The history of Western magic in modern and even near modern times, say from the 1800s on, is a fairly unflattering history of the occult (with scare quotes). The history is unfortunate, but it does feel like magic is finally starting to separate from the occult these days. And this is a good move as the patina of deliberate weirdness wears off the topic of magic in general, with Silicon Valley brothers doing ayahuasca and everyone's mom getting into yoga and meditation. A circle of inclusivity is being drawn around even the weirdest among us, just not the creepiest. Ironically, the beginning of this phenomenon may have been the emergence of chaos magic culture in the nineties. Ironic because this culture came to be at least in part due to a bunch of nerds becoming as interested in Dungeons and Dragons as they were in their computers. The most curious minds of the nineties were getting into trouble online, scraping ancient texts together into digital repositories, reporting their own DIY psychonautic adventures into bulletin board systems and swapping magical tech in the pre appropriation age of information freedom. The Chaos Magic movement boiled over from this melting pot of curiosity into the Western esoteric community, and it was the antithesis of the existing culture of self-aggrandizing, magical borders and die hard kabbalists, a sorely needed manifestation of punk ethos in magic. The Western esoteric system had become bloated with “real” (scare quotes again) adepts with big opinions and manufactured authority. You know the kind of magicians who own impressive ceremonial swords but can't manifest their way out of their mom's basement. In all fairness, early chaos magic was too embryonic to be of very practical use. I'm not sure what the real world application of summoning Superman or Cthulhu is, but you have to appreciate the experimental spirit at least. What it did well, though, was attract bold, curious types that were willing to fuck around to find out what worked and what didn't. What makes Chaos Magic special is its honest attempt to integrate empiricism into magical practice for the sake of self-improvement. When you're learning everything from the ground up without qualified teachers, nothing can be taken for granted, and every theory has to be tested. Chaos Magic is what you get when hackers discover grimoires. Of course, hacking is frequently artless and messy.-more trial and error than performance- and the framework of mind that produces hackers is too mechanistic. True empiricism isn't really possible in something as subjective as spiritual experience because, you know, your mileage varies. So this is how you find yourself summoning Cthulhu instead of just praying to the planets and stars like our ancestors did. Chaos magic threw out the baby, the water, and the bathroom itself, in its attempt to reboot magical thinking. Still, for all its faults, chaos magic at least had the benefit of returning a sense of accountability to magic in which the results were more important than the aesthetic. Chaos magic’s successful practitioners eventually moved on from experimenting with raw tech to experimenting with different living lineages of magic-different currents, If you will. This was a change for the better, of course, but as a result of this learning curve, the term Chaos magic picked up an unfortunate reputation. So now there are better terms to describe free form experimental magic, like neo shamanism, for example. But that's beside the point that I'm trying to make now, which is actually that instead of thinking of this results driven approach as unique to chaos, magic, we should be applying this rigor to all of our magical endeavors. When you're performing magic for a purpose to achieve a particular effect, it matters if you're successful or not. Like with anything else, you can only improve if you recognize where your technique is lacking and find ways to improve it point by point. Because that's the kind of magic that we all want to be able to do -the effective kind- regardless of technique or modality or whatever. The catch is that there's no simple way to measure magical efficacy. There are, however, some loose guidelines that we can follow to make sure that we're not just fooling ourselves, that we're actually shifting reality with our intentions and spells. In this episode, I'm going to share some lessons that I learned along the way to consistently generating results with magic, how to set up your magical experiment so that you can measure the results, when and how to double down with your magical efforts, and tips for selecting viable magical targets and more. Stay tuned for episode 20 of the Postmugglism podcast in just a moment. Welcome to the Postmugglism podcast, the show that talks about magic in the postmodern age.-spells for interesting times- and how to enchant your way to the better future that you know is possible. I'm your host Nate, coming to you from the sunny tropical paradise that is the Mexican Riviera. Thanks for tuning in to this., my 20th episode in which we'll discuss the most practical of magical subjects, how to track and measure results, and then use that information to improve your results in the future. Before we get started, please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already, so that you'll get notified whenever I publish a new episode every two weeks. And check out my other content like other episodes of the show, videos on magic and astrology, articles, and more

