Popular Home Remedies and Superstitions: Of the Pennsylvania Germans: Now Available!

 

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This little work is a dense compilation of folklore and superstition from the Pennsylvania Germans, compiled partly from Hohmans' "Pow Wows" and from Albertus' Magnus "Egyptian Secrets". Some of the lore is obscure, some well known, and part of it is quasi-medicinal. The obviously skeptic author of the work makes numerous sarcastic remarks about the folk magick herein, and the foreword oddly criticizes him for that.

48 pages.

Witchcraft Detected and Prevented: Now Available!

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This work is a bit on the odd side because the title is utterly useless in determining its content; reading the title (which proposes the work to purely oppose witchery) and the preface, one would assume it's nothing more than Christian zeal or, at most, white magick. It is in fact based partly on the work of Magnus, partly on the Petit Albert (or some intermediary text) and partly on the fortune telling tradition of the late 1700s with the Norwood Gypsy and other content. As such, it is a bric-a-brac, a gray magick grimoire, and a miniaturized compiling of herbal and folk lore and magic, all combined with some protective incantations and plenty of superstition.

In fact, altogether, it almost rivals the Petit Albert or Hohman's "Pow Wows" for interest in my own opinion- this kind of work is uncommon, and extremely interesting. It also contains some basic chemical works (alchemy!) and weather prognostication with astrological overtones.


92 pages.

The Useful Family Herbal: Now Available!

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This little work manages to compact a large number of recipes (receipts) into a very small page size. Crafted in the early 19th century, it is semi-antiquated in word usage, but provides cures, preventions, and treatments for things common in the era, such as tuberculosis and palsy.

It should not be particularly surprising that a large proportion of medical recipes here contain wine or rum, or else are crafted into a sort of medicinal beer- while not all of the recipes are likely effectual (some aren't even remotely safe- lead is usually no longer used as medicine!) many of them certainly would have gotten the user drunk enough to forget their illness. It contains a short index of medicinal species as well and their properties.

30 pages.

Hieroglyphical Fortune Teller: Now Available!

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In a stroke of good luck I happened upon this work while researching the early 1900s Oraculum; the Dream Book version, as opposed to Tousey's far better Book of Fate version.

A slimmed down work, it contains an expansive oracle in place of Tousey's shorter oracle twain with other content. As a pure fortune telling manuscript, it revolves around asking one of 26 questions, then choosing one of 26 letters to represent the answer- this works better when ascribing the numbers 1 through 26 on a random number generator to this purpose, or when the letters have been placed on cards and turned facing down so the user is able to eliminate the possibility of guesswork based on prior usage (the original text merely instructs the user to choose a Hebraic symbol for their answer- useless if they have used it more than a few times.)

Altogether an interesting work.

35 pages.

A New Booklet I Obtained; And More!

I have obtained a copy of Dr. Pierces' "What your Neighbors Say about You." This long-running quack pharmaceutical pamphlet is half dream interpretation and half other material- the "other" category is mostly medical ads for quack healing but also contains some herbal at-home remedies, recipes, and other stuff. The particular edition I purchased from ebay isn't like any of those I have seen on the internet as pdf scans so I can only guess at some of the content.

Obviously I plan to scan this for the occult archive (as the first new file available there in several years! Huzzah!) as well as to create a paperback edition for others to purchase. The dream interpretation section appears to be almost as long as that found in Napoleon's Oraculum.

I am currently editing "The Hieroglyphical Fortune Teller" which is similar to the early 1900s Oraculum but has Hebrew lettering instead of nativity symbols and has several different questions and a dissimilar casting system. It will take quite a bit of time to complete despite its short length because I am simultaneously writing "Sickness in Hell" (I am now done with the epilogue and first three chapters!) and editing The 1875 work "The Secret Book of the Black Arts" (not to be confused with the similarly titled work by Cavendish much later.) It's a somewhat longer work (about 200 pages) so I will release three or four shorter manuscripts while editing it.

