TRAJECTORIES OF MAGICAL TEXT
IN CHARMING TRADITIONS

Daniel A. Schulke

   Folk-magic, being essentially a practice, has long made use of text in manifold forms. The European exemplar of the grimoire is an outward manifestation of the ‘magical book’ used by the ceremonial magician or necromancer, and perhaps the image most indelibly fixed when ‘magical text’ is summoned to mind; lesser-known book-recensions of folk magic such as The Devil’s Plantation of nineteenth century Essex also partake of this legacy. But the spoken charm, orally transmitted and manifest, is a textual vessel far older than the written word, and a medium of enchantment possessing entirely different parameters. Magical traditions where such charms fulfill a central role often command unique approaches to text and its specialised use for magical power. In this article I will examine some examples of charming traditions, especially those existing at the boundaries of traditional witchcraft, as well as their usages of the Word, be it spoken, sung, written or inscribed.
   ‘Charming Traditions’ is a modern academic term applied to surviving exemplars of “verbal magic, spoken or sung”. Though the study of verbal charming is rooted in the academic climes of the late eighteenth century, the discipline has experienced a recent revival as a partial result of the European witchcraft studies of such scholars as Carlo Ginzburg, Gustav Henningsen, Eva Pocs, and Wolfgang Behringher. At present a vigorous and lively series of researches is unfolding, producing original work on the magical charm which adds considerable breadth to our knowledge of the layered magical topography of Europe and its magical heirs. Even if one disagrees with the approaches or conclusions of such research, the scholars themselves are to be commended for bringing much obscure magical material to light.1
   Researchers presently studying such charms employ a taxonomy for their typological classification, applying such names as Flum Jordan (invoking the River Jordan, often present in blood-stopping charms), and Tres Angeli (invoking the power of three angels). The burn-healing charms common to folk magical practice in Europe and North America is an exemplar of this latter type, as is this magical prayer collected from North Carolina:
 
I saw six angels coming from the North
Three had fire, three had frost.
Go out fire, come in frost
By father, son, and Holy Ghost.

American exemplars of the ‘fire and frost’ charm type have been collected from practitioners who knew it exclusively as an orally-transmitted tradition. Many variants of this charm are scattered throughout the weaving of folk magical practice over a wide geographic area, including a curious version where-in the bearers of power are not angels, but Indians.2 These North American charms, still practiced in a localized folk-healing context and outside the urban phenomenon of popular occultism, are similar in many ways to the charms of rural Cornish and Devonshire charmers, also still practiced:

Feyther Son and Holy Ghost.
Naale the Divil to this post!
Throice I stroikes with Holy Crook,
Won for God an one for Wod and one for Lok!3

This particular example, utilizing both ‘pagan’ and Christian elements, typifies the so-called ‘dual-faith observance’ found in modern recensions of traditional witchcraft and allied folk-magic.
   Amongst the Pennsylvania Germans of North America are Brauchers, those who practice the art of braucherei —or, more rarely, hex— a form of Christian charming largely of German-Swiss origin whose greater concerns are healing, protection from devils, and exorcism. The Art is said to be given by God, and, like many forms of charming in the West Country, the word ‘witch’; is very rarely used, if at all, to describe the practitioner. Yet in my own experience as a practitioner of traditional British charms, these vital streams of braucherei share considerable commonality with traditional witchcraft, as their root-ethos, concerned with the efficacious usage of magical power, is not religion but sorcery.4
   While many oral charms are used within braucherei, several forms of written magical text arise from that tradition as well, and represent curious transits from verbal charm to printed. One is Pow-Wows, or The Long-Lost Friend, a magical manual containing folk remedies and charms, and bearing textual similarities to the “black books” of Europe. Compiled by Johan Georg Hohman in 1820, there are several variants of the manuscript in private hands, as well as the more commonly available recension in published form.5
   One aspect distinguishing The Long Lost Friend is its inclusion of ‘proofs’ alongside some of the spells it contains. Statements of efficacy such as “proven”, or Probatum underscored the reliability of the magic, or in some cases took the form of a testimonial. This distinction also occurs in the Scandinavian svartebøker or ‘black books’, and may be a feature arising in the historical transmigration from an orally-transmitted and practiced charm to the hypostasis of a textual vessel. We might also consider that to transpose into published text an Art which has long remained the orally-transmitted preserve of initiates, would necessary entail that Art entering the world of profane men, and scepticism. Proofs, while a minor feature of a printed magical text, are likely a buttressing textual device lending additional power or credence to the printed charms. Perhaps more cynically, we may see Proofs as a partial appeal to Reason, for in entering a book, a magical narrative would transcarnate into the world of the rational; much as science was one of the lynchpins of the written magical recensions of Aleister Crowley.6 Alternatively, science and some forms of magic share a common aim of illuminism.
  As with many magical books, the book of Pow-Wows was also considered a textual fetish: mere possession of The Long-Lost Friend was sufficient as for magical protection. Within the text itself we have a direct affirmation of this:

Whoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible, and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water, nor burn up in any fire nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him. So help me.

