably something.

1992: My work relocates three hours away so I have a crazy commute on weekends and have to find a way to stay there during the week. Somewhere along the line the car I've got from my parents also dies.

1993: We buy another new car. Wife fails her qualifying exams and leaves her graduate program at the end of spring. She finds short-term jobs, but not until November 1995 does she find a job that she can hold more than a year. Also in 1993 I get my first solid (non-contracting), professional job in the field that leads to my career.――The next year (1994) we buy a house and start to think that we are joining the professional middle class. After a while, Wife stops doing magical spells to get money to drop into our laps.

... or at any rate she pretty much stopped until we sold the house and she was once again living on her own. I don't know what she did after that, but I think she started up again. Also her financial situation started deteriorating.

My memory is a little sketchy for this kind of detail that far back. (I can remember stories; but after a while the dates blur.) But I'm pretty sure this is close to accurate. And it means that for most of the first ten years of our marriage, Wife was doing magical spells to get money to drop into our laps. And for most of the first ten years of our marriage, we had at least one major financial crisis each year. So yes, maybe that counts as being "as reliable as tomorrow's sunrise."

If so, a concatenation of that many dramatic coincidences does kind of suggest that magic may work. Also, don't try this at home.