www.postmugglism.com. Subscribe for free to my email newsletter to get notified about all of my free content and have it delivered right to your inbox. Plus, get additional short timely posts reserved for subscribers. And finally, if you feel like it, you can support my efforts with a $5 a month paid subscription, which unlocks even more additional private posts and personal updates. Now on to the matter at hand, practicing effective results driven magic by tracking our intentions and the outcomes that we do or don't manifest from them, so that we can learn and improve. First things first, let's answer the most obvious question: Why track our results? Well, without some system of holding yourself accountable, you'll inevitably claim the good results while writing off the bad ones and rob yourself the benefits of learning from both your successes and your failures. If you work magic for prosperity, but never get a windfall or a better paying job, or grow your business or whatever, then you should admit that your magic didn't work the way that you wanted, change your approach ,and try again. It's all too easy to structure your petition so that you can claim success no matter what happens. You can only target outcomes that are already likely to occur, for example, or you can simply make your request so broad that you're guaranteed that naturally occurring events can be attributed to your magical efforts. And there's nothing explicitly wrong with these softball approaches. But if you're not testing yourself, at least a little, you're not going to grow as a magician. To evaluate your magical efforts, you need to be honest with yourself. Most of the time when I've experienced a failure, it's because I don't understand the situation and its probabilities, not because my ritual lacked in performance quality or whatever. And if I can recognize the spell missing the mark early enough, I can think of new ways to approach the problem and try again. Making a mistake once and recognizing it means that you're not likely to make that mistake again. Or if, on the other hand, you just keep practicing rote rituals that aren't really having any effect, then your technique may never improve. Some failures are bigger than others. When you have a lot riding on a magical working, you need to know that you can trust your magical abilities or you'll miss important opportunities or worse, never have the confidence to try for them in the first place. Most tragically of all, though, is that if you fail to impress yourself with the results of your magic, then you will eventually question if magic is actually real after all. It's only by seeing the effects of magic at work, inexplicably and marvelously, that you fully commit to the belief that will fuel your further magical development. Small successes create the faith largest successes required to manifest. Like using a smaller fish to bait a bigger one. Success breeds success, as they say, so you get more beneficial effects in the long run by trying and failing and succeeding later than you do for operating in a state of blind, untested positivity. The mind carries doubts regardless of what you do, and without the benefit of solid proof of your magical efficacy, that doubt will grow like a tumor of disbelief in your practice until it's eventually fatal to it. But what is success? How do you define it? How do you measure it? And who holds the assessor accountable? Let's start by differentiating magical workings, spells and so on from devotional work, i.e. relationship building with spirits. When I refer to doing a bit of magic, I mean something above and beyond the routine practice of offerings, prayers and whatnot. I mean, a deliberate ritual act designed to create a meaningful shift in reality that produces different effects than were already likely to happen. There's nothing wrong with less intentional spiritual acts, and they may even benefit your life and your practice. But such cases are gifts from the gods and not expressions of your own will and creativity into the universe. Success can be simply defined as having your intended outcome come to pass, but the reality is often more nuanced than that, and many situations will require a way to describe and measure partial successes as well. We'll stick with that phrasing for now. Partial successes. Magic is like horseshoes and hand grenades, and that sometimes almost is actually good enough, depending on the situation. Measuring how close to the mark you managed to get with your magical efforts is tricky though, and very subjective. But practically speaking, just roughly assessing your impact by a percentage (eaning I got 50% of what I wanted or I got 80% of what I wanted, etc.) will work for our purposes. Sometimes this might appear as getting a boost in prosperity, but not the whole bag you wanted. Or you might get promising results at first, only to have them peter out. These could both be considered partial successes. The key is to only count them as partial successes if the results wouldn't have occurred naturally. But honestly, all of these are moot points if you weren't structuring your magical working so that you can track and measure your results effectively. Broad petitions can be good to a point, but too broad and the results can be difficult to measure. And at the opposite extreme, highly specific outcomes are easily measured, but the resulting probability of success may be too limiting to generate results. The right petition is very important because it both communicates your intentions to spirit and defines your conditions of success. It all starts with magical planning. By