“I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.” – Tony Montana

    Once upon a time there was a young man, a purveyor of magical items. Magicians came from all around to buy the wonderous creations displayed on his shelves. Oils and tinctures glittered from bottles and jars. Dirts, dusts, powders and compounds filled the air with their pungent odors, adding to the dusty smell of hundreds and hundreds of books. For the practitioners of all magic-using traditions, this was the most powerful place in the city.
     It wasn’t just the great and powerful who came to buy his magical goodies, either. Ordinary people, run-of-the-mill working class folks, came to purchase their charms and spells to make their lives a little better. Spells to get rid of their neighbors, spells to get so-and-so to date them, spells to pick up a little extra money or get revenge on someone who’d wronged them. For a price, our humble protagonist could lay a curse, take one off, or knock back the person who’d laid it.
     Our story begins with Jeanelle, a young woman who had a problem. She lived next door to a small general store, the kind of place where all the kids would hang out. The store itself was a very popular place, but it wasn’t actually making a lot of money because it was still just a small neighborhood store. The owner had made several requests to Jeanelle’s landlord about buying the house to expand his business, and she came first to the magic shop for help.
     Jeanelle’s first spell was a shot across his bow. The store began suffering general misfortune over the next few weeks, eventually leading to a break-in which left the store trashed inside. This would normally have been the end of a relatively small business, but less than two weeks later it was open again and doing more business than before. Jeanelle came in for a tarot reading and discovered that the store owner was doing some sort of defensive magic designed to deflect her attacks back on herself. Quickly she purchased defensive spells of her own, and a few more nasty tricks to try and put the store out of business.
     This exchange went back and forth for several months, both sides exchanging blows until a van parked next to the store caught fire one night, and both buildings burned almost to the ground. Fortunately nobody was seriously injured, but the store had to close and Jeanelle had to move in with her mother.
     When relating this story to his apprentice, the young warlock was careful to point out that nobody ever really “wins” a war – they just lose less. “So … how was it you were able to predict and counter each spell?”, the apprentice asked.
     “Well, the store owner was in here to get readings and buy *his* spells too. I was able to give them both exactly what they wanted, because I knew what they were both trying to do to each other.”
     “But was it ethical for you to be selling spells to both Jeanelle AND the store owner?” the apprentice asked.
     “Perfectly ethical, son. Neither of them ever thought to ask for peace.”

     Truth is the stock in trade of all the most powerful people. Not so much the telling of it, but the control of it, seeking it out and acquiring it as if it were veins of precious metal. Truth is power. Truth is practically currency. But what sort of friend is truth? Truth is the friend that takes your keys when you’ve had too much to drink, but it’s also the friend that rats you out when you cheat on your girlfriend. Truth can be a real bitch sometimes.
     It’s easy to think of truth in terms of an abstract substance of some sort, but to phenomenize it in that manner steals focus from its true nature, and therefore from its true power. The world is truth – “truth” is a snapshot of the actual material state of the world, so go get it. Seek it out, hunt it down, make it your own. Whether your objective is to make the truth public, hoard it for yourself, or embellish it to spin the perception in another direction entirely, your first desire should be for the truth.
     The biggest problem for a magician who deals in truth is how to tell a lie. Essentially, a spell is a lie you tell the universe. Things are one way, and you tell the universe things are different and if you lie well enough, the universe believes you and makes it happen. So, when a magician tells an ordinary lie there is a strong tendency for it to become truth, because the magician said it was so.
     The cure for this is a wonderful term invented by the Catholic Church, called “Mental Reservation”. You can speak a direct lie, as long as you correct it by extension in your mind.

“No honey, of course we won’t go to the strip club tonight (mentally adding because if we hurry the sun will still be technically above the horizon).”

“You know I love you because I’ve never let on that I don’t.“

“I can’t come to work today because I’m sick of dealing with you clowns eight hours a day.“

     Naturally, you can see how each of these three lies might come true if not neutralized by Mental Reservation – the trip to the gentlemen’s club might get interrupted any number of ways, the speaker might *actually* fall in love, and the worker might genuinely become ill while playing hooky. Truth is a valuable commodity, so you should be very very careful not to taint it with lies. The best that could happen is that those lies become truth, but the worst that could happen is that the lies take power out of your words, and you lose the ability to do magic by fiat.