Bit of a pessimistic thread, but to all the practitioners out there, how many failed petitions did you go through before your first one worked?
Itās not pessimistic. Failure happens. Itās how we learn.
How many petitions failed before one worked? Far too many to count. It took years of trying before I became successful at magick.
Donāt give up, but also donāt set your expectations too high. Sometimes people try to hit the big time right out of the gate, but that rarely, if ever, happens. Even great magicians must learn to crawl before they can run, and I guarantee every successful magician on this forum and beyond has a file full of failures behind them. If anyone claims otherwise, they are lying.
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I suppose there isnt much wisdom in hoping for my first one to smash my expectations then? ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
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You can always hope your spell will smash expectations because you never know what can happen. However, if you set your expectations too high, you set yourself up for disappointment if the result does not fulfil those expectations.
Itās a balancing act because sometimes a spell or ritual will bring you more than what you requested, but sometimes, it might bring you less. Both would count as a successful result, but if your expectations were too high for the latter, you would be disappointed and think your magick didnāt work, even though you got what you asked for.
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Hopefully my petition was an easy one. It was to cause hatred between two people. The reason I went for it was because of how āachievableā Gordon made it out to be in DoM, which I hope is starter friendly. āMinds, and even hearts, are extremely easy to influenceā, apparently.
If I may ask, could you tell me about your first success?
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Iāve never used the petition method of Demons of Magick. My very first magical success was a candle spell to banish fear from Raymond Bucklandās book Candle Burning Rituals.
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iāve only done 1 petition, to jinn
, when i first started getting into magikā¦ no results yet ssooooā¦ yeah =/ā¦ iāll try another petition again eventually when i have a strong idea of what to petition for and to who
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I cannot begin to recall how many petitions I have done, but I would say it has been around 50/50 in terms of success and failures. Not entirely sure why, maybe I have gotten lucky with certain spirits, but I think some of it stems from what you are asking for and how close you are to the spirit before hand.
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Magic is like trying to induce a sneeze.
Sometimes I can do it fine sometimes I need tools like the sun to make it happen and sometimes no matter what I try it just doesnāt work 
But seriously good analogy
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i only see results with Belial even disliking to lose my sleep everytime i meet him and all that terror that he brings with him,some of the spirits have crazy nature and a really brutal way to behave lol no mid terms,only savagery lol dangerous field to play on but at the sametime a feeling of ( this will bring results ) no fear , just astonishment in how strong some of them are
the thing that i like is that i donāt need manners or etiquette with him.the big dude is terrifying
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So far only 2 failed petitions as I havenāt done many yet to begin with, but so far the ancestor one failed and another to do with a job I wanted lol.
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This is was my issue with petitions. I would have nothing seem to work, suddenly then one would and Iād be like yep I got this, then the next wouldnāt.
Personally I took it as a call to dig deeper and further. Maybe demons werenāt the right spirits for me, 50/50 isnāt bad really- was specially if the odds to gain what I wanted on my own were low in comparison, but there must be more effective methods right? Surely not all the great magicians settle for this, knowing half will work and half are a waste of time.
I started looking at multi faceted approaches, breaking down issues into mini issues, spirits closer to this plane thst could affect it easier, spirits further from this plane but even more ancient and could affect it easierā¦
But mostly I worked on me, the biggest change I made was learning to push and pull energy. Learning how to expend my own force at a target in addition to working with spirits of the dead, beings thst I was told I didnāt have the right heritage for, or thst I needed some sort of special initiation to reach.
The harder it was to find the information about a being, the more likely it was to work well in conjunction with my new found methods.
I focused less on meditation and more on doing.
I think the deceiving item, however when one of jumps from novice to a more adept position, is thst we suddenly can manifest everything we want. Thatās not really true, but not due to lack of ability. Once we jump up, sometimes we are too confident and rush in guns blazing and fuck ourselfs. Sometimes we decide we are going to force a situation, and the only realistic way for it to manifest- is completely opposite of what we hoped to accomplish. Sometimes we learn the people dearest to us are holding us back, either intentional or unintentional. The magic gets easier, but the path gets harder imop.
