Witchcraft & Magic
-
Mail Order Magic
Back in the 1940’s Standard O and B Supply Company, a Chicago-based distributor of Occult, astrological and African-American hoodoo material, was the go-to mail order company for all your magical and occult needs. Their Masters Occult Catalog carried everything from books like The 7 Keys of Power and The Ancient Book of Formulas to necessities like Uncrossing Powder, Black Cat Candles, and Dream Perfume. Were you looking for a Bible with full color illustrations? They had it. Sampson Snake Root? No problem. David the Fearless Floor Washing Soap. Step right in. What about a glow-in-the dark Yogee Board? $1.98 please. Best of all you sent no money, everything was C.O.D.…
-
Gundella: Michigan’s Good Witch
Decades ago when I first started awkwardly hanging around metaphysical conventions, I would often find myself, at some point, retreating to a quiet area in order to read the strange books and pamphlets I had acquired from the event’s participants. At those events, although filled with curiously thinking individuals, I seemed, as a teenage punk with blue hair and a jacket covered in spikes, to feel even stranger and more curious than those who were taking aura photographs, performing energy healings and retelling their encounters with spirits, angels and extraterrestrials.At one of these conventions is where I first met Marion. Though that first meeting’s conversation has been lost to the…
-
The St. Louis Witch Murder
Many people believe that women being murdered for being a “witch” ended once the Salem Witchcraft Trials were over. Unfortunately, it did not and it still goes on around the world to this day. This is only one of those tragic stories. 1911 As the month of May came to a close in 1911 so did the life of Aldina Eisenbarth. Not more than a month earlier had she married Alois Eisnenbarth against the wishes of her friends. Aldina a 63 year-old widow had moved back to St. Louis three years earlier after the death of her husband. She met Alois while doing odd jobs around his house and soon,…
-
Old Time Halloween Games for Finding a Lover
Halloween is, of course, filled with bats, spiders and ghosts but it’s also filled with opportunity to find love. Most Halloween parties, of the more turn-of-the-century variety, were simply excuses for men to touch women’s arms or for women to fondle a man’s mustache, how profane. These aspects of the Halloween season have been mostly forgotten, cast aside for plastic skulls and styrofoam gravestone but “no more”, I say. Let Halloween be returned to the lovers …or those who are destined to walk the dark roads of loneliness for eternity. Let the games begin It is said that before you go to bed you should dampen the sleeve of a…
-
The State of Modern Magic: Occult Systems & Applications
It’s more than common for people these days to speak of magic and want to practice magic and almost always they are convinced that they need to burn candles at midnight, with crystals awash in the river water cleared by a full moon. Which is fine. Ha-ha, but practical magic which is practiced everyday and in a far more subversive way, to me is much more interesting. One of the main difficulties in discussing magic and already I have to clarify that I’m not speaking about prestidigitation, slight of hand, stage magic but the more traditional idea of magic as in spell-casting is that as ideas evolve and as our…
