There is something deep in human nature that believes words can change things. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Actually, physically, supernaturally change things. That the right syllables, spoken in the right order, with the right intent, can bend reality to the will of the speaker. Every culture in recorded history has held some version of this belief. And from that belief, across thousands of years, a small and peculiar vocabulary has accumulated: the magic word. Some of these words are ancient beyond reckoning, trailing roots into dead languages and forgotten theologies. Some are corruptions of once-sacred phrases, worn smooth by centuries of repetition until the original meaning has been lost entirely. And some, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting, are complete inventions, words conjured from nothing by stage magicians and novelists, which then accumulated the feeling of antiquity through sheer force of use. The line between the ancient and the invented is, in the world of magic words, remarkably blurry. And that blurriness tells us something profound about how language and belief actually work. Abracadabra ~ The Word That Heals, the Word That Kills Of all the magic words in the Western tradition, abracadabra is the oldest with a documented history, and its origins are considerably stranger and darker than its current life, shouted cheerfully by children’s entertainers beside supermarket cake tables, would suggest. The word first appears in a Latin medical text of the second century AD, written by a physician named Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, tutor to the Emperor Caracalla. In Liber Medicinalis, Sammonicus prescribes the word not as a spoken charm but as a written one. Specifically, as a triangular amulet to be worn around the neck as a treatment for malaria, or what the Romans called febris, the fever. The instructions are precise: write the word in full on the first line, remove the last letter on the second, and continue until only a single A remains, forming a downward-pointing triangle of diminishing text. —ABRACADABRAABRACADABRABRACADABABRACADAABRACADABRACAABRACABRAABRABA— The logic was sympathetic magic: as the word diminishes on the parchment, so the fever diminishes in the body. The amulet was then to be tied with flaxen thread and worn for nine days before being thrown backwards over the shoulder into a stream flowing east at sunrise. As prescriptions go, it is not without a certain poetry. What Does It Actually Mean? Here the scholars argue, and have done so for centuries. The most compelling theories trace the word to Aramaic or Hebrew origins. One popular reading derives it from the Aramaic phrase avra kadavra. Meaning, roughly, I will create as I speak, or it will be created in my words. If this etymology is correct, then abracadabra carries within it one of the oldest and most powerful ideas in the philosophy of language: the word that creates reality in the act of being spoken. The divine parallel is obvious. In the beginning was the Word. And it suggests that whatever figure first coined this charm was working within a tradition that understood language as fundamentally creative, not merely descriptive. Other scholars link it to the Hebrew ha-brachah dabra, meaning speak the blessing, or to Abraxas, a Gnostic deity whose name was itself considered a word of power, the numerical value of its Greek letters summing to 365. One for each day of the solar year. The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain. The word may be a corruption of something once meaningful, its original sense dissolved by centuries of repetition. Or it may have been invented whole, an arrangement of sounds that felt powerful before anyone thought… …
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The image depicted here is an AI-generated representation of Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs. As I do not have permission to republish any image of the book. There is a particular kind of book that becomes furniture. Not in the dismissive sense. In the sense that it is simply always there, always open, always consulted, until its spine breaks and you buy another copy because you cannot imagine working without it. Scott Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs is that kind of book. It has been in print for over forty years. There are practitioners who have worn through five copies. The book does not teach you how to work magic. Cunningham is honest about this from the introduction – it is a reference, not a course. What it gives you is the accumulated folk knowledge of centuries, distilled into accessible entries for over 400 herbs, each noting the plant’s common and scientific names, planetary and elemental associations, gender, deity correspondences, magical powers, and practical uses. There are hand-drawn illustrations throughout, a comprehensive index organised by folk name as well as by application, and a cross-reference section that solves one of the most persistent practical problems in historical craft. If a spell calls for “bat’s wings,” what does that actually mean? (Holly. It means holly.) The folk name index alone is worth the cover price. Many older charms and recipes used euphemistic or coded names for plants, partly for secrecy, partly because naming conventions varied wildly by region, and without a key, a practitioner working with historical material can lose hours. Cunningham provides the key, carefully assembled from sources across traditions and centuries. His approach across the book is warm, practical, and genuinely respectful of the plants themselves. He does not treat herbs as interchangeable magical ingredients to be swapped in and out according to a spreadsheet. He encourages practitioners to develop their own direct relationships with plants, to work with what grows locally and what responds to their particular energy, and to treat the folk knowledge in the encyclopedia as a starting point for personal experimentation rather than a fixed authority. The main limitation is one Cunningham himself would probably acknowledge: this is a reference, not an explanation. The entries tell you what is associated with each herb and how it has been used, but not always why. The mythological and historical reasoning behind the associations is largely absent. A practitioner who wants to understand the underlying logic of, say, why bay laurel is associated with protection and prophecy, or why elder has the fraught, liminal quality it carries across European folk traditions, will need to look elsewhere. The Encyclopedia maps the territory without always explaining how the map was drawn. But the map is excellent. No practitioner working with herbs needs more than this and a willingness to spend time in the actual plants. For over forty years, people have been consulting it with their hands still dirty from the garden, and the book has not let them down. Who it’s for: Every practitioner, at any level, who works with plants in any capacity. The reference book that belongs on every craft shelf. Pair with: direct work with your local plant allies, and any good history of herbal folk magic for the reasoning behind the correspondences…. Membership Required You must be a member to access this content.View Membership LevelsAlready a member? Log in here...
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In the spring of 1662, in the small parish of Auldearn on the Moray coast of Scotland, a woman named Isobel Gowdie began to speak. Over six weeks, between April 13th and May 27th, she gave four separate confessions to a panel of ministers, landowners, and a public notary named John Innes, who wrote everything down. She was not, as far as the records indicate, subjected to the spectacular physical tortures that characterised some witch trials. She simply spoke. At length, in detail, with a richness and internal consistency that scholars have been returning to ever since. What she described was a world saturated with magic. A coven of thirteen, each with a named spirit attendant. Meetings at Earlseat Hills and the Kirk of Nairn and Darnaway Palace. The Devil as a large, dark, cold man. The Queen of Faerie in white linens. A puddock-plough drawn by frogs, with traces of dog grass and a half-gelded ram’s horn for a coulter. Clay images made to destroy the heirs of local landowners. Elf-arrows, shaped by the Devil’s hands and trimmed by hunchbacked elf-boys with packing needles, shot from the thumb. And charms. Twenty-seven of them in total – more than in any other recorded British witchcraft case. Three appear twice in the confessions, with significant variations, as if Isobel was either refining her recollection or the written record captured two slightly different versions of living oral material. The charms are remarkable. They are not the formal Latin incantations of learned ceremonial magic. They are working folk charms. Rhythmic, practical, spoken in the first person, built on the kind of internal rhyme and repetition that makes things memorable, that makes them stick. Some of them invoke the Devil explicitly. Others carry the unmistakable flavor of pre-Christian magic overlaid with Catholic forms. The saints’ names, the Holy Trinity, the Lady and her Son. Which is exactly what you would expect from the older healing tradition of the Scottish Highlands, where Christian and pre-Christian elements merged seamlessly in popular practice for centuries. Reading them now, what strikes most is their directness. This is not abstract theology. This is someone who knew exactly what they wanted and had words they trusted to get it. What follows is every charm from Isobel Gowdie’s confessions, organised by purpose, with the context in which she described them. The language has been lightly modernised where Scots spellings make comprehension difficult, but the substance and structure of each charm is preserved exactly as recorded. A Note on Reading These Charms Isobel Gowdie was almost certainly executed, though no record of the execution survives. She named dozens of her neighbours in her confessions. The world she described – the coven, the devil, the murders by magic – was understood by her interrogators as literal truth, and the consequences for the people she named were real and serious. The charms here are historical documents: windows into a specific time, place, and tradition of folk magical practice in seventeenth-century Scotland. They are also extraordinary poetry. The shape-shifting charms in particular have a rhythmic drive that suggests they were made to be spoken aloud, repeatedly, until the saying of them changed something in the speaker. Emma Wilby, the scholar who has studied Gowdie most thoroughly, has suggested that Isobel may have been a genuine magical practitioner, a cunning woman or wise woman, whose real practices were translated, under the pressure of interrogation, into the framework of demonic witchcraft that her Calvinist questioners were looking for. The healing charms lend weight to this. They are not devil-worship dressed up as medicine. They are medicine, with… …
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You may have already learned that water carries intention. And that different waters hold different energies, that storm water is fierce and moon water is soft, that river water moves things and well water holds them. So here is a question worth sitting with: What does your shower water carry? Every day, you move through the world and the world moves through you. Conversations that left a residue. The energy of a difficult meeting or a crowded shop floor. The low-grade static of other people’s moods. The news. The scroll. The relentless output of existing in proximity to other humans and their unprocessed emotions. By the time you reach the end of a day, your energetic body has absorbed considerably more than your physical one. Your skin picks up the literal. Water picks up the rest. The case for showering at night is not just about hygiene, though it is also about that. It is about understanding what water actually does when it moves over a body that has been out in the world all day. And why doing that work before you sleep changes the quality of everything that comes after. What You Bring Home In our Guide to Water Types, we talked about water as a conduit, a carrier, a cleanser, a threshold substance that bridges states. And in our piece on Water’s Fluid Memory, we explored how water responds to what it encounters: that it takes on the imprint of energy, emotion, and intention directed toward it. This works in both directions. You are mostly water. The human body is somewhere between 55 and 65 percent water, and that water is not inert. It is responsive. To your emotions, to your stress levels, to the energetic environment you spend your day in. When you move through a tense environment, your body registers it. When you absorb someone else’s grief or anger secondhand, your body registers that too. Not always consciously. Not always in ways you can name in the moment. But the registration happens. Think about how you feel when you walk in after a long or difficult day. Not just tired – there is often something else. A heaviness. A low buzz of anxiety that does not quite belong to anything specific. A residue of a mood that started in someone else’s office or car or conversation and somehow followed you home. That is not metaphor. That is your water body carrying what it encountered. The Threshold of the Night In almost every spiritual and magical tradition, the transition between day and night is a threshold. A liminal crossing that deserves marking. In Irish folk tradition, the threshold of the home and the threshold of darkness were both considered powerful and potentially dangerous crossing points. The cunning folk of early modern England understood that what you carried across a threshold came with you. In many indigenous traditions worldwide, the practice of ritual cleansing before sleep is ancient and ongoing. Not as obsessive hygiene but as a recognition that the unseen world becomes more accessible at night, and you want to arrive at that crossing clean. In Ayurvedic practice, the period before sleep is considered critical for what enters the dream state. Whatever you carry to bed with you, emotionally, energetically, physically, goes into the unconscious with you. The night is not a neutral pause. It is an active processing time. What you bring to it matters. If you have read on Dream Witches, you will know that the dream is not simply a byproduct of sleep but a genuine realm. And the quality of your crossing… …
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Witchcraft is not one thing. It never has been. Even within a single tradition, no two practitioners work the same way. But over centuries of folk practice and decades of modern revival, certain distinct types have emerged. Recognisable not by rigid rules or formal initiation, but by the energy they are drawn to, the tools they reach for, the part of the world (seen and unseen) they feel most at home in. What follows is not an exhaustive taxonomy. It is a field guide. Some witches will recognise themselves immediately in one entry. Others will find themselves scattered across five. Most practitioners are a blend, with one or two threads running stronger than the rest. Read with an open hand. Take what fits. Storm Witch The energy: wild, electric, threshold, force The Storm Witch works with weather. Not just as a metaphor, but as a living, responsive force. Thunder, lightning, wind, rain, fog, the pressure drop before a storm, are not backdrops. They are tools, allies, and teachers. Storm magic is one of the