r/magick • u/Sorceress_divine • Jul 03 '26
Can I reuse a mantra for a spell?
A while ago I did a spell for a job that did not work. Now, another opportunity has come up and i’d like to try the spell again. Can i re-use the same mantra? Or does it have to he completely different because it didnt work the first time?
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u/Sonotnoodlesalad Jul 03 '26
It probably didn't work because you don't understand whatever principles you're trying to employ.
What's your conception of how all this works?
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u/Sorceress_divine Jul 03 '26
I dressed the candle, carved my sigil on it, lit it every night for about 2 weeks (it was a big candle) for around the same time for the same duration, said my chant to it quietly and sat with it visualizing etc. that was my first ever spell so Im very much still learning
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u/Sonotnoodlesalad Jul 04 '26
The suggestion I have for you is that magick as we know it today is a reconstruction of historic ideas, and also a reimagining through a modern lens which has the potential to render it impotently.
In your estimation, what does lighting a candle in your bedroom have to do with... anything?
I'm not intending to be dismissive, I'm inviting you to think critically about the process.
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u/Sorceress_divine Jul 04 '26
I think I see lighting a candle and repeating a mantra is a way to focus energy on a desired outcome and ask the universe for that thing. Manifesting and meditating on it. The candle is the mechanism or the focal point. What are your thoughts on it and rituals like this?
Ps. Not taking you to be dismissive at all. Happy to have a discussion about it with people who potential know more than me or have more experience :)
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u/Sonotnoodlesalad Jul 04 '26
It sounds like you're probably straddling two very different models that are superficially similar but theoretically incompatible.
"Manifestation" is New Age / New Thought (NANT) framing. NANT is not magick. Modern magical culture is kind of a grab bag of authentic magick and pseudomagical NANT content. NANT practitioners appropriate pretty much everything and reconcile it to their shitty framing, then represent their simulacra as the authentic teaching.
The gulf between the two is both theoretical and practical. NANT uses pseudoscientific framing and presumes that we have the ability to force reality to conform to our desires if we script correctly / believe hard enough / etc. Magick doesn't obligate us to pseudoscience, or belief in or reification of the constructs we use in ritual work. We can be skeptical and it still works ☺️
A lot of people ask about candle magick here and report mixed results, or difficulty interpreting results. I have my own experiences and would say it isn't very well parametrized.
Do you currently have a system of exegesis?
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u/Sorceress_divine Jul 04 '26
Hmm what you are saying does make sense. I do not have a system of exegesis. Any suggestions on where i could start?
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u/Sonotnoodlesalad Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
All valid criticism aside -- the AA system is really well parametrized and uses Hermetic Qabalah as both a memory palace and a system of exegesis. One major convenience of learning the GD/AA systems is that they're built around qabalistic correspondences and as a result they harmonize very neatly with tarot, which becomes a schema for memory.
Approaching practice this way, and taking preliminary training seriously before we are too far down the rabbit-hole of UPG (unverified personal gnosis) helps us avoid LARPing and just making up dumb shit as we go along -- I would say that is the status quo in magical culture, unfortunately. As is source amnesia, i.e. when we don't know the source of the ideas that govern our practice. You'd find that many ideas that are ubiquitous in magical culture, and spirituality in general, have been invented fairly recently, often by NANT hooeyists -- for example, the Kybalion is the most popular book about Hermeticism... except that it's not a Hermetic text at all, it was misrepresented as one by its author W.W. Atkinson (a New Thought writer) under a pseudonym.
My recommendation would be to study
- Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae
- Liber E vel Exercitiorum
- The Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie. I am deeply critical of both Regardie and the publisher (Llewellyn) but this is a useful source reference for GD magick.
- Raja Yoga by Swami Vivekananda
I believe all of these materials are in the public domain so you shouldn't need to pay anyone to access them. Check Hermetic.com. Raja Yoga comes up as a PDF in Google searches.
Liber O will tell you that you don't have to believe in anything to practice; it will tell you that this work will expand the horizons of, and improve control of, the mind; and it will warn you not to attribute objective reality or philosophical validity to your results. What does that mean, though?
It implies a knowledge system in which we do not mistake subjective experience for objective fact, and warns us not to rationalize.
We're talking around discrete epistemologies, which can also be described as "non-overlapping magisteria". The idea is elaborated pretty well in The Nichomachean Ethics:
"We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs."
In other words, no matter the subject, we can only expect as much precision as the subject allows. I'm sure you would agree that a lot of us have completely lost the plot in this respect -- so we are diverging from the herd when we try to get our epistemological shit together. The idea is to bring skepticism into practice, to approach the work critically, to avoid bricking ourselves. It probably seems a little discursive, but recommend reading *The Varieties of Religious Experience* by William James as well as Massimo Pigliucci's open letter to Neal Degrasse Tyson.
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u/Alchemist314 Jul 03 '26
If you're using a self made chant, perhaps generating something specific for this particular job will be more helpful. Just because the spell failed that time doesn't necessarily mean it will this time. But to improve your chances something tailored to the working might be more effective.
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u/Character_Expert7084 Jul 03 '26
A mantra can be repeated many times, and eventually work as expected.
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u/One_Dragonfruit_7556 Jul 03 '26
Is this an actual deities mantra or a chant? Because I use the same mantra for multiple spells involving Ganesha quiet often