Hoodoo You Read?

Hoodoo & Conjure Quarterly is a new journal on Southern magic and folklore, and you can buy it on Amazon.com (follow link above).

Contents of the first issue:

Denise Alvarado: “The Origin of the Root,” “Dirt Dauber Nests,” “Conjure Artist profile: The Georgia Mojo Man,” “A Goetic Ritual: Magickal Doll to Raise the Ghost of a Loved One”

Sharon Marino: “Bat’s Blood,” “Secrets of Sex Magick: Explore Your Sexual Fantasies with the Help of the Guede,” “St. Martha Dominadora Love Domination Candle.”

Matthew Venus: “What is Real Hoodoo?” “Bottle Spell for Prosperity”

Madrina Angelique: “Buying Cemetery Dirt”

Alyne Pustanio: “Haunted New Orleans Folklore: The Devil Baby of New Orleans: Fact or Fiction?”

Chad Balthazar, “Planetary Magick and the Venus Love Tub Lamp”

Papa Curtis, “A Short Look at Witchcraft and Self-Defense in the Diaspora”

Carolina Dean: “Shoe and Foot-Track Magick”

Dorothy Morrison,: “The Real Dirt on Visiting the Dead”

Aaron Leitch: “The Return of Psalm Magick and the Mixed Qabalah”

H. Byron Ballard: “Cove-Witches and Curanderas: Traditional Healers and Magic-Women in Modern Appalachia”

And there are several formulas for magickal oils and powders, a little lagniappe (that’s Cajun for a little something extra) magick, a free conjure doll baby template, and a historical text related to Voodoo in New Orleans by Lafcadio Hearn.

Maybe these are people who don’t worry about whether there are pentagrams on the tombstone—they are there for the graveyard dirt.

‘The Magical Battle of Britain’

“The Battle of Britain” usually refers to the German bombing campaign during the summer of 1940, planned to lead into a seaborne invasion across the English Channel.

Gerald Gardner claimed that the “Southern Coven”  performed a ritual in the New Forest at Lammas 1940 against the threatened invasion. Based on my reading of the evidence, or lack thereof, I don’t think that this ritual took place as he described it.

Nevertheless, telling about the ritual fifteen years after it supposedly happened was part of his claim that Wicca was an indigenous British religion  that could repel the “foreign invader,” Christianity. (And if alive today, Gardner would probably add Islam as well to the list of invaders.)

Whereas we have only Gardner’s after-the-fact claim that the Lammas 1940 ritual occurred, another esoteric group was indeed fighting Nazi Germany on the astral plane—Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of the Inner Light.

“The Magical Battle of Britain,” by Dave Evans and David Sutton, is available at The Fortean Times.

The authors describe how Fortune’s group conceived of their magical battle, designed to strengthen British will power and stop the invasion, even if its effects are hard to quantify compared to those of the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, and the Army.

Some of her followers believe that the workings ruined her health, leading to her death a few years later.

And they quote a well-known scholar of esotericsm who comes to this conclusion:

Possibly such tales of magical warfare are simply one of the ways, as esoteric scholar Professor Wouter Hanegraaff describes, in “which magic­ians seek to legitimate magic to the wider society as well as to themselves” in the modern era.


Pour Me Another

 

Old-school brewing ingredients (Smithsonian)

Researchers create old brews. Really old brews.

The truest alcohol enthusiasts will try almost anything to conjure the libations of old. They’ll slaughter goats to fashion fresh wineskins, so the vintage takes on an authentically gamey taste. They’ll brew beer in dung-tempered pottery or boil it by dropping in hot rocks. The Anchor Steam Brewery, in San Francisco, once cribbed ingredients from a 4,000-year-old hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian beer goddess.

And here I am drinking a bottle of Heineken—it seems so bland without the  mugwort. Do those Amsterdam brewers have a beer goddess?

“I keep telling people that beer is more important than armies when it comes to understanding people.”

Online Egyptological Magazine

Egyptological is a free online magazine devoted to ancient Egypt.

It offers “papers, articles, brief items, reviews and reports, all discussing the rich world of Ancient Egypt.”

One current article discusses how civil unrest in Egypt right now leads to (surprise!) more looting of archaeological sites.

Word Follies of 1916–1918

Yikes, I’m not keeping up with Dave Wilton’s researches!

1916: He’s keeping it on the hush-hush, but the looey plans to open a Ford dealership after the war is over. Read the rest.

1917: OMG! They’re selling pep pills at the Piggly Wiggly? Read the rest.

1918: Congresswoman, allow me to create a Venn diagram. This circle represents the introverts and this other circle represents the extroverts. Where they intersect . . . well, you have to read the whole thing.

Viewpoints on Pagan Values

At The Juggler, a roundup of blog posts from Pagan Values Month, which is June.

I liked Kayleigh’s discussion on the counsels of Solon “the lawgiver” and from there into a Pagan view of destructive natural disasters.

Talking about Tlaloc, 2

A turkey feather and a candle for Tlaloc. This culvert carries Hardscrabble Creek under a road—what is left of it.

In her comment on my first Tlaloc post, Hecate Demetersdatter asks,  “What was/is it about Tlaloc that called/calls to you?”

It was my reading and re-reading of Craig Childs’ House of Rain that made me conscious of how important a deity Tlaloc (under various names) had been from antiquity to the present day in the American Southwest and on south into Mesoamerica. (Childs, no avowed polytheist, tends to regard him simply as the personification of the hydrological cycle.)

If we might regard deities as connected with place, then I am in that place and subject to that hydrological cycle—a cycle that seems to have stalled a bit this year.

And as Tlaloc has been addressed in many tongues already, why not add English to them?

Also, looking forward to the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco, I obviously need to eat here.

 

You always Hear about the Witch’s Broom…

. . . but rarely about the witch’s dustpan. Some interesting costuming from the 1870s at Sexy Witch.

Pagan Family Website Seeks Writers

From Sarah Whedon at Pagan Families:

Pagan Families seeks carefully written contributions on all aspects of Pagan pregnancy and childbirth. Examples of the kind of writing we are seeking include: scripts for conception rituals; theological essays on the ethics of reproduction; prayers to mother goddesses; Pagan sensitivity guides for birth professionals; personal essays on the experience of spiritual practice during pregnancy; reviews of Pagan-friendly birth resources; and Pagan birth stories. This list is by no means exhaustive. Pagan Families will publish in a blog format, using tags to organize content into categories so frazzled parents can easily research a particular topic.

The subtitle is “resources for Pagan pregnancy and birth,” but she adds,

The site is called Pagan Families because that name gives us lots of room to grow. I have two visions for the future growth of Pagan Families.  The first is to amass enough thoughtful and inspiring material to publish a book on Paganism and the childbearing year.  The second is to expand the site to cover other aspects of Pagan families, such as parenting and partnering.

She already has some good posts up—check it out.

Firefox and Wicca

I have not been keeping up with xkcd, and I missed this.