The Skeptical Occultist

In the modern world of revivalist magical practice much attempt is made to “simplify” the variables of ritual and folk magic practice. The substitution of herbs and other necessary ingredients for those more readily available to the reader, the replacement of complex ritual tools, whose consecration methods involve months of separate magical practice to achieve, with mundane kitchen drawer implements, the shortening of benedictions and prayers, the cheapening of offerings to spirits (buy the good rum, ffs), the list goes on endlessly.

While there is truth to the concept that an experienced practitioner may do what is needed with what variables are at hand, it is often those writers and bloggers who have very little understanding of the science underlying magical practice that so easily dismiss variables they find problematic as superfluous.

Long have writers of the “rationalist” era decried the seemingly barbaric ingredients of spells, cures, and charms as primitive and unnecessary. Yet in the 21st century we have a vast body of peer-reviewed evidence to support the fact that people of distant ages somehow held knowledge that would give even the most modern pharmacist pause for consideration.

In a 2015 University of Nottingham study scientists recreated a recipe from a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon volume, “Bald’s Leechbook”, held in the British Library, that was intended as a cure for eye infection. The eye salve contained garlic, onion, wine and cow bile. The microbiologists tasked with the study found that it wiped out the MRSA bacteria. Something that modern antibiotics are basically powerless against.

There are numerous examples of these ancient ways of healing providing some clue to a body of knowledge that comes from many centuries before we used the term “science” to describe the process of accumulating and verifying knowledge. Michael Scot, the 12th century scholar, alchemist and tutor to the Holy Roman Emperor, casually created a form of Richter Scale Graph with which to measure local earthquakes some 800+ years before Richter. Of course, his contemporaries believed he had created an “earthquake making device” but such are the views of small minded people throughout time.

Humans are a curious and inquisitive lot, we have been exploring and analyzing the world around us for many thousands of years. Cultures we have no memory of as a people have come and gone, building vast empires only to be erased by the sands of time, with little to no record of their existence. These empires used technologies - metallurgy, chemistry, mathematics, in order to do what they did. The traces of their acquired knowledge lingered on, long after their cities have withered to dust.

In the center of any magical practice is the body in which you exist. The body is, afterall, a temple in which we reside, defining “us” in physical form. In a very real way, it is just a leather bag full of chemical soup. Much of the history of magical practice, from shaman’s hut to necromancer’s circle, is characterized by the complex control of the variables of that chemical soup we inhabit. Incense full of henbane, myrrh, sage, free floating chemical activators to tickle that quantum finger that is your nose. Plants and animals we imbibe, and very specifically the avoidance of foods and other substances that might pollute the body during the actual act of magic.

Many cultures hold on to ancient dietary practices, from the halal of Islam and the kosher of Judaism, to the Ital vegetarianism of Rastafari, the withholding of particular foods is important. In the context of magic, it is one of the primary things that determines success.

Fasting is an incredibly important part of making the body ready for the exercise that is practical magic. It resets the gut biome, that 30ish% of your body weight that is just a colony of bacteria living in your intestines. The symbiotic relationship we have with our gut flora can not be underestimated when it comes to the perceptual paradigm we consider “the real.” We rely on our senses too heavily as indicators of reality, when we know scientifically that our senses often lie to us. The gut is the measure of that lie, feeding our brain tailored hormones that we use to structure information, and create memories.

As well, dietary avoidance of liver, sausages, yogurt, aged cheese, and other food that contains high levels of the chemical tyramine is essential to opening various channels of transmission involved in magic. Not to mention that it interferes with a wide range of MAOI like particulars one may imbibe during the ritual itself.

Before any large operation I generally fast a minimum of 30 days without the above foods, 7 days with no meat and the last day before the operation with a tiny simple diet, usually rice and nuts. Specific rituals and magical practices may have even more stringent requirements, but these are my baseline.

There is, in the study and practice of magic, the allure of power. The endless seekers of quick wealth, easy love and societal fame come to the practice of magic looking for personal gain and glory. Inevitably faced with a life time’s worth of work and study these seekers soon turn back, giving up their study and turning to pantomiming some practice made hodgepodge out of a skimmed book or two, or buying some initiation into a “current”, order, or coven.

As well there are those who would sell you either their magic or a “path” in which you yourself can “be a god”, or some such nonsense. Charlatans and frauds who would sell you a path to a glory they do not themselves possess. Shiftless fakers who would have you believe that the quest for power and money is the alchemist’s stone and solvent.

It is by no means a shortcut in life, magic. There are far easier ways to gain love and wealth than through the study of the esoteric arts. Like playing a musical instrument or practicing a martial art the formal, practical and contemplative study of magic requires serious inquiry, endless reading and many hours of solitary working and breathing out in nature.

Magic in the 21st century is all the rage, a counter point to the uncertainty of the world and its geopolitical stage. Endless tv witches in black dresses, spells cast on politicians publicly with a photo op of the ritual included in the press pack. Capitalism has cottoned on to the desire for the ‘otherness’ that witchcraft and magic possess. Humans worn down by the ever encroaching digitalization of life seek again the uncanny. Yearn for nature at its core, a rewilding of the soul that somehow eludes the mundanes in their day to day living.

Yet there is no quick trick, no simple solution, no spell that brings wealth or love, that provides comfort and riches. Magic can do all of those things, of course, but it is a long road to understanding how and making that practical. Better to find a more direct path to the wealth you seek, for the magician seeks not wealth nor glory, only the endless quest for knowledge of the beyond.

Like it has so many times before in history the high tide of popular awareness of magic and its practice will recede. There may be a rough focal point in near history where magic is briefly taken seriously enough that laws start being made and people get hurt, but that too will pass and the masses so enamored of magic’s subtle glamour will move on once again.

Throughout time the narrative of magic has been drowning in a bazaar’s worth of hawkers, fakers, charlatans and frauds. They seek money and fame, and their customers are not guileless in their desires for quick solutions. No innocents are harmed in the racket of selling fake charms and spells to those disinterested in doing their own homework.

The internet provides a boundless sea of garbage about magic. Thousands upon thousands of volumes of mostly rehashed bullshit 20th century nonsense. Crib note style ’dark fluff™’ for the would be witch or wizard with simple instructions and a how to list of ritual items that can easily be purchased from the publisher’s website. Fuck off.

But that is the real initiation into the occult. Having swam through the sea of badly written occult fiction tripe, bdsm ken doll grimoires, and Scott fucking Cunningham wiccan douchery, we emerge like newborn beings out of an abyss of bad knowledge. We see clearly the glimpses of work that have value, and patterns of understanding begin to form.

So read and read and read some more. Look at a book’s bibliography as a guide, if it doesn’t have one its most likely bullshit. Go back to sources before the 19th century, and look at sources outside of the narrative of magic (aka orders like OTO, GD, AA, etc). Look at folklore records not just Inquisition documents, read children’s stories and mythology and know that half of the academics that pretend to objectively write about magic are also secretly practitioners.

Regardless of the interests you have and the path you will find yourself on the only way to understand the mechanics of what you are doing, or the lay of the landscape in which your practice resides, is through a continued year’s long regular consideration and actualization of magic. Only when you can see the wiring under the board will you have the ability to gain riches and fame, the irony is at that point you will no longer seek them.

There is without a doubt a rise in the number of white men who think they have some claim to being the world’s worst assholes. Despite roundly being rejected in the second world war they fetishize their own skin colour, and live in a fantasy of some “European” lineage that forgets thousands of years of interaction between the Vikings and the Moors, the Africans and the Italians, not to mention the Sami people of the true north.

It seems not a day goes by in the political realm where a nazi doesn’t need punching. Pasty faced “white” inbreds the lot of them. Ironically most of them would have been fed first in line to the gas chambers by the German Nazis of a century ago.

The subtle infiltration of fascist ideas in the occult and music worlds has long been at play. Whole groups of supposed occultists have been exposed over the years to be nothing more than neo-nazi recruitment tools. Alt Right “cultural purists” who would show you the “Secrets of Odin™” and let you know you are a member of the “Master Race™” if only for a small monthly membership fee and a laundry list of over priced perfect bound books with runes on the cover.

Recently I had an author be brought to my attention whose books sounded quite interesting. A writer I follow mention the author and two of their books as dealing with subjects of my own interest involving folklore, magic, entheogens, and the like. I sought out the author’s books and requested they be sent for review to the publisher.

It was when I was writing the review that I took a longer look at the other books on the publisher’s site and noticed that they are, by their own admission, dominantly a publisher of far right material. I was aghast and asked a friend, who is also a publisher, about the author of the works to be informed by my friend that they didn’t believe the author to be fascist, or even right leaning. Although they knew the far right publisher well and confirmed my suspicions about their intentions.

