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Love Magic
Discover the power of love through the mystical practice of magic in this wide-ranging collection of spells, rituals, and meditations from the authors of Power of the Witch.
You don't have to be a Witch to use Love Magic. This enlightening book--a rich treasury of spells for men, women, and couples to attract, enhance, or end relationships--addresses both the novice and the experienced magic worker. Following an inspiring and informative overview on the meaning of love magic and on the craft of performing it, Love Magic offers an extensive array of rituals to bring warmth, affection, pleasure, and passion into your life and the lives of others. Told in Laurie Cabot's friendly voice and reflecting her many years of experience as a Witch, Love Magic promotes magic for the good of all and the harm of none, so readers can't hurt their chances at love, only increase them.
You don't have to be a Witch to use Love Magic. This enlightening book--a rich treasury of spells for men, women, and couples to attract, enhance, or end relationships--addresses both the novice and the experienced magic worker. Following an inspiring and informative overview on the meaning of love magic and on the craft of performing it, Love Magic offers an extensive array of rituals to bring warmth, affection, pleasure, and passion into your life and the lives of others. Told in Laurie Cabot's friendly voice and reflecting her many years of experience as a Witch, Love Magic promotes magic for the good of all and the harm of none, so readers can't hurt their chances at love, only increase them.
288 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 23, 2018
I don't know what to say about this except it was pretty interesting. I don't practice Wicca. I'm just genuinely curious.
May 5, 2023
Laurie Cabot's Love Magic is a good introduction to the subject. There was a chapter on astrology as it pertains to finding a partner and a chapter on pagan gods and goddesses to help the reader understand themselves. Then chapters of spells for attracting and enhancing love as well as ending a relationship. This is probably not the best and up to date book on the subject as it was published over 30 years ago, but good for basics. I did chuckle over the three entries in the appendix for sources of supplies in the US. A lot has changed over the years and most towns as well as all cities now have at least one pagan/Wiccan store and of course there is the internet.
August 23, 2007
A good book on the topic. Ethical, with Laurie's flair.
August 29, 2026
A lot of books on love magic are really books about attraction. They teach you how to draw someone in, make yourself more desirable, or create the conditions for romance, then more or less stop once the relationship begins.
Laurie Cabot's Love Magic is much more interested in the entire life cycle of love.
There are workings for attracting relationships, but there is also material on deepening affection, strengthening existing bonds, understanding compatibility, recovering passion, and ending relationships that have reached their natural conclusion. That wider scope immediately made the book feel more emotionally mature than I expected.
I especially appreciated Cabot's insistence on ethics. Love magic is one of those subjects where magical desire can very quickly become an excuse for coercion, and she consistently frames the work around creating opportunities for love rather than overriding another person's will.
That approach does not make the magic passive. There is still plenty of spellcraft, ritual, visualization, correspondences, and deliberate magical action, but the goal is to create conditions where love can flourish rather than force a specific person into a predetermined role.
The astrology material is interesting for similar reasons because it shifts some attention away from simply obtaining a partner and toward understanding what we actually seek in relationships. Attraction alone says very little about compatibility, emotional needs, communication, or the patterns we repeatedly bring into intimacy.
Cabot also brings in Pagan gods and goddesses as mirrors for different expressions of love and sexuality. That gives the book a mythic dimension and encourages readers to think about love as something much larger than romantic pursuit.
Some portions definitely show their age. The book was published in 1992, and a few assumptions about gender and relationship dynamics feel more conventional than many contemporary readers will be comfortable with. Reviewers have noticed this too, even while describing the book as unusually progressive for its period.
I can live with that because the larger message is surprisingly expansive.
Love is presented as something that requires self-knowledge, intention, pleasure, honesty, emotional courage, and sometimes the willingness to let go. A successful love spell is therefore not always the one that brings somebody closer.
Sometimes it helps you recognize what kind of relationship you actually want. Sometimes it strengthens something already worth protecting, and sometimes it helps create the conditions for a relationship to end cleanly enough that both people can move forward.
That last category particularly impressed me. Magical books often treat attraction as success and separation as failure, but real relationships are more complicated than that. Ending something that no longer serves either person can be just as loving as beginning something new.
Cabot's writing also has the warmth that makes her older books so approachable. She communicates authority without turning Witchcraft into something intimidating, and the spells feel like practical applications of a larger philosophy rather than disconnected recipes.
That may be why Love Magic still works despite its age.
The details of dating and relationships have changed enormously since the early 1990s, but people are still trying to understand desire, compatibility, heartbreak, commitment, and when to hold on or let go.
Love Magic treats all of those experiences as worthy of magical attention. Instead of promising a perfect romance, it offers something more useful: ways to participate consciously in the complicated process of loving another person.
Laurie Cabot's Love Magic is much more interested in the entire life cycle of love.
There are workings for attracting relationships, but there is also material on deepening affection, strengthening existing bonds, understanding compatibility, recovering passion, and ending relationships that have reached their natural conclusion. That wider scope immediately made the book feel more emotionally mature than I expected.
I especially appreciated Cabot's insistence on ethics. Love magic is one of those subjects where magical desire can very quickly become an excuse for coercion, and she consistently frames the work around creating opportunities for love rather than overriding another person's will.
That approach does not make the magic passive. There is still plenty of spellcraft, ritual, visualization, correspondences, and deliberate magical action, but the goal is to create conditions where love can flourish rather than force a specific person into a predetermined role.
