Kitabı oku: «The Element Encyclopedia of 1000 Spells: A Concise Reference Book for the Magical Arts», sayfa 5

One thing magical practitioners have in common all around the world is curiosity, the quest for knowledge. We are the original enquiring minds who wish to know. Obstacles to knowledge are bitterly resented and are persistently undermined. Magicians always wish to expand their power, and increase their knowledge and repertoire. There is a reason that so many of the earliest books printed were grimoires, or books of magic—the same reason that Lord Thoth is patron both of scribes and magicians. Providing that a society is at all literate, magical practitioners, on the whole, are great readers, from ancient Egypt’s Houses of Life to the Voodoo queens of New Orleans.

There is only one thing better than learning from a book and that’s learning from each other. Magical practitioners are, in general, an open-minded bunch. Put a few in a room together and fairly quickly tools will be compared, secrets shared, and demands for knowledge made.

Spells are constantly evolving to suit changing needs. This is particularly true where cultures live closely alongside each other. Nothing crosses borders faster than a magic spell. For instance it can be almost impossible to separate totally the intermingled strands of various European magical traditions. Because certain methods, materials, and styles are more popular and prevalent in one area than another doesn’t necessarily mean that they originated there or, at least, not in isolation. Even the most sedentary, isolated communities received periodic magical cross-pollination from Jews, Romany, tinkers, and assorted wanderers.

These entwined traditions become even more complex in the magical and spiritual traditions of America and the Western Hemisphere.

During the height of the African slave trade, people were kidnapped from all over Africa. What were originally distinct cultures, each with specific spiritual and magical traditions, found themselves thrown together in dire circumstances, the type of circumstances in which many reach for magic. In Haiti, the traditions of the Fon people of Dahomey were dominant and evolved into Vodoun, although not in isolation. These traditions evolved, adding components of indigenous Taino magic, diverse other African traditions, French, and Spanish magic, thus also transmitting Basque, Jewish, Moorish, and Romany influences and, last but not least, Freemasonry. You think this is beginning to make Alexandria look simple? Just wait.

Following later political turbulence, many Haitian refugees fled to New Orleans, where Vodoun evolved once more, retaining its frame but picking up new influences, this time from the local black population, whose own magic derived from Congolese sources rather than Fon, and also British, Italian, and Native American magical traditions. New Orleans, the Crescent City, became known as the capital of American magic. Its traditions would soon be incorporated into what might be called mainstream magic, that magic most accessible to the population at large. This magic would eventually be transmitted to Europe where, who knows? Maybe it’s now been picked up by African emigrants to evolve and transform once more.

After extended contact, New Orleans Voodoo can be hard to distinguish from Hoodoo. Hoodoo’s basic framework also derives from Africa, mainly from Congolese traditions, but again not in isolation. Deprived of the botanicals with which they had been familiar in Africa, their materia magica, enslaved African magical practitioners consulted with Native Americans and acquired a whole new botanical tradition, sharing magical and spiritual secrets as well. These Hoodoo doctors typify the proverbial questing, intellectually curious magician. In addition to Native American, West and Central African roots, their tradition soon incorporated European folk magic, the Egyptian mysteries, Freemasonry, and Kabbalah. The great grimoires became available to all. Transmission was cross-cultural. With the exception of a very few isolated mountain pockets, American magic in general demonstrates tremendous African influence.

Further north, Pow-Wow is the magic of German immigrants to Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Dutch (a corruption of Deutsch). The basic framework is, of course, the German magic the migrants carried with them, both high ritual and folk magic, which incorporated a healthy dose of Jewish and Romany influences as well as those of neighboring European people. In America, strong further influence (and the tradition’s name) came from Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, and from the Chikkeners, the so-called Black Dutch: Romany (Zigeuners) forcibly deported from Europe who, separated from clan and family, found discreet safety among the Pow-Wow artists.

In 1819 or 1820, dates vary, Pow-Wow artist and hexenmeister John George Hohman compiled a canon of Pow-Wow wisdom and published it under the title The Book of Pow-Wows: The Long Lost Friend. This book, still in print, traveled to the cities of the South, carried largely by Jewish merchants, who sold it to Voodoo and Hoodoo practitioners, who incorporated it into their already multi-cultural blend of magic and, no doubt, sent some equally valuable information up North with the returning merchants, who were learning from everybody and spreading the news.

There is an important exception to this magic melting pot, of course. Very isolated areas, places where people have historically had little or no contact with others, maintain extremely pristine, ancient magical traditions. Like the unique creatures of the Galapagos Islands, their traditions developed in isolation and thus may have very unique, easily identifiable characteristics. It’s much easier to clearly identify a spell from Papua New Guinea, for instance, than it is to distinguish between French, German, or Swiss spells. Because these traditions are so unique and because one can identify the spell’s origins, it’s very tempting to constantly point out which spell came from which isolated culture. The danger is that this creates a lopsided effect, akin to those old-school anthropologists who were so quick to note the curious habits of the “Natives” while failing to remark on similar practices, parallels, and traditions back home.

I can’t emphasize more that every distinct people, every culture, every nation, every religion and spiritual tradition has, at one time or another, incorporated, developed, and created magic spells. Each one of us has a magical history somewhere along the line. Loss and abandonment of these traditions tends to accompany loss of cultural or religious autonomy. These spells, therefore, are our shared human heritage, not isolated odd things engaged in only by strange other people, very different from us.

