Musing Mystical

✨ A Gathering Place for Magical Readers and Writers ✨

Author Archives: Rachel McConnell

About Rachel McConnell

Rachel Christina McConnell is a witch, tarot reader, intuitive astrologer, and writing spider. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in the City of New York. Her short stories have appeared in Dark Moon Lilith Press and Minerva Rising Press’s The Keeping Room. Links to her publications are available here: https://rachelchristinamcconnell.wordpress.com

Pagan Portals – The Norns, by Irisanya Moon

Pagan Portals – The Norns: Weavers of Fate and Magick, by Irisanya Moon
Moon Books, 1789049105, 112 pages, August 2023

From the Weird Sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the three witches in Disney’s 1993 cult classic Halloween film Hocus Pocus, the Triple Goddess of Fate haunts pop culture, bewitching the masses in the form of three meddlesome hags. Fate’s commercial success in such unflattering incarnations betrays how terrifying the concept of predestination is to contemporary Westerners who tenaciously cling to the secular cult of Free Will, despite the audacious philosophers and neuroscientists like Sam Harris who have declared that free will is an illusion. According to Harris, the conscious mind may believe it’s in control, but it only acts out decisions that have already been made by the subconscious mind. 1 Some people may even become enraged by the idea that there is no such thing as free will, because our culture places such high value on accepting personal responsibility for our successes and failures in life. There is a deep collective fear of not having control over our destinies.  

In Pagan Portals – The Norns: Weavers of Fate and Magic, author, witch, and priestess Irisanya Moon reveals that the ancient Norse had a more holistic view, and saw Fate, or Wyrd, as an intricate web that both includes and transcends us. The Norns, the trio of mysterious goddesses who personify Fate in Norse mythology, are ubiquitous spirits, unseen yet all-pervasive, ever weaving the fabric of space and time. They occupy the liminal spaces, moving through us and around us, forever spinning the wheel of the Cosmos, and their spindle of Fate pricks the thumbs of both gods and mortals alike.

Because of their ubiquity, the Norns can be difficult to define. There are the primary three, named Urd, the Norn of What Was, who is associated with the past and creates the thread of life; Verdandi, the Norn of Becoming, or the present moment, who measures the thread of life; and Skuld, the Norn of What Shall Be, who cuts the thread at the end of life. The Norns also include a collective of female ancestral spirits called the dísir, who watch over humanity. Additionally, Moon points out that “a common meaning for norn in modern Icelandic is ‘witch’ or ‘hag’.”2

Instead of rehashing Norse myths that can be found in other books, Moon guides readers to discover who the Norns are by fostering intimate relationships with them. She encourages personal gnosis of these divine beings through a variety of exercises, such as “Stepping into the Worlds of the Norns”3 through trance.

As Moon invited me to travel in spirit to the World Tree and visit the Wyrd Sisters, I was flooded with vivid imagery. In an eldritch forest, I saw the World Tree Yggdrasil towering above the other trees, its evergreen boughs silvered by moonlight, dripping lunar dew over the Well of Fate, pooling in an earthen basin formed by the vast network of knotted roots. Three shadowy maidens rose from the depths of the lake, shifting shape. They coalesced into a trinity of spiders, weaving the elastic web of the Multiverse in the boughs of the World Tree. Infinite worlds were reflected in the dewdrops of their infinite eyes. I began to think of Yggdrasil as a human body, my body. My spine became the tree’s trunk, a ladder of bone that could take me up to Asgard, the realm of the gods, or down into the depths of Hel, the Norse Underworld. I realized that all the trees in the forest around me were other people’s World Trees. We live in a Multiverse where everyone is their own Yggdrasil. 

“Everyone has a part of the wyrd, like a web, like a large woven tapestry,” Moon says. “My wyrd intersects with yours, perhaps. Yours intersects and pulls on mine. And all of this is what creates fate and destiny.”4

Together, we all shape Fate as a collective. 

I was drawn to this book because I’m a fatalist. I believe that free will is an illusion, but I think that we should behave as though we have free will, and make responsible choices to the best of our abilities, even if our subconscious mind has already made them for us. It appears to me that there are too many external factors limiting any supposed free will that we mortals may have, from mental programming imprinted upon us as children by our parents and the culture in which we were raised, to societal limitations that limit our mobility as adults. I think that when we act out what we believe is our free will and pursue our dreams, we are in fact acting out our soul’s true purpose and what we are destined to do. We are coming into alignment with our True Will, which is the will of Fate. 

I believe the excessive praise of individualism in Western civilization is harmful to the collective. The emphasis on individual free will and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps blinds us to systemic abuse and allows the continued oppression of large swathes of people. Everyone’s fate is connected. The focus on individualism creates the illusion that individuals are struggling alone. In truth, their struggles are shared with other people in similar circumstances, but in isolation, they are tricked into believing they should shoulder the burden of circumstances beyond their control all on their own. 

I appreciate how Moon compassionately addresses the ways that Fate encompasses circumstances beyond one’s control.

“Dismantling the structures of oppression requires the commitment to uncovering and understanding that people do not all have the same opportunities,” Moon says. “Many are born into places that limit and seek to continue to hold them back.”5

This thought-provoking book had me pondering the shared Fate of the collective, the interconnectedness of people’s individual threads, and how great an impact any word or action, however small it may seem at the time, can have on so many people. I can recall times when the actions of others have inadvertently shifted my path, and I am sure I have had the same effect on other people as well, in ways which I am not aware. Just as Moon says, “I can choose to meet my fate in a way that is honorable and respectful of the collective versus just being out for myself.”6

My sole criticism of this work is that the author’s well-meaning efforts to be all-inclusive were superfluous to the point of distraction. For example, Moon spells the word “gods” with double ds (“godds”), to make it more gender inclusive, which I don’t feel is necessary, because I read the word “gods” as gender neutral without a second thought, and my inner editor kept flagging it as a spelling error.7 

Moon also suggests that the gender of the dísir, who are traditionally female ancestors, may make some people uncomfortable, and “it might be more inclusive to expand this to those who birth or those who mother without being attached to gender.”8 I don’t understand why seeing the dísir as female matrons would be offensive, and I feel that we can learn more about their true essence by examining the traditional perceptions of these ancient spirits instead of projecting modern gender politics upon them. It would be far more interesting to explore why the dísir were perceived as female instead of dismissing their femininity and assigning them whatever gender feels more comfortable. I personally think the focus on female ancestors is beautiful because it emphasizes matrilineal descent, as opposed to our patriarchal society, which frets over paternity and erases the maternal line by only giving children the surname of the father. I feel that dismissing the female gender of the dísir only reinforces these patriarchal views. 

It’s no accident that the maternal line is also known as the distaff line. 9 The word distaff is derived from the Old English, dis, meaning “bundle of flax” and stæf, meaning “staff,” so the distaff is a staff on the spinning wheel that was wound with flax in preparation for spinning. Meanwhile, the strikingly similar Old Norse word dís means “goddess,” and the plural form of dísir means “goddesses.”10 Spinning was traditionally women’s work, and the dísir are the spinning goddesses, the collective ancestral mothers. They are inherently feminine, and I think it would be disrespectful to change that just because their gender might make some people feel uncomfortable.

I see the Thread of Fate as the umbilical cord, which nourishes the fetus in the womb and connects the unborn child to the well of ancestral memory (the well of Urd). When the baby is born, the umbilical cord stretches out and is measured by Verdandi, in that precious and fleeting moment when mother and child are still connected. When the cord is cut by the midwife Skuld, the neonate takes their first breath of spirit, and accepts the destiny that has been gifted to them by the Norns.  

I gained some wonderful insights into my personal perception of the Wyrd Sisters by experimenting with Moon’s exercises. While I prefer a more traditional view of the Norns, I feel that my disagreement with some of Moon’s progressive views produced creative tension that helped me further clarify my own relationship with these potent spirits.

Pagan Portals – The Norns: Weavers of Fate and Magick is a book that shifts one’s perspective from fearing Fate to embracing the mystery of how our individual fates intertwine with the world’s collective Fate and the greater destiny of the Multiverse. The exercises contained within encourage developing a personal connection with these transcendent powers through journaling, self-exploration, and trance work. For those who love journal prompts and guided meditations, this book can facilitate a deeper relationship with the mysterious spirits of Fate who watch over us all and guide us towards our destinies.

Persephone’s Oracle, by Jennifer Heather

Persephone’s Oracle, by Jennifer Heather
Independently Published, 22 cards, 29 pages, January 2023

Persephone is my goddess archetype, and during the fall, I honor her annual descent into the Underworld to sit on the Iron Throne as Queen of Shadows. As the Sun enters the Venus-ruled sign of Libra, where Saturn is exalted, it is a time for evaluating our relationships and honoring our commitments. I see Persephone as the Virgo Harvest Maiden, led by her psychopomp Mercury into the cavernous Great Below with the Golden Scales of Libra in hand, ready to renew her infernal vows with Hades and share in his judgment of the dead, balancing his Saturnine sternness with her Venusian grace and compassion.

This year, I was thrilled when my Hadean partner surprised me with Persephone’s Oracle as an Autumn Equinox gift. The creator of this deck, Jennifer Heather, is based in the UK and sells this oracle in her ObsidianSirenShop on Etsy. I love supporting Etsy creators, and this deck, as well as her Aphrodite’s Oracle and Hekate’s Oracle, have been on my wish list for a while.

Persephone’s Oracle is a shadow work deck consisting of 22 cards and a slim guidebook devoting a full page to interpreting each one. The entries also include journal prompts to facilitate shadow work and deepen self-knowledge.

In the introduction chapter of the guidebook, creator Jennifer Heather says, “Persephone’s Oracle is symbolic of the journey towards wisdom as experienced by the archetypal maiden descending into the Underworld to face the unknown terror of darkness,”11 and the cards “depict the transition of the maiden to maturity and the lessons obtained along the way.”12 If the cards are read in order, they begin with card 1, titled “Innocence,” relating to Persephone’s beginning as Kore, the innocent Flower Maiden.

The first five cards in the series contain uplifting messages about connecting with your inner child, letting your light shine, and spending more time in nature. The tone shifts with card 6, titled “Surrender,” which speaks of the trauma of Persephone being abducted by Hades in the meadow and carried down into the Underworld, a terrifying ordeal which she had no other choice but to accept. The series continues through various aspects of Persephone’s process of individuation as she is transformed by her journey through the Underworld, and returns to the surface in card 22, titled “Ascension.”