Thus I have been giving a lot of time to thinking about if I should publish the review of this author’s book. I have long held a “no platform” opinion of how to deal with nazis, trolls, racists and their ilk. I believe that broadcasting the existence of these people is in itself harmful. Supporting the author means financially assisting an organization that publishes a mountain of material I wholly reject as a writer, magician, and human being.

We must be diligent in our practice and study that those who would lead us on a path astray, one of political and ideological miscarriage, should be avoided at all lengths. They offer nothing in the way of understanding, of knowing. Nor can they understand the nature of magic if they think that somehow one colour of human is different than another.

Those that would infiltrate our ranks are exactly those who would betray us and see us burned at the stake for not conceding to their ludicrous fantasies. Young white men are particularly vulnerable to their propaganda, offering an alluring sense of belonging to outcasts who feel alone in this world. They prey upon those unskilled in the art of mental defense and seek to warp kind minds to ill opinions. They are themselves wounded humans who lack understanding and empathy, sociopaths suffering of delusions of grandeur.

We tend to think of water spirits as existing in rivers, lakes, and oceans. Yet water itself exists within the earth throughout the globe. The “water table” under the land may be very deep, but it is there from tundra to rainforest under every bit of walkable landscape

As I sit on the mountain side listening to the crickets of the night air I think about the deep wells that surround this isolated cabin. The various springs and water mines that dot the mountainside portals to that underworld of the land’s water. Pockets of aqua that bring life to the land and its inhabitants and often represent gateways into the otherworld of folk belief.

Each of these water spaces traditionally contains a spirit, often one with a history of local social interaction. The spirits of the wells of England are long thought to possess healing powers that were often later appropriated by the Christian church. Pagan sites converted to shrines of the Virgin Mary and her various saintly retinue.

This phenomena of folk belief in a water spirit that exists within the boundaries of a source of water is a practically global concept, common throughout world cultures. Yet in Portugal, like in Britain, they have come to have a long evolved set of ideas associated with them.

The moura of Portugal are often thought of as the Portuguese equivalent of fairies of the British Isles, yet they have come through a historic past that has shaped them in ways unimaginable to the average celt. Legends of Moorish magic from the time of the Iberian Caliphates ingrained in centuries long folk magic practice, romantic notions of hidden treasures tracing their roots to that people driven so long ago from these lands by Christian Crusaders. Distilled into a corpus of Cyprian related magics seeking to reveal that which is said to have been hidden by Arabic magic.

Bubbling under the surface of this landscape is an ocean, even here in the high mountains of the Açor, where the namesake açor goshawk cries above me as I write. It flows from springs to form streams and creeks that merge downland into rivers, ultimately flowing toward the Atlantic.

While these aquatic protrusions into the land, river and well alike, are often believed to be the home of some spirit or another, the water inside the land stretches in all directions unseen and underfoot. THe well and the river are merely the gateways to that realm of water hidden by the landscape itself.

My investigations into the apotropaic markings on agricultural buildings has led to a number of interesting documents of markings on or near springs and water mines. These marks, scratched into the soft schist stones, resemble in some forms those markings found near agricultural buildings that housed goats and other livestock. Yet more prominent near water sources are circular patterns, not always closed or complete, that repeat.

Found deep inside the watermines these markings have led me to more exploration of their cause, though local inquiry turns up a blank among the people of these hills. None of my mostly reliable sources have been able to find even a whisper of a memory of what or why these markings came to be in the watermines. Contrary to those on buildings, who seem to have as many opinions about there purpose as there are locals to ask about them.

I thought I would offer this article on landscape magic from the first issue of FOLKWITCH as a public offering this Solstice. May the sun burn bright and the bonfires burn brighter on the hills of your ancestors.

“The Mirror of the Landscape” Eldred Wormwood

The realm of the witch is defined by their interactions with that natural world in which they exist. From the dawn of mankind’s attempts to harness the power of magic we have relied on the subtle web of our interactions with the world “beyond the veil.” That mirror of the landscape in which we read our fortunes and prophecy our circumstance.

Yet little direct attention has been paid to the role that the landscape plays in the practice of witchcraft in the annals of so called occult scholarship. Much has been said about the how of practical magic and ritual, but very rarely do we hear of the why or where.

The landscape, that terrain in which you exist every moment of the day. From the dew covered foggy mountain bottoms to the industrial park urban sprawl the landscape surrounds us. It is the plane of reality in which we live.

You bleed into the ground. Feed the soil with your sweat and tears. Drink from the well that fills from its water table, your body becomes one with the place you inhabit. The landscape and the body are part of the system, the inextricable network of interrelated particles that make up evolving life on earth.

Most humans, mundanes without the perception to see the world for what it is, simply go about the actions of living life in survival mode. Take what they need, give what they must, eat, sleep and eventually die. But the witch sees the world at a resolution differently than most, looks at those shadows that others ignore, sees the light through the trees as more than random, holds on to the language of pattern.

The witch reads the world like a book of secrets, the landscape a story of evolving ideas that we grasp and understand. The clouds like a language, the whisper of the wind through trees, the way that puddles of rain reflect the sky - a signal we come to understand.

Your nose knows the way it seems, a deep sensor of quantum mechanics it feels like a finger into the cloud of potentiality that is the future, guiding you through the fog of possibility until you reach your goal along the path. The nose knows, if only you could speak its subtle language.

Mankind has always existed in the landscape, even in our futile attempts to control it. We are primates, who lived among forests and grass plains so recently that rivers remember when there were no cities. We are part of the natural world, whether we realize it or not. The witch is merely aware of this fact, and that knowledge creates an open state of knowing.

The landscape itself is a sound system, filled with the reverberations of not merely the events that have unfolded in this river of time, but the echos of other rivers descending in a swirling madness of never and always, meting out punishment when needed to teach the seeker a lesson in humility.

The mass of forms on the surface of the earth create chambers that capture the sounds and energies created by living things. These echos are the ancestors, speaking across the illusion of time to teach us the way toward the future. The beat in the echo of space like a drum in a forest, like a stolen P A in a Detroit warehouse.

From the time before written words we had strove to gain a foothold in this primordial state. Abrahamic religions even cite our fall from this world of perception, though go on to ban anyone who would seek it out for themselves.

In the ancient Greek Magical Papyri it is documented our relationship with the spirits who inhabit this physical world around us. While they rarely have corporeal bodies these spirits wield incredible power over the forces of the natural world.

These ‘genius loci’ tend to a static place, inhabiting features in the landscape full of energy. Rivers & streams, mountain valleys, ancient forests, those places where the nexus of being affords them a comfortable habitat.

Yet even in the urban world that we have carved they have evolved to function. Certain forms of building, areas of great human traffic like crossroads, material places we have created for sometimes other reasons that the abode of these spirits have come over time to find ‘genius loci’ of their own. Instead of teeth of thorn and stone they bare teeth of glass and steel.

Not all seekers can walk a path of pure natural landscape. Many are stuck in the sprawl of urban decay, watching ruins of man’s 1970s bad design decisions be polished into glass and steel turds of prefabricated corporate enclaves. Startup incubator hellscapes that shine in the rain like a b set on the Blade Runner story board artwork.

The city is haunted by these corridors of steel, the shades that stalk the streets are those of the dead homeless, of working girls and deranged ex bankers tossed out of their office after breaking down in a fit of anti- capitalist rage and destroying the spreadsheets through which mankind must continually consume.

We work our magic at these crossroads of manmade forms, concrete covered in tar and piss, the smell of car exhaust thick like incense of copal, the steel and glass become an altar at which we sacrifice lives to the deities of consumption and avarice.

In the 1950s a group of modern thinkers created the philosophical genre of psychogeography. The Situationists, primarily under the influence of Guy Debord, outline this critical analysis of the landscape in a series of articles published in the “Internationale Situationniste”.

Debord would publish his seminal work “Theory of the Dérive” originally in Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956). In this short piece he outlines a form of practical divinatory landscape magic (though he does not make reference to magic directly) he dubs “dérive” which translates roughly as “drifting”.

“The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.” - Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”

While Debord was primarily preoccupied with the urban environment, these ideas being born out of creative theories of the urban dwelling surrealists and eventually the situationists, they hark back to various forms of wandering and coming to know one’s environment through intimate journey common in rural areas throughout history. The “riding” of Scotland, the “walkabout” of the Australian native tribes, many cultures have a prescribed method of coming to know oneself via the land. Yet rarely do these cultural ideas of landscape exploration delve into the nature of the landscape in any scientific way.

The witch walks as well among the ruins of capitalism as we do the forest floor. We smell the stench of mankind’s death lingering on the horizon, a literal forest fire shouting in hisses and belches “I can’t breathe.” But even the urban witch needs time out away from the designed landscapes of man’s continual betrayal.