In some cases, in this book, I have pointed out where spells come from and which traditions they represent, especially if there’s some interesting factoid associated with it or if that knowledge may help you cast the spell, or sometimes just to give credit where credit is due for a particularly beautiful spell. However, I have not done so in every case. Sometimes I did not wish to keep emphasizing one culture, as if they were Earth’s only magical ones, especially those cultures whose vast magical repertoire has stimulated others to vilify, stereotype, and persecute them. In other cases, the roots were too tangled to identify their origins honestly.

Although many of the spells in this book are meant for use, others are included purely for historic value and perspective, so that we may remember and learn from them.

Magic Today

These are both the best and the worst of times for magic.

On one hand, there is currently less persecution of magical practitioners in more parts of the world than at any time since the rise of Christianity. This very book that you hold in your hands would once upon a time have earned reader, writer, publisher, and bookseller alike a slow and painful death.

Materials, once rare, craved, hoarded, and often forbidden are available and affordable to more people than ever before. Think about that the next time you sip some mugwort tea, an herb that might have branded you a witch just a few centuries ago. Frankincense and myrrh, once the most precious expensive commodities on Earth, may now be purchased in any well-stocked health food store. Salt, packed with magic power, once extracted from Earth and sea with terrible human effort, once very expensive and precious, is now so cheap and common that every fast-food vendor gives away free packets by the handful.

Although fewer people have private gardens, there is greater access than ever before to the botanical material that constitutes the foundation of magic. Some spells in this book refer to what may seem to be very obscure items and plants: virtually nothing is unattainable, however. Once upon a time, a practitioner was limited to local botanicals. Now you can import living as well as dried plants from virtually anywhere on the globe for your private use. Do you want to access the power of Peruvian shamanic plants? Go on the Internet; you’ll be able to buy some. Where botanical material isn’t practical, modern essential oils and flower essence remedies reproduce alchemical methods to bring you the power of even more flowers, available in a simple, easy-to-store, user-friendly, inexpensive form.

Practitioners are unafraid to teach and to share information. I remember when booksellers didn’t generally stock spell-books. Now you can buy them everywhere. Classes are advertised in newspapers. You don’t have to be a member of an inner circle to discover metaphysical companions. There’s little need to hide in back rooms, fearing arrest or worse, as in previous days. In industrialized nations there is new-found appreciation for magical wisdom and traditions.

Yet it’s also the worst of times in other areas—ironically, in those isolated communities where magical knowledge was preserved in such purity for so long. Many of Earth’s surviving magical traditions are vanishing as quickly as the rainforest, coral reefs, or any other endangered species.

While some re-embrace a magical heritage rejected for so long, traditional practitioners who’ve maintained those spiritual traditions for millennia lack similar privileges and protection. Like those vulnerable creatures of the Galapagos, having never before met attempts at suppression, they may never have developed the skills of subterfuge developed over generations among other more frequently oppressed people.

As rainforests are cut down, as ancestral lands are annexed, traditional practitioners and shamans have less access to the botanicals they depend upon than ever before. Instead of open-minded, questing fellow magical practitioners, eager to learn and share knowledge, the only outsiders these traditional practitioners are likely to meet are those who undermine their magical traditions, and pressure them to abandon their own faiths and convert to others.

Every day, somewhere on Earth, a traditional practitioner is pressured to abandon shamanism, divination, or some variant of the magical arts. Sometimes suppression is violent. Tools are destroyed, modes of transmission suppressed. Shamans and leaders of magic are isolated from their communities, or as the Bible so eloquently says, “put away.” The stimulus to reject old magical traditions may also come from within, from a culture’s desire for modernity, to appear civilized and rational. In other cases magic and traditional knowledge are victims of war and political unrest.

It is ironic to observe precisely which information appears to be vanishing versus what appears to be preserved for posterity. Once upon a time, very recently, Western magical adepts and elite scholars of magic alike favored the remote “pure” traditions of the Himalaya and Indonesia. Scholars and adepts journeyed with tremendous personal effort to the far corners of the Earth to meet with Ascended Masters while simultaneously scorning magical traditions found closer to home as superstitious nonsense.

Today it is those previously respected traditions that are rapidly being eroded and are vanishing for a host of religious, political, and environmental reasons. Closer to home, Celtic traditions, once reviled as foolishness, have been revived and energized by a massive number of new practitioners. The Romany people, terribly persecuted for centuries, scorned sometimes precisely because of their magical traditions, have recently re-asserted control over those traditions and how they are to be perceived. Hoodoo, once beheld by both academicians and elite occultists with particular scorn, largely for race-based reasons, appears to have its survival assured, thanks to the dedicated efforts of its own scholars, Zora Neale Hurston, Harry Middleton Hyatt, and Catherine Yronwode.

Silver Raven Wolf, modern chronicler of Pow-Wow, once dismissed as ignorant folk-practices that were unworthy of scholarly interest, writes of scouring Pennsylvanian nursing homes, looking for old people with snippets of information that she may then preserve and share. Perhaps others will fulfill this role for other genres of magic in other parts of the world. It takes only one generation for information to be lost forever. How many traditions, how much hard-won human experience and accumulated wisdom from every inhabited continent, have already been lost? This big book that you hold in your hand is but a tiny portion of Earth’s magical wisdom. In keeping with the inquiring, questing spirit of magical practitioners throughout the ages, don’t be too respectful with the spells in this book. If you find something that suits you or intrigues you, use it. If something isn’t quite right, play with it. Tap into your own magic powers and continue the evolution of our magic repertoire.