One of my favorite things about Persephone’s Oracle is that the cards are graced with the masterpieces of a variety of famous artists, and the name of the painting, the artist, and the date it was produced is given in the guidebook, so each card is like a mini art history lesson. For example, six cards feature the Art Nouveau paintings of Alfons Mucha, and French Symbolist Odilon Redon’s work appears on four cards. My personal favorite is Proserpine by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1874).

I immediately connected with this oracle, and as I shuffled, I asked for a message from Persephone. I felt her gentle, loving energy radiating from the cards. “Cycles” jumped out of the deck, which advised me to “harmonize and flow with life’s rhythm.”13 The painting on this card is Autumn by Alfons Mucha (1896). Autumn is depicted as a nymph with long, flowing auburn hair and a crown of chrysanthemums upon her head. She floats in a vineyard, harvesting grapes. The grape vine is sacred to Dionysos and I see Autumn as one of his female followers, the maenads. I imagine her pressing grapes beneath her bare feet to make wine, the blood of Dionysos. Her flower wreath is significant because the ancient Greeks wore chaplets of chrysanthemums to ward off evil spirits.14

According to Scott Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, mums are protective solar flowers associated with the element of fire. He claims that imbibing an infusion of chrysanthemums is a cure for drunkenness. When worn, he says the flowers protect one from divine wrath, and growing mums in the garden repels evil spirits. 

I decided to explore the journal prompts in the guidebook by pulling a tarot card for additional guidance. I chose the journal prompt: “In which areas of my life do I resist change?”15 I pulled the Nine of Knives (Nine of Swords) from The Tarot of Vampyres, my current go-to shadow work deck.

The Nine of Knives depicts a moonlit vampire in a torture chamber, holding a dagger and licking blood off her fingers. There are meat hooks hanging on the wall behind her, reminding me of the Sumerian tale of the descent of the goddess Inanna into the Underworld, where she was killed by the Queen of the Great Below, her shadow twin Ereshkigal, and her corpse was hung on a meat hook. The Nine of Knives brings “change through torment” and indicates that “an enemy is projecting their phantoms onto us.”16

Like Persephone, I resist change when an attacker is attempting to force it upon me. I think this is true for most people, because no one wants to be forced to change against their will, but sometimes we can be our own worst enemies. While some cycles, like the changing of the seasons, are a natural part of life, others, like addictions, negative behavioral patterns, and cycles of abuse are meant to be broken, and hitting rock bottom can be a catalyst for positive transformation. Like the Underworld journeys of Inanna and Persephone, a painful change that is forced upon us can liberate us by destroying a false sense of self and initiate our metamorphosis into a new, more empowered and authentic identity. 

The chrysanthemums on the “Cycles” card represent protection from evil spirits, the shadowy phantoms that others project upon us. Flower medicine is one of the gifts of Persephone. Pulling these cards prompted me to get a pot of vibrant orange mums for my front porch, and to press a few flowers in my grimoire for future protection spells.

Persephone’s Oracle is an insightful tool for shadow work and self-discovery, and a great complement to tarot. The paintings stimulate the imagination, lending themselves to additional interpretation. Just as Persephone found her latent powers and the hidden aspects of her personality during her dormancy in the darkness, and bloomed with the renewal of spring, we can do the same by embracing the cyclical rhythms of our lives, and the archetypal journey from darkness to light.

Undreaming Wetiko, by Paul Levy

Undreaming Wetiko: Breaking the Spell of the Nightmare Mind-Virus, by Paul Levy
Inner Traditions, 1644115662, 416 pages, May 2023

In the modern (mis)Information Age, a collective madness has possessed the mob through mainstream media. “Fake news,” conspiracy theories, and pernicious lies spread like wildfire across the internet, confusing the masses. Identity politics and outrage culture further divides people and eats them alive. Author Paul Levy calls this psychic disease that has infected humanity wetiko (pronounced “wet-tee-ko”), named after an evil cannibalistic spirit in Native American mythology.12

Levy’s vision of wetiko is informed by the integration of Buddhism, Jungian psychology, Gnosticism, western politics, and his personal traumatic experiences with “archetypal evil,” which manifested in his abusive father. By creatively appropriating the name wetiko, Levy found a potent way to personify the cross-cultural phenomenon of psychic blindness wreaking havoc on humanity.

In 1981, Levy had a shamanic initiation and spiritual awakening that was catalyzed by the trauma of abuse, during which he was hospitalized multiple times and misdiagnosed with manic depression (now known as bipolar disorder). Being institutionalized only traumatized him further, and these experiences made him conscious of the dreamlike nature of reality, opening his eyes to the psychospiritual illness of wetiko through firsthand experience. Levy broke free of the abusive psychiatric establishment and became an art teacher and wounded healer, assisting others in spiritual awakening as the founder of the Awaken in the Dream community, based in Portland, Oregon.

Levy has been writing about wetiko for more than twenty years, and has created his own acronyms for describing this elusive phenomenon. In his first book on the subject, titled The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis (2006), he referred to what he would later call wetiko as “malignant egophrenia, or ME disease,” because it clouds one’s self-perception, or identity.15 Levy expanded upon these insights and adopted the name wetiko in Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (2013) and Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus that Plagues our World (2021). He also detailed his personal traumatic experiences in Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father (2015).

In his sixth and latest book, Undreaming Wetiko: Breaking the Spell of the Nightmare Mind-Virus, Levy says that “finding the name for what is afflicting us is like a deliverance from a nightmare,”17 and “the cure for wetiko is to see it.”18 Naming this phenomenon objectifies it, calling it out into the open so that it can no longer hide in the shadows.

Levy asserts that wetiko is highly adaptive and has thrived on the internet as a “techno-virus.” 19 I was instantly hooked on this book because it gives a name for a psychic contagion I have observed online. I unplugged from the matrix of social media about a year ago and one of the main reasons I deleted all of my accounts was to protect my mind from the sensory overload of advertisements and other people’s opinions. I felt like I was being psychically drained every time I logged in, so learning about the “mind-virus” spread by the wetiko spirit objectified the overall bad vibes I was sensing when I was on socials.

Levy believes the best cure for this collective mental illness is to remove the mask of forged identity and get in touch with our true selves. Creative self-expression helps us connect with our authenticity. Like a stagnant pool of water mirroring a cloud of blood-sucking mosquitoes, the rise of social media and online influencers has given wetiko an internet breeding ground to further brainwash, confuse, and distort the perceptions of the masses, encouraging escapism through social media addiction and comparison to others instead of turning us within to seek the truth of who we are as individuals. Social media encourages identification with a false, filtered public persona, which is reinforced by how many likes people receive on their vacation pictures and selfies. Social media touches people’s deepest insecurities and exploits them.

We can’t connect with our authenticity if we hide behind filters and deny the flaws, secret pain, and traumas of our shadow selves. I believe the New Age Movement has also been hijacked by wetiko, because there is a toxic denial of negativity in this popular spiritual community in favor of love, light, and positive vibes only! which encourages complete denial and repression of the shadow aspect of the psyche. This kind of delusional spiritual bypassing and willful blindness gives wetiko a safe space to flourish and spread like cancer.

Wetiko is nourished by darkness, and thrives in our unconscious blind spots. Willful ignorance and denial makes us complicit in its devious workings. When we do so, Levy claims we are conspiring in the murder of Christ, crucifying the living light within. Embodying the salvific light of truth is the only thing that can restore our sight and liberate us.20

In Undreaming Wetiko, Levy reveals that this mind-virus originates and proliferates through abuse. Unresolved ancestral trauma, family curses, and child abuse are the gnarled poisonous roots of wetiko that burrow deep within our subconscious minds. When we incarnate into our family line, we inherit and unconsciously channel the collective ancestral trauma, giving it an opportunity for liberation through physical manifestation.

“Like a toxic entity,” Levy says, “this unprocessed trauma becomes an ancestral spirit that penetrates and insinuates itself into the core of the child’s being.” 21

This passage struck me as particularly illuminating, as it implies that part of our life purpose is to heal the unresolved ancestral trauma that was imprinted upon us at birth. This means it may manifest in our lives in such a way that we are forced to recognize and consciously work through it in order to fully process and resolve it. However, if we are unconscious and sleepwalking through life, we may become possessed by this spirit of ancestral trauma and recreate the abuse, thus perpetuating the cycle.

I resonated deeply with this section because I feel like I am alchemizing at least three generations of trauma through my maternal bloodline: the ancestral trauma my mother experienced and passed down to me, my personal trauma, and what I unconsciously projected onto my own children because of my unhealed wounds and life challenges.

“When parents repress their unconscious and do not responsibly do their inner work,” Levy says, “it radiates out into the family environment and infects the children, who will be compelled to live out the repressed, unconscious, unlived lives of the parents.”22

This psychic projection of unresolved trauma and emotional issues is what causes multigenerational family curses.

It’s easy to place blame on an abusive or neglectful parent, but I feel it’s important to recognize that they may have been overwhelmed by the radioactive psychic material they were attempting to transmute, and passed some of it down because it was simply too much for one person to handle. I believe that was the case with my own mother, who confided in me about her intense trauma, and believed she had broken the family curse over me in the name of Jesus. However, when she placed her palm upon the crown of my head and spoke in tongues, I felt the weight of that curse, and I believe my mother inadvertently transferred the burden of whatever she had repressed and denied onto me.

There is, however, hope. According to Levy, as we heal ourselves, we heal our entire family line. This is very reassuring to me, because I fear it’s too late to mend any damage I may have caused my own children while my wounded self was raising them, but this indicates that any private healing work I do now will benefit everyone in my family line, both past and future. Time is nonlinear, and as multidimensional spiritual beings, our healing work radiates throughout time and space, benefiting not only our direct lineages, but also the entirety of the human race.
Wetiko works through our blind spots. To see them, we have to be honest with ourselves about whether or not we are acting out or condoning the abusive behavior we are trying to heal within ourselves. This is what makes healing work so difficult. By being touched by abuse, we have absorbed and internalized it, and it can unconsciously seek expression through us.

So we have to be truthful with ourselves about how the abuse we have experienced is manipulating our own behavior and worldview. This can be really challenging because no one wants to identify with something that harmed them, and no one likes to admit they have the potential to cause the same harm to others. In fact, according to Levy, it’s important to not identify with it, which can cause feelings of despair and thwart the healing process. A delicate balance must be struck between owning our shadow impulses and not being defined by them.

Truth-tellers are one of the greatest threats to wetiko. When we share our emotionally-charged survival stories, and other people become angry and attack us, they are speaking for wetiko by reenacting the very abuse we are shedding light upon. Wetiko wants to silence us, and becomes embodied through our unhealed attackers, who attempt to shut us down and bully us when we speak our truth.

This can be re-traumatizing for us, but it can also be an opportunity to recognize that our words have deeply touched their own unintegrated and unconscious wounds, and we should not take their projections personally. Knowing that their perceptions of us are being clouded by their own unconscious wounding, which has been triggered, or re-activated, by our stories, we can deflect their projections and be more firmly grounded in our own truth.

Undreaming Wetiko is an essential text for those who are deep-diving into shadow work and healing ancestral trauma. I feel it validated a lot of my intuitive realizations about family curses and intensified my personal healing work by compelling me to journal more about my traumatic experiences. Levy’s insights have also helped me to identify the shadow projections I have absorbed from my parents that are not a part of my authentic self. I will likely reread this book in the future because there is a lot of excellent information that may require additional readings to fully metabolize. For those who are open and receptive to its teachings, Undreaming Wetiko is a phenomenal book that will assist in transformative healing breakthroughs and awaken the divine light within.

Tales & Legends of the Devil, by Claude and Corrinne Lecouteux

Tales & Legends of the Devil: The Many Guises of the Primal Shapeshifter, by Claude and Corinne Lecouteux
Inner Traditions, 1644116855, 240 pages, August 2023

The Devil captured the medieval imagination with a variety of epithets, such as “Lucifer,” “the Evil One,” “the Black Tempter,” “the Horned One,” “Beelzebub, the master of the devils,” and “Old Eric” or “Gamle Erik,” as he is known in Denmark. Being a more nuanced character than the theological Satan, the folkloric Devil was often depicted as a clever trickster who was morally ambiguous rather than evil, occasionally even doing good deeds, such as freeing a prisoner or helping someone in need, for a price.1

Tales & Legends of the Devil: The Many Guises of the Primal Shapeshifter is a collection of fifty-two medieval folktales from twenty European countries, compiled by medieval scholar Claude Lecouteux and his wife, co-author and translator Corinne Lecouteux. Many of these stories begin with the classic fairy tale opening “Once upon a time,” setting the stage for imaginal realms to encroach on reality through entertaining diabolical delusions.

In this treasury of infernal tales, the folkloric Devil is an elusive entity whose most defining characteristic is his ability to shapeshift. He can assume whatever form he pleases, appearing in the guise of a seductive woman or a handsome young suitor, a redhead, a hunter of souls, a man clad in the black cassock of a priest, or in the shape of an animal, often a black one, such as a goat, dog, cat, toad, serpent, crow, or wolf. When he appears in humanoid form, he often has horns and hobbles with a limp, and the cloven hooves peeking out from underneath his clothes give him away before he vanishes in a puff of smoke.

The Devil is a portmanteau figure whose quicksilver nature encompasses a myriad of mythical beings demoted by Christianity, such as gods, sorcerers, fairies, and nature spirits.2 This is often made clear when a folktale describes an entity as a devil rather than the Devil. In a Bulgarian tale titled How the Devil Recognized a Flea Skin, “a devil sprang out of the sea” and “changed into a man” in order to wed a princess.21 After the wedding, “he dragged her with him into the sea,” revealing his true identity as a “merman.”23 Stories like this no doubt evolved from pagan fairy lore about mortals being abducted by supernatural beings and carried away to otherworldly realms. These devils are also mortal, and can be outwitted or killed by clever human beings.

In many of these stories, the Devil abducts women and takes them as brides, bringing to mind the classical myth of the rape of Persephone. The Devil in the guise of a bridegroom feels like a cross between the fairy tale serial killer Bluebeard and the Greek god Hades. In one tale, a Persephone-like maiden picks a radish that drags her down into the Underworld to marry the Devil. In another, the Devil carries away a princess on a winged horse, and guards the multiple wives he has imprisoned in hell in the form of a dragon.

Some of these stories have recurring themes and complement each other with nearly identical endings. A tale from Switzerland titled The Devil for a Brother-in-Law and a longer story from Denmark called The Black School both conclude with the devil giving a young man who has served as his apprentice in the black arts a limitless coin purse under the condition that he stay in an inn and not groom or bathe for seven years. The young man’s nails grow into claws and his hairy, demonic appearance is so shameful that he is too embarrassed to leave his room. While in this disheveled and animal-like state, the man uses his diabolical wealth to aid the poor from behind closed doors. During the sixth year, he agrees to help a man who has gambled away his fortune pay his debts in exchange for the hand of one of his three beautiful daughters in marriage. The two eldest daughters are so disgusted by their benefactor’s foul odor and bestial appearance that they reject him outright. Although the youngest is also horrified by him, she is the most virtuous and agrees to marry him out of filial piety. After the seven years have ended, the beast cleans up and transforms into a handsome young man, much to his fiancée’s relief. Her older sisters, who had spurned him, commit suicide out of jealousy and the devil is delighted to have gained two wives of his own out of the bargain by collecting their souls.

In my favorite story, The Devil in the Cask Spigot, which comes from Transylvania, Romania, a princess evades marriage by out-dancing potential suitors to death. She meets her match in a devil, who forces her to dance with him until she faints. Then he curses the whole kingdom by turning everyone to stone. A thousand years later, a young man chances upon the overgrown ruins of the castle. A strange imp falls out of the chimney and tells the intruder that he is “the devil and the master of this castle,”24 and that his guest must fight him to the death in order to stay the night. The young man says he is too tired for a duel and asks to postpone it until the next day.

The devil agrees to advance his hospitality if they will have a drinking contest that night instead of a fight to the death tomorrow. The man agrees, and outsmarts the devil by trapping him in a wine cask. The kingdom is restored to life and the young man is betrothed to the princess as a reward for delivering her kingdom from the curse. The last line struck me as pure genius: “The young husband never gave a second thought to the fact that he had left his own time to travel one thousand years into the past.”25 Up until that point, the thousand year difference between his culture and theirs is not addressed, but that one line stimulated my imagination. A common motif in fairy tales is the timeless quality of fairyland, and I wondered if he had wandered through some sort of magic portal or temporal rift and had actually traveled back in time.

Tales & Legends of the Devil is a literary treasure trove glittering with fairy gold that will be cherished by anyone with an interest in European folktales and medieval lore. Creative writers may be inspired to craft their own fairy tales featuring devils, and practitioners of traditional witchcraft who honor the Devil as the sire of witches will appreciate the insights these tales offer about the mysterious nature of the Horned One. Whatever allure the Devil has for the reader, the beguiling schemes and mischief of this ultimate antihero are sure to entertain.

Soul Medicine, by Edward Tick

Soul Medicine: Healing through Dream Incubation, Visions, Oracles, and Pilgrimage, by Edward Tick
Healing Arts Press, 164411089X, 288 pages, January 2023

In ancient Greece, the sick sought healing through dreams, and patients would retreat to sacred sanctuaries where they would pray and rest, waiting for the gods to intervene on their behalf and impart healing wisdom through oneiric visions. This “temple sleep,”1 also known as dream incubation, was practiced for two thousand years before the advent of modern medicine. Most contemporary physicians dismiss the power of the psyche to reveal cures through dream incubation, but a holistic practice that honors the patient’s relationship with their inner self, combined with a Jungian approach to psychotherapy, bridges the gap between past and present, allowing the gods to reemerge in the present day as archetypal powers that can guide patients on their healing journeys. 

In Soul Medicine: Healing Through Dream Incubation, Visions, Oracles, and Pilgrimage, poet and transformational psychotherapist Edward Tick, Ph.D. offers a soul-nourishing approach to healing trauma, informed by sixty years of studying the ancient Greek healing tradition.  Dr. Tick has been working with Vietnam veterans since 1979, accompanying them on pilgrimages, returning with them to the place of trauma to retrieve their souls26, a topic he has explored in previous works, such as War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (2005) and Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul After War (2014). In Soul Medicine, Tick takes veterans to sacred sites in Greece, where they encounter the gods in healing dreams and visions. While he specializes in treating veterans with PTSD, his methods can be adopted by readers who are recovering from any form of trauma or those who are seeking to restore and deepen their connection with their inner selves. 

As a psychotherapist, Tick is an “attendant of the soul.”28 Just as the wounded healer Chiron learned to live with the emotional pain of being rejected by his mother as a child and from the incurable wound inflicted by one of Herakles’s poisoned arrows as an adult, we must learn to accept and integrate our traumas. By identifying with archetypal powers, our own identities are enlarged and expanded, awakening us to universal truths greater than ourselves. 

In Tick’s practice, he seeks to bridge the gap in medicine between science and spirituality with ancient healing wisdom. An atheistic, sterilized approach to healthcare is suffocating for those who crave communion with the Universe, yet modern psychology often labels magical thinking as a symptom of a mental disorder. Existential suffering is numbed by mass consumerism and pill-popping biochemical regulation instead of getting to the root cause. Medical practices devoid of spirituality have detached us from the World Soul, and the severance of the body-soul connection is deeply wounding on a collective level.

In Tick’s mythopoetic approach to illness, he looks for the god within the disease. He found that his own lifelong history of back problems related to the Titan Atlas, who bears the weight of the world.29 An alcoholic may need to transform their relationship with Dionysos30, and a sex addict might find healing in devotion to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.31  Collective problems, such as a pandemic, may be a plague sent by Apollo to punish the hubris and irresponsibility of humanity.32 

The healing process in Soul Medicine involves transmuting personal suffering and victimhood into universal wisdom that benefits the collective. When we understand what our personal trials and tribulations say about the human condition, we transcend our private pain and merge with the archetypal universe. Part of this requires affirming the inevitability of fate and surrendering to these cosmic powers.33 

 “Ananke [Necessity] indicates that we do not have a choice,” Tick says. “What happened cannot be changed but only how we interpret, carry, and respond to it. These are ultimate conditions we are challenged to accept as ingredients of our personal mythic history. This is a necessary step in any healing enterprise, a step I call “affirmation of destiny.” ”34 

This fatalistic perspective might raise some hackles in a New Age community obsessed with personal power and accepting full responsibility for controlling one’s own destiny, but it can be freeing for someone coping with feelings of powerlessness, shame, and guilt associated with past trauma. Unfortunately, the New Age fixation on personal power and the belief in manifesting one’s reality through the Law of Attraction philosophy, which blames bad circumstances on negative thoughts, can be used to spiritually bypass and blame victims, instead of offering them the emotional support they need when recovering from trauma. For those who are tired of accepting personal responsibility for things beyond their control, Soul Medicine is a soothing balm.