oldest attested forms of witchcraft. Fear of weather witches runs through the historical record from ancient Rome to early modern Scotland, where witches were tried for raising storms to sink ships. The folk tradition of knotting wind into cord, three knots, three speeds, appears across Scandinavian, Scottish, and Baltic coastal traditions. The Storm Witch feels the approach of weather in their body before it arrives. They may work magic most powerfully during a storm, using the charged atmosphere as a natural amplifier. Lightning strikes the earth and for a moment the boundary between worlds thins. They know this. They work in it. Storm witches are often solitary practitioners. Their practice does not lend itself easily to scheduled circle meetings. You cannot book a thunderstorm for the third Saturday of the month. What they believe: the natural world is not passive. Weather is not random. The wild forces of the atmosphere are conscious in their way and respond to relationship. The witch who walks out in a storm and is not afraid is already halfway to the work. Their tools: storm water, lightning-struck wood, feathers, wind-knotted cord, threshold spaces (the cliff edge, the open hilltop, the window in a storm), the sky itself. Bone Witch The energy: ancestral, chthonic, death-medicine, deep time The Bone Witch works with death. Not as morbidity, but as the deepest form of transformation available to us. Bones are what remains when everything temporary has gone. They are the architecture of a life, the last physical record of a body’s existence on earth. This practice has ancient roots in cultures that practised bone curation, relic veneration, and ancestral skull worship, from Neolithic skull burials to the bone-working traditions of cunning folk. The bone is not the death. It is the distillation of the life. Bone Witches collect bones ethically – roadkill, fallen creatures, gifts from the land. Each bone carries the energy of the animal it belonged to. Deer antler for sovereignty and the wild threshold. Crow bones for intelligence and the crossing between worlds. Snake vertebrae for transformation and shedding. They read bones (cleromancy), work with them on altars, and use them in spellwork as anchors of enduring energy. Many Bone Witches also work extensively with the ancestors. The beloved dead, the lineage dead, and the nameless dead of the land. Their altars often hold photographs, bones, earth from graves, and offerings of tobacco, whiskey, or milk. What they believe: death is not the opposite of life. It is part of the same cycle. The dead are not gone. They are changed…. …
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The image depicted here is an AI-generated representation of The Crooked Path by Kelden. As I do not have permission to republish any image of the book and I honestly don’t need any copyright issues. The Crooked Path: An Introduction to Traditional Witchcraft by Kelden · Published by Llewellyn Worldwide, 2020 · ISBN 978-0738762036 · Available everywhere books are sold If you have spent any time in witchcraft spaces online, you have probably noticed a growing divide. On one side: Wicca and its many eclectic descendants, the tradition most people encounter first. On the other: Traditional Witchcraft. Older, thornier, less codified, and significantly harder to find a clear entry point into. Most of the serious books on the subject are either dense academic texts, obscure small-press publications, or written by British practitioners working from a very specific regional lineage that can feel remote to a newcomer. The Crooked Path by Kelden was written to close that gap. Published in 2020 by Llewellyn and introduced by Gemma Gary, author and co-founder of Troy Books, one of the most respected publishers in the Traditional Craft world. It is exactly what it says it is: an introduction. Not a grimoire, not an initiation manual, not a comprehensive theological treatise. A doorway. And as doorways go, it is a good one. Who Is Kelden? Kelden (who writes under a single name) is a practitioner based in Minnesota who has been working in Traditional Witchcraft for over a decade. He runs a blog called By Athame and Stang on the Patheos Pagan channel, and his writing has appeared in The Witch’s Altar, The New Aradia: A Witch’s Handbook to Magical Resistance, and This Witch magazine. He is also the co-creator of The Traditional Witch’s Deck and has since published The Witches’ Sabbath: An Exploration of History, Folklore, and Modern Practice and All Them Witches: Folktales and Rhymes. He comes across, both on the page and in his wider work, as someone who takes this seriously without taking himself too seriously. That matters in a genre that can slide easily into either pomposity or superficiality. What Is Traditional Witchcraft, and Why Does It Need Its Own Book? This is the question the first chapter addresses head-on, and it is worth understanding before you decide whether this book is for you. Traditional Witchcraft is not Wicca. That distinction is important, and Kelden makes it clearly without being dismissive of Wicca. Wicca is a mid-20th century religious tradition primarily developed by Gerald Gardner, with a specific theology (the God and Goddess, the