#tashathestoryteller

If you study theology as far back as you can, you eventually see almost every ancient culture independently came up with the same stories. Floods that wiped out humanity. Gods who died and came back. Heroes who went into the underworld and returned. Creation rising out of darkness and chaos.

Humans keep telling the same stories across space and time because we keep having the same experiences. The symbols aren't owned by any one culture. They keep surfacing because we, as humans, keep needing them.

The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) didn't invent their symbolism. They inherited it from much older traditions. And as we know, deliberately buried where it came from. The angels in the Bible are borrowed from Mesopotamian tradition. The devil as we know him is heavily shaped by Persian religion.

The early Israelites had a whole divine family they worshiped, including a goddess named Asherah who archaeologists now believe was worshipped alongside God in early Israelite practice. Her name has been found in inscriptions paired directly with Yahweh's. A priestly reform movement spent centuries trying to scrub her out of the record, but she's still there if you know where to look.

That's the thing about erasure. It's never truly complete when you're competing with the symbolism hardwired into humanity.

Certain figures just will not stay buried. Hekate has been through every cultural upheaval you can name and came out more complex and more present each time, not less. The Morrígan. Brigid. Inanna. These beings keep surviving because they represent something the human soul keeps needing to name. You can rename them, absorb them, declare them demons. They just wait.

Now stay with me through this little history lesson.

When the Scots-Irish came down through the mountains into Tennessee and North Georgia they brought fragments of something much older than the Christianity framing it. Charm traditions. Folk healing. A bone-deep understanding that words spoken with intention (over the land, an enemy, the sick) carried real power.

German settlers moving the same route brought their own layer of the same thing, a healing and protective tradition called Braucherei. It was practiced by people known as hexmeisters and was already deeply Biblical in its framework.

And somewhere along the way a book started circulating that became one of the most quietly influential texts in American folk magic. It called itself the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. It was known as the lost secret scripture that explained how Moses actually did all those miracles. The real source of the power, hidden by institutional religion and finally recovered.

But there is no Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses in any Bible. There never was.

It was a German magical handbook, first published in 1849, pulling from older Jewish mystical traditions, European folk magic, and Psalm working practices that had already been floating around for generations.

It gave people a way to do openly magical work. Work that felt deep and ancient to them the same way it does to me, inside a Biblical container. It was safe, accessible, and familiar.

The rabbit hole on this one is wild. The "sixth and seventh book of moses" matched specific Psalms to specific purposes. Protection. Reversals. Justice against an enemy. Court cases.

Because (and this is what blew my mind) the Psalms were always working texts. Psalm 91 was inscribed on amulets and worn on the body centuries before Christianity existed. Psalm 109, which calls down specific harm on an enemy, their days shortened, their children left without a father, their name wiped from memory, was official Temple worship music. The magic wasn't added to the Psalms. It was already there.

By the late 1800s and into the early 1900s this knowledge had woven itself into Appalachian folk practice. It exchanged with Black folk magic traditions developing in the same region. It got so absorbed into everyday life that most of the people using it genuinely believed they were just using the Bible.

In a very real sense they were.

Pentecostalism kept more visibly magical elements alive than almost any other Protestant tradition while loudly insisting it wasn't magic.

Speaking in tongues is altered state ritual vocalization. Faith healing is hands-on energy work. Prophetic dreams taken seriously as divine communication is divination. The whole tradition is built on direct personal contact with spiritual power.

They didn't call it that. They didn't have to.

I spent a long time resenting Evangelical Christianity especially. The shame, the control, the misogyny, the way it took something alive and turned it into a set of rules. I still understand that anger.

But somewhere in tracing all of this back I found something I didn't expect.

My grandmother wasn't trapped in a framework she couldn't see past. She was doing what her people had always done. She was taking the container that survival handed her and putting the real thing inside it. The Psalms as working texts. The laying on of hands. The charming of warts. The title Granny, earned before it was technically hers...

She was holding a thread. And that thread runs a lot further back than the King James Bible.

The craft didn't die in these mountains. It survived because the people carrying it were smarter than the systems trying to erase it. They hid it in the only book they were allowed to keep. They called it prayer. They called it folk medicine. They called it being a good Christian woman who happened to know things.