Essay: Lovemagick, a Confession

The Truth About Love Spells

By Ghia Vitale
QuailBellMagazine.com

From what I’ve learned, this force is by no means a “little thing,” although it is certainly crazy and chaotic in nature. As far as human neurology is concerned, love is one of the most formidably-influential drugs in the entirety of Earth's existence. Love has to be powerful in order to perpetuate life. Love spells, perhaps more than any other variety of spell, attract many people to the art of spellcraft.

But love magic itself also remains a source of contention in the occult community. It’s not as though this prejudice is entirely unfounded because love spells often involve infringing upon the will of another person…or at least they do when operating upon a basal intention of that nature. Many magicians adhere to the belief that aiming love spells at unspecified love interests is the only ethical form of love magic. Yet there are also magical traditions that find love spells no more Machiavellian than wearing fishnets or splashing a dash of seductive pheromone-fortified cologne. I am referencing a wealth of personal experiences and research to justify my beliefs in pertinence to love and sex spells. After much trial and error, I’ve come to learn that love, like most magic, cannot be accurately compartmentalized into polarized, figuratively “black-and-white” categories. I should also note that I am using the term “love” in the broadest sense of the term, which includes the multitudinous shades of simple infatuation, limerence and “true” love, whatever that is.

I shall preface this confession with this: love is arguably one of the most potent intoxicants known to humankind. When you or someone else feels under the influence of love, understand that love is a drug, an inebriant administered by one’s brains that can distort even the most pragmatic minds. The mind alone cannot always temper the bewitched heart. Emotions compel the lovestruck to think or act in ways that can also influence a spell’s cumulative manifestation(s). Love pervades all senses to the point where anything (or anyone) that specific force yearns is what “makes sense” to the body, heart and mind, despite the protests of the rational mind or the onlooking good samaritans. Often, emotions like inadequacy or underlying psychological issues masquerade as “love.” 

Love spells are quite difficult to effectively execute for a well-practiced magician, let alone people who aren’t experienced with the art and science of manifestation. Budding magicians who takes spellcraft semi-seriously have a fairly significant advantage in comparison but that’s only a few inches of a few miles. Hell, even Apollo couldn’t get it right and he is a god! There are reasons why Aphrodite (a Goddess of love and beauty) and Dionysus (a God of intoxication, viniculture and chaos) are notoriously compatible, but I’ll leave that for you to research.

Love spells require meticulous efforts and energetic awareness. Yes, there are vague love spells that are conducted to attract the most suitable mates to the caster. These are often employed successfully and I have heard of many couplings, short-term and long-term alike, occur due to these types of spells. One of the first times I performed a love spell, I purchased a pre-packaged spell kit with an instructional outline from a local metaphysical store. Soon after casting the spell, I wound up making out with a friend in another friend’s pool one night. This friend had not previously expressed interest. I think we “went out” a little bit but broke up a few days afterwards. This boy later came out of the closet but the spell succeeded in uniting us for those few days. The friend who kindly let us use her pool even noted that she thought our momentary coupling was the product of a love spell. 

My experiences have taught me that there must be some pre-existing attraction for love spells to be optimally successful. That, or at least a desire to get to know the person better. Even if that target is unknowingly receptive to the spell, it is still highly unlikely to secure feelings of affection or desire for a relationship without some inkling of pre-existent attraction. Trying to “induce” love or manipulate someone into thinking that you are “the one” is usually fruitless unless the target is easily influenced by any kind of external forces. But even that will fade as the spell fades. 

In the cases of unrequited attractions, I have noticed my targets becoming inexplicably distant, aloof, or simply no longer interested in cultivating a connection, even if they had previously expressed enthusiasm in the aftermath of casting a love spell upon them. On some level, the spell probably made my intentions clear, intentions that did not correspond well with my targets' feelings. Obviously, I was strict about policing my behavior to make sure that there wasn’t a drastic change because I was curious to see the actual results. For a long time, I feared rejection and intimacy. Thus, I often let my feelings languish as I prayed that my crush would make a move. Of course, in passing years, I’ve accepted that no response is a response, although not exactly trustworthy if you don’t make your intentions clear. Love spells were my way of nudging the people I was interested in to make a move without risking rejection. For that reason, I still endorse love spells as a positive way to facilitate romantic connections.

