H_James said:
I think someone (Lizard?) posted on here a while back about how the lottery is so tied up with charms, wishes, curses, spells etc that it's pointless.
Yes, that was me, on the 'Do Sigils Work' thread in Esoterica ... the poll on that, incidentally, stands currently at exactly 50/50.
Magica(k)ally speaking there is a bit more to 'getting what you want' - i.e. manifesting your will in a material sense - than fervent desire, visualisation of success or even concentration and gnosis, otherwise, for example, all our masturbation fantasies would come true (pun intended) and
then we'd be in a real mess
If there is any more to magic(k) (which is, essentially what you are talking about it when you seek to influence something that you have no physical control over through the power of your mind) than what we currently understand to be psychology (and many argue there isn't) then it is certainly something more than 'positive thinking'.
If you want to know my feelings on the subject today, I am having a bit of a thing about 'clustering' (due to a combination of revisiting some Alan Moore psychogeography and William Burroughs chaos magic(k)). As has been mentioned above, some people seem to win things a lot and some never. Similarly sometimes it seems that everyone you meet talks about e.g. having pins and needles with remarkable frequency and othertimes no one mentions it to you for years. It's a synchronicity thing. Every crackpot has their theory about what it all means. You can argue it is the 'red mini' effect, but where the 'powers of the mind' are concerned it hardly seems to matter if the phenomenon has any valid exo-reality
If things do 'cluster', like some strange tide washing a certain meme into your existance, then the principles of sympathetic magic(k) and magic(k)al correspondances make perfect sense .... to contact a particular current you need to create an environment where its arrival would be a remarkable coincidence, and so a magic(k)ian uses the symbols - shapes, colours, incense, gems, herbs etc etc associated with a the entity that is associated with the desired outcome in his or her working to achieve it.
To attract wealth, for example, you could go all solar - and it's coming up a good time of year for it too, Christams being such a sun thing, with all the cinnamon and oranges and golden baubles and feasting etc.
But equally, you could use a more modern and less obviously 'magic(k)al' paradigm and try and think of all the things that would strike you as being 'spooky' adjuncts to becoming suddenly wealthy... perhaps making the changing hands of money a bigger part of your life (use dirty hard cash instead of your plastic for a month maybe, or count up all that shrapnel you keep in a sweet jar on the sideboard), buying yourself a new wallet, setting up a new bank account, taking up a prestige leisure activity that will have you mixing with the filthy rich, or just a part time job in a posh boozer selling 'em beer .... I dunno .... your imagination is much more relevant to your life than mine
... the more you make your life about it in an unrelated way, whilst not overly bothering about the thing itself, the more likely you are to attract it, if there is any mystical virtue to the clustering theory at all. If you work on the theory that the universe loves coincidence and irony you can work out how to encourage certain things to happen in this way, perhaps. Or perhaps just send yourself crazy. Maybe both.
I still don't think you'll win the lottery though
Although if it helps you create your 'cluster of coincidences', I did collect the whopping sum of £6.60 today in lottery winnings myself