Out of the city, into the remaining forests and plains, to the mountains and beaches bereft of human indignities. Here we recharge ourselves, listen at the lectern of that parliament of birds, meditate in that complex drone of bees in a flower covered field. The wind through various trees speaking to us in a tongue we have always known but have no name for, only the sounds that tell us things we have always wondered but were simply afraid to ask.

This is the sabbat, this return to nature. This is the revelry for which we must escape even the most dreary urban existence, this soil from which our blood is fed, these waters to cleanse our spirit in preparation for the journey we must take along the path.

The “land” is itself the surface of the Earth’s crust, an area created by the shifting of the tectonic plates. This thin skin of cooled material harbors and incredibly diverse ecosystem. Yet it is not just above the soil that life lives. Deep into the earth we find an enormous quantity of complex lifeforms existing at depths we have only recently come to understand.

That earth, a particle itself screaming through naked space. A vehicle we inhabit, a space station ringing out dub frequencies into the cosmos. The electromagnetic field of the sun, its orbiting particles/planets shifting over the empty space in the radiant aura of that star at the center of the solar system.

When we look up into space we see nothing more than particles. Screaming suns that ring out just like every atom in your body. Interrelated electromagnetic fields pulsing in waves like haunted sound-systems. Singing that tune your soul needs, urging you on to the sex beat of reproduction. The pounding drums of interstellar rain inhabiting your abode, shining out of your eyes and your mouth like the burning of a salamander born under a blackened sun.

The surface of the earth we inhabit is not merely the geographic variables we perceive, nor is it only the organic film that clings to the upper layers of the outer crust. The earth is inhabited by more beings than can be accounted for with mass and electrons. Beings of light and gravity, magnetism and electricity. They inhabit rivers, mountains, crossroads. They ring out the tune you seek, dance to the beat you need but if only you could see with your ears and hear with your eyes.

Throughout this region there is an electromagnetic field of complex forms, irradiated by material objects (including the earth itself) yet influenced by shifting patterns of energy in space beyond the biosphere. Like a tapestry made of energy this electromagnetic field contains forms of life long known to the witch, yet hardly understood by common society.

These entities exist in ways both dimensionally and frequency shifted from our own plane of existence. While we are able to bridge the gap between our realm and theirs, and these dimensions do share a common fabric, it is only through practice that we can become accustom to their existence.

Spirits; whose names and forms are as varied as the names mankind has given to shades of colour and light. These beings we refer to as ancestor, kith, and elemental are but part of an ecosystem we have little knowledge of, and what rare knowledge we have is occulted.

With various forms of offering, pacts and rituals we have come to learn how to coax them into allegiance. How to work with them and communicate. Though much of our ritual action is not for them, it is to prepare us as practitioners for the mental and emotional toil of interaction with beings whose existence is obscure. This is why our offerings must come from our possessions, must have meaning to us. Our mental desire projected into the value of an object enriches its value in our trade with those who inhabit the landscape.

As old as it is in the realm of practical magic that concept we have been referring to as “landscape magic” is long overdue for a more accurate descriptive terminology. We have relied for centuries on the designations of various religious authorities to give form to our understanding of these beings, even in the days of ancient Greece, where the witch’s perception was shaped by the everyday culture and beliefs of the ancient Greek.

The secularization of witchcraft, particularly in the practices of the folkwitch, leaves us a framework that can adopt to a practitioner’s own religious beliefs, or be parallel to them in the practicalities of magical practice.

Yet the terminology of “landscape magic” is limited through lack of direct dialog between the disparate practitioners. When we turn to those authors whose work have touched on landscape magic beyond the psychogeographers, (historians like George Ewart Evans, folklorists like Katharine Briggs) we see a pattern of understanding in the practice of common folk magic throughout the world of interaction with a class of spirits whose form and function are shaped equally by the physical manifestation of the geographic landscape in which they inhabit, and the socio cultural framework of the practitioner in their understanding of the shape of the universe.

When we have considered the language of magic and its history of cultural appropriation we have tried in many ways to find a terminology that best represents the broader ideas encapsulated in “landscape magic”, in particular relation to the folkwitch.

Jake Stratton Kent, in his landmark text “Geosophia”, outlines the history and origins of grimoiric magic through the concept of Goetia, a body of knowledge whose origins are derived primarily from the ancient Greek Magical Papyri. While he doesn’t dissect the name of his volume the term “geosophia” is a Greek compound derived of “geo” for earth and “sophia” for wisdom.

The relation of goetia, though distinct and historical, to landscape magic is apparent in that many of the concepts related to spirits we as magic practitioners have come to understand find their origins in the goetia.

I have proposed the term “geotia” (geo sha) to give a broader modern terminology to the idea of landscape magic. It takes the reverse of two vowels in goetia and alters its meaning to one more rooted in the land itself and less tied to a specific massive historic body of knowledge.

Geotia is the state of being within the land itself. The total perceptual elimination of the culturally perceived boundaries between oneself/ species and the natural world. The prerequisite state of the practice of folk witchcraft.

Thus the intersection of geotia and witchcraft is a shared understanding of the form that reality takes when stripped bare of our projected ideas of consensual (culturally acceptable) reality. When we embrace the seeking of that state of geotia we begin to see more widely the potential of energy that exists in the world around us. The folkwitch comes to work a specific patch of land, one that is tended to and looked after by the witch.

The landscape that you make your patch is populated by a wildlife beyond physical form. Not just in the echo of your ancestors, but beings who have lived as long as there have been homosapiens, often longer.

You bleed into the ground, it drinks of your essence and it knows you. You feel outward into the landscape. In some places on the earth it is calm, its hills and valleys having long settled with history. But in others it is marred with the darkness of bloodshed, disease and war. Haunted landscapes that linger still because we refuse to let them settle, they instill us with that dread of our species past.

The words of your ancestors echo down the dna line, reverberate in the sound chamber of the landscape. They teach you who you are and who you are meant to be. They guide you on your path, but like a willow-the- wisp there is no catching them, only a journey further and further into the endless forest of self discovery.

The witch is the link between the ostracized humanity of the late 21st century and the natural world. We are the walkers who can hear, perceiving the true structure of the world we inhabit, beyond the illusion society teaches is “real.” We have been to the other side of the hedge, and have ridden the night winds. We fear not death, and often flirt with its sweet caress. The witch is the guardian of the land, but what we guard it from is humanity.

Bibliography:

Guy Debord. Theory of the Dérive. Les Lèvres Nues #9. 1956.

Jake Stratton-Kent. Geosophia. Scarlet Imprint. 2013.

George Ewart Evans. The Pattern Under the Plow: Aspects of Folk-Life in East Anglia. Faber and Faber. 1966.

Katharine Briggs. Pale Hecate’s Team. Rutledge. 1962.

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There are benefits to having made a pact with a spirit who procures books as its very nature. The sideways of having something appear that you never were looking for, but indeed wanted, is particularly helpful.

As it was I have been thinking about the role of the occult bookseller down through the ages. How, from Roman times until now one could purchase a manuscript, and later printed books, of occult lore from a professional seller. In times of suppression there were still those who dealt books of forbidden knowledge, keeping a copy under the counter for those who inquire directly. Booksellers in London have carried the works of Dee and Agrippa for centuries, no less in the 16th century than today.

What a wonderful book it would make, a history of those actual historic persons who sold occult books. A well written story of the occult publishers and bookshops that have existed from the middle ages until the late 19th century would be fantastic. Something very accurately written, well footnoted, and with an extensive bibliography.

So I mused for several days on this day dreamed book until, after having ordered a volume of the first edition of “Folk-Lore volume 5” 1887, I received something altogether different. Instead of a book of folklore, I received a copy of “Book-Lore, vol 5 1887”. In it I found plenty of stories of booksellers, occult and otherwise, but even more so stumbled onto this absolutely fantastic portrayal of occult book collectors. Its such a perfect and spot on assessment of those who would be occultists, yet find the collecting part much more enjoyable than the actual practicalities of magic. As true today as it was 130 years ago when it was written.

I reproduce the full short piece below. I am still waiting for a concise history of occult booksellers to appear, but in the meantime this laugh will do.

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“The Vagaries of (Occult) Book Buyers - III ” from Book-Lore, a Magazine Devoted to Old Time Literature - 1887

Lord Lytton, in that curious and mysterious novel, Zanoni, mentions an old bookseller who, after years of toil, had succeeded in forming an almost perfect library of works on occult philosophy. Poor in everything but a genuine love for the mute companions of his old age, he was compelled to keep open his shop, and trade, as it were, in his own flesh. Let a customer enter and his countenance fell; let him depart empty-handed and he would smile gaily, oblivious for a time of bare cupboard and inward cravings. A purchaser was indeed a deadly enemy to the old man, for every proffered coin was scorching hot, a miserable and inadequate exchange for one drop of purple blood.

