And why do you want free witchcraft spells? Do you want free witchcraft spells to find “true love”, free witchcraft spells to hog-tie that wayward ex and drag them back, free witchcraft spells to make you sexier, smarter, stronger, healthier and, of course, free witchcraft spells to make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams?

The problem with free witchcraft spells is that they are not worth the paper they are printed on.

These days, if you were to toddle into your local bookshop, close your eyes and fling a dart, there’s a reasonably good chance you’d hit a spell book. There’s an even better chance that you’d be forcibly ejected from the shop shortly thereafter, so I’m not advocating this practice. It does, though, make the point that this literary genre has never been more popular.

Everybody wants witchcraft spells, but nobody want to go into the bookshops and pay for them. Which is just as well, really, since that would be a pointless waste of money in most cases.

The biggest Witchy complaint against spell books or free witchcraft spells online is that the spells don’t (or possibly can’t) work. The spell in the spell book or the free witchcraft spell on the web page looks comparable to a recipe, but whereas Delia Smith can reliably lead most of us through the creation of an omelette, the compiler of spells is less likely to guide the average punter to health, wealth and insuperable sexual charisma.

The better authors in the field make it clear that the spell isn’t really the equivalent of the recipe for “Grandma’s Mushroom Meatloaf”. It’s more like sheet music: valuable to those who have put the effort into learning how to read music and perhaps play an instrument, but bookshelf clutter to those who haven’t.

Free witchcraft spells as no more than electronic bookmark clutter if you haven’t learned how to work magic. The free witchcraft spells you will find online often contain expensive ingredients which, co-incidentally, are supplied BY the writer of the free witchcraft spells. Go figure.

To find out how to work Magick without needing formal spells, read The Inner Circle.

Bookshops and websites today are filled almost to the point of popping with guides to Beginner Witchcraft: Witchcraft 101, some inspiring, some uninspiring and some very close to expiring. You really, really don’t need another explanation of how to pronounce “Samhain” or which end of an athame to hold or how to differentiate Witchcraft and Ceremonial Magic/Druidry/Satanism/Jo Rowling and so on. The truth is out there, along with any number of fascinating lies about beginner witchcraft.

What’s a bit thinner on the ground is literature that leads from the outer to the inner circles of Witchcraft, and books that do purport to do so can make for a pretty rum old read. Many of them work on the assumption that the more privy to secret traditions the author appears to be, the more humbly appreciative the reader ought to feel for such shadows of ghosts of secrets beyond beginner witchcraft are hinted at in the tome.

There’s nothing very novel about this technique – it was used to great effect by many of the most influential people in the magical word, from Helena Blavatsky to Gerald Gardner (who was positively nutty about the notion). Aleister Crowley, no stranger to the technique, was memorably grumpy when on the receiving end, grumbling about an Order that “swore me to secrecy with terrible oaths and threats of death, and then revealed to me the Hebrew alphabet” - which is certainly something at the beginner end of beginner witchcraft, rather than an advanced magical secret!

To find out how more about moving beyond beginner witchcraft, read The Inner Circle.