What is certain is that whether folk customs or more formal ceremonies are used, the underlying principles of all types of magick are the same throughout the world,
Some of these can be categorized under the following headings.
Sympathetic Magick
This involves performing a ritual that imitates what you would desire in the outer world, so bringing on to the material plane a desire or need or wish from the inner or thought plane.
This is done using appropriate tools and symbols. So in a spell for the gradual increase of money, for example, you might grow a pot of basil seedlings (a herb of prosperity) and light a green candle.
Contagious Magick
This involves transferring and absorbing power directly from a creature or an object, such as an animal, a bird, a crystal, a metal, the wax of an empowered candle or even the Earth itself.
This principle is central to the potency of talismans and amulets; for example, traditionally, hunters might wear the pelt of a lion to bring them the beast’s courage and ferocity.
So, by the same token, if you wished to become pregnant, you might make love in a newly ripening cornfield (near the edge so as not to damage the crops); alternatively, you might try one of the ancient power sites of Earth, close to the phallus of the chalk Cerne Abbas fertility giant that is carved in the hillside at Cerne in Dorset.
Attracting Magick
This type of magick embraces both sympathetic and contagious magick to bring you something you desire.
For example, you could scatter pins across a map between the places you and a lover live and with a magnet collect them, while reciting:
Come love, come to me, love to me come, if it is right to be.
You would then place your pins in a silk, heart-shaped pincushion or a piece of pink silk, also in the shape of a heart, and leave it on the window ledge on the night of the full moon, surrounded by a circle of rose petals.
Banishing And Protective Magick
This involves driving away negative feelings, fears and influences by casting away or burying a focus of the negativity.
For example, you might scratch on a stone a word or symbol representing some bad memories you wished to shed, and cast the stone into fast-flowing water.
Alternatively, you could bury it, together with quick-growing seeds or seedlings to transform the redundant into new life.
Binding Magick
Binding magick has two functions, one to bind a person in love or fidelity and the other to bind another from doing harm.
This may be done in various ways, using knots in a symbolic thread, or by creating an image of the object or person and wrapping it tightly.
But all binding can be problematic in terms of white magick, for whatever method you use, you are very definitely interfering with the person’s karma, or path of fate.
However, it is tempting to think that if someone is hurting animals, children, the sick or elderly, you may be justified in binding them.
And what if your partner has deserted you on the whim of passion, taking all the money and leaving you and your children penniless?
