Category: Blog

Blog Post 187 – Magical Hats

Cowboy hats for sale in Austin, TX (photo by Nika Vee, via Wikimedia Commons)

There’s a line from the classic (well, sort of) movie Smokey & the Bandit in which Burt Reynolds’s character explains to his lady of the film that he only takes his hat off for one thing, to which his female companion (Sally Field), of course, replies: ‘Take off your hat.’

Costume is frequently a reflection of ceremonial, ritual, or even magical operation, an outer manifestation of inner desire or power. A nun’s habit or a burqa can both represent a commitment to religious life, and inspire reactions from those around them. The ceremonial robes of a Thelemic magician frequently conform to specific standards to enhance invocations and rituals. The Encyclopedia of American Folklore notes:

Folklorists who discuss adornment have concentrated on costume’s socializing force and its relationship to the maintenance of individual and group identities. According to Don Yoder (1972), folk costume expresses identity in a symbolic way; functioning as an outward “badge” of community identity and expressing an individual’s manifold relationships to and within that community (Brunvand 341).

One of the items frequently associated with magicians is the magic hat—whether it’s the shiny tophat of a stage magician concealing a rabbit in its depths or the pointy, star-spangled adornment of a fantasy wizard. In American lore the hat has a special place as a magical item, frequently providing either symbolic guidance, otherworldly taboo, or a method of deployment in spell-casting.

When people think of American hats, possibly the most iconic is the cowboy’s ten-gallon hat (which, of course, does not hold ten gallons, but the galon hatband worn by Southwestern vaqueros). I remember teaching overseas and asking about impressions of America, and the most common response was that we tend to wear cowboy hats and smile a lot.

The cowboy hat—as well as a number of other elements of ‘rugged’ American folk costume—was borrowed from other cultures:

Many specifically American types of costume emerged from the interaction of diverse costume traditions in dialogue with indigenous materials and environments. Recognizable forms in Western regional costume, for example, are creolized forms resulting from the interaction of different traditions of dress. The costume of mountain men who charted new Western territory—fringed buckskin coats, breeches and shirts, fur “coonskin” hats, and thick, colorful blanket jackets—was an adaptation of Native American costume forms suitable for native environments and constructed with indigenous materials. The occupational costume of the American cowboy was also the result of the interaction of various cultural forms in dialogue with the demands of occupation and environment. Many of the recognizable elements of the classic American cowboy costume, such as spurs, hat, boots, and chaps, were the result of cultural exchanges between working Anglo and Mexican cowboys, known as vaqueros. Vaqueros were known by their wide-brimmed hats, short jackets, colorful neckerchiefs, red sashes, elaborate spurs, and protective leather leggings (Brunvand 343)

Given the emblematic nature of the Stetson and its kin and the frequently superstitious nature of life in the Old West, it is hardly surprising that lore has arisen surrounding this headgear. Probably the most common belief surrounding the cowboy hat has to do with what to do when you’re not wearing it. There seems to be an absolute taboo on placing a hat on the bed, which appears in everything from Southwestern rodeo lore to Oregon folk belief.

In both the American South and West, a particular custom of hat-burning following the birth of the first baby (or sometimes only the firstborn son) of a miner prevails. From Vance Randolph’s Ozark Magic & Folklore comes the following account:

In some clans, when a baby boy is born, a sister of the babe’s father comes to the house, looks at the child, and then burns the first hat she finds. No matter whose it is, nor how valuable, she just picks up a hat and throws it into the fireplace. Many people laugh at this and pretend to take it lightly, but it is never omitted in certain families. I know of one case where there was some doubt about the child’s paternity, and the husband’s family were by no means friendly to the young mother, but despite all this one of the sisters came and burned the hat; she did it silently and grudgingly and most ungraciously, but she did it. This practice is never discussed with outsiders, but it is sufficiently known that a series of funny stories has grownup about hats being burned by mistake, strangers’ hats missing, doctors leaving their hats at home, and so on (Randolph 205)

This practice was also found in California by folklorist Wayland Hand, where “[o]n occasion of a miner’s first trip to the mine after the arrival of the firstborn, his comrades simply seize his hat and burn it despite any resistance or protests offered” (Hand 52). This act functions both as an initiatory rite and as a method of preventing bad luck for the child. Hand also notes that the baby was usually made to touch the hat if possible prior to its cremation. A soldier’s hat could also be worn by a woman in labor to give her strength during the birth, furthering the link between children and hats.

A number of traditions from African American folklore have been attached to hats. In most cases, headgear serves as a method for the transference of contagious magic, sometimes almost in a medical sense: “if one borrows a hat from a diseased person, and the wearer sweats round the forehead where the hat rests, he will take the disease” (Steiner 267). Harry Hyatt recorded a string of beliefs among African Americans surrounding hat lore:

9750. If a girl puts a man’s hat on her head, she desires him to kiss her; if a man puts his hat on a girl’s head, he desires to kiss her.
9751. A girl should never put a man’s hat on her head; it will cause quarrels with him.
9752. The girl who tries on a man’s hat will not get him for a husband.
9753. If a woman throws her hat and gloves on a man’s bed, she wants to sleep with him; if a man throws his hat on a woman’s bed, he wants to sleep with her.
9754. A girl can strengthen a sweetheart’s love by laying his hat on her bed when he comes to see her.
9755. The significance of a beau refusing to hand his hat to his girl when he calls on her is love growing cold. 9756. A girl stepping on a man’s hat will soon marry the owner.
9757. “The girls did this when I was young: in the spring stamp with your thumb in the palm of your hand the first twenty-seven straw hats you see and you will meet your beau.”
9758. If a girl takes the bow out of the hat of each man liked, she will marry the owner of the seventh hat.
9759. Let a girl take as many bows as possible from the hats of men liked and wear them on her garter; the bow staying on longest will reveal who among these men loves her best (Hyatt 231)

Clearly some of these are contradictory, as in the piece about one gender wearing the other’s hat breeding either contempt or desire. There does seem to be a very strong connection between hats and sexuality, however, perhaps because the hat sits so close to the brain and retains the warmth of the head, it may be seen to cause ‘feverish’ behavior, such as love, lust, or even fighting. The divinatory rites surrounding hats are also interesting, although I suspect these performances have less to do with any direct effect upon the mind and more to do with other counting rituals related to love forecasting. Several tricks in the practice of old-style hoodoo involve acquiring the band from a man’s chapeau and using it to deploy any number of tricks, mostly designed to influence him in love (or occasionally business).

A bit of lore from the Southern mountains tells about how a person can reverse bad luck caused by unfortunate omens (in particular a fearsome rabbit crossing one’s path): [If a] Rabbit runs cross yur path, turn yur hat ‘roun’. (Wear your hat with the back part in front.)” (Duncan 236). This is not much different from the idea of turning around if a black cat crosses one’s path or even turning a key or coin over in one’s pocket after seeing an unlucky sign. In an era when hats are frequently worn backward (if worn at all), this sort of act is probably much less out of place today than it would have been half a century or so ago.