The astrology material is interesting for similar reasons because it shifts some attention away from simply obtaining a partner and toward understanding what we actually seek in relationships. Attraction alone says very little about compatibility, emotional needs, communication, or the patterns we repeatedly bring into intimacy.
Cabot also brings in Pagan gods and goddesses as mirrors for different expressions of love and sexuality. That gives the book a mythic dimension and encourages readers to think about love as something much larger than romantic pursuit.
Some portions definitely show their age. The book was published in 1992, and a few assumptions about gender and relationship dynamics feel more conventional than many contemporary readers will be comfortable with. Reviewers have noticed this too, even while describing the book as unusually progressive for its period.
I can live with that because the larger message is surprisingly expansive.
Love is presented as something that requires self-knowledge, intention, pleasure, honesty, emotional courage, and sometimes the willingness to let go. A successful love spell is therefore not always the one that brings somebody closer.
Sometimes it helps you recognize what kind of relationship you actually want. Sometimes it strengthens something already worth protecting, and sometimes it helps create the conditions for a relationship to end cleanly enough that both people can move forward.
That last category particularly impressed me. Magical books often treat attraction as success and separation as failure, but real relationships are more complicated than that. Ending something that no longer serves either person can be just as loving as beginning something new.
Cabot's writing also has the warmth that makes her older books so approachable. She communicates authority without turning Witchcraft into something intimidating, and the spells feel like practical applications of a larger philosophy rather than disconnected recipes.
That may be why Love Magic still works despite its age.
The details of dating and relationships have changed enormously since the early 1990s, but people are still trying to understand desire, compatibility, heartbreak, commitment, and when to hold on or let go.
Love Magic treats all of those experiences as worthy of magical attention. Instead of promising a perfect romance, it offers something more useful: ways to participate consciously in the complicated process of loving another person.
September 6, 2026
Love magic may be the branch of witchcraft that exposes our ethics fastest. Protection can be discussed abstractly, prosperity usually raises few eyebrows, but tell someone you have performed magic to attract another person and suddenly everyone wants to know exactly how much free will survived the ritual. Laurie Cabot was already taking that question seriously in 1992. Her answer is recognizably Wiccan. Magic should increase the possibility of love without overriding another person's will, and the workings throughout the book are shaped by that assumption.
What makes the book more interesting than a collection of romantic spells is Cabot's conviction that successful love magic begins with understanding the person doing it. There is material involving astrology, gods and goddesses, meditation, magical technique, and the different ways people seek affection, passion, companionship, or release from a relationship that has run its course. Some of the gender language is very much of its time, and as a gay reader I occasionally found myself translating assumptions about men, women, and heterosexual courtship into something more useful. That was hardly unusual in Pagan books of the period. Gay witches became quite skilled at mentally editing rituals while everybody else was still deciding who had to hold the athame.
Cabot is strongest when she treats love as a force larger than obtaining a particular person. Desire can tell us something about ourselves, but obsession can just as easily disguise itself as destiny. Magic does not automatically make our motives wiser simply because candles are involved. I appreciated the fact that the book includes attraction, sustaining affection, passion, and ending relationships rather than treating every romantic problem as a request to make somebody fall in love with you. There is a maturity in recognizing that sometimes the most loving magical act is opening a door, and sometimes it is finally closing one.
This would not be the Laurie Cabot book I would choose first for someone interested in her larger magical system. Power of the Witch tells me much more about how she understands the mind and magical consciousness. But Love Magic has its own charm because it reveals how she applies those ideas to one of the messiest parts of being human. Thirty years later, some of its language has aged and some of its assumptions deserve questioning, yet its central advice holds up surprisingly well. Know what you actually want, do not confuse possession with love, and make sure the person casting the spell is part of the situation being transformed.
What makes the book more interesting than a collection of romantic spells is Cabot's conviction that successful love magic begins with understanding the person doing it. There is material involving astrology, gods and goddesses, meditation, magical technique, and the different ways people seek affection, passion, companionship, or release from a relationship that has run its course. Some of the gender language is very much of its time, and as a gay reader I occasionally found myself translating assumptions about men, women, and heterosexual courtship into something more useful. That was hardly unusual in Pagan books of the period. Gay witches became quite skilled at mentally editing rituals while everybody else was still deciding who had to hold the athame.
Cabot is strongest when she treats love as a force larger than obtaining a particular person. Desire can tell us something about ourselves, but obsession can just as easily disguise itself as destiny. Magic does not automatically make our motives wiser simply because candles are involved. I appreciated the fact that the book includes attraction, sustaining affection, passion, and ending relationships rather than treating every romantic problem as a request to make somebody fall in love with you. There is a maturity in recognizing that sometimes the most loving magical act is opening a door, and sometimes it is finally closing one.
This would not be the Laurie Cabot book I would choose first for someone interested in her larger magical system. Power of the Witch tells me much more about how she understands the mind and magical consciousness. But Love Magic has its own charm because it reveals how she applies those ideas to one of the messiest parts of being human. Thirty years later, some of its language has aged and some of its assumptions deserve questioning, yet its central advice holds up surprisingly well. Know what you actually want, do not confuse possession with love, and make sure the person casting the spell is part of the situation being transformed.
May 1, 2024
surprisingly ahead of it's time! a few spells did feel a little stereotypical when it comes to power dynamics and gender roles, and the astrology part was a bit lackluster. but for beginners, laurie cabot did a great job as always
August 27, 2022
Pretty good, pretty practical, decently ahead of its time.
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September 8, 2010Wonderful worthwhile spells that are tried and true.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews