Multi-day spells are incredibly common in the craft. Everyone has seen a few spells that take 3, 5, or 7 days and sometimes up to a month to complete! While some might assume that these spells are inherently better because of how much extra effort they require, others find themselves skeptical. Are these long, drawn-out spells actually worth the effort? Do they really enhance the effects of your spells?
In some cases they do, and in others not so much. As with most things in the craft, this sort of repetitious casting is all about how you use it. To make the most of it, you have to know how it works and why you’re utilizing it in your practice.
How Multi-Day Spells Work
Multi-day spells make use of a sort of cascade effect to build energy over time. If you think of the energy, you’re using to fuel a spell as a river, every time you work part of a multi-day spell, you’re feeding another stream of energy into the river. This makes the overall river of energy bigger, it moves faster, takes up more space, and has a greater total quantity of energy to fuel your spell. In a matter of days, these small, repeated actions can build up to a very large force working toward your intention.
Multi-day spells can also help to focus your intention more fully. With repeated attention, your desires become more fully formed, more thought out, and more present in your mind. This allows your energy to flow unrestricted toward your goal, as uncertainty in your intention is often what causes energy to stick and become stagnant rather than moving to create your desired reality.
When To Use A Multi-Day Spell
While all of this may seem like a great thing to use for every spell, it’s actually not. Multi-day spells are great in some instances, but not at all necessary in others.
Pros:
1. Building energy
When it comes to building up a lot of energy, these spells are excellent. If you’re the kind of person who can’t manage to work up a huge amount of energy at once, then this is a great way to cast more ambitious spells without completely draining yourself. Instead of draining every last drop of your energetic reserves, you can feed only a part of your energy into the spell on a regular basis until enough energy-momentum has been gained. This allows you to recharge, ground, and regain your energy levels in between casting, which lessens the risk of you feeling ill, drained, or emotionally exhausted after spellwork. If you’re prone to these kinds of symptoms, then multi-day spells might be a great solution for you!
This is a particularly good practice for low-energy witches. If you’re chronically or mentally ill, then often putting a lot of effort into a big casting can completely wreck your ability to function for days. We don’t want that! Instead, shrink the spell down to something very small and simple that you can perform on a daily basis without exhausting yourself.
2. Gaining clarity
Sometimes when we cast a spell the first time, our idea of what outcome we’re trying to create can be fuzzy. The magical imagination is an amazing tool but, like every tool, it can take time to learn to use it to the best of your ability. If you struggle with getting a clear and solid idea of your goal, taking multiple days to develop this image can be a huge help.
Think of your magical imagination like a muscle. When you first start training, the muscle is likely too weak to handle a lot of stress. It won’t be able to handle a lot of work and it may give out fairly early in your training sessions. Over time, the muscle gains strength and stamina and becomes a well-functioning part of the body that allows you to accomplish the goals you have. When you begin using your magical imagination, it might be quite weak. Many of us have very little opportunity to utilize this skill in our daily lives, and worse, for others, this mental skill is discouraged and creativity is postured as something that we shouldn’t pursue because of various social perceptions of creatives, dreamers, and people who are imaginative.
If this is you, give yourself time! You shouldn’t expect yourself to perform at a high functioning creative level when you’re completely out of practice using these skills. You can and will improve your imaginative capacity with regular use and multi-day spells can give you both an excellent way to work around this temporary weakness AND train that skill so that it improves rapidly.
3. Adding an element of ritualism
For many witches, ritualism is a huge help in their work. The psychodrama and theatrics of ritual help to suspend disbelief, get the energy into a profoundly magical space, and solidify the magical space into reality for the caster. If you’re the kind of person whose magic benefits from this kind of ritual element, then multi-day spells can amplify that effect.
Repetition is a commonly used ritual technique in many ways. Chanting, incantations, ritual opening and closing procedures, and more are all ways of solidifying your sense of ritualism through repetition. Repeating a spell over many days does the same thing! With practice and repetition often comes a kind of familiarity that takes the mind out of a thinking and analyzing space into a far more present space. Instead of having to think through each step, refer back to the instructions, and interrupting the flow of the ritual to make sure you’re getting it right, you’ll find yourself going through the ritual on automatic by the later repetitions. This gets the thinking, skeptical mind out of the way and lets you focus your attention on using every action and word to channel energy properly. It silences the thinking mind and allows you to feel the process more fully.
