I am often asked, “what is the best spell for a beginner?”
Here is my comprehensive answer.
The best spells for beginners are:
Spells which have quantifiable results
In addition, good beginner spells…
This means, spells where you can point to an actual outcome and say, “my spell worked” or, “my spell did not work.” An example of an unquantifiable spell is a luck spell. A lot of ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’ things happen to us on a regular basis, but how can we really judge that? Will you succumb to confirmation bias and start deciding that every fortuitous happenstance is evidence of your luck spell working? Or if something lucky does happen, how do you know it wasn’t already going to happen in the first place?
Another example of an unquantifiable spell is something that is supposed to stop an event that wasn’t happening anyway. For example, nobody has broken in to my home, ever. In the last 3 years I have placed protections on my home to keep out intruders. Do these protections actually work? I have no way of knowing – because it is “stopping” an event that was never going on.
Quantifiable spells are those which cause something specific to happen that probably was not going to happen on its own, or stop something that is already happening.
For example, a money spell. Either you come across more money (by finding it the street, working more hours, getting a promotion, etc) or you don’t. Finding money in the street and getting a new job are unusual enough occurrences that we can reasonably say, “this wasn’t happenstance, my spell worked.”
Another example is a banishment spell. If someone at your job is bothering you, banish them. If they quit work and leave forever, your spell was a success. If they stay and nothing changes, the spell failed.
Other ideas for quantifiable spells are friend-finding, prosperity (money finding, job finding, reducing bills, reducing debt, holding on to money), banishment of peoples and situations, and emotional and mental spells cast on yourself or others.
Spells should be accurately recorded
So let’s assume that you cast your first spell, and it was a success! But you cast your second spell, and your third, and neither seem to work. What happened? What went wrong? You will have a much easier time telling what happened if you have accurate notes of all of your spellwork.
Maybe the first time you cast a circle, but later you did not. Or perhaps you used a special technique or phrasing or way of raising energy that worked for you. Many who do magic will attest to that ‘spell space’, and once you are done casting magic everything within that 'space’ gets blurry and hard to remember. It is not so easy to recall exactly what happened during certain spells, and trust me when I say the smallest thing may be the key to unlocking your puzzle.
To record spells, I make notes of what I plan to do beforehand, then annotate them afterwords with what I actually did.
You can also create a custom form to fill out whenever you do a spell, which could include fields like the date/time, moon phase, day of the week, weather, whether or not a circle was cast, if spirits were called (and who they were), ingredients and tools, chants used, exactly what was said, how the spell was sealed, how the spell was delivered, etc.
Spells should be objectively judged
It is tempting to misjudge the success of spells, either for or against them. Skeptics like to look to other causes, and optimists like to buy in to magic whole-heartedly, without questioning their results.
But the fact of the matter is that spells don’t work just because you really want them to work; spells can fail for lots of reasons.
My way of judging a spell is to ask myself,
A) did the spell do what it was supposed to do?
And B) was it reasonably likely that the results would have happened anyway, without the spell?
I see a lot of half-result spells like, “I did a money spell and found a quarter on the sidewalk!” Or spells where the results don’t match the original intent, like, “I did a spell to make more friends and my BFF stopped talking to me. I guess I am learning who my true friends are after all.” So the first question to ask is, “did the spell do what it was supposed to do?” In the first example, yes – money was found. In the second example, no – the opposite happened. A spell to make more friends should not cause your other friends to stop talking to you.
And then I always ask, was this result likely to happen on its own? I think in our first example, it is reasonably likely to find a quarter on the sidewalk. Magic isn’t necessary to find loose change on the street now and then. Now if you found $20, that is another matter.
If the spell did what it was supposed to do, and it was not likely that event would have happened randomly, then I count my spell as a success.
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