The Element Encyclopedia of 1000 Spells: A Concise Reference Book for the Magical Arts. Judika Illes
Although magic is a conservative force in ways, harking back to humanity’s most primal arts, it also evolves endlessly, adapting new materials, new traditions and new methods as they appear. It is fluid and defiant and resists control.
Fundamentalists of all kinds are inevitably opposed to magic, but this tension exists even among liberal faiths that prize their magical traditions—so-called magical religions. Here, inevitably, religious tradition stipulates a right way to practice magic. Knowledge may be reserved for the few, with methods reserved for those going through the proper, authorized channels. Tension will exist between the officially initiated and independent practitioners.
That tension between authority and magical practitioner is, I suspect, the real reason why secular rulers and religious authorities (frequently in conjunction with each other) attempt to brand magic and its practitioners as evil influences, a cancer among the submissive. Lack of obedience rather than lack of morality is what really draws down the wrath of authority.
It is no accident that the Bible records that Israel’s diviners, shamans and necromancers were “put away” during the reign of its very first king, Saul. When the prophet Samuel warned the children of Israel that choosing a king would mean losing sons, daughters, land, and livestock, he neglected to mention that they would also lose their previous access to professional magical advice. Or perhaps he didn’t bother to mention it because he was aware, as apparently was the king, that those magical services are so crucial that they are never entirely suppressed. In fact, King Saul himself is very soon shown, in his hour of need, searching out one of those prescribed, forbidden bone-conjurers for a private consultation.
Because the Bible has so often been used as an excuse to persecute and exterminate witches, it’s significant to note how the Bible depicts the Witch of Endor actually accomplishing her task. She’s not painted as a stranger with strange talents, or as a foreigner, but as a member of the community. Neither is she shown to be a fraud; she capably fulfills her royal client’s request. Nor is she depicted as malevolent or evil, but as a good-hearted woman: having accomplished the unhappy task that every fortune-teller dreads, of delivering really bad news, she comforts and feeds the distraught king, providing his last meal on Earth, at personal sacrifice (she kills a calf to feed him) considering that he is responsible for her loss of profession and, presumably, income.
Fortune-tellers, readers, and diviners hold an especially tense relationship with political authority. Historically, rulers, particularly the all-powerful, very much like to have the future revealed. They also typically wish to retain exclusive control over this information. Because others may use a diviner’s skill to plot rebellion, historically diviners have been imprisoned, or one is imprisoned for the ruler’s private’s use, while others are killed. To make matters worse, rulers usually desire to hear only the future as they envision it; a diviner can only read what entrails, shoulder blades, or other tools reveal. You see the need sometimes to keep your power secret. Although it frustrates us today, there’s a very good reason Nostradamus recorded his prophesies in code.
Wherever efforts have been made either to subjugate or convert another country or people, among the first acts traditionally taken is the attempted subversion or elimination of native shamans and traditional magical practices and practitioners. This is inevitably perceived as necessary for the pacification of the masses. This is not purely paranoia on the part of those seeking to assert and retain authority.
Traditional shamans and magical practitioners are consistently in the forefront of resistance to oppressive authority. (Because winners write history, the conventional historical explanation for this phenomenon is that shamans attempt to impede the “path of progress.”) In the British West Indies, historical records show that Obeah men and women (the local shamans) led slave revolts or attempted to do so. The Haitian revolution, which ended slavery in that French colony and established the first independent black republic in the Western Hemisphere, was inaugurated at a Vodoun ceremony dedicated to the Spirit of Iron, the material, with the sole exception of menstrual blood, singularly most charged with magical power—although as soon as native dictators proceeded to seize and consolidate power, not surprisingly, they too attempted to restrict or eliminate Vodoun.
This, not evil, power-hungry sorcerers, is the hidden history of magic. In the United States, the prominent Voodooists Marie Laveau and Mary Ellen Pleasant rescued and redeemed slaves, with Pleasant providing funding for John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. (Their male counterpart, Dr. John Montanet, was himself a freed slave, as was Pleasant.) Lest you think that this association between magic and social justice is limited to African influence, Native American shamans were (and remain) in the forefront of resistance to white encroachment, and traditional practitioners led desperate resistance to Christian domination of Europe. Who knows what attempts to defy limitations on women’s magical and spiritual traditions were destroyed in the flames of the craze of medieval witch-burning? Virtually all the records that remain are filtered through the eyes of the torturers.
Although men suffer too, societies that suppress the magical arts will, as a rule, also limit women’s voices and power, often with terrible brutality. Significantly King Saul, in need of a necromancer, requested that his minions find him a conjuring woman. Although it’s since taken many twists and turns, magic ultimately derives from women’s mysteries and the mysteries of creation, and the history of magic’s suppression cannot be separated from the history of women’s oppression.
Is magic evil? Well, if your perception is that sex is inherently evil, Creation inherently tainted with sin, and that women constitute Earth’s weakest link, then I guess you’d better lump magic in there with the rest of these moral dilemmas.
If magic cannot be entirely divorced from religion, even less can it be separated from herbalism, the root of all traditional medicinal systems, systems that for millennia have investigated botanical impact on health and (above all) on reproduction. Magic is the primordial human art and science. It stems from awe inspired by all Earthly creation, but especially the mysteries of human creation. Every new human life is the ultimate act of magic. Conscious attempts at conception probably constitute the first magic spells, especially if you consider that our remote ancestors didn’t understand pregnancy in the detached, technical manner that we do today. Primordial religions venerated the divine in the form of human genitalia with joy, awe, and respect, not prurience, recognizing their capacity for sacred generation and creation.
Although these symbols still survive in isolated pockets of official religion, magic remains suffused with sexual imagery, in ways that may surprise us today, in efforts to maximize the blessings inherent in the powers of anatomy, both male and female. However, magic stems from fascination, on the part of both women and men, with women’s mysteries: the capacity to produce life where it didn’t exist before, magic blood that flows on schedule from no wound and then is mysteriously retained, the links between that blood, fertility, women, the moon, and the sea. These were and remain conduits to the sacred for primordial magic and spirituality alike.
Where Do Magic Spells Come From?
According to the author, folklorist, and scholar of magic, Zora Neale Hurston, “magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.” Very true, but what we do know is that magic comes from all over the globe. There is neither a people nor a culture on Earth that did not at one time possess a magical tradition, whether they recall it today, or whether or not they still use it. Some cultures and religions revel in their magical traditions. Others are ashamed of them or deny that the traditions ever existed. Some ethnic groups like to point the finger and suggest that magic comes from other people, not them, oh no, never—any practices of their own are only isolated bad habits picked up from disreputable magical wanderers or neighbors.
When a large cache of papyri from Alexandria in Egypt was found to be largely devoted to magic spells, anthropologists, Egyptologists, and other scholars exulted. Not because they were necessarily so interested in magic, although some were, but because magic spells reveal a tremendous amount about a culture and its circumstances. Read between the lines of a spell and you will discover important details about people’s expectations of life and death, their daily problems, the materials that they cherish, their spiritual outlook.