   This idea of the ‘talismanic book’ is present in many magical traditions using books, for example Christian practices of weighing witches against the Bible to determine their guilt or innocence. More important to the traditional witch or charmer, we may cite the Welsh dream-incubation ritual at the healing well of Llandegla, whereby patients suffering from epilepsy would sleep beneath the altar using the Bible as a pillow.7
  
Another unique magical text of the Brauchers is a distinctive written charm called a ‘Himmelsbrief’ or ‘letter from heaven’, penned by God himself and serving as a magical talisman of protection, worn on the person or secreted in a house. As with The Long Lost Friend, the text was talismanic: its possession was apotropaic. In rare cases, where a person possessing a Himmelsbrief was the direct subject of demonic attack, or required extra power, the letter could be taken out and read aloud as a spoken charm. An excerpt from one Himmelsbrief held in the Pennsylvania German Broadside Collection at Franklin and Marshall College reads:

The Holy Trinity be with me, on the land and on the water, in the wood, in fields, towns, cities, villages, groves and thickets. Lord Jesus Christ protect thou me against all enemies, seen and unseen, secret or open; keep me safe from all harm through the bitter sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ, and his holy raisin-colored blood, which he shed at the foot of the cross. Jesus Christ was conceived at Nazareth, born at Bethlehem, and crucified, murdered and died at Jerusalem. These are words of truth written in this letter, that I may not be caught and bound by men or murderers. They must flee from me all arms and guns, and not take hold on me and loose all their power over me. Rifle hold thy load.

   Himmelsbriefs ascribed their authorship to God and were hand-copied from one person to the next. This, as well as the fact that the actual texts of known letters is different, may be seen to constitute a notion of kind of ‘textual lineage’ within Braucherei, similar to that of a trade, craft, magical tradition, or religious sect. Each Himmelsbrief  therefore had a distinct history of passage from hand to hand, back into time to divine origin itself.
   Following in certain forms the magical contours of inscribed Graceo-Roman lead curse-tablets, often found thrown in wells or in graveyards, is the transference of verbal charm to a physical substrate, often used as a talisman. The Welsh fairy-doctors, whose traditional cures of physick were both spoken and compounded in mortar and pestle, stand at the heart of a charming tradition centered upon healing. The Physicians of Myddfai: a manual of healing magic and cures set down in the eighteenth century but by tradition said to date from the 1200s, includes inscriptions of apples and nails with healing charms:

For all sorts of ague, write in three apples on three separate days.

In the first apple O Nagla Pater
In the second apple O Nagla Filius
In the Third Apple O Nagla Spiritus Sanctus.

And on the third day he will recover.

The Latin components of this charm are already recognizable from a number of charming traditions, here they have been transferred in script to the living flesh of apples to effect healing. Of additional interest is that, like The Long-Lost Friend, some traditions of Welsh charming have ascribed especial powers to magical books or those who own them. The power of Huw Lloyd, the fifteenth century dyn hysnbys or wise manwas attributed in part to his possession of magical books, two of which were alleged to belong to a faerie woman who lived in Bridge Lake.
   Possession of magical manuals is also considered a magical specialization of Russian sorcery, the term chernoknizie loosely translating as ‘black bookery’ or ‘art of the black book’. Texts thus utilized included Charovnik, a book of spells no longer extant, which gave instructions on “how to leave your body as if as if dead and fly like an eagle or a hawk or a crow or a magpie or an owl, or run like a panther, a savage beast, a wild beast, a wolf or a bear, or fly like a serpent.” W.F. Ryan notes that while most of the banned Russian magic-books were of Byzantine origin, but Charovnik has clear Russian shamanistic features.8

   The Scandinavian svartebøke comprise anotherEuropean charming tradition, this one melded with the textual trajectory of the magical manual. Essentially private collections of magical charms, the ‘black books’ may vary widely in their contents, sometimes attributing the origin of the magic to the Devil.9 A leaf from the Norewgian svartebøker known to scholars as the Rustad Manuscripts, dated from 1790 to 1820 and published in 1999 under the name The Black Books of Elverum, describes a geoglyphic spell utilizing magical text:

To put out the eye of a thief:

Take the fat from a chicken and mercury and man’s blood, on a Sunday morning during the church service. Blend together to make a dough. Then drawn an eye with this mixture on a table with these words around it, as follows:

DIABOLA, APURT, SIO

Then take a copper nail that has been forged on a Sunday morning, before the sun goes up, made with three blows from a hammer in the Devil’s name. Then set the nail against the drawn eye and strike three blows with the same hammer and and say:

