u/MorganaSpells

I keep thinking about this and I still do not fully know what to do with it.

In 2015 a team at McGill University went through 84 clinical trials for pain medication conducted between 1990 and 2013. What they found was that in 1996 the actual drugs in those trials relieved pain 27% more than a placebo. By 2013 that gap had shrunk to 9%. The drugs did not get weaker. The sugar pills got stronger.

Let that land for a second. People who were given a pill with literally nothing in it, no active ingredient, no medicine, no anything, were experiencing dramatically more pain relief in 2013 than people given the same kind of fake pill in 1996. And brain scans showed these were not people just saying they felt better to be polite. Their brains were releasing real endorphins. Real dopamine. The same chemicals the actual drugs were designed to trigger.

More than 90% of new painkillers developed in the US have failed their final clinical trials in the last decade. Not because the drugs do not work, but because the placebo group keeps getting better results and the drug can no longer prove it is superior to nothing.

Here is the part that nobody can fully explain. This is only happening in the United States. Trials in Europe and Asia are not showing the same trend. Some researchers think it is because the US is one of only two countries that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers, which raises expectations. Others think it is because US trials have gotten longer and more elaborate, with more personal attention from staff, and all of that care itself does something. But none of these explanations fully account for the scale of the change.

What sits with me is what this actually means at a basic level. Your body can produce its own pharmacy. It can manufacture real chemical responses based on nothing more than the expectation that something is going to help. Not a little. Enough to rival the performance of drugs that cost billions to develop.

And somehow this ability is getting stronger over time.

Study:

PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26307858/

ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151006142418.htm

Open for bookings at the moment.

🔮 Psychic Readings - I work in a meditative state and read on whatever you need clarity on. Career, a decision you are stuck on, a person, a direction. I use your full name and date of birth to connect. $50.

🕯️ Spell Work - I take a wide range of intentions, and custom requests are welcome. The stranger the situation, the more interested I usually am. Everything gets talked through properly before I begin, including what I think is and is not realistic for your case.

Message me here, or look through https://morganaspells.com first if you would rather see how I work before saying anything.

🔮 Psychic Readings - I connect with your energy using your name and date of birth and tie what comes through into your chart. Love, career, people, crossroads, whatever needs clarity. $50 per reading.

🔮 Psychic Readings - I connect with your energy using your name and date of birth and tie what comes through into your chart. Love, career, people, crossroads, whatever needs clarity. $50 per reading.

DM me or visit https://morganaspells.com

🕯️ Spell Work - custom only, built around your specific situation after we talk it through. I work with a wide range of intentions. Everything comes with a satisfaction guarantee. No results, full refund.

🔮 Psychic Readings - I connect with your energy using your name and date of birth and tie what comes through into your chart. Love, career, people, crossroads, whatever needs clarity. $50 per reading.

DM me or visit https://morganaspells.com

🕯️ Spell Work - custom only, built around your specific situation after we talk it through. I work with a wide range of intentions. Everything comes with a satisfaction guarantee. No results, full refund.

🔮 Psychic Readings - I connect with your energy using your name and date of birth and tie what comes through into your chart. Love, career, people, crossroads, whatever needs clarity. $50 per reading.

DM me or visit https://morganaspells.com

🕯️ Spell Work - custom only, built around your specific situation after we talk it through. I work with a wide range of intentions. Everything comes with a satisfaction guarantee. No results, full refund.

🔮 Psychic Readings - I connect with your energy using your name and date of birth and tie what comes through into your chart. Love, career, people, crossroads, whatever needs clarity. $50 per reading.

DM me or visit https://morganaspells.com

Something that took the pressure off me when I was starting out, so I am leaving it here.

Colour correspondences feel ancient. They are not. Candle dye was not widely used in manufacturing until the nineteenth century, and a real range of colours only became cheap and easy to buy in the early twentieth, once paraffin and aniline dyes turned up together. Before that you got whatever colour your wax happened to be. Tallow was a greasy off white, beeswax was gold, and that was the selection.

So when an old spell specifies a candle colour, the specification is usually much newer than the spell.

