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Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition
by Yvonne P. Chireau

"Black Magic looks at the origins, meaning, and uses of Conjure--the African American tradition of healing and harming that evolved from African, European, and American elements--from the slavery period to well into the twentieth century. Illuminating a world that is dimly understood by both scholars and the general public, Yvonne P. Chireau describes Conjure and other related traditions, such as Hoodoo and Rootworking, in a beautifully written, richly detailed history that presents the voices and experiences of African Americans and shows how magic has informed their culture. Focusing on the relationship between Conjure and Christianity, Chireau shows how these seemingly contradictory traditions have worked together in a complex and complementary fashion to provide spiritual empowerment for African Americans, both slave and free, living in white America. As she explores the role of Conjure for African Americans and looks at the transformations of Conjure over time, Chireau also rewrites the dichotomy between magic and religion. With its groundbreaking analysis of an often misunderstood tradition, this book adds an important perspective to our understanding of the myriad dimensions of human spirituality."

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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)

"The title character, Charles Dexter Ward, is a young man from a prominent Rhode Island family who (in the story's introduction) is said to have disappeared from a mental asylum after a prolonged period of insanity accompanied by minor, but unheard-of, physiological changes. The bulk of the story concerns the investigation conducted by the Wards' family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett, in an attempt to discover the reason for Ward's madness and the physiological changes. When Willett learns that Ward had spent the past several years attempting to discover the grave of his ill-reputed ancestor, Joseph Curwen, the doctor slowly begins to unravel the truth behind the legends surrounding Curwen, an eighteenth century shipping entrepreneur rumoured to have been an alchemist, but in reality a necromancer and mass-murderer."

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Melungeon [məˈlʌndʒən] n:(Social Science / Peoples) any of a dark-skinned group of people of the Appalachians in East Tennessee, of mixed Indian, White, and Black ancestry[of unknown origin].

"In Melungeons: Footprints from the Past, Author Jack H Goins revisits several events described in his previous book, Melungeons and other Pioneer Families, using new evidence from court records and DNA. Goins trails the Melungeons from Pamunkey River to the Flat River, then to the New River, Fort Blackmore, Blackwater adn Newman's Ridge."

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Ishi's Brain - In Search of America's Last Wild Indian

"Touted in his day as "the last wild Indian," Ishi, of the Northern Californian Yahi people, survived by adapting to a life housed within a San Francisco anthropological museum, where spectators paid to see him make arrowheads, until he died in 1916. Under 1990s repatriation laws, a group of Maidu Indians from the Sierra Nevada region sought to reclaim Ishi's ashes, buried in a San Francisco cemetery, but a rumor persisted that Ishi's brain had been removed during autopsy, pickled, and was still hidden somewhere. Duke University anthropologist Starn searched for the brain and here offers an unlikely narrative, informative and politicized, with easy-to-read, much-needed thumbnail histories of the Indian Wars. (As Starn notes, California Gold Rush atrocities against Native Americans are so recent that people remember them firsthand from their grandparents.) One of Starn's main accusations is that the widow of the important, early anthropologist Alfred Kroeber first made Ishi's story famous through "writerly liberties" as well as "careless research and made-up dramatic effects." Starn himself makes his own feelings and impressions central to the story, allowing himself to tell us, for example, that he "fell asleep at midnight with the motel swimming pool's blue floodlights glowing through the curtains like the beams of an alien spaceship." His search takes him from the University of Berkeley to the Cornucopia Restaurant in Oroville, Calif., to the Repatriation Office and "wet collection" in the Smithsonian Museum of National History, to an Ancestral Gathering at Mount Lassen National Park, to "Grizzly Bear's Hiding Place." For some readers, Starn-as-protagonist will ground this intellectual mystery, while others will find him distracting. But on the whole, the book satisfies as a quick review of sordid chapters in the nation's history, and a genuinely compelling investigation of how one culture's attempt to dominate another can take bizarre, persistent forms."

Something to Consider Should This New Year Turn Out Like the Old...

Suspiria De Profundis (Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow)

Thomas De Quincey (1845)

"Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have much leisure for very much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the new-born infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness,—typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of that benignity in powers invisible which even in pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should grovel there for more than one instant, either the paternal hand, as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near kinsman, as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps, in his heart, “Behold what is greater than yourselves!” This symbolic act represented the function of Levana. And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face (except to me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb) levare, to raise aloft.

This is the explanation of Levana, and hence it has arisen that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary power that controls the education of the nursery. She, that would not suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation for her awful ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the real degradation attaching to the non-development of his powers. She therefore watches over human education. Now the word educo, with the penultimate short, was derived (by a process often exemplified in the crystallisation of languages) from the word educo, with the penultimate long. Whatever educes, or develops, educates. By the education of Levana, therefore, is meant,—not the poor machinery that moves by spelling-books and grammars, but by that mighty system of central forces hidden in the deep bosom of human life, which by passion, by strife, by temptation, by the energies of resistance, works for ever upon children,—resting not night or day, any more than the mighty wheel of day and night themselves, whose moments, like restless spokes, are glimmering for ever as they revolve.