Wiccan Rede, a particular ritual structure) and initiatory lineages. It is a genuine spiritual path. But it is relatively new. Traditional Witchcraft draws from something older and less tidy. The folk magic traditions, cunning craft, hedge-riding, and witch lore that existed in rural European communities for centuries before anyone wrote a handbook about it. It is rooted in the land, in animism, in the spirits of specific places and ancestral lines, in practices that were never meant to be systematised into a coherent religion. It does not have a fixed theology or a central authority. It does not necessarily involve worshipping a God and Goddess duality. And it is considerably less comfortable than the wellness-friendly version of witchcraft that dominates social media. What Kelden is doing in this book is offering a framework, not the framework, for beginning to engage with this territory. What the Book Covers The structure is logical and moves from foundation to practice. Kelden begins with the cosmological and philosophical underpinnings of Traditional Witchcraft, the nature of the witch, the role of… …
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Most witches spend the majority of their energy on the beginning of a spell. The intention. The tools. The activation. The moment of casting feels like the whole thing. And then the spell just… trails off. The candle burns down, the mood dissolves, and the practitioner wanders off to make tea with the working half-open behind them. This is one of the most common reasons spells do not land the way they should. Sealing a spell is not a formality. It is the act that completes the circuit. Without it, the energy you raised does not fully release into its work. It lingers in the space around you, or it leaks back into your field, or it simply dissipates without direction. The seal is what tells the magic: this is done. Go do what you were sent to do. If you have read our How to build a real spell, you already know that closing is the final step in the structure. This post goes deeper. Into the different ways to seal, what each method does, and how to choose the right one for the work at hand. What Sealing Actually Does Think of a spell as a container you have been building throughout the working. You set your intention – that is the shape of the container. You gathered your elements and raised your energy – that is the contents. You activated it – that is the moment the contents became live. Sealing is putting the lid on. Without the seal, the container stays open. Energy is not static. It moves toward the path of least resistance, and an unsealed working will bleed. The intention diffuses. The raised energy dissipates into the ambient field of the room rather than being directed where you sent it. And because you remain in the space, still emotionally attached to the outcome, the energy can actually fold back toward you. Which keeps it stuck in your own field rather than moving outward to do its work. The seal does three things: It closes the container. The energy you raised is now held and directed, not leaking into the surrounding space. It releases the working. Once sealed, the spell leaves your hands. You are no longer responsible for carrying it. This is what creates the energetic separation between you and the outcome. The separation that allows magic to actually move. It signals completion to your own nervous system and subconscious mind. This matters more than people give it credit for. Your subconscious is one of the primary mechanisms through which magic operates. A clear, deliberate close tells your deeper self: this work is done. Stop interfering. Trust the process. The Methods of Sealing There is no single correct way to seal a spell. Different traditions use different methods, and different workings call for different approaches. What matters is that the method feels final, that it is done with full presence, and that you mean it. Words ~ the spoken seal The spoken word is the oldest and most universal sealing method. Language that carries the energy of completion, said aloud, with conviction, at the end of the working. Traditional closes you may already know: ~ So mote it be ~ from ceremonial and Wiccan tradition, meaning “so it must be” ~ an assertion of will~ It is done ~ simple, direct, final~ And so it is ~ affirmative, present tense, complete~ As I will it, so it shall be~ The work is sealed. The spell is free. The specific words matter less than the quality of presence behind them. You are not reciting a… …
