In my Pop Culture Magic series, one of the topics I explored is the danger of the cult of personality. Anyone who has tasted some degree of fame knows this danger and how seductive it can be. When you suddenly have people hanging on your words, looking to you as a teacher and guru, it gives your ego a tremendous shot in the arm. You’re also, magically, a recipient of the incoming energy and attention those people direct toward you.
I have a theory that one of the reasons so many celebrities or other people who experience fame go crazy is because they aren’t energetically equipped to handle the amount of attention being directed their way, or the pressure that comes with trying to live up to an image/persona of who people think you are, versus who you are actually are.
Imagine for example, trying to live up to the image of being a six or seven figure entrepreneur, where you’ve crafted a persona around how much sex you have or the cars you drive or all the other images you create to sell your persona of success, just so you can get people to invest in your classes. You attract people to you, who buy what you offer and now suddenly you’re on the hook. You have to live up to the image and persona you’ve created.
That creates a lot of pressure, especially if your public persona doesn’t match up with your private life. Something I’ve both observed and experienced directly is that it can be all too easy to try and live up to an image and feel like a huge fraud because the image of you is saying one thing and the reality of you is experiencing something else entirely. There can be a deep feeling of shame.
What you may not realize is that your persona has taken on a life of its own.
Your persona becomes a thought form
The persona is a separate identity from your own. It is made up of the thoughts, emotions, belief and energies that other people direct toward you as well as what you’ve put into it. Initially a persona can be useful. It gives you a way to face the world and be larger than life, but the reality is that a persona can also become an egregore, an independent entity that takes on a life of its own, with its own desires and needs.
The persona as an egregore doesn’t have your best interests at heart. You are a tool for it, that happens to have birthed it. Every action you take needs to feed the egregore and the attention and energy people direct you also ultimately goes toward the glamour egregore that you’ve created.
It becomes its own reality and it sucks you into that reality. Incidentally, this doesn’t just apply to celebrities or politicians or other people in the public eye (though its far more obvious there). It applies to anyone who feels like they need to live up to an image of who they think other people want them to be. It can apply to:
The mom who is always taking care of everyone else in her life.
The man who feels like he has to be a leader in everything he does.
The student who thinks they have to get perfect grades.
And I’m sure you can think of a few other examples, perhaps even your own.
The glamour persona egregore can apply to anyone who feels like they are living a double life.
Article continues below, but first
Wanting without Shame - Alchemize your desire into Reality
Join us for our next live class on September 19th at 9:30 AM PST
In Wanting without Shame, we work with desire as magical material.
Desire is not just a personal preference.
Desire is orientation.
It is the current beneath intention, ritual, spellcraft, spirit work, creative work, business, visibility, money, pleasure, devotion, and becoming.
In Wanting Without Shame, we invite you to come play so you can:
Clarify the desire underneath your magical intentions, instead of casting from obligation, confusion, or “should.”
Identify the old selves that distort what you think you want: the self other people imagine you to be, the past self still running old spells, the idealized self chasing comparison, and the present self who can actually cast.
Work with shame, shadow, envy, greed, pride, lust, wrath, sloth, and hunger as information instead of contamination.
Use Love and Loathe tracking as magical data for your practice, business, relationships, rituals, offerings, and creative life.
Create Desire Statements that function as magical source code for spellwork, spirit petitions, sigils, business direction, offerings, and life choices.
Turn your desires into reality clearly and cleanly
Who are you, really?
The glamour persona is a magical identity, but it may not be your identity. It’s the mask you put onto to face the world and meet the demands of your day, but it is really you?
Can you take off the mask?
Can you become the person you know yourself to be, when you aren’t wearing the mask?
The danger of the persona is that it can be a larger than life personality that doesn’t fit who you are. You construct it as an opportunity to become something new, with a perception around who you think you ought to be. That has its uses, but when it becomes something you wear to manage the way you handle the world, it also creates a separation because you’re always trying to fill the shoes of this being that you’ve created.
In magical identity work, instead of creating a persona for how you navigate the world, the focus is on picking a result and becoming that result. The difference is subtle, but important. In identity work you don’t create a persona that you use to handle situations, people, or experience. You define your desired result and then you become result. This is a process of transformation that isn’t based on trying to create a lifestyle glamour. Instead it’s based on bringing the result into your life in a meaningful way.
I came up with this approach after making the mistake of trying to craft a persona. I lived in the shadow of my persona and burned out because I was trying to be something that wasn’t real for me. My persona felt exaggerated and unreal and didn’t really match the person I knew I was. In trying to be larger than life, I actually found myself diminished by the persona.
I dismissed the persona I created and rethought my whole approach. I didn’t need to create a larger than life personality. I needed to be myself, but I asked myself if I could be myself and make changes that still lined up with my identity. That’s when I came to recognize that doing magical identity work was a better approach.
I focused on changed my identity from within myself by picking out a result and becoming the result. Becoming the result allowed me to organically accept a new outcome where I became the person who lived that result. I avoided the dangers of persona work in favor of simply choosing to become the result I wanted to live. Here’s a practical exploration of how this can work.
Step 1: Choose your desired result. It should be something that is a stretch for your identity, but also something you want to become. For example, I wanted to own a home, but had always been a renter.
Step 2: Create a practical magic working that connects your desired result with your current identity. For example, I created a sigil magic working, where one sigil represented me as a renter. Then I created a second sigil which represented me as a home owner. I drew a line between the two sigils.
Step 3: Activate the practical magic working so you shift from one identity to the other. I burned the first sigil and scattered the ashes. I took the second sigil and applied to applications I was filling out for home loans as well as paperwork for potential houses.
Step 4: Become your desired reality through mundane actions that support your magical work. I started shopping for homes. Once I found a home I wanted, I made an offer on it and did a working to Aphrodite to make my house offer more attractive. I also promised her that I would make her the patron goddess of the house. Then I imagined myself living at that house and being the home owner.
This is how you can get a result by changing you identity without using a persona.