It is astonishing what a deep interest some people take in weird and obscurely written books. They will gloat over the mysteries of Hermes, and nervously finger the pages of Agrippa, - that foul magician whose judgment of himself and all his labours is so eloquently portrayed in his Vanitie of Arts and Sciences. No matter, says the devotee, Agrippa was mistaken; he was afraid of the Inquisition, and recanted. He could not have invented the sigils, triangles, and magic circles, without which congregated with horrid eyes the spirits of the Moon and Paymon, the King of the West Wind. Agrippa was afraid of the spectres he had raised; afraid of his own black dog, and of the hell to which it pointed.

The amateur occult philosopher is, however, not afraid - as yet - and every spare moment is occupied in ferreting out the names of ghostly men, who either suffered on the rack or at the stake, for leaguing themselves with the powers of the air, or else tumbled headlong into the talons of besieging hosts of devils, all screaming, as Paracelsus says they sometimes do, “ Thy pentacles and thy circle are wrong, thy words are false; come thou with us.”

The old bookseller was a type, and, as we think, a type only, of Lytton’s own creation; perhaps a reflection of the soul of Lytton himself, ever groping through mists of tale and fable, and ever unsatisfied.

The purchaser of works on occult philosophy is usually exceedingly enthusiastic, so much so that he persists in his so-called studies, notwithstanding the fact that nine-tenths of his books are in Latin, a language of which he knows little or nothing. In a few words, he would become a disciple of Jannes and Jambres, and to this end sets about accumulating materials in the form of huge folios, conscientiously intending, no doubt, to read them when time and opportunity offer.

His course of reading so far has been confined to the Strange Story, which first riveted his attention on fiends and spectres, and to Barrett’s Magus, which, being in English, and adorned with a number of weird plates, has proved an excellent stimulant to further exertions. The Bible is ransacked, and the “Witch of Endor and Simon Magus duly weighed in the balance, while such phrases as ” Now the magicians of Egypt they also did in like manner with their enchantments,“ roll off the tongue with unctuous volubility. Presently the aspirant to ” horrors fell and grim “ stumbles across the treatises of Raphael and Sibly, and sighs to think that his ignorance effectually cuts him off from the delightful contemplations of those obscure authors upon whose diatribes their works are founded.

At this point the average student comes to a full stop, and turns probably to astrology as being a more tangible study, and apparently much easier. His little library swells with the treatises of Lilly, Raphael, Placidus de Titus, and the great Ptolemy, while he rejoices to think that Flamsted believed in the reality of the science, and that old Burton, the "Democritus Junior,” hanged himself rather than admit that his own horoscope was out of gear.

The next step is the purchase of a planisphere, which conveniently dispenses with abstruse calculations in spherical trigonometry; and finally the student erects a horoscope all out of his own head, showing plainly enough that he was born when Mercury was retrograde, and at the square of the moon - a never-failing sign of idiocy, proved up to the hilt, be it said, when he is at last actually persuaded to go a-horse-racing with his slender capital, merely because the “quesited” - the famous “Flying Scud” - is in a trine aspect with Jupiter, Lord of the Seventh, and therefore cannot lose. The horse, however, breaks down, and is scratched four-and-twenty hours after the money is staked, and henceforth astrology is a Will-o’-the-wisp that will never again lure our bibliophile to his ruin.

Out of every twenty persons who take up the study of occult philosophy, nineteen are supremely ignorant of the most ordinary branches of knowledge, but the twentieth is a man of very different composition. He, too, began, perhaps, in the same way as his less gifted brethren, and has followed the same paths, and pored over the same books, and would like also to rival the deeds of Albertus Magnus, who had power over the elements; or of Peter of Abono, who raised terrible forms as easily as a market gardener raises cabbages.

He speedily discovers that Barrett’s Magus is, in part, at least, a mere translation, and a very bad one, of Agrippa’s fourth book, and that Raphael has mutilated the words of every author he quotes. There is no reliable work in English which can possibly be procured, and so he turns to the Latin, beginning with Iamblichus, and his famous book De Mysteriis, printed by Aldus in 1497. This rare and interesting specimen of typography loses, however, all its beauty in the absorbing nature of its contents; and the same observation is applicable to the author’s Vita Pythagorae, published at Rome in 1556. These treatises are, it is true, mere introductions which every tyro who hopes hereafter to lift the veil of Isis must read if he wishes to fit himself to meet the petrifying gaze of the “Dweller on the Threshold” but they are also two most useful books, as from them can be gleaned a mass of information which, rightly understood, is declared by the initiated to point to the portals of the world beyond the grave.

With appetite whetted to a swallowing-point perfectly gluttonous in its magnitude, the student next turns to the treatise of the learned Jesuit, Martin Delrio, who, in his Disquisitionum Magicarum, examines the many different systems of magic practised by the professors of his day; to Bodin’s De la Demonomanie des Sorciers; and in their turn to Boissardus, Jerome Cardan, Glanvil, Grillandus, Van Helmont, Wierus, and the Malleus Maleficanim of Sprenger and Institor.

All these works, comprehending as they do an assortment of wonders the like of which the world never saw, and perhaps never will see, support one another in a manner that would put a coterie of Old Bailey witnesses to the blush, so precise and seemingly accurate are the expressions used, so consequential the inferences. There is no mincing matters, no equivocation nor contradiction; everything is so orderly and precise that what is usually regarded, in this country at least, as a structure composed entirely of falsehood and fraud, becomes quite natural in appearance, so that, at last, the student finds himself accepting a statement, no matter how foolish, simply because Sprenger affirms it to be true, or Robert Fludd hints that it possibly may be.

All this time money is going out as fast as credulity, for works on occult philosophy are very expensive. The dealers are aware of their patron’s feverish anxiety to obtain them when once bitten by the mania, and, as a matter of course, charge accordingly. Thus £3 is, as a rule, demanded for the Opera Omnia of Paracelsus, 1658, 2 vols., folio; seven or eight guineas for the collected works of Cardan, Lugd., 1663; and as much and more for those of Robert Fludd, Oppenheim, 1617-38. Respecting this last author, Isaac D'Israeh, in his Curiosities of Literature, states that in his time as much as £40 had to be given for a single volume, so great in those days appears to have been the anxiety to obtain copies of works of this and a similar class. We can imagine, therefore, how large must have been the value of the unique collection formed by the bookseller to whom Lytton so fondly refers, and we - or at least some of us - may almost participate in his disinclination to have such a splendid assortment broken in upon by the amateur peripatetic philosopher who in all probability cannot read one hundredth part of the treasures he longs to possess.

The modern world has now been revolving for nearly 1,900 years, and during the whole of that time repeated attempts have been made to lift the curtain that shuts out the invisible world. Some few persons - as, for example, Rozencrantz, who founded the Society of the Rosy Cross, and Paracelsus, who is “now living in his tomb, whither he retired disgusted with the vices and follies of mankind ” - are credited with having peeped for a few brief moments behind it; but with these and some other exceptions the progress that has been made is admitted by the most ardent devotee to have been nil. Rumour, as chorus, has taken the place of fact, and dreams that of reality, but still the modern occultist cannot be brought to see that he labours in vain. And so he goes on purchasing ponderous volumes, ugly to look at and absolutely useless for every purpose, theoretical as well as practical, until either he is forced by repeated failures to admit that his favourite authors are impostors, or that he himself has, in spite of all his application, failed to reach the road that leads from this world to that which is to come. He and others like him - and there are many even in this century - would outstrip themselves in a desperate race through the darkness of Erebus; they spend a lifetime in learning to walk, only to be afflicted with total paralysis at the last; and when they awake to find their labour has been in vain, they are amazed to think of the fallacy which engulphed years of toil in the futile attempt to discover what they will learn in five minutes after they are dead.

However, be this as it may, the sale of books on occult philosophy goes on apace, and purchasers are very eager to part with their cash, a phenomenon which is observed in very few instances save the one under discussion. Some of these days enterprise may detect money in new editions and translations of Artemidorus on dreams, and Raymond Lully and Artephius on the philosopher’s stone; but at present the trade is confined exclusively to old and battered copies which have served generations of investigators, which are now being read, and which will be read, in all probability, until they are thumbed out of recognition.