4. Maintaining focus over time
Have you ever cast a spell and then forgotten about it, only later to realize that you’ve been thwarting your own spell with your thoughts and actions a few weeks later? Yeah, we all end up doing that, eventually. Repeating your spell over time can help to lower the possibility of this happening by keeping your attention on your desired outcome. You’re far less likely to work against your own spell if you’ve cast it very recently! If your intention is something that will take a long time to manifest, this is where repeating once a week or once a month can come in handy. You lose a lot of the cascade effect of building the energy this way, but it does keep you focused on your intention and working with it rather than against it, which is often more than enough for the spell to do its job.
Cons:
1. Unnecessarily expending energy
While it may seem great that you can build up a ton of energy to throw at your spells, sometimes this isn’t exactly productive. Before you go pouring your energy into something every day, you need to ask yourself, does this spell really need that much energy? In many cases, the answer will be no. The truth is, it doesn’t usually take a massive amount of energy to effect changes in your world! Often a small amount of energy is more than enough and I will always advocate for casting with less rather than more. Why should you expend a ton of energy over an entire week to get what you want when one simple casting would get the job done just as well?
If single casting hasn’t accomplished what you want yet, first consider what might be blocking your intention from manifesting. Are you creating the right circumstances for this reality to exist? Do you actually believe that you can have what you’re trying to create? Are you doing anything to help the spell along in mundane ways, or are you actively working against your intention in your daily life? Often what is needed isn’t a huge amount of energy to get over obstacles, we just need to remove the obstacles! If you can’t come up with any obstacles that might be blocking your magic, then you might actually need more energy from a multi-day spell.
2. Over-focusing
Yes, it is possible to focus on your intention too much.
Constant focus on your intention may not be necessary or even desirable. If you’re not struggling with working against your own spells, then it’s ok to just forget about them! You’ve told your magic what to do, you’ve given it the energy it needs, you’ve gotten the obstacles out of its way, now let it do its thing! There’s no need to get all mother hen on your magic. Nobody flourishes under micromanagement. Trust yourself and your magic and lay off.
3. Increasing the risk of casting failure
One major danger of multi-day spells is that it’s easy to fail in your casting. If you’re supposed to cast a spell every day for 7 days and you miss day 5, are you really going to feel as strong in your casting on day 6? I’m willing to bet not. Missing a day can feel like failure and nothing will take the wind out of your sails more than feeling like you’ve screwed up on a spell. Even if you’ve poured a ton of energy into a spell, if you’re the type who’s hard on yourself in this kind of situation, your spells are going to immediately fall flat.
If you think there’s a risk of missing a day of the spell, you have a few options. The first option is just to not do multi-day spells. They’re not for everyone. I rarely do them for exactly this reason. I’m just too forgetful. The second option is to decide that you don’t care if you miss a day. If you just decide that it doesn’t matter, then the guilt that causes the energy to suddenly fall off never arises and there’s not much problem with the spell. You need to be honest with yourself here though because if you tell yourself that it doesn’t matter and then you end up feeling bad about it anyway, it’s still going to mess up your spell. The final option is just to go in with the knowledge that if you do miss a day, you’re going to have to start over. There’s nothing wrong with this! It’s better to start the full 7-day spell over rather than cast the spell with gaps and not get the results you’re looking for.
Remember, witchcraft isn’t about being technically “good” at witchcraft! It’s about getting results and creating the life that you want.
4. Excessive specificity
There’s also a risk of the spell becoming too specific to function. I’ve covered the pros and cons of being specific in your spellwork before. Essentially, if you’re too specific, you can narrow down the potential paths that your magic can take so far that you reach a stalemate and the energy has no way of actually accomplishing your goal because you’re fighting an uphill battle against reality. If, over the course of many days, you add more and more conditions to your intention, this is likely what’s going to happen. You’ll end up painting yourself into a corner and instead of the magic being able to take the path of least resistance to get you what you want, it’s stuck trying to flow uphill against a huge number of roadblocks and it’ll end up requiring an inhuman amount of energy to actually work.
Multi-day spells can be amazing tools and I absolutely recommend using them… in the right circumstances. Make sure to take stock of your actual needs and desires in your spell casting before embarking on a casting project like this. As always, the tools themselves will not make or break your spellwork, how you use them will!
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Updated on August 19, 2023 by Avery Hart
I enjoy you and the way you take to magic. It’s exactly how I feel about mine. You and maybe one or two other women I feel are my style.im more good at divination:telepathy:visual: I’ve taken your advice on many different ways to cast like speaking w not just my ancestors but people I’ve never met but when I ask to connect w them they come thru! Idk I’ve always been sensitive I’m good w dealing w death and dying I was a nurse 15 yrs.