Categotry Archives: folk

folk

by

Russian Black Magic – Natasha Helvin

No comments yet

Categories: folk, satanism, Tags:

Russian Black Magic coverPicking up where her previous book Slavic Witchcraft left off, Natasha Hevin’s Russian Black Magic turns a dark corner into regions unequivocally black. While its predecessor considered fairly generic folk magic, with, as the review attested, some psychologically-questionable attitudes towards consent and mental wellbeing, the negativity here is of a more glamourous kind, with a book whose explicit diabolism might seem at odds with something as New Age-adjacent as the Destiny Books imprint of Inner Traditions.

Helvin divides her book into two halves, the first and shorter being a history and theory lesson, whilst the second is a practical spellbook, a Black Magic Spellbook, as it plainly says on the tin. As an indicator of the grimdark vibe, if this wasn’t enough, Russian Black Magic is preceded by the de rigueur cautionary note warning that anyone who performs these spells does so at their own risk, and Helvin and the publishers accept no liability. Neat.

Helvin writes in a forceful almost proselytory manner with a sometimes unwarranted confidence, dispensing categorical statements sans examples and evidence when something more circumspect or empirical would be warranted. This is on display in the first chapter where she gives a basic outline of magical principles before describing the mages that practiced it prior to, and following, the Christian conversion of Russia. Despite apparently being heirs to a system that had been honed and systematised for centuries, these ill-defined mages exist in a temporally-unspecified murk of history. There’s no names given, no references to historical records, barely any specific locations, just this vaguely-defined idea that these mages have been out there, doing their mage thing for many mage years. There’s not even an appeal to authority via some mysterious claim to a magical lineage, just categorical statements about something that can’t really be fact-checked on account of the dearth of facts to check.

Russian Black Magic spread

It’s not just the lack of specific history that makes for an infuriating read but also statements so sure of themselves that the self-belief is staggering, such as when Helvin casually refers to Western ceremonial magic as the opposite of Catholicism because of its, would you believe, black mass. She also identifies Russian black magic as dual faith and claims with admirable audacity that dual faith is an “exclusively Russian phenomenon; it has no equivalent in other cultures.” This is particularly amusing given that one of the one of the favourite comparisons that Helvin makes for her Russian Black Magic is Vodou whose fundamental syncretism is the very definition of a dual faith.

Russian Black Magic spread

In her second chapter, Helvin introduces another form of magic workers, distinct from mages from which they sprung, the Veretnics or heretics. At last, an actual name, one might foolishly say, but Google return results almost exclusively related to this book, and nothing independent; though presumably the name is meant to be related to the Russian erétik (‘heretic’). But if you want made up names, have we got you sorted, because in her third chapter we meet the demonic pantheon of this system. Satan’s there, all good (although he is only designated as a prince, which feels like short changing oneself when you make a big deal about wanting to reign in Hell), but then his companions are all unfamiliar and largely un-Googleable etymologically-diverse faces. There’s Prince Veligor, Prince Versaul, Prince Enarh, Princess Death, Prince Indik, and Prince Mafawa. One of these demonic princes does have a familiar name, Enoch, but this isn’t the antediluvian patriarch of the Bible but a demon of lust and debauchery (and presumably identity theft). Another one, Prince Aspid (Satan’s nephew, according to Helvin, but really just the Russian word for ‘asp,’ is a little-known dragon from Slavic folklore, rather than a demon of greed and envy as he is here, and is the closest Helvin gets to anything authentically mythic. Helvin gives multiple paragraph descriptions of each of these demons, explaining their responsibilities and what role they played in the rebellion in heaven, which is just silly as it’s all patently made by her out of whole cloth. One could easily create an interesting pantheon that had some Slavic connection to either folklore or pre-Christian mythology to give it an air of authenticity, while still adding glamour with some demonic sheen. But to spend so much time on your war in heaven fanfiction without making it even remotely fit the brief seems like a consummate waste. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with making up your own cosmology and pantheon, cultures have been doing it for millennia, but to weakly try and pass it off as some ancient Russian tradition serves no purpose.

Russian Black Magic spread

Helvin follows her demonic pantheon with chapter on cosmology that segues into a discussion about the definitions of Satanism and paganism, There’s a retelling of the story of creation and the war in heaven, filled with lots of other embellished details delivered with undeserved confidence and in one instance, an appeal to authority referencing a legend (from an unspecified time, place and culture) that hasn’t previously existed. When it comes to define Satanism and what it is and is not, there’s a lot of ponderous waffling, the kind of near incoherent but strangely didactic tone and structure one would expect in a self-published guide to the dark arts, where the writer is so sure they’ve got this intellectual stuff down and it’s all going so well… “look at me ma, I’m writing, I’m really writing.” Helvin’s definitions, be they of Satanism or paganism, always feel a little off, divorced from reality and experience; an ambiguous sensation that is then compounded, not assuaged, by her unwarranted certainty. The rituals and ceremonies that pagans perform are, apparently, “quite pleasant for their participants” with music, dancing, alcoholic beverages and, gosh, “interaction with the opposite sex” phwoah. We could pick out other moments to critique but it’s not worth the effort, suffice to say, it goes on and on, page after page, periodically devolving into convoluted literary miasma and making it apparent that there was never an editor going “maybe you should reign it in and tighten this up.”

Russian Black Magic spread

With it now being time for the Black Magic Spellbook section, let’s rub those hands together and get busy. Well, busy after some ponderous theorising about the principles of magic, sprinkled with some faulty etymology, poorly cited folklore, mixed mythologies, interminable fluff and the ever present insufferable pontificating. When it does get to the magic, after all this talk about century-long mages, it’s a little disappointing because it’s pretty much just the same kind of old folk magic from Helvin’s previous ill-considered book, but this time, you do it in a cemetery because it’s darque. Lots of love spells (in the cemetery), divorce spells (in the cemetery), death and harm spells (in the cemetery), followed by another chapter of similar sortilege but in a church. It all concludes with a chapter of more of the same but these ones are under the glamorous title of The Thirteen Veretnic Spells of Evil which at least live up to the hype with their cartoonish diabolism, destroying icons and images of the trinity, trampling a crucifix under foot, all the hits. Fun times.

Russian Black Magic spread

In all, this makes for a very odd book, particularly, as noted, with it being released by a conventional metaphysical publisher like Inner Tradition’s Destiny Books imprint. Helvin’s unwarranted confidence grates, and this is especially compounded by the sloppy writing and editing, not to mention the comical enthusiasm for grimdark diabolism. It’s hard to tell who the audience for a title like this was, with its lack of genuinely Russian elements doing a disservice to anyone who comes to it looking for that, while its publication by a New Age publisher may restrict its appeal to any angsty teen starting out on an antisocial path of antichristian occult mastery.

Published by Destiny Books

by

The Spiritual Power of Masks – Nigel Pennick

No comments yet

Categories: folk, witchcraft, Tags:

The Spiritual Power of Masks coverBearing the rather poetic subtitle of Doorways to Realms Unseen, Nigel Pennick’s The Spiritual Power of Masks promises to provide a thorough exploration of the use of masks in folklore and magic, with a particular focus, as one would expect, on the British Isles. Given Pennick’s vast experience in writing on matters of folklore and magic, one would think that he has explored masks in some depth before, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. He has certainly touched on them previously as part of his broader considerations of Norse magic and folk traditions, such as chapters on masks and mumming in his 2015 Pagan Magic of the Northern Tradition: Customs, Rites, and Ceremonies, but as this book’s own Pennick-rich bibliography shows, this is the first standalone donning of such a ceremonial guise.

