02.05.2022

“Quartz: Breath of the Dragon” by Melusine Draco (ARCANUM)

Magick Matters

"Since antiquity, varieties of quartz have been the most commonly used minerals in the making of jewellery and hard-stone carvings, while in the metaphysical world even the smallest piece is imbued with powerful properties that enable the bearer to cross the boundaries between the worlds. Archaeologists are now finding more and more evidence that quartz played an important part in the ritual and burial customs of our Ancestors. In truth, as Dr Meriem Clay-Egerton asserted some forty years ago, the use of quartz in prehistoric stone-working traditions was a worldwide phenomenon. For archaeologists, however, quartz was often misidentified, or ignored. Indeed, well into the 20th-century, quartz artefacts were routinely discarded during excavations. A new study...>>

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02.05.2022

“Thrice Great Thoth: The Magician’s Magician” by Melusine Draco (ARCANUM)

Magick Matters

"In its simplest form, the modern function of the ancient Egyptian god, Thoth, can be seen as being the patron of writers and magical practitioners. Thoth is attested from the earliest historical periods onwards: he already played a prominent role in the oldest religious texts of Egypt, the Pyramid Texts, and continues to appear almost everywhere in Egypt up to the end of Egyptian religion some 4000 years later. Throughout this long period the god is overwhelmingly present in a vast body of documentation that yields an extraordinarily colorful picture of his nature and functions within the Egyptian pantheon. We should not forget that the archaic Thoth-cult of the pre-Dynastic era was a long way...>>

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02.05.2022

“Gateways to Otherworld” by Melusine Draco (ARCANUM)

Magick Matters

"When we talk of Otherworld, we are usually referring to the world of spirit, of Fae, and the ancient Ancestors, from whom kindred calls to kindred and blood calls to blood. It is a separate reality, or a world that exists simultaneously with ours, but independent of it — and most true witches find that they spend their lives with one foot in the ‘real’ world and one in Otherworld. We co-exist in a way that enables us to ‘see’ things on the other side of the veil without the rigmarole of trance- or path-working, self-hypnosis, meditation or contemplation. To find the psychic gateways or portals that enable us to step through into this Otherworld...>>

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02.05.2022

“Scent of a Witch: The Power of Perfume” by Melusine Draco (ARCANUM)

Magick Matters

"Magic and scent were conceptually linked in antiquity. Ancient authors sometimes treated magic as a type of smell; at other times odors were treated as a medium through which magic worked. Some authors compare the effect of smells to magic; others described scent and magic as different things but impossible to distinguish. Magicians used incenses and perfumes liberally to set the scene for their rituals and please the gods, as demonstrated by the corpus of spell books that survive from Greco-Roman Egypt; meanwhile, ancient deities signaled their presence by their divine fragrance.’ So writes Britta Ager in her academic paper for Penn State University, Magic Perfumes and Deadly Herbs: The Scent of Witches’ Magic...>>

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02.05.2022

“Sacrifice to the Gods” by Melusine Draco (ARCANUM)

Magick Matters

"The act of propitiating or appeasing the gods is as old as humankind. And, it is just as much an integral part of pagan worship today as it was when our Mesolithic ancestors first began leaving their mark on the landscape — both to honour the gods in times of plenty and to appease them in times of trouble. For the tribes that were beginning to track their footsteps across the open plains of the vast continents, they left behind evidence of their 'holy places' — where they periodically stopped and gathered together in the act of honouring the Gods, the Ancestors and denizens of Otherworld, according to the light of their times ......>>

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