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

  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...

This is Conjure Cookbook's recipe for Dark Arts Oil , also called Black Arts oil or Black Magic oil , used to cast wicked and harmful spells upon enemies. patchouli, black pepper, wormwood, valerian root, spanish moss Why no quantities? Because most home practitioners don't use them! Of course if you were to be selling commercial hoodoo formulas you'd want to invent a formal recipe for yourself, but magic doesn't require scientific level measurements. Add the items in whatever amounts feel right to you. This is the secret of magic! You can find more recipes for occult ritual oils in The Conjure Cookbook , which includes even these harmful recipes which many books of witchcraft deliberately leave out!  There are a few magical recipes that I know but did not include within the  Conjure Cookbook.  I wish I could say it was due to some grand scheme like wishing to prevent the careless from misusing such knowledge or trying to protect occult secrets, but frankly, i...

Prosper Mérimée was a French writer of the Romantic movement. As with many Romanticists, he was also a noted archaeologist, historian, and an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen , which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen.  Mérimée acknowledged that he chose to make his femme fatale Carmen a gypsy mostly because that's what he had been studying at the time he composed the novella, and he was very excited about the subject. One can't fault any man who lived 200 years ago for not following modern academic styles in his research, but just because it's old doesn't mean his reports should be totally discounted. These are some of the best records we have about the life of the Romany people at the time.  Within his fictionalized story of Carmen, he sought to utilize known information about their lifestyle and magical practices. Because the story was widely read, these types of spells became general fol...

My life's introduction to Cornelius Agrippa was not through reading his books, but through the article about him in Man, Myth and Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural. It includes the following little rumor about Mr. Agrippa: ...He went out one day, leaving the key of a secret room with his wife. She foolishly lent it to the lodger, a student, who went into the room and found a huge book of spells, which he began to read. After a while he looked up and found a demon standing in front of him, asking why it had been summoned. He gaped at it in horror and the demon strangled him. Agrippa returned and, fearing a charge of murder, made the demon restore the student to life for a few hours. The young man was seen walking in the street but when the demon's magic wore off, he collapsed. In that same article, his appearance in the German children's book  Struwwelpeter is mentioned purely because they wanted to use the public domain illustration of him. Now, the fir...

The particular idea of the  vampire has its origins in Eastern European lore. However, the simple idea of undead corpses returning from the grave exists in many cultures. Sometimes they're seen as merely a type of ghost , or other times they may be a flesh and blood creature such as the zombie .  Vampires, as we understand them today, did not feature prominently in medieval English sources. However, the concept of the undead or revenants, beings that returned from the grave to harm the living, did exist. These creatures were often described in folklore and ecclesiastical texts rather than in literature. Medieval England had its own share of supernatural beliefs, heavily influenced by both Christian doctrine and older, pagan traditions. These beings were believed to rise from the grave, often as a result of improper burial practices, curses, or as divine punishment. They were sometimes said to cause misfortune, illness, and death among the living. One of the earliest medieval ...

THE DEAD WOMAN'S PHOTOGRAPH Virgil Hoyt is a photographer’s assistant up at St. Paul, and a man of a good deal of taste. He has been in search of the picturesque all over the West, and hundreds of miles to the north in Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects, and put a canoe through the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of an adventurous sort and no dreamer. He can fight well and shoot well and swim well enough to put up a winning race with the Indian boys, and he can sit all day in the saddle and not dream about it at night. Wherever he goes he uses his camera. “The world,” Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with him when he smokes his pipe, “was created in six days to be photographed. Man--and especially woman--was made for the same purpose. Clouds are not made to give moisture, nor trees to cast shade. They were created for the photographer.” In short, Virgil Hoyt’s view of the world is whimsical, and he doesn’t like to be bothered with anything disagr...

The year is 19 AD. The Roman Empire is in turmoil. The emperor Tiberius is old and sick, and the succession is uncertain. In this time of chaos, one man stands out as a beacon of hope: Germanicus, the nephew and adopted son of Emperor Tiberius. Germanicus is a popular and charismatic figure. He is a brilliant general and a skilled diplomat. He is also a devoted husband and father. But Germanicus is also a threat to Tiberius' power. The emperor fears that Germanicus will one day usurp the throne. In 19 AD, Germanicus is sent to the East to quell a rebellion. But while he is there, he falls ill and dies. The official cause of death is fever, but many people believe that Germanicus was poisoned via witchcraft. Proofs also of fascination and sorcery were pretended to be found, such as the ashes and bones of human bodies, dug up again half burnt and stained with black blood, magic forms of devoting persons to the infernal gods, and Germanicus's name graved on sheets of lead. Robert ...

It was another day in the life of the online hoodoo spell lady. She sat before her computer, staring at the screen, her inbox beckoning her. She knew the drill - the first task of the day was always to check her emails. A couple of spell inquiries were waiting, each vying for her attention.  The first inquiry, however, made her heart sink. She knew it was the worst kind - the kind that demanded reassurance. The kind that would make her promise the impossible. She had warned people about this, but it seemed like nobody paid any attention. It was a woman this time, seeking a spell to make a man give her more of his time, sex, and conversation. The catch? She wanted to know if it was going to work.  The online hoodoo spell lady sighed. She knew that success was a tricky thing, especially when it came to people wanting "more" of something. She crafted an honest response, but deep down, she knew that it would only discourage or confuse the woman further. Nevertheless, she hit the ...

Thomas Hardy wrote with the eye of an antiquarian. His Wessex novels are set in a fictionalized version of his native Dorset, but the customs, dialects, and beliefs he transcribed into them were drawn directly from a vanishing rural England he was determined to preserve on paper. He kept folklore notebooks, corresponded with members of the Folklore Society (founded in 1878, the same year Return of the Native was published), and treated peasant superstition not as curiosity but as serious record of how people actually lived. Return of the Native takes place on Egdon Heath, a windswept tract of bracken and barrow-mounds where the modern world feels like a rumor. Among its cast is Susan Nunsuch, a heath-dwelling mother convinced that the striking and rebellious Eustacia Yeobright has overlooked her sickly son — that is, harmed him by malign or envious glance (what other cultures call Evil Eye.) Hardy's account of Susan's response runs to several pages of close working detail:

There was once a blind man, who only knew the world by what he could hear, smell, taste or touch. He had heard many mentions of an object called the moon; he was told that it sat in the sky glowing, changing shape and controlling the tides. But when he asked to touch it, he was told it was too far away. “How do you know this ‘moon’ of yours exists if you can’t put your hands on it?” he asked skeptically. People assured him it was plainly visible, its actions had been reliably charted and tracked for centuries. “Well, prove it to me,” he said. So several people were brought to him assuring him that they’d seen the moon and knew it to exist. The blind man, however, was unconvinced. “All I have is hearsay, I want solid proof that it exists!” The blind man was told that any further proof would be virtually impossible to obtain. He scoffed. “I think you guys are all delusional; you’re just imagining things that aren’t there, and then spreading gossip about it until other weak-m...