I remember an animated conversation between two people at a pagan meeting. One was a Celtic Wiccan and the other a Kabbalist ritual magician. The Wiccan was insisting that doing a money ritual was best organized using green as the color motif. The Kabbalist was insisting that for prosperity the best color was blue.

Neither noticed until much later that they were not talking about the same thing. There is a fundamental difference between doing a ritual to manifest money and doing one to manifest prosperity.

The difference is in the difference between High and Low Magick. There are no Wiccans from far Northern countries or from arid deserts. Wiccans and the four seasons go together.

In every country, no matter where, the wise ones realized that the three stages of create, sustain, destroy, or start, change, stop, applied to every process in the mundane universe. Everything going on in your life is in one of these universal stages. The complexities of life tend to occur when you have several things going on at the same time and one is in the beginning stage and another at the ending stage, with others in stages that you can’t identify.

The wise ones renamed these stages as cardinal, fixed, and mutable and applied these three, one by one to the four seasons. What resulted was astrology with its 12 signs of the Zodiac. By contemplating these 12 combinations you could, with a long enough life, produce the whole science and art of astrology. And this happened wherever it was obvious that that the stars seemed to revolve around one point in the sky.

So the High Magick folk discovered and developed astrology everywhere, but the Low Magick laws were not found everywhere.

This was because the Low Magick folk were agricultural folk. There were shamans but no Wiccans among the Eskimo people and the Siberians. To the agricultural folk generally the great sign of abundance and supply was the green shoots and buds of spring among the crops they planted.

To such a people the color green became inextricably entwined with the concept of supply.

The High Magick people did not share this view. They went into their libraries, laboratories and scriptoria and contemplated the original source of creative energies. Because they did not have the built in preference for green as the color of abundance they were able to produce the Tree of Life with the Sephirah of Chesed as the source of abundance. And its ritual working color is blue, using the sacred name El and the planet Jupiter. On the Tree the energy of Chesed flows into Netzach, whose energy is green, and whose goddess is Aphrodite or Venus.

The difference is critical. By using magick with the blue you contact the LAWS of abundance and supply. By using magick with the green you get in touch with the FRUITS of the law, things like money, food, shelter, relationships and so on.

Outside my kitchen window is an apple tree. In March it has no apples at all. But the law of supply works regularly on that tree and in autumn it will be full of apples, the fruit of the law.

The horticulturalist doesn’t cut down the apple tree in winter because it has no fruit. He is not an accountant or a politician. He is wiser. He understands the law and its timing. Time is a factor in producing the fruits.

One almost universal error that American pagans make, having come from a society where money is a god, is to confuse money with supply. Money is NOT supply. It is the EFFECT of supply.

Once you have realized that the same law that works for the tree is working all the time for everything in the universe, including you, then you acquire a different perspective. You realize that you are always swimming in supply like a fish in water. You lose the hang up that ‘no money’ means ‘no supply.’

It is necessary to keep a clear head about this because the early programming that most people experience about money tends to lead peoples’ minds into great confusion.

One of my New Thought students who knows nothing at all about Wicca or pagan religions knows a lot about positive thinking and affirmations to help him ‘demonstrate’ what he wants in life. He was an avid student of ‘The Science of Mind’ by Ernest Holmes. So I was surprised when he came to me with the problem that his affirmations about money weren’t working. He said that he seemed unable to demonstrate $2000.

“Why do you want to do that?” I asked. “I want to get a new computer.” was his reply. His error was obvious. “Then demonstrate a computer.” I suggested. “It’s the computer you want, not necessarily the money to buy it. Having the money is only one way to make the computer available. You are severely limiting your options by assuming you have to focus on money and have to buy everything. It’s an assumption, not a fact.”

When he changed his focus to demonstrating a computer he got one quite quickly from a source that he had not once imagined when he was limited to getting the money to buy one.

If a pagan is clear on the distinction between cause and effect, blue and green in the supply example I just used, then he will get best results with using blue in his rituals and visualizations. Blue and Chesed represent the cause. Abundance is the effect. Green and Netzach are the effect.

Some Wiccans with flexible minds have experimented with what the inflexible regard as dogma, just like the people in the churches they have recently left. Some have left the church building and have just transferred the church mind set to another group of ideas that again become dogmas. Experience, not my say so, will show the experimenter that blue works best. And in skilled and safety conscious experiment in a flexible manner lies all progress in the magickal arts. Dogma is incompatible with progress in every field of endeavor.

If a Wiccan is under the impression that money is supply then he or she will still get some kind of result with green visualizations to accompany the rituals. But the success of the practitioner will be limited to those times when the cosmic patterns resonate with money.

They resonate with abundance far more often, as every field of grain, flake of snow, or dead maple leaf in my gutter will testify. Money is a sub set of abundance, not its cause.

The principle of going to cause applies in all magickal work. Clever indeed is he who always distinguishes between the roots and the source, to quote one of my wise colleagues.