Magic is, at its heart, about territoriality. It’s the active expression of will, the use of power, the owning of a space –be it a room, a position, the pattern of one’s fate, one’s every day life. It is about ownership and exerting one’s dominance within a chosen territory over all others, driving out and blocking that which does not belong. By doing so, any possibility of manifestation in opposition to your own will simply cannot exist. It has nothing upon which to feed, no soil in which to root itself. I was taught long ago that magic is the skill of creating and arranging possibilities and potentialities, overlapping and manipulating them via one’s Work, until no other course of manifestation exists save that upon which the magus has decided. It’s much like tossing a rock into a pond after calculating -- based on velocity and weight -- where the ripples will go, then observing that and tossing a second rock to get another clearly calculated effect. The only effective way to do any of this (this thing called magic) is to claim, own, and hold one’s territory again and again and again. That ownership, that dominance must be bone and marrow deep. There can be no question in the magician’s mind as to his or her rightful claim.
The pre-requisites to this are easily extrapolated: one must be centered, grounded, and in complete control of oneself and one’s impulses. There’s a wonderful site on dog training that I found, while chatting with a friend about the possibility of buying a dog. I was suggesting some sites as I have owned several dogs in the past. One of the pages discussed dominance training for dogs and I was particularly taken with advice offered to owners whose dogs jump up on them, or who are in some other way physically aggressive. The human response is to step back and cede space. The dominant’s response is to step forward and claim it. That latter is also the action of a magician (as well as a good dog owner, who should be the alpha of the dog’s “pack”).
Where there is a vacuum, something is going to rush in to fill it. Don’t allow a vacuum to form. Most especially, don’t allow anyone else to have one iota of dominant energy within your chosen sphere of space. Magic is about control. It starts with control of oneself and one’s impulses and expands out from there in concentric energetic circles.
Most of all, the magician must not only understand hierarchy and the patterns of power (dominance/submission which exists in all relationships whether we acknowledge it or not) but be comfortable embracing them. The magician afraid to own power, to name and claim his or her place in that hierarchy is no magician at all.