The lists also contradict each other. Zora Neale Hurston recorded a set of hoodoo candle colours in Mules and Men in 1935. Red for victory, yellow for money, white for peace and uncrossing, and green for driving something off. Green now appears on nearly every chart online as money and prosperity. Same colour, opposite job, ninety years apart.

This does not make colour useless. It means the meaning is doing its work in your head rather than in the wax, and a colour that carries a strong association for you personally will do more than one you copied off a chart.

Which is also why plenty of long time practitioners just use white for everything and do not think about it again.

The Ars notoria is one of my favourite medieval texts and hardly anyone brings it up, probably because it does not involve summoning anything impressive. What it offers is the university syllabus. Grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, then philosophy, medicine, music, geometry, theology. Delivered by angels, to a student who could not afford the books or the lectures.

The method uses figures called notae, dense diagrams with strings of unpronounceable names woven through them. You do not copy them or carve them. You look into them, on a schedule tied to the lunar month, reciting the prayer that belongs to each one.

Here is the part I love. In the grammar working you recite the words twenty four times, gaze into the image twelve times, and are also told to open books of grammar and glance at them. The magic includes studying. Someone in the thirteenth century decided the angels prefer a student who has at least cracked the spine.

It was never fast either. A full operation runs a lunar month at minimum and climbs to thirty seven recitations a day near the end. Aquinas condemned it by name in the Summa as unlawful and futile. Fifty six manuscripts survive anyway, kept in religious houses to the end of the medieval period.

Think about what actually happens at a birthday party. Someone puts candles on a cake. They light them. You close your eyes, hold a very specific wish in your mind, blow the candles out, and watch the smoke rise. And you are told that if you say your wish out loud it will not come true.

That is not just a cute tradition. That is a textbook candle spell.

The practice goes back to ancient Greece. Worshippers of Artemis, the goddess of the moon, would bake round cakes meant to look like the full moon and place lit candles on top so they glowed like moonlight. When the flames were blown out, the rising smoke was believed to carry prayers and wishes up to the gods on Mount Olympus. The candle was not decoration. It was the delivery system.

Centuries later in Germany the tradition resurfaced during Kinderfest celebrations, where each candle on a child's cake represented a year of life. The child had to blow them all out in a single breath for the wish to work. And the wish had to stay secret. If you told anyone, it lost its power.

Now think about how candle magic actually works. You set a clear intention. You focus on it. You light a flame. The flame acts as a focal point for your will. And when the candle burns down or is blown out, the energy is released. The smoke carries it.

Birthday candles follow that exact structure. Intention, fire, focus, release, secrecy. Every single element is there. Most people have performed this ritual dozens of times before they ever picked up their first book on witchcraft.

I think there is something kind of beautiful about that. The idea that magic is not some distant, exotic thing you have to go looking for. It has been woven into ordinary life all along, hiding in plain sight inside the things we do without thinking.

In 2004 a neuroscience lab at the University of Wisconsin hooked up Tibetan Buddhist monks to EEG caps with 256 sensors and asked them to meditate on compassion. These monks had somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 lifetime hours of practice. Some of them had been meditating eight hours a day for over seventeen years.

The gamma wave activity they produced was 25 to 30 times stronger than a control group of students who had been given a week of meditation training. Not 25 to 30 percent. Times. It was the strongest gamma activity ever recorded in healthy human subjects. The researchers actually double-checked their equipment because they thought something was malfunctioning.

But here is the part that really got to me. The monks' brains were already different before they even started meditating. Their baseline resting state, just sitting there doing nothing, already showed elevated gamma oscillations compared to normal brains. The practice had changed their brains so deeply that the effects had become permanent traits rather than temporary states.

The lead researcher later observed that some of these monks maintained unusual gamma patterns even during sleep. Their brains never fully went back to what we would consider a normal resting pattern. Tens of thousands of hours of generating compassion had literally rewired them at a level that persisted around the clock.

I find it interesting that out of all the things they could have been meditating on, the practice that produced these results was specifically focused on unconditional compassion and loving kindness toward all beings. Not concentration, not visualization, not emptiness. Compassion.