Tick compares trauma to the mythical dismemberment of the god Dionysos, who was torn to pieces by the Titans. “Remembering what we have denied, buried, or forgotten is an act of being re-membered—put together in a new way,”35  Tick says. Dionysos is the god of theater, and watching or reenacting tragic plays can awaken our own repressed wounds and provide cathartic release, while also comforting us with the insight that we are not alone in our experience because tragedies explore universal themes of abuse, death, and grief.36 

In Soul Medicine, Tick shares beautifully written anecdotes about pilgrimages to sacred sites and the divine revelations he has experienced at them, coupled with signs and synchronicities, taking the form of earthly messengers of the gods such as crows, butterflies, bulls, and shed snakeskin. He writes about moments of divine inspiration with poetic grace.

During a pilgrimage to the Oracle of Delphi, Tick had “an imaginal conversation with Apollo.”37

“Apollo, the god of the inner light, consciousness, and reason,” he says, “spoke as the voice of my knowing deep mind.”38 

Tick professed doubts about who he was and what he should be doing with his life, and rather than clarifying his purpose, his inner Apollo replied, “You already know.”39 

He was losing sight of his personal path and not embracing it because he was distracted by external human affairs. In fulfilling one’s soul purpose, Tick says, “It is our human task to remain committed against barriers and disappointments.”40  The gods will assist us in mysterious ways, but they will also test our faith and our worthiness.

When Tick asked what he was doing wrong, his inner Apollo replied, “Continue as you are…Nothing is wrong.”41  As if to confirm this telepathic conversation was a true divine message, a black cloud of crows, the messengers of Apollo, circled around Tick as he ascended to Apollo’s temple.

This touching message resonated with me because there have been many times when I have struggled with my own self-doubt and despair over not knowing my place in this world, then heard a reassuring voice inside my mind whispering the same words to me: Nothing is wrong with you. 

This passage also reminded me of a dream I had about a year ago, in which an unseen female deity, who I believed to be Artemis, had instructed me to honor Apollo. I was guided to sit outside at dawn, facing the east, bathed in the rosy pink light of the golden hour, and burn a bay leaf, while praying to him and savoring the sweet smoke. As the burning leaf crackled, I found myself sitting in front of a bronze statue of Apollo reclining on a couch, and his posture reminded me of his half-brother Dionysos, the god of ecstasy and madness who counterbalances his logic and reason. I sensed that Dionysos was with me as well, though invisible, creeping around the edge of my awareness like a serpentine vine. I realized that calling on one of them also summons the other, for they are as light and shadow, and two sides of the same coin.

I have always felt an affinity with Dionysos, and I apologized to Apollo for not being moved to honor him sooner. I sensed Apollo’s presence as aloof and haughty and knew that calling him beautiful would appeal to his vanity. Upon waking this reminded me of the arrogance ascribed to Lucifer, and how self-knowledge is demonized as narcissism. When the sun rose, I grabbed a lighter and a bay leaf from my kitchen cabinet, went outside, and recited the Orphic Hymn to Apollo, which calls him Bacchos, identifying him with his half-brother Dionysos.42 It felt important to me that I reenact the dream in waking life to reaffirm the act of devotion I had taken on the astral plane. 

Soul Medicine has reminded me yet again that I need to remember to honor my inner Apollo and trust in his wisdom. We are all his oracles, if we choose to listen.

The Eye Evil, by Antonio Pagliarulo

The Evil Eye: The History, Mystery, and Magic of the Quiet Curse, by Antonio Pagliarulo
Weiser Books,157863797X,  256 pages, May 2023

The mysterious power of eyes to psychically touch what they gaze upon is unmistakable to anyone who has felt the uncomfortable sensation of someone staring at them, or has been caught in the act of staring at someone else. Have you ever been paid an insincere compliment accompanied by a look that made your skin crawl because you sensed an undercurrent of jealousy and malice beneath it, and not long afterwards you seemed to have a run of bad luck? If so, you may have felt the sting of the magically weaponized gaze known in Italian as il malocchio, “the Evil Eye.”38

The Evil Eye: The History, Mystery, and Magic of the Quiet Curse by Italian folk magic practitioner Antonio Pagliarulo is a manual on psychic protection that teaches you how to detect, banish, and prevent the malison of the Evil Eye. If you are so inclined, there are even instructions on how to cast the curse yourself as a form of self-defense.43 The book itself, decorated with a radiant gilded eye on the front cover, is a protective amulet, and the author recommends keeping it on your desk or by your bedside.

Raised in the Bronx by southern Italian immigrants, Pagliarulo learned folk magic cures for the Evil Eye from his grandmother when he was a child. When he attended public high school in Manhattan and made friends with people from other cultures, he discovered that the concept of the Evil Eye is a universal belief with ancient roots. It is known as mal de ojo in Spanish, mati in Greek, and ayin hara in Hebrew.44 In ancient Rome, it was called the oculus malus, and phallic amulets were believed to deflect it.45 Belief in the Evil Eye is so ancient that archeological evidence for it dates as far back as the third millennium BCE, to Sumerian apotropaic spells recorded on cuneiform tablets. 46

The Evil Eye is so ubiquitous because anyone can cast this curse, regardless of whether they intend to or not. “The Eye’s point of origin is emotion,” explains Pagliarulo, “and we all experience feelings of envy, greed, and resentment at some point in life.”47 He advises that we watch out in particular for people who are harboring years of resentment, because they pack a lot of festering emotions behind their attacks. As an interesting side note, “Zoroastrians also believe that a menstruating woman can cast the strongest Evil Eye curse.”48 I’ll keep that in mind the next time my uterus is angry. 

So, what exactly is this malevolent Evil Eye, and how does one cast it?

“The Evil Eye is a baneful force transmitted through a stare or glance, and it can be delineated in three distinct ways,” Pagliarulo says.49

The first way is through a compliment, laced with envy. Regardless of how kind and sincere the words may sound, the eyes reveal the true underlying feelings of bitterness and jealousy. The second type of attack is obvious because the person won’t hide their contempt behind flattery, and they will often publicly vocalize their malice.50 The third way is unintentional, through being the recipient of excessive praise and adoration. Too much good fortune tempts the Eye to balance the scales by adding the weight of misfortune and sorrow. 51 

The way Pagliarulo describes the Eye in the third scenario, it sounds like a malicious and adversarial entity with a consciousness of its own, one that follows a distorted supernatural system of checks and balances. This gave me pause, because I feel that one should be grateful for the good things they experience in life and not hide their happiness out of fear that some invisible force will take it away, especially when success has been hard-earned and well-deserved. 

However, the more I think about it, it occurs to me that perhaps excessive praise, especially on the grandiose level that celebrities receive, can generate a malaise of jealousy in the common rabble that coalesces into a malicious entity, as multiple people envy the attention the target is receiving and feed the Eye with their collective negative energies. It’s not surprising that Meghan Markle, who has been vilified by the media and resentful family members ever since her so-called fairy tale wedding to Prince Harry, has been spotted wearing the blue-eyed nazar amulet, one of the most popular and easily recognizable wards against the Evil Eye.52 

Pagliarulo assures readers that he does not intend to frighten them into silence. “The key,” Pagliarulo says, “is to create a healthy balance of self-praise and discretion, which is accomplished by being mindful of your speech.”53

One interesting example of using speech to deter the Evil Eye comes from Egypt. An Egyptian man Pagliarulo interviewed said that he would deflect a compliment regarding his good health and thriving business by claiming he had tripped and almost broken his leg that morning, even though this wasn’t true. “What matters is the strategy—by minimizing the compliment, he minimized the potential envy brewing inside the person who offered the compliment,” Pagliarulo says.54

Some common amulets believed to protect one from the Evil Eye include the ancient Egyptian wedjat or udjat (the Eye of Horus), the hamsa, or Hand of Fatima, a hand-shaped amulet with an eye in the center of the palmthe Italian cornicello, or “little horn,” the Cimaruta (cima di ruta means “top of rue” in Italian), which depicts a sprig of rue decorated with a crescent moon, a key, a serpent, and other witchy symbols that ward the Evil Eye while doubling as a lucky charm, and the Turkish nazar, a beautiful pattern of blue and white concentric rings that looks like an eye, which is by far the most popular and seems to be everywhere these days. The nazar amulet is so trendy that many witches display the nazar emoji on their social media profiles.

“Wearing one of these ancient symbols is an act of magic, for it creates a shield of protection around the individual,” Pagliarulo says.55 He encourages the reader to trust their intuition when choosing an amulet, rather than picking one based on religious affiliation or the popularity of use.

After an extensive list of amulets, this book contains methods for diagnosing the Evil Eye and several protection spells that require few supplies and are simple to perform. Most of the spell ingredients can be found in the kitchen, such as olive oil, garlic cloves, bay leaves, and other herbs. One of the easiest spells involves braiding long hair into a basic three-strand brand and securing it with a rubber band or hair tie while reciting an incantation for protection.

Other spells call upon various spirits from different faiths to assist in the removal of the Evil Eye. Many of the workings are derived from the author’s Italian Catholic background and invoke the power of saints, but Pagliarulo also presents rituals from Judaism, Islam, and paganism. 

I came to this book as a believer seeking psychic protection, but also with a certain degree of healthy skepticism. I think that when one is too superstitious and paranoid about psychic attack, there is a risk of giving your power away to others through your belief in that superstition. My concern is that a fearful and excessive focus on the potency of the Evil Eye can be a self-fulfilling prophecy and a kind of psychic hypochondria. More often than not, I think there are rational explanations for bad things happening, and not everything is a sign of a curse. However, I also feel that empaths and magically inclined people are more sensitive and susceptible to psychic attacks so it’s a good idea to take magical precautions. As Pagliarulo says: “You can never be too safe.”56

Pagliarulo’s The Evil Eye is a powerful amulet for anyone who wishes to enhance their psychic shields and improve their overall luck and well-being. Even if you have doubts about whether or not the Eye has been cast upon you, these spells are good all-purpose cleansing and protection rituals. While not every bad thing that happens should be blamed on the Evil Eye, one can never be too careful.