As the reader begins to make their way through this, a book ostensibly about the spiritual power of masks, they may notice that while there’s a lot of spiritual power here, it’s not necessarily just about masks. Instead, masks are but one accoutrement amongst many others in what can be seen as a broader consideration of all manner of guising and ritual regalia and their use across Europe in various festivities and rituals. With this broadness also comes the opportunity to investigate the folklore that lies behind or resembles such ritualised events. Thus, there are chapters about the Furious Host and Wild Hunt, as well as other types of spectral animals, all of which tend to focus just on folklore accounts, thereby effectively providing a cultural context, rather than how they might specifically relate to guising.

Spiritual Power of Masks spread

The area that receives the largest focus in The Spiritual Power of Masks are English folk customs, with Pennick offering individual but connected chapters on Straw Bears and Straw Men, Masquerades, Rural Ceremonies, Carnival Characters and Mumming; with a further chapter on the specific characters, disguises and costumes of Mummers’ Plays. Some of these entries do mention similarities with Scandinavian or Continental traditions (such as Germany in the connection to straw bears due to their greater popularity there), but by and large, the focus is on England and the wider British Isles.

Animal guises take up significant space in this book, with several chapters devoted to their various forms. Horses have such a prominent role in guising that they warrant their own chapter, as do dragons, with Pennick listing possibly every instance of a processional horse or dragon, including a personal anecdote about performing as the white horse at a folk festival in Cambridgeshire. The miscellaneous assortment of other animal guises, those not deserving the sixteen pages given to horses or the thirteen for dragons, receive a combined chapter, so let’s hear it for the rams, bulls, goats, camels, and a few sundry others. In addition to animal kind, Pennick devotes separate chapters to their more humanoid cousins such as straw bears/men, and the civic giants that were processed through towns and cities.

Spiritual Power of Masks spread

The remaining chapters, constituting about half of the book, largely turn from the players to the plays, considering the various events at which guising might occur, including Christmas revels, masquerades, puppet shows, mummer’s plays, and rural festivals. Pennick tracks the history and evolution of such events, showing the influence that Commedia dell’arte in particular had throughout Europe, immortalising such figures as Harlequin, Pulcinella, Pantalone and Pierrot. By far the largest topic covered in this grouping is mumming and mummers’ plays, as well as similar rural ceremonies. Pennick is thorough here, documenting various examples from across the British Isles, all copiously illustrated.

Spiritual Power of Masks colour plates

Leaving no stone unturned, Pennick concludes with a sequence of chapters that feel slightly odds and ends, but which consider other less discussed roles of masks and guising. Of particular interest are two chapters that deal with guising as a tool for misrule, rioting and other rebellious acts, with a focus on fiery Guy Fawkes celebrations and the somewhat related creation of brigades that allowed the disguised population to fight various injustices or attempts at political or religious control. The most delightful of these were the Skeleton Army, factions of which were established across southern England, created as a reaction and opposing force to the Salvation Army’s proselytising and calls for temperance. When the Salvation Army arrived in a town, bothering the locals with excessive hymnody and objections to alcohol, the Skeletons would mobilise, meeting them with violence and vulgarity, throwing flour, rotten eggs, and dead rats. Fun times.

The strangest of these latter chapters begins with a brief description of the English festival tradition of Pantomime before veering widely across the English Channel for an only slightly longer discussion of guises and masks in modern Avant-Garde European art movements. Bauhaus, Dada, Futurism and Surrealism get brief mentions, though these receive considerably more attention than the artists mentioned in the chapter’s final paragraph where Pennick concludes by listing the names of some mask-rearing contemporary musicians you’d never expect to see receive a mention in one of his books: the Knife, Slipknot, Pussy Riot, and the veritable kings of these unexpected and aberrant appearances, the Insane Clown Posse. Just the thought of Pennick sitting there typing ICP’s name into his manuscript creates, in one, a bubble of concentrated joy.

Spiritual Power of Masks spread

At 267 pages of body copy alone, this is a thorough book, one that is perhaps ill-served by the limiting title, as what Pennick presents here is a valuable resource concerning guising and related folk traditions. There is so much material here, with Pennick comprehensively drawing from a variety of sources, bringing a wealth of information together in an easily accessible reference. The abundance of information can make the reader feel overwhelmed by encyclopaedic info-dumps (a previously-aired complaint in some of Pennick’s other titles), in which the facts and information are presented abruptly, with little literary or analytical cartilage to string them together. Given how frequently this critique continues to come up in these reviews, one can assume it’s not going to change any time soon. This is a shame, especially given that Pennick is a skilled writer, and just adding a bit more analysis and continuity would raise the value of these books. With that said, and while we wait in vain for anything to change. Pennick’s exhaustive data collection is for the most part fastidiously referenced, with citations appearing in-body and pointing to a lengthy reference list at the back.

Spiritual Power of Masks colour plates

The Spiritual Power of Masks features text design and layout by Priscilla Haris Baker, using Garamond for body copy, with Belwe and Gill Sans as interior display faces, and with the decorative Amber Taste giving a vintage vibe for the cover. Like many of Pennick’s books, this one is profusely illustrated with a wide selection of photographs and other illustrations; so much so that, in some places, two-page spreads of just text can be hard to come by. This surfeit of pictures is not limited to the text body, as there is an additional 16-page section of full colour plates, doing justice to the costumes and festivities with a wonderful and welcomed burst of colour.

Published by Destiny Books

by

Fortuna: The Sacred and Profane Faces of Luck – Nigel Pennick

No comments yet

Categories: folk, Tags:

Fortuna CoverThis is a brisk little read from Destiny Books’ ever-growing collection of titles by Nigel Pennick, clocking in at a total of 134 pages, which does include an index, references and appendices. The subject here is one which Pennick has some familiarity with, having considered various forms of divination throughout his written career. Rather than runes or other script-based based systems, though, this time the focus is on the core mechanics of randomness and chance that lies behind so many divinatory systems, but largely reduced to the pure mathematics of dice.

As a complete work, this is something of a strange beast, given its focussed and specific nature. In many ways, it feels like a section from another book that become unwieldy and was separated off to become its own thing. With its description of examples of gambling and dice from modern folklore, one could imagine this coming from one of Pennick’s other books where he plucks at thematic threads and goes off on little folkloric tangents with reckless abandon.

Pennick divides this brief work into equally brief chapters, ten in all, fair powering through his subject matter. The first is something of a theory dump, in regard to ideas of predestination and randomness, predominantly in conceptual terms accompanied by only a handful of references to historical examples. The second chapter is titled Lady Luck and the Goddess Fortuna, and despite the title of the book and the image of Dame Fortuna on the cover, this is really the only mention of her here, and it only runs to seven pages of body text. There’s a couple of page overview of Fortuna, but this is brief and limited to only the classical period, with no exploration of her later periods of greater prominence, the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Indeed the second half of this chapter ignores its title and abandons any discussion of Fortuna in order to discuss the historic use of dice.

Fortuna Spread

And if you like dice and gambling, there’s plenty more of that here, with chapters on techniques for cheating when throwing dice, the history of wagered walks, and the pre-nineteenth century prohibitions on gambling and gaming. These are topics that might be of interest to some people, and presumably are to Pennick, but there’s no escaping the fact that, for this reviewer at least, it’s really boring, just devastating in its dullness. That these chapters feel longer than the other more interesting ones doesn’t help either, nor does their complete separation from the magical themes one might expect to find in here.