which I mean the process that you go through when you've identified your goals and you're beginning to plan rituals to achieve those goals. A typical planning process considers all of the essential elements of ritual the goal, petition, intention, statement, timing, the various metaphors that you use to reinforce the intention, magical links, the spirits you intend to work with, and so forth. And all of these details largely determine the success of any working so thoughtful planning is really essential. A more in-depth discussion about magical planning is certainly warranted, but it's not the topic of this episode, so I'll have to save that for another day. However, if you're interested in learning more about the topic of magical planning, there is no better source than Ivy over at CircleThrice.com. Subscribe to her email list for weekly updates on good dates and times for magic and tips on how to plan accordingly. Again, that's CircleThrice.com. What is relevant for this discussion, though, is the aspect of planning that we can use to shape our spells and rituals so that their effects are easily measurable. Let's take a look at the elements of magical ritual that we need to consider when planning how to do a bit of results driven magic. The first thing to consider is how you launch your spell, because the ritual culminates there and depending on your method, the approach varies a little. If you plan to use sigils, for example, you'll need to give yourself time to create the sigils, separate a few days from trying to launch them, so that you can’t figure out which one is which. Also, sigils are most effective in groupings of four or five, which means that there are four or five unique statements of intent that you've converted into line drawings. To accomplish this, if you're working a more theoretical framework, the whole process for getting your intention is forgotten instead and is replaced by repetition. Repeated petitions tend to be heard and delivered on more effectively than one offs and astrological elections pair very well with theurgic workings, so petitioning at very specific times is also important. As I mentioned, I consider this distinct from simply praying without considering timing, metaphor, links and so on. So the how is important. Regardless, it probably makes sense to break up any big goal into a variety of smaller, more manageable concerns which can be addressed in a constellation of magical workings. This is especially important when creating groups of sigils, but even in theurgic rituals, this precision and clarity is a benefit. This is just one example, but you can apply this logic to any other methods of magic you may employ by considering how you're planning to launch your spell and how that will affect your petition or statement of intent. The most important aspect of planning when it comes to tracking success, though, is selecting targets with measurable outcomes. A magical target is the outcome that you want to produce, or it's at least the thing that you want to affect in order to achieve the result that you desire. This is really the most important element of any spell. Working with prosperity again, an example of a good magical target with a measurable outcome might be a down payment on a house, and the resulting statement of intent might be something like “We have enough savings for a down payment on a house”. This is specific and measurable without overcommitting to any unnecessary detail. And here are some examples of bad magical targets for comparison.“An unexpected windfall of money” or “$10,000 cash for a down payment”. And each of these are bad for completely different reasons.“An unexpected windfall of money” could mean any amount of money, so it will be too easy to attribute unrelated events to your magic. And in the case of “$10,000 for a down payment”, the specific dollar amount decreases the overall probability of success because now a specific dollar amount has to be deposited in your account rather than just having whatever it is that you need to move forward. Try to keep to that middle ground between being so broad that you can't measure and so specific that it becomes limiting. The right balance feels like something that is only as specific as it needs to be, but would be impossible to attribute to any kind of normal occurrence. Which leads to another common mistake. Being so afraid to fail that you shortchange your magical potential by picking targets that are too easily accomplished. When you do this, you get the benefit of easy victories, but you can't ever really surprise yourself. Magic is free, more or less, so you might as well shoot the moon. When you only work magic for low risk situations, you throw off your concept of how big magic is, meaning what's possible, and your ability to differentiate between real wins, magically speaking, and things that could have occurred without the benefit of your intervention. In my experience, the success or failure of your working has less to do with the perceived size of the goal than other factors like the amount of time that you have available and so on. Linear time may be subjective, but cyclical time, magical timing is just geo positional. It's universally true, but the specifics depend on your exact location on earth time, which is literally both time and place is one of the most important factors in the effectiveness of magical workings. First, it should be said that it's important to give your magic enough time to work. Physical reality is rarely manipulated by magic directly. Mostly you're