#historical magic

[magic-study]

[trumoi]

So I've been (very slowly) reading *The Witches' Advocate* by Gustav Henningsen. It outlines and collects the documentation around the largest witch hunt in Catholic history: the Basque Witch Trials. I can make more posts about the info in it because it is fascinating, but it's basically the story of how the Spanish Inquisition rounded up thousands of accused and then a specific Inquisitor fought to get them all released.

Today, however, I wanna mention something about it that was very light and funny: its description of familiars. This is paraphrased from actual interviews by people who believed/confessed they were witches and how they explained their own toad familiars.

The familiars journey begins as a regular toad in a flock of toads that are shepherded around by young witches while the older witches do their regular trials. The young trainee witches are expected to keep the toads in a little clump and punished if they slack off.

Once a witch reaches their seniority in the coven, they take a toad home and begin to feed it. It grows large as a small dog, is able to talk, and often wears fancy dapper clothing (I'm not joking, that's emphasized). It has a special hiding spot so when people come into the home they never find it, not even with magic.

It is very voracious and complains regularly. If you don't feed it what it wants, or feed it enough, then it will rat you out to Satan and get you in trouble. Lil fucking tattletale. Poorer witches resort to stealing food from neighbors to satisfy this grubby little turdnozzle.

When the Witches' Meeting (described as Sabbath because antisemitism that I will not replicate here) draws near, the Toad swells more as they eat until they cannot walk. The witch then takes the toad and STOMPS ON IT until its poisonous unguent gushes forth. They then strip naked, gather the unguent, and rub it all over their body. This poisonous ointment is how they fly off to the Witches' Meeting.

So if anyone wants to draw the dapper, stinky, little tattletaling layabout who complains day and night about not having enough to eat and has to squeeze into a tiny compartment when visitors arrive, please do.

I might try to later but I'm a shit visual artist.

[ellynneversweet]

Today I’ve learned that Old English had at least three words for ‘virgin, female’ all of which were grammatically masculine (Wikipedia notes that ‘Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages, remarkably opaque[...]learners would have had to simply memorize which word goes with which gender’ which is a whole mood), as well as the apparently-distinct mægden (ie, maiden).

More delightfully, I’ve learned the word sigewif, which means victorious woman and was used to compliment bees.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Wait what's the I Wind, Who Holds game and the stairs and mirror game I can't find anything about it anywhere

Late Victorian/Edwardian romance divination games. They may date back further, but those are the earliest concrete mentions I can find.

I Wind; Who Holds is my favorite because it’s also somewhat creepy. The player tosses a ball of yarn out the window of their house while keeping hold of one end, traditionally on Halloween night, and slowly winds it back up while chanting, “I wind; who holds?” When they’re nearly done, they’ll supposedly see an apparition of their true love/future spouse holding the end of the yarn. This one appears in period sources less often and may have been specifically a southern or Appalachian thing.

The stairs and mirror game is more common. You walk backwards up a flight of stairs in the dark with a mirror in one hand and a candle in the other. You’re meant to see, again, a vision of your future spouse in the mirror. Or a skeleton, which means you’ll die unmarried. There were multiple variations of this one; it may be the tamer ancestor of the modern Bloody Mary game.

I could probably talk at length about how these are the great-grandchildren of rituals like the egg-in-water that caused so much trouble with the teenage girls of 1690s Salem, or how mostly women did them because every aspect of a woman’s future was usually tied up in marriage. But that’s another post altogether.

source on I Wind; Who Holds? (there are more sources with other variants; just search “I wind who holds” in quotes like that)

source on the stairs and mirror game and its near-infinite variations

[marzipanandminutiae]

So I love your posts about divination in the Victoria era etc, so can you tell us more about that cake-charm thing? Thank you!! (I'm sorry about how I write, English isn't my first language so sometimes i don't know how to express things properly)

Thank you!

It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You bake a bunch of things into a cake- a ring, a piece of cloth, a nut, a coin, a cheap porcelain baby doll, a key, a thimble, a button, or any combination of those and/or other items -and each has a different meaning for the future of the person who finds it in their slice.

As with most of these games, there were about a thousand variations. Similar cakes are baked in certain cultures for Twelfth Night or Three Kings Day at Christmastime. One variant, called a dumb cake, had to be baked in complete silence and had pretty complicated rules for its creation and consumption. Interestingly, the dumb cake started as a way to tell only who a woman’s future husband would be, but the 1890s source I’ve found involves tokens that give the (almost always female) participants clues about other parts of their lives. Perhaps it’s a silent commentary on women gradually becoming more independent and having options other than marriage?

