Folk Magic Quotes

“He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.

("Pollock And The Porrah Man")”
― H.G. Wells, Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

“It's my opinion he don't want to kill you,' said Perea - 'at least not yet. I've heard deir idea is to scar and worry a man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic pains, and bad dreams, and all dat, until he's sick of life. Of course, it's all talk, you know. You mustn't worry about it. But I wunder what he'll be up to next.'

'I shall have to be up to something first,' said Pollock, staring gloomily at the greasy cards that Perea was putting on the table. 'It don't suit my dignity to be followed about, and shot at, and blighted in this way. I wonder if Porroh hokey-pokey upsets your luck at cards.'

He looked at Perea suspiciously.

'Very likely it does,' said Perea warmly, shuffling. 'Dey are wonderful people.'

("Pollock And The Porrah Man")”
― H.G. Wells, Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

“Joseph Smith was not concerned about how divination and money digging would impact his social, political, and religious reputation. His teenage years were not formed in an environment where magic was the primary influence upon him or others...but at the same time, it was not uncommon for people to take interest in the supernatural. Other religious leaders who were at one time interested in the folklore of magic generally did not have to justify their curiosity....

...[R]esearch has shown that between 1810 and 1840 there was an apparent increase in the use of both seer stones and divining rods to find buried treasure in the American northwest frontier.

Searching for buried treasure was usually done with a divining rod, in a similar fashion similar to searching for subterranean water but in this case involving the use of seer stones. ... The supernatural element was important to money digging, and modern historians studying the use of seer stones in the Book of Mormon translation process often look at Joseph's money-digging days for answers or clues to understand the translation process better.

The decision to make this comparison, though, is structured around a division: the idea that money digging was a nonreligious endeavor, while the translation of the Book of Mormon was decidedly religious in nature. However, these are labels imposed by the modern perspective, and they ignore that both treasure seeking and translating were likely perceived by Joseph's early converts as supernatural events. Early believers did not necessarily struggle with the fusion of Joseph the treasure seeker and Joseph the translator, even if future Church members would.”
― Michael Hubbard MacKay

“Today’s man is absorbed in abstraction, and lives in his virtual world, far from the goals of hermeticism, and equally distant from the spirit and from nature. Liquid crystals, in the abstract sense, caused the same thing to occur, like in Egyptian antiquity, with the long copper hook of the embalmer… 'Our man' would like to see all of the mysteries of antiquity immediately and fully because his own era is not enough!

This departure of the brain from the skull (or to use abstract terms: the atrophy of the intellect), can explain the behavior of our contemporaries: drug experiments led by materialistic logic, various forms of folk magic (a false part of Neo-paganism, healing with cracked crystals, calling angels in groups of absolutely undisciplined participants) and a large increase of interest in 'the mysteries of sex'.”
― Lukáš Loužecký, Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic

“Now comes the fun part. The ingredients. We need star anise for clarity, bloodroot for connection to the Earth, and...ah, yes. A single black feather from a raven. Findin' that in New Orleans is like findin' a honest politician, but that’s what makes it potent.”
― High Priestess, Marisol