It is said of the Emperor Nero, that among other studies he ardently followed that of magic. He employed immense sums, wrung from the sweat of Rome, in this pursuit; searched far and wide for professors, - penetrating the remote regions of India and Africa, - and even prowled among the ruined towers of Chaldsea. Rewards were offered, and threats of cruel torture not only lavished but carried into effect, and with what result? Absolutely none, for all the power of Rome could not raise up another Witch of Endor, nor prolong the Emperor’s life for a single second. And yet there are in England at this moment thousands of busybodies who think they can, with their limited resources, accomplish what Nero, with all Rome at his back, failed to perform; and so they go on, blinking like owls over distressing paragraphs that no one either in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth, can possibly construe into intelligible English. The only consolation is that these good people are out of harm’s way, and may perhaps be laying up a store of patience which may serve their end when the fit is over. They are very good customers of the booksellers also, and rejoice exceedingly over one very small piece of silver which they persuade themselves they are on the eve of finding.

- M. A. G.

Find the rest of this fantastic 19th century magazine of book collecting here:

I have been considering in what regard the role of religion takes in the practice of magic. Particularly when one converts from one faith to another late in life. How does one’s previous religious beliefs shape our perception of the new faith we have acquired, with all its attendant ceremony?

As an example, what the story of St Cyprian lacks is a pagan context. His worldview in the context of the narrative of St Cyprian and St Justine is one in which he is already in league with the devil and his minions before he converts to the Christian faith. But it is established that he is a pagan, someone who believes in a different faith. Cyprian’s worldview was shaped by his faith prior to his religious conversion. The “demons” and “devils” he traffics in before his conversion are entities only being viewed as such in hindsight through the Christian lens. They are not being given the context of their faith/cosmology, and such there is the root of the problem of the magic of pre Christian Cyprian the Sorcerer.

As I have outlined in the past, a religion acts as a cosmological framework for the believed reality of the faithful. Cook up a universal creation story, a narrative of the purpose of life, some societal rules and an awe inspiring wizard acting on behalf of the “gods” and you have yourself a religion. Access to drugs helps.

When we talk about deities we talk about complex belief systems that evolved over centuries, rooted within the framework of a common language system. These two, language and religion, act as parallel guides, informing and shaping a cultural understanding of each other. It is through a given language that we can understand the deities of the world’s religions.

Increasingly the world is full of young people who identify as atheist. That have no gods nor goddesses, and yet still find themselves drawn to magic. They feel the pull of the path yet do not understand how to approach gods they do not believe exist.

To give a thorough understanding how cosmology shapes identity and how language shapes our perception of reality is beyond the purvey of this short article. But suffice to say that we are rooted in language, it is inescapable and in history each language gave birth to a set of gods and goddesses that best fit the people of that language.

Like language religions evolve, the temperament of modern Judaism and Islam as practiced in the west is nothing like that of practices common just a few centuries ago. As needed ideas are birthed and factions are created religions split and diverge, peoples move away from one another geographically and the once common language takes different turns and they become two distinct languages over time.

How does someone who believes in no gods use a magical system rooted in a very specific religion/belief system? One group will tell you that it can’t be done. If you don’t speak the language, and weren’t raised in the belief system, you won’t be able to approach those gods. Simple and often disappointing.

Some will argue that religious conversion can be and often is sincere. If St Cyprian can be shown the light of the Christian god, and be saved from Christian hell despite his previous deeds, can not anyone then convert and understand the faith they chose? It depends on who you ask.

On the other hand there is chaos magic, and the idea that these systems of organized religion are all merely fictions we project onto structures we can not otherwise understand. The true architecture of reality is beyond our grasp, and this fiction or that fiction are both invalidated and given new validity. I can do anything, use a butter knife as a ritual dagger or a super complex custom made out of rare materials dagger. Religions are up for total appropriation as fictions created by long dead authors, and thus in the public domain.

But neither of these extreme viewpoints offers much consolation to the wayward would be wizard looking to find a path without the mumbo jumbo of their ancestors bad beliefs. And here is the key, it’s those ancestors that really matter. The coded bullshit they passed down your dna, the mumbo jumbo they themselves experienced. You’ve got to deal with that before you can make any advance on the path. It may not be your religion, but it was to your kin and you need to come to terms with that and approach them with the grace they are due.

Magic is not a religion anymore than electricity is a religion. It’s a system of dealing with concepts and realities that exist on the edge of cultural (and human) perception. A way of approaching those things that although commonly discussed in human society, are rarely taken seriously. The shimmering edge of reality beyond the veil of perception. That vast other that is the beyond.

“Now to ‘scape the Serpent’s Tongue, We will make amends ere long.” - Puck, in William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

I was in my early twenties and found myself on the tail end of a multi-year journey back and forth across the United States. I had abandoned my academic studies in order to look more thoroughly at a fork in the path that had opened up to me via a series of ecstatic visions.

By the early 1990s, after a dark stint in New York City that involved a flat above a store front gospel church and a mad brilliant Kabbalah teacher and poet named Lionel Ziprin, I ended up in Chicago, living on the south side practicing a hybrid of western ceremonial magic and south american ecstatic shamanism. I had picked up in my wanderings the method of seeking the vision serpent, and the divinatory and spirit communication avenue of the great serpent. Not left hand path Set based workings but Mayan glyphs and scrying bowls full of flaming liquids. The Serpent is much older than Western civilization and its sister the jaguar hunted men before the written word was a scratch in the dirt.

The vision serpent is a spirit that manifests in flames, usually derived from an organic oil or other agent burning in a specially prepared black bowl. When invoked the serpent can be dangerous, and will lie endlessly if one can not come to an arrangement with it. It is wise beyond our understanding of time, but it cares little for the contemporary matters of mankind.

I had come to Chicago to seek advise about Mayan glyphs and blood rituals. I knew that at the University of Chicago I had connections to various experts and their holdings yielded much of what I was seeking. Body modification rituals, complex astrological/astronomical formulae, calendars of divinatory events stretching far into the past and future.

The south side of Chicago is a strange place full of more than its share of unusual characters. The University of Chicago casts an eldritch shadow over an otherwise dominantly black American set of urban neighborhoods. Among the professors of U of C are some eminent academics, hell even Indiana Jones studied at U of C. The mix of this culture of academia with the surrounding black americana was rich with African Diaspora practices.

I learned to dance at basement Rada parties and longed to become a Maman player, that deep drum that I have long felt is directly responsible for the jagged change in rhythm via the Kasé (pattern break) that triggers the state of possession in the dancer. I hung out with blues musicians and listened to their stories of hoodoo men, crossroads and root conjure. It was the end of an era there in those days, where Sun Ra’s ghost had recently been seen, just days after Alton Abraham (his former partner and lawyer) had come into the record store on 53rd Street boasting of having had his Lincoln Continental’s seats recently relined. It was the last days of the real Maxwell Street, where you could buy John the Conqueror root at any number of stalls while street preachers accosted one with the potentialities of eternal damnation and endless fire for not accepting the Lord’s love.

The neighborhood of Hyde Park was stuffed with antiquarian bookstores, Jamaican restaurants, soul food kitchens and above all Harold’s Chicken on 53rd. I took a job at a record store and spent my days chatting with professors over jazz records about everything from astrophysics to trance inducing sound forms and psychopharmacology.

Somewhere there in a massive and mostly empty apartment I found a way to stitch together bits from the grimories with the serpent’s fire, the pounding drums with the crossroads. I got as far as a letter of introduction to a houngan in Haiti from a professor and the offer of a free ticket from a friend who had an airline voucher that was about to expire before the universe shoved me in another direction. Probably for the best really, that lost trip to Haiti still smarts though.

Instead of Haitian drums I learned to listen to free jazz percussionists, improvised rhythms that fall together and apart endlessly. I studied Kabbalah further under Russell Thorne, owner of the Occult Bookstore and an avant-garde composer himself.

The serpent dances inside of us all, it burns with our blood as its fuel, it is a fire of creation as well as destruction. To call the vision serpent is to call a complex thing to present itself to you. It is partly you, that paradigm in which you perceive reality manifesting itself. But it speaks with a voice animated by something other, something that is always there but usually not paying the slightest attention to the world you call home.

Careful of the fire of the vision Serpent’s tongue. It will lie to you as you lie to yourself. It will trick you as you allow yourself to be tricked. But it is wise and has much to teach those patient of its ways.

The Library of the Poison Garden

Those students that seek to wander the paths of the Poison Garden would do well to spend some considerable time researching their chosen plant spirit guides. This poison path is one fraught with danger to those who are less than methodic, who would take reckless shortcuts or seek thrill above wisdom. Study, much reading and understanding, is a required practice in the journey of the hedgerider. Anything less leads to certain death.

Despite a landfill’s worth of useless paperback ratcage fodder written on “herbalism” and “herb magic” there is actually very little practical information easily found for the study of this particular branch of craft practice. Sensationalist crap recycling questionable lists of plant attributes, watered down Gerald’s Herbal remedies passing as folk magic. Almost none of said books giving proper attention to the true plants of the witch traditions.