Hats, then, can be deeply magical objects to those that wear them. It’s hardly surprising that Lyle Lovett sings of his size-7 Stetson, “Well if it’s her you want, I don’t care about that/ You can have my girl, but don’t touch my hat.”

So what about you? Do you have any hat-related lore? What kinds of hats hold particular magic for you? The pointy costume ‘witch’ hat? A trucker’s cap owned by a favorite grandfather? I’d love to hear what makes your hat special and whether you ever ascribe anything magical to it.

Thanks for reading!

-Cory

Blog Post 186 – The Seventies Witch

Borrowed from Pinterest user shuttlecock (click for link)

Or, “Myrtle Snow is my Power Animal.”

[NOTE: The original version of this article contained a phrase that, used in this context, is insensitive and appropriative towards several Native cultural traditions. I leave the original above with a strikethrough to indicate that such use was a mistake. My mistake. I regret the choice of phrase and I apologize for any discomfort or harm it causes to anyone. I don’t want to completely erase the original because I worry that doing so will look like I’m trying to hide the mistake, which I’m not trying to do. I want others to see and know this was not a good choice on my part, and that I am sorry for it.]

(A few AHS: Coven spoilers below, but no major plot points)

For those who, like me, spent the past four months or so riveted to the meandering and bizarre plots of the American Horror Story: Coven television series, the ride is now over and we’re all left sorting out wheat from chaff from eyeballs from  axe-murdering ghosts living in knotty pine hell. One of the most interesting and unusual characters in this season was Myrtle Snow (portrayed by the luminous Frances Conroy), a complicated, artistic, eccentric witch that is just about everything you could dream of having in a crazy aunt who can cast spells and is willing to melon-ball out the eyes of her enemies to restore your own sight. Myrtle plays the theremin, knows fashion inside and out (one of the best moments in the series was her screaming “Balenciaga!” at a crucial moment in the final episode), and has a palate for classic French and continental cuisine. She is, in short, a child of the seventies. More importantly, she is a child of the seventies witch.

Today I wanted to briefly look at that decade (which I’m treating as a “long” decade, starting in around 1965 and going through the very early 80s), which spawned a very particular witchy aesthetic.  It was the decade of Stevie Nicks (another AHS trope) and saw a marked growth in the popularity of occult themes across all sectors of American—and international—society. This is not going to be comprehensive, of course, and I know this is not exactly folk magic drawn from a weather-beaten nineteenth-century almanac, but I think that we should be cognizant of the role of recent (well, as recent as almost half-a-century ago, anyway) history in the development of modern magic and witchcraft. If the Victorian era was the early bloom of occultism, the seventies was the springtime explosion of color, dripping nectar, and bloody thorns which allowed a lot of the witchcraft we have today to re-surge, and it even helped fuel some of the studies of folk magic which have been so crucial to us in contemporary times.

In 1958, the film Bell, Book, & Candle featuring Kim Novak, James Stewart, and Jack Lemmon appeared in movie houses following a popular run of the play on Broadway. The sympathetic witch, played by Novak, and her hep-cat brother Nicky (Lemmon) mark some of the earliest American pop-culture portrayals of sorcerers who are not scary and evil, but hip, cool, and attractive. The success of the film eventually fed into the production of the classic television show Bewitched, which ran from 1964 to 1972, which starred Elizabeth Montgomery as the beautiful and charming Samantha. These portrayals are occasionally problematic—the film requires Novak’s character to give up witchcraft in the name of love, and the show was centered around Samantha’s struggles to sublimate her magic so that her husband could lead a comfortable suburban life (although that magic frequently saves his proverbial bacon)—but these glowing women brought glamor to the popular American experience of witchcraft, and the occult looked a lot less intimidating.

Knock, knock!

Then, in 1967, Ira Levin published his book Rosemary’s Baby. The following year, Roman Polanski adapted the book into a film the following year, and the eerie occult was back, with full-on Satanic conspiracies lurking behind Manhattan closet doors. Even in Rosemary’s Baby, however, the glamor persisted—the eccentric but resplendent witches-next-door, Roman and Minnie Castavet (played by Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer), were magnetic, and served frosty cocktails in their spacious New York flat. There Satanic witch-cult even seems more like an anarchy art clique than a sinister magical lodge for the most part. The film put the fear of witches back into the American mind, however, with a new twist—witches were spooky, but spooky was cool. Incidentally, another classic occult film, The Devil Rides Out, appeared in theaters the same year as Rosemary, and lit its own subtle fires under the cauldron.

With this new-found social capital, witchcraft and the occult took the world by storm in the seventies. Some of the occult films which appeared during the decade were hallmarks of art and cult cinema: Simon, King of the Witches (1971); The Devil’s Daughter (1973); The Exorcist (1973—not a true ‘witch’ film, but one with strong occult ties and influence); The Wicker Man (1973); Season of the Witch (1973, directed by zombie-genre great George A. Romero); Lisa & the Devil (1974); and the highly glamorous Suspira (1977), a veritable precursor to 2010’s creepy art-dance film Black Swan. In essentially all of these films, the presence of the occult is a trope, and does not have any of the benign or jovial qualities of Bell, Book, & Candle or Bewitched. Yet each film features a mixture of eroticism, fashion, and allure layered over the tale of black magic driving the story. Liberation, sexual empowerment, and countercultural energy augment the horror of the films, and the gray space between forbidden occultism and fashionable society becomes a gulf.

Art and music also experienced an occult florescence during the seventies. The aforementioned Stevie Nicks—the “White Witch” of music—joined the group Fleetwood Mac along with boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham in 1974, and in 1975 the group experienced mainstream success with an album featuring witchy hits like “Rhiannon.” Her flowing shawls, black gowns, and stage twirls bewitched audiences, and her fashion became a standard of young, hip women seeking to look a little out of the mainstream—a little “witchy.” The occult music craze started well before Nicks, of course, and bands like Coven and Black Widow had experienced some chart success with their Satanic/witchy black rock during the late 60s. In 1970, Santana recorded and released Fleetwood Mac’s song “Black Magic Woman,” on their (fairly occult-named album) Abraxas, taking it to no. 1 on the pop music charts. In 1972, the Eagles released “Witchy Woman,” another big hit glamorizing witches, and in 1974 Cher released “Dark Lady,” about a love triangle involving a witchy fortune teller. Cher herself cultivated a glam-witch look throughout the decade, further expanding the cultural capital of witchcraft fashion. Other rockers who adopted elements of the occult into their songs, performances, and fashions include David Bowie, Jimmy Page, and, of course, Jim Morrison. Patti Smith notes the heavy influence of the occult on the Greenwich Village music scene in her memoir Just Kids, and especially the huge artistic influence that it had on artists like Robert Mapplethorpe. Penthouse magazine did erotic spreads centered on occult themes as well, such as this one featuring Babetta Lanzilli from 1974.

