Pentamegistus

Hoodoo’s golden age (the early 1900’s) left us a number of valuable books. Arguably the least known is a curious 63 page text, titled Mystic Secrets of Mind and Power: The Key to Success, anonymously published in 1942. This is an extremely obscure work; the sole reference I found was in Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans , and couldn't even locate the original publisher. Consequently, I decided to highlight it here, that it may become better known. The anonymous author may have been any of the early prolific writers on Hoodoo listed here , but his/her identity remains a  mystery. Mystic Secrets is a guidebook to psychological self improvement, inspired by New Thought, with a section on the virtues of herbs and substances commonly used in rootwork, a table of lucky and unlucky days, and a chapter on prayer. The first few chapters address methods for overcoming fear (especially irrational fear), with useful techniques, such as shifting the mind’s focus to physical activit...

Over the last month, I have conducted some experiments with an invocation from a Coptic magical papyrus ( Cairo 45060 ). Being the direct successors of the earlier PGM material, the Coptic magical papyri ( henceforth CMP ), are a good corpus for PGM practitioners to safely explore and even incorporate into existing workings. The CMP consist primarily of magical rites derived from Sethian Gnosticism,  interspersed with some earlier PGM material,  and strongly Christianized. Cairo 45060 forms part of a genre I refer to as the polyvalent /  omnivalent   formula , an invocation or prayer that has several different uses (which usually follow it in the surviving texts), and often can be employed for just about anything. Several of them occur in the CMP, most of them published in Marvin Meyer's "Ancient Christian Magic" (whence the present one is taken). One of the most impressive ones in my opinion is a long, liturgical Sethian invocation, published in " A Coptic Han...

Ritual for binding and restraining an enemy This was a ritual I devised to remedy a personal situation, where a jealous individual was deliberately fomenting trouble for my family. The invocation in this rite is based on a spell in the Leyden Demotic magical papyrus (PDM IV, column XXIII, a rite to inflict catalepsy), combined with a long tested Hoodoo technique. I performed this a year ago, as the situation was escalating, and approximately a week afterward, the individual went quiet and has not stirred up any strife since.   Some may question my use of Saturnian associations for Set-Typhon, who is a bellicose, Martian deity, but in the lead up to the final version of this rite, I had several insights urging me to funnel Typhon-Set’s unwieldy, aggressive nature, through the tempering medium of Saturn, whence restriction and subjection arise (but which likewise shares Mars’ malefic nature).  Moreover, in the Egyptian myth, Seth used a leaden coffin to imprison a...