programing pre-reality by sending your intention and awareness to the outcome that you want in the imaginal in order to bring it gradually into reality. And this just takes time. So the question is how much time do you give your spells to work? If you're judging their success or failure. That depends on the goal. Obviously, some targets are easy. Some are more challenging. The more challenging ones tend to take longer because more of reality has to be shifted to make them possible. There are no guideposts for estimating the length of time to allow a working to take before ruling it unsuccessful besides that, it should be less time than it would normally take to achieve that goal by fairly mundane means, or that the opportunity expires for some reason. For example, if you were doing magic to get a particular job or promotion, the working has failed when the job is awarded to someone else. But in situations without any hard deadlines like working magic to find your dream home, you simply have to set a goal and remain open to adjusting. it later, as you learn more about what the situation requires. However, there are usually mundane avenues to achieve these goals that you can compare your results to in practice. A home can be purchased within a few weeks to a few months, so a dream home shouldn't take years to find., unless your dream is especially rare. For something open ended like, “I have many happy paying clients,” for example, you can measure the rate of increase over a period of time, such as three months (one quarter of a year fiscally speaking). To gauge your impact, if your clients are increasing in a meaningful way consistently over time, you should mark this as a success. If no progress is made then obviously it's a failure. But what if you get some new clients and then the tap dries up again? It's situations like this that make it necessary to track a third

one for winners, one for losers, and one of almosts and not quites. When I first began, I just assumed that there were only two options: a spell working or not. But that's not really been my experience. Over the years, I've done lots of workings that weren't successful per se, but there was a bit of movement initially, and then it seemed like the results kind of fizzled out. After that happened a number of times, I realized that the problem was that the outcome that I wanted wasn't really possible to achieve in the way that I was going about it. If it was a prosperity working, for example, I would see some small successes, get a few new clients, etc. and then my focus would shift to the more mundane aspects of dealing with the new business. And suddenly my time and attention wasn't available anymore., so the spell stopped working. A number of times with the project here in the jungle I've unsuccessfully tried to speed up the process, which has been exceedingly slow going. But the problem is that I don't really understand what's happening behind the scenes. I don't know who the decision makers are. And so on. And just in general, Mexico moves very slowly, especially the government, and nothing makes them go any faster. Apparently not even my magic. If I were to try to do something about this, I’d need more information and a better strategy. Simply petitioning for favor from authorities hasn't done the trick because I don't think we're really subject to anyone's fiefdom as much as we're in a long, slow moving line. The issue isn't a favor, it's efficiency. And that's asking a lot of Mexican bureaucracy. But recent spells for my business and the growth of my audience seem to be working. In those examples, however, I am one of the most important factors to success, and I am more easily manipulated than the workload of the city officials in Puerto Morelos, where we live. So how long should I give for my speedy approval spell to work? Well, I would like to think it's done something, but it's been quite a while now. So when the approval finally comes through, I don't think I'll be attributing it to the spell because there's a good chance it could just be time for my paperwork to be finalized naturally. With the prosperity magic, however, I saw meaningful results in under a month. So I'm feeling very positive about that spell. The only remaining question is if the results will continue to grow sustainably. If I start to lose momentum, I'll know it's time to reinforce my efforts with additional magic. Let's say that becomes necessary as it often does. What's the best way to add more magic in support of a goal while still trying to measure the outcomes of your spells? Well, for a number of reasons, it's best to layer together your spells using different targets for each that align towards a common purpose. For example, if you're doing a prosperity working, you could start with a shoal, a cluster of related sigils for a high level goal, like “We have a year’s salary in our savings” and then related sub goals like “I save [whatever 1/12 of your salary is] per month,” “My salary increases every year,”“Our credit card debt is paid off,” and so on. Or you could create a talisman for general prosperity like a 3rd, a 7th, or maybe a 28th lunar mansion talisman. You could also approach it from a folk magic angle and enchant a lodestone, a natural magnet to attract wealth. Or, like us, you could turn a lodestone into a 3rd lunar mansion talisman. And if after a while, you feel like the results you’re trying to manifest just aren’t coming to fruition, you can reassess your approach and add more magic as needed. But each time you add a layer of