A 500 Year Old Dragon-Slaying Love Spell From Trinidad
by Gordon • • History, Magic • 5 Comments
Neat title, huh?
Grimoires by Owen Davies is on my book pile at the moment. It’s a history of magic books. (I’ll review it when I’m finished with it. But definitely buy it.)
While discussing the so-called demoncratisation of magic following the invention of the Gutenberg press and how different practices split along literate/illiterate lines (male/female, basically) he recounts the story of a woman I would love to have met.
Basically, an Inquisitor was set to Trinidad in 1568 to investigate a sorceress by the name of Mária de Medina.
Love prayers to Saint Martha were popular at the time. I find this weird because Martha’s story is basically that she was Mary Magdalene’s sister who -after Jesus died- allegedly moved to France and killed a dragon before introducing Christianity to the locals of Provence.
So really it’s a domination spell rather than a love