Why Ritual Is So Powerful: Magic as Communication With the Unconscious (Episode 2)
In Episode 2 of The Seven: Living with the Planets, Lucy Baldwin explores a foundational question in planetary magic:
Why is ritual so effective?
This episode is an introduction to how magic works psychologically and spiritually, and why ritual has the power to create real inner change. Ritual is not superstition. It is a symbolic method of communicating with the unconscious mind.
Watch Episode 2 of The Seven here:
What Ritual Actually Does
Ritual works because the human mind is a master interpreter of symbols.
Lucy emphasizes that one of the most distinctive features of being human is our symbolic intelligence. We live inside meaning. We respond to structure, language, metaphor, and pattern.
Ritual is one of the most direct ways to use that symbolic capacity intentionally.
It is a practice of sending a message that the unconscious can understand.
The Unconscious Responds to Symbol and Structure
A core teaching of this episode is simple:
The unconscious mind does not respond primarily to logic.
It responds to symbol.
Lucy describes ritual as a structured way of giving instructions to the unconscious through actions, words, and repeated forms.
When you light a candle, speak an invocation, or enter a familiar ritual pattern, you are highlighting something for the psyche:
This matters. Pay attention. Receive this.
Ritual puts brackets around an intention.
It makes meaning durable.
Ritual as a Form of Inner Communication
Lucy frames magic as communication with the deeper layers of the self.
Ritual is not about forcing the world.
It is about installing a message into the unconscious using symbol and structure.
She compares it to writing a piece of code, something the psyche can absorb and begin to organize around.
This is why even small rituals can feel powerful.
They speak the native language of the mind.
Why Planetary Ritual Works So Well
Planetary magic is especially effective because the planets carry archetypal meaning that already exists in the psyche.
Lucy explains that planetary symbols have momentum. The unconscious already recognizes them.
When you work with Venus, Saturn, or Jupiter, you are not inventing meaning from scratch.
You are working with an ancient symbolic current that the mind can immediately engage.
This is one reason planetary ritual is such a coherent and enduring spiritual technology.
Magic Is Not Reserved for Specialists
A central theme of The Seven is accessibility.
Lucy repeatedly returns to a simple truth:
Magic is your birthright.
Ritual is not something only scholars or initiated orders can do.
It is a human capacity, rooted in the symbolic structure of the mind itself.
Try This: Begin With a Simple Ritual
If you want to begin practicing planetary magic, start small:
Light a candle with intention
Speak a clear symbolic phrase
Choose a planet as an archetypal focus (Moon, Venus, Saturn)
Repeat the ritual form consistently
The point is not perfection.
The point is relationship, structure, and meaning.
Frequently Asked Questions (Ritual and Planetary Magic)
Why does ritual work psychologically?
Ritual works because the unconscious mind responds to symbol and structure. Ritual communicates meaning through action, repetition, and archetypal form.
Is ritual just superstition?
No. Ritual is a symbolic method of inner communication. It highlights intention and installs meaning in the psyche through structured action.
Why are the planets used in magic?
Planetary archetypes carry strong symbolic associations that the unconscious already recognizes. Working with planetary ritual allows you to draw on that existing meaning.
How do I start practicing planetary ritual?
Start with a simple repeated form: a candle, a phrase, and a planetary focus. Consistency and symbolic clarity matter more than complexity.
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Hello, welcome to episode two of the seven, Living With The Planets. I'm Lucy Baldwin. And in this episode, I'm talking about why ritual is so powerful. And I'm just gonna get in a little bit here into explaining kind of how magic works for those of you who don't know or might be new to this, because you might be familiar with astrology and you know, have placements and you have ⁓ planets that are in signs
in houses and depending on how far into astrology you may have gotten, you might know what some of that means and you might not. And that's totally fine. But
⁓ my husband likes to kind of, he's ⁓ got a PhD in chemical engineering. I mean, he's a very scientifically minded person, but he does believe in magic and he struggles a little bit with astrology
But I kind of had an argument with him. I think I may have won, which I almost never win arguments with my husband because he's usually right. And ⁓ he,
He believes that matter, the location of matter affects each other. he, He was talking about gravity and how gravity seems obvious to us in some sense, but it's also extremely mysterious. Like, why does the sun have this gravitational pull? It's not as intuitive as we kind of, like it, it's kind of crazy when you think about it. it's just, it's this really heavy, dense thing. And so things are attracted to it.