“Satan, Beelsebub, Belial, Astarath, and all the Devils that are in Hell.”10

   Present in this charm is a well-known formula of Christian inversion present in many folk magical practices which came to be called ‘witchcraft’; it is noteworthy that the Devil, at times specifically named as Lucifer, recurs within this manuscript as the source of the charms’ power, whilst Christic potencies are invoked throughout. Spells utilizing inscriptions and written components are also numerous, including the inscription of the words I ERBUM DIE MANET ME TERUNEM on the door of a burning house to stop the fire, and the inscription of an aspen leaf with a magical charm to cause everyone in a house to dance.
   A curious usage of magically inscribed corpora occurs with regard to the so-called ‘Hendy Head’ of Anglesey, an enigmatic stone head conforming to the archaeological contours of so-called ‘Celtic’ stone heads often found in Wales. Enjoying modern cultic veneration, the head’s mouth bears a drilled hole, into which a worshipper inserts an iron tube-like object whose Welsh name translates as “staple for Hell’s chest’. Inside this tube is a scroll bearing the following prayer:

O Gwydion protect your servant, he who was with you in the battle of the shores of Llifon. Keeper of the secret routes, protect him so that he might be saved from the Betrayal so that he can return through the vortex when he is ready.

He was born in the presence of the Black Well, three ages and thirteen circuits after the Great Crisis. This is affirmed by one hundred less fifty of the suitable sisters on the shores of the perfect lake.11

  The Hendy Head and its faithful have been the subject of controversy among academics and occult practitioners alike concerning the origin and antiquity of their practices; it is not my purpose here to examine this question. I cite the example because its specific usage of a  physicaltext as an intercessor between practitioner and spirit bears a striking resemblance to similar practices of other charming traditions long extant, such as the Himmelsbrief of the Pennsylvania Germans. Its geographic situation in Wales, where charming traditions and written talismanic texts have an established history12, is also worthy of consideration, as is the wording of the prayer inscribed on the scroll.
   My ongoing inquiry into these matters is experiential as well as academic, for the historical radices of the witchcraft tradition to which I belong arise from charming traditions which are not mere historical artifacts but living magical corpora practised by its body of initiates. Though this tradition has come to coin the modern term ‘Sabbatic Witchcraft’ to describe the particulars of its magical foci —namely the ecstatic communion of the Witches Sabbath— it remains a tradition of charming. The initiatic conjunction with the heart of what academics presently call ‘charming traditions’ is thus a vital and energising force of the Magical Current of the Sabbatic Cultus, ciphers of its charm-bearing physium are present in its published magical texts.
    Inasmuch as ours is a magical tradition utilising, in part, the verbal charm, it is also a literary tradition, having produced a corpus of magical text since the early 1990s for both inner and outer use. Of these magical texts, a salient feature is the book arising from dream. Both Azoëtia and Viridarium Umbris, as well as Andrew Chumbley’s One: The Grimoire of the Golden Toad, owed their genesis in part to oneiric revelation or refraction resulting from magical dream-control. Other Cultus grimoria, both complete and in preparation, are similarly reified. Additional types of magical text I am familiar with personally are the sigillised communion wafer, and inner magical lexica shared in common by a cloister of initiates.13
   Yet the glamours of the book, and even the fixation of the Logos itself, must be understood only as the outer periphery of the witches’ rhombus, a skin of mediation whose right reading is its own flaying. To the reader encountering a written magical text, whether appearing in publication or as an archaeological artifact, perception is impressed by the exteriorisation of Sign and Substrate, and what may be correctly intuited from them. For the textual compiler self-conscious of the magical narrative’s potential trajectories, this is the fertile field wherein the fascinum is sown. For the scholar seeking to contextualise the text in the greater narrative of magic itself, comparison with other extant charms and texts, as well as orthographic analysis, can in fact broaden understanding —but only to a degree.
   In addition to those portions of a text directly experienced upon reading, a magical text possesses a number of ‘secret histories’ known only to its compilers and users which, of necessity, forms a hidden legacy of the magic itself. This shadow-narrative unfolds within the bound circle of the Art Magical; it will include correct ritual actions performed adjunctive to the charm, incidents of its use and efficacy, the nature of the spirits attending, and the manifold factors which led to its textual reification. In the case of the latter consideration, a printed magical operation may, by custom, omit or falsify words considered too sacred to be committed to text, or those vouchsafed by oath. One may consider in this light the Hebrew ‘magical name of God’, whose spelling is often standardised as a series of Hebrew characters but whose correct vocalisation is known but to the high priest.
  Similarly, there are significant differences in power between reading a magical charm and exacting it; betwixt that rite encumbered by text and that wherein the voces magicae is held in balance to apprehension of a magical text’s ritual hot-points. There is a profound and measurable difference between reading a printed charm from a book and speaking prayers from the heart to the presiding powers direct, without the intercession of the printed word. The two processes are fundamentally different, requiring different aspects of the sorcerous mind, as are their ‘results’. Rote memorisatio of a magical text fulfils a function of exactitude, as well as a sacrifice of the Ars Memoria, but allows scant liminal state wherein the sorcerer may achieve a state of presence with the spirits and their actuating powers.
  In other words, there is an inevitable degradation of power when a spoken charm takes the form of the printed word: something is gained (such as the outward beauty of the text’s corporeal form, or technical notation), but much is also lost (such as vocalisation, telaesthetic impress, magical link, and magical or cultural context). Even where such charms are studied by ethnographers and anthropologists observing their direct usage, the observer almost always lacks the inner perspective gained by the practical use of such charms in situ over time and their interconnectivity to such highly personal elements as kin, clientele, and ancestors, as well as the breadth of personal spiritual revelation (gnosis). In essence, the format of the printed text, thesis and synthesis, constrains extra-textual understanding of the charm.
  Such matters are worthy of the charmer’s consideration when encountering all forms of the Logos, written or spoken. The reciprocity between verbal and written forms of magical text, as well as the unspoken and unwritten narratives of the Circle itself, will ever serve to inform the tongue and temper the quill. If magical text may be understood as dynamic, fluid and part of a larger procession of calls sounding from the atavistic reservoir, then textual reification is not merely the ediolon of the profane. Thus we may strive ever closer to remembrance of words-of-spirit, inscribed on the black pages of the aethyrs, whose reading awakens the Flesh of Light.

