Spiritual First Aid: Defense Against Love Spells

Welcome to the latest edition of Spiritual First Aid! I apologize it’s been so long since my last column. Life has been a little hectic between my personal life, and with my new book being released and the many many side projects I have going on I have neglected the thing that gives me the most joy- writing. Some of these projects, you might know about, such as The Invisible College, the nonprofit I founded to aid the development and infrastructure of the spiritual communities we all hold dear. I also have some other new projects on the horizon that I’m going to keep silent on for the moment as they manifest- but rest assured, the best is yet to come. If you think I’ve been busy now, wait until you see what happens in the next few months. Let us just say that marketing and promotion of the new book, my summer book tour, being the executive director of a new nonprofit, working a full-time job, and working on four books at once is my new normal. Anyway, enough about me…

The season of Beltane is upon us! As such, it seems like a great time not just to reflect on themes of fertility and sex and love, but also some of the darker things that may happen in terms of spiritual first aid and how they interrelate: defense against and dealing with love magick. So let’s get our hands dirty and talk about the nitty gritty of love magic and its defense.

On the onset one might be thinking why you would need to defend myself against love magic, but I think it at least warrants a conversation. We all have needs. We all want to love and be loved and sometimes we do not pursue those needs in a healthy manner, with even the best of us resorting to more coercive means that take a simple and basic human need and cause us to do something that ends a little destructive for all parties involved. Let me tell you a story…

A witch was having problems with her boyfriend and he seemed to lose interest. She decided to do a love spell to hold his attention and keep him attracted to her. The spell worked and not soon after he not only was more attentive, but he asked her to marry him. After some time, his interests seemed to run hot and cold. Sometimes he was amazing and other times he would be disinterested. The witch decided to do another spell. They ended up having kids. After a few years of repeated love magick, something odd happened. He started to get angry and the relationship became more and more toxic and she had to leave with the kids with the help of a mutual friend. My theory is that part of the guy knew he was being manipulated and was subconsciously fighting against it and tha, combined with his underlying issues and propensity towards toxic behavior, the perfect recipe for disaster was created.

This is an example of a worse case scenario and close to what I am going to cover. There are a few types of love magic that I want to get into and I am going to need to define some terms but how they relate to love magic and its different types of branches.

Many people like to dissect the study of magic into these dichotomies, or polarized categories. Things are rarely that simple and are usually somewhat complex. I like to think that everything happens on a spectrum between extremes. That being said, let’s talk about a few of those polarities.

Constructive versus Destructive- Some magic is used to build something to build us up, build up our communities, build up our connections to the sources of Life. Magick in many ways is co-creating with the Universe. Destructive magic is not about creating chaos (necessarily, as true chaos in a cosmological sense is more of a blank slate on which to create) and is not a bad thing. The Tower card in Tarot can be one of the most beneficial cards in the Major Arcana since as things are destroyed, they can be rebuilt even better than before. A forest fire can be very deeply destructive and at the same time there is great fertility that comes from it afterwards. Every act of destruction is an act of creation. So these two dichotomies actually reflect and balance each other as they speak to a cycle of life and growth that is beyond the polarities and onto something greater than itself.

Light(White) versus Dark(Black)- I am not sure where Light being more airy, happy, positive came from. Perhaps more from the New Age movement, but as much as I worship darker deities, I have found that there is great value in taking a breath, not taking things so seriously and focusing on things that are not as heavy. Even Hades is married to the goddess of Spring. sIn terms of Pagan worship, I can probably trace this back to Robert Graves in his work “The White Goddess, but even he espoused balance between “the white goddess” archetypes of deities like Aphrodite versus the “the dark goddesses” such as Kali or Hekate.While dark can have so many negative connotations- it is in the darkness that he starts shine and the “light” of consciousness shine upon our self to show us our shadow – the things that we need to work on, address, explore, and transform so that we can be our best selves.

Left Hand Path versus Right Hand Path- This is where you get deeper into what a lot of people talk about white and black magic. Right hand path magick can be more about healing, balancing one’s life, growth, fertility, self-evolution, and theurgy- that is the magick of connecting us to the gods. I like to think that is magick that is more about expressing the essential spiritual truth that we are all connected- the magick of the collective tribe(s) that are apart of. We are the World, and we are all reflections of it. Left hand path magic is a little different. It is more about the self- about focusing on the practitioner as the god within and having the inner authority of one. A left-hand path practitioner may have impeccable manners, go live their lives with a sense of grace and diplomacy that is almost superhuman, but if you violate their boundaries if you cross them- they have every right to defend themselves with as much force as they deem worthy to the situation. I like to joke the the left hand path is the path of “f*** around and find out. Now of course the left hand can’t live without the right hand right? So when we talk about the balance between left hand and right hand magic, we are really talking about the balance between the community and the self; the collective welfare versus personal sovereignty; of what we need to do so that the microcosm and the macrocosm are in balance within and without.