A Walk Through the Forest of Souls, by Rachel Pollack

A Walk Through the Forest of Souls: A Tarot Journey to Spiritual Awakening, by Rachel Pollack
Weiser Books, 1578637708, 288 pages, May 2023

Award-winning science fiction author, comic book writer, tarot expert, and trans activist Rachel Grace Pollack passed away on April 7th, 2023, at the age of 77. Born Richard A. Pollack on August 17th, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York, Rachel came out as a transgender woman in 1971, at the age of 26. During this time, Pollack discovered tarot and broke into publishing with a science fiction short story titled “Pandora’s Bust,” which appeared in New Worlds Quarterly.45

Pollack had an impressive literary career, publishing four short story collections and seven novels, three of which received awards. Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1989, Temporary Agency (1994) won the Nebula Award, and Godmother Night (1996) won the World Fantasy Award. Pollack also blazed a trail through the DC Universe by creating Coagula, aka Kate Godwin, the first transgender superhero, while writing issues 64-87 of the rebooted DC Comics series Doom Patrol (1993-1995). However, it was the classic tarot tome Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980) that was the most influential work in Pollack’s oeuvre, and established Pollack as a leading authority on tarot.49

A Walk through the Forest of Souls: A Tarot Journey of Spiritual Awakening is a revised version of the out of print book titled The Forest of Souls: A Walk through the Tarot, first published in 2002. In this updated work, Pollack’s approach to reading the cards is innovative, intuitive, and imaginative. Rather than a cookbook of interpretive meanings, A Walk Through the Forest of Souls is a guide to using the tarot as a spiritual tool to expand consciousness and open one’s mind to new possibilities. 

“This book contains some outrageous ideas and questions,” Pollack says. “We will play with the idea that the Tarot images existed before the creation of the universe, that God somehow consulted the cards to make the world, and even that we can use the cards to find the very reading that God received.”50

Pollack is Jewish, but mischievously identifies as a heretic. The idea of God making a card game of creation is not meant to be taken as literal truth, but to be regarded as serious play. “God in these pages becomes a way to express our universal desire to know and comprehend the sacred,” says Pollack.51

Unlike an ordinary book, “the pages of the Tarot are not bound in any real order.”57 Through the act of shuffling, a new deck is created, and we are given the opportunity to turn over a new leaf, so to speak.

“In this book readings do not reveal a fixed future,” Pollack says. “They become a means to gain new perspectives and explore possibilities outside our normal ways of thought.”58

Pollack’s science fiction background shines through this book’s non-linear approach to the concept of time. “The future can ‘cause’ the past as much as the past causes the future,” Pollack says. “In fact, neither one causes the other, they exist in a relationship that goes in many directions at once. Imagine a web with a vast number of points, all connected to each other, with no single point as the origin or primary cause of the others. Our consciousness places us in one point, convincing us that a single line from the past has caused our current situation to come into being. But this may be an illusion.”59

Tarot reveals possibilities, not an immutable fate, and Pollack even goes so far as to say that since “divination creates new possibilities, it liberates the Creator from a universe where everything is planned and known ahead of time.”60

I recently rewatched the original Star Trek movies, and Pollack’s concept of nonlinear time being an elastic web in which the future can influence the past brings to mind a particular scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). In this film, Admiral Kirk and his crew time travel to late 20th century San Francisco on a mission to bring two humpback whales back to the future in order to repopulate a 23rd century Earth where they are extinct.

Chief engineer Montgomery Scott and Dr. “Bones” McCoy visit a Plexiglas factory seeking construction materials for a whale tank. In exchange for the glass, Scotty gives the proprietor Dr. Nichols the formula for transparent aluminum, a futuristic construction material that is lighter and stronger than the Plexiglas he is currently manufacturing.

“You uh, realize of course if we give him the formula, we’re altering the future,” Bones says. “Why, how do we know he didn’t invent the thing?” says Scotty. His response implies that their need for Plexiglas is part of a predestination paradox, or causal loop, in which the invention of transparent aluminum depends on the necessity of their time travel in the first place.61

I’m a fan of non-linear thinking, and it’s mind-blowing to apply the predestination paradox to tarot reading. Perhaps the guidance we receive from the cards comes from our future selves, who, like Scotty, plant ideas in our minds that may not otherwise have come to us62

Pollack suggests using the cards for “Wisdom readings,”63 which transcend personal concerns by seeking deeper meaning with universal questions like “What is the soul?”64 According to Pollack, the tarot is an instrument we can use to communicate directly with Sophia, the divine personification of wisdom, and we limit its vast potential when we only focus on personal questions.65

The title of this book, A Walk through the Forest of Souls, was inspired by Pollack’s first Wisdom readings, using the Shining Tribe Tarot, a deck created by Pollack. When Pollack asked, “What is the soul?” the Ace of Birds (Ace of Swords) appeared, depicting an owl, the animal familiar of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom.66

Pollack then asked the cards, “What is Tarot?”67 The answer was the Six of Trees (Six of Wands), which depicts trees with owl eyes. “If the soul is an owl,” Pollack says, “then these woods become a forest of souls, and the Tarot, as the title of this book says, is ‘a walk through the forest of souls.’”68

In my own readings, I have found that lately, I tend to ask fewer personal questions and more cosmic ones, such as, “What will be the influence of the Full Moon in Cancer?” or some other upcoming astrological transit. Inspired by Pollack’s “Wisdom reading” method, I decided to ask questions about the symbolic language of mythology.

The first question that entered my mind was: “Why does the goddess Demeter carry two torches when searching for her daughter Persephone, when one would provide sufficient light and a free hand?” I knew that the twin torches symbolized some sort of celestial light, perhaps the horns of the night-wandering moon, but I wondered specifically why there were two of them. The answer I received surprised me, yet made so much sense. 

I drew three cards from the Crow Tarot: The Star, The Empress, and the Four of Wands. Venus, as the Morning and Evening Star, immediately came to mind. In her dual forms as herald of dawn and dusk, she represents two lights, or two heavenly torches. The astrological association for The Empress is the planet Venus, and the Four of Wands is associated with Venus in Aries.

Reading the cards like a sentence, I was moved by the heartwarming message I received: She is the Mother Star (Empress + Star), guiding her children back home (the Four of Wands represents the home and is a card of celebration, and the astrological association of Venus in Aries reminds me of Demeter and Persephone’s springtime reunion).

In retrospect, I used to be confused by The Empress being associated with both Venus, the goddess of love, and Demeter, the goddess of the harvest. I didn’t think of Demeter as being Venusian, since she is so often depicted as wandering in grief, searching for her lost daughter. After contemplating these cards, I now link Venus, the Heavenly Mother, and Demeter, the Earthly Mother, in the following way: When we are born, we descend into matter, like Inanna, the Sumerian Venus, descending into the Underworld.

When we get lost in the trappings of materialism, we can lose touch with our divine mother, and without her guidance, we may feel as though we are wandering alone in the dark. But she also descends with us, as chthonic Demeter, an earthly manifestation of Venusian energy. When we realize that the Goddess is simultaneously here with us on earth, as well as in heaven, we are reunited with her, just as Venus, the Morning Star, (or in the case of Demeter, a star of mourning) is reborn and emerges from the Underworld, and Persephone is reunited with Demeter. When we see and feel the presence of the Earth Mother made manifest in the physical realm, we are blessed by her with fertility, wealth, and abundance. When we are depressed and feel separated from her, the world in turn feels cold and barren. 

The leaves of tarot whisper to us all in unique ways, and the possibilities for interpretation are limitless. Pollack’s work encourages us to tap into our intuitive creativity and experience the tarot like we never have before. Experimenting with Wisdom readings has shifted my perspective on how to use tarot, and I plan on exploring Pollack’s techniques further in my personal practice.

Beginners may get lost trying to follow Pollack’s twists and turns through the Forest of Souls, but this thought-provoking guide will be a breath of fresh air for intermediate to advanced tarot enthusiasts, opening them up to expansive new ideas regarding what tarot is and how to use it. This final work will no doubt be a classic in Pollack’s enduring tarot legacy.

The First Female Pharaoh, by Andrew Collins

The First Female Pharaoh: Sobekneferu, Goddess of the Seven Stars, by Andrew Collins
Bear & Company, 1591434459, 464 page, April 2023

Most people are familiar with the famous Egyptian queens Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Hatshepsut, but few are aware that they were preceded by Sobekkara Sobekneferu, the first woman to break the glass ceiling and be crowned pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt. Sobekneferu (pronounced “sob-bek-nef-frew”) was the last ruler of the Twelfth Dynasty, which brought the Middle Kingdom to a close about 3,800 years ago. She may have been around 30 years old at the time of her accession to the throne, and she ruled for almost four years, between the approximate dates of 1798 to 1794 BCE. The circumstances surrounding her coronation and her untimely death are unknown.

I first learned of Sobekneferu by reading Egyptologist Kara Cooney’s work When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt (2018), and I was thrilled to review a book dedicated to this fascinating monarch. In The First Female Pharaoh: Sobekneferu, Goddess of the Seven Stars, author Andrew Collins (Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods, 2014) does rigorous archaeological detective work, analyzing a variety of statues and beads honoring Sobekneferu, in an effort to humanize her and unravel the mystery of her life and death. This book also has a historical whodunit vibe, as Collins explores possible political intrigues that may have led to her rise and fall. It’s amazing how much information can be gleaned about her from so few inscriptions and artifacts, and Collins walks the reader through each exhibit, clarifying its context.

Collins begins his search for the enigmatic Sobekneferu in London’s British Museum, where he inspects a cylinder seal bearing her royal titles. He presents clear diagrams of the inscriptions on the seal, accompanied by translations of the hieroglyphs so the reader can examine the artifact along with him and imagine the feeling of this ancient stone bead rolling between their fingers. We learn from the seal that her throne name, Sobek ka Ra, means “Sobek is the soul [ka] of Ra,”58 and her personal name, Sobek neferu, means “Beauties of Sobek of Shedet”68. 

The ancient city of Shedet (known to the Greeks as Crocodilopolis), located in the lush oasis of the Fayum, was the cult center of the crocodile god Sobek, to whom Sobekneferu was devoted. Sobek was a manifestation of the solar deities Ra and Horus, and as Sobek-Ra he represented the sun’s nocturnal journey through the Fayum’s great lake, Lake Moeris, before being reborn at dawn every morning.  He was also connected with the divine right of kings to rule and the annual flooding of the Nile. Before Sobekneferu, the Twelfth Dynasty pharaohs, who ruled Egypt from the city of Itj-tawy in the Fayum, adopted the name of Amun or his consort Wosret. Sobekneferu’s identification with the fierce male crocodile god and her alliance with his local priesthood may have politically supported her claim to the throne.