In the ‘real-world’ of witchcraft, a number of stars were aligning to add fuel to the magical fire. Chas Clifton outlines a number of the groups which were exploding onto the scene in his book Her Hidden Children, including the Psychedelic Venus Church and Anton LaVey’s Satanic Church, which also released a film called Satanis in 1970 (there are some great pictures of a 1969 LaVey here). Alex Sanders, the progenitor of Alexandrian Wicca, released an album revealing some of the workings of Wicca called A Witch is Born in 1970. Wicca had arrived stateside with Raymond Buckland in 1968 (although it may have had some early seeds from other sources, too). Buckland expanded on witchcraft religion through books like Witchcraft Ancient & Modern and Witchcraft from the Inside. The hugely influential publication of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land in 1967 led to the foundation of The Church of All Worlds (CAW) and shaped practices in other groups as well (such as the aforementioned Psychedelic Venus Church).  The mass-marketing of witchcraft became a staple of the 70s, with sales of “black magic ritual kits” hitting store shelves and a variety of occult-inspired board games. The Ouija game was purchased by Parker Bros. in 1966, and they began to push it as a party game rather than a spiritual tool. There was also a push towards legitimacy. Journalist Hans Holzer published his mainstream apologetic (and sensationalist at times) text The Truth About Witchcraft and opened the door to public discussions of its practices as legitimate, if fringe, activities done by regular people. Wicca and neo-Paganism in general underwent a rapid expansion and transformation, and the end of the decade saw the journalistic survey of new witchcraft (and other alternative) faiths in Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon (1979). That same year, Starhawk published The Spiral Dance, which crystallized the evolving feminist Wicca movement. A busy, busy decade for witchcraft.

I should point out that these different aspects of witchcraft may have occasionally interacted with one another, but they were not in strict conversation through the decade. Instead, the popular conception of the occult and witchcraft grew in one direction—often sensational and glamorous—and the nature-based religions that were gaining momentum in fringe spiritual culture. Yet there does seem to be a shared zeitgeist from that era that drove ever more people into the black-robed arms and beshawled shoulders of witches. For a number of people, the ecological spiritualism which was fueling part of the neo-Pagan segment was a complete non-starter. Instead, the sex, drugs, & rock-and-roll aspects of witchery worked as an artistic medium of self-expression. Both segments were connected to counterculture, but with different aims and methods. Following this decade, with its chaos and beauty, the occult got heavily mired in a number of problems, most notably the “Satanic panic” of the 80s. With the recent popularity of witchcraft in media, I’d be hardly surprised to find a resurgence of people claiming to have been harmed or attacked by evil cults over the next two decades or so. Let’s hope there’s been some growth on that front and that the information age will keep it in check, but I somehow doubt the ripples aren’t already in motion for the next “panic.”

So what does all this have to do with Myrtle Snow and the Diane von Furstenburg  wrap dress (“the greatest invention of the century,” according to dear Auntie Myrtle)? I think that it can be very easy to lose sight of just how diverse witches are, for one thing. Dressing in black (despite AHS:Coven’s edict that “On Wednesdays we wear black”) may be a statement, but so is sporting a pair of black-and-red Pleasers for ritual sex, and there’s nothing wrong with a Pier 1 altar and a little P90X before ritual. I don’t want this to devolve into a post on there being no one type of witch, or on what witches should or shouldn’t look or act like, but I do think that the recent witchcraft revival in pop culture means that there’s room for some real glamor in witchery again. Folk magic performed with embedded style and power—a flair for the dramatic—could be a very refreshing thing. I’d like to see witches embracing their own high-fashion spins on tried and true witchcrafts—not so much glitter in conjure oils, but a really knowledgeable mixologist of a witch brewing enchanted herb rinses for bewitching cocktail hours, for example. I certainly don’t want to see the folk magic I study and practice cheapened by commercial interests, of course, but I would love to see a few more Myrtles playing the theremin around bonfires, while our cultural capital is so ascendant.

What about you? Is there a place for glamor and high fashion in your witchcraft? Are the seventies still alive in your spells?

Thanks for reading!

-Cory

Borrowed from KPopStarz (click for link)

Blog Post 185 – New World Witchery Cartulary No. 5

Happy New Year to you!

Today I thought I might share a few of the things from my holiday stocking, as well as other treats and delights I’ve been enjoying lately. I got a very lovely and eclectic selection of books & music, some of which might be of interest to folks here, so if you find something among the pile that you like, I’d love to know!

The first thing I want to mention is a beautiful copy of Crossway’s Four Holy Gospels. It’s the English Standard Version (ESV) of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John illuminated using contemporary art by Makoto Fujimura. It’s a big, gorgeous clothbound edition and conveys a great deal of the mystical nature of these texts. I know it’s a bit odd to recommend a Bible of sorts on a site with so much magic and all, but if you’ve been around us for a while you know that we’re equal opportunity when it comes to mysticism and magic. So if you’re looking for a good heirloom version of the gospels with a little artistic magic, this is a good one to have.

In addition to the gospels, I got a copy of an excellent book called Kanaval: Vodou, Politics, & Revolution on the Streets of Haiti. It’s a photojournalistic look at the Haitian carnival costumes, parades, and traditions, and it will be of extreme interest to anyone captivated by the rituals of Vodou(n) or other African Traditional Religions. A number of lesser-known loa show up in the text, and there are oral histories from participants in the celebrations that are simply unmatched in recent history. In addition to the book and its magnificent photos, there are two accompanying CDs (one of which I received along with the gospels from my in-laws—I have an amazing family). One is called Spirits of Life, which has a number of ritual songs, and the other is Rara in Haiti and plays some of the more celebratory carnival jazz-style music.  I also bought myself a simply wonderful new magical psalter from Troy Books:  The Charmer’s Psalter, by Cornish witch Gemma Gary. It has fast become one of my favorite magical books and travels with me everywhere now.

Shifting from the authentic to the entertaining, I’ve been very much enjoying this year’s run of American Horror Story, subtitled Coven and set in a world of New Orleans Voodoo and witchcraft. I actually introduced Laine to the show, and she’s taken off running with it, consuming the first two seasons as well (subtitled Murder House and Asylum). I’m sure we’ll wind up discussing it more elsewhere, and it’s generating some controversy around the Pagan blogosphere, but if you’ve not checked it out and enjoy good, immersive horror, it’s fun to watch, in my opinion.

In that same vein, I’ve also been enjoying the kitschy-but-witchy antics of Witches of East End on Lifetime. I can’t say it’s a must-see, but the episodes I’ve seen have been enjoyable and if you’re a fan of things like Charmed, this might be fun, too. Might.

A lot has been going on in the podcasting universe lately, too. I’ve been tuning in to a couple of new shows, including The Kindle Witch with Faelyn, Pagan Life Radio with Brent/Raven, and one called Disney Story Origins. The first two offer some nice new elements to the Pagan podcasting world. Faelyn uses her show to explore books in a sort of book-club format, while also sharing a lot of neat moments from her own practice. Brent/Raven uses his show to create a really neat community space for talking to Pagans working on specific goals, or just get into good discussions about the role of Paganism in contemporary society. The Disney origins podcast is a gem, where the host compares and contrasts the stories that inspired Disney movies to the films and explores how that translation happens. The most recent episode gets into the excellent recent film Frozen and its inspiration, “The Snow Queen,” by Hans Christian Andersen (a section of which was included in our Yule show this year).

