Bad Magic

A recent question asked by a witch I respect got me thinking: what is "bad" magic and what is the consequence of doing "bad" magic?

If you have a lot of unskilled witches effectively doing “bad,” or substandard magic, does that mess up the universe? A recent question asked by a witch I respect got me thinking.

I’m going to say up front, this is not about the uses and perils of hexing or baneful magic. I already did an essay about that here.

Rather, these are my thoughts on the idea that there is qualitatively good and qualitatively bad magic, and what might the propagation of low quality, or “bad” magic might mean for witches and the world at large.

To even start to answer the question requires an unpacking of the idea of magic being qualitatively measured in any objective way. What makes a magical endeavor of good or bad quality?

More importantly, who gets to decide?

Because that’s a big sticking place. A person who’s been trained in classic hermetic magic is going to have a vastly different answer to the question of what is high quality vs. low quality magic than someone who’s been trained in classic Gardnerian Wicca. And someone who’s been trained in Feri or Reclaiming will have different ideas as well. And what of the eclectic solitary who has cobbled together a syncretic practice drawing from many different ideas and frameworks? We do not have “one Craft to rule them all” so is this in fact a fool’s errand from the outset?

If you want to make this work, you might need to take a page from the Westminster Dog Show. How do you decide who is best in show in a dog show with dozens of different breeds, all of which have a differing idea of what makes for a perfectly fashioned dog? The judges at Westminster answer that question by evaluating each breed of dog based on how closely it meets the breed standard. The “best” dog is the one that is the best example of is breed. Likewise, what’s “bad” or “good” is probably best measured based on what the tradition or system you’re working with would define as “bad” or “good.”

I won’t lie, I mentioned the Westminster Dog Show in part because it gives me a great excuse to use a photo of cute doggies. We need more cute doggie pictures in our lives right now. Photo by Jeyakumaran Mayooresan on Unsplash

Here’s the thing -- magic may come in different flavors, with different traditions, different gods, different cultures. But magic is rarely “purebred” when it’s done in practice. This is especially true the more skilled we become. A gifted witch doing a spell might start with a Gardnerian altar and circle cast with some technique borrowed from Appalachian folk magic and blended with some ideas copped from writings from a reclaiming witch. And that doesn’t mean that the work is somehow deficient.

As much as we might want to talk a good game about our witchy pedigree, which tradition we belong to, or who we studied with, the truth is that even those of us who wear cords and talk about degrees and initiations will, when we’re actually practicing magic, likely do so in an eclectic and syncretic way.

All of that said, there is a much more simple benchmark that we can look at -- does it work?

After all, as one of my favorite authors likes to say, paganism as a path is built on orthopraxy as opposed to orthodoxy. What that means is that the focus is not on what we believe so much as what we do. We are, at bottom, solidly grounded in the natural world around us, in the recognition of the sanctity of our own bodies, and in the acts of devotion we make, usually centered around the Wheel of the Year. We are not people of faith, we are people of pragmatism.

So, the good magic is the magic that works and the bad magic is the magic that doesn’t. That seems rather simple, yes?

Except that magic is rarely so cut and dried in its working.

Sometimes our spell works exactly as we hope it will, delivering precisely what we’ve designed it to. And sometimes it delivers what we’re supposed to have, not what we’ve asked it for. Sometimes it delivers something that is not what we wanted, but is precisely what we asked for. Magic can be funny that way. Good magic is not always the magic that does precisely what we ask it to, or works the way we expect it to.

And the truth is, there are commonalities. There are guiding principles that tend to work across traditions and schools and types of magic. Despite all of my going on about differences and one size does not fit all and the Rule of 100, the fact of the matter is that a witch knows good magic when they see it. You can feel when a spell or a ritual has tapped into something greater than the sum of its parts. You can tell when magic is good because it doesn’t just change your external circumstances or the “universe,” it changes you.

Good, well-executed magic is thoughtful in its creation, well-designed, and brought forth with passion and will, drawing and directing energy in a way that you can feel. Good magic is like good poetry -- every word and gesture and element that is brought to bear is essential to create the meaning and the impact, and there is nothing extraneous or unnecessary. And you feel it down to the marrow of your bones and the bottom of your soul.

