Silvercrow's Book of Shadows

🚫❌Spirit Scams❌🚫

Common spirit 'scams'
Introduction to magic masterpost

These are situations I have seen happen over and over again, and in my opinion are big red flags.

Two-faced:

The spirit will originally tell you that it is an XYZ spirit, but then later will say it is "actually" an ABC spirit. They will smooth this transition with lies like,

"I didn't tell you beforehand because you weren't ready for the truth."

"I didn't tell you because I was worried you wouldn't accept me."

"I didn't tell you because I wasn't ready to trust you yet."

What actually happened was that you mentioned you really wanted to get to know an ABC spirit, and now your XYZ friend was "really" an ABC spirit all along. They are only playing in to your fantasy and trying to become the 'perfect' spirit friend you will trust, and let past your defenses.

"I can do that!"

For whatever reason you originally brought this spirit in to your life, it constantly presents itself as a master of every skill you want to attempt. It looks like this:

You say you are interested in divination, banishing, hexing, money spells, or any other area of magic. Each time you bring it up, the spirit will say, "I was the grand-master champion of money spells, I can teach you the most amazing and powerful money spells of all time."

Again, this plays in to the fantasy that you have found a very powerful and wonderful spirit friend who can do everything for you.

Mary-Sue Waifu

This spirit presents itself in the most grandiose ways it can. Minutes after meeting it, the spirit will tell you that he is your ultimate spirit guide that has been with you for hundreds of lifetimes. It presents itself as a highly powerful creature you can trust, and the "missing link" you need to become a really powerful witch and have magic start working perfectly for you.

Or, it will reveal that it is a lost and ancient god who has been watching over you since birth. It will be quiet about its own powers at the start, but the more you share with it, suddenly its personality will start to develop - you can bet that it's god powers will be related to the interests and desires you share. In exchange for granting you its powerful blessings and turning you in to a Priest/Priestess/Priesten of its lost religion, it only requires a large altar and regular offerings.

However the Mary-Sue Waifu spirit presents itself to you, you can be sure of 2 things:

It will attempt to make you feel like you need it in order to become a better magical practitioner, and it will make you feel scared of losing it

Its personality and abilities will only come to light after you have shared your hopes and desires

"Ahah, of course I won't lie to you ever again, dear human. I just wanted to test you."

You can catch a spirit in a lie and call it out, but the clever ones will gloss over this.

"I just wanted to see if you were good enough to catch me."

"I needed to test you to make sure you are ready for receiving all of my powerful gifts."

"The only reason I lied is because I can tell that you don't fully trust me, you need to be able to trust me if you want to unlock your true potential."

A spirit who has good intentions for you should never lie. That's the long and short of it. Spirits do not lie by accident. They do not let white lies slip out. They do not lie to test you. They lie to deceive you.

But he's my Doctor!

Witches, especially neophytes with little magical experience, may be tempted to hang on to 'bad' spirits because that spirit is the only real powerful magical experience they have ever had.

Imagine the Doctor flying the TARDIS to your school and offering to take you to amazing places. For many of us, that would be so difficult to resist. It feels like our one chance to experience things we could never otherwise reach. Spirits can have this same effect on us. They may present themselves in such a way that we feel they are our 'one true Doctor', and we need them in order to experience a new level of magical reality.

Or, we could simply be attracted to them because they serve as proof that our beliefs are real, and we want to interact with that kind of power.

I absolutely do not believe that there is one special spirit that can open up the world of magic for us. I do not believe there is one spirit that can suddenly make our spells work and grant us special abilities. If you know a spirit is manipulating you and trying to feed off of you, and you still decide to keep it around because you don't want to 'lose' your taste of magical power, I have a hard time fully blaming the spirit for your misfortune.

Ultimately, please take this post with a grain of salt. I have only listed some situations I have seen repeated by different manipulative spirits. This is not a comprehensive guide, nor is it true for every situation.