And why is that? we don't necessarily fully understand these things. we can calculate them and we can talk about them and act like we know what's going on, but it's kind of forces in general are kind of mysterious. why are we pulled to the earth just because it has density and it is spinning and it's just, it's when you get into the physics. So I actually started my college career as a physics major before I kind of was like, I want to get a little more fundamental than this. I went.
into philosophy, which then led me into the human mind and I ended up getting a degree in cognitive science. ⁓
When you're studying physics, forces are treated as kind of mysterious we can measure them and we can quantify them and we can talk about them, which is more than we can do for the mind, by the way. But we don't really understand them. that would be really a far jump, a far cry to say that we actually understand how they work. So anyways, he was talking about gravity and kind of the great mystery of gravity.
And especially when you think about black holes and space. And I took that opportunity to kind of say, ⁓ yeah, it is very mysterious. And isn't it interesting how in astrology, you know, it makes total sense to me that where things are located when you're born would have, would leave like a kind of signature.
or have that impact on you, on how you're formed. Like we know that there's this relationship between mind and matter. We don't know what the relationship is. Nobody understands that. Anybody who claims to understand that is full of it. They're lying. I know this because I studied it. It's like what my degree is in ⁓ is language and the human mind and consciousness. And as a... ⁓
⁓ In cognitive science, we actually study computer because don't know, it's kind of an interesting compliment to understanding the mind. And I will use those kinds of metaphors. We study psychology, we study linguistics, because linguistics is a huge part of the human mind. Like language is just so fundamental. And I'm to talk more about language in a minute.
we study anthropology and what did I miss? Philosophy, of course. So all of those are sort of painting this broader picture of what it means to be human and trying to understand the human mind. like there's something, know, anthropology, we're studying culture, which is an essential piece of
the human mind and how we relate to each other is so fundamental. And how do cultures emerge and what do they tell us about ourselves and linguistics and know, psychology and philosophy is sort of the foundation for everything. Philosophy is the foundation for all the sciences. And I think a lot of people forget that they want to kind of like leave out the messy sloppy philosophy because
when we acknowledge the role of philosophy as being foundational, we have to kind of accept that we don't know as much as we think we know. ⁓ And that's, you know, that makes a lot of people, especially in the science community, very uncomfortable. And specifically the mind, we don't understand the mind. We don't understand how it's related to matter. don't understand. We can't measure it. We can't quantify it.
⁓ We can't understand it. We are it we are minds like that is the most fundamental thing that we know that we are and It is what all of our experiences are filtered through so even our body like we we experience our body through our mind and ⁓ So yeah, is what my whole sort of experience was all about like delving into this world of understanding the human mind
And one of the things about the human mind that is so unique and so special is language. And it's special because we're the only species that we know of. And we've studied a lot of species and we've looked for language in so many different species and people have been trying forever since this was a thing to claim that other animals have language and they've never been able to do it because they don't.
because other species communicate, absolutely, they communicate. ⁓ Bees have very complex communication. Dolphins and whales have very complex communication. ⁓ There are other animals that communicate. Obviously chimpanzees and other ape-like animals have, they can communicate, of course. But.
the question is, are they using language to communicate? so in order to sort of understand how it is that they're not using language, we need to understand what makes language language. So I promise this is going to get back to ritual. ⁓ I am going somewhere with this. So the thing that makes language so unique is that we're using symbols, words that have no attachment.
what they represent. So it's a completely arbitrary. The words that we use are arbitrary. That's why we can have so many languages and we have different words for the same thing in different languages. And you know, the word dog has nothing to do with a dog. And the word cat has nothing to do with a cat. And you can say those words in other languages and those people will have a concept of what you're saying. They know what a dog is. ⁓ But the word dog
is completely arbitrary. Like, I mean, it's not arbitrary in the sense that language evolves and becomes what it is over time. The same thing that every, the same way that everything does. And there's a whole study of that, which is fascinating, but you can make up a language So grammar is a big part of what makes language so unique.
because we basically have these structures, these rules that we put these symbols together according to these rules and it creates meaning. And the grammar is actually a really important part of it. It's called syntax. And a lot of people who study language and linguistics, they spend a lot of time trying to identify. There was a big push for like many, years of trying to find like a universal grammar, some kind of like innate
structures that born with that define language or that make all languages sort of ⁓ have as their universal structure. And they've never been able to identify such a thing. ⁓ Some people kind of claim to, but it's just not compelling because the structures are made up. Like we create them.