Anyway, that’s a quick rundown of Halloween cake divination in the 19th century. And your English is excellent, by the way.

source (read to the end to find out about a girl who choked on a chicken heart while trying to swallow it in a distinctly less fun divination ritual)

[slewfootwitch]

𝔞𝔫 𝔢𝔵𝔭𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔬𝔣 𝔩𝔞𝔶𝔪𝔞𝔫'𝔰 𝔠𝔥𝔞𝔯𝔪𝔰 𝔦𝔫 𝔢𝔲𝔯𝔬𝔭𝔢𝔞𝔫 𝔣𝔬𝔩𝔨 𝔪𝔞𝔤𝔦𝔠

“[…] there can be said to exist two types of practitioners—the specialists or wise ones (Sw. klokfolk) and the common persons who are sometimes clients of such specialists, but who can also perform certain procedures on their own, as long as certain ritual prerequisites are met. For this reason, there are some rituals that seem accessible to both the specialist and the common person.” - Dr. Thomas K. Johnson, Svartkonstboker

Notes: This post, like all of my posts, is written from the background of diasporic European folk magic. This post largely deals with historical magic and is not intended as an admonition of purchasing “fixed” or “charged” spell items; nor is it intended to categorize such purchases in contemporary use as layman’s magic or the practitioners who purchase them as non-practitioners.

A large portion of the known body of traditional folk magic is what is known as “service magic”, magic that was bought from skilled practitioners by non-practitioners. In many cases, these services were rendered directly by the practitioner in the form of spells, rituals and remedies. Here, the magic, healing, or other working was performed entirely by the practitioner at the request of a client. This magic, although performed on behalf of a non-practitioner, still falls into the realm of specialist magic because it is performed by a practitioner in its entirety.

On the other side of the spectrum of service craft is “layman’s magic”. This was magic that, despite being purchased from a specialized practitioner, was both easily enough performed by an outsider to the craft and also somewhat reliant on an element of client participation for best results. In layman’s magic, the practitioner lays the groundwork by performing any complex or specialist tasks, and then hands the work to the client for completion. It is the layman’s participation in such magic that activates the working and binds it into its place.

How Did Historical Layman’s Magic Work?

In our modern magical community, we tend to think of magic as something that is exclusively performed by practitioners (or, at the very least, by dabblers). In our world, magic is performed by witches and mages. We can find it packaged up and categorized into clear designations of what can be done by whom, and what qualifications must be met before the performance of certain magics is appropriate. Sometimes it is even further divided into what magic is suitable for beginners vs. advanced practitioners, and so on. Factors like travel and immigration, culture-sharing, the rise of literacy and published materials, and accessibility of information through resources like the Internet have made international and intercultural interaction much more common for the average person. They have also made the development and expression of such categorizations and boundaries necessary for the protection and maintenance of closed practices.

For the early modern practitioner, however, magic was much less divided. A given area or culture would typically only have one or two folk magical traditions living within it. So there was much less of a need for boundaries about who could and could not practice magic in its many forms. Occasionally there were gender-focused rules or rules associated with the circumstances surrounding one’s birth—but even those were flexible and sometimes fluid. If an aspiring cunning person didn’t have access to a willing mentor of the appropriate gender, for example, they could still become a practitioner of magic by stealing or finding a Black Book or by being mentored by spirits directly. Magic was practiced by all genders and ages; it was taken up by both the poor and the wealthy. The only separation that truly seemed to exist in early modern folk magic and folk medicine was the divide between the cunning person/skilled practitioner and the layman.

The layman of the early modern era was different from the non-practitioner that we might come into contact with as contemporary practitioners of magic and witchcraft. In our own day and age, we might assume that every non-practitioner that we encounter is also a non-believer. We know that, as a general rule, Joe Average neither practices nor believes in magic to any significant extent. This wasn’t the case for the historical non-practitioner. Although belief in magic and reliance on both folk magicians and folk healers gradually declined between the 18th and 20th centuries in Europe, belief in magic and spirits was an ingrained fact of life for the majority of human history. Whether a person was able to practice magic or not, they were almost guaranteed to believe in it. Prior to the scientific advancements of the 19th century, anything that altered one’s fate, caused illness, and created misfortune were believed to be the work of unseen spirits, devils and magical afflictions rather than germs, gases, and other mundane causes. Non-practitioners believed in magic and the supernatural, though they also believed that the world of the spirits and control over spirits was inaccessible to them, limited (at least to some extent) to the purview of the skilled practitioner.

Magic was a necessary part of the spiritual landscape of the early modern era and a means of obtaining healing, happiness and control for both skilled practitioners and their clients. The service magic economy created a sort of magical situationship in which the non-practitioner client base could rely on the folk practitioner’s cultivated relationship with their craft, the spirit world, and the land around them to help navigate issues of fate, health, wealth, and livelihood. But they did not always need to rely on the practitioner’s direct action to be the solution to their problems. Sometimes, magic could be prescribed rather than performed on the layperson’s behalf. The same way a doctor with the necessary skills to diagnose illness and the credentials to prescribe medications might assess a sore throat, diagnose it as strep and prescribe an antibiotic, the folk practitioner had the ability to assess problems caused by spirits, devils and other supernatural forces and determine the best course of action for solving them.

Some historical service magic is comparable to the “Etsy witches” of the contemporary age, where the entire magical working is performed by the practitioner with little assistance or action required from the client. Most of the surviving examples of service magic, however, fall into the category of layman’s magic. These include examples of rites in which something was required of the client, such as procuring certain items believed to have innate magical powers, making ritual journeys or nightly repetition of charms and prayers. They also included physical items which were intended to be worn or used by the client, as is the case with many amulets, prayer and charm scrolls (Breverl) that were meant to be sewn into clothes or worn in charm bags, and magical ointments. Such examples of layman’s magic were activated by the practitioner and then sold to the client who could apply or use them for their own purposes. It was not necessary for the practitioner to place the working directly on the client, their home, loved ones, farm, etc. It was enough that the magic had been placed on the amulet, written into the parchment, or otherwise activated.

Layman’s Magic Today

This tradition of service magic is still alive and well today, despite the gradual decline of many people relying on folk practitioners for help with their daily lives. The clientèle, however, has changed with time. In Western culture, many non-practitioners no longer believe in magic and many that do avoid interaction with practitioners and artifacts of magic out of fear or contempt. In my own experience (having both owned a witchcraft shop myself pre-pandemic and having collaborated with other retailers), the vast majority of what would once have been charms, amulets and tools intended for non-practitioners are now purchased by practitioners themselves. Fixed/charged candles, amulets, spell kits and other such tools are no longer considered the domain of the non-practitioner. Instead, they are readily available in witchcraft shops everywhere and (after being created and activated by one practitioner) are worked alone or incorporated into larger workings as magical support/enhancement.

The evolution of these charms in this way is not an end to the tradition of participatory elements of service magic. The use of what would have once been layman’s charms by contemporary magical practitioners is something of a natural continuation of the tradition, which reminds us that such the participation of the client in the workings of service-oriented folk magic was not an odd exception to the rules of folk magical practice. This participation was (and still is) one of the defining features of European service magic. It is also a reminder that such folk magic has always been something done not just for our communities, but with them.

[haloquin]

Occult Con Reflections - On Necromancy

Part of a series of posts inspired by the South Wales Occult Conference in Cardiff on 2nd November 2024 – find the first post and index here. It wouldn’t be a conference on death in the occult without at least one talk on, well, talking to the dead. Enter Dr Al Cummings. On video. Poetically titled “Black Arts and Cunning Crafts”, Al’s talk was thick with information about Early Modern cunning…

Occult Con Reflections - On Necromancy

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

I suggest that witches’ connection with nature represents an intensification of the cultural association of women with the natural world and the human body. Witches are not merely associated with nature, they are identified with it. As we have seen, witches can be found out in the wild, and they can even be described as savage animals themselves. Their connection with nature, however, extends even beyond this identification with nature to actual control of natural phenomena. So, for example, Ovid’s Medea addresses the gods and spirits of nature with these words: With your help when I have willed it, the streams have run back to their fountain-heads, while the banks wondered; I lay the swollen, and stir up the calm seas by my spell; I drive the storms and bring on the clouds; the winds I dispel and summon; I break the jaws of serpents with my incantation; living rocks and oaks I root up from their own soil; I move the forests, I bid the mountains shake, the earth to rumble, and the ghosts to come forth from their tombs. You also, Luna, do I draw from the sky, though the changing bronze of Temesa strives to aid your throes; even the chariot of the Sun, my grandsire, pales at my song; Aurora pales at my poisons. The image of the witch causing streams to run backward and “drawing down the moon” is found throughout the literary depictions of witches from Apollonius Rhodius to Lucan. The witch’s control of the natural world is an inversion of the “natural” order of things, whereby men through their association with cul- ture have control of the world. The ancient authors presented this inversion as profoundly threatening. They suggested that it led to the dissolution of all law and the destruction not only of culture but also of the entire world.

- From Goddess to Hag: The Greek and the Roman Witch in Classical Literature by Barbette Stanley Spaeth, as found in: Daughters of Hecate Women and Magic in the Ancient World