Fortuna Spread

There are some valuable early chapters on geomantic divination and another on the late antique dice-based divination described in the Sortes Sanctorum text, with Pennick providing a full history of the system, including later examples of similar dice oracles. Things also refocus on matters mystical towards the end of the book with chapters on illegal gambling’s intersection with divination and magic, and on superstition in gambling, but as just discussed, these feel relatively brief and the connections tenuous. In the end, it feels like there was only so much that could be written about luck and dice systems of divination, so the rest of the word count had to be massaged with more general discussions about more mundane gambling.

Fortuna: The Sacred and Profane Faces of Luck ends with two appendices and an extensive nine page bibliography, and it certainly is a bibliography rather than a reference list, as very few of the titles are cited in the text. Only direct quotes receive in-body citing, with extended quotes getting a lot of mileage out of some titles, in particular John Ashton’s 1898 The History of Gambling in England.

Fortuna Spread

Text design and layout comes from the capable hands of Virginia Scott Bowman, with type set in Garamond and Gill Sans, with the flared-serif Ribelano and a smattering of Optima as display faces. As is di rigueur for titles by Pennick, there’s a surfeit of illustrations dotted throughout the book, a combination of old etching or posters, as well as contemporary photographs of various apropos artefacts, varying in quality as is typical of this type of visual curation.

Published by Destiny Books

by

Tales & Legends of the Devil – Claude & Corinne Lecouteux

No comments yet

Categories: folk, satanism, Tags:

Tales & Legends of the Devil coverSubtitled The Many Guises of the Primal Shapeshifter, this is an English edition of Contes et légendes du diablele, first published in French, sans the subtitle, in 2021 by Éditions Imago. As with two previously reviewed titles from Claude and Corinne Lecouteux, Mysteries of the Werewolf and Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder, Inner Traditions have put a bit of extra effort into the presentation, with a red cloth-bound hardback wrapped in a fetching dustjacket.

Les Lecouteux draw on folk traditions from all over Europe, some twenty countries including Transylvanian Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Switzerland, Italy, France, Scandinavia, Moravia, Bohemia, Lapland, and the Baltic countries. These tales are grouped together into seven categorical chapters considering the Devil as a suitor, the family of the Devil, tricking or outsmarting the Devil, the relationship between the Devil and the Church, visits to Hell, and finally, singular tales that eschew these broad classifications. Although there is a substantial bibliography at the rear of this book, the front matter includes a list of credited source that is rather humble, running to only nine works, though some of these are quite substantial, such as Walter Scherf’s 1600 page Das Märchen Lexikon, as well as the folklorist’s essential double-feature bill of Antti Aarne’s The Types of the Folktale. A Classification and Bibliography, and Stith Thompson’s seminal six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.

Tales & Legends of the Devil spread

Following a foreword by translator Jon E. Graham, the authors give a brief introduction, introducing the folk concept of the Devil and providing a quick summary of how he appears within the tales they have collated. Leaning heavily on Aarne and Thompson’s pioneering work in folklore, each entry includes endnotes that indicate a particular folk motif when it appears in the story. These are enhanced at the end of the book with two appendices, one which lists the included tale types based on Aarne and Thompson’s international classification system, and an index of motifs associated with the devil based on Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature.

The type of stories included here will be familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the tropes of folklore, with the Devil appearing as an often whimsical, sometimes inept, buffoonish figure, a stark divergence from his grimdark ecclesiastical role. He gets tricked by knaves and deserters, is shot in the face by his son after mistaking a rifle for a flute, and is trapped inside a walnut. Not quite the primal shapeshifter of the subtitle, more like the primal doofus, but that probably wouldn’t look so good on the cover.

Tales & Legends of the Devil spread

In the Scriptus Recensera review of Mysteries of the Werewolf it was noted that the entries in that book lacked references and footnotes, while later, we were happy to find, in a significant improvement, that Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder refreshingly had both. But Tales & Legends of the Devil takes a step backwards, and although the references are there at the end of every tale, only a tiny handful of them have any notes or analysis. There’s also no introduction or summary at the beginning or end of each chapter, meaning that you are just given the stories themselves and that’s about it. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it weren’t for how the book is presented as if it offers something more. This begins with the subtitle The Many Guises of the Primal Shapeshifter, which suggests some sort of editorial direction in which the idea of the Devil as a “Primal Shapeshifter” will be unpacked through canny exegesis by Les Lecouteux. This is then affirmed by a reviewer’s blurb on the back cover, hyperbolically talking of Les Lecouteux ‘unearthing’ “a truth that our culture translates into myth: we as a human community remain deeply affectionate to our old gods.” and of having created “a forbidden feast.” But nah, they didn’t do that, they just republished some old folktales.

Tales & Legends of the Devil spread

Promotional copy from Inner Traditions also leans into this perception, crediting an agency that, save for the introduction, just isn’t in the book, with talk of the authors explaining this, or peeling back the Christian veneer here, and even tracing the devil’s shapeshifting powers back to their Vedic origins in ancient India. Um, what? That weird, aberrant little claim is a marketer’s injudicious extrapolation of a strange start to a discussion of the Devil as shapeshifter in which Les Lecouteux make the eyebrow-raising declaration that the Vedic names for the devil are kamarupa or vicvarupa, and saying that these names mean “he who changes shape at will.” This may be indicative of some loss in translation, if we’re generous, because that’s quite the claim to make and there is no further explanation as to how the Devil would even have a name in Bronze Age India, As it is, Kamarupa is simply the name of an early semi-mythical state from India’s Classical period (with an etymology, developed six centuries later, explaining it as the place where the god of love Kamadeva regained his rupa or form). Similarly, Vicvarupa is presumably Visvarupa, the name of a theophany of Vishnu which is also used as an epithet for Soma and Rudra, amongst others deva, and as a name of Tvastr who is, at least, classified as an asura. But I digress.

The value, then, of Tales & Legends of the Devil is more humble than the marketing might have us believe, and yet, perhaps more worthy. For this is found in its concatenation of tales, making it a handing resource for getting an exclusively diabolical, albeit often comical, slice of the far larger pie that is folktales and legends.

Tales & Legends of the Devil spread

As is tradition, Inner Tradition have turned to Debbie Glogover for the text and design layout here, with the body of Tales & Legends of the Devil set in Garamond, paired with Nocturne Serif and Gill Sans as display faces, and with the battered serif of Zamora taking the lead for chapter headings and as the cover star. The title text, along with the cover hero image (using the image of The Trinity of Absolute Evil based on a miniature from the 15th century Histoire du Saint-Graal), are both spot varnished on the ruddy dust jacket for that extra bit of class.

Published by Inner Traditions

by

Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic, edited by Frank Klaassen

No comments yet

Categories: folk, grimoire, Tags:

Making Magic in Elizabethan England coverIn 2019’s Making Magic in Elizabethan England, Frank Klaassen uses two anonymous manuscripts of magic from Elizabethan England to consider the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period. He explores how this milieu, in drawing on currents from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and new developments in science, as well as the birth of printing, impacted on the practice of magic, creating an enduring influence on the formation of modern occultism. Though untitled when written, the works are now known as the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. The former is concerned with treasure hunting, healing, and protection, and blends medieval conjuring and charm literature with excerpts drawn from Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft. The Boxgrove Manual, meanwhile, is a consideration of ritual magic that synthesises material from and credited to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and related medieval works concerning the conjuration of spirits.

