Meredith Graves, occult powerhouse and magical director for Kickstarter, makes a wonderful observation that our own first exposure to magic – whether it comes through fairytales, Disney movies, or stage illusionists – leaves a lasting impression in the way we comprehend and interact with the unseen later in life.1 That initial conception of magic sets the direction for our magical path. For my part, my initial impressions were formed by fantasy series: Harry Potter, A Wizard of Earthsea, Eragon. All stories in which there exists some ancient magical language, comprised of the true names of things, the knowledge of which confers arcane power. Stories that depict a complex and dynamic interplay between language and magical ability.2
For better or worse, this is an impression that has heavily influenced my own practice over the years. And I am not alone in this association; humans have long drawn parallels between language and magic. Indeed, it is baked into the very etymology of our modern vocabulary. Consider the words spell from the proto-Germanic spellam, meaning “to talk” or “to tell”;3 and charm from the Latin carmen, meaning “song, verse, enchantment, or religious formula.”4 These ideas of speaking or singing power into existence are woven through our lexicon even to the present day.
And this is but a facet of the complex historical interplay between language, writing, and magic. Many deities are ascribed domains that include both. Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe god of Egypt, ruled writing, science, art, and magic. Apollo, the Greek solar god, presided over light, truth, healing, poetry, and prophesy. Mercury, the divine messenger of the Roman pantheon, served as a psychopomp, as well as ruling commerce, eloquence, communication, travel, and magic. Odin, the all-father of the Norse cosmology, who famously discovered the runes, was a god of knowledge, sorcery, poetry, and ecstatic trance. Again and again we see this association between spoken or written language, foretelling, and magic.
We see it even in the symbol sets of writing themselves. The individual characters of the Hebrew alphabet, in addition to representing sounds, identify both concepts and numbers – opening up a whole complex field of textual analysis to derive occult meaning. The Scandinavian runes, similarly, represented complex concepts and shades of meaning beyond just their phonetics. These individual characters were used historically (and still are today) for both divination and witchcraft. The symbols of language become the symbols of magic, or perhaps there was never a distinction to start with.
And it’s not hard to imagine how such an association might arise. In an illiterate society, the ability to take arbitrarily large amounts of information and bind them into physical artifacts – either to be recollected infallibly at some future date or transmitted at a distance – would indeed have seemed a strange wizardry. If we have symbol sets designed to capture the intangible and make it physical, how great a leap is it to repurpose them for sortilege or sorcery?
We see this tradition persist all the way into Renaissance magic. Consider the emphasis – both in Solomonic conjuration and in religious exorcism – on identifying a demon’s name. To know the name of a spirit was to be able to exert some degree of influence over them. Consider as well the idea of a written and sealed spirit pact. It makes an appearance in the Grimorium Verum, where the preparation of a demonic pact document is at the core of the operation. It also appears in the broader tradition of Liber Spirituum, books of spirits that serve as both a record of past conjurations and a method to quickly re-establish communication with the spirits named.
Dr. Alexander Cummins, magic historian and geomancer extraordinaire, makes the wonderful distinction between books about magic, books of magic, and magic books. The first category consists of books that discuss magic as a historical, social, or cultural phenomenon; those that explore magic intellectually as a field, but don’t attempt to teach the actual details of magical practice. The next category covers books that actually set out to convey those practical details – spellbooks, ritual instructions, magical order training documents, etc. These books seek to provide not just a theoretical understanding of magic, but specific procedures for carrying it out. The canonical Wiccan “Book of Shadows” is an example of this type. The third, and most interesting, category consists of books that are themselves magical. Books that are, by their very nature, spells or spirits in their own right.
To the extent that I consider myself to have a particular field of specialization within magic,5 it is this third category. I’m tantalized by the tradition of the Liber Spirituum. The idea of finding or crafting a book that is by its very nature magical – a book that is a talisman, magical tool, spirit directory, conscious entity, or all of the above – fascinates me. It is part of what originally drew me to working with St. Cyprian of Antioch, who has become a pillar in my personal practice. There are a huge number of folktales concerning the grimoire of St. Cyprian, the legendary black book in which he recorded all his spells and powers. Tales of people using it to achieve their desires, or seeking it out and having their worth and worthiness tested.6
As I continue to develop and deepen my own practice, I find myself drawn ever further into this convergence of magic and language. I find myself called to the idea of the Liber Spirituum, because it is such a concrete artifact of this convergence: the intangible made tangible, the invisible world rendered real. In exploring this interplay, I am immersing myself in a tradition that is thousands of years old, perhaps as old as language itself. How can I hope to do that, and come away unscalded? Perhaps that is the allure of words, that mutual exchange of substance – that we shape them to our will, and are shaped by them in turn.
- Eth, A. (Host). (2020, April 16). Welcome To Malkuth: Meredith Graves on COVID-19, Magic, Music & Quarantine [Audio podcast episode]. In Glitch Bottle. https://www.glitchbottle.com/podcast/2021/5/29/welcome-to-malkuth-meredith-graves-on-covid-19-magic-music-amp-quarantine ↩︎
- Eragon specifically has a wonderful scene where the protagonist misconjugates a word and accidentally curses someone instead of blessing them. ↩︎
- Harper, D. (Ed.). (n.d.). Spell (n.1). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved November 25, 2024, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/spell#etymonline_v_23997 ↩︎
- Harper, D. (Ed.). (n.d.). Charm (n.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved November 25, 2024, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/charm#etymonline_v_8449 ↩︎
- Which mostly I don’t. My practice is wildly syncretic. I very much tend to fall into the category “jack of all trades, master of none.” ↩︎
- Leitão, J. (2017). The Immaterial Book of St. Cyprian. Revelore Press. ↩︎
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