magic, come up with a fresh petition or intention that describes some new aspect of the future that you want to manifest in a way that complements your other spell work. This way you can more easily distinguish the results of each without compromising the effectiveness of your magic. Because that's what's most important right? Results. You can be too focused on keeping your experiments pure and not focused enough on generating results. And there's something about experimental magic that I've noticed. It's much harder to get an outcome when you don't really care about it. So if you just do magic to see if you can get the spell to work, it won't typically work as well as it would if you really deeply needed it. Therefore, you should be very invested in the outcomes you're trying to manifest and throwing as much magic at them as it takes. We do magic to change reality in our favor, and so achieving that outcome should always be the top priority rather than the purity of the experiment itself. So again, why is it important to track and measure the results of your magic? Well, because you can't improve without honestly appraising your results. Otherwise, you'll just keep using techniques that don't really work. We actually need the outcome. The outcome is really all that matters. And worst of all, if we keep soft balling or magical approach will eventually prove to ourselves that magic isn't real after all. To measure what happens after you've done your spell, you have to begin by planning your magical rituals in advance that their outcomes can be tracked and assessed, considering things like the method or style of your spell. For practical reasons, selecting targets with measurable outcomes. Thinking bigger than usual so that you can actually tell when your magic is involved in your successes. Factoring time into your assessment and how you're going to assess your near misses and partial successes as well as your wins and failures. Then layering on additional spells and rituals to make sure that you get what you need in a way that still allows you to learn from your experiences and improve over time. By creating constellations of related adjacent statements of intent as sigils, or working in different magical currents like making a talisman and making a folk magic fetish, etc.. Selecting high level magical targets first (general prosperity, for example) and then adding spells for sub targets(like a raise, promotion, more clients and so on). And having a unique enough target for each spell that you can tell if your magic worked or not. Well, that's all great in theory. Your mileage with each practice will vary based on how you work magic. Your personal style and letting that come through in your ritual has more to do with your success than really any other factor. In my own practice, the concept of layering has become very important. It's almost a given that I’ll perform multiple rituals for any significant goal, and most of my magic is targeting pretty real important stuff in my life. So the investment is high and so is the risk of failure. I've also migrated over the years from one modality to another, and the format of my ritual has evolved alongside my cosmology. Sigils were a huge part of my practice a number of years ago, and I rarely use them now, preferring to find magical elections, create talismans and other forms of image magic, and simply horse trade with the gods in theurgic rituals, or repeat my petition for a certain number of days like a novena, for example. It's just a better fit for my magical practice these days, and my strategy for tracking and measuring my results has had to adapt as well. But while the vibe of your ritual is constantly evolving, there are certain universally applicable pro tips for what we're calling results driven magic that should pretty much work for anyone, regardless of the specifics of their practices. First of all, I've never had much luck targeting hyper specific things like dates and times or dollar amounts, and instead I set goals seasonally or on a rough monthly basis sometimes, and I generally prefer to work towards open ended non numerical targets like “I double my client sessions in the next quarter”, or even “I have many paying clients” as a high level target because I can measure the increase over time to validate that the spell is working. The reason I avoid specific times and numerical amounts and prefer “enough resources to do X by the time I Y” is that being too specific can render your intention impossible rather than simply improbable. Magic won't produce impossible results, but it excels at shifting improbabilities into the field of probability, so it's important to thread that needle correctly. Plus, in the case of financial magic, it's often more trouble to get money to appear in your bank account so that you can spend it on something you want or need than it is to simply provide you the thing that you want or need without the hassle of a financial transaction. And the problem with getting magic to work by a certain time is that we usually have no idea what it's going to take to make our intentions come to pass. So it's very hard to estimate. Instead, if you have a deadline of some kind, you can use that to frame your timing. My wife and I used to do spells every month to try and hit our numbers at work, which is dumb for a lot of reasons, but primarily because it's hideously inefficient. Also, it violates both of those two conditions I just discussed. Still, month after month, we would both spend our best magical opportunities for