Agency and consent

Agency means you can leave a practice, change its words, and decline a vision that someone else finds profound. Consent means other people receive the same courtesy from your magic that you would want from their hands.

What you may work for

• Your own habits, courage, grief, study, and recovery of attention.
• Protection of a household you are responsible for, aimed at harm and not at a named neighbor’s personality.
• Opportunity: applications sent, rooms entered, work made visible. The rite accompanies the email. It does not replace it.
• Release of what is already ending, including a relationship that you are the one leaving or grieving.
• Blessing of a friend who asked, in words, to be included.

What this library will not teach

• Rites to make a specific person desire you, stay with you, or leave someone else.
• Rites to change someone’s gender, orientation, or decision to come out.
• Rites to compel a job, a judge, a doctor, or a vote.
• Bindings on another living person. Self-binding — a promise you make to your own future self — is taught separately, and it includes a way to untie it.
• “Harmless because they will never know.” Secrecy is not consent.

Divination and other people’s business

A tarot card is a poor reason to text your ex. Reading for another person requires their request, a question they chose, and your willingness to say “this is reflection, not news from the future.” Reading a third person who is not in the room, in order to manage them, is surveillance with better lighting.

Bodies

No one owes a circle their body, their story of transition, their diagnosis, or a performance of sensuality. Sensual practice — perfume, music, a beautiful cloth, the pleasure of a well-set table — is welcome. Explicit sexual ritual is not published here. Groups that do work erotically, including some gay initiatory traditions, keep those rites among initiates. This is not one of those rooms, and it does not reprint their mysteries.

A consent check before any rite

1. 1Who is affected if this works the way I secretly hope?
2. 2Did every living person involved ask to be involved?
3. 3Am I trying to skip a conversation I am afraid to have?
4. 4What ordinary action will I take in the next two days that matches the intention?
5. 5How does this end, and what will I do with the materials?

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