My friend Hawk recently posted this on twitter:
Hawk is awesome and I appreciate the important reminder of this basic principle.
Yes, there are better and worse times to do magic. Yes, astrological alignments, lunar days, planetary days and hours can all impact your enchantments. I have a whole monthly planner based on the idea that leveraging magical timing is a useful thing to do. I also believe that positioning yourself in space/time is a critical component of ritual. So it’s not like I’m anti-timing.
But in the end, none of that matters if you don’t actually do the magic.
In my experience, it’s better to do more magic than less. It’s like any other skill: practice makes progress. Doing magic makes us better at magic and gives us better, more consistent results. In order to get that practice, you might need to keep your enchantments simpler, less complex, and less time-bound. There’s certainly a reason for highly-specific talismanic timing and a time for elaborate all night rituals. But if that’s the only type of working you do, well, the risk is that you don’t do enough workings.
This is why I’m such a fan of sigils. They are the definition of quick and dirty — simple, flexible, CHEAP. This kind of magic fits better into a busy life and ironically that means you have a better chance of timing your workings enough to improve their efficacy without making it so restrictive that you don’t end up doing anything. Here are a couple of ways of thinking about this:
Thematic timing: If you have specific goal you are working toward, you can adjust your approach depending on a rough planetary timing model. For example, let’s say you are after a new job. On Sunday, you can focus on empowering yourself for the search; on Monday, increasing your intuition about the job you need; Tuesday can be about beating the competition and being courageous in your search; Wednesday is naturally for communication and road opening; Thursday is for expanding your reach and finding prosperous options; Friday is all about glamour and networking; and finally Saturday you might set appropriate boundaries so that you don’t end up in a job you hate.
Does that mean you need to do seven workings, all in the same week? Not necessarily. But you can use the natural alignment of the day you happen to be free in order to make the magic more effective. Flexible enchantment allows for this.
Opportunistic timing: Sometimes you want the opposite approach. Let’s say you have a free Saturday afternoon this week for magic. You take a look at the planner, which calls for a day for ancestor workings. So maybe you spend the time getting your ancestor shrine in order and do a prayer for your ancestors of blood or practice. Or Wednesday evening is free, but it’s Mercury retrograde. So instead of typical Mercury workings, you do the kind of backward focused magic that is better aligned to the Rx.
The more creative and flexible you can be with this process, the more magic you will end up doing and the more magical your life will become.
