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

  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...