During my sophomore year of college, I would often see this stranger around campus who caught my attention. Although I didn’t know his name, I yearned to meet him. One day while I was in the library, I wrote a letter addressed to a “dear blond boy with the hat,” with a concise message following as to how I thought he was cute and probably interesting. I even expressed my interest in having sex with him. I was sure to explicitly write that I respected his right to reject my advances. Though I never gave this boy the letter, the very next day, I walked into my college suite and there he was, visiting my roommate. We never really consummated our friendship, with the exception of one sloppy, drunken hookup. In the end, the crush that was mostly unrequited. Nonetheless, he had welcomed me into his life with the help of that spell’s influence.

When I did the same spell again in the same manner (with another target), I also burned the letter to expedite the message’s delivery. I entered my friend’s apartment for another wild Friday night to find the letter’s “recipient” already there. I frequented this apartment so I knew that it was not some fluke that he was there. Only flirtation happened but like the previously-mentioned case, the letter’s recipient responded to my beckoning, prompting the Universe to arrange a “chance” meeting, although as far as magic in concerned, coincidences are never meaningless. You employ magic to make your reality “coincide” with your will and desire. 

Another problematic component of love spells relates to magic’s tendency to produce manifestations on the premises of intention. Love often scrambles and obfuscates intentions beyond recognition. Although the forefront of your consciousness might comprehend your desires as wanting a lover, the depths of your consciousness might be yearning or magnetizing something entirely different.

An eye-opening experience for me involved being the “other woman.” This terrible mistake wound up teaching me many invaluable lessons in the form of harsh wisdom. I was involved in an intense flirtation with a taken person and had what I now recognize as an emotional affair. The problem with the “other woman complex” is that she always thinks that he is different, that her situation is the sole exception to her beloved’s infidelity, that his unfaithful behavior doesn’t reflect his true character. I fell for him hard and, since we both believed in magic, I thought that a love spell would be the best course of action.

On a night in which the full moon was in a Venusian aspect, I set out with a Wiccan friend to “draw down the moon” and raise energy for whatever we wished to manifest. Unbeknownst to her, I was casting a love spell. As I was performing the spell, I randomly thought about how awful it would be if he actually asked a girl out in front of me (namely, the girl with me that night) which, in my eyes, was much worse than seeing him flirt with other girls or not forsaking his girlfriend to be with me. He’d never flirted with this mutual friend, but guess what happened the next day? This specific experience not only gave me a crash-course in respecting others' romantic relationships, but also helped me identify some of my grave love spell-casting errors:

1. There were too many external energies intermingling with the energies I projected towards my own desired outcome. I performed the spell in the presence of another person. Someone else’s presence can abscond the romantic/sexual focus of the spell from being centralized solely upon you and your beloved and contaminate your otherwise individual energy.

2. This is a biggie: I thought of someone else—namely, someone else who may have been considered “competition”—whilst casting the spell. When casting any kind of love spell, DO NOT think of anyone else but the target, ESPECIALLY someone who is somehow a sexual or romantic “threat” in any way, be it in the form of someone you both know who is also attractive, somewhat compatible with the target, or someone who has had any kind of non-platonic relations with the target in the past. Don’t even think of someone else that you know who that the target doesn’t. This is a surefire way to cause a cross-contamination of energies which will result in the target being the recipient of confused energies as opposed to receiving the loving influence of just one person. I’ve noticed that results get sloppy when trying to cast the spell upon two people at once.