prosperity, working hard to barely reach our goals rather than surpass them. Now we focus primarily on pairing high level prosperity workings with all kinds of talismans that we create with magic to attract clients, more bookings, and other related targets that all work together towards the success that we want to manifest. Another useful trick is for intending for things that you won't do unless your goal is reached. Like “I go on a vacation to Europe next year [to celebrate my new job]”, or “I have the savings to take a year off”. This has the added benefit of helping you avoid lust for results(which is the obsessive preoccupation with your desired outcome that can interfere with your magic) and helps to avoid the trap of manifesting the work rather than the payoff. That might look like intending for a promotion so that you get a raise so that you can afford something that you want But then that promotion carries all kinds of new responsibilities because then you're setting yourself up to work harder from that point on just to be able to afford something that you want one time. When we were first planning our move to Mexico and strategizing a constellation of sigils in support of this goal, it occurred to us that it makes way more sense to intend for “living in Mexico” rather than “moving to Mexico” for exactly this reason. Bringing us back around to time again, not only do you want to allow enough time before you judge your success or failure, particularly with more significant goals, but you should also be careful to allow yourself enough lead time for the outcome that you want to be able to manifest at all. Back when we were doing magic to hit our numbers every month like dummies, we failed to consider that our sales rarely opened and closed within the same month. So we really needed to be doing magic on the sales for next quarter, not the month ahead. Many goals, which are completely impossible to achieve in the short term, become much more possible in the long term. So setting your sights further into the future provides the universe a more malleable medium from which to mold reality according to your desires. How much time is enough? Obviously this depends on the goal, but what I just said about targeting sales a quarter out has the right energy. If you know what it would take without magic at your back, you can give it that much time and hope that it happens sooner. But keep in mind that everything that you want to achieve magically will still have to happen through physical means, and that just takes time. There is some tension between the desire to target specific enough that you can track them, but not so specific that you limit the possible pathways to success. The more conditions that you have for your magical targets, the less likely it is that they'll happen naturally, and therefore the more reality has to be shifted to get you what you want. One of the best ways to avoid boxing yourself in is to focus on the outcome rather than the means of achieving it. Meaning if your end goal is to say, “Own your own home”, then don't bother doing magic to” find a home I like” or “buy a house for a good price”. Just focus on “own my dream home”. You don't even need the extra qualifiers because you will either have a windfall to get you the money that you need or you'll get a good deal on the property because otherwise you wouldn't buy the house anyway. There's a lot of benefit in intending for the outcome rather than the means of achieving it. But what's potentially most important to consider is that you may be making your goal out to be more difficult than it really is for reasons that you'd have no way of knowing if you intended for the outcome rather than what's involved in getting it. You leave the opportunity for victory to be easier than you anticipated. Driving results isn't just about postmortem analysis, though. Many times the difference between success and failure is just trying again and trying something a little different. There are signs that you can pick up on if you know what to watch for, that will tell you if the magic is working or not. Synchronicities, for example, are very common and generally a good sign. Having a good feeling in your gut and feeling abnormally positive after a ritual is also a very promising development. But the best indication of success is, of course, progress. So start watching for changes in your situation or factors adjacent to it which align with the outcome that you want. As you notice movement in the ether with multiple events aligning to your benefit, you can assume your magic is working. And if you don't, you should assume your efforts will not be successful enough to the degree that you intend, unless you dial up your magical efforts. It rarely hurts to do more magic than you need, so I tend to throw the kitchen sink at anything that looks like it's not going to work out. I like to think better safe than sorry, but I'm also careful to pick magical targets that are distinct so that I can track their individual successes and failures. The best way to keep track of all of this is with a magical journal or rather to journal about your magic. And the best way to journal is thoroughly. Start by making a bullet pointed list of your goals and then find the best magical timing for each. Then write down everything you're doing and short facts only notes and include your final statement of intent. And if you're using sigils, the final image along with the date and phase of the moon, you should avoid looking at your notes very frequently because focusing too