AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the “magical practices” section of her book, Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers, T. Susan Chang offers “probability enhancement” as one definition of practical magic. It involves creative visualization (a more assertive type of creative imagination) in the form of a consciously-scripted aim to manifest what we want for the future. It is a more diligent and assiduous approach than merely attuning ourselves to receive the perhaps-undeserved bounty, despite what advocates of the Law of Attraction would have us believe.

But I would expand that description to embrace “probability management” in general, since there is no guarantee that we will be in a position to “enhance” what we are given by a reading, we may only be situated to “mitigate” its less-desirable ramifications. There is still power in being presented with a choice, although we may be constrained by circumstances from pursuing the optimal one. In Chang’s terminology, we must “actively shape” our response through a display of willpower since unforced destiny may have different plans for us that we might want to redirect by leveraging the trends, tendencies and potentials that appear in the forecast.

Although it may not be the most convincing from a mystical psychology perspective, one of the most intriguing explanations of the True Will (aka “Magical Will”) comes from Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. He postulates elsewhere that any action performed when exercising one’s True Will is an act of magic (his word is “magick”), and if we are truly expressing our innate sovereignty (as in “Every Man and Woman is a Star”), we have no choice but to follow its dictates. His famous phrase “delivered from the lust of result” means that we should be strictly focused on spiritual aspiration and indifferent to mundane acquisition. This is obviously a more exalted calling than we are likely to encounter in dealing with the average tarot client, but the objective of routine divination is not incompatible with it: empowerment of the seeker in making the correct moves to achieve the most auspicious outcome.

The key point is that wanting something to happen is not the same as willing it to do so; one is entirely passive, the other is an active statement of expectation. No amount of wishful thinking will supplant that single demonstration of magical purpose. I once wrote a detailed analysis of Crowley’s assessment of the “True Will” that I’m linking below rather than covering the same ground here.

Wilt or Want? That is the Question