Within the fourth century BC, an unknown – however obviously disgruntled – schemer from the Greek town of Antioch had a curse pill made. Inscribed on a skinny piece of lead and deposited in a smartly, the pill referred to as for a “thunder-and-lightning-hurling” god to “strike, bind, bind together Babylas the greengrocer”.
Round 1,400 years later, an Anglo-Saxon allure steered on how to give protection to a box. The name of the game was once to take a work of turf from each and every nook and anoint it with a mix of oil, honey, yeast, milk from the animals at the land, items of the bushes and vegetation at the land, and water consecrated to the god Thunor.
In Seventeenth-century England, the antiquarian Elias Ashmole was hoping an astrological talisman would expel vermin from his area. In the meantime, the diarist Samuel Pepys cured his dissatisfied abdomen via buying a brand new hare’s foot. In Nineteenth-century New Orleans, the Louisiana Creole girl Marie Laveau turned into well-known for her therapeutic, clairvoyance and paintings as a voodoo priestess, which she displayed in public gatherings at Congo Sq..
Those are a few of the many desirable snippets mentioned in Liz Williams’s new guide, Compendium of the Occult: Arcane Artefacts, Magic Rituals and Sacred Symbolism. Taking a look at western occult traditions from earlier period to the current day, the guide explores how human societies have sought energy, coverage and perception from gods and stars, spells and amulets, sacred puts and seductively enigmatic organisations.
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The guide is made up of 65 brief articles, grouped into six sections: the origins of western occultism; divination, rituals and rites; charms and talismans; curses and hexes; secret societies; and websites of importance.
Lots of the articles quilt a number of centuries, which means there’s no scope for detailed research. On the other hand, Williams moves an efficient steadiness between basic evaluate and vibrant examples. She is delicate to variations in viewpoint, noting the competing explanations for phenomena akin to dowsing or Ouija forums.
She additionally recognizes the complexities of reconstructing previous ideals and practices from imperfect surviving proof, even though sometimes unreliable supply subject material isn’t sufficiently interrogated. The guide accepts too readily, as an example, the questionable tale that Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Montespan organized “black masses” by which she used the blood of small children to summon the satan.
Magic and maladies
Compendium of the Occult is handsomely sure, pleasingly laid out and wonderfully illustrated. There are photographs of historic clay pills crisscrossed with incantations, witch bottles filled with nails and urine, voodoo dolls, mummies, skulls, books, statues, artistic endeavors and protecting amulets within the form of jaunty phalluses.
The guide accepts too readily that Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Montespan used the blood of small children to summon the satan.
Wiki Commons
Probably the most printing reasons confusion, on the other hand. “Gold dots” at the timelines are tough to peer, as is the advent’s small white textual content on black pages. The courting of a few entries lacks evident good judgment: “palmistry” is dated from the fifth to the first century BC, even if the item stretches to the 20 th century, and different practices get the vaguer label “ancient times to the present day”. However those are minor quibbles.
Extra considerably, the guide’s geographical remit is proscribed. The advent refers to occult traditions in “the west”, however Britain is a specific point of interest. Williams discusses 8 “sites of significance”, of which 3 (Glastonbury, Avebury and Stonehenge) may also be discovered inside of a 75-mile span in England.
She does quilt historic Egypt and Mesopotamia; there may be an access on voodoo; there are references to the influences of Arabic astrologers, and coffee mentions of practices in east Asia. However extra engagement with occult traditions from past Europe, specifically in fashionable instances, would have enhanced the quantity and higher justified the formidable name.
A 1660 representation of Claudius Ptolemy’s geocentric type of the Universe, from Compendium of the Occult.
Wikimedia Commons
All of the similar, it is a wealthy and interesting guide. Humankind’s inventiveness in conceptualising the workings of the sector emerges with drive. A lot magic is underpinned via a trust that the the entirety is interwoven: the earth corresponds to the skies, the microcosm of the human frame to the macrocosm of the universe.
Williams quotes the doctor and polymath Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), who described how a sq. inscribed with numbers, stamped on a silver plate on the proper hour, may just name on Jupiter to carry the landlord wealth and peace. If revealed on coral, it would break evil spells.
Subject matter items, vegetation, numbers and heavenly our bodies are drawn right into a symbiotic courting, and invested with the ability to reshape human lives. Agrippa’s plates replicate a long lasting need to situate humankind when it comes to the surroundings, and impose which means and solidarity on a chaotic cosmos.