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Most spell tutorials are either too vague to be useful or too theatrical to take seriously. This is neither. What follows is the actual structure of a working spell – the skeleton every effective working is built on, regardless of tradition. Step 1 ~ Intention: Know Exactly What You Want A spell without a clear intention is just atmosphere. Your intention is the engine. Everything else, the candles, the moon phase, the words, exists to serve it. Before you gather a single thing, you need to be able to state your goal in one sentence. Specific. Present tense. Positive framing (what you want, not what you want to avoid). Weak: I don’t want to be broke anymore.Strong: Money flows to me steadily and I meet my needs with ease. Write it down. Refine it until it feels true and you can say it without flinching. If you feel resistance when you say it out loud, that’s information. Work with it before you proceed. Questions to sharpen your intention: ~ What does success actually look like? What changes?~ Is this mine to ask for, or am I trying to influence someone else’s will?~ Am I ready for this if it arrives? Step 2 ~ Elements: Assemble What You Need Elements are the physical and symbolic anchors of the spell. They give the working weight in the material world and signal to your subconscious, and to whatever forces you work with, that something real is happening. Choose by correspondence Every element should map to your intention. Nothing is decorative. Element Name Examples Color Match the energy, not the aesthetic Green for abundance, black for banishing, red for strength Herbs & Plants Use what grows near you when possible; they’re more potent Rosemary for clarity, bay for manifestation, lavender for peace Stones Choose one or two – don’t overcrowd Citrine for abundance, obsidian for protection, rose quartz for love Candles Color + shape both matter A figure candle for person-specific work, pillar for ongoing work Symbol or Sigil Write or draw your intention into a single mark A hand-drawn sigil created from your goal statement Water, Fire, Earth, Air At least one classical element grounds the working A bowl of water, incense smoke, a dish of salt, an open flame Keep it lean. Three to five elements, each chosen deliberately, outperform a crowded altar every time. Step 3 ~ Channeling: Get Into the Right State This is the step most people skip and why most spells feel hollow. A spell is an act of directed energy. If your mind is scattered, distracted, or halfway convinced this won’t work, the energy is scattered too. Before you activate anything, you need to be fully present and internally aligned with your intention. Ways to channel and drop in ~ Breathwork ~ 4-7-8 breathing, box breathing, or simply taking ten slow deliberate breaths before you begin~ Meditation ~ even five minutes of stillness clears the noise~ Movement ~ some practitioners pace, sway, or drum to raise energy before working~ Sound ~ a specific song, a singing bowl, chanting your intention as a mantra~ Scent ~ smoke cleansing, incense, or anointing oil pulled through the space first~ Visualization ~ close your eyes and see the outcome as if it’s already happened. Feel it. Hold it until it’s vivid The test: do you feel the shift? There’s usually a physical cue. A deepening in the chest, a sense of stillness, heightened awareness. That’s the signal you’re ready. If you’re doing this in a specific tradition, this is also when you call in your guides, deities, ancestors, or allies. Step… …
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The image depicted here is an AI-generated representation of The Book of The Dead. It is not a book of death. It is a book of becoming. The title was coined by a German Egyptologist in 1842 – Das Todtenbuch – and it stuck, even though it misses the point entirely. The ancient Egyptians called it Reu Nu Peret Em Hru: “The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day.” A manual not for dying, but for moving through darkness and emerging on the other side transformed. That distinction matters. It shapes everything about how you read it. What It Is The Book of the Dead is a collection of spells, prayers, hymns, and ritual instructions used in ancient Egypt from roughly 1550 BCE through the first century BCE. A span of over 1,500 years. It is not one fixed text. It is a living tradition: a pool of around 200 spells from which individual copies were assembled, personalized, and commissioned for specific people. No two copies are identical. Some versions were painted on papyrus scrolls up to 40 metres long. Others were inscribed directly onto tomb walls, coffins, linen wrappings, and amulets placed against the body. The wealthiest Egyptians commissioned elaborate illustrated copies with their name written into every spell. The less wealthy got shorter versions, sometimes with the name left blank to be filled in. The equivalent of a spiritual template you customised yourself. It evolved from two older traditions: ~ The Pyramid Texts (c. 2400–2300 BCE) ~ the oldest religious writings in the world, carved into the walls of royal pyramids, reserved exclusively for pharaohs~ The Coffin Texts (c. 2100–1650 BCE) ~ adapted from the Pyramid Texts and extended to the nobility, written on the interior of wooden coffins By the New Kingdom period (1550 BCE onward), the tradition had democratised further. Any Egyptian who could afford it could commission their own Book of the Dead. The afterlife was no longer the exclusive property of kings. The Spells The word “spell” is a reasonable translation, though heka, the Egyptian concept of magic, carries far more weight than our modern understanding allows. Heka was not superstition. It was the fundamental creative force of the universe, present before the gods themselves. To speak heka was to participate in creation. Words, properly spoken, properly written, were not symbols of power. They