The Element Encyclopedia of 1000 Spells: A Concise Reference Book for the Magical Arts. Judika Illes
of times for magic.
On one hand, there is currently less persecution of magical practitioners in more parts of the world than at any time since the rise of Christianity. This very book that you hold in your hands would once upon a time have earned reader, writer, publisher, and bookseller alike a slow and painful death.
Materials, once rare, craved, hoarded, and often forbidden are available and affordable to more people than ever before. Think about that the next time you sip some mugwort tea, an herb that might have branded you a witch just a few centuries ago. Frankincense and myrrh, once the most precious expensive commodities on Earth, may now be purchased in any well-stocked health food store. Salt, packed with magic power, once extracted from Earth and sea with terrible human effort, once very expensive and precious, is now so cheap and common that every fast-food vendor gives away free packets by the handful.
Although fewer people have private gardens, there is greater access than ever before to the botanical material that constitutes the foundation of magic. Some spells in this book refer to what may seem to be very obscure items and plants: virtually nothing is unattainable, however. Once upon a time, a practitioner was limited to local botanicals. Now you can import living as well as dried plants from virtually anywhere on the globe for your private use. Do you want to access the power of Peruvian shamanic plants? Go on the Internet; you’ll be able to buy some. Where botanical material isn’t practical, modern essential oils and flower essence remedies reproduce alchemical methods to bring you the power of even more flowers, available in a simple, easy-to-store, user-friendly, inexpensive form.
Practitioners are unafraid to teach and to share information. I remember when booksellers didn’t generally stock spell-books. Now you can buy them everywhere. Classes are advertised in newspapers. You don’t have to be a member of an inner circle to discover metaphysical companions. There’s little need to hide in back rooms, fearing arrest or worse, as in previous days. In industrialized nations there is new-found appreciation for magical wisdom and traditions.
Yet it’s also the worst of times in other areas—ironically, in those isolated communities where magical knowledge was preserved in such purity for so long. Many of Earth’s surviving magical traditions are vanishing as quickly as the rainforest, coral reefs, or any other endangered species.
While some re-embrace a magical heritage rejected for so long, traditional practitioners who’ve maintained those spiritual traditions for millennia lack similar privileges and protection. Like those vulnerable creatures of the Galapagos, having never before met attempts at suppression, they may never have developed the skills of subterfuge developed over generations among other more frequently oppressed people.
As rainforests are cut down, as ancestral lands are annexed, traditional practitioners and shamans have less access to the botanicals they depend upon than ever before. Instead of open-minded, questing fellow magical practitioners, eager to learn and share knowledge, the only outsiders these traditional practitioners are likely to meet are those who undermine their magical traditions, and pressure them to abandon their own faiths and convert to others.
Every day, somewhere on Earth, a traditional practitioner is pressured to abandon shamanism, divination, or some variant of the magical arts. Sometimes suppression is violent. Tools are destroyed, modes of transmission suppressed. Shamans and leaders of magic are isolated from their communities, or as the Bible so eloquently says, “put away.” The stimulus to reject old magical traditions may also come from within, from a culture’s desire for modernity, to appear civilized and rational. In other cases magic and traditional knowledge are victims of war and political unrest.
It is ironic to observe precisely which information appears to be vanishing versus what appears to be preserved for posterity. Once upon a time, very recently, Western magical adepts and elite scholars of magic alike favored the remote “pure” traditions of the Himalaya and Indonesia. Scholars and adepts journeyed with tremendous personal effort to the far corners of the Earth to meet with Ascended Masters while simultaneously scorning magical traditions found closer to home as superstitious nonsense.
Today it is those previously respected traditions that are rapidly being eroded and are vanishing for a host of religious, political, and environmental reasons. Closer to home, Celtic traditions, once reviled as foolishness, have been revived and energized by a massive number of new practitioners. The Romany people, terribly persecuted for centuries, scorned sometimes precisely because of their magical traditions, have recently re-asserted control over those traditions and how they are to be perceived. Hoodoo, once beheld by both academicians and elite occultists with particular scorn, largely for race-based reasons, appears to have its survival assured, thanks to the dedicated efforts of its own scholars, Zora Neale Hurston, Harry Middleton Hyatt, and Catherine Yronwode.
Silver Raven Wolf, modern chronicler of Pow-Wow, once dismissed as ignorant folk-practices that were unworthy of scholarly interest, writes of scouring Pennsylvanian nursing homes, looking for old people with snippets of information that she may then preserve and share. Perhaps others will fulfill this role for other genres of magic in other parts of the world. It takes only one generation for information to be lost forever. How many traditions, how much hard-won human experience and accumulated wisdom from every inhabited continent, have already been lost? This big book that you hold in your hand is but a tiny portion of Earth’s magical wisdom. In keeping with the inquiring, questing spirit of magical practitioners throughout the ages, don’t be too respectful with the spells in this book. If you find something that suits you or intrigues you, use it. If something isn’t quite right, play with it. Tap into your own magic powers and continue the evolution of our magic repertoire.
How do you cast a magic spell? Do you shout abracadabra, turn around three times on one foot and shoot sparks from your wand? Or do you stand within a circle of lit candles, magic sword at the ready, attempting to read unknown, unpronounceable words from a dusty grimoire? Will you tuck one single crumb of bread, one single grain of salt, and some burned-out charcoal into a scrap of red fabric, and then make knots in the cloth as if your very life depended upon it? Perhaps you will stand at the crossroads and just…stand?
Magic spells come in virtually unlimited form, some dramatic, some shocking, and some perhaps surprisingly mundane. Definitions of exactly what constitutes a magic spell depend a lot upon one’s personal history and experience, the stories you were or weren’t told as a child, and cultural expectations. What separates a magic spell from just any random series of actions is you, your intent, goals, and desires.
A magic spell is a conscious formalized attempt to manipulate magic power and energy ( heka) in order to achieve your own personal goal.
There are many styles of spells, featuring all sorts of ingredients. If one style of spell doesn’t suit you, there are others. Afraid of fire? Cast your spell by creating enchanted baths. Don’t have a tub? Brew potions or tie magical knots. If one ingredient is unobtainable, there are substitutes. If you can’t afford precious gems and resins, there are plenty of powerful magical materials masquerading as common kitchen ingredients. Magical energy is irrepressible; magic spells are the controlled conduit for directing this magical energy. There is only one component of every magic spell that you cast that cannot be replaced and that is YOU. Yours is the unique binding energy that provides the spark of life which transforms actions, words, and thoughts into magic spells.
Everyone’s secret desire, of course, is to possess enchanted words or objects that achieve our goals for us without even our slightest effort. Just say “hocus pocus!” and poof! Your boring date is instantly transformed into Mr. Right. There is a grain of truth in this fantasy: the most magically charged objects will perform a lot of the work for us, although magic spells are never completely effortless. Some naturally occurring items inherently possess this type of magic power (iron, menstrual blood, salt, certain botanical plants); in other cases, some extremely intensive spell-casting is required in order to craft a tool of requisite intense magical power