If, then, these are the ministries by which Levana works, how profoundly must she reverence the agencies of grief. But you, reader! think,—that children are not liable to such grief as mine. There are two senses in the word generally—the sense of Euclid, where it means universally (or in the whole extent of the genus), and in a foolish sense of this word, where it means usually. Now, I am far from saying that children universally are capable of grief like mine. But there are more than you ever heard of who die of grief in this island of ours. I will tell you a common case. The rules of Eton require that a boy on the foundation should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at six. Children torn away from mothers and sisters at that age not unfrequently die. I speak of what I know. The complaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; but that it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has killed more than have ever been counted amongst its martyrs.

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers that shake a man’s heart: therefore it is that she dotes on grief. “These ladies,” said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was conversing, “these are the Sorrows; and they are three in number, as the Graces are three, who dress man’s life with beauty; the Parcoeœ are three, who weave the dark arras of man’s life in their mysterious loom, always with colours sad in part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson and black; the Furies are three, who visit with retribution called from the other side of the grave offences that walk upon this; and once even the Muses were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute, to the great burdens of man’s impassioned creations. These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I know..."

The entire essay can be found here.

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Note: In honor of Dan O'Bannon

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"PERKINS, William (1555-1602)
Discourse of the damned art of witchcraft In
The Workes of that famous and worthy minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, Mr William Perkins.
London : Printed at London by John Leggatt, printer to the
University of Cambridge, 1616-1618.

Perkins was a prominent English demonologist and widely regarded Puritan preacher, who's Discourse was published posthumously in 1608. Like several other witch believers such as Henry More and Henry Hallywell, he was a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. A primary English authority on witchcraft, Perkins ignored the work of the European demonologists, basing his work almost exclusively on the Bible.

The book is divided into seven chapters covering true and false miracles, the league between Satan and a witch, divination, good witches, and the discovery and punishment of witches. It was influential throughout the 17th century because of its distinctions between false and uncertain signs of witchcraft, presumptions of guilt, and just and sufficient proofs."

Curently Reading...

The House with a Clock in it's Walls:

"Lewis always dreamed of living in an old house full of secret passageways, hidden rooms, and big marble fireplaces. And suddenly, after the death of his parents, he finds himself in just such a mansion--his Uncle Jonathan's. When he discovers that his big friendly uncle is also a wizard, Lewis has a hard time keeping himself from jumping up and down in his seat. Unfortunately, what Lewis doesn't bank on is the fact that the previous owner of the mansion was also a wizard--but an evil one who has placed a tick-tocking clock somewhere in the bowels of the house, marking off the minutes until the end of the world. And when Lewis accidentally awakens the dead on Halloween night, the clock only ticks louder and faster. Doomsday draws near--unless Lewis can stop the clock!"

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"Reynolds charts a "white trash" teenager's harrowing adventures in a wonderfully compelling, powerful, moving, and complex coming-of-age story. Jael helps her mother run a sleazy bar and pool room, all the while fearing the drunken sexual advances of customers who sometimes pass out on the front porch, only to resume drinking in the morning. Her nurturance by the goddess-Mother Earth-Madonna spirit informs the whole novel. She finds this nurturance when she takes comfort from the nearby woods; she finds it in the giant, uprooted oak that provides her shelter when she is seduced and abandoned on an uninhabited swamp island; and she finds it in comforting words from the Virgin Mother's statue in the church in which she discovers work and the power to find peace. Counterpointing Jael's self-redemption, however, is her self-mutilation when in confusion she ritualistically cuts her name into her thigh, gashes her own belly, and gnaws away the skin of her knuckles because it reminds her of penis skin."

-Whitney Scott

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Mike Tribby -American Library Association:

"Searching for "authenticity" in a music intended for broad commercial success may seem an odd undertaking, but Barker and Taylor are hardly the first to try. What was more authentic, the Sex Pistols or disco? Setting aside that so asking demonstrates a misunderstanding of what Malcolm McLaren and his hirees were up to, that simple question expresses the authors' MO. Similar queries animate the discussion and help make a framework within which to consider desegregation in the American South and other historical matters. Perhaps the quintessential chapter is "Heartbreak Hotel: The Art and Artifice of Elvis Presley." Few other pop stars have so thoroughly covered the gamut from the plausible authenticity of Presley's musical roots to the obvious, saccharine artifice of the King's movies. Other chapters ponder Neil Young (a rocker given to concerns about authenticity and legitimacy, sometimes too much so), Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Moby, and Donna Summer. With plenty of interesting and contentious assertions to stimulate even casual readers, this is a heck of an argument starter."

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From University of California press:

"The life story of Ishi, the Yahi Indian, lone survivor of a doomed tribe, is unique in the annals of North American anthropology. For more than forty years, Theodora Kroeber's biography has been sharing this tragic and absorbing drama with readers all over the world.

Ishi stumbled into the twentieth century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and with terror of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California. Finally identified as an Indian by an anthropologist, Ishi was brought to San Francisco by Professor T. T. Waterman and lived there the rest of his life under the care and protection of Alfred Kroeber and the staff of the University of California's Museum of Anthropology. Karl Kroeber adds an informative tribute to the text, describing how the book came to be and how Theodora Kroeber's approach to the project was both a product of her era and of her insight and her empathy."