Now I have to sit and think for days about what I want to happen when I want to change something, and essentially devise a plan of attack. Firing off without care for what will happen, will no longer work for me- something surely will happen, but if itās counterproductive because I didnāt spend the time or effort to ensure I was on the right course towards my outcome, then the magic worked but didnāt help. Turning a situation upside down, and forcing someone to sink or swim is something Iāve gotten quite good at, but thst can be furthest from productive at times.
Food for thought. Think I get a bit off, but still relative. Sorry.
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No worries, I think it is an important thing to talk about. I tend to walk the middle path between the two by learning how to work with the spirits I call as opposed to asking them to do it for me. I still need to constantly work in myself and push the limit, but I am willing to seek aid for additional power when I need it as well. Not necessarily having the spirit do all the work for me, but a little extra push when needed.
I tend to use petitions only for asking that additional energy if I use them at all these days.
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I donāt see anything wrong with that approach, and I still summon to work in conjunction with beings- Iāve just taken the bulk of it, and figured if I canāt learn to do it myself, why would a spirit constantly respond to what I request? Maybe thatās a goofy way to be idk, but it seems to work well for me- and at the end of the day, I think we should each work with what works for us, and that we have to be somewhat open to the fact that others techniques may not work for us, but sometimes others are onto something I never consider as well. I think this life is really much more complicated when you get deep into it, than what most beginners expect.
If I make any sense lol.
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You are making sense and I agree with you. At the end of the day, use what works for you.
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Another thing as far as the beginner advice goes- I think we focus too hard on full evocation and seeing things. I started going with when I felt a shift in the environment.
I read this termed yesterday as the summoned presence- in one of Hargroves books. It was dealing with the goetia, but his shorter rituals with focus on communicating one way, were really what jump started my workings.
Focusing on merely making contact instead of necessitating a response in which I was sure I had the beings attention made a huge a difference.
Iām sorry I got so far off from petitions. I think I was trying to encourage the op to dig a little deeper if petitions are not working out, rather than settling on āwell this is what everyone is doingā
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Nah
No need to apologize as youre probably entirely right, chances are that petitions simply arent the way to go here.
I have been looking around and trying to figure out what other methods are out there for those looking to pop their lhp cherry, and this might just be the one that works for me.
Not that I tried a full evocation yet, but still, I will probably think of this, should it not work
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Corwin Hargroveās books are truly a great resource- for me at least. He approaches things in a more simple, almost hands on way. Even if you canāt visualize, his works are designed to be simple, make contact, and get out basically.
For me, this was huge compared to most things out there, which often require a certain depth of focus, or development of the Clair skills and such. I found my clairs continued to develop while my focus was elsewhere.
Since Iāve learned techniques that I never considered, such as the magic eye 3D puzzles and such to further strengthen my clairs, but taking a disinterested approach in actively pursuing it was something that aiding me considerably. I also found with anphantasia it was easier to focus on what I could feel than what I could see, yet wasnāt perceiving.
The bright wiggling worms in the sky, swirling unexplained colors and such eventually took a form I could perceive- but 34 years of seeing stuff thst didnāt make sense and no one else could see was a challenge in itself.
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Iāve been lucky all of mine have worked out, some in slightly unexpected ways but they have worked.
I also donāt make that many and most of the time they are to help what my life mission is.
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I kinda had the opposite happen, although I am still very new to LHP practices/petitioning entities.
My first petition(s), I kind of did backwards; I expended a lot of energy trying to make them happen. Started with evocation & verbal pleas for a certain outcome, then clarified said pleas in another evocation, then finally performed some actual āofficialā petition rituals, burned the sigils, and so on, and all the while Iād go and contact the entities every couple of days just to chat. Big no-no generally throwing that much effort in instead of trusting the initial cast but I have learned. Some were subjective/non-quantifiable and some were material; some have come to pass and I believe others are in progress as I have had strong objective signs that they are works in progress.
I recently changed tack and tried another formal method of petition - two petitions. They both had a very tight timeframe and did not come to fruition; I am unsure if it was the method I used (essentially using a totally different paradigm) but Iām thinking itās probably because my deadlines were really tight (one was < 24 hours, one was three days).
Iāll report back in a year and see how my outcome rate is going 
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