Key to the importance attributed to the notebook and the manual is their interstitial status as post-Reformation works. As products of their time, they evince how occultists had to contend with a Catholic legacy in a newly-Protestant England. Up until then, magic had been inherently Catholic in form, employing the religion’s rituals and hagiographic mythologies, not to mention the fundamental idea that divine could be entreated using such systems and drawn into the world. Under Protestantism, these formulae and the very ideas behind them were forbidden, making the occult a doubly illicit practice, both theologically and politically: it was wrong for simply being magic as proscribed against in the bible, but also wrong for retaining elements of, and implying a sympathy for, Catholicism, and with that, a potential vulnerability to the machination of foreign Popish forces.

Making Magic in Elizabethan spread

Klaassen uses these two titles as a counter to the idea that post-Reformation Protestant theology and the emergence of secular science initiated a process of entzauberung or disenchantment within modernity, in which the previously omnipresence of the supernatural was removed from the world. Instead, Klaassen argues that the Reformation did not so much disenchant the old consensus about magic as to break it apart, allowing for it to be reassembled with new definitions that were increasingly divorced from the previous reliance on traditional religion. The Protestant author of the Boxgrove Manual had, for example, removed any explicitly Catholic content from his source material, but rather than creating a Protestant form of magic in its stead, the book represents not just a break with Catholicism, but a separation from religion itself.

In addition to this general overview with which he opens the book, Klaassen provides specific introductions to both texts, giving their history and an analysis of not only the content but its creators, assessing their intent and methods. The text themselves are presented in a thorough manner, with Klaassen using a preface before each one, explaining the physical characteristics of the manuscript in question, an explanation of the sources he cites, and a setting out of editorial principles. His translations are categorised as semi-diplomatic editions, producing an intermediate version of the manuscript text, largely faithful to how it was produced, but with some minor alterations for readability, with abbreviations expanded, and a few forms of punctuation standardised.

Making Magic in Elizabethan spread

The two works are extensively annotated by Klaassen, marking out amendments in the editing process but also providing valuable commentary both minor and extensive on matters that arise in the text. Due to the length of some of the digressions, these are understandably formatted as endnotes, rather than footnotes, which is still a shame, as their worth is such that it would aide reading to having them as an accessible adjunct on the same page as the body, visible at a glance, rather than necessitating the flicking between the here and now and the end of each chapter.

Despite their relatively shared provenance, these are two distinct works, in both style and subject matter, with the Antiphoner Notebook being arguably the less interesting of the two. Its focus is almost entirely on charms, perhaps the dullest and yet most popular form of occultism, with all the usual dubious cures for a variety of ailments, as well as dealing with that most perennial of problems, thieves. Many of these are common charms, many of which are drawn from Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, and they do tend to dominate in the latter half, but there are also some interesting rituals and procedures, such as divination with a crystal, and a very long procedure for exorcising demons guarding a treasure. One instance tellingly shows how the grip of orthodox religion was loosening in magic, with the compiler including a guide for creating a wastcote of proofe, the process of which involves thread being spun in the name of the devil. The verbatim source for this was Discoverie of Witchcraft, but unlike its use there as part of Scot’s sceptical exposé of superstitious beliefs in witchcraft, in the Antiphoner Notebook it is included as something that could be readily employed like any of the other entries. Klaassen notes that this explicit use of the devil’s name, as well as other formulae in which both demons and angels are directly invoked, would have been beyond the pale of even later medieval necromancers who may have conjured demons but only did so in the name of Jesus.

Making Magic in Elizabethan spread

With its reliance on works by and attributed to Agrippa, and its focus on matters invocatory, the Boxgrove Manual makes for an immediately more interesting book than the Antiphoner Notebook. It opens with a Pentacle of the Apocalyptic Christ before continuing into a set of planetary seals and a guide to creating lamens for calling spirits, with both good and ill ones being listed. The manual is heavily indebted to Agrippa’s three volume De Occulta Philosophia as well as the apocryphal fourth book pseudonymously attributed to him as Liber Quartus De Occulta Philosophia. The compiler of the Boxgrove Manual clearly believed Agrippa to be the author of Liber Quartus, and draws from it throughout, but he also credits him with authorship of the Heptameron, which is usually credited, again pseudonymously, to Peter de Abano.

Making Magic in Elizabethan England spread

Klaassen concludes the section on the Boxgrove Manual with a brief but valuable appendix, providing the sources for each of the manual’s entries, thereby showing the debt owed to the Heptameron, and to Liber Quartus in particular. In all, Making Magic in Elizabethan England, is a valuable title, not only for the versions of the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual but for the way in which Klaassen contextualises them within post-Reformation England. He writes with a deft, knowledgeable hand that makes for a joy to read.

Published by the Pennsylvania State University Press

by

Volcanoes in Old Norse Mythology: Myth and Environment in Early Iceland – Mathias Nordvig

Categories: folk, germanic, Tags:

Volcanoes in Old Norse Mythology coverThis book from Mathias Nordvig provides a full exploration of an idea he first presented in 2014 as a PhD dissertation called Of Fire and Water. The Old Norse Mythical Worldview in an Eco- Mythological Perspective, and which he has subsequently promoted in smaller essays, including one in the recently reviewed Handbook of Old Norse Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches from de Gruyter. As the title suggests, the focus here is on volcanism, and in particular the intersection between its physical presence in the landscape of Iceland and the topography of Norse mythology. Nordvig’s argument is that volcanoes and their effects had an outsize influence of the imagery found in the eddas and skaldic poetry, with the latter being used by Scandinavian migrants to medieval Iceland in order to understand and negotiate the unfamiliar geological hazards of the island. With the post-conversion growth of writing, and all the editing that is intrinsic to it, this world-view became codified in myth. In this way, Nordvig argues that Norse mythology is an indigenous expression of life in Iceland which has been emplaced in a Latinate script-world.

Volcanoes in Old Norse Mythology is significantly shorter than its dissertation forerunner, being largely divested of the academic necessities of the latter, such as literature reviews and overly-long explanations of theoretical frameworks and methods, but it does not come across as simply a reworking of the latter for a wider audience. Instead, while the ideas are the same, they provide the only through-line between the two works, with a sense of this book being built from scratch, rather than a mere editing down of a thesis with some finessing for publication.

Following a brief introduction, Nordvig begins with Old Norse Mythology Between Environment and Literature, in which he argues that Old Norse mythology is social memory that has direct reference to the world surrounding the texts, drawing comparisons from other cultures around the world in which a people’s myths, legends, and folktales can be instructive for understanding the environment in which they live. A large part of this chapter does not relate directly to the volcano theory and instead is an engaging discussion of concepts of memory and place both in Old Norse society and elsewhere. Key to this approach is Elizabeth W. Barber and Paul T. Barber’s book When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, which Nordvig references extensively as his ideas mirror their approach to interpreting environment as a mytho-linguistic practice. The Barbers define four principles in this practice: silence (things that everyone takes as read), analogy (if any entities or phenomena bear some resemblance, in any aspect, they must be related), compression (once a theme achieves sufficient mass, it attracts more stories to it), and restructuring (significant cultural change means that some patterns in the theme will be restructured or reinterpreted, leading eventually to obfuscation). This, then, is effectively, Nordvig’s summary of his methods, though he is not entirely beholden to the Barbers’ model, stating that unlike them, he does not intend to define environmental factors as etiological reasons for mythogenesis, critiquing them for painting with broad strokes and attaching geologic meaning to myth where it is not warranted, Nordvig promises to avoid similar post hoc fallacies, saying that he will not claim that all aspects of Old Norse mythology are associated with environmental conditions.

