Why is there a sort of taboo around gambling and lottery in occultism work?

You have a good point and I would argue that maybe there are some work arounds, like bringing or pulling towards Luck rather than going for the end goal itself, which is making money fast/winning the lottery.
A lot of authors have written about Luck in so many different approaches and I believe most of them agree that winning the lottery is almost impossible. I could be mistaken here but it´s an interesting subject!

That's probably because it doesn't work in most cases. Divination generally informs you about choice - not chance.

Take a look at this:

So perhaps it is because of the gigantic nature of the task that the topic is avoided?

Manifestation "teachers" nowadays do insist in that anything is possible and that the power of the mind is vast.

And, in case chance were the problem, as in, the probability is too small, then what are the chances (or probability) that any other practices work? Like doing a ritual or casting a spell? How do you know the odds on that one?

Ignotus said:

Take a look at this:

Book – PDF - The Sporting Life: How to Help Yourself with Hoodoo from the Streets to the Sheets By Professor Charles Porterfield.

https://mega.nz/file/mXZklIzK#6V4emmvvY2tZ-73f3CzSyliBKfBse0tB-ae6Eqpdn9A

wizardforums.com

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Thank you, will research once I gain library access.

I must say I am not an erudite by any means, so perhaps me seeing this topic being "avoided" is just my personal lack of knowledge about all the material available.

Gambling magic is a fairly large field of practices. You have good luck charms, and spells to affect a particular outcome. Maybe you're blessing horses. Go to any occult shop and tell them youre headed for Vegas, and they'll happily sell you something.

But the Lottery is rigged. Maybe not the small payouts, but the big ones are all rigged. It's a fundraising system and you aren't going to "win" no matter what you do.

Faria said:

Gambling magic is a fairly large field of practices. You have good luck charms, and spells to affect a particular outcome. Maybe you're blessing horses. Go to any occult shop and tell them youre headed for Vegas, and they'll happily sell you something.

But the Lottery is rigged. Maybe not the small payouts, but the big ones are all rigged. It's a fundraising system and you aren't going to "win" no matter what you do.

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I guess that's true, there are many luck charms and such. I might be looking at the situation incorrectly.

However I do want to say, from time to time you do hear of people hitting the jackpot. But then, being "realistic", the thing that makes most sense is that the whole system is fake, as you said.

raptordog said:

I guess that's true, there are many luck charms and such. I might be looking at the situation incorrectly.

However I do want to say, from time to time you do hear of people hitting the jackpot. But then, being "realistic", the thing that makes most sense is that the whole system is fake, as you said.

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The guy who won the biggest Lotto ever (at that time) used to be my neighbor. The entire lottery system is a quasi-political money machine. A giant evil lie. You cannot win.

It's estimated that your chances of winning the UK lottery are of the order of 15 million to one.

In comparison, William Hill, the bookmakers, give the odds of the Biblical Apocalypse at 6000 to one.

Your chances of dying in a car crash are around 350 to one.

It is linked to addictive behavior and would take away from the ritual purity that a lot of magic would require..?

Because no occult system is totally fatalistic. Even when objective forces are aligned towards a very likely outcome, there is always room for the wild card of individual will (in many ways, magic is the rejection of predetermined fate in favour of will). The reason why these arts cannot reliably be applied to gambling/the lottery is because no outcome (accessible to humans at least) is pre-written. If it were, we'd essentially be puppets on strings and that would be absurd (even hardcore determinists don't believe that).

Practically, this means that divination (drawing information from the Unmanifest) cannot actually tell you "the number 11 will appear in the lottery on Saturday". It can highlight shadowed truths, reveal forces acting on events which you cannot see with your natural eyes, and then you can make a decision based on that knowledge but there's no guarantee of outcome. The same is true of magic (sending a request into the Unmanifest); it can bend variables in your favour and "slip through the cracks" of various forces working on a situation, but nothing can compel a precise outcome.

With time and experience, initiates get better and better at knowing which variables to play with, where to direct their energy and where not to.

Faria said:

The guy who won the biggest Lotto ever (at that time) used to be my neighbor. The entire lottery system is a quasi-political money machine. A giant evil lie. You cannot win.

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Oh so you have some first hand experience on this. Well, you can't beat seen things with your own eyes. Thanks for sharing.

