Happy Hallowstide, listeners! We are delighted to invite you to an especially-very-special episode of Radio Free Golgotha – our 40th episode! We took this anniversary opportunity to do something a little different: rather than pick individual foci amongst the topics of our usual sorcerous Sesame Streeting, we got into the fields of the topics themselves: what and how we are continually inspired by getting to talk about Saints, Demons, Herbs, Minerals, Types of Magic, Geomancy, Cartomancy, and of course the folk necromancy of Dead Magicians. In other words, welcome to our Oops All Types of Magics episode.
In considering the Magics of Saints and Hagiography we got into (re)assessing the virtues of ritual time and liturgical calendricals of feastdays and the holy in these holidays, as well as celebrating the mysteries and meanings of the famous, infamous, and lesser-known sacred dead. We also got into – amongst other things – hagiographic blur, value centers, saint-masking, bottom-up folk veneration, and the protocols and practicalities of canonization.
In extolling the dark arts of the Magics of Demons and Demonology, we chatted about the values of grimoiric spirit catalogues not only as means for navigating infernal hierarchies, but demonstrating the interrelationalities of such ‘unclean’ spirits, and the organizational tools and perspectives that they afford the karcist working alongside their Good Devils.
In discussing the natural medicines and miracles of the Magic of Herbs and Herbalism we touched on plant allies, engagement with landscape and the natural cycles of the year, as well as what it means to conjure an ingredient – from the exorcising of unhelpful influences to (re-)baptizing our materia (and their substitutes) into that which deemed necessary for the operation.
This discussion naturally extended into considerations of the Magics of Minerals and Lapidary: from the archeo-geological blurring of names-which-are-more-descriptions in medieval books of stones, to the yes-and of working by a knowledge of both natural substances’ modern physick and their pre-modern spiritual virtues.
Turning the mirror upon itself we also got stuck into the Magic of Magical Techniques, Technologies, and Typologies, and touched on both the shortcomings of over-compartmentalizing sorcery as well as the crucial importance of celebrating the (especially differing) cosmologies of the world’s cultures and histories which underlie the common and uncommon strategies which humans (not to mention non-humans) apply in our spellcrafts and solutions when we make such horizontal comparisons and contrasts.
In highlighting the importance of the containers we develop and preserve to hold and empower our magics, conversation rather naturally turned to divination: firstly, to our beloved Magics of the Figures of Geomancy and their counterpart mysteries in the corpus of the Odu of Ifa and Merindiloggun, especially these Figures as markers of potential, “shelfmarks of reality”, patterned flavours of the cosmos, archives of befallen Fate, collections of historiolae and precedents, muster points of possibility, menus for operative sorcery, and haunted doorways.
In expanding our appreciation of divination we turned to the Magic of Tarot & Cartomancy, considering the uniting lingua franca that the grammar and shared understandings that tarot provides to find a common language with which to read for querents and help them navigate time’s meanings, the destiny of decisions, and the consequences of our actions; which included weighting the role, ethics, and best practices of diviners to communicate with their clients, and to search not only for forecasts but also strategies and forwards-motions of remediation.
Finally in turning to the appreciation and ongoing engagements with the Magics of Dead Magicians, we got far further into developing and cherishing this thing-we-call folk necromancy: further adumbrating how and why we may usefully consider the