So I think part of the reason why this is so compelling, like so interesting and why they've looked so much for this is because language is so universal among humans and only humans. So just as we're the only species that has language, we also all have language. is completely like every single person has language. So even a deaf person born in a community with no other deaf people,
So somebody who has no way to talk to other people, like can't hear, will learn. They actually invent what's called home sign. So them and their caregivers will make up a language. And those languages will have, it won't be very sophisticated grammar, but it will absolutely have a grammar. Like it will have rules and the rules of like what order things have to be in and how they relate to each other based on that order and things like that. they will literally
that a language if they don't have one. And that is just so incredibly fascinating because it's like there's something in us that we have to have language. We all have it. We're the only ones that have it and we have to have it. It's like this essential piece of being human of the human mind. And it's so interesting because when you break it down, you know, I've just sort of broken this down for you. It's like language is
It's symbols and structures. That's what it is. So we're using symbols that in the case of language are arbitrary and we're putting them in a structure. And with that, this is kind of a cool property of language. We can say anything like the it's infinite. The possibilities of things that we can convey is infinite. And so, you know,
A lot of people have tried to teach chimpanzees how to use language and they can get them to say sentences, but the chimpanzees will never invent their own like sentences. Like they won't say things that don't like they can't. Okay. So like ⁓ a toddler that's learning language will just kind of start
adapting and adding on and ⁓ applying grammatic rules kind of spontaneously without explicitly being taught. But the chimpanzees, mean, they, these people spend, their full-time job to try to teach them language. And I'm not trying to hate on chimps here, by the way. It's just, it's just what it is. ⁓ They will spend a full time trying to teach them language. And it's like, they can produce sentences, but they're never going to
do anything that's outside of what they've explicitly been taught. And so it's not that they don't know what it means because they do, but they can't produce language. Like it's just not the same thing. And yeah, so there's very like clear reasons why it's not the same thing.
What's also interesting about this and why I'm talking about this is because
just really laying out for you the fact that the human mind is a master symbol interpreter. That is what it does. And I want to be clear. This is...
Very different. I'm talking about language. I am not talking about reading and writing. Reading and writing is a completely different thing. Reading and writing is actually very difficult. It is learned. It is not inherent. We have to train to read and write. And there are lots of people who struggle. I actually used to volunteer at an organization where we taught illiterate adults how to read.
I was a teacher at this organization for a couple of years and it was very challenging. And these were smart people. These weren't like dumb people. It's not like, they're just too stupid to read. No, these were intelligent people and they just, they couldn't read. just, couldn't, it was so hard for them to map the visual symbols onto the words that they represented.
because that's another arbitrary relationship. The letters, the shape of the letters have nothing to do with the sounds that they produce. ⁓ But the fact that we can learn that is so fascinating. And I think part of it is because our brains are so good at interpreting symbols and manipulating symbols. And I think this is actually, I don't want to go into a whole tangent about AI, but...
I've been kind of following AI for a long time and was really into like futurism and read Nick Bostrom's super intelligence like 10 years ago. And so I was sort of waiting for this big AI thing to kind of explode. And it's weird because we got these LLMs, large language models that produce language. And, but they're kind of just like chats and
And they happened, it happens so slowly, it feels like. And one day my husband was just kind of on this thing where he was like, have like, we have AGI, we have artificial general intelligence, here it is. And we had this whole debate about whether or not it actually was artificial general intelligence, because I was just like, but it's not, because it's just manipulating symbols. And... ⁓
And it's really bad at certain other things. And I had to kind of confess that that's a little bit how humans are. And I'm not sure if we have a AGI and I don't want to go on a whole AI tangent, but know, I think that it's, I will say that it's very different what we're doing than what AI is doing because we can debate whether or not AI is like conscious. I don't think that it is, but the truth is that
AI does not have a body. And this is where the whole mind body thing gets very confusing. And I will absolutely have an episode about this because it is the experience of being in a body that grounds our thoughts and the content of our mind into lived experience. So we can feel things with our body based on a thought.