Nordvig then presents his indigenous theory of volcanism in Iceland, using the poem Hallmundarkviða from the story Bergbúa Þáttr as his central and foundational piece of evidence. It’s pretty convincing too, with the poem describing an event in a cave where the arrival of a giant appears to be an anthropomorphised depiction of a volcanic event in which stones fly, dark flames drive and spit, embers shoot, raging streams rush in heavy rubble, and strange new clay flows from the ground. Even without any exegesis from Nordvig, it’s clear to see how this igneous imagery fits his thesis, but he does expertly consolidate this conclusion, drawing upon the concept of geomythology to create parallels with indigenous theories of volcanism from Hawai’i, Aotearoa, Indonesia, North America, and the European and African continents. While Elizabeth and Paul Barber’s book was pivotal to the first chapter, it is Dorothy B. Vitaliano’s Legends of the Earth that naturally assumes that role here, with her coining the phrase geomythology and defining it as the geologic application of euhemerism. Vitaliano argues that etiological folklore has given rise to stories about geological phenomena and her considerable focus on volcanism provides mythological context to volcanic phenomena in Polynesian myth and elsewhere that finds comparisons in Old Norse mythology. Of particular interest are the shared motifs attached to volcanism, with themes of taboo, supernatural anger, and most intriguing of all, ghostly ships, occurring in myths from across the world. It is at this point that Nordvig turns to Hallmundarkviða, showing many of the same themes within that Icelandic poem.

In the third chapter, Nordvig gets to the titular application of his theory, looking for further depictions of volcanism in the broader vistas of Old Norse cosmogony. This pyroclastic evidence is often veiled with the poetic language of myth in which, following the Barbers’ approach,  analogies occur between lava, ash, glacial bursts, ice, water, poison, snow, and sand. Nordvig’s focus in this chapter is entirely on the Old Norse creation myth, arguing by way of the use of these poetic analogies that the streams of ice and eitr in the myth refer not to anything icy but to streams of lava and other results of volcanic activity. But what is presented here never seems to be quite as convincing as the anthropomorphism found in Hallmundarkviða.

In the fourth chapter, Nordvig explores his thesis in terms of what he defines as the social order of Old Norse mythology, applying it to significant mythological events, most notably the story of the mead of poetry, which is dissected exhaustively, as well as Þórr’s duel with the giant Hrungnir. In the concluding fifth chapter, Nordvig effectively provides a summation of what he has covered before, underscoring his idea of volcanoes as a cosmological principle in Old Norse mythology and in the societies in which it informed their world view.

The examples that Nordvig uses to validate his volcano theory vary in how convincing they are, often coming across as circumstantial and tenuous in their use of allegory. Nordvig attempts to pre-empt this criticism by defining his theory as specifically not a nature mythology, be it in the vein of the nineteenth century natural allegory model or its contemporary incarnation as geomythology. Instead, Nordvig argues that his analogical descriptions are valid because multiple factors occur simultaneously. What constitutes a convincing factor is open to interpretation, and fundamentally, everything that is presented still feels like nothing more than a reiteration of myth as natural allegory, with so thorough a descent into the theory that almost anything in myth can be related to volcanic imagery, even when there’s little to no hint of it. Thus, any description of dwarves groaning becomes the sound of subterranean rumblings, and anything that lives in a mountain or in the underworld must somehow be related to volcanic phenomenon. Some of the examples are more convincing than others because they draw on chthonic and alpen imagery, such as the mead of poetry myth in which Óðinn enters the mountain home of the giant Suttungr and his daughter Gunnloð. In this instance, the mead that Óðinn steals as he bursts forth from Hnitbjörg is imagined as a flow of lava, which is a pleasant enough conclusion, albeit one that still feels circumstantial.

At the same time, though, a significant amount of time is also spent here discussing Hrungnir, a rock giant without so much as a sulphurous whiff of a lava flow about him. The reaching to find any correlation becomes exasperating when surely the creators of the myth could have just imagined a cool looking rock giant, because giants and rocks are cool; and it’s handy to have an imagination that can create imagery ex nihilo when your job is being a storyteller. It’s not even about whether Hrungnir could symbolise a volcano, which could be the case if the imagery at least fitted, but rather the insistence that someone looked at a volcano and imagined it as a giant; and not only that, but looked at a volcano and imagined its attributes as the explanation for almost anything else in myth. Suffice to say, it’s a case of an interesting theory that works in some instances but is then enthusiastically and injudiciously applied in an overreaching scattergun effect, much like earlier nature allegories in which everything was theorised to be a sun god or a harvest myth. This reaching for connections can get to ridiculous levels, such as when it is argued that the admittedly puzzling interpretation of Gunnloð’s name as ‘invitation to battle’ fits with “the conceptualization of volcanic activities as violent,” when maybe battle just means battle, as it does every other time a battle is a battle. It seems unlikely anyone has ever looked at a volcanic eruption and gone “Cor, you see that, it looks just like a battle, what with all the flaming ejecta and lava, and a distinct lack of swords. Imagine being invited to that.”

The other problem with the idea of multiple factors occurring simultaneously in order to confirm the volcano theory is when multiple other environmental factors occur but which don’t seem to have had any effect on the myth. Thus, while its superficially appealing to imagine a ruddy flow of lava emerging from the earth as the mead of inspiration, that’s pretty much where the analogy ends. There’s nothing in myth about the mead searing someone’s throat when they recklessly swallowed it, or it hardening into igneous rock in someone’s stomach, or indeed being deadly and very burny for entire villages.

None of this is too say that there isn’t anything to recommend about Volcanoes in Old Norse Mythology: Myth and Environment in Early Iceland. Nordvig writes with an enjoyable and knowledgeable style and he by no means skimps on the evidence when making his arguments. Indeed, the thoroughness of it all is what contributes to the feeling of confirmation bias as it use of allegoric minutiae shores itself up in a way that prevents you from seeing, if you will pardon the inversion, the trees for the wood (or their volcanic equivalent). Even if one finds, as this reviewer obviously does, that the volcanic theory is applied to easily and too thickly, Nordvig’s analysis of the myths themselves is worth the price of entry, as he draws widely from Norse scholarship to present a comprehensive consideration of his sources, and in particular, the creation myth, the mead of poetry myth, and the Hallmundarkviða poem.

Published by Arc Humanities Press

by

The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia – W. F. Ryan

No comments yet

Categories: folk, grimoire, witchcraft, Tags:

The Bathhouse at Midnight cover Yet another entry in Pennsylvania State University Press’s expansive Magic in History series, the peculiarly-titled The Bathhouse at Midnight is a rather weighty and encyclopaedic tome, running to over 500 pages, albeit with a significant slice of this page count being inflated by the large selection of endnotes with which each chapter concludes. William Francis Ryan explains in an introduction that the work builds upon material that they began collecting for their 1969 doctoral dissertation on Old Russian astrological and astronomical terminology, as well as a series of articles on the history of science and magic text in Russia. Suffice to say, it seems that Ryan collected quite a bit of material during this career-spanning hunt, now distilled into fifteen chapters covering off almost every field of magic conceivable.

These chapters broadly divide Russian magic and divination into various subcategories, beginning with popular magic, and followed by considerations of different wizards and witches, systems of divinations, omens, predictions from dreams and physiological phenomena, spells, talismans, materia magica, bibliomancy, numerology, geomancy, alchemy, and astrology. Ryan concludes with a chapter on the relationship between magic and the church, the law and the state, and includes a roster of witchcraft cases that the Synodal court dealt with in the eighteenth century.