Robert Ramsay said:

It's estimated that your chances of winning the UK lottery are of the order of 15 million to one.

In comparison, William Hill, the bookmakers, give the odds of the Biblical Apocalypse at 6000 to one.

Your chances of dying in a car crash are around 350 to one.

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If odds and chances are the metric, then what's the point of magic work? Does this mean magic work is only a way to better the odds of something happening?

Wintruz said:

Because no occult system is totally fatalistic. Even when objective forces are aligned towards a very likely outcome, there is always room for the wild card of individual will (in many ways, magic is the rejection of predetermined fate in favour of will). The reason why these arts cannot reliably be applied to gambling/the lottery is because no outcome (accessible to humans at least) is pre-written. If it were, we'd essentially be puppets on strings and that would be absurd (even hardcore determinists don't believe in that).

Practically, this means that divination (drawing information from the Unmanifest) cannot actually tell you "the number 11 will appear in the lottery on Saturday". It can highlight shadowed truths, reveal forces acting on events which you cannot see with your natural eyes, and then you can make a decision based on that knowledge but there's no guarantee of outcome. The same is true of magic (sending a request into the Unmanifest); it can bend variables in your favour and "slip through the cracks" of various forces working on a situation, but nothing can compel a precise outcome.

With time and experience, initiates get better and better at knowing which variables to play with, where to direct their energy and where not to.

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I understand, I think. How would you relate this to stories of people who have dreamt of the winnning numbers? I saw a story like this on youtube once from a lady who had a NDE.

raptordog said:

If odds and chances are the metric, then what's the point of magic work? Does this mean magic work is only a way to better the odds of something happening?

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Yes, pretty much. Although the word 'only' is doing a lot of work there. Like "poetry is only words" or "the cure was only down to the placebo effect".

Even Crowley said: "it is theoretically possible to cause in any object any change of which that object is capable by nature"

i.e. something that could have happened, we can make it happen. The "theoretically" comes in when the possible thing is a long trek behind the decimal point.

I consider Richard Webster a NewAge author, his archangel book series is nothing but fluff. It's not seen as a taboo around here, just take this rather long thread:


It's rather that serious writers on financial magic like Jason Miller routinely use trying to win the lottery as a prime example for the misapplication of money magic which should ideally generate steady income streams and feature making wise investments instead of idly waiting for windfalls. Other authors take the same line - quit slacking, get busy and help your magic along by real-world efforts!

There's a book by David Thompson called The Magick of Fortuna: Luck, Fortune and Wealth Magick in the Library though which has a chapter on gambling. Nice if you can get it work and if you can afford to lose if you can't, I suppose.

I started playing the lottery regularly a while back because of a thread on WF. Honestly, I think most people just don't have the patience for it and the setback of losing would rock their world. I went into it with the mindset of "I'm improving my odds from 1 in 292 million to 1 in 1 million" and don't plan on winning it any particular night. For what it's worth, I think I've beaten the stated odds on the small prize tiers, while still losing slightly more than I won overall.

One interesting thing I've noticed is that people win the lottery a lot. It's not just about the jackpot, that second place prize is still life-changing, and they post when someone wins one of those on the lottery website too. Seems like each week about four people win a million+ dollar prize. There was one night this year where over 90 people won a second-place prize in the Powerball (1-2 million pre-tax, depending on if the ticket was power play), I sure noticed that.

I truly believe the reason most people say "don't play the lottery" is because they were feeling magickally cockful one night, were absolutely certain they could manipulate the odds, and their ticket lost so they decided it was impossible after losing sucked the wind out of their sails. I just buy a lottery ticket for two weeks every payday and enjoy dreaming/"planning" my lottery win. Shopping for houses is the big one, I've got a shortlist saved for me to tour when I win the big one tonight .

If you're interested in people using magic to win the lotto, I recommend Timothy Schultz on youtube. He doesn't directly cover magic, but he interviews lottery winners and a lot of them describe some form of Law of Attraction/Assumption. Enough so that I feel like there's something to it.

I think the best way to look at it is like a love spell. The conventional magickal wisdom is, if you're going to make a love spell, make it to attract love into your life, not to force someone to love you. That's kinda my approach to winning the lottery with majiq. My practice is to attract abundance into my life, buying a lottery ticket is just opening one avenue for it to reach me. I'm not counting on it. I follow the lottery's advice, they say it's about having fun, and I have plenty of fun just thinking about what I'd do with a few million dollars.