So I have gathered together a list of books for the would be reader to hunt down. Not all are easily found, but the desire to learn must overcome the obstacles in order to achieve the knowledge needed for the task at hand. Herein you will find a selection of books that form the center of the Library of the Poison Garden. Read well and tread carefully on the poison path.

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Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers - Albert Hofmann, Richard Evans Schultes, Christian Rätsch

Hofmann and Evans-Schultes classic introduction to entheogenic plants updated extensively by researcher and anthropologist Rätsch. Full of amazing photos, charts and maps of the world’s various entheogenic plants and the cultures that embrace them.

Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization - Hans Peter Duerr

Duerr broke a lot of ground in this seminal 1970s look at shamanistic use of entheogens in world culture. A foundational text on the subject of altered states. Required reading.

Old Vegetable Neurotics:Hemlock, Opium, Belladonna and Henbane - John Harley

Harley’s 19th century Gulstonian lecture was over a century ahead of itself. A sharp eyed look at the scientific use of the components of the witches ointment without a drop of folklore or legend. Straight science of doses, reactions and antidotes. (Available as a public domain pdf here.)

Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath - Carlo Ginzburg

Ginzburg’s theories around the origins of the Sabbat practice are controversial, yet the historic insight into the early use of herbal ointments is profound.

The Mystic Mandrake - C.J.S Thompson

Thompson delivers a detailed history of the mandragora, an overview of the historic legends surrounding this anthropomorphic plant.

Pharmako Series (Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft, Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulating Plants, Potions, and Herbcraft, Pharmako Gnosis: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path) - Dale Pendell

Pendell’s poetic encyclopedic study of the history and uses of psychoactive plants, published over 2 decades, illuminates the personal practice of one long on the poison path. Particularly useful is his Pharmako:Gnosis.

The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia - Paul Devereux

Devereux is a researcher with a body of work that would fill a library. From megalithic sites, fairy roads and landscape magic to this overview of the history of human drug use his work is always insightful.

Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices and Forbidden Plants - Claudia Müller-Ebeling & Christian Rätsch

Müller-Ebeling & Rätsch are something of a superhero research couple in the world of entheogens. Witchcraft Medicine offers some particular insights into the cultural practices of European folk traditions.

The Book of Poisons - Gustav Schenk

Schenk’s book of poisons is a well researched look at various poisons from a scientific viewpoint. His personal descriptions of inhaling henbane smoke are of particular interest to the student of the poison path.

The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic - Thomas Hatsis

Hatsis is a green writer who could use an editor for this edition that has a rather self-published feel. But it is otherwise an insightful look at Mediterranean cultural use of plants in magic. Heavy focus on the Roman and Greek origins of said plant use and their connection to later witchcraft practices.

The Witch’s Garden - Harold Hansen

Hansen’s little volume is a useful introduction to the various plants associated with the practice of witchcraft. Short concise chapters on individual plants with a nice mix of folklore, history and botany. A good place to start if one is already lost.

For the next issue of our quarterly publication FOLKWITCH we will be giving some form to the idea of the “sabbat” and the role of the witches gathering in the folklore and history of folkwitch practice.

I have decided to offer a lecture I gave some years ago in London before a private members society on the history of the Witches Ointment, the full article runs to 5k words but here below is an excerpt to wet one’s whistle for the coming publication of the full text in FOLKWITCH:

There are still a handful of copies of Folkwitch Issue Two available for preorder before they run out.

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Ecstasies of Darkness, the history of Witches Ointments E.H. Wormwood

presented before the Last Tuesday Society

Myths & Histories, an intro

When we talk about witches ointment the image that comes to mind when viewed through the lens of 21st century ethnography is one of flying and transportation. We look at the narrative, as depicted mostly through the written document of confessions (where both torture and the notary’s religion surely shaped the content), as one of the salve as a secondary component of a larger sabbatic ritual.

Perhaps, as is now more generally accepted, the substance referred to as an unguent or salve, was more central to the ritual practices of the supposed witch than mainstream literature has long understood. That the substances in question were in fact so widely known by the general public that they were diminished in the eyes of the church and state. Seen as commonplace until such time as their use became a public taboo under penalty of law.

What aims had the establishment of the middle ages in suppressing the use of certain substances by connecting them with heresy and blasphemy? Could the witch hunts of the middle ages been merely an early example of drug prohibition used to suppress a minorities rights and take away their culture? That minority being women and “effeminate” men?

Grecian Witches & Roman Salves

In western culture the iconic representation of the witch comes from the Greek legends of Circe and her sisters. A Thessalian coven of sisters bound in the knowledge of the rites and uses of herbs and natural magic.

In Homer’s Odyssey we are regaled with the legend of Circe turning Odysseus’ soldiers into swine, leaving them grunting and writhing on the floor of her temple. In this legend specific plants are mentioned, a triumvirate of herbs from the Solanaceae family related to the common tomato. Henbane, Belladonna, Mandrake, all native to the Mediterranean climate. Though by no means the only herbs in their bag of tricks these three were in particular potent and central to the dangerous arsenal of the Grecian witches.

By the late roman period, on the cusp of roman christianization, these herbs were widely used in society as part of the pharmacopoeia commonly in practice. Joint aches, heart murmurs, tooth infections. These and a wide variety of now commonly labeled “poisonous” plants were used to sooth the pain and heal the lame of commoner and noble alike.

Yet it is in this period of Roman decline we see the first laws in relation to these herbs and their use. How the law interprets these plants and the products like salves connected with their use tells us a great deal about both the potency of the plants and the growing superstitions surrounding their use.

Under Roman law possession and use of these salves was slowly criminalized based both on the method of delivery and the intent of use. Further distinctions of “veneficia” (poisoning) and “maleficia” (magic poisoning) were outlined in law. The latter being a graver offense than the former.

In Roman court records we have testimony, by and against the accused, that possession of these herbs, though widely in use publicly, was considered evidence for probable cause for the practice of maleficia or witchcraft.

Those targeted, despite possession of substances identical to their neighbors medicine cabinets, were convicted of the crime of black magic and often sentenced to death. So we have a drug, whose possession though common, is used to suppress a given minority.

This is the beginning of an historic trend that, although commonly in use, certain drugs are used by the establishment to criminalize the behavior of a specific targeted minority for harassment and detention.

The Solanaceae Diaspora

From its humble beginning the use of these plants spread across Europe by as early as the late Neolithic period. Burial sites as far north as Norway from the 5th century show possible healers in possession of large numbers of henbane seeds. At the Balfarg site in northern Scotland , a complex late neolithic site used for ritual purposes, we find the remnants of henbane seed use in the pottery and stoneware bowls used at the temple sites. (Moffat 1993) This plant, so far removed from its native habitat has made its way into the ecosystem of all of northern Europe. From Ireland to Poland and as far north as Norway and Iceland it can be found in waste areas through human diasporic migration.

As traders and settlers moved north and interacted with previously localized groups the spread of the propagatable seeds of the Solanaceae family was fed by a basic reality of their usefulness as medicinal herbs. Had the chemical constituents of these herbs not had a noticeable effect their use would not have been so widespread, nor their propagation over such a wide and alien habitat.

Viking Seeress (8th century)

That the Vikings had henbane in known use is evident in the archaeological record. Norse shamanic practitioners have been found buried with the seeds of henbane and both henbane and belladonna seeds have been found at sites in northern Scotland and Denmark.

In the Norse burials the seeds were kept in a specially decorated pouch and worn regularly by the owner. 300 to 500 seeds carried regularly indicates regular use, likely as a pain reliever among the public.

Much of the later reports of the effects of the use of the witches ointment points to complex hallucinations centered on sensations of flying, gatherings of motley beasts and creatures, and acts of sexual deviance often in groups.

Such ideas of physical transformation (shapeshifting), hosts of spirits and demons, and sexual arousal mirror the pre Christian mythologies of the northern people’s of Europe. Tales of fairy hosts, wild hunts, and feasts that transform men into beasts have long been a central part of the folklore of Europe.

The genesis of these folk tales and the spread of the Solanaceae herbs across Europe have a distinct parallel in the evolution of European culture in the pre Christian and early christian era.

Feral Herbs

By the 10th century, with the rise of monasteries across Europe the herbs continued to find themselves in heavy use. Monks and priests grew belladonna and henbane as part of their pharmacopeia. Having gardens of particularly manicured henbane, mandrake and belladonna the monasteries were clearly aware as early as the 8th century of their herbal usefulness.

It was likely these very monasteries that introduced the use of henbane and belladonna to give added kick to beer and ales. The production of spirits using a variety of herbs as both flavor and intoxicant enhancers goes back to the early history of the use of alcohol. But it was the introduction of henbane, long the predecessor of hops, as an ingredient in beer that popularized henbane to the wider public as more than just a medicine to relieve pain.

