Spell Working Makes You Smarter

Last Sunday, I began our session with my definition of a spell as a “multimedia affirmation,” and I also suggested that because many traditional magical systems have you doing all kinds of different things, spell casting engages more areas of your brain. However, I don’t know if I explained that adequately.

So, if you look at the magic working practices of many different cultures, or in any number of spell books, including classics like “The Greek Magical Papyri” and Harry Middleton Hyatt’s “Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork,” working a spell often requires combining a number of different activities, such as saying affirmations or singing incantations, dancing or making various physical gestures, drumming, using scented oils (which work on the lizard brain and the amygdalae), drawing or painting images or modeling them in clay or other materials, drawing sigils, runes, or other magical alphabets, burning candles, doing visualizations, going in search of all kinds of ingredients, working with herbs and spices, going to unusual places that take you outside of your normal boundaries, and much more.

So, these types of activities not only engage the senses of sight, smell, sound, touch, (and sometimes taste), they also get the right and left hemispheres of the brain to work together, as well as the front and rear parts of the brain. (The forebrain, as you recall, we talked about in regard to “the frontal lobes supercharge,” and the rear brain is that older part that deals with motor movements and a lot of other stuff.)