And, you know, even like when I say dog, I could kind of see a dog in my mind's eye. And even if you're not good at visualizing, it's like certain thoughts will make you feel sick. Certain thoughts will make you feel fantastic. And it's it's very, it's embodied. We're living an embodied experience. And so things have meaning to us, like lived embodied meaning that AI cannot have because
AI doesn't know what it feels like to be hungry. Like AI can manipulate symbols about the idea of hunger, but it doesn't know what it feels like to be hungry. It doesn't know what it's like to be in a body and have hunger. It doesn't know what it feels like to have you know, arms and legs and to walk and to exercise and to exert yourself and to take a cold shower. Like AI just can't actually relate to those things. So it's very different in kind.
to what we are. ⁓
If nothing else, hope that this episode is making you feel really grateful for being a human because we're so cool and interesting. ⁓ But what I'm pointing at here is that the human mind is an incredibly powerful, powerful symbol manipulator, symbol interpreter. Okay. And what I also want to point to is that yes,
we have a conscious part of our mind and we have an unconscious part of our mind. And this is, I don't want to have to do like a whole lot of explaining about this because I hope that that's intuitive and obvious to you. But just through the very fact that all the time we do and say things, we don't know where that came from. ⁓
A great example of this that I've been experiencing lately is that I have cryptograms. I do cryptogram puzzles. And if you're not familiar with cryptograms, it's like every letter will have a corresponding number and you have to like, you get the numbers and they're kind of in little clumps, like where the words would be. And you have to solve for what the sentence says. So it's like, there's a sentence, they replace each letter with a number.
and then you have to figure out what the sentence says.
And I have a book of these and I do them at night and
I am freakishly good at this, but it's not me. I don't know how I know. Like I'm not solving the puzzle. Like I promise you, it's not me. I have no idea how that's happening. And it baffles me every time because the thing with cryptograms is that...
And I have this book that I got on Amazon. hate the book because it says like, it has this section that's like easy cryptograms and they're like one sentence and then it has medium cryptograms. And by one sentence, I mean, sometimes they're like three words or like five words. And then it will say medium cryptograms and they're like one sentence and then it has hard cryptograms and they're like a whole paragraph. And anybody who actually does cryptograms, which obviously the creators of this book are not, do not actually do cryptograms, knows
that the long cryptograms are much easier to solve than the short ones. So they have it completely backwards. The long cryptograms are the easy ones and the short ones are hard because you have a lot more information to work from with a long cryptogram. And some of the short ones are nearly impossible to solve, but I mostly stick to the medium and long ones. And ⁓ I can kind of try to figure it out. You know, I can...
I can kind of try to figure it out. could say like, ⁓ okay, these one letter words are obviously I or a, and I can come up with rational excuses for why I think it's one or the other. And I can see certain patterns, like, there's a lot of words ending with the same three numbers. So maybe that's like ing or, know, there's like little kind of techniques that I can call upon, but mostly, especially hard ones that don't have one letter words and don't have a lot of things that I could kind of
look at as evidence for, you know, and make a case for why we would put certain letters in those locations. I just kind of stare at it.
And eventually I just start guessing. And the more that I do these puzzles, the more that I notice that I can just kind of be like, I just stared at it for a while. And then I'll just kind of be like, I think that's, she's the, I don't know why. I don't know why I think that. And the number of times that I get it right, I mean, you wouldn't even believe because you're just making it up. have no idea. It could be anything.
And I'm very aware of that. Like I'm like, oh, but it's a three letter word that ends in E. That doesn't mean that it's the like it could be anything. And sometimes I'll put in the, and sometimes I won't. And when I won't it miraculously won't be the, but the time that I did, it always was. It's like, what I'm trying to say is other than I am a master cryptogram solver, which I am. What I'm trying to say is that it's not me.
It's not me. It's my unconscious. And my unconscious is so much smarter than me, especially at these puzzles. ⁓ But, know, Bruce Lipton wrote an amazing book called Biology of Belief, where he basically says that, you know, you're only actually driving yourself. You're only actually, consciously in control of yourself, maximum 5 % of the time.
