Can you actually change your personality through magic or rituals?

[1st.error]

I’m curious if anyone here has experience with rituals, occult practices, or anything similar that helped them change aspects of their character. For example, becoming more confident, less shy or nervous, more social, disciplined, charismatic, or just generally changing the way they act and think.


I’m not really looking for generic self-help advice. I’m specifically interested in whether there are any traditional rituals or practices that people believe can help with personal transformation.


If you’ve tried something like this, what was it supposed to do, and what was your experience?

 

[ahathoor]

You certainly can. It's kind of a "fafo" business, like most efficient things in magic. Finding out will teach you a lot about both psychology and magic, lol. Probably in an unpleasant way. But don't let that hold you back.

No, I won't give you ideas. You have a good idea what you want to achieve, you'll come across threads to pull on with minimal research.

 

[reverendsteveii]

there are people who would tell you that changing yourself is the ultimate point of magick and that anything else it allows you to do is really just a side effect. from personal experience, I went from being a pill-addicted jerkoff living in my childhood bedroom in my early 30s to being one of the most successful and disciplined people I know, and magick was a huge part of that in both discovering what I actually want from my life and helping me figure out how to become the kind of person who gets it.

It sounds like overall you want something like Thelema, which is Greek for "will" and is a practice founded by gifted magician and notorious weird fucker Aleister Crowley. The entire focus on Thelema is personal growth and development toward the discovery and implementation of one's will, using magick.

 

[Picklesuh]

From what I've learned over the months, there are specific occult rituals to change your personality, but they're so varied — ranging across a spectrum from ceremonial magick to simple affirmations — that it's hyper-specific to whichever group or ritual you're using.


That said, in Chaos Magick there's a method of creating magickal constructs that let you execute a specific, complex task. For example, there are things known as servitors, which you can program with a specific purpose, and they'll carry it out — but only if crafted properly.


For example, you could create a servitor whose purpose is to convert your anxiety into confidence. In that act alone, you've already changed your personality — assuming the servitor is made properly, of course.


In Chaos Magick there are also practices akin to ceremonial magick, where one summons certain planetary energies into one's vessel to bring forth the desired change — like a ritual invoking Mars into your vessel to bring forth confidence, passion, and drive.


But before doing any of this, I'd recommend first thinking about what aspect of your personality you actually wish to change, and why you believe you are that way. Sometimes a spell, ritual, etc. just becomes a spiritual band-aid for a psychological bullet wound that hasn't healed. ( i did use ai to correct my grammar ok!)

 

[Nembra]

I’m curious if anyone here has experience with rituals, occult practices, or anything similar that helped them change aspects of their character. For example, becoming more confident, less shy or nervous, more social, disciplined, charismatic, or just generally changing the way they act and think.


I’m not really looking for generic self-help advice. I’m specifically interested in whether there are any traditional rituals or practices that people believe can help with personal transformation.


If you’ve tried something like this, what was it supposed to do, and what was your experience?

Literally everything changes your character. It's also probably the most reliable and appropriate space to apply magic overall. There are of course traditions but in this particular discipline one of the most tried-and-true methods is making shit up as you go.

 

[nunaphael]

Changing your personality through magic or ritual is essentially what invocation is all about. You can permit another entity to either merge with your own spirit or temporarily take over for a certain duration or to accomplish a task. There are many rituals for invoking all sorts of entities, gods, spirits, demons, ghosts, ancestors, aliens even, whatever you can imagine. You will find them everywhere you look, in almost every reconstructed grimoire and every contemporary guide to witchcraft or sorcery.

 

[solxyz]

As others have said, yes, definitely, and there are a lot of ways to go about this. But for my money, for long-term self-transformation I recommend a devotional practice. Here is the super abbreviated version: find a being (saint, deity, etc) who is an exemplar of the qualities that you wish to embody. Make an altar for that being. Every day, (1) bring on offering for your being. (2) Spend time contemplating the amazing qualities of your being (it is probably helpful to speak this aloud in the form of praises). (3) Let yourself feel the energetic qualities of your being entering your body until it is almost unbearable, making a commitment to embody this energy more fully every day. (4) While in this energetic field, contemplate your behavior and the steps that you need to take over the next day. (5) Give thanks, then go and accomplish.

 

[r4zorenigma]

Yes 100%, but for the non adept, its not as simple as a person joining the army or military for instance.. or a frat in college.. Stuff like that is way more transformational than asking spirits to impart changes on you... especially because 98% of people are not even evoking anything when they are doing their rituals.. because magick is flawed.. and the true secrets are hidden.. for the most part.. c an find alot of good stuff publically.. but theres jus so much to know and gather for things to work correctly.

P.S I should rather say, magick is heavily dependent on what you believe and working knowledge of corresponding elements that make you believe in the "alchemical" processes... Thats' why adepts have much better results.. they just contain more tools, knowledge, and things that they believe in because they've employed thousands of times and really charged meaning into alot of those correspondences.

 

[HoldAll]

One of the major problems in self-transformation is correct diagnostics. It's very likely that you'll start out from wrong or incomplete assumptions. You may not even be aware of what the real issue is because you focus too much on a single aspect that appears to be most urgent to you at the moment. So you perform a ritual to gain more self-confidence but your shyness may stem from an excessive need for privacy where you're afraid to become entangled in other people's business, which you may realise only much later. Even if your ritual is successful, its result may become undermined by the implications of the still-active but undiscovered root causes of your shyness.

What I mean by all this is that you might not see the forest for the trees at present. A pinpointed magical intervention, e.g. chaos sigil magic, tackling a specific problem of yours that may not even exist, or is of a nature different to what you imagine it to be, may have the exactly the unintended consequences @ahathoor hinted at. For that reason, I think that @solxyz's approach makes better sense. Admit to yourself that your perspective is necessarily limited at the moment and let things evolve on their own based on your devotional practice instead of constantly meddling with what you perceive are your flaws.

Pitfalls:

• What you're worshipping is an ideal, a symbol of unattainable perfection. You're only acquiring certain qualities to bolster or correct your own, but you don't have to fly like superman.
• Sooner or later you'll have to put your increased self-esteem to the test, or you may become exposed to such a test involuntarily. Your wallflower days will be over now. Your newly gained self-confidence will be challenged as it will be perceived as a threat by others. If it doesn't hold up under stress => back to the drawing board.
• As soon as your perspective changes (which it invariably will), you might discover additional facets of the being you're worshipping, or find out that it has become obsolete now and ditch it. Give it some time though.

It's not a quick fix, not pushbutton magic. It won't be something you can design alone in your room from start to finish, and you may have to make course corrections several times based on real-life experience. It'll be an adventure, hold on to your hat.