much on the magic that you've done can bring on the lust for results and short circuit your magical efforts. And particularly with sigils. The point is to forget the statement that goes along with each sigil. So you don't want to be reminding yourself. While the magic could still be working. That's a bit of a superstitious take. But again, better safe than sorry. You can avoid this easily by having someone read the statements of intent that you've already cast as sigils out to you without revealing the sigil so that you can assess if that intention is a) a success, b) a failure, or c) either still undetermined or in progress at this point. Generally speaking, it's impossible to know which of your spells is going to be successful. And failure in itself doesn't say anything about your skill as a mage because we can't always know what's truly possible or impossible and why. Sometimes you'll think you want one thing and subconsciously recognize you want something else. And this inner turmoil will show up as failing through self-sabotage. Sometimes an outcome is just fundamentally impossible, but you're not able to see it. Sometimes you can make a difference on the outcome, but not enough to get you exactly what you wanted. The benefit is in the analysis. Why did this one work and this one did not? Was it something that you could have foreseen or could have handled differently? Was there something missing, etc.? Your average rate of success is really the most important metric to estimate as you're honing your magical abilities. It's most useful to see how your success rate changes over time. This should be improving steadily as you work results driven magic more often, and once you're in the 60% to 80% success bracket, it's not as important to track so rigorously, so long as you can always be honest with yourself about your wins and losses. It's not a competition. It's just data that we can use to improve and refine. To sum up quickly the introduction of Chaos Magic in the nineties strip the Western esoteric system of much of its pretense and rigidity. For all its faults, chaos magic's punk ethos and pirate mentality is useful for a serious magical practice because it encourages honesty, authenticity and open minded creativity. Though the term may have fallen out of favor, this ethos of curiosity and accountability to results is a healthy thing for us to cultivate within our magical community. Select magical targets as part of a coordinated strategy planned out in advance so that all of your statements of intent complement rather than compete with each other and then track and measure failures and successes, as well as partial successes and near-misses. In other words, try really hard to understand what happens as a result of your magic and be honest with yourself about what you are doing with your magic and what's just happening organically. Try different things, find the right times and watch for signs of progress. In the absence of this progress. Layer on additional magic that targets adjacent goals align with the spells and rituals you've already done so that all of your intentions are working towards the same positive future. And most importantly of all, stay focused on driving results, not just experimenting and learning. Because the most important part of any spell is its outcome, its effect. The opportunity to improve is a distant second, but working magic becomes something much more meaningful when it's also more reliable. Being able to trust in supernatural assistance makes you a bolder and more adventurous person, and this is, generally speaking, a very good thing with practice, you can get good at anything if you believe in yourself and hold yourself to your goals. Practicing magic frequently, taking good notes and learning from your mistakes and oversights is how you become a more effective mage. After all, praxis makes perfect. Thanks for tuning in to the 20th episode of the Postmugglism podcast. It feels good to reach this milestone with 20 diverse and interesting episodes in the catalog, and I'm excited about where we go from here. I have a lot of ideas for new episodes and even new types of episodes, so I promise there's a lot to look forward to on the show. So if you haven't yet, please consider subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Spotify, Google, YouTube, etc. so that you get notified whenever I publish new episodes every two weeks. And please check out my website for all the other magical content that I produce. Like other episodes of this podcast. My monthly letter mentioned guides and other videos and articles on magic, astrology, shamanism, dirt, sorcery and more. Visit me at www.postmugglism.com and then sign up for my email newsletter to get all my content on every platform delivered right to your inbox. In the next episode, I'm going to share my thoughts and findings on the recent nodal ingress into Aries and Libra and what it means for each rising sign. How the North Node speaks to our Fate and the South node to our Karma, and what lessons we can all look forward to during this next 18 months of this transit, as well as the related eclipses that take place in these signs. The ingress of the lunar nodes into a new sign tends to create very tangible effects on our lives, and understanding what's happening to the myths and symbols of astrology can help us put the next year and a half into perspective in a very useful way. So please tune in again for that next time. Until then, thanks so much for spending your time with me today and made the gods be with you.