All these dichotomies being said we can talk about more white magic love spells being about personal growth, promoting positive self-esteem, and working on our image of the self. The greatest love spells focus on sel-flove, as we cannot love others effectively without loving ourselves. I would definitely classify something such as a simple glamor spell as as white magick, for the similar reason the base of any good glamor spell is appreciation of one’s beauty- both in and outer- and projecting that image upon the world. However the more that you project something outward the more you something is projected inward. As above so below; as within as without.

More of a left hand path love spell would definitely be more of the coercion sort of magick spoken about in the case study above where there was manipulation involved. However, how bad is manipulation- that is something each practitioner will have to decide on their own. For example, is marketing and advertising inherently wrong? These use tools of psychology, and honestly the father of modern advertising is the Renaissance magician Giordano Bruno who talked about the use of an emotionally charged image and how that magically charged image can manipulate the masses (oh Bruno- we are your children).

I’m not advocating one thing over another, but I am putting forth the idea that there is once again a spectrum from one to the other. “Black” is at one end, “white” on another, and there are many colors in between.

One last categorization for different types of love spells- I would explore the difference between conscious and unconscious magic. Magick is for everyone and anyone can do magick. I am rarely concerned about people that study magick in earnest- ii is the untrained or “wild” ones. For example…

Many years ago, I had a good friend who I would classify as a wild or untrained practitioner that used unconscious magick (I may have talked about her in my book, but honestly I have so many stories I can’t even remember who I’ve told what at any given point- damn ADHD). Anyway my friend, let us call her Samantha, had another friend that partied way too hard and actually had an alcohol problem that was fairly severe. Samantha’s friend would go out clubbing, get drunk, take home strangers and put themselves at risk in terms of their physical safety and health. Samantha’s friend was also at risk of losing their job. In a wild burst of emotional rage and loving concern- she focused upon her friend and swore at them that they would stop drinking immediately and fix their lives. It was not more than two days later that Samantha’s friend, after drinking came back to their home in the middle of the night, slipped on a patch of ice on their stairs, went flying backwards, and broke their back. Samantha’s friend spent two months in the hospital healing, and during that time of reflection and immobilization, they reflected not only in their life choices but they had a chance to detox from the alcohol. After that, they left the hospital, quit drinking, and began to have a more productive life, live their dreams, and get re-centered back on the path of their life’s purpose.

Of course the other end of this is a trained practitioner who devotes time and resources to studying the art and uses imagination, visualization, concentrated will, and with a daring heart- makes that vision a reality, and manifest their desires into the physical world.

All right, end of that lecture let’s get on some more fun stuff to get our hands dirty.

Let’s start with the glamor. While glamors can be mostly harmless, they can be used in more coercive and forceful ways. A good glamor highlights someone’s beauty, charm, and charisma to various levels. I think of it as “magic make-up” in some instances. If you find yourself feeling ambivalent or even repulsed by a person and suddenly you find them more interesting suddenly that might be the sign of a glamor. Once you find the person using the glamor more interesting, a mental hook has been established and develops into something more emotional and connections are made- energetically, emotionally, and mentally (that reminds me I’ll go into manipulative cord forming later). The first defense is mindfulness and being aware that there is a change in how you perceive and receive them. That being said this doesn’t mean that we naturally don’t change our opinion of people over time, but I feel that with practice and discernment one can tell the difference between the natural progression of a relationship versus a very sudden change that may be indicative of coercive magick. One defense against the glamor I found to be effective is relatively simple- for every positive trait you notice, or attracted to, about that person who maybe using a glamor try to notice and focus on a “negative trait”. For example and, not to be too superficial, let’s say for some reason you’re drawn to someone’s eyes and you find them more beautiful than other eyes you have seen. You may say things to yourself such as “wow, I can see the light of the Universe reflecting in their eyes” (or something similar) In that situation you might want to notice if their eyes are asymmetrical, if they have a unibrow, if one eye is “lazy”. The goal is not to think poorly of the person, but to find things that humanize them in contrast to the attributes you may find mesmerizing.

I mentioned cord creation as a technique of love magic. I have done a lot of classes on energetic cords and cutting them (there is an entire chapter devoted to this in my book). If you go on social media, you’ll see all sorts of spells for cord cutting between people that have ended a relationship. I have noticed in my direct experience, and with working with clients/students, that while candle magick to release connections may be effective and there is certainly a therapeutic effect of a cord cutting ritual, the energetic connection between those two people has not been dealt with. Any relationship we have with anything – a person, place, thing, or even an experience – there is an energetic connection. These connections typically form along the chakras or other parts of the metaphysica/lenergetic anatomy. As someone can do a cord cutting to get over someone, cords can also be created to create intimacy very quickly that would not have existed naturally, or would have taken a lot more time to develop. Now, if you are doing cord creation on purpose and this is consensual -as in with magick used for intimacy or creating bonds for a group – then that is of course fine.