Such manicured gardens of monasteries are bound to fall to ruin, and even in their height of form be frequented by birds to whom the alien Mediterranean seeds are a tasty treat. Their pods and berries are helped to be distributed as the birds travel from region to region leaving the seeds in their droppings. The migratory birds of Europe providing a convenient transport system for the seeds of the Solanaceae plants as they continued to ingrain themselves into local habitats.

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From the perspective of the 21st century witch practitioner there is little benefit in ascribing to a theistic dogma, aka traditional religion. While Abrahamic religions are plentifully on hand the modern witch tends toward a more holistic view, allowing for the potentiality of all religious beliefs, as long as they aren’t being shoved in our faces or infiltrating our governments.

The reality is that despite much admixture between religion and magic the two are not entirely interdependent. Religion is, on the whole, the subscription to a cosmology of belief. It is at essence a “how I believe the universe is formed and shaped” and all religions have a form of magical practice regardless of their conflicting cosmological outlooks.

Yet there is a distinct overlap in the mechanical function of magic in all cultures. Fundamental ideas about chemistry, physics, and spiritual reality are at parallel between religious cosmologies much in the way that water boils at the same temperature for a Muslim and a Christian.

Throughout the history of occult and esoteric practice the idea of rarity is present. That certain objects held sacred status, that certain information must be kept secret from the many because to reveal it would be disastrous to the order of society. The word occult itself means secret.

What separates the occult sciences from the mundane are practices and perspectives that require a degree of removal from the everyday world. This isolation is often social/emotional as well as physical. We go where others dare not, see things others refuse to see.

Historically we practiced in hiding, for reasons beyond the threat of ecclesiastic disapproval. We have long known that to practice for public fame and monetary gain was dangerous - When one looks over the trial records in the history of European witchcraft persecution one sees that by far it is not the authorities out hunting witches, it is dissatisfied clients and competing practitioners who themselves alert the authorities out of spite.

Our tools and talismans are that which one must keep hidden at all costs, for the very seeing of the objects robs them of their rareness, takes from them their sacredness. Agrippa warns not to even speak of the ownership of the wand, and countless early texts caution against allowing public eyes to fall upon those tools and fetishes we hold sacred in our practice.

Yet all too often today we see from those who self describe as witches an endless array of “altar selfies”, glimmering dramatic photos of witches wands and knives, altars lit with care for instagram photos and blogs. Even images supposedly taken during an actual magical ritual. The irony of these practices of public display lost on those who would do better to consider why we walk in shadows, and how our practice is undermined by this form of mainstreaming.

The times we live in are tumultuous, filled with technological shortcuts that seem to give us so much access to information, but in fact simply sell us a reality much in the way of the religious cosmologies of yesteryear. We have come to worship in the temple of consumption, our appetites replacing our piety. Where before we feared the priest as the hand of god now we fear the debt collector and public opinion.

But the folkwitch pays no attention to these things. We move among roots and trees, even rusty buildings of urban blight, to gather our bits and pieces. We understand the psycho-geographic duality of our world, and shy away from spectacle and reward in search of something nearly lost in this over busy world. Stillness. Those moments outside of time where true magic happens.

As practitioners of magic we must avoid the profanation of our craft. We must resist the temptations of monetary gain through practice for others. Ours is a path for the few, not the many. Only those who have learned to listen to the forest grow and the city decay will understand the Way, the rest are just fashionably attired.

Recent conversations have led me to give some consideration to the idea of a necromancy of trees. More or less a set of rituals meant to appease and appeal to the spirit of a tree that once stood, but is no more.

Perhaps it is a tree of our memories, a tree whose branches we long ago climbed, or a tree under which we found youthful lust, read poetry and daydreamed about the age to come? Or it could be the stump of a tree you never knew, whose waterlogged carcass feeds insects and fungi, decorated by mosses and molds.

Trees have existed for far longer on this earth than the monkeys that call themselves mankind. To the earth’s trees we are but a cancer as a species, whose destruction of their kin is blood/sap on our hands.

As witches we are in many ways the would be protectors of trees and woods. We are nurtured by forests and in return we must see to their rehabilitation when man’s lack of insight has led to a trees harm.

So a necromancy for those trees we have lost to the ether seems appropriate. But when I look at the various sources I find little in the way of any form of specific adoration for dead trees. While some cultural distinctions do rub in the right direction toward a sylvan necromancy, they are not codified in any way that gives them a useful form.

But we must consider the spirit of the tree as we would the spirit of a river, a familiar, or other being whose presence we may know. It is a pattern of complex energy, manifesting much the way we are in the 3 dimension space that we call reality.

Living in its terrestrial form for some thousands of years trees have seen a scope of time humans can barely grasp. Their roots traveling some dozens of meters down into the earth, using the microorganisms of the biota of the earth’s soil as a medium in the way a fish swims in water or a bird flies in air.

Through their roots they are often plugged directly into the water table, that underground ghost sea that permeates the landscape, conductive and in constant flux with the electromagnetic field and the gravity fields of the sun and moon.

Via a network of fungi trees can communicate complex information about pests, fire, storms and earthquakes. Their ability to perceive their own environment is far more precise and vastly more complex than our own.

“You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.” - Bernard of Clairvaux

Necromancy is, at its core, communication with the dead. In folk necromancy in its various cultural forms there is a tendency to deal with one’s ancestors (aka relatives) as the first line of sight in traffic with the departed. One must appease their ancestors, work with them and gain their approval, in order to find success on the path.

The systematization of this interaction of appeasement makes up the bulk of the underlying premise of many major religions.

The gear is the same even millennia later. An altar, some imagery related to the altar’s focal intent (spirit/god/dead gran), some vessels to hold offerings of various types, the offerings themselves and then what one might call the “altar furniture”, various tools and props that help set the tone for the space of adoration the altar encompasses.

Beyond an altar the main component in necromantic traffic is the offerings one makes. The range of offerings can be very simple, a common offering is rain or spring water, to more complex things like alcohol or sacrifices.

How then does one approach the spirit of a dead tree in a necromantic exchange? What offerings can one make to appease the departed soul of an ancient forest mother who has left only her stump or some fading memories behind to guide us?

I have wandered through the ancient forests of the world, have stood among the smoldering remains of once vast woodlands reduced to burning holes in the ground where even days afterward smoke continued to rise from the hollow. Cowered under the awe of giant Californian redwoods, slept in the boughs of oak and pine, elm and yew.

Is the shape of a nature spirit given form over time by a culture and its linguistic perception of that spirit or is it formed in a more immediate way through the prism of cultural perception in the individual having the experience, defined by that culture’s language?

When we look at the cultures of the world, both classic and contemporary, we see a spectrum of belief in “spirits” that is prevalent in all cultures continuously throughout history. In some form or another the concept of spirits is as wide ranging as language itself. An instrumental part of the development of all socities, the nature of these spirits takes on a wide variety of roles depending on the culture in which they have blossomed.

From the ancient jinn of the east, to the nagas of Asia, the fae and sidhe of the Celts, the ancestor spirits of Africa and her diaspora in the new world, the German goblins, Norse trolls, the Vodoun lwa, the saints and demons of Judeo-Christian pantheons, the world over is full of the belief in beings whose form is transitory yet whose power is recorded as often enormous in scale. Who exist at the edge of temporality and are supplicated with offerings, orisons and rituals.

Yet while the concept of spirits is one that is universal, little contemporary thought has been given to the nature of these beings and their origins on a practical level. Relying heavily on pre enlightenment ideas of corporeality the contemporary magician is often working under conditions that have proven to be obscure at best, fraudulent at worst.

What then is the nature of these beings with whom all magicians the world over interact? How are we to express in terms scientific and yet openminded, those entities with whom our craft is indebted? Where are we to find the headwaters of these beliefs and their origins in human culture?

To say that nature is the source of all life is axiomatic, for nature is itself all life, the very mathematic formula that drives evolution on all its scales. While the boundaries of what makes up life may be little understood its form, as we perceive it, tends toward that which is measurably obvious to the viewer. As mankind has developed intellectually over the past few centuries our understanding of the complexities and subtleties of living beings has grown immeasurably. From the first understanding of the nature of germs to CRISPR gene editing in under two centuries mankind is just now beginning to scientifically understand the fields of energy that surround us that have long been overlooked.

The electromagnetic fields of all living things stretch far beyond the boundaries of their physical masses. The electromagnetic field of the earth itself functioning like an engine driving our planetary variables, steering tectonic plates, controlling weather systems. The interplay of these electromagnetic forces, coupled with energies we are barely able to understand that exist in quantum interactions and dimensional concepts too complex for a blog post, are just now being looked at, let alone fully grasped at this stage in our intellectual enlightenment.