I’m also sad to say we’re losing at least one of our podkin for a while. Gillian at Iron Powaqa recently announced she’s taking an open-ended break from recording to focus on other projects. I completely understand her reasons, but she will definitely be missed. I fear this will be a trend, as several podcasters have disappeared this year.  On a happier podkin note, Fire Lyte has published his first book of poetry, The Playground, which is available in several formats now. If you’re a fan of his poetry, this is definitely a book to get (plus it supports Pagan podcasting, which is always a noble cause).  Finally, if you’ve not been listening to Peter Paddon’s revitalized podcast, do so! It’s the reason New World Witchery even exists, and he’s an absolutely charming fellow (all puns intended).

That’s all the news that’s fit to print for me this week! What was under your tree this year?

Don’t forget to enter our contests! We’ve got a NOLA Swag Bag contest finishing this Friday, and a Three Questions contest which will finish up next week. Give ‘em a go, and maybe win something fun!

Thanks for reading!

-Cory

Quick Update – A New Year, A(nother) New Giveaway!

Divination Prize Pack

There’s a bit of folk superstition about New Year’s Day that says whatever you want to be doing for the next twelve months, make sure you’re doing it on January 1st. You’re also not supposed to start anything you can’t finish, which brings me to this quick-n-dirty little blog post. I intend (dare I say hope?) that I will be doing a tremendous amount of writing over the coming year, including finishing several writing projects I’ve been working on for a while, so I wanted to make sure I wrote something for New World Witchery before midnight tonight. But I also have been using the day to accomplish a dozen other New Year’s magical traditions (cleaning, black-eyed peas, collard greens, etc.) so I thought a short and simple giveaway post might just kill the proverbial twin birds.

For this giveaway, we’ll be handing out a doozy of a divination prize pack. It includes:

  • A copy of my cartomancy book, Fifty-four Devils
  • A mini-altar kit and pair of mini-dowsing rods from Franchesca at The Texan Heretics
  • A bottle of Psychic Boost Oil from the lovely Magnusons of Candlesmoke Chapel
  • A stunning javamancy board from Chas Bogan of Carnivalia
  • A five-card email card reading from me, complete with card report

Pretty stellar, huh?

So what do you have to do to get an entry into this contest? It’s incredibly simple! Just answer one or more of the following questions:

  1. What are your magical/witchy/Pagan New Year’s resolutions? What magical projects do you hope to get off the ground? Are there areas you want to learn more about? Are you going to get more involved in the community? Just give us a brief snapshot of what you hope to accomplish from a magical standpoint in the coming year.
  2. What is your favorite magical/witchy/Pagan holiday and why? What do you do for it? Has it always been your favorite? What will you be doing to make it special this year?
  3. What (if any) practices, spells, etc. has New World Witchery been able to add to your cauldron? Are there specific regions of folk magic you’ve begun to explore more (like Conjure or Powwow)? Do you find the info here useful on a practical level or is it more of a general information site for you?

That’s it! All you have to do is write to us at compassandkey@gmail.com and answer a question or two or three. You get one entry per question answered, so you have a chance to get up to three entries just by writing to us (you can combine all answers into a single email, as long as you make it clear you’re answering multiple questions somehow). Make sure to use the subject line “Three Questions Contest” so I know what you’re writing us about.

The deadline for this contest will be Friday, January 31st, so get your answers to us by then!

Also, please check out and/or enter our other current contest for one of three NOLA swag bags, which will be ending January 17th!

Thanks everyone for a great 2013, and here’s looking forward to a very enchanted new year!

-Cory

Blog Post 184 – Comets

The Comet of 1680, by Lieve Verschuier (via Wikimedia Commons)

“Like a comet burn’d
That fires the length Ophiuchus huge
In the Arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war” (Milton, Paradise Lost)

With the ISON comet drawing eyes to the night sky, I started thinking a lot about the superstitions and magical beliefs surrounding the appearance of comets in the sky. Comets have long inspired people in strange, occasionally beautiful, and sometimes disturbing ways. Mark Twain’s life was framed by the appearance of Haley’s Comet, a point the author himself noted. The Heaven’s Gate cult engaged in a group suicide surrounding the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet.

Increase Mather, famed early American religious writer, dedicated an entire work to explaining the spiritual importance of comets in his Kometographia of 1683. He was responding to the presence of the Great Comet of 1680, which had captured the attention of most of the Western world, and felt that many people would be afraid at this sign and misunderstand it as a phenomenon which directly influenced the course of events on earth, rather than a sign from God of some important event to come (see more here). Generally speaking, comets have historically been associated with strife and woe to come. My Opie/Tatem Dictionary of Superstitions gives a laundry list of examples of ill-omen presaged by what the Venerable Bede called “long-haired stars”:

  • A comet as portending a change in governance (Tacitus, Annals)
  • Famine or pestilence or war or “fearful storms” (Byrhtferth, Manual)
  • A comet [the Great Comet of 1680] appeared two days before the Duke of Monmouth died, and all over Europe before the death of Charles II (J. Case, Angelical Guide)
  • An appearance before the plague struck London (Defoe, Journal of a Plague Year)
  • A wry observation that those who laugh at comets as tokens of disaster will studiously insist on “times and situations proper for intellectual performances” (Johnson, The Idler)

In the New World, comets seem to have retained much of their wicked reputation. In some cases the danger foretold by the comet is vague and ill-defined: “When a comet appears there will be trouble” (Roberts, “Louisiana Superstitions”). In other places, the significance of the hairy star was more direct and its consequences very  clearly understood: “A comet is a sign of war” (Thomas, Kentucky Superstitions).  Why should these astronomical phenomena, which had been showing up in night skies for ages, have such a bad rap? Considering even Classical authors like Tacitus cite the comet as woeful, the impulse must run deep. The unique cosmological view of Calvinism, though, which influenced much of Atlantic American colonization, both denigrated occult practices like witchcraft and supported an enchanted view of a univers under Divine direction:

“The Calvinism of the colonial awakenings also paralleled important occult ideas. The fatalism inherent in Calvinism’s concept of predestination found an occult equivalent in the idea fundamental to astrology that motions of star and planets revealed a future that individuals could not control. Calvinist evangelists and occult practitioners also explained catastrophes in similar ways. Believers in occult ideas thought the coming of comets and eclipses had inescapable and usually disastrous consequences; not even kings and queens escaped their verdicts. No one escaped judgment by the Calvinist God either. Sometimes He damned seemingly model Christians simply to demonstrate His sovereign” (Butler, “Magic, Astrology, & the Early American Religious Heritage”).

The shared cosmology of the colonists saw the universe as inhabited by spiritual consciousness, and an intelligence that wished to convey its meaning to human beings for one reason or another. Signs, omens, and portents were one such method. Comets, with their placement among the stars, their strange and ill-understood movement, and temporary nature made perfect fodder for prognosticators of all stripes—religious, occult, and both (they did exist, even during the Colonial period).