Another seal in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo gives the grammatically masculinized forms of her names, suggesting that the gender of her royal epithets may have sometimes been changed to legitimize her rule. A headless quartzite bust of Sobekneferu in the Louvre Museum in Paris may have been smashed in an attempt to erase her from history. What remains of the decapitated statue depicts the striped lappets of the nemes-headdress worn by male rulers cascading over her shoulders, and although she is wearing the shoulder straps of a woman’s dress, she appears to have flattened breasts.69 Like the Eighteenth Dynasty Queen Hatshepsut, it appears that Sobekneferu masculinized herself to be accepted as pharaoh, and perhaps Hatshepsut was inspired by her predecessor’s images. Other statues Collins analyzes have also been defaced. He explains that iconoclasts broke noses off of statues in the belief that without them the soul of the deceased wouldn’t be able to breathe in the afterlife.

Sobekneferu’s Two Ladies appellation, Sat sekhem nebet tawy, meaning “Daughter of Power, Mistress of the Two Lands,” is a reminder that she inherited the throne from her father, the mighty king Amenemhat III.70 Sobekneferu further legitimized her reign through her divine patriarch by honoring his memory, completing his pyramid complex at Hawara, known as the Labyrinth. 71 She deified him there and made herself the high priestess of his temple cult, a suave political move that emphasized her reign being the will of the gods. 72

Her Horus name, Meryt-Ra, meaning “Beloved of Ra,” was feminized, and was a title often given to priestesses, indicating that she may have served as one before rising to power.73 Collins believes she may have served the goddess Hathor. 74 During the Twelfth Dynasty, it was trendy for queens and kings to be depicted as sphinxes. In doing so, the monarch embodied the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, the vindictive aspect of Hathor, whose name means “The Powerful One.”75

While Sobekneferu’s tomb has never been discovered, there is evidence that cult veneration of her continued long after she passed away. Graffiti left by visitors in the funerary chapel connected to the Theban tomb of a priestess of Hathor named Senat indicates that her burial site doubled as a place of veneration for Sobekneferu.76 Perhaps pilgrims were drawn to this location because it was the only Middle Kingdom tomb built for a woman.77

Sobekneferu’s older sister, Neferuptah, was heir to the throne, but she died young, and was buried in a small pyramid in her father’s temple complex. 78 Neferuptah was the first Egyptian woman in history to have her name inscribed within a royal cartouche, suggesting that her father may have been preparing her to rule after his death.79 Collins brings up the possibility that Neferuptah was murdered.80 Her cause of death is a mystery because her body unfortunately disintegrated due to groundwater leaking into her tomb.81

After Amenemhat III passed away, presumably from old age, Sobekneferu may have wed her brother Amenemhat IV upon his ascension to the throne and co-ruled with him, a position that had been intended for Neferuptah.82 Nine years later, Amenemhat IV died without a male heir to take his place, perhaps due to sterility resulting from generations of inbreeding.83 

In ancient Egypt, a woman could take the throne as regent, temporarily ruling on behalf of an heir who was perhaps too young to rule himself.84 Hatshepsut, for example, established herself as regent but did not relinquish the throne when the male heir, her co-king and nephew, came of age. After the death of her brother-husband Thutmose II, Queen Hatshepsut served as regent for her two-year-old nephew, Thutmose III 85. Instead of functioning as a placeholder who would step down when he came of age, by the seventh year of her regency (or perhaps sooner), she was officially coronated as king, assuming full pharaonic power through the religious authority of the oracle of Amun, which had declared her the rightful ruler. 86

In the case of Sobekneferu, when her brother died, there was no heir, and she took the throne without the pretense of regency, which is quite amazing. Collins suggests there may have been a nationalist plot to usurp Amenemhat IV and place Sobekneferu on the throne.87 Her brother’s “progressive ideologies” and open border policies would have been perceived as a threat to Egyptian nationalists, who were concerned about the influx of western Asiatic foreigners settling in northern Egypt and occupying positions of power, which no doubt paved the way for the Hyksos invasion a few generations later. 88 He was also allied with the priesthood of Atum in Heliopolis rather than the local cult of Sobek. 89

A controversial theory which Collins presents for the first time in this book is that the legend of Queen Nitocris, recorded in book II of The Histories by the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E., is a dramatized account of Sobekneferu exacting revenge for her brother’s regicide. 90 According to the legend, Nitocris invited the Egyptian subjects who murdered her brother-husband to a banquet in an underground chamber and then drowned them by flooding the room with Nile water through a secret channel. 91 Afterwards, she committed suicide by throwing herself into a chamber of hot ashes in order to avoid retribution for her actions. 92

The Egyptian historian Manetho recorded that Nitocris was the last ruler of the sixth dynasty, but there is no evidence that she ever existed, and Collins believes that the twelfth dynasty ruler Sobekneferu is the best historical fit. 93 “The real Nitocris of legend was, I would argue, an abstract memory of the life and deeds of Sobekneferu,” Collins says. 94 He suggests that she may have collaborated with Egyptian nationalists to have her brother assassinated, then shifted blame onto her political opponents after she was placed on the throne. 95

Sobekneferu may have fallen out of favor due to low flood waters during the third year of her reign, which would have been disastrous for the cultivation of crops. 96 Since the failure of the inundation would have been perceived as her fault, Collins suggests that she may have been pressured by the priesthood at Heliopolis to take the role of sacrificial king and either commit suicide or be murdered. 97 

Collins has an intriguing theory regarding the method of her ritual death. He suggests that the serpent involved in Cleopatra’s suicide may have been symbolic for the ingestion of poisonous plants or the inhalation of their smoke, 98 which leads him to believe that the chamber full of hot ashes into which Nitocris threw herself may have been a room suffocated with mephitic fumes, and that this was how Sobekneferu committed suicide. 99

While the theories Collins presents are often pure conjecture, he clearly delineates between what is based upon concrete archaeological evidence and what is speculation, all the while acknowledging that we may never know the truth. Readers who are armchair archaeologists will appreciate his detailed analysis of artifacts, and those who want to learn more will find Kara Cooney’s book When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, which Collins cites several times, to be an excellent companion text to The First Female Pharaoh. 

The figure of Sobekneferu is just as relevant today as ever because she presents an interesting historical perspective on gender stereotypes and public perceptions of women’s leadership abilities both past and present. Women in positions of power are still pressured by society to adopt masculine fashions in order to be taken seriously, such as the pant suits worn by modern female politicians and other professionals. One might argue that these suits have evolved to become gender neutral, but originally they were worn to project an air of male authority, and on a subliminal level, they still convey the same message. Appearing androgynous often requires women to minimize or conceal their femininity instead of embracing it, perhaps even blurring their perceived gender identity, as was the case with both Sobekneferu and Hatshepsut. 

Hatshepsut in particular depicted herself as a man towards the end of her reign, and in When Women Ruled the World, Egyptologist Kara Cooney says that rather than this being an indication of her own gender confusion, “Hatshepsut’s problem was that she was trying to inhabit a masculine role within a patriarchal system on a long-term basis while there was a male king already occupying the throne.” 100 Depicting herself as a man was a way of validating her right to rule. 

In modern times, Sobekneferu has reincarnated in pop culture as a dangerous Egyptian queen with supernatural powers who returns to the realm of the living by possessing a young woman’s body. The subtitle of The First Female Pharaoh: Sobekneferu, Goddess of the Seven Stars, invokes Bram Stoker’s Egyptian novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), in which the daughter of an Egyptologist, a young woman named Margaret, is possessed by the spirit of Queen Tera.

Critics have perceived this as a Gothic horror personification of the New Woman movement of First Wave Feminism at the turn of the century. As the spirit of Queen Tera takes control of Margaret, she becomes more strong-willed and independent, putting up increasing resistance to the masculine authority of her father and love interest, perhaps serving as a cautionary tale about the dangers of female empowerment, since Stoker didn’t seem very fond of the movement based on his treatment of strong female characters. 

Collins believes that Stoker’s evil Queen Tera was inspired by Sobekneferu, 101 and that she in turn influenced the character of Queen Kara in the 1980 film based on the novel titled The Awakening, starring Charlton Heston. 102 Collins posits that Stoker’s source materials were two works on ancient Egyptian star lore and mythology by Gerald Massey (1828-1907) that featured Sobekneferu, associating her with an ancient “Mother-Goddess of Time,” the “Goddess of the Seven Stars,” identified with the constellations Draco and Ursa Major. 103

The enigmatic queen Sobekneferu has also made quite an impact on the occult community. Esteemed occult writer Kenneth Grant drew connections between Sobekneferu and an ancient Draconian cult in his Typhonian Trilogies (1972-2002).104 According to the Tumblr account of Pacific North Witches, Sobekneferu even has a feast day, which falls on July 23.105 

It seems this ancient queen has indeed been resurrected into the collective consciousness. Whether we view Sobekneferu as a high priestess of Draconian magic or as the ultimate embodiment of female empowerment, she has achieved the dream of immortality that all the mighty ones of ancient Egypt sought to attain, inspiring new generations with her mysterious legacy, nearly 3,800 years after her death.

The Cult of the Yew, by Janis Fry

The Cult of the Yew: Tree of Life, Mystery and Magic, by Janis Fry
Moon Books, 1803411538, 480 pages, April 2023

Artist and yew tree specialist Janis Fry was first initiated into the yew mysteries in the fall of 1974, when she stumbled upon the Aberglasney Yew tunnel while exploring the overgrown hedges surrounding an old dilapidated country house in West Wales. The bent boughs of the ancient yews had fused together, forming a magical cathedral-like archway that drew her into a lifelong spiritual quest for the secrets of the legendary Tree of Life. 

Fry is now one of the foremost authorities on yew trees and advocating for them has become her life’s work. Her native Great Britain has the largest treasury of ancient yew trees in the world. There are at least 174 ancient yews in the United Kingdom, and many of them are over 2,000 years old.75 Some of the UK’s most precious arboreal treasures are even estimated to be 5,000 years old, such as the Defynnog Yew in Wales and the Fortingall Yew in Scotland. Many of these ancient yews preside over churchyards, where they should be safe and well maintained.

However, Fry laments that there are no legal protections for these sacred trees and many suffer from neglect, becoming strangled with ivy and more vulnerable to breakage during storms, or having limbs amputated that should have been left alone to take root in the ground and regenerate.92 The hollows of some church yews are even used as storage sheds for groundskeeping supplies such as lawnmowers and oil tanks.106 Even if the clergy does take proper care of their sentinel yews, the trees are still in danger if the church closes down and developers purchase the land.

