Part 2: Yin Magic: How Rituals, Divination, and Protection Change During Exhaustion or the Winter Season
How does magic change with Yin energies?
Continuing on from my blog post about exhaustion and magic, while there may be some truth to this, working in Yin is not simply just “doing less” or “slowing down.” It is adopting the formats of magic altogether as a different set of spirits are involved, along with their mechanics. Below is an overview of what the magic looks like, what actions belong here, and what forms are no longer viable under Yin governance. (I elaborate MUCH more in Finding I Ching Clarity, a 24 part series on understanding the spirits of Yin and Yang, and how their lines interplay within the hexagrams of the I Ching, the oldest oracle still in use).
1. Magic shifts from “casting” to “conduction.”
The idea that magic begins with projection, intention, and will is largely a Western formulation. It emerges from Renaissance ceremonial magic, Enlightenment-era notions of individual agency, and the belief that the practitioner’s mind is the primary instrument of power.
Part 1: Magic When You’re Exhausted: A Change in Spirit Governance
The assumption that magic relies on clarity and elevated mood is largely a Western inheritance, an artifact of the idea that power should be linear, solar, upward. But in animist and Daoist cosmologies, exhaustion and depression are not “blocks” or something “wrong”. They are transfers of jurisdiction. Your field is being resonating with a different set of custodians, entities or energies who specialize in depth, slowness, dark clarity, and the intelligence of submerged or subconscious-making.
To work magically in these seasons, you must work with the spirits, elements, and hexagrams that govern this terrain. Any other approach is simply the old problem: trying to perform Yang inside a Yin moment.
Low Mood as a Change in Cosmic Jurisdiction
There are phases when your rituals stop responding the way they did during your bright seasons. It’s not because the spirits “left,” and it’s not because your energy is “low vibration.” It’s because your field’s governance has shifted. (Arthur Edward Waite discusses the hierarchy and governance of spirits in The Occult Sciences).
In bright seasons, you’re under solar, upper-world or Yang influence: spirits of fire, breath, clarity, forward movement.
In depleted seasons, you fall under the care of Yin’s jurisdiction…