Lest we make the mistake of thinking that the observation of comets was the purview of only a few dusty old white occultists or a lot of fiery former Englishmen with strong religious convictions, I’d also like to point out that the cosmology which imbued comets with significance stretched across a broad swath of New World denizens, including Native Americans, Spanish and French colonists, and of course, the imported Black slaves.

“English Protestants often read unusual events as evidence of the divine presence in everyday life, acknowledging the activity of a creator deity who operated through omens and portents within the natural order, or signs and wonders in the heavens, philosophy known as Providentialism. “Comets, hailstorms, monster births and apparitions” and other disruptions of the ordinary were demonstrations that foretold God’s will or signaled His displeasure withhumankind. Africans’ understandings of the universe were also inspired by visible manifestations of spiritual forces within nature. They too viewed thunder, lightning, and other elements as heralds of sacred hierophanies,the awesome presence of numerous divine beings.” (Chireau, Black Magic).

The Providentialism Chireau notes fits the cosmology of the English and other European settlers, but it is clearly not unique to them. A world with Divine presence not only innate to its component parts, but in which those component parts act as mediums for communicating with humans, is also very much an African perspective. And while it is tempting to think that such beliefs can be relegated to history’s dustbin, we should also remember that in our time comets stir up a lot of strange excitement. Religious scholar Camile Paglia notes, for example:

“The Children of God, founded in 1968 as Teens for Christ by “Moses” David Berg in Huntington Beach, California, were negligible in number but came to public attention when they loudly prophesied that the us would be destroyed by Comet Kohoutek in January 1974. The group continues under the name “The Family” and is regularly excoriated by conserva tive Christian watchdog groups for its practice of free love (called “Flirty Fishing”) as well as its heretical beliefs that Jesus was sexually active and that God is a woman. (Paglia, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness”)

Paglia also references the Hale-Bopp comet mentioned earlier, and Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult. I have, so far, not heard of any particularly distressing phenomena surrounding ISON’s appearance, but if nuclear war breaks out, I may have to blame that particular “long-haired star.”

If you have comet lore you’d like to share, please do so in the comments!

As always, thanks for reading!

-Cory

Quick Update – NOLA Swag Contest!

Hi all!

If you’ve listened to the latest episode, you know we’re having another big contest right now. We had such generous sponsors this year we were able to put together a few extra swag bags for fan giveaways, so you have the opportunity to win one of these stuffed full of magical goodies!

kathleen_swag_bag_2013What’s in the bag, you ask? Well, specific contents will vary a bit (due to the personalized nature of the sponsor items in some cases), but I can tell you about our fantastic sponsors and what they sent along to give you a good idea what would be in there:

  • Javamancy Kit – Carnavalia/The Mystic Dream  – Chas Bogan and Storm Faerywolf created a fun and clever play on geomantic divination with a Victorian flair.
  • Three Venezuelan Powers Holy Card Sets – Camino de Yara– The lovely Carolina Gonzalez shares a beautiful bit of South American folk magic with us.
  • Stay with ME Bath – The Curio & Candle Shop  – Ms. Melanie made these simply beautiful (and wonderfully scented) magical herbal baths.
  • Lucky Green Rice Sachets – Draconis Arcanum  – Rebecca sends you luck and good fortune, and invites you to share the promo code attached to her samples with your listeners (and use it yourself if you like!)
  • Handcrafted Conjure Condition Oils – Candlesmoke Chapel– The Magnusons (Sara & Joseph) are sharing some of their incredible and all-natural hoodoo oils.
  • 2014 Witches’ Companion – Llewellyn Publications – This almanac/annual magical compendium has oodles of lunar dates, spells, and articles.
  • Horsetamer CD – Julia Ecklar & Prometheus Music  – This lovely CD crosses Pagan, folk, and pop genres. Music can be used in podcasts, and especially recommended are tracks “With the Trees” & “The Troll King’s Dream.”
  • Traditions Download Card – Kellianna – A beautiful new record with an old soul! Feel free to listen and use the songs from this excellent album in your shows. Features many fabulous duets, including Wendy Rule, and a number of great old songs with Kellianna’s gorgeous vocal updates.
  • Enchantment – Pendraig Publishing– Peter Paddon (in attendance with us this year) sent his latest excellent book, all about the use of physical movement and beguiling in witchcraft. I bet he’d even sign it for you if you ask him.
  • Banshees, Werewolves, Vampires, & Other Creatures of the Night – Red Wheel/Weiser Books– Weiser supplied this Varla Ventura title all about the beasties of darkness which is sure to keep you up late at night!
  • The Candle & the Crossroads – Red Wheel/Weiser Books– Weiser also supplied this energetic look at Southern folk magic written by Orion Foxwood (who is one of the teachers at the Folk Magic Festival this year).
  • Fifty-four Devils Cartomancy Kit – New World Witchery – Cory & Laine give you his book on cartomancy, a fun deck of playing cards to try it out, and Laine’s hand-made card pouches to keep your fortune-telling deck safe!
  • Witches & Pagans Magazine  – BBI Media  – Anne Newkirk Niven & her team at BBI are providing us with the premier magazine in Paganism today.
  • Herbal Healing Salve – Rue & Hyssop/Three Brooms & a Cat  – Jen sadly couldn’t make it this year due to last-minute problems, but sent along these gorgeous hand-made herbal salves in her place.
  • Magical Miscellany Oil & Incense – Magical Miscellany– The lovely Velma Nightshade (also in attendance this year) has provided us with a sampling of her magical wares from her newly launched business venture, Magical Miscellany.
  • Coconut Oil & Obsidian – Kathleen Borealis/Borealis Meditations – Raw coconut oil and hand-selected obsidian chips from our brilliant globe-trotter, Kathleen!
  • Mini-Altar Kits/Dowsing Rods – Franchesca/VampRaven’s Nest– These super-cute little boxes contain a complete miniature altar set with candles, matches, incense, etc., plus a second box with little custom-made dowsing rods!
  • Scarlet’s Deck – Scarlet’s Treasures/Lakefront Pagan Voice– Scarlet surprised us with copies of her own very special and highly limited-edition tarot deck! These aren’t available for purchase anywhere, so only a few people, including us lucky podkin, have a copy!
  • And let’s also do our best to say thanks to Anna, owner of Erzulie’s Voodoo in New Orleans, who hosted us for our event (even if we were our own meet-and-greet, it was still nice of her to let us have the space for a couple hours).

A pretty fabulous haul, eh? There’s definitely at least $100 worth of stuff inside, but really the money side of it doesn’t begin to cover the quality, thought, and love in these items.

So now that you’re eagerly clawing at your scroll button, eyes big as saucers as you see all these amazing things that *you* can win, how do you go about getting your name in the hat?