3. My intentions were out of whack. I believe in one of the foundational tenets of Chaos magick which constructs belief itself as a malleable tool that shapes reality. However, one must understand that it’s not as though everyone is psychically numb if they don’t invest effort into their spiritual or psychic development. Everyone, to one degree or another, is psychic and depending on the target’s receptivity, that person can sense and interpret the spell in different ways, be it subconscious or otherwise. If your feelings are not romantically and/or sexually reciprocated, the target might just feel the energies and become lovey-dovey or more sexual than usual...but not towards you.

The likelihood of unintended reactions runs quite high with love spells. These energies could attract others to them or worse, they can become distant due to the innate sense of being subject to psychic intrusion and intended manipulation. As previously stated, I’ve seen targets of love spells become inexplicably distant or flat-out lose interest after casting a spell without any abnormal behavior being exhibited by the spellcaster. The target responded to the love spell's energy by consciously or subconsciously thinking, “No thanks.”

There was this guy who was really into me, often walking past my house and “finding” me on MySpace. My non-monogamous partner didn’t like him at all and, although I thought he had redeeming qualities, I was not hot in the pants for him. Since he was also into occultism and witchcraft, our conversations often revolved around mystic topics. While I was away at college my freshman year, he contacted me via MySpace (again) as though we had never met. I intuited that he had cast a love spell on me afterwards, a hunch I never had about anyone prior. We’d talk and he expressed willingness to come visit me at my faraway college. The spell’s influence made me adore him. My friend and I spent hours looking through his MySpace to laugh at the bizarre pictures on his profile. I loved him, alright? He brought me joy, but it was certainly not the reaction that he was hoping for.

Many of the objections to love spells often include a disclaimer that reads something like the following: “Don’t do it! They’ll become obsessed with you! It will be AWFUL!” In the disoriented state of someone under the influence of love, the would-be caster is not as likely to think, “Wow, that sounds horrible!” If anything, that deluded brain exclaims, “WOW! That sounds awesome!” I have heard accounts of love spells gone awry where the target did indeed become obsessive and possessive, sometimes to the point of stalking and making homicide attempts. Other accounts of love spells (which are often poorly conducted) tell of how love spells can result in the manifestation of toxic relationships. I recall reading the account of one lady who did a spell to forge a relationship with a man who was been taken. Although a long-term relationship ensued and the couple bore children, the spellbound lover was hardly bound to her in any emotional way, as he committed frequent infidelity with any willing woman he encountered.

I’ve heard many stories in which the offspring of love-spellbound couples suffer from physical and mental ailments. Many novice casters attest that they themselves developed health problems which they sense to be rooted in the performance of a love spell. Addictions are also prone to emerge out of nowhere. There are also many accounts of instances in which the bewitchment transformed the target into a “love zombie” of sorts, plaguing them with thoughts of the caster and consuming all of their energy in other destructive ways. Perhaps the spell’s energies attracted vampiric energies or entities who saw the target as a wonderful host(ess) to feed on?

But wait…There’s more! Love magic isn’t all negative, even ones that are directed at specific people. There are the fortunate couples who claim that a love spell is what catalyzed their relationship. Personally, I think that prologue sounds wonderfully romantic and adds an otherworldly element to their union, legitimizing that the pair was indeed meant to be together, just like in a fairy tale. These tales never involve hell raining on any lives. As I’ve previously mentioned, love magic can be excellent, but in order to cast a wondrous love spell, there must be some kind of pre-existing attraction.

One thing that I hope you, the reader, have learned from this essay is that it is best to garner an expansive body of experience with spellcraft before delving into love spells. Most of the horror stories I hear involve shoddy magical practices. Almost all of the negative experiences I’ve heard involving love spells going awry are cast by inexperienced folk. Love spells are very easy to trip up even for skilled magicians. So when laced with insufficient occult experience, casting such a spell can be a recipe for some kind of failure. Magic is an intricate art and science which necessitates the acquisition of knowledge in order to thrive. Simply finding a spell—any spell— on the Internet and just doing it without any background knowledge means gambling with the universe. Remember, knowledge is power!

#Spells #Magick #Witchcraft #LovePotion #Relationships #Sex #Lust #Wicca

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