The Spellcaster's Source Hoodoo and Voodoo Witchcraft Blog of Talia Felix

  Modern discussions of color magic often devolve quickly into some scientific mumbo jumbo about "light frequencies." Study of color from such perspective did not exist meaningfully until the late 18th century. Yet color correspondences for magical workings are far older... but also unsteady. We've talked previously about hoodoo style color magic on this blog and in my book The Conjure Cookbook,  but for this post we are concerned solely with the planetary magic correspondences in historical sources. Agrippa's  De Occulta Philosophia  (16th century) holds: Now the colours of the Planets are these: of Saturn, blew and leaden, and shining with this: of Jupiter citrine neer to a paleness, and clear with this; of Mars, red, and fiery; of the Sun, yellow, and when it riseth red, afterward glittering: of Venus, white and shining; white with the morning, and reddish in the evening: of Mercury, glittering; of the Moon, fair. The 17th century Clavicula Salomonis lists: Of ...

  On a freezing night in January 1800, a voice rose from the cellar of a house on the Maine coast and identified itself by name. In a dark London lane in 1804, a man fired a shotgun at what he believed was a ghost and killed a bricklayer dressed in white. In the hills of Tennessee, an invisible entity slapped a twelve-year-old girl unconscious, quoted scripture in multiple languages, and then sang drinking songs at the funeral of the man it claimed to have poisoned. In Cheltenham, a tall woman in black walked the same route through a house for seven years, pausing in the drawing room where a dead woman's jewels were hidden under the floor, while a medical student took notes. In Greenbrier County, West Virginia, a murdered woman appeared at her mother's bedside four nights running and turned her head all the way around on her broken neck to show exactly where her husband's hands had been... These aren't campfire stories. They're sworn depositions, trial transcripts, ...

Before the Demiurge botched the material world, before Sophia made her catastrophic independent decision, before any of the cascading disasters that Gnostic myth uses to explain why existence is the way it is, there was Barbelo — the first emanation of the Invisible Spirit, the divine Mother-Father, the one whose existence preceded every other existence except the one at the top of the hierarchy that is too abstract to be called an existence at all. She is understood as the first self-revelation or ‘thought’ of the Invisible Spirit, which makes her simultaneously the first act of divine self-reflection and the origin of everything that followed, including all the trouble. She is also, depending on which Gnostic text you're reading, a cosmic power, a first principle, a triple-formed divinity who descends through the world three times in different guises, and a figure whose name turns up in magical papyri and on protective amulets. She appears in some of the most important survivi...

The angel on the modern candle label artwork — soft-focus, usually blonde, wearing flowing white, willowy figure, gazing serenely — has nothing to do with the angels of the texts these systems claim to draw from. When angels appear in scripture, the first thing they generally have to say is "do not be afraid" — which suggests the people they're appearing to are very afraid, and not without reason. This isn't a pedantic objection, the entire framework of modern "angel magic" — the pastel oracle cards, the channeled messages of unconditional love, the assumption that working with angels is the safe alternative to anything else — rests on a sanitized image that doesn't survive contact with the actual textual tradition. (The angel that wrestles Jacob in Genesis 32 dislocates his hip.) The historical practice of angel magic is one of the most thoroughly documented strands of Western esoteric work and it is also stranger, more demanding, and morally weirder th...

  In the summer of 2025 I had just completed one of the most stressful projects of my life by producing a stageplay, a production of W.S. Gilbert's musical comedy  Ages Ago . I probably got 5 hours of sleep in the entire week before showtime and I lost 10 lbs from the stress. I was always fighting with the director and I was starting to have forms of out of body experiences.  After the show had completed its run, I performed a Cut and Clear spell  to release me from the relationships formed during the show (and to limit the likelihood of my holding grudges) but even after this, I was still very stressed out, sleeping badly, feeling disordered chakras . What to do?  Well, I could have used traditional hoodoo or folk magic spells and uncrossings for alleviating the problem, but, instead I decided to try a more simple and more mainstream solution: a spa day. In Santa Fe there's a very famous Japanese style spa, but which is also quite expensive. Spending a lot of m...

One beginning in the tradition of hoodoo should know about the importance of baths. They are vital tools in hoodoo work and cannot be dispensed with.  Many people nowadays don't have bathtubs, and some adaptation can be achieved by way of showers. Other people use a large bowl or bucket of water to pour on themselves in place of a spiritual bath. In olden times, and also in some places today where water on tap isn't common, people will perform their spiritual baths in a river or pond outdoors.  A spiritual bath is similar to a regular bath, but with certain key differences. Spiritual baths are not meant primarily for physical cleansing and so washing items like soap might be taboo depending on the exact bath type. However there are some types of magical bath that do use the multitasking property of soap or other cleansers, and in those cases the cleaning aspect is appropriate to the work. There is some controversy around washing the hair in a spiritual bath. Many people don...

  Christopher Marlowe was a Cambridge-educated playwright, the greatest talent of the Elizabethan stage before Shakespeare overtook him. He was rumored to be an atheist, faced charges of blasphemy, almost certainly worked at some point as an agent of the Crown, and was killed in a Deptford tavern at twenty-nine in a fight officially recorded as a quarrel over the bill. Doctor Faustus dates from the last few years of his life, somewhere between 1588 and 1592, and survives in two markedly different printed versions that scholars have argued over for four centuries. The play's plot was not Marlowe's invention. He was working from the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, an anonymous German chapbook printed in Frankfurt in 1587 and translated into English around 1592 as The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. Behind that chapbook stood a real person — Johann Georg Faust, an itinerant German astrologer, alchemist, and self-promoter who lived roughly 1...