“Most people assume that ancient trees are protected,” Fry says, “but this is not the case unless someone has gone out of their way to have a Tree Protection Order placed on a particular tree and even if a tree has a TPO, the level of protection offered is not much of a deterrent to a developer who will often simply include the cost of the fine in the cost of the development.”107

A petition that Fry created on change.org to save Britain’s ancient yews has gained over 300,000 signatures so far. Her sense of urgency comes from the heartbreak of seeing so many of them become firewood. “Over 500 ancient Yew trees have been destroyed since the Second World War,”108 she says on her petition.

While Fry’s activism focuses on the physical preservation of yews, her artwork and books illuminate the otherworldly beauty of the yew and its spiritual significance as the Tree of Life. Fry feels she has a telepathic connection with yews, and they communicate with her visually, through imagery and symbolism, which she channels into her art. Many of her paintings are haunted by yews—the cover of The God Tree (2012) featured an acrylic painting of the selfsame title depicting red humanoid shapes emerging from the thick bark of a graveyard yew, their arms stretched skyward, rising like flames in the night. The blurred watercolor silhouette of a moonlit yew reflected in a rippling triangular pool, titled “Yew and Well,” graces the cover of her latest book, The Cult of the Yew: Tree of Life, Mystery, and Magic (2023).

“The phenomena known as ‘Yew’,” Fry says in the introduction, “is far more than a tree. It is a holder of wisdom, a keeper of knowledge and quite possibly a creator god and watcher of the human race. The Tree of Life, the Otherworldly tree, is a conscious entity, a tree that can bleed like a human, change sex and produce the enigma of the Golden Bough.”109

In The Cult of the Yew, Fry expands upon her previous research in The God Tree and aspires to track down a royal bloodline of sacred yew, called Taxus Sanctus, which descended from the original Tree of Life. She believes the offspring of this fabled tree were propagated by members of a yew cult who traveled long distances carrying cuttings, roots, and branches as staves or wands and planted them throughout Britain. Fry traces the original holy tree back 15,000 years, to the temple of the sun god Atum Ra in the ancient Egyptian city the Greeks called Heliopolis, and suggests that the ankh, the Egyptian symbol for eternal life, represents a branch taken from the Tree of Life. After a severe flood, she thinks an offshoot or cutting of the tree was rescued, taken to the Sumerian city of Eridu, and transplanted in the Garden of Eden.

Fry asks her readers to keep an open mind as she presents controversial theories that will be a stretch of the imagination for the more incredulous members of her audience. In the third chapter, titled “The Dragon Serpent Tree Gods,” she subscribes to the ancient astronaut fringe theory that human beings were a hybridization of primate and alien DNA created by reptilian extraterrestrials to be a slave race.

She quotes proponents of the theory such as Zechariah Sitchin (Earth Chronicles, 2004), who posited that the Annunaki gods of the Sumerians came from a hypothetical planet called Nibiru and created humans to mine gold for them in South Africa. According to one Babylonian myth, before the creation of humans, the Annunaki had enslaved a race of younger gods called the Igigi. One of these beings, Kingsu, led a rebellion and was ritually sacrificed by the god Marduk, who then created humanity from clay mixed with Kingsu’s spilled blood. We therefore inherited our rebellious nature from the Igigi gods.

From this perspective, the Biblical serpent represents our reptilian blood and the tree our earthly roots. Norse mythology even identifies the first human beings as trees, and Fry considers the possibility that the yew and the serpent are one. As a tree god, the serpentine yew thus symbolizes the hybridization of celestial blood and primate clay used to create humanity. 

The duality of the yew makes it a prime candidate for the tree of knowledge. “We must not forget that like the viper or serpent, the tree carries deadly poison which can and does kill and has no antidotes,” Fry says. “On the other hand, it also provides Taxol that heals cancer. This is a tree of opposites, of contradictions, a tree of good and evil.”110 She also says that the yew “was described in ancient times as ‘the snake that swallowed itself, referring to the yew’s habit of putting down an aerial root inside the old tree to make a new tree inside it.” 111

In summer heat, the yew sweats toxic vapors that can induce a shamanistic trance state. This alkaloid poison is called taxine, and inhaling the vapors can stimulate visions and facilitate communication with the dead. Fry says of the yew that “One of its functions is to act as a portal in time and space and another is to enable some to cross kingdoms, other realms and dimensions that run parallel to our own.”112

Fry attests to the supernatural power of yews to distort time and transport one to other realms. “On a personal level,” she says, “I have experienced a kind of rapid downloading of information and visions of things from times past at ancient yew sites.”113 She suggests that one might be able to step inside the hollow of a yew and time travel through dreams and visions.

Another theory Fry presents is that the ancient Egyptians brought the sacred yew to Britain. As evidence of Egyptian migration to Ireland and Scotland, Fry references a 13th or 14th century Middle-Irish manuscript titled The Settling of the Manor of Tara, which relates how Diarmait, the High King of Ireland, held a great weeklong feast in Tara every three years, and was considering reallocating the Manor of Tara for cultivation in order to cover the expenses.

Before making a decision, he summoned the wisest men in the land to advise him, who in turn referred him to an even older and wiser man, named Fintan son of Bóchra, who had been alive for 5,500 years and traced his ancestry back to Noah. The king asked Fintan if he had any historical information that would help him settle the Manor of Tara. Fintan then told him the story of how a heroic giant named Trefuilngid Tre-eochair came to Ireland from the west at sunset on the day of Christ’s crucifixion, carrying a golden branch of Lebanon wood. The giant attended an assembly of the people of Ireland and their king, Conaing Bec-eclach, in which the king related the history of his people.

King Conaing told the giant that after “the confusion of tongues”114 his people were invited into Egypt by the Pharaoh, but left when the Israelites escaped, because they feared being enslaved in their place, and migrated to Ireland. Trefuilngid Tre-eochair remained in Ireland for forty days and nights, advising the people on how the land should be apportioned. Before leaving, he gifted Fintan son of Bóchra some berries from the branch he carried so they could be planted throughout Ireland. Fintan said that Trefuilngid “was an angel of God, or he was God Himself.”115

Fry interprets this manuscript as proof of Egyptian migration and claims that the branch of Lebanon wood is in fact yew instead of cedar, which is what scholars have previously assumed Lebanon wood to be. Fry suggests that Fintan himself was a yew tree, since one can live for over 5,000 years and could have survived the Great Flood. While this document is fascinating, I suspect that a medieval manuscript alone is not viable evidence because it only proves that the writer was captivated by the magical allure of Egypt and felt inspired to trace a mythical vein of Irish ancestry back to the Nile.   

Fry also posits that the Ankerwycke yew beside the Nile-like River Thames may be one of the trees brought to Britain from Egypt, and that the name Ankerwycke may be derived from the Egyptian Ankh, which she believes to represent a “sacred branch from the Tree of Life.”116 Fry mentions that there is evidence of an Egyptian burial in Tara, Ireland, and advises the reader to refer back to her former book The God Tree for details on this topic and others she explores in greater depth, but unfortunately it is out of print, and may not be easy for the earnest reader to acquire.

In Nevern, Wales, there is an avenue of rare bleeding yews, which shed a substance that resembles congealing human blood. Why they bleed is a mystery, and Fry offers a spiritual explanation by connecting them to Christ, whose blood, she asserts, is the blood of the sacred yew, and is an elixir of immortality.

Fry claims that Jesus was not crucified, but hung on a living tree that was planted on Adam’s grave at Golgotha as atonement for Cain’s murder of Abel. She says that “the sacred Tree of Life, the one Jesus hung on, was no doubt a bleeding monoecious yew”117 (monoecious trees are hermaphroditic, having both male and female reproductive organs), and it was Constantine who changed the living tree to a post of dead wood.

“The truth,” she says, “is that Jesus was hung on the Tree of Life, despite the later myth-making which turned Jesus’ death into a crucifixion with the Romans in charge rather than the Jews, whose tradition it was and who planned it all. The events leading up to Jesus’ death led to a ritualistic death for which he would have been prepared all his life and which would have been managed by Nicodemus and Arimathea.”118 Fry believes that Joseph of Arimathea, who was Jesus’ uncle according to Talmud, brought a branch from the Tree of Life, upon which Jesus hung, in the form of a staff to Britain.

A source Fry cites for the true cross being a tree is The Epistle of Barnabas119, an apocryphal gospel written in Greek between 70-132 CE that was named after the reputed author Barnabas, a companion of the apostle Paul. The Epistle was included in the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, or Sinai Bible, but was later removed from the canon. “It was Barnabas who wrote about Jesus being hung from a tree and not crucified,” Fry writes before quoting Barnabas 8: “‘the reign of Jesus is on the tree’.”120

Fry’s case for Christ being a bleeding yew god is compelling and holds mythopoeic appeal. It reminds me of the early eighth century Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, a medieval dream vision honoring the sacrifice of the living tree that became Christ’s cross (rood is an archaic word for the cross upon which he was crucified). The rood and Christ suffer as one, as both are pierced by nails, tortured, and ridiculed. I can’t help but wonder if this poem betrays a residual belief in the true cross being a living tree, and I’m surprised Fry didn’t mention it in this book. 

Another intriguing insight Fry shares is that Jesus was depicted with a wand in early Christian art. The image of Jesus evolved from a clean-shaven young man with short hair wielding a wand to a bearded and long-haired man crowned with a halo. Over time, the halo gradually replaced the wand, which disappeared altogether by the end of the 5th century. Fry, of course, suggests that Christ’s wand was made of a yew branch taken from the Tree of Life, which she says the early Christians believed was the Egyptian ankh. Or perhaps, if there was no physical wand, that he himself was the embodiment of the eternal life it represented, since the Gnostics called Christ the Tree of Life.

In modern times, the mythical Golden Bough, or Golden Fleece, has miraculously emerged on evergreen yews in clusters of gilded needles that resemble sheep’s wool. Ever since the first one sprouted on the Defynnog Yew in 2002, others have manifested on at least twenty British yews, and Fry is hopeful that they herald a new Golden Age for humanity reconciling with nature.

I was astounded to learn that the Golden Bough of Greco-Roman mythology may have been inspired by the appearance of golden boughs on yews in ancient times. In the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas obtains the Golden Bough as a gift for Proserpina, the Queen of the Underworld, in order to gain clearance into her realm and speak with the shade of Anchises, his dead father.

In Greek mythology, the Golden Fleece was the fabled golden wool of the winged ram of Poseidon that rescued the Boeotian prince Phrixus from his wicked stepmother, who plotted to kill him, and carried him to Colchis, where he was received by King Aeëtes, son of the sun god Helios. In gratitude to Poseidon, Phrixus sacrificed the ram, which was immortalized as the constellation Aries. Phrixus then gifted the Golden Fleece to the king, who hung it on a tree in the sacred grove of the god Ares in his realm, guarded by a vigilant dragon. Later Jason and the Argonauts stole the fleece with the assistance of the witch Medea, the king’s daughter.

