┌─╷─┐ ╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub ╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes └─╵─┘
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A question I saw once upon a time on Reddit:
Before the internet was it possible to be a poor magician? Seems to me all the big time occultist and magicians had one thing in common...money. what do you think?"
Being "big-time" in any field or cultural area generally correlates with having money, yes. That's kind of the point of being big-time. But let's consider this same situation with musicians for a moment: given how many big-time musicians there are even today, how many more small-time musicians are there out there? How many folk musicians are there, how many garage band players, how many hobbyists, how many sincere players are out there who don't make it big-time, or who don't care to do so? The same goes for magic and magicians, now as ever. You don't need money to be an occultist or magician; indeed, most of them across all of history never had much to speak of, after all.
Which, in that light, reminds me of another good point: just how you don't need money to be a magician, you don't need much to do magic, either. Most of magic out there has three aspects: materials, timing, and ritual. While they're all important and should be kept as close to ideal as possible, timing is more important than materials, and ritual even more important than timing. There's more than one way to skin a cat, after all.
For instance: say you're doing a ritual, and the text it comes from calls for a gold plate shaped into a particular pattern. Can't get a gold plate? Get brass. Can't cut it into the right shape? Cut out some firm cardboard, soak it in Goldschläger, and cover it with gold paint.
I'm not saying you should always take the easy way out; far from it! We should take pains to get our tools as good as we can, our timing as exact as we can, our rituals as tight as we can. Adapt however you need to, but absolutely no more than how much you need. Even within those limits, you can do great magic with what you've got; after all, we have thousands of years of evidence of just that. Over time, you'll make them work fine! But getting things ideal from the get-go will make them work a lot faster, a lot more easily, and a lot better. Do your best, and the rest will fall in line.