Why I Don’t Offer Magick As A Paid Service….

There are some Professional Tarot Readers out there who broaden their “marketing perspectives” by adding paid spellwork to their repertoire of services, but I will never be one of those people.  Why? Some of it has to do strictly with laws of energy exchange (I’ve only got so much to go around, ya know?), but it also gets into some pretty heavy ethical questions, and has a lot to do with the history of such things as plenary indulgences in the Medieval Church.

Say what?

Back in the 9th and 10th century, it became a fairly common practice for very rich people to purchase plenary indulgences from the Church (note: historically, you will find the Church described or defined as Catholic at this point in history, but technically, the Catholic Church did not happen until the East-West Schism of 1054, in the 11th century).  What’s a plenary indulgence?  It is officially defined as “a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins”.  Basically, it’s like a “get out of jail free card” between a person and Deity.  This practice of buying and selling plenary indulgences also has an official name: simony.  That is defined in canon (Church) law as follows:

“a deliberate act or a premeditated will and desire of selling such things as are spiritual…by giving something of a temporal nature for the purchase thereof, or in other terms it is defined to be a commutation of a thing spiritual…by giving something that is temporal.”

So, basically, it’s selling somebody a mundane representation of the prayers you just said for them.  Spells are prayers!  For those keeping score, simony is not only a sin, but it’s also illegal in a lot of places–as in, you could go to jail.  I tend to avoid things that could land me in the slammer, how about you? Sin is also nothing to sneeze at….

Sure, there are plenty of shops (some of which are quite reputable and which I wholeheartedly trust) in Salem, Massachusetts that sell “spell packets”–essentially a “take home spell kit”, that you can buy, take home, and perform the spell yourself. That is completely different, in my opinion, from simony, because that’s not paying someone else to do the spell for you, that’s purchasing the tools and the expertise to then go home and actually do it yourself. In that scenario, nobody is being paid to do the spiritual work for you; you’re just buying the tools and the “know-how”. That’s no different than going to a Catholic-based shop and buying a rosary, which is obviously not only perfectly okay, but encouraged.

Simony aside, there is also the issue, as I said, of the law of energy exchange.  Basically, this is a theory that says that we only have so much energy to go around (which, if you think about other things that use energy like, say, light bulbs, for example, makes total sense), so we’d better use it wisely.  I have done on-demand spellwork for people in the past–for free, mind you!–and I found that after doing two or three workings in a row, I was completely mentally, physically, and emotionally tapped out.  (And I will still do spellwork for free, by my own initiative, not on-demand, the same way I will pray for someone for free, because, hey, that’s just what you do, right?)  I found that once I had done those two or three spells in a row, I had nothing left for little ole me! And I was in high school at the time, constantly being bullied, and having other teenagers actually threaten to burn me at the stake, so I could’ve really used some mojo left over for me!  My basing some of my reticence to do spellwork for money on this law of energy exchange is not selfish; it’s simply taking care of myself, which is something most of us should do a whole lot more of, ya know?

And then there are those heavy ethical questions I mentioned….

Most of the time, when someone actually hires you to do spellwork for them as a paid service, they want something highly specific.  Most of those very specific things involve either love or money: they want so-and-so specific person to fall in love with them, or they want so-and-so specific money-making venture to come through for them with a big payoff.  That isn’t a true spell; that is an attempt to play God/dess. I feel the same thing applies to prayer: you don’t “make deals” with God/dess wherein you say “oh, if you’ll just let John Doe love me like there’s no tomorrow, I’ll say the rosary every day and give twenty percent of my paycheck to charity every time”!  It doesn’t work that way. You don’t honestly know exactly what’s best for you–only Deity knows that!  So when a spell is being cast, one asks for the “ballpark” of what they want, and then leaves the Universe and Deity room to actually provide for them what they need.  Someone may think they want John Doe to love them like there’s no tomorrow, but they should actually ask for a fulfilling love to enter their life, for the benefit of all, and harm to none.  And when you start doing paid spellwork, most people aren’t going to take that explanation to heart. They aren’t going to be in a position where that is what they want to hear. There is a scene in the film Practical Magic which perfectly sums up what I’m talking about here: a desperate woman comes to see the elderly witch sisters who are Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman’s “crazy aunts”, and she is so desperate that she is literally scratching on the glass of their back door.  This desperate woman comes to see those two ladies for paid spellwork, and that is the kind of desperation one often encounters when one throws their hat in that particular ring–people like that lady in the movie are in no condition to hear that highly specific spellwork is the wrong thing to do. They want you to play God/dess. I am not God/dess. Most people who really know me would agree I’d make a pretty lousy deity!

I close nearly every counseling session that I do for follow-up with my Professional Tarot Readings with: “I will keep you in my prayers.”  That’s not just my Southern way of being polite; that is a wholehearted assurance that even when the reading and the counseling session are done, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers, whoever you are, and whatever you’re going through.  I don’t just do this to make money; I do this to honestly help people.  When you’ve hired me for a Reading, you can count on the fact that you mean more to me than your bank account.  But that is as far as I’m willing to go.  There is absolutely everything right with caring about your clients; there is absolutely everything wrong with enabling desperation, which I feel is precisely what paid spellwork does.  I believe doing repeated readings on the same question when a client is in a desperate situation is fleecing them for money for the exact same reason: that is enabling their desperation, instead of caring enough about them to empower them instead.

So, no, I won’t be adding paid spellwork to my repertoire, because I am here to empower, not enable.  I am here to provide a gateway to your own Self-Empowerment, not to provide a magickal “quick-fix” in a desperate moment. “Quick-fixes” are precisely that: band-aids, that are going to hurt a whole lot more, when they’re pulled off, than they did when you put them on!  I’m in this to provide you with a long haul, not a “quick-fix”, so that those desperate moments will hopefully grow fewer and farther apart, until eventually, they no longer happen at all.