The Bathhouse at Midnight spread

Ryan begins this trip to the bathhouse at midnight with an historical outline, a large part of which is effectively a literature review, albeit not of comparable scholarly dissertations, but of the source texts upon which much of Russian occultism was based. Ryan shows how a considerable body of material imported into Russia was influential on later occultism, with streams coming from an older Byzantine textual tradition, a corpus of translation from Hebrew that were originally made in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as more obvious Western influences. In so doing, the Russian tradition is situated within a broad occult context, wherein the confluence of similarities between indigenous and exotic practices and influence makes it hard to determine what exactly constitutes something that may have originated in native practice.

The Bathhouse at Midnight spread

The next two chapters focus on practices and the practitioners of magic respectively, beginning with a comprehensive discussion of various types of popular magic, categorised into sections on the evil eye, malefic magic, entities such as ancient gods and evil spirits, prophylactic magic, festivals and other propitious times or dates, magical places and directions, and finally religious parody and inversions. This amounts to a covering off of all the usual areas that one might find in a contemporary practical magical text, but in this instances, there’s a lot more detail and provenance, with Ryan meticulously referencing all his sources. With the following chapter’s focus on the practitioners of this magic, Ryan provides a catalogue of these various types, dedicating usually at least two pages to discuss the Volkhv, the Koldun, the Ved’ma, the Znakhar’, and the Vorozhei. These are only the main designations, and Ryan follows with an additional section exhaustively documenting all the words used for both types of magic and their practitioners. As elsewhere, this is no perfunctory list, and Ryan lists sources, derivation and context.

This is a formula that Ryan uses throughout, everything is so detailed and draws from a wide range of sources, all tied together with an expert voice and clear familiarity with his subject. Evidence of this is the consideration of materia magica, in which Ryan provides a lengthy and useful roster of plants, both real and fantastic, used for magic rites and in Russian folk medicine, where herbs dominated. There are nine pages here, with 49 plants described with varying levels of details, some with botanical names identified, and others with merely the places they are mentioned and their purpose.

The Bathhouse at Midnight spread

With his background as a president of the Folklore Society and an emeritus professor and honorary fellow at the Warburg Institute and the University of London, Ryan is well equipped to not only deal with the subject of this volume but to authoritatively draw comparisons with Western magic, as well as its classical roots. This makes for a comprehensive work, one that is thorough in its specificity but is aware of a broader context within the occult milieu. Because of Ryan’s readable manner, The Bathhouse at Midnight can be read sequentially from cover to cover, but is also clearly organised in such a way that allows for simply dipping in as a reference.

The Bathhouse at Midnight spread

The Bathhouse at Midnight is formatted in the academic style one would expect of a publisher like Penn State Press with a small but readable typeface throughout and an even smaller point size for the references and index, suggesting that with less frugal formatting it could have been a work significantly longer that its 504 pages. At first glance there is one exception to the quality of the layout with a distractingly small safety area on the top margins on each page, meaning that the page title and page numbering in the header sit a mere 3mm from the edge of the page. The digital preview version on Amazon features a more comfortable margin and a closer inspection shows that printing is provided by print-on-demand service Lightning Source, whose lackadaisical quality control has resulted in a tiny top and a big bottom. Therefore it is worth bearing in mind that this book may be printed on demand and so the results may vary, for the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the layout but in the printing.

Published by the Pennsylvania State University Press

by

Journeys with Plant Spirits – Emma Farrell

No comments yet

Categories: folk

Journeys with Plant Spirits coverSubtitled Plant Consciousness Healing & Natural Magic Practices, Emma Farrell’s Journeys with Plant Spirits is a book that is light on the plants and heavy on the ‘consciousness,’ in the most excoriable form of the term. The book shares its name with an online course that Farrell runs for a mere £260; a price that generously includes a free copy of this book, score! As one would expect, the course mirrors the contents of this book with much talk of energy fields, consciousness and personal psychopspiritual (sic) healing.

Farrell is described as a plant spirit healer, a geomancer, a shamanic teacher, an apothecary of plant spirit medicine, the runner of a school of warrior healers (a handy class in a MMORPG, to be sure), a cofounder of the self-described “ground-breaking” Plant Consciousness event in London, the recipient of a mere two-year master’s degree, and someone who has been initiated into ancient magical practices of both the British Isles and the Ecuadorian Amazon. That’s a lot of things. Farrell also describes herself as a lineage holder of the White Serpent teachings, the system of one David Leesley, a mortician based on the Isle of Man who also claims to be a Vanuatuan High Chief whose arrival on the island of Tanna was long foretold by its so-called cargo cults (a bid for colonial prophetic glory that, surprisingly, is not unique for a certain class of bearded white men, as documented in Jon Tonk’s recent book The Men Who Would Be King).

Journeys with Plant Spirits spread

Farrell divides this work into two sections, the theoretical Entering the World of Plant Spirit Healing and the slightly more practical Thirteen Plants and Tree Spirits. The first section shows one of the problems with Journeys with Plant Spirits, the fluff, with a constant churn of metaphysical speculation in which so much is written but little is said. This is particularly true of the preponderance of unverifiable and glib statements that are de rigueur in new age writing and apparently don’t require any proof, other than an unctuous tone. All of which frankly feel a little dated in their fear-inculcating paranoia: television is the real hallucinogen used by “the authorities” to brainwash you, man; the symptoms of any disease come not from the disease itself but as the result of our experiences in life; toxicity surrounds us on ever side like predacious demons to the medieval mind; education is a meanie, and water has memory. Indeed, fairly generic water woo plays a significant role here, and leads to several descents into pseudo-scientific quackery, such as the bizarre statement, uttered with all the unwarranted certainty but lack of referencing that one would expect, that the molecules in tap water and bottled water are ‘shattered,’ whatever that means, and that this unstructured water is hard for the body to absorb. Quite why or how this has happened isn’t explained (why would you need to anyway, given that it’s apparently self-evident that modern-life=bad), but then bizarrely, Farrell says that the water in our bodies is the same water that is in the sea and clouds, which would surely mean that all water everywhere is broken, whether it comes out of a tap, bottle, urinary tract or refreshing mountain stream. Oh noes, we is doomed.

In concert with this wooliness is how Farrell’s grab-bag of credentials comes through within the pages of this book, with the text presenting information as a myriad of little bits without any depth or breadth. Various concepts are referenced but often with only a superficial glancing blow, lest anything be said in detail that could be easily queried or found contrary to the general narrative that is being promoted. Thus, there is talk of medicine wheels but any association with Native American expertise is fleeting and instead only the nomenclature is used with talk of a “Celtic medicine wheel” and the “tradition of medicine wheels” in the British Isle. There’s a bit of Tibetan Buddhism here, a little Chinese medicine there, and a mention of a Kichwa shaman that Farrell knows who calls earth a ‘prison planet.’ There are appeals to authority by quoting the pseudoscience of the Hearthmath Institute and, of course, there’s the de rigueur New Age references to misunderstood quantum physics as something that is ‘breaking down the barriers between science and spirituality.’ Naturally, the latter comes on the heels of a moan about how the scientific method is all about rules, man, and how all that analysis and measuring and verifiable results is such a bummer, dude.       