This is not to say that every creepy person is consciously thrown energy around and weaving energetic chords like some sort of pickup artist with spider powers, but they may be using tools of psychology or even some of the things from the “pickup artist” school of manipulation, and as energy follows intention and intention, the intention of manipulation may follow through into an energetic result.

There are ways around this. Mindfulness, and after making a determination on the nature of your connection with the person in question that might be “spinning cords”, you can cut those connections. Before you start going around waving your magical tools and cutting connections, you want to mentally and energetically tune into those chords with this other person and make an evaluation. As an old woodworker friend of mine used to say “measure twice, cut once”. I find this philosophy to be very insightful in terms of magic and metaphysics. I do not say this from some sort of high horse or Ivory tower, there have been plenty of times where I have gone in with “wands blazing” and made a mess of things. The subject of such misadventures would definitely be the subject of a new article or a blog post!

Going back to energetic cord cutting, let us say for example a woman meets someone at a music festival named “Chris”. Chris looks like a guru from India, he plays a drum, knows some mantras and he connects with you on a one-on-one basis in the middle of the music festival. Then Chris says “I really like your energy”, and “I feel like..I don’t know…I’m getting flashes we might have met each other in a past life”. Meanwhile Chad is probably using some natural talents or even learned ones of energy manipulation to force a connection. Let us say later on that day this same woman is hanging out with friends and she thinks of Chad for some random reason and although she did not like Chris intuitively, some obsessive thoughts occur. In this situation, it would be wise to take a few breaths, evaluate the emotions around Chris and if there are connections, especially more on the root chakra or physical level, just after a brief interaction I would be very cautious of those and I would probably cut them. Iif there is a chance that Chris was actually an alright person, then connections can be made with more purpose. Sometimes all the mindfulness in the world doesn’t match following your gut. I’ve been on both sides of this there’s definitely people my life I wish I would have cut at the initial meeting, and there are times where I was just unhealthy or toxic where I wish people would have cut me off so I could have had the alone time to reflect on who I was and do some more personal growth.

Everything I’ve spoken about so far is more direct, and very energetic. Let’s talk about things that are a little bit more subtle. In psychology, we can talk about positive and negative reinforcement. These concepts can be used in magick, just as easily as training a dog to manipulate someone. For example someone can do a negative reinforcement spell where your life can get worse and worse until you start to warm up to them. The victim may notice that the more they warm up to them, or make space for the person in their life who’s casting this love spell against them that their life gets better mysteriously – horrible luck starts to cease and becomes better and better. In this case, the correlation between the connection with the person, and how the caster of the spell is treated, determines how well the victim’s life is going. In this case both positive and negative reinforcement are working together in a very potent mix. The cure for this can be as simple as an uncrossing spell or ritual- where holding a black candle in sacred space (I personally like to use the 7 Days candles that are in glass) – and hold that candle while thinking about all the negative luck and bad things that have happened recently. Then put the intention that whatever thing you are connected to, or is causing these negative things, in your life to happen be disconnected from me, maybe folded in and on itself, and sent back to the person or place from where it came. Then I would light that candle. This can be done with a combination of any magical practice or technique you normally use. I want to express that not only does every magickal act have an energetic component, but all spells have an energetic result, and that you can take your already developed practice and use your knowledge of how energy works to get better results by focusing on that energetic component.

I hope this helps avoid some painful situations, consolidates wisdom that you’ve already gained from your life experience, and helps put it in a more of a magical context so you can work with it more effectively and make the conscious choices necessary to live the life you deserve. Until next time, may the gods and ancestors guide and shine upon you. Blessings.

Mark NeCamp, Jr. is a writer, poet, teacher, public speaker, entrepreneur, spiritual alchemist, and modern day student and practitioner of the Art. He teaches classes using magick as a tool for personal growth. He is passionate for how we each can, through the alchemical process, turn our spiritual lead into gold as individuals and as a global community. Skilled in Western magick and Eastern thought, he weaves together a global approach to magick that seeks to create harmony and balance while pursuing personal growth. He is the author of the book Energy Magick, by Moon Books Publishing, and is the executive director of The Invisible College- a non-profit created to support the Pagan, Heathen, Witchcraft, and Occult communities through the creation of social, financial and educational resources. He can be contacted through his website www.marknecampjr.com.