“The ancient kingdom of Colchis where the Golden Fleece is found is one of the most important areas of ancient yew forests in the world,”121 says Fry. These myths reveal that the Golden Bough is a symbol of divine kingship, spiritual authority, and a golden ticket that grants safe passage to the Underworld and back, which leads Fry to suspect that the Golden Bough is a magic wand.122 

In her reverence for the Tree of Life, Fry is like a druidess, initiating readers into her yew-centric worldview with artwork and writing that captures the hallucinogenic quality of her god tree. Her wild theories enliven the imagination and compel critical readers to do their own research. Fry hopes this work will inspire her audience to seek out the Golden Bough and restore humanity’s sacred bond with the immortal yew. The poignant message of The Cult of the Yew is that the eternal Tree of Life is a living, breathing, sentient being whose underground current of salvific wisdom will open our eyes to greater truths when all of nature once again becomes our Eden. 

The Magic of the Sword of Moses, by Harold Roth

The Magic of The Sword of Moses: A Practical Guide to Its Spells, Amulets, and Ritual, by Harold Roth
Weiser Books, 1578637260, 192 pages, August 2022

The Sword of Moses, titled Ḥarba de-Moshe in Aramaic, is one of the earliest extant grimoires of Jewish magic. Originating in northern Israel during the third quarter of the first millennium (circa 700-1000 CE), this medieval pre-Kabbalistic book of spells was written by an anonymous author in both Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. The author compiled magical formulas from multiple texts and documented his own personal three-day purification ritual of fasting, prayer, and angelic adjurations to be performed in order to gain the spiritual authority to use the Sword. The resulting compendium of 136 spells emphasizes the power of the spoken word rather than exotic ingredients or expensive ritual tools. 

While the book’s epic title The Sword of Moses may conjure up mental images of an Excalibur-like enchanted weapon, the Sword is in fact a poetic metaphor for 1,800 divine names, invoked and wielded by the magician’s tongue. The authenticity of these words of power is proclaimed by inserting them in mythic time. The manuscript claims that when Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the stone tablets of the Law inscribed by God, he also carried with him the Sword of sacred names, which had been gifted to him by the angels. It may seem audacious for magicians to presume they have the authority to command angels to do their bidding, but through performing the purification ritual, which identifies them with Moses, they follow in his stead and invoke the power of the divine names to bend the world to their will. 

When Harold Roth, artist and author of The Witching Herbs (2017), first encountered The Sword of Moses in the occult section of a university library, he was frustrated by its inaccessibility. Moses Gaster, who first translated The Sword of Moses into English in 1896, had bowdlerized the text by censoring many of the spells and replacing the divine names with X’s, rendering the grimoire useless for magical practice. This inspired Roth to do his own research and reconstruct the sorcerous manual for contemporary use. 

In The Magic of the Sword of Moses: A Practical Guide to Its Spells, Amulets, and Ritual, Roth supplies a scholarly background of rich historical context combined with detailed instructions for the modern magician to incorporate the Sword into their practice, making this work accessible to both seasoned sorcerers and curious readers with little to no previous knowledge of Jewish magic. Just as the anonymous author who first compiled these spells made them his own through creative revision, Roth has adapted this ancient grimoire for modern use with his own practical and easy to follow instructions in plain English. 

Roth also supplies his own thought-provoking insights regarding the mysterious manuscript. According to The Sword of Moses, humans were given the spiritual authority to command angels by God, but cannot command the Holy One himself. “However,” Roth says, “one of the most profound conclusions I’ve come to from studying The Sword of Moses is how much the angels seem indeed to be God, in particular because of the recurrence of parts of the ineffable Tetragrammaton in their names.”109 

The divine names are spelled out in easy to pronounce syllables, such as “GiBehRehYoAhLa,” which Roth identifies in a footnote as “clearly the name Gabriel.”123 However, this is one of the few he explains and the rest run together in long strings of barbarous names of power, such as the following, which appears to be a flowing permutation of the four-letter ineffable name of God, transliterated as YHWH: “YoHehWaWaHeh AhHehHeh HehWaHeh HehHehYo…”124 In a spell for wisdom, one of the most curious names mentioned is Prince Abraxas, a Gnostic spirit addressed as a Jewish archangel, who is charged to reveal arcane knowledge to the magician, indicating some syncretism with Greek magic. 

While the power of the spoken word is emphasized, the magician may also wield the Sword in written form by creating talismans, writing the divine names on fabric and crafting them into ritual garments, or even scrawling them on one’s own skin like a tattoo “to protect the magic worker from the wrath of angels, who can easily be offended by humans.”125

There are a variety of intriguing spells, ranging from those addressing mundane health concerns, such as one to cure migraines believed to be caused by a demonic spirit called a palga, to the more fantastical, such as walking on water and path-jumping, a type of supernatural travel involving riding a reed, rather like a witch straddling a broomstick. A few of the spells utilize the apotropaic hand gesture of crooking the little finger of one’s left hand. For example, this gesture is used in a spell to protect yourself “during legal proceedings”126, and in “a binding spell to catch thieves,” the magician is instructed to put their little finger in their ear while saying the divine names.127 

There are even killing spells included, without any didactic warnings or threats of karmic repercussions. Roth says that “Jewish magic does not have any idea of karma, the Three-Fold Law, the slingshot effect, or other negative reactions for negative magic.”128 The Sword gives you the freedom to think for yourself, and decide what action is appropriate and justified in your situation outside of the confines of any rigid moral code. Besides, one might hope that the angels would not bestow such power on someone who would use it irresponsibly. 

In mythic time, Moses himself used a killing curse. Exodus 2:11-12 recounts how Moses murdered an Egyptian overseer who was beating an Israelite slave. The weapon he used to slay the Egyptian is not mentioned, but according to an alternate version of the tale in Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer (Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer), Moses cursed the overseer and slew him with “the sword of his mouth.”129

Before the reader dares to try any of these spells, they must first obtain the spiritual authority to wield the Sword by performing a three-day purification rite, for which Roth gives detailed instructions.

“This book’s aim is to make it as simple and easy as possible while maintaining its authenticity and power.”130

 The magician is advised to bathe in living water, wear only white, avoid contact with anything unclean (including insects, dead things, nocturnal emissions, semen, and menstrual blood), fast for three days, consuming only bread, salt, and water after sunset, and recite the Amidah (the Standing Prayer) thrice each day while facing the east. The prayers are interwoven with potent angelic adjurations addressing thirteen archangels. The purpose of the adjurations is to invoke the thirteen heavenly princes and bind them and all the angels under their authority to the magician, and in doing so, gain control of the Sword. If the magician is not in a state of ritual purity, he risks offending the angels and incurring their fiery wrath. As a verbal fail-safe, the angels are also ordered not to harm the magician.

I believe the threat of being burned alive is a metaphor for the transformative power of the angels. Their celestial fire brings symbolic death and transfiguration through spiritual alchemy, and they will sear away the impurities of the magician in order to make him worthy to speak the divine names. The fiery Sword of Moses bestows the power to change reality, but first the magician must initiate change from within. 

This metaphorical sword of magic words captured my imagination, and I was so fascinated by the divine names that I decided on impulse to perform the purification ritual as soon as possible, following Roth’s directions to the best of my ability. Roth suggests that a long weekend may work well for some practitioners, so I chose Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to perform the rite and began at sundown on Friday in keeping with the Jewish tradition that a day begins when the sun sets the day before. Not being Jewish myself, I didn’t have to worry about violating any Sabbath restrictions. According to Roth, gentiles may say the prayers because Isaiah 56:7 declares that “My house shall be a house of prayer to all nations.”131

Unfortunately, I don’t live close to a body of living water, so I wasn’t able to dunk myself in one, but I hoped that taking a shower would suffice. I avoided using scented toiletries, as these may offend the angels, who are sensitive to strong fragrances, regardless of how pleasing humans may think they are. I wore a white robe for three days and baked my own bread for breaking fast when the sun went down. Even though the bread was delicious, it quickly became boring. I was at least permitted to butter my toast, because according to Roth, “There is nothing that says we cannot.”132 I recited the Amidah and the angelic adjurations thrice each day, while facing the east in my bedroom. Roth assures us that there is no need to cast a magic circle for protection or to contain raised energy because the angels are listening to the adjurations from up in heaven. Each recitation took 35 minutes, which was a test of endurance. The first day was especially challenging because I had a headache from caffeine withdrawals. If I had only had the foresight to give up coffee a few days before I began the ritual, I could have avoided that discomfort. 

The time of day for saying the prayers and adjurations was not rigid, so I chose shortly after dawn for the first recitation, solar noon for the second, and a couple of hours before sunset for the third. As I chanted, I visualized a burning sword revolving in the air before me, ablaze with Hebrew letters that lit up the blade like orange lava, as if it had been forged in a smoldering volcano. Sometimes I got tongue-tied and stumbled over the strange syllables, but in the moments when the cantillations found a steady flowing cadence and rolled off my tongue with natural ease, it felt as though my lips were possessed and aflame with the holy names. I found that concentrating all of my energy on reciting what my conscious mind registered as gibberish banished extraneous thoughts and induced a light trance state which I think is key to facilitating contact with the Divine powers being addressed. Between the fasting and standing for extended periods of time chanting, I often felt exhausted afterwards and needed to lie down. 

While I would love to report that some stellar transformation occurred, or that I had an incredible vision of being gifted with a supernatural sword, after I completed the ritual, I only felt a subtle difference, a numinous sense of peace and gratitude. I felt it to be very healing and it helped me to better recognize when irrational anxiety is knotting up inside of my chest. One line in particular from the Amidah really resonated with me:

“Heal me, Nurturing One, and let me feel healed. Save me, Holy One, and let me know I am safe. Healed in body, mind, spirit. Saved from the blight of my own fears. Heal me from perfectionism and lust for results. Save me from believing my own inner critics and soothe my grief.”133

The Magic of the Sword of Moses will be a treasure to anyone who has an interest in Jewish magic and medieval grimoires. There is a wealth of information packed into this slim volume of less than 200 pages, presented with clarity and precision. The modern magician’s magical practice will be enriched by sharpening the sword of their tongue with divine names of power, as long as they approach the angels with a sense of respect and awe, ever keeping in mind that they are spirits of fire.