were power. The spells of the Book of the Dead operate across several categories: Navigation and Protection Spells to guide the deceased through the Duat, the Egyptian underworld, safely. The Duat was not a simple place. It had gates guarded by serpents, lakes of fire, corridors that shifted, and beings who could destroy a soul entirely. These spells functioned as passwords, maps, and shields. Spell 125 requires the deceased to name each of 42 divine judges and declare their innocence before them. Knowing the name of something gave you power over it. One of the most consistent principles running through all Egyptian magic. Transformation Some of the most striking spells describe the deceased transforming into other forms – a falcon, a heron, a lotus flower, a crocodile, a swallow. Spell 77 allows transformation into a falcon of gold. Spell 83 transforms the soul into a phoenix (bennu bird). These were not metaphors. They described genuine metamorphosis, the soul learning to move through different states of being, gathering different kinds of power and perception. Preservation of the Body and Soul The Egyptians believed the soul had multiple components. The ba (personality and individual essence, often depicted as a human-headed bird) needed to be able to return to the body. The ka (life… …
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The Carmina Gadelica, also known as Charms of the Gaels, is a compendium of prayers, hymns, charms, incantations, blessings, folk poems, songs, proverbs, and miscellaneous lore gathered in the Gàidhealtachd regions of Scotland between 1860 and 1909. (Wikipedia) Alexander Carmichael was a civil servant and exciseman whose work took him throughout the Highlands and Islands, and he spent those decades sitting with people in their homes, listening, and recording what was being said and sung in a tradition that was already beginning to disappear. The Original Six-Volume Set Carmichael himself was responsible for the first two volumes, published in 1900. His daughter Ella re-edited them in 1928. Further volumes were edited by his grandson James Carmichael Watson and published in 1940 and 1941. A fifth volume was edited by Professor Angus Matheson in 1954, and the series was completed in 1971 with a sixth volume containing a lengthy glossary and indices.( Wikipedia) So the complete work spans seventy years and three generations of Carmichael’s family to finish. The original six volumes are bilingual, Gaelic and English on opposite pages. Internet Archive They are the scholarly definitive edition, and they are extraordinary, but also dense and not the easiest entry point. The One-Volume English Edition (Best Starting Point) In 1992, Floris Press published a one-volume English-language edition with a valuable introduction by Dr John MacInnes. (Wikipedia) Previously only available as a bilingual text in six volumes, this one-volume edition in English only is an important contribution to the wider awareness of Celtic literature. This is the most accessible version of the original collection and the one most practitioners reach for first. It’s available on Amazon and through most booksellers. The Celtic Vision ~ The Most Accessible Version If you want to start somewhere gentler, The Celtic Vision edited by Esther de Waal is the best gateway. Assembled from the original six volumes of Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica by noted Celtic author Esther de Waal, this rich array includes elements of piety that address every side of life. De Waal curated the most beautiful and accessible prayers and blessings into a single slim volume that reads beautifully and is widely available in paperback. It includes the smooring prayers, milking songs, blessing prayers, and protective charms.. This is the version many practitioners keep on their altar rather than their bookshelf. Free Online Access The Carmina Gadelica is fully available online, with each contributor listed with their occupation and location. Goodreads The Sacred Texts website – hosts the full bilingual text of all six volumes for free, including Carmichael’s original English translations and his extensive notes on customs and dying traditions. This is genuinely one of the most useful free resources in Celtic folk tradition available anywhere. A Note on Carmichael’s Editing It is worth knowing that Carmichael’s editing methods were challenged in 1976, with accusations that he had meddled with, altered, and polished original texts. The Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell conceded that much of the first three volumes must be taken as a literary rather than a literal presentation of Gaelic folklore. (Soundyngs) The Carmichael Watson Project at the University of Edinburgh has since published his original field notebooks online, allowing comparison between what was recorded and what was printed. This doesn’t diminish the beauty or the value of the collection . It simply means approaching it as a curated literary work as much as a verbatim folk record, which is what the best folklore collectors have always produced. In short: Start with Esther de Waal’s The Celtic Vision for a beautiful, readable introduction. Move to the Floris Press one-volume English edition… …