Official Rules

  1. Purchase something, anything really, from one of the sponsors (preferably from one other than us, and preferably your purchase would have come after November 1st, but we’re not going to be incredibly rigid on those points). You could buy a wanga doll from Erzulie’s, or a copy of one of Peter Paddon’s books from Amazon, or pick up a copy of Witches & Pagans at your local bookstore…pretty much anything you want to buy. It can be for you, it can be a holiday gift, it doesn’t matter. Really we just want you to support our sponsors! [Edit: Dutiful listener Jasmine noted that requiring a purchase could land us in hot legal water. While the spirit of the contest is to encourage business with our sponsors, we will, of course, allow entries from folks who cannot purchase a product. No purchase necessary, simply email us and state you’d like to enter the contest and we’ll put your name in the hat.)
  2. Once you’ve purchased your item, take a photo of you with your purchase (or a copy of the receipt, or a screengrab of your digital receipt, etc.). Send that picture and a brief message asking to enter the contest and saying what you bought to compassandkey@gmail.com (or tweet it to us @NWWitchery).
  3. EVERY item you purchase gets you a new entry (as long as you send us a picture & message), so enter as much as you like!
  4. Contest ends at midnight, Central Time, on Friday, January 17th, 2014! Get us your picture(s) before then!
  5. We will draw three names at random from all the entries, and each of those three names will win a swag bag!
  6. Due to some of the items in this bag and potential international restrictions (as well as international shipping costs), this contest will only be open to listeners in North America. Sorry! 😦
  7. Winners will be announced in the late January show (our 4th pod-iversary!).

Not too complicated, I hope! If you happen to let the sponsors know you found them through New World Witchery, we’d love that, too!

So that’s the basics of this contest. We’ll keep some reminders going throughout the next month and a half, but entering early and often can’t hurt! We’ll also have a few other small contests running between now and then for books and extra swag items, and most of that will happen via Twitter and Facebook, so make sure you’re watching us at those places, too.

Good luck everyone! And thanks for reading!

-Cory

Blog Post 183 –Lost in the Supermarket (Part II)

Last time, I looked at a few of the standard products found in a typical supermarket which could be easily used within a folk magical context. I’m continuing that theme today, and while I’ll still be doing my best to stay out of the ubiquitous enchanted spice aisle, I will be touching on a few ingestibles. Please note, however, that as I frequently say: THIS IS NOT A MEDICAL BLOG, AND NO INFORMATION PRESENTED HERE SHOULD BE TAKEN AS MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE. Before you start popping things into your mouth or rubbing them on your skin, you should make sure with your doctor that doing so will not lead to genetic mutation, pestilence, plague, or ennui of any kind.

supermarket_herbs_spices

I’m going to start in what my part of the country likes to think of as the “ethnic foods” section, which generally speaking involves a portion of the produce area and an aisle with Asian, Hispanic, and perhaps Italian meal ingredients. It’s where I found the candles I showed in the previous post, but in most of the grocery stores around here, despite the obviously oblivious marginalization that comes with a label like “ethnic” or “international” cuisine, the diversity of the consumer population has made a lot of once-rare items much easier to find. The section of these stores directed at Hispanic consumers provides a number of tools for folk magic that fall under the practices of curanderismo and/or brujeria. I’ve covered supermarket staples like eggs already, so today I thought I’d look at three somewhat more distinctive items: corn husks, hot peppers, and coconuts.

Corn Husks

The papery, stiff-but-pliant corn husk is absolutely essential for making really good tamales. Usually these come in huge packs (because if you’re going to go to the trouble of making tamales, you may as well make a lot of them), and they’re often dirt cheap. In fact, in the late summer, I frequently fine freshly stripped corn husks in buckets next to the corn displays, and few grocery store managers care if you grab a sackful to take home with you for free. So what sorts of magical mischief can you get up to with all those husks?

Corn dolly folk art (via Wikimedia Commons)

If you’re not making ensorcelled tamales, you might consider saving a few husks and turning them into doll babies for working various kinds of poppet magic. In some cases, the husks would be bound to the cob, along with various herbs and things like hair or clothing from the intended target to work a spell on them. Texan rootworker Starr Casas describes one such baby in The Conjure Workbook, vol. 1:

“When I was caring my daughter [sic] I was very ill. I was put on bed rest for five months. My Grandma knew this lady and asked her to come to my house and help me during the week. She treated people who were ill. I think that due to her efforts my daughter is alive today. I trusted her because my Grandma trusted her…She prayed over me every day; one day she asked if she could have some of my hair. She could have just taken the hair from my brush, at this time my hair was very long. She told me the hair needed to come from the crown of my head.

A few days later she came with this Dollie. This was the first time I had ever seen a doll like this. The body of the doll was a corn cob and the doll was covered in corn husk. When I asked her what it was for all she told me was to keep me and my baby safe. After I had my daughter the Dollie disappeared. When I asked her about the missing doll she told me the doll wasn’t needed anymore. I have never seen another Conjure doll like that one again” (Casas 246-7).

Starr’s encounter with this type of doll is not typical of conjure practice, something even she notes, but the use of doll baby magic is fairly common and corn husks make a simple, cheap, easy-to-make-and-destroy sort of doll. One reason that Starr may not have seen them since is that they are less directly associated with hoodoo and more directly associated with mountain crafts, particularly the crafts of the Appalachians. In fact, you can find wonderfully detailed instructions and step-by-step photos on constructing corn dollies in Foxfire 3, which records the folk practices of the southern Appalachians (a later compendium called The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Toys & Games also discusses the corn dolls, but doesn’t give the detail the actual anthology book does).  That’s not to say that such dolls are not found in any version of conjure—Dr. E mentions them in his article on doll making, found in The Black Folder, for example—but that they very likely drifted in from non-African sources. Their provenance matters not, though, because they are incredibly useful magical tools in any case.

Hot Peppers

Have you ever seen the sheer plethora of peppers available in a bodega? Even at the chain supermarkets, you can now find dozens of choices, ranging from fresh jalapenos and big, fat Anaheims to the huge sacks of tiny dried japones peppers and the small-but-potent habaneros. So what to do with all those peppers?

Of course, the obvious answer would be hot-foot work in hoodoo, but you can also get a little more creative than that. Using the peppers as a vessel, it takes very little effort (but a good bit of practice and caution) to slit open a habanero, stuff someone’s name inside and bind it back up. Doing that works sort of like a vinegar jar cranked up to eleven, in that it puts a lot of unpleasantness into someone’s life. Peppers don’t have to be all bad, either, as cooking them with something like chocolate creates a very different effect—a good hot cocoa with a hint of chili pepper makes an enlivening winter beverage, and a heck of an aphrodisiac! A little rum in that latter option helps, too, of course.

Speaking of rum, one of the more interesting uses for all those hot peppers in magic—and here I’m stretching the term to incorporate a certain degree of magical religion—is to soak the peppers into an alcohol like rum until it is nigh undrinkable. Why would you do that, you ask? Maya Deren explains the use of the drink during a Vodoun rite in her book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti:

“As Lord of Eroticism, he [Ghede] embarrasses men with his lascivious sensual gestures; but as God of the Grave he terrifies them with the evidence of the absolutely insensate: he will not blink even when the most fiery liquid is sprayed into his eyes, and only Ghede can swallow his own drink—a crude rum steeped in twenty-one of the hottest spices known. Thus he may alternately remind men that he is their past, their present and their future, that he is master of their compulsive drive to life and the inevitability of their death” (Deren 104).

