“How do spells work if there are so many different spells to cause the same effect?” one might ask. The answer that witches give is often, “Well, the intention is what really matters,” in which cause you might wonder what the point of ingredients is at all. Can you really replace every herb with rosemary and have the exact same result as if you used what was called for? People may have different answers to this, but here’s what I think. The rules of magic don’t really follow logical structures that we are used to. Magic in particular tends to be difficult to quantify, difficult to study in a laboratory setting, and the effects are difficult to reproduce. That doesn’t make it definitively not real but it means that we have to look at it through a different lens than we are used to. I am a programmer, and I make analogies to programming a lot. When I was first learning to program, I had an incredibly difficult time with the learning curve. Of course I know now how consistent the logic of programming languages is - but despite the consistency, it is an entirely different way of thinking than the way we think about problem solving in human languages. Both ways of thinking about data have their own structures, but learning to think a different way can be incredibly difficult. People may also encounter this difficulty when learning a human language with a wildly different grammar.
We don’t really know a lot of things about magic or why it works, and that is why there isn’t a really good, logically consistent answer to these kinds of questions. Maybe intention matters, but maybe the proximity of intention to certain ingredients matters. Maybe the timing matters. Or maybe these are all just dressings to active some force - of the universe or of our own minds - that we don’t know we don’t know about yet. Maybe some things are just coincidences, and we can’t separate out which things are coincidences and which things are meaningfully caused. Some things are demonstrably placebos - but to most people it will not matter anyway, so long as they get the effect they want. Witches end up feeling things out. And part of the reason everything is so individualized and non-straightforward is because different things seem to work for different people. But we don’t necessarily know why that is. So witchcraft becomes a craft of sifting through information, trying things, discovering things, and alighting on different things that seem to work for the individual practitioner. And as their magic becomes more advanced, it becomes more difficult to articulate hows, whats, and whys. A lot of my magic is based on wishing superstitions. I have no idea why, but the trappings of those things work for me. If I ask for something while blowing all of the seeds off a dandelion, it will happen. I can’t just make that seem wish at nothing and have it come true. Does it activate some power in me? Is it based on my own belief? Is it because I was born in February? The reason why this works for me and not for other people could be any number of reasons, but I don’t have a good way of studying those reasons. Meanwhile putting herbs and stones in a jar really seems to work for some people, but doesn’t seem to do much for me at all. So the answer to the questions I asked at the beginning is basically: no one really knows. People have guesses that are hard to prove or disprove. But plenty of science-minded or skeptical people like myself still engage in the practice of magic because there are discernible patterns to some things - and witchcraft is a search to discover one’s own patterns.