Daniel A. Schulke is the presiding Magister of Cultus Sabbati, a magical order of traditional witchcraft initiates in Britain and North America. The aforegoing article is based on a lecture of the same title given at the Esoteric Book Conference in Seattle, Washington USA in September 2009.

Notes

1. See, for example, Roper, Jonathan ed. Charms, Charmers and Charming: International Research on Verbal Magic, (Palgrave MacMillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2009)

2. Kirkland, James. ‘Taking Fire out of Burns: A Magico-Religious Healing Tradition’ (Herbal and Magical Medicine ed. Kirkland, Holly F Matthews, CW Sullivan III, Karen Baldwin. (Duke University Press, Durham 1992: 41-52.) Both the blood-stopping and burn charms here referenced are ultimately European in origin; for example the popular medieval charm for healing wounds and arresting hemorrhage found in the Compendium Medicinæ of Gilbertus Anglicus, physician to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century.

3. Mullins, Rose. White Witches: A Study of Charmers.( PR Publishers :12)This charm occurs with vernacular variations in a number of published sources, both widespread and obscure; one well-known version appears in Paul Huson’s The Devil’s Picture-Book (Putnam USA 1971: 157)

4. I am most grateful to those good Brauchers who were kind enough to answer some of my questions personally regarding the finer points of these practices, and who must nonetheless be cited here as ‘anonymous’.

5. Originally titled Der Lange Verborgene Freund, the title is currently published by Health Research Books, Pomeroy, WA, USA.

6. For a traditional witch’s perspective on the relation of science to magic, see Chumbley, Andrew D. ‘A Short Critique and Comment Upon Magic’  Skoob Occult Review (Autumn 1990) re-printed in Opuscula Magica, (Three Hands Press, 2010)

7. Bord, Janet. Cures and Curses: Ritual and Cult at Holy Wells. (Heart of Albion Press, 2006: 75-77)

8. The Bathhouse at Midnight ( 55)

9. Stokker, Kathleen. Remedies and Rituals: Folk Medicine in Norway and the New Land. (Minnesota Historical Society Press USA, 2007: 75-91)

10. Rustad, Mary, ed. and trans. The Black Books of Elverum. (Galde Press USA, 1999: 72-73) Similar books have been found in North America as the magical relics of European immigration, such as Perfect and Tested Secrets or Various Medical, Magical, Chemical, Sympathy and Anti-sympathy Treatments (Vollkommen und bewarte Geheimnusse oder allerhand Medicinische, magische, spagijrische Sympathetische und atipathetische Kunst-Stucke).

11. Ross, Dr Ann. Folklore of Wales. (Tempus, 2001: 151-153)

12. Merrifield, Ralph. The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. (New Amsterdam, New York USA 1988: 152)

13. One example of the inscribed communion wafer occurs in the calligraphic manuscript The Satyr’s Sermon by Andrew D. Chumbley ( Xoanon 2004,2009), and is given the name ‘Corpus Satyri’. A type of ‘inner magica lexica’ is the Richel-Eldermans Collection of artifacts housed at the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall.

Copyright © text and illustration D.A. Schulke 2010.