It is in this realm, of complex energies, vibratory frequencies, and misunderstood quantum mechanics, that we find the root of those beings who can be grouped into the categories of “spirits”. From Grecian daemons to Galician mouros, lwa to kitsune, wight to ghost, the patterns of energy that make up these beings are all drawn from that stream of energies which is invisible to mankind, though slowly being revealed under the lens of contemporary technology.

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” ― Nikola Tesla

While this river of energies may be just now coming into focus through accepted scientific practice the craft finds its very roots at the base of this tree of knowledge. The varieties of dealing with these spirits are as complex as the cultures that bore them. The negotiations of these relationships across the world playing similar tunes, yet varied in their composition to reflect the variables and practicalities at hand.

Yet we must wonder at the nature of these manifestations against the cultures in which they are perceived. What causes such a diverse narrative and a motley assortment of creatures that have long interacted with mankind? How are we to know wight from lwa? What defines the differences and commonalities of these beings? How can a river of energies so universal manifest so differently among disparate cultures, while retaining distinct core similarities in their nature?

I propose that these manifestations are given form via the specific language a practitioners understands and communicates in. That the culture whose folk narrative has given form to these spirits is manifesting the boundaries of said beings through the use of language itself.

We are linguistic beings by nature. Our entire world perception is defined through the language we speak, and not all words in all languages easily translate across linguistic boundaries. We may speak in one language of emotions and concepts that are entirely alien to the thoughts of a native speaker in another language. The sounds of one culture’s joy may be the sound of aggression in another culture and its linguistic palette.

Thus as a culture has become defined throughout time, like the polishing of the facets of a jewel, mankind’s perception of these entities that exist at the boundaries of our perception have come to reflect the inherent peculiarities of a given culture. Our fears as a people, our inhibitions and immoralities, our taboos and desires projected onto these entities we encounter in the natural world.

Thus the differences that have grown between cultures are the differences in mankind’s pantheon of spirits the world over. Some are to be feared, as that culture is one of fearfulness, others to be befriended, as that culture is one of openness and sharing.

Though as much as there are differences, more striking still are the commonalities between cultural perceptions of nature spirits. That their roles remain often identical in light of their polarized appearances, that they are more common among the untouched places of the natural world, that they can be bound, threatened, supplicated, bribed.

When in the course of the practice of the craft a magician of any ilk encounters a spirit, through accident or intention, it’s best to be aware of the shape that they manifest in relation to our perceptions and expectations. That their form is one that easily fills the container of our language and its inherent biases and preconceptions about the nature of reality. We give to these spirits as much of their form and power as they themselves, much the way we give to our rulers the power over us that we must yield in order for them to rule.

While much research in this field has yet to be done the current of this form of spirit anthropology is just now awakening. Considerable historic documentation exists to outline the ever evolving relationship between mankind and that other. Yet a fuller look at the extent of human participation in spirit interaction may be a decade or more in the making. 

It would do well for the practitioner to keep in mind that the nature of the spirit catalogues of antiquity are that of slow evolution, where names shift over time via generations of misspelling and misappropriation. Recent research has been done in tracking these changes, yet the full scope of how the spirit is given specific form by the language, and thus the perception of reality that the practitioner holds, has yet to be done.

Six Spells Stolen Since Saturday

A farmer’s tool taken from the shed, its stones laid some century before. “Thrice bind the windswept wheat, thrice the bitter crow’s tail, thrice bind a widow’s tears, sweet as the death rattle’s frail.”

That sprig of Lavender from the crossroads it bloomed, its delicate nature an alluring perfume. “Thrash the threshold dearly, with that single lavender sprig. Its beaten bow the better for it, as quick as a black widow’s sting.”

A pinch of moss from the Bishop’s grave, to summon his spirit to confess & betray. “Spread its smoke about the space with a burning black censor, the form it gives to spirits haste a grime and true dispenser.”

Hold the slate inscribed of graphite means, a board on which we excise that most devilish of fiends. “The sigil holds the vector true, a keyhole in its place. A way beyond the form it takes, your enemy’s disgrace.”

A boar’s bone scavenged from a well worn path, to contain the spirit fierce its laughter of woven wrath. “Thrice bind the wind’s cold tail, thrice the shadow’s keep, thrice bind the serpents whisper, as pure as silver weeps.”

While out for an evening walk tonight I came on to a fox, a common enough resident of the neighborhoods. Unlike the regularly jaunty foxes that one tends to see, a youthful creature full of playfulness, this one had a darker aspect. A kind of sickness that hung like a shadow over it. Not as simple as a true disease, more a hex upon its life that has become palpable.

The fox is curious thing here in England. It is resident to the streets as well as the woods, common as a rat in terms of visibility. Yet it is not a mystery to the English as it is to the Japanese and other cultures.

The Japanese “kitsune” or “fox spirit” is an ancient being that is both shape shifter and trickster. It fulfills the role of Fairy as a child stealer, doppelganger, and boggart curser. Each century it gains a new tail to show its age, with as many as nine tails being noted in the literature.

In the north the Scandinavians believed that the Aurora Borealis was the result of foxes. The Finnish word for the Aurora Borealis “revontulet” is associated with the arctic fox. According to a legend an arctic fox is running far in the north and touching the mountains with its fur, so that sparks fly off into the sky as the northern lights. In another story the fox throws the northern lights up into the sky by sweeping snow upwards with its tail.

In England the fox was seen in the Middle Ages as a messenger of the Devil. Often decried as a Witch’s Familiar there were occasional scourges of foxes as a result. Today it is at most quaint and the worst a pest.

But the fox is a spirit that inhabits this place whether the people pay attention to it or not. It runs through the shadows of the night, sleeping throughout the day like some Robin Goodfellow. Over hedgerow and down alleyway, gnawing the remains of a chicken and chips or chasing a rabbit through a roadside leeway.

It is at once invisible and constantly among us. It dwells in the spaces between, in the discarded remains of our lives, unseen but for the hapless night wanderer or the morning milkman.

Whatever ghosts haunted my dark fox are the reflections of his urban lifestyle. Too easy a life of scrounging and little hunting. Not enough open fields and moonlit chases.

What has come to my mind recently is the nature of our historic understanding of witchcraft/cunning craft/etc as practiced in Europe over the course of the past 200 or so years. We base much of our knowledge, and further more most of the pages of the known literature, on the testimonies of parish priests, inquisitors and confessions often made under duress and torture. This body of knowledge has become, for the worse of history, the basis in which contemporary craft practice has been rooted. It is a framework of Christianity, a universe predicated on a savior, and a god who forbids such acts in law. An Abrahamic cult brought to the British Isles by the Roman in the 6th century. A patriarchy of knowledge control and subjugation.

Yet there exists, starting in the early 17th century, a profound body of knowledge that is not derived from tortures or confessions but on stories and knowledge freely given amongst locals in villages and towns. It is the body of what we now call ethnographic study, but is most commonly known as folklore. Starting in 1878 The Folk Lore Society in London began publishing a series of ethnographic studies, both in magazine and book format. But such folkloric study goes back several centuries before to men from the Brothers Grimm, Thomas Crofton Croker, Dalyell, Henderson, Kirk, Lady Wilde, and many others over a span of 300+ years. People who went into the pubs and gardens and talked to the real people of these places. Who listened and wrote down the stories of warding off beings and banishing dead souls. The instructions for curing illness and the nature of laying on hands and second sight.

This body of knowledge is a directly transmitted oral testimony, storytelling and folk beliefs handed down within families and gathered together by the folklorists and antiquarians from across regions of the British Isles and Europe. There are hundreds of books of these beliefs, many with detailed descriptions of spells to attack, to ward off spirits, to bind and banish and drive forth. Often listing exact components of charms and dances. Studies on the nature of folk magic in Scottish highlands, on horse magic in East Anglia, of the witch bottles and warding wands of Wales, and endless stream of valid information on the flowing tradition of folk magic as a living practice in the UK over the past half of a millennia. As well as documenting the exact pronunciation of regional words, curses, and spirits terminology, often with a glossary!

And yet this body of knowledge is almost completely overlooked in the contemporary literature on witchcraft practice. Which instead relies on the testament of Church torturers as to what was said, on the scant testimonies of victims of a system of abjuration pointed against herbal healers and common folk practitioners, more often than not elderly widows whose properties could be confiscated by the Church warden.

Its time for a rethink of our understanding of the nature of folk magic. How it is the very essence of true witch practice and is at its heart older and truer a practice that those tainted by the narrative of the Church over the past thousand years of attempted suppression. We must dig into this lost literature, much of which is available online for free as pdfs hidden on archive.org and in google books.