Magick of Thought

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If you outlaw catapults, then only the outlaws will have catapults -Socrates

Fighting is essential to practicing magick. You must be able to defend yourself from spirits who try to steal the energy that keeps your body alert and mages with immature tempers.

There are no police. The bad guys know how to fight. You should too.

A Magickal Fight

You feel distracted, suddenly tired, and the cool tingling of someone watching you.

The distraction is from a spirit altering your energy so you won’t fight back. The fatigue is that spirit absorbing your body’s energy. The tingling is from its connections shifting your magickal structures as they enter your body.

The best way to get a spirit off you, to make yourself an undesirable meal, is to hit back. Casting a circle, burning sage, or imagining a white light won’t be as effective as attacking the spirit yourself.

First, find the connection. Start at the source of the tingling. The connection will have the spirit’s signature, so look for anything with an unfamiliar signature.

Block the spirit’s energy and connections by putting mental weight where the connection enters your body. If you are distracted and tired, you won’t put up much of a fight. This should reduce those effects.

Trace the connection back to the spirit. Enter its mind. Damage it until it leaves you alone.

Fundamentals of Fighting

Most fights start when you are attacked. At least, this is my hope in writing this article. It’s about how to defend yourself, not about delivering the first blow.

Most fights then go through these steps:

• Defense. Prevent the attacker from damaging you.
• Trace the attacker’s connections back to them.
• Offense. Enter their mind, damage them.

Defense

Before you can win, you must avoid getting hurt long enough to fight back.

Sometimes, your attacker will get frustrated and give up.  More often, defenses are a temporary measure to buy time for a counter-attack.

A static shield will help buy that time, but bypassing shielding isn’t hard. I’ll write about it later this week. A shield should prepare you for an active defense, not replace one.

Cleansing rituals rely on a system to remove the attacker’s connections. They require time to execute, and are only as strong as the system. I would use them as a final step to remove connections after winning a fight, rather than as a first line of defense.

The active, first line of defense is applying mental weight to your magickal body.  Fill the part of your body being attacked with your connections and energy. Push back against whatever changes your opponent is making, or just hold the structures firm.

Your goal is to avoid taking too much damage while you find their connection, so you can advance to…

Tracing Their Connection

Before you can counter-attack, you must find your attacker by tracing their connection back to them.

To find their connection, look in the area you are defending for what is pushing against you.  It will have a foreign signature.  This will be the attacker’s connection.

For many attackers, the connection will go straight to them, passing through a system along the way.  You can trace it just by holding the connection with your mind and thinking about finding its source.

For more advanced attackers, you will need to trace the connection through several signature shifts intended to disguise it. I’ll write about tracing hidden connections soon.

Offense

Flinging energy at your opponent from far away requires a lot of effort for very little effect. Your opponent can apply weight to their structures to prevent you from doing damage.

But a small amount of energy applied precisely inside your opponent’s mind can end the fight.

Offense is about access, about entering your opponent’s mind and shifting his signatures to disrupt his ability to do magick. It doesn’t take a lot of energy.  But it does take access to his mind.

You have to get in, in order to win. It’s important. So I made it rhyme.

Trace to your opponent. Enter his mind. Flood it with an energy incompatible with its current signature. I assure you, this will do more damage than building energy in your body and flinging it at them.

Winning

Two things make you win fights: Speed, and breadth of ability.

Fighting is fast. You defend an area by applying mental weight, so the attacker shifts to another part of your body. You trace their connection, so the attacker drops it and starts a new connection for a new attack. Whoever is faster usually wins.

Fighting is also about breadth of ability. If you only use connections to systems, you cannot defend against connections to your body, mind, etc. If you know a domain your opponent doesn’t, you can get into their mind even if you are much slower. Experience with a different domain is a huge advantage.

Other posts in this series:

• Fighting With Magick (March 17, 2010)
• Blocking a Magick Attack (March 20, 2010)
• Effective Energy Attacks (March 23, 2010)
• Effective Psychic/Magickal Shielding (March 31, 2010)
• Fighting for Ritual Mages (April 3, 2010)
• Bypassing Magickal Shields (Advanced Direct Magick) (April 6, 2010)

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Tags: Protection/Safety, Quick Tips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 4:23 PM and is filed under Fundamentals of Conscious Magick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.