Telling an Occultist they are “fake” because they don’t have money is like telling a doctor they are “fake” because they caught a cold. In other words, you absolutely don’t get how either magick OR money works.
Most of the time, occultists attempt to answer this accusation from a philosophical standpoint. They explain that magicians simply aren’t the type of people who pursue money, as they have more important jobs and issues to which to attend. However, this argument falls on deaf ears in our modern culture, where cash is king. “Don’t tell me you don’t need money!” they say. “If you can’t even cover your own doctor bills, then your magick is a failure.” Truly, telling a modern Westerner that you don’t seek money is, for them, pure gibberish. It doesn’t compute.
But occultism and its relationship to money don’t require that kind of philosophy to explain. Occultists aren’t broke because of any altruism, or any kind of feeling they are “above the need for money.” Nope—we need money to survive just like everyone else, and the fact that we don’t typically have a lot of it does sometimes bite us in the ass, thank you very much. But if you think learning the arts of magick has jack-all to do with making money, then you clearly have no clue how either magick or money works. That last part is the real key, though. People who accuse occultists of fraud based on a lack of money are never rich people themselves. Rich people—and by that term I mean people who work damn hard for their money, not folks born into mega-wealth—would never say such a thing to an occultist because they do know how money works.
But, guess what? Occultists aren’t high finance business people. This may come as a shock, but most of us spend our time studying magick rather than the intricacies of how financial markets work. Astoundingly, we do not know which stocks are best for investments. We don’t all keep up with the strength of the dollar against foreign currencies. Being a wizard doesn’t make you a financial wizard. If I were to successfully conjure a million bucks—and I mean it fell right out of the sky with no legal repercussions for me—that million would be gone before I knew what happened.
Money invocations must be handled with care. The blue gnosis of wealth and desire creates demons as easily as gods. To work like a possessed maniac all day for the questionable pleasure of drinking oneself into near oblivion on vintage champagne every night is to have missed the point entirely and to have entered a condition of anti-wealth.
However, the majority of those who are poor in relatively free societies where others are rich, owe their poverty either to a lack of understanding of how money behaves or to negative feelings which tend to repel it. Neither intelligence nor investment capital is required in any great degree to become wealthy. The popularity of tales about the misery and misfortunes of the rich is testimony to the ridiculous myth prevalent amongst the poor, that the rich are unhappy.
Before beginning works of blue magick it is essential to seriously examine all negative thoughts and feelings about money and to exorcise them. Most of the poor people who win in lotteries and only the poor regularly enter them, manage to have nothing to show for it a couple of years later. It is as if some subconscious force somehow got rid of something they felt they did not really deserve or want. People tend to have the degree of wealth that they deeply believe they should have. Blue magick is the modification of that belief through ritual enactment of alternative beliefs.
Blue magick rituals may thus involve exorcism of negative attitudes to wealth, divinatory explorations of one's deepest desires, and invocations of the Wealth-self and the spirit of money during which the subconscious wealth level is adjusted by ritual expression of a new value, and affirmations of new projects for the investment of resources and effort are made. Hymns and incantations to money can be delivered. Checks for startling sums can be written to oneself and desires can be proclaimed and visualized. Various traditional god forms with a prosperity aspect can be used to express the Wealth-self such as Jupiter, Zeus, and the mythical Midas and Croesus.
Simple money spells are rarely used in modern blue magick. The tendency nowadays is to cast spells to enhance schemes designed to make money. If one fails to provide a mechanism through which money can manifest then either nothing will happen or the spell will flesh by strange means, such as a legacy from the untimely death of a much-beloved relative for example.
Serious blue magick is never attempted by conventional forms of gambling. Conventional gambling is an expensive way of buying experiences that have nothing to do with increasing one's wealth. Blue magick is a matter of carefully calculated investment. Anyone but a fool should be able to devise an investment that offers better odds than conventional forms of gambling.
So, in summary, you can indeed use magick to obtain money and increase your general prosperity. However, even if you know the secret to turn lead into gold, you’re never going to be “rich” unless you know what to do with that gold once you have it. And since most occultists are not financiers, then you’re simply not going to find a lot of rich occultists. It doesn’t mean their magick doesn’t work, nor that their patrons and spirits aren’t taking care of them. It simply means they are focused on other subjects and have accepted some amount of personal poverty for themselves in order to study what they love.
Em Hotep - Patrick Gaffiero