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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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“The Craft as Revealed by Traditional Practitioners”
Having a pretty fine understanding of the craft in the more abstract and universal sense, from reading Levy & Others, this was an easy read filled with recipes and some background on the practice.
Some notes:
The Importance of Symbolism & Ritual - the preparation of the supplicant, the items selected and their usage, the time of day, month, year, the circumstances of the ritual to be performed (is the fetish to buried or cast into a river or in a specific direction), the points of the compass, the use of magnets or lodestones for sympathetic magic, red cloth (usually flannel), biological ingredients - eg Pubic & Armpit hair, menstrual blood, semen, urine, etc (there might be something too this above & beyond magic - in love philtres they might have the effect of “familiarizing” the love object with your scent & dna), noteworthy was how all the spells adhered to what I now would understand as "Universal" general rules of magic.
Treasure - that you must wear a cross when digging for treasure to prevent it from sinking further into the earth. I've seen so many similar charms and rituals you must obey before searching for treasure that I'm thinking it might be time for me to come up with a few myself.
Ingredients - In this little attention is paid to the obtaining of ingredients. Generally every ingredient itself would or should require some ritual to be observed before it's acquiring, in this the many of the ingredients can be store bought throughout the American South by various Hoodoo supply shops, the act or practice of Magic being reduced to the assembly of store bought ingredients that oft are not even what they purport to be.
This is a short list of some of the doubtless endless supplies one can acquire via these shops:
This reduces the act of Magic to basically a recipe and formula, readily assembled from such store-bought ingredients as
- Graveyard Dust
- Jinx Killer Incense and Oil
- Drive Away Evil Incense and Oil
- Compelling Power Incense and Oil
- Holy Power Bath Oil
- Goofer Dust
- Love Drawing Power Bath
- Strong Love Cologne, Hearts Cologne
- Make Your Wish Sand
- etc, etc,.
A lot of these "recipes" balance home grown ingredients and those one can find locally - things like hot peppers, salt, a knotted string, etc - with the more exotic ingredients (still easily acquired) - such as toads, frogs, lizards, snakes and chickens. Sadly the last few creatures on the list rarely survive the magic. It does make me wonder though, as the recipes shipped with ingredients usually recommend proprietary ingredients - would you be able to substitute "Jinx Killer" for "Drive Away Evil" incense and oil? What about "Strong Love" and "Hearts" Cologne?
Now while I have great skepticism of Magic done with store-bought materials obviously the hoodoo practitioners that endorse all this don't. And some credit must be given to the people who make up the ingredients and spells - they have to somehow - subconsciously - "ring true" - to the client for the magic to have any endorsement or success whatsoever.
TO conclude, this was a light read that in it's details confirms a lot of what anthropologists and psychologists already know. As a guidebook to practitioners of the craft, well, I'll leave that alone.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 61
A somewhat entertaining view of the Klondike told via the letters and conversations with the women who had lived there.
Novel, in that most of accounts focus on the gold, whereas a goodly portion of the infrastructure and services (legit & otherwise) were provided by women, without which a lot of the prospecting would not have happened. And a few of the more savvy women became claim holders and mining bosses themselves.
Still, as happens, there were enough accounts of the gold in the creeks to re-inspire me to try and get up north for a summer...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 95
A slender book, maybe 4X4 Inches, 100 pages, a curated selection from Ovid on the Myth of Orpheus.
Only there was maybe 2 pages all told about Orpheus, Eurydices, the rest is all the accompanying myths and fables that set up the rest of Greek Mythology. And if 2 pages were told about Orpheus and Eurydices, why then less than a page is devoted to his time in the underworld.
Anyways, Ovid and his metamorphosis. Orpheus and his Lyre. And in the end they were together, he and Eurydices, so - nothing in Ovid's rendering of the myth that I can use, but it was good to be refreshed...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
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I have absolutely no interest in the Azande people, but I do have an interest in the rest. Anyways, an early 20th century "study" by Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard on the beliefs of the Azande of the South Sudan as pertains to the title. His explanations are excellent and somewhat illuminate the reasoning process behind it all. But - all in all - I preferred Levy-Bruhl's "Primitive Mentality" - which as opposed to focussing on one tribe describes an aggregate of how "all tribes" (worthy of an Anthropologist) arrange their thinking and 'supernatural' beliefs. So while I enjoyed it will be moving on to the bookstore, I can't keep them all...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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This was, given my newly acquired original Fisher Gold Bug, essential reading and I must find a place for it on my shelf. My shelf, already stuffed and overflowing...
First published in 1963 the author had a chance to interview a lot of the original inhabitants of the ghost towns, even then in their 90's, and the book is well furnished pictures, maps, descriptions, conversations, it's a reference book, a guide to gold creeks and treasures, photos taken back in the day of ruins long since vanished - some of the towns won back, like Ferguson, others vanished, lidar will be the tool to search for their remains.
There are the Coal mining towns, Lumber & Sawmill towns (ghost towns by the 20's as even then forestry was a little overly zealous), Rail towns, vanished Forts and Trading Posts, Silver and mining towns, all these of interest, but no one laid up a cache of lumber in a sawmill town that I can metal detect my way to fortune, same with the silver, coal (I found a tin full of coal! I’m rich! I’m rich!); no, it’s the gold mining encampments that stir the imagination, the hidden unrecovered pokes and caches of gold and coins and robberies with spoils buried under trees….
Anyways, it was - as I noted before, a lyrical and poetic waxing on places long disappeared, and between the conversations and descriptions of decaying ballrooms and threaded in the writings of long dead reporters there are abundant clues to lead me on to treasure...