Some excellent points already made. I'd also add that for state and regional lotteries, where both the pool of prizes and players scales significantly, you reach a point where magickal workings aimed at tipping the odds in your favor often struggle to maintain their momentum.

I personally wouldn't call it a taboo as much as an area where an appeal to pragmatism is warranted. In reality, your desire to win the lottery is competing with the desires of thousands if not millions of others. Each one of them has their own intent for the money they stand to win, regardless of the circumstances. That's an enormous sea of contesting wills. Smaller lotteries/games of chance are a bit more feasible

Many occultists would suggest focusing the time and energies ( through personal power, demons, angels, etc. ) on smaller scales where the route to manifestation can be found and followed with much less friction. For example, aiming for a well-paying job where you're trying to stand out in a pool of 20-30 applicants rather than millions. And securing that position carries greater prospects for long-term financial stability, not to mention potential connections that may serve you well when you seek to move up or branch out.

HoldAll said:

I consider Richard Webster a NewAge author, his archangel book series is nothing but fluff. It's not seen as a taboo around here, just take this rather long thread:

https://wizardforums.com/threads/are-you-trying-to-win-the-lottery-with-magic.11453/

It's rather that serious writers on financial magic like Jason Miller routinely use trying to win the lottery as a prime example for the misapplication of money magic which should ideally generate steady income streams and feature making wise investments instead of idly waiting for windfalls. Other authors take the same line - quit slacking, get busy and help your magic along by real-world efforts!

There's a book by David Thompson called The Magick of Fortuna: Luck, Fortune and Wealth Magick in the Library though which has a chapter on gambling. Nice if you can get it work and if you can afford to lose if you can't, I suppose.

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I am quite interested in the topic so I gave that thread a thorough read. Very interesting stuff. One post caught my eye saying:

"I know that a black magician can easily make a powerful love spell that takes away a person's will. I know that it can also trigger a powerful curse that will cause a person to die in a matter of months. But why is it that when we talk about the lottery, magicians seem to be powerless?"

So it is, by universal metric (however the universe "calculates" things), that it is a more menial task to kill a man with a curse than it is to hand big amounts of money to people by "chance".

I've read and heard of the power of curses, can definitely reduce a man to nothing. Is it really sensible to think that destroying a life is simpler or easier than attaining wealth through games of chance?

Like has been mentioned already, there is essentially 3 schools of thought that you see the most:

1) Winning money is too dirty of a thing for magic.

2) It’s all probability. 290,000,000 to 1 odds even increased 100 time over by magic is still 290,000 to 1 odds. Significantly unlikely to win even if you kept up that level of serious magical operation for the rest of your life while playing in all 5 of the big lotto draws every week (in the USA). 50 years x 50 weeks x 5 times a week = 12,500 attempts. Which is a lifetime of work for the odds still being so stacked against you.

3) Too many forces involved. How many 10s of thousands of practitioners are giving it a go on any given week. Not to mention millions of prayers and wishes and etc.

And like P.G. said most every occultist has given it a go, ended up not matching a single number, and given it up as impossible.

-Eld

beardedeldridge said:

and given it up as impossible.

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And yet Jeffrey Epstein won it twice, right when he needed it, and just what he needed.

Faria said:

And yet Jeffrey Epstein won it twice, right when he needed it, and just what he needed.

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That's an urban legend, he owned a property called "Zorro Ranch" and a lottery was claimed by a "Zorro Trust". Zorro is a spanish word and a famous TV show. There is literally no evidence beyond that superficial commonality that he won the lottery.

I came back to this thread to post this screenshot I took the night 95 people won the lottery.



It's worth mentioning that the national lottery isn't the only lottery you can play/win. My state's state lottery begins at $20,000, still a lifechanging amount of money, and the odds for that one are ~1:35,000. I haven't won that one yet, but I've only played it a handful of times.

Another thought I have on the subject of the improbability of the lottery: What are the odds of being you? Just the odds of being yourself out of all the humans alive today is around 1:10B. What are the odds of being you out of all the humans who were ever born or who ever will be born? Compared to those odds, winning the lottery seems relatively probable.