Hohman's Pow Wows (or; Long Lost Friend)

Now that the Universal Fortune Teller of Mrs. Bridget is complete, it's time for a new edited work; and thankfully this time it's in semi-modern English and comes from the United States.

Hohman's "Pow Wows" has nothing at all to do with Mesoamerican ritualism; which is funny given the connotations of the title- instead, it's a fusion system between German ritualism (influenced, as I will explain, by French ritualism) and Americana, a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition from the dawn of the 1800s.

The work itself is about the same length as, and contains some material similar to, the Petit Albert of 1700s era French renown- in my estimation the French cycle has influenced the content of this work, based on its eerie level of similarity- although it is within the realm of possibility that the similarities are due to traditions which were simply popular enough to have spread around Europe; after all, there's no certainty that all content in the Petit Albert originated in France (indeed, it mentions Hungary and other regions explicitly for a few of its passages.) It's broken into similar sections and covers similar maladies such as the bite of mad dogs (rabies of course) and headaches, hysteria, and other conditions.

One part herbal, one part prayer/incantation booklet, and one part folkish tradition, this rivals the Petit Albert for "most in depth ritual system" I have ever edited. It is likely that I will list this with the grimoires, since that is essentially what it is, even if it is also technically a work of folk magick.

I expect that it will be around 110 to 120 pages when completed, and it's quite a nice work.

The Universal Fortune Teller: Now Available!

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The Universal Fortune Teller of Fortey's fame is a work vaguely similar to Napoleon's Oraculum- containing some of the same material (in not quite the same form) a full 24 years before the Oraculum was crafted, adding several new elements to the work and removing several others.

This specific work revolves mainly around the reading of tea leaves, palmistry, and a section on charms and simplistic rituals mostly involved with love and marriage.

Indeed, the Fortune Teller is itself based upon a similar work from 1790 by some anonymous author called "Universal Fortune Teller: Mrs. Bridgets Golden Treasury." This latter text is attributed to the "Norwood Gypsy" and contains the same prognostication for children born on each day of the week (omitted from the Oraculum; but I added it back for continuity's sake) and a lengthy astrological exposition included in the Oraculum in modified form and absent from the 1860 Fortune Teller.

The convoluted and interconnected content of these three works, as well as the second version of the Oraculum is interesting enough to warrant a future post specifically delineating the content.

A Slew of New Work

Coming soon: Johannes Trithemius' "The Art of Drawing Spirits Into Crystals"- a sort of short-ish grimoire and similar in infamy and length to De Septum Secundeis- these two works form the twin counterparts to the Steganographia and never obtained the level of fame of this much longer, Latinized work. I have already fully edited this manuscript and it will be released in two days.

In addition to this July release, I am looking forward to another double release; the Universal Fortune Teller, an 1860 work similar to the Oraculum, and a work on mesmerism and hypnotism of note from the 1930s which I scanned from my very own collection.

In addition to these two notable works of paranormal Americana, I want to begin the Nigromancia as soon as possible due to its fame, alongside beginning Sickness in Hell; it needs to take rough form before October, which is for obvious reasons the best month for editing works of darkness.

Napoleon's Oraculum - Now Available!

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At long last one of the best writings ever made on the topic of fortune telling and divination is available. Having reviewed other variants of the work available for sale, they are all substantially more expensive and most are primitive facsimiles. My works are never facsimile copies and are always fully edited by hand. I'd by lying if I said I didn't feel proud of this slower, more thorough effort.

The Oraculum stands at 76 pages; some variants are longer because they're mostly filler or else contain the longer but less varied Oraculum of the 1890s- the latter version does not contain most of the vaguely folk-tradition spells and rites of this version. The 1884 Tousey version is also notable for its expansive section on dream interpretation; I happen to agree with most of his inclusions here over those made by new age groups and posted on the internet- his version of interpretation, whatever its source, is more authentic.

It's a fine work, made finer by being completely overhauled for a modern audience.