As part of its seasonal festivities, JStor Daily has a good (if brief) article by Hillary Waterman on spoken spellcraft entitled “Herbs & Verbs: How to Do Witchcraft for Real“. Ignore the title—the article is much better than that.

Waterman examines Anglo-Saxon spells and a spell from Papua, New Guinea. Although separated by miles and centuries, the spells are quite similar.

“Common to all kinds of magic are:
*Actors—a practitioner, a subject, and an agent (a spirit or energy source)
*A decontextualizing of the language and actions from everyday life and resituating them within a special and powerful—and abstracted (often mythic)—context
*A special-purpose language or speech register
*Rituals and taboos
*Use of herbs and talismans
*Altered states of consciousness induced by chanting, fasting, or herbal draught”

If you’re new to magic, this is a good outline for understanding spells, and creating your own spells.

Waterman cites several sources, and I encourage you to read the article for yourself and check out the references.

A frontispiece from Grete Herball, a 1526 English herbal manuscript.
via Wikimedia Commons

Friends
~ William Stafford

How far friends are! They forget you,
most days. They have to, I know; but still,
it’s lonely just being far and a friend.
I put my hand out—this chair, this table—
So near: touch, that’s how to live.
Call up a friend? All right, but the phone
itself is what loves you, warm on your ear,
on your hand. Or, you lift a pen
to write—it’s not that far person
but this familiar pen that comforts.
Near things: Friend, here’s my hand.

Image Credit: Pixabay

And With March a Decade in Bolinas
~ Joanne Kyger

Just sitting around smoking, drinking, and telling stories,
the news, making plans, analyzing, approaching the cessation
of personality, the single personality understands its demise.
Experience of the simultaneity of all human beings on this planet,
alive when you are alive. This seemingly inexhaustible
sophistication of awareness becomes relentless and horrible,
trapped. How am I ever going to learn enough to get out.

The beautiful soft and lingering props of the Pacific here.

The back door bangs
So we’ve made a place to live
here in the greened out 70s
Trying to talk in the Tremulous
morality of the present
Great Breath, I give you, Great Breath!

Bolinas Lagoon – Image By Bolinas Surf Lessons

Winter: Tonight: Sunset
~ David Budbill

Tonight at sunset walking on the snowy road,
my shoes crunching on the frozen gravel, first

through the woods, then out into the open fields
past a couple of trailers and some pickup trucks, I stop

and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue,
green, purple, yellow, gray, all at once and everywhere.

I pause in this moment at the beginning of my old age
and I say a prayer of gratitude for getting to this evening

a prayer for being here, today, now, alive
in this life, in this evening, under this sky.

Winter Sunset by Melanie Mc Murray

The Lovers
~ Timothy Liu

I was always afraid
of the next card

the psychic would turn
over for us—

Forgive me
for not knowing
how we were

every card in the deck.

The Aquarian Tarot, David Palladini, copyright US Games Systems