Journeys with Plant Spirits spread

It takes 128 pages of new age speculation and metaphysical truisms to get to the actual plant spirits of the title. Farrell has chosen thirteen spirits, a combination of herbs, weeds, shrubs and trees, featuring mugwort, oak, hawthorn, nettle, dandelion, alder, lady’s mantle, rosemary, fireweed, wormwood, angelica, elder and yew. Each plant receives its own chapter, prefaced with little hand drawn illustrations by UK-based artist Edward Foster, and featuring a multi-page exploration of both plant and spirit, followed by examples of practical application such as mediations and less frequently, guided meditations. As is to be expected, given the precedent set in the first half of this book, things get pretty fast and loose with facts, along with the insertion of a raft of new age terms like energy fields, harmonic resonances and psychic hygiene, all shot through with paranoid ideas about toxic entities that might sneak in through negative emotions. By now, the latter is par for the course, and so what really grates is the lack of rigour in what little historical or quantifiable information there is about each plant. Mugwort is “known as the queen of herbs or the witches’ first herb,” but no, it’s not, it just isn’t. Then there’s the claim that “in the mythology of the British Isles, fire is Freyja, the goddess of the three worlds who carries the impetus for the Great Web to manifest,” which, whatever the hel that is all meant to mean, is a yeah, um, no to that one too. And then there’s the idea that the lung disease and addiction associated with the smoking of tobacco only exists because of the Western commercialisation of the plant, and not because, you know, smoke is carcinogenic and nicotine is a highly addictive alkaloid.

Journeys with Plant Spirits spread

Thus, there’s not actually much that’s tangible in the discussion of each of these plants, with the metaphysical and theoretical dominating the discussion, empiricism be damned. As one would expect, then, there’s very little in the way of specifically plant-related referencing, with the most, which really isn’t much, coming from Dale Pendell and Scott Cunningham, who are cited less than the likes of Rudolf Steiner and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. One could argue that this isn’t much of a problem as there’s relatively little practical application given for working with the actual physical plants, with the focus being on the spiritual rather than the botanical. So there’s more time being spent with the spirit of the plant; or at least the spirit as defined by Farrell, because the way in which some of these spirits concern themselves with particularly New Age visions of healthcare would make them unfamiliar to anyone from previous centuries. Even the idea of plant essences which can be taken orally, and which one would imagine involve distilling a plant’s chemical properties into a solution, turn out to contain only the ‘bioresonance’ of the plant spirit, meaning that it “holds the conscious intelligence of the plant or tree within the crystalline structure of water, fixed with alcohol,” which just sounds horrific. So yes, without the nasty chemical compounds of the plant, these essences have done the impossible which is to be even less effective than the watered down remedies of homeopathy.

Journeys with Plant Spirits spread

In the end, despite the patina of positivity and good vibes only, Journeys with Plant Spirits comes across as a profoundly negative book, promoting a paranoid and fear-based world view in which unspecified toxins and parasites, both psychic and material, assail us at every turn. A lapsarian world in which everything is broken by an insidious, oppressive and even predatory modernity. Indeed, it’s all rather reactionary, like a New Age Evola setting itself against the modern world™, while the world that is preferable is comparable to a medieval Christian one in which superstition is rife and science, medicine and education is suspect. A world in which delusional parasitosis is rampant and there’s an assumption that these ‘toxins’ will perpetually infect you. That like medieval demons, these anthropomorphised predators can be responsible for anything and everything. Keeping things current, this attitude also bleeds into discussions of the COVID19 pandemic, which unsurprisingly features some paranoid hot takes, with Farrell talking ominously of uncovering truth and of vampiric energies, the dark forces behind vaccine mandates that want to take our freedoms and human rights. Ermahgerd!

Journeys with Plant Spirits runs to 270 pages but, with its metaphysical churn and constant barrage of entirely speculative ideas, feels longer. Text design and layout is by Victoria Bowman, with the body set in Garamond and Hermann as a display face.

Published by Bear & Company

by

Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder – Claude & Corinne Lecouteux

No comments yet

Categories: folk, Tags:

Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder coverLike Claude Lecouteux’s recently reviewed Mysteries of the Werewolf, Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder, this work was originally published in French and here receives its first English edition, with Inner Traditions giving it the hardcover treatment, wrapped up nicely in a green dustjacket. Like the previously reviewed title, this is an anthology of source material, but this time Lecouteux is joined by his wife, Corinne, a translator specialising in tales and legends.

Interestingly, comparing the new title with that of the 2013 original, Contes, Diableries et Autres Merveilles du Moyen Age, only the ‘wonder’ now remains, with the diableries being replaced by the slightly more palatable witchcraft. As one might expect, then, this new title is somewhat of a misnomer as the witchcraft content within these pages is so slight as to be effectively negligible. Even a section on devils and magic concerns itself with general legends of diabolism with not a single witch amongst its cast of characters. Instead, these tales of wonder run the gamut of folklore, divided into fairly self-explanatory chapters that cover off animal tales, oddities and wonders, deviltry and spells, the supernatural spouse, both licit and illicit love, wisdom and stupidity, and heroic legends. Indeed from the pleasant alliteration of the title it is ‘wonder’ that is the operative word here, with the entries often being examples of medieval miracula and mirabilia, popular narratives of the fantastic that, as Les Lecouteux note, were often mined by romance writers of the Middle Ages to form their own tales. Applying Caroline Bynum’s seminal definition of the terms, these tales are examples of mirabilia, in that the detail “natural effects we fail to understand,” and miracula, that is, “’unusual and difficult’ events… produced by God’s power alone on things that have a natural tendency to the opposite effect.” Also puzzling is the book’s subtitle, The Venomous Maiden and Other Stories of the Supernatural, given that said tale, concerning a maiden fed poison her entire life in order to become a vehicle for revenge, is hardly the most representative entry here.

Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder spread

In their introduction, Les Lecouteux provide an overview of the types of tales within, categorising them into five types: legends of the dead, demonic legends, historical legends, Christian legends and etiological legends. In an important caveat, they mention that to present these tales verbatim would be only of interest to specialists, so all of them have been rewritten into a consistent manner, free of redundancies and tedious appeals to God’s mercy and omnipotence, as was the style of the times. This creates a readable narrative with Jon E. Graham’s translation also flowing freely and complimenting the text nicely.

The first section with its examples of animal tales is the shortest at a mere six entries, though stories in which animals appear as the spirit forms of people do bleed into the following chapter on various oddities and wonders. One of the longest sections concerns the idea of the supernatural spouse, but there are few entries, with each of the tales being exhaustive retellings of medieval legends of courtly love, including those of Seyfried von Ardemont, Frederick of Swabia, and two swan knights, Aeneas and Helias. A similar thing occurs in the heroic legends chapter where many of the pages are devoted to single entries variously retelling the stories of Velent (Völundr) from Þidrekssaga af Bern, the anonymous 14th century romance Valentine and Nameless, and the hagiographic legend of Saint Oswald.

Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder spread

A source of frustration mentioned ad nauseam in the review of Claude Lecouteux’s Mysteries of the Werewolf was that title’s lack of contextual information and referencing, with all the entries largely adrift in terms of time, space and authorship. Mercifully, that is not the case here, and indeed Les Lecouteux appear, intentionally or not, to have made up for the omissions in the previous work with a veritable surfeit of supplementary information. Every entry has a listing of the source, one that more often than not is also footnoted to point to the particular edition in the bibliography. Not only that, but almost all of these tales conclude with an italicised explanation by Les Lecouteux, citing provenance, influence or elucidating themes and motifs. The thoroughness does not end with these though, and Les Lecouteux provide an extensive appendix of various folk tale type classifications, including Antii Aarne’s numbered system from The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and a Bibliography, the moral themes of F. C. Tubach’s Index Exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales, and the extensive index of motifs from Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature. Keys to these indices appear at the end of many, though by no means all, of the entries. The inclusion of such classifications is a valuable tool and while the cross-referencing of these indexes may be limited to folkloric specialists in its usefulness, its inclusion is unobtrusive and can be ignored if simply reading for pleasure or general research.

Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder spread

All in all, Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder has much to recommend it as a compilation of well referenced medieval legends. The text design and layout by Debbie Glogover presents the work in a pleasant fashion, with the body text set in Garamond, minor headers in Gill Sans and Myriad, the antique NixRift for the header of each entry, and Shango, based on F.H. Schneidler’s elegant classical serif Schneidler Mediaeval, for the main and chapter titles. A feathered woodcut image sits behind each chapter heading, a various smaller images, of varying reproduction quality, are spread throughout the body of the text to keep things interesting.

Published by Inner Traditions

by

Slavic Witchcraft – Natasha Helvin

No comments yet

Categories: folk, witchcraft, Tags:

Slavic Witchcraft coverWith its title and subtitle, Natasha Helvin’s Slavic Witchcraft: Old World Conjuring Spells & Folklore promises much in this 2019 release from Destiny Books. It’s debatable as to whether this promise is met by Helvin, a Soviet Union-born “professional rootworker and spiritual coach” who now lives in the Pacific Northwest and claims to be a fifth generation hereditary witch. That’s a lorra generations.

With her brief opening chapter, Helvin offers a general history of Russian pre-Christian belief, and its evolution with the coming of Christianity, pushing the idea of dual observance that incorporated the two. In a strange little section she also draws a somewhat unnecessary comparison with Voodoo, which she awkwardly describes as having, like Slavic paganism, aspects of the older African religions; that’s quite some cultural diffusionism.

In her second chapter, Slavic Magic, Power and Sorcery, Helvin begins with very little focus on said Slavic magic, instead presenting a primer on the mechanics of magic in general sans the book’s cultural context. This covers off many of the core principles that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time within 20th and 21st century magic, including expressing intent through actions and words, and the use of objects and amulets as repositories of this intent and power. It is only in the second half of the chapter that Helvin turns to specific Russian examples, abruptly moving away from the high magic theory to spend several pages discussing the folklore associated with Russian sorceresses. This abruptness, perhaps unintentionally, highlights a contrast in writing style that is found throughout Slavic Witchcraft but most noticeably in this chapter. For the most part, this book features the awkward, lumpen tone that one might expect from someone with English as their second language: sentences can be too short, the flow is halting and the phrasing can often be a little tortuous or naïve. The section of magical theory, however, has a more confident flow, and a contemporary nomenclature quite distinct from the rest of the book.

Slavic Witchcraft spread

The spells in Slavic Witchcraft are presented with nary a trace of source or reference and in her introduction, Helvin explains that they come predominantly from her family, with others collected whilst travelling abroad and on expeditions to rural Russia. This does rob the content of context, as there’s nothing denoting a spell’s origin, nothing to give value or credibility based on provenance or even popularity, nothing to suggest that they haven’t all just been made up by Helvin on the spot. This highlights a problem found throughout Slavic Witchcraft, in which there is no referencing, no primary sources, and also, most frustrating, very little in the way of specifics. W. F. Ryan’s 500 paged The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia this is not. Instead, this vision of Russia is an ungrounded, almost mythic, one, in which its 17.13 million kilometres contain very few named towns, cities or regions, ultimately implying a widespread homogeneity, given how so many of things are inconceivably attributed, like a comedy bit, to just “in Russia.” Apparently whether you’re in Kaliningrad or Vladivostock, it’s all the same. The same is true on matters of ethnicity and even worse, time, with the spells and the anecdotes existing in some ambiguous temporal space, unmoored from any particular time period. Context is everything and in this instance, context is completely absent. A spell may have been composed centuries ago, or it may have been made up yesterday, it’s impossible to tell.

This lack of context contributes to another problem with the spells in Slavic Witchcraft: there’s too many of them. A vast swathe of the book, fifty pages in all, is dedicated to love and relationship spells of the most psychologically suspect kind, all sharing similar goals and similar techniques to the point of redundancy. If Helvin documented where these spells came from, then there could at least be some validity to including all of them out of historical or anthropological interest. Instead, it’s just spell after spell of ways to get your husband back, how to hurt their mistress or new partner, how to forget your attachment to a married man that you’re having an affair with, how to get a reluctant partner to marry you, how to get your partner to forgive you after you’ve cheated on him and he doesn’t wanna, and how to make men who are indifferent to you instead fall for you, emotionally healthy catch that you are.

Slavic Witchcraft spread

Now, books of this stripe often attract reviews on Amazon from people who, being a little susceptible to superstition, find a particular title too heavy with the bad vibes, a cursed tome that brought bad luck until they wisely disposed of it. Slavic Witchcraft itself has one of these reviews and in some ways, they’re right. Not because the book is anything more than ink on paper, or because the content is grim and dark and will open the very gates of hell (if only), but because, well, some of said content is just gross and comes from a decidedly emotionally unhealthy place. Witness spell after spell that presupposes conflict and infidelity, and provides, as its solution, coercion and deceit. And some of the spells are ridiculous in their specificity, prefacing with misogynistic scenarios that says a lot about their authors: you trusted your beloved before you got married and had complete harmony and understanding between you, but the situation changed after the wedding. You began to control him, answer his calls and demand a full report on what he was doing. The solution? Basically say a charm reminding yourself of your proper place, as the led not the lead, as the neck not the head, which, after a week’s repetition, will change your “inner state,” your anxiety will go away, your irritability will be replaced by gratitude, and best of all, your husband will once again adore you. Score!

Suffice to say, it’s all very icky and all very tiring, and all a bit strange coming from a publisher like Destiny Books/Inner Traditions whose self-help titles on relationships probably don’t contain anything resembling these psychologically damaged inanities. It’s telling that this chapter begins with a bizarre little paragraph stating baldly that God created the first humans as androgynous, happy creatures that were later divided into male and female halves, and now those unhappy heteronormative halves look to reunite with each other and that, dear reader, is what love is. Naturally, this is presented simply as fact, and it is not explained whether this is Helvin’s personal belief, some scrap of folk belief “from Russia,” or just something cut and pasted from an inspirational meme on Facebook. Helvin goes on from here, effectively justifying the spells that follow, by saying that sometimes these relationships between the two halves are not always perfect, since, she seems to say with some inevitability, “either a rival turns out to be more grasping or beautiful and takes your love away or takes a loving husband and father from his family” or you know, the fire goes out and there’s no passion. Options, we’ve got options.

Slavic Witchcraft spread

The other spells collected here are grouped into sections on money and wealth, protection, and house and home. These cover many of the familiar concerns of folk medicine, with some methods that will be familiar from elsewhere. Indeed, reiterating that point, there’s often very little that distinguishes what is here from things that would be found elsewhere, with nothing obviously or uniquely Slavic about the spells. Perhaps the one selling point are the spoken charms which employ a darkly glamorous lexicon and which, par for the course, there doesn’t seem to be any prior trace of, be it in print or online, so you have no idea of their provenance, save for assuming it’s merely Helvin’s hand; or in a few cases,  onemagic.ru

The final section of spells focuses on cemetery traditions and unlike the previous groupings, these have a substantial preamble, outlining various Slavic funeral folk traditions. Again, this has the barest of details, nothing is geographically more specific than ‘Northern Russia’ and there’s little indication of the time we’re talking about, be it ancient, recent or contemporary.

Slavic Witchcraft spread

If Slavic Witchcraft documented its sources and presented itself with considerably more rigour, it would have much to recommend it, as there is a staggering amount of material here that cannot be found anywhere else. But, because of this failing, the reader, save if they be of a most trusting disposition, must surely assume that almost everything here has been crafted from whole cloth and these attested old world conjuring spells are considerably more new world.

Published by Destiny Books

1 2 3 4 5 6