So if that’s good magic, what is “bad” magic? Because that is as equally difficult to pigeonhole as “good” magic.

There’s the obvious point that if magic doesn’t meet the standard of good, then it is bad. Or at the very least mediocre. Some might say that mediocre magic is actually the worst of all. After all, actively “bad” magic can be executed with as much passion and with as much thoughtfulness as good magic, but ends up being “bad” because the elements and the materials being worked with are wholly wrong or ill-conceived. And while bad magic will fail and perhaps even leave chaos in its wake, there can be an epic-ness in how it fails that is almost admirable. The spectacular failure that happens because of ambition and courage and daring, even when it is misguided in some way, can be impressive. I wonder whether it is possible that magic, like some movies (”Hot Tub Time Machine” comes to mind), can be so bad that it is actually good.

So what is the impact of bad magic? Does badly-executed, mediocre magic cause harm? In an environment where there have never been so many people unleashing their magic in the world, many of whom have not received the kind of instruction that might enable them to be good at their craft, is there an impact from so much “bad” magic being done?

Again, it depends on what you think bad magic is and how it operates in the world. If bad magic is magic that does not work, then bad magic isn’t having any impact because it’s not actually doing anything. If bad magic does in fact create an impact on the world, but does so in an incomplete, chaotic, or bungled way, then how significant is that impact? Does the presence of bad magical impacts cause harm or interfere with the results of good magic? Does an abundance of bad magic create some kind of energetic damage that undermines magic or the universe more generally?

I think which conclusion you draw is dependent upon whether you believe we are living and working in a universe that embodies some intelligence (either in the form of deity or some other concept) or not. If the universe is basically a big dumb machine, with no guiding intelligence that guides it, and magic is just using energy to manipulate the workings of the machine, then perhaps bad magic can be quite powerful. But if you believe that the universe ultimately has some kind of intelligence at its heart, that the universe does to some extent decide which magical acts it will allow to take effect and how much effect it will take, then you might rest easy knowing that the universe only responds to the good magic, or at the very least dulls the impact of the bad magic.

Personally, I think an intelligent universe is capable of having mercy on magicians who are either under-educated, or who make mistakes. While certainly if you put bad magic into the world, you will own the consequences of that, I think that often the universe allows us to avoid the worst impacts of our bad magic if it means that we learn and grow and eventually get to where we’re doing the good magic.

While I personally prefer to believe the universe is deeply intelligent, I’m not going to be prescriptive in that. I honestly don’t know, and I could be wrong. Others are free to choose what they think and feel about that as they are sovereign over their own paths.

One thing I do know, however, is that an over-emphasis on dividing the world into “good” and “bad” magic and the assertion that the presence of “bad” magic undermines good outcomes from good magic creates an environment where practitioners do not have room to make mistakes. By that light, errors cost too much to be suborned. After all, if “bad” magic ruins the world, then we should all take it upon ourselves to never do magic unless we know for certain we can do it well, and have it be “good” magic.

And that would be a real tragedy. I teach a lot of beginners who already feel disempowered because they don’t feel they know enough to do the spells they read about, or to try and work magic on their own. It sets up a high hurdle and creates a sense that magic belongs only to those who are capable of reaching a certain level of education or skill. It smacks of an elitism that actually runs counter to what the Craft is about. The Craft has always been a tool for those who lack other kinds of power or influence or resources. Magic is what you do when all other means to change a thing have failed or are unavailable. It is more than that, of course. Magic can be a tool for daily growth and improvement. Magic can be a way of life. But none of those use cases thrive when you insist that one should only use the tool if you can be good at it.

As Phyllis Curott likes to say, the world needs her witches. Witches who do only good magic do not happen overnight. All of us do a lot of bad magic before we get to the good stuff. We need to be able to make mistakes. We need to be able to fail spectacularly from time to time. I personally believe that deity provides the necessary grace for us to do “bad” magic, perhaps even a lot of bad magic, so that we can grow into the powerful good magicians we are meant to be. Obviously we should work to make sure that witches learn how to do good magic and not bad magic. The world benefits from her witches being as skilled as possible. But I’m not sure promoting a perfectionism vibe really helps with that.

Blessed be, y’all.