It's kind of like how you drive your car and suddenly you just arrive at the place. If you're going somewhere new, you're going to pay attention. ⁓ But maybe not even because now we have navigation.
this is just something that is well understood that we are, we have a lot of stuff that we do that we're not even aware of. We are only actually in control of ourselves some small percentage of the time. And what this points to is that there is a unconscious meaning there's a part of our mind
that we're not aware of. We're not following its story. We're not tracking it. We're not hearing it think And there's actually, there's a lot of theories about the unconscious and
it's the part of our mind that is somehow connected to our body and our brain, which we don't know how those things are connected, but it's telling our heart to beat. And I mean, that is a function in the brain, but it's, I think, related to our mind also, our unconscious mind, which may or may not reside.
in space at all It seems to be a different sort of thing.
without going on a whole tangent about my philosophical views on that. I just want to say that kind of like bring us back to ritual. so our mind, and I'm gonna review here, as humans,
our mind is the thing that we have access to and knowledge of. It's what filters everything. It's what everything comes, it's like what we're actually experiencing.
And it is an incredibly powerful symbol, interpreter, and manipulator.
and it uses structures to interpret symbols. It's symbol and structure. And it responds to all kinds of structures. Because again, as we see with language, they all have different grammars and there's no universal grammar. They are all different. So the structure, doesn't matter what the structure is, it just needs to have one.
And so ritual is a way of communicating. I think, I like think of it as like giving instructions to our unconscious using the structure of the ritual and the symbols of the actions that we take and the words that we say within the ritual to communicate a really like a solid piece of important information and put it into our unconscious mind.
used to use the sort of like computer science metaphor. It's like a code. We're writing a piece of code and we're installing it into our unconscious. And that's why ritual is so powerful. There's a lot of ways to do ritual. and you know, there's this thing called chaos magic, which I will absolutely have an episode about. So look for that in the coming weeks where you're just kind of like,
doing the symbol part, like you're coming up with a symbol and you're ⁓ assigning the meaning to the symbol and then you're doing the thing. So the symbol would be like an action or a thing that you're going to say, which is an action. ⁓ And that is how we communicate. But the ritual element, and especially if we do rituals kind of in the same kind of pattern,
or similar pattern every time, we're setting up the structure for our unconscious to understand like, oh, this is a command. This is something to pay attention to. It's like we're putting brackets around it we're highlighting it in big yellow highlighter when we light a candle and call in a deity. And to take this a little bit further, and I'll get way more into this in future episodes, it's like, reason we work with the planets is because they have...
strong symbols already associated with them that our unconscious already knows. So when we call in those archetypes, our unconscious knows kind of like what we're dealing with. And it has this ⁓ sort of momentum that we can write it and we can use that symbol and we can benefit greatly from the power that already sort of resides within that symbol and that archetype. Okay, this was a long episode.
And I hope that you now see the power of your own mind. And also, you know, I've, I'll say over and over again, probably in every single episode that you have the ability to do magic. ⁓ every single one of us does. And, that's because our mind is a extremely powerful symbol manipulator. So don't underestimate.
your own ability to communicate with yourself and also because magic is just you communicating with your unconscious. And I'll talk more about that also. So ⁓ stick around for more episodes if you want to learn more. And I hope that you will go and try a ritual. And ⁓ if you want to come to a ritual, I put on rituals every month for free in my online community called Inner Circle. And you can join us at the link in the description.
You just give your email and then you'll get the email invitation. You'll also get a calendar link if you want to just like add all the events to your calendar. There's usually like two or three events a month. It's not too much, but it's enough that yeah, you can come to some rituals and those are really fun. And you can also come to my community connection events that I do once or twice a month where we play hot seat and we do capacity building.
connection games that are really fun and it's also kind of like doing ⁓ Personal development work, but that feels like a good time and Yeah, it's sort of like What used to be for me like when I was a teenager? I wanted to go to nightclubs and dance The new hot super fun thing for me to do is these reflection games calls where I'm connecting with people and like doing really
how getting into like really deep stuff and ⁓ just like getting, I don't know, you'll see, you got to come and find out. It's really, really fun and it's a great pleasure and joy. So yeah, I hope to see you there. Just click the link in my bio to join Inner Circle and I'll see you on the next episode.
New to this work? Start with Lucy Baldwin’s full Planetary Magic overview here.
Next Steps
If this episode resonated, you are invited to go deeper.
Lucy offers free monthly rituals through her Inner Circle community, along with practices and connection spaces for ongoing planetary work.
New episodes of The Seven are released weekly.