Deren also notes that anyone claiming possession by Ghede is subject to both of the tests she mentions: having the hot rum sprayed in their eyes and being told to drink it. A truly possessed devotee will have no problem doing so (and likely be able to down the entire bottle of rum and show no effects after the possession ends).

Coconuts

If you ever need to pretend to ride a horse, you will probably automatically feel the need to buy a coconut and bang the two empty halves together to simulate the sound. At least if you grew up watching a lot of Monty Python that’s probably what you’d do. The coconut is good for more than equine simulations, however, and you can use the whole fruit/nut and its liquid for several magical functions.

“Retrato de una señora principal con su negra esclava,” by Vicete Alban (via Wikimedia Commons)

Drilling holes in the coconut will allow you to do two things: firstly you can get at the precious liquid, coconut milk, inside. It’s delicious and a wonderfully refreshing drink, but if you can resist the urge to down it all in one go, save some for later. Now that you have a semi-empty coconut with holes in it, why not stuff it full of name papers, sweet things like raw turbinado sugar (also available in the Hispanic section usually) and create a natural honey-jar spell? This sort of spell will, of course, not last as long as an actual honey-jar, but it has the advantage of being very quick and due to the sympathetic magic connected to the coconut’s skull-like density and shape, it works right on the minds of the folks targeted with the spell.

Speaking of heads, if you saved that liquid, you can turn that into a powerful magical formula as well. An African-derived magical practice known alternately as “feeding the head,” or in Vodoun as a lave tet ceremony (literally “head washing”) involves using a coconut wash on the head and hair during a ritual setting in order to fill it up with good spiritual forces. The feeding usually follows a simple head washing, either with natural water (sea water, spring water, etc.) or a number of aqueous formulae found in various traditions. Then comes the feeding:

“The process of feeding the head is simplicity itself. The coconut milk or cream is scrubbed into the head, just like the head-washing compound or a shampoo. Once the compound has been worked into the head, the hair may be combed out again. However, unlike a head-washing compound, the coconut compound should be left to dry on the head—preferably, overnight. A scarf or towel may be wrapped around the person’s head to insure this…In the morning, the coconut compound may be rinsed out and the person’s hair washed with a shampoo and dried, as it would normally be” (Mickaharic, Spiritual Cleansing, 101).

The richness of the coconut milk causes the spirits which guard a person (frequently though to be connected to a person’s head in African tradition) to be refreshed and take a renewed interest in the person’s well-being. It’s sort of like bribing a guardian angel with a good pina colada, which would be another fun way to use that coconut milk if you’re so inclined.

Of course, you don’t even have to open the coconut up to use it magically. I’ve seen a house cleansing method which involves simply kicking a coconut around a new home, through every room from top to bottom and back to front. You might say a psalm as you go, or repeat the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostles’ Creed. Other traditions use other incantations, songs, or words, but the point is the same: get the coconut all over the house, kicking it as you go, letting it soak up bad vibes like a sponge. When you finish you can either pick it up in your left hand and take it to a far away tree, where you crack it open and leave it at the roots, or you can drop it into running water heading away from your home. It essentially functions as an egg cleansing for a domicile, but coconuts tend to be less messy than eggs when kicked (Mickaharic has a variant on this practice using a head of lettuce in his Spiritual Worker’s Spellbook).

There’s an entire pharmacopeia in a well-stocked bodega, with everything from aloe vera gel (and the live plants) to nopales (prickly pear cactus, sometimes used in curanderismo for treating diabetes) to chicken feet and cattle tongues (both edible, but also both used in various hoodoo spells as well) available to an informed shopper. I mention these three ingredients solely as a way to begin to see the shelves as stocked with more than marketing gimmicks and high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden beverages. While having a good local witch shop is invaluable for many reasons, the grocery store may be your best friend when it comes to simple, practical magic.

I know this article barely scratches the surface of the subject, and I highly encourage you to look at some other sources on making the most of a grocery store’s shelves for your spell work. As I said before, much of my own inspiration came from Sarah Lawless’ post on the topic and Cat Yronwode’s compilation The Black Folder, which features not only an article on grocery store magic (covering things like onions and lemons) by Cat herself, but other useful tidbits such as Norwegian bread charms (from Dr. Johannes Gardback) and an article on “kitchen witchery” by Sister Robin Petersen. Of course there are probably dozens of books on this subject, many of which I’ve sadly neglected here. Do you know of any good grocery-store spells? If so, please feel free to post them to the comments below!

I may eventually come back to this topic another time, but for now I hope this has been a useful glimpse beneath the barcodes into the magic of the market.

Thanks for reading!

-Cory

Quick Update – Who’s Ready for a Giveaway?

Hi everyone!

We came away from PPSM4 in New Orleans this year with a few extra items that I thought might be fun to share with our readers! We’re going to start with some books. I’ve got a magical three-pack of books to give away, which includes:

      

The 2014 Witches’ Companion – Llewellyn Publications

Banshees, Werewolves, Vampires, & Other Creatures of the Night, by Varla Ventura – Red Wheel/Weiser Books

Fifty-four Devils, by Cory Thomas Hutcheson – New World Witchery

There will likely be an extra goody or two in the book box, too, but I’ll keep that stuff a surprise.

So what do you have to do to get entered? This time around, I’ll make it super-simple. All you have to do is either “like” our Facebook page or leave us an iTunes review. Email me at compassandkey@gmail.com to let me know you’ve done it (and tell me what day you did it so I can verify your entry), and I’ll put your name in the sorting hat! If you do both, you get two entries.

I’m going to put the contest deadline at midnight, Central Standard Time, on Friday, November 22nd, 2013. Please make sure you’re entered by then! If you win, I’ll reply to your email to ask for your mailing address.

Just to make it fun, I’ll even give away two runner-up prizes, copies of The 2014 Witches’ Companion from Llewellyn Publications.

We’ll have a slightly bigger and more exciting contest to announce in our upcoming podcast episode, too, but for now I thought this would kick things off for the holiday season nicely.

Good luck! And thanks for reading!

-Cory

Blog Post 182 –Lost in the Supermarket (Part I)

Customer making purchase in WWII grocery (via Wikimedia Commons)

If you have that song by the Clash in your head now, congratulations, that was my primary purpose in writing this article. Kidding.

Last time I took you on a quick but fun tour of my home to show how I’ve applied some of the folk magic I’ve picked up over the years in my personal life. Today, I’m drawing some inspiration from Sarah Lawless, whose article on “Pantry Folk Magic” is one of the finest pieces on using what’s at hand for practical spellwork that I’ve ever read. I’m also inspired by an article on “Grocery Store Magic,” in The Black Folder, a compilation of workshop notes by Cat Yronwode (which I recently reviewed), and I’ll be citing both of these sources as well as several others in the coming few paragraphs.

There are plenty of articles out there on doing magic from the grocery store, but I wanted to go beyond the spice aisle a bit and look at the vast number of folk magical items that may go a little under the radar in a standard shopping trip.

Before we go much further, I do want to mention that I don’t think the grocery store is the end-all be-all of magical supply houses. I prefer by far to grow or wildcraft my own botanicals, use hand-crafted incenses from a local occult shop, and carry talismans picked up at the nearby Catholic bookstore in a lot of cases. Supporting community commerce and doing work oneself fits in as well or better with most magical practices than grabbing a mass-produced box of incense from a five-and-dime shelf, but there are always going to be cases where magic must be done on short notice or with supplies not readily purchased at the witchy store. In some of the cases below, it should also be noted that the grocery stores where one can find these ingredients are not the big chains, but rather local bodegas or international markets.  You are far more likely to find chewing john (galangal root) in an Asian market than in a big chain one, for example. Now, on to the tour!

Candles

One of the big resources that frequently gets missed in grocery store magical item lists is the cornucopia of candles that can sometimes be found. Of course, a lot of stores carry scented jar candles and those are reasonable enough for doing some workings, but if you look in the Latin American or Hispanic section you can often find a number of saint candles as well. I’ve found everything from the standard Virgen de Guadalupe to Santa Muerte, Seven African Powers, Just Judge/Justo Juez, and even a Lucky Lotto Numbers candle just by browsing a little. Below you can see a pair of very cute candles which look like children’s novenas for working with Guadalupe or St. Jude, found at a mid-level chain grocery store.

Little Candles

The novena candles are also frequently available unlabeled and sometimes in multiple colors. It’s fairly easy to customize them to your own needs and do extended spellwork using these tools.

The candles don’t stop there, though. Say you want to do a quick-and-easy candle spell, but you know you won’t have time to burn a candle 1-2 hours per night for nine nights. Stop by the baking section and grab birthday candles, which are small and burn very quickly. Will it change the potency? Perhaps, but you’ll be able to at least do what you want to do. They also frequently have letter or number shaped candles, so you might be able to use those to target a specific goal or person with the spell (especially if you’re knowledgeable about numerology and can figure out the right number(s) for the job).

If your grocery also has a Jewish section with kosher options, check to see if they sell Shabbat candles. They frequently come in boxes at a very reasonable price, and are specifically designed to be used for spiritual purposes (albeit non-magical ones in most cases).  These burn longer than the birthday candles but much more quickly than novenas, and so would be good for mid-range spell work.

Cleaners

We’ve mentioned these a bit in our previous post on Spiritual House Cleaning, but here I mean less of the whole-herb types and more of the mass-produced stuff. Harshly-scented cleaning solutions with abrasive chemicals and artificial odors may not seem like a particularly likely place to find folk magic, but it’s there if you look for it. One of the most common of household cleaning agents, ammonia, acts as a substitute for urine in some spells. Cat Yronwode suggests in her Hoodoo Herb & Root Magic that ammonia can be used in spells focusing on protection and spells designed to improve sales, either at a business or of a home (Yronwode 29). In Spiritual Cleansing, Draja Mickaharic mentions ammonia’s great psychic cleaning powers and notes that putting a little bit down the drain after a house blessing & cleansing will help finish the job.

In a similar vein, we find plenty of uses for that old pantry/laundry/cleaning-closet standby, vinegar. Sarah plainly mentions vinegar as one of her grocery store finds for the working magician. All vinegars can be good for simple crossing work, according to Southern folk magic, and it would be very easy to turn cider or wine vinegars into a variety of Four Thieves Vinegar for both aggressive protection and subtle cursing. I mentioned on our Spell Failures episode that I had attempted to work a vinegar jar with poor results (mostly due to my lack of dedication). I found an interesting hexing combination of both vinegar and ammonia in Zora Neale Hurston’s article on “Hoodoo in America,” too:

i. To Punish.
When you want a person who is indited punished, write the name of the person in jail on a slip of paper and put it in a sugar bowl, or some other receptacle of the kind. Put in red pepper, black pepper, one penny nail, fifteen cents of ammonia and two keys.  Drop one key down in the bowl and lean the other against the side of the bowl. Go to the bowl every day at twelve and turn the key that is standing against the side of the bowl to keep the person locked in jail. Every time you turn the key, add a little vinegar (Hurston 382).

I find it interesting that both ammonia and vinegar seem to be able to perform cleansing functions in a household, but applied to an individual their corrosive nature seems to become destructive. I think this illustrates the principle of the two-sided coin of magic nicely, though, as the same ingredient that can save you from nasty spirits might also be turned around to damn an enemy.

Before I move off of cleaners, I want to mention a couple of the commercial products out there that have some magical history and applications. First, the famous Pine-Sol cleaner, which has been found in grocery stores for almost 60 years. The product was born in Mississipi, and even today contains pine oil to give it cleaning power and its trademark scent (along with a hefty dose of chemical salts and alcohols).  Pine oil is another spiritual cleanser and refresher, in addition to having some mundane cleaning properties as an antibacterial and antiseptic disinfectant. It works a lot like lemon does in spiritual cleansing—so much so that one of Pine-Sol’s first offshoot scents was lemon, although now they have half-a-dozen different aromas to choose from.  While I’d never suggest using a commercial pine cleaner on the body (or in the body especially…that’s a big no-no!), some folk magical traditions have used pine oil-based treatments for medical ailments (there’s a fine example in Hohman’s Long Lost Friend, for instance). So the presence of lemon and pine has the power to cut through spiritual ailments as well as the nasty germs lingering on your kitchen floor. You can make a variant of your own pine oil cleaner by simply adding pine oil to some salted water with some castile soap dissolved in it. It won’t be as strong as Pine-Sol, but it also won’t be quite as harsh. You could even add a bit of lemon juice or lemon oil to that, too, for extra kick (both spiritually and microbially speaking).

Since we’re talking of lemons and soap, I can’t help but at least briefly mention Murphy Oil Soap, which has been treating hardwood floors for over a century (although only in a mass market for about half that time). The cintronella oil in Murphy’s has a citrusy, lemony scent, and is both a lucky and cleansing ingredient in spiritual work (it’s one of the oils used in Van Van Formula). Queen of Pentacles Conjure notes that both Murphy’s and Pine-Sol make great additions to the spirit worker’s cleaning closet. Citronella keeps away mosquitoes, too, which makes me love it even more.

I’m going to pause here before continuing through the aisles, as this article is already quite long. There is plenty more to see as we make our way through the store, though, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading,

-Cory

Quick Update – Pagan Podcasters in New Orleans!

Hi all,

I just want to remind everyone that we’ve got our annual gathering of Pagan/Magical Podcasters coming up at the end of the week in the wonderful New Orleans, Louisiana. We’ve been posting about it over at our Facebook page and our Twitter account, and details are up at the event main page as well, but in case you’ve missed it, here’s the information on where you can come out and meet your favorite magical media folks:

Where: Erzulie’s in New Orleans
807 Rue Royal (St. Ann & Royal ~ French Quarter)
New Orleans, LA 70116

When: Saturday, November 9th, 2013. 11AM – 1PM(ish)

Attending Podkin include:

We’ll have a chance to chat, shop, and even give away a thing or two! Please stop by if you’re anywhere nearby! The Folk Magic Festival is also going on this weekend, so there’s plenty of enchantment going on!

Hope to see you in NOLA!

-Cory