-SHOWNOTES FOR EPISODE 16- Summary
Today we answer some listener questions and present some feedback. Then we have an interview with magical author Judika Illes.
It’s here! Sooner than expected, though far too long in the making. We’re working on lots and lots of products at the moment, but our initial offering includes:
Saints & Spirits Oil – This oil is attuned to the spirit realm, and can be used to anoint offering candles or to work spells relying on the aid of spiritual forces. It’s got a “churchy” smell offset by lavender for a peaceful, pleasant effect.
Wall of Flame Oil – If you need to keep bad influences out of your life, this oil is right up your alley. It’s like laying down a ring of fire around you and the people and things you love. Sharp, clean, and hot smelling, it sends back any hurtful energies directed at you to their sources.
Uncrossing Oil – When you’ve got troubles that just don’t seem to quit, and it feels like your luck has just plain run out, this is the oil to use. A little of this worn on the body (particularly the hands and feet—though do be careful if you have sensitive skin) or burned while praying can do wonders to knock any curses off of you.
Within the next few days we also hope to be able to offer these:
Crown of Success Oil – One of our favorites! This sweet, spicy blend is designed for general purpose success spells. It can also be applied to any more focused mojo, like a simple gambling hand or money drawing bag, in order to bring increased potency.
Crown of Success Mojo Bags – Just like the oil, these general purpose mojos are designed to generate some serious success in your life. They should be fed at least weekly and carried in a pocket, purse, or somewhere out of sight. They’re red cotton cloth and smell rather nicely, too!
And we’re also working on these items as well, though they will probably be another week or two away:
Attraction Oil – Need to bring something good your way? Luck, money, or love? Well this might be the oil you’re looking for. It works like a magnet for drawing things to you. Annoint a little of your money before you spend it and it will come back to you with more in tow eventually. Dab a little on before going out for the evening and you may find yourself bringing home a new lover. It’s warm and citrusy with floral notes, and a real pleasure to smell!
Uncrossing Soap – Like the oil, this soap helps peel away the spiritual grime that may be hanging around you. If you can’t manage to take a full spiritual bath, this soap makes a nice alternative. Smells great and is made with skin-friendly goat’s milk.
Crown of Success Soap – This richly scented olive-oil based soap can help to bring prosperity and good fortune to those who use it. Use as a hand soap and wash before leaving the house every day, or as a body soap for occasional boosts to your luck and fortunes.
Saints & Spirits Soap – If you need to get spiritually clean, or just want a nice spiritual cast to your day, this is a great soap for you! It has a holy scent and peaceful pieces of lavender mixed into it. It’s a lovely way to get clean, right down to your soul!
Once we get things going, I’m going to start making package sales, where you can buy a mojo and an oil of the same type for a discounted price if you get them together. I also plan to eventually release that print edition of the cartomancy guide through the Etsy site, but I want it to be a little better quality if I’m asking people to pay for it, of course.
I should say that for legal reasons, all of our products are sold as novelties and are NOT to be ingested! I offer them as folkloric specimens and results will vary from person to person.
If you have products you’d like to see us offer, by the way, please send us a message! We’re always interested in seeing what people want. We tend to lean towards prosperity and blessing-type products at the moment, but we’re not opposed to branching out.
Today I’ve got a few photos of things to tease and entice you. We’ve got something happening in the very near future and I wanted to let you blog readers be the first to know about it. You can probably guess from the pictures what the announcement will be.
Be watching for an update soon! Until then, thanks for reading!
As some of you may know from other sources at this point, several of us witchy podfolk are going to be in the Chicagoland area on Saturday, Oct. 2nd. If you’d like a chance to meet and greet Velma Nightshade from Witches Brewhaha, Fire Lyte from Inciting a Riot, Gillian from Iron Powaqa, Jasmine & Isaac from Pagan Hooligans, Scarlett from Lakefront Pagan Voice, Britney of the Urban Green Witch, and of course me, stop by Witchy Wearables in Midlothian, IL between 11am and 1pm on 10/2. We’ll be doing a little chat, and there’s going to be a witchy craft fair that day, too. It’s a good chance to come out and put faces with names and voices, and maybe pick our brains a little (what will be left of them after jet lag, anyway).
Here’s the short version of the info: Pagan Podkin Meet and Greet
Saturday, Oct. 2nd, from 11am – 2pm
@ Witchy Wearables
4459 147th St Ste D
Midlothian, IL 60445
Many thanks to Witchy Wearables for hosting this event, and to all the wonderful podkin who have made this community feel so close. And, of course, thanks to our marvelous audiences, who we are very eager to meet. We hope to see you there!
I’ve not got a long or involved post to share today, just some links to articles of interest. The first two are about a recently excavated site in Maryland which turned up a football-sized “spirit bundle” with some very clear African magical paraphernalia inside of it. Finds like this are not exactly rare, but neither are they well documented at this point, so it’s fun to see American magic (or rather, African magic in America) getting some attention from the scientific press. As a bonus, the location of the burial was once apparently a crossroads! Neat!
The last link I have for you today is about Brice House, an historical site (also in Maryland) in which a number of interesting magical and spiritual artifacts have been found. Known as a “hoodoo cache,” the dig revealed a bottle and several pierced coins buried in an “X” pattern near a bricked up doorway. It’s pretty cool stuff!
Yesterday, when I went to the mailbox, I pulled from amidst the circulars and credit card pre-approvals the always-entertaining J. Peterman Catalog. For those who don’t know anything about this catalog, it’s basically a clothing and accessories shop with its ad copy in the form of mini-travelogues. The company’s charismatic founder, J. Peterman, allegedly visits exotic locales and has wonderful adventures, then brings back inspirations for different lines of shirts, dresses, hats, and fragrances. He’ll spend a summer evening in Chile camped out in the Andes and come back with a rugged but stylish belt. He’ll recall a wonderful oyster dinner at a café in Paris and design a dress after his dinner companion’s outfit that night. And so on. The company is also fairly famous for being Elaine’s job on Seinfeld for a few TV seasons.
The clothing is expensive, though it certainly looks nice and has an air of romance about it. But that’s not really what I’ll get into here today. As I walked up my driveway, I flipped open the catalog to a random page, and found an interesting womens’ top with the following description:
The Crystals of the Sabbat are being polished.
The cry for more myrrh is heard.
An open call for fire dancers is taking place.
The healing masters are calling their travel agents.
They’ll be outdoing themselves at the Mabon Pagan Autumn Festival this year.
So what are you wearing?
Something exotic from India perhaps?
Vintage Pagan Embroidered Jacket (No. 2803). Tie front closure. Which means you can keep it tied or, depending on what the ceremony calls for, open. Embroidery continues along front, short sleeves, shoulder, yoke, and hem. Black piping on sleeves and around neckline. Very casual and easy. You can wear long sleeves under it.
And you know how good pagan looks with jeans. Imported.
Hopefully the scan of the catalog page above will let you see this advert in all its glory, but I think you get the gist.
I’m not going to get on any high horse here. I’m not offended by the catalog or the company. In fact, I am pretty tickled by it. Fire Lyte posted a blog entry yesterday about fear-mongering in the Pagan community, and I thought that this ad was a rather serendipitous arrival as I pondered on his points. While I don’t take a hard stance on Jason Pitzl-Waters’ Wild Hunt Blog (I’ve never noticed the paranoia Fire Lyte mentioned myself, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not there as an undercurrent). Fire Lyte’s broader point about the persecution complex prevalent in some Pagan circles seems valid to me, though. If I’m being honest, I experience almost no persecution, despite being in the Bible belt and regularly attending a church with people who know I’m not Christian and have magic books. Sure, hot button issues flare up from time to time, but they mostly tend to be ideological (such as the Creation vs. Evolution debate) rather than religious (though I readily admit that one of the first five questions a new acquaintance asks is “So where do you go to church?” in this part of the country). But I just don’t see the witch-hunting that seems to be implied in many cases.
That’s not to say there aren’t a number of folks genuinely experiencing some kind of enforced closeting or living in a state of anxiety over their belief system. I know there are. But I don’t know anyone who’s lost a job due to religion, myself, unless they made a big deal out of it and generally became a pest or nuisance. I’ve visited federal prisons (not as an inmate, if you’re wondering) and generally seen a very pluralistic attitude toward religion. In fact, it appeared as though religion was encouraged no matter which branch or denomination it was—copies of the Quran, the Bible, the Talmud, Buddhist texts, and even a “new age” book or two all sat on the rolling library cart.
What I’m really getting at is the other side of this particular coin. While there are plenty of folks upset over being hounded by Christians and conservative groups and bemoaning the presentation of witchcraft on “Bones” as a bleak cult phenomenon, I think there are ever more positive images of Pagans, witches, and magical folk surfacing in the world. The J. Peterman catalog is one example of someone taking the stereotype of the “hippie witch” and playing with it to create a little romance and allure—all in the name of capitalism, of course. I’m sure some would accuse this catalog (or me even) of “Uncle Tom” passivity over the commercialization of sacred traditions, but honestly I’m just pleased as punch that they referenced one of the much-less discussed holidays on the general Pagan calendar (though it’s not on my personal calendar, but that’s beside the point). Anyone will mention witches and Pagans at Halloween—who talks about Mabon, though?
I’ve noticed that this sort of “popular Paganism” has been surfacing more and more, which is rather heartening to me. On a Simpsons episode recently, Lisa temporarily joins a Wiccan coven, then stops the town from engaging in a full-on witch-hunt. An episode of Futurama from a few years ago showed main character Leela wishing to be a witch, but only “As long as I get to hurt people and not just dance around at the equinox.” I even seem to recall an episode of the animated Batman series from the 90’s where Batman needed the help of a Wiccan coven to solve a case (why is it that cartoons are so dang progressive?). I’m not saying that I think all of these portrayals are accurate, but they are all positive (Leela’s desire to be a “wicked witch” notwithstanding—she does portray non-wicked witches in fairly benign terms).
I don’t usually go into posts like this here at New World Witchery, and I don’t plan to make a habit of it going forward. I just found the lovely coincidence of the catalog arriving just as I was thinking about Fire Lyte’s post to auspicious to pass up. But I’d love to hear your thoughts, too. Do you see Pagans, witches, animists, and other magical folk as persecuted? Have you experienced outright persecution in your life (not a fear of it, but actually losing custody of a child or getting fired from a job because of it)? Do you see popular examples of paganism elsewhere? Do you think the public perception of Pagans is going less from “scary weirdos” to “funny eccentrics” as I do? Please leave your comments and your thoughts!
Okay, enough op-ed for the day from me! Thanks for reading!
-Cory
P.S. To all you wonderful folks who have commented or emailed and not received responses, I promise I’ll be getting back to you soon! Sorry for the delay!
Summary
Laine and Cory discuss favorite spellbooks and how they design their own magical texts. In Witchcraft, Laine looks at the craft of bookbinding, while in Spelled Out, Cory talks about magically binding books.
I know that I’ve been a bit scanty on blogging lately, for which I apologize most profusely. Unfortunately, I’m likely to stay busy with many irons in many fires for quite some time to come, but I feel like you readers are wonderfully patient with me when the blog and podcast have dry spells and I want to reward that. And so, I have put something together for those of you who have been taking an active interest in the recent cartomancy posts.
I’ve put together those posts with some additional material in an e-book, which I’m making available for download free from the site:
It’s a PDF and should be easily readable with Adobe Reader. Like I said, it’s totally free. Feel free to save it, copy from it, distribute it, etc. Please do attribute any citations, excerpts, or references back to me, but otherwise, I hope you enjoy it! And if you do like the book, consider making a donation here, or with the button on the sidebar.
I’m also planning to revise this material, with some additional sample readings, expanded information, a quick-reference chart, and improved graphics and release it as a chapbook sometime in the near future. The printed chapbook will have a cost of some kind (and will probably be sold through our Compass & Key Etsy shop, which I’m hoping to revamp and relaunch soon), but I’ll try to keep it very reasonable. The e-book will remain available through the site, however, and I intend to keep it free/donations-only for all to download.
I know it’s nothing spectacular, but I hope it is useful to some of you. Thank you all so much again for your patience and your patronage of New World Witchery, both blog and podcast. We really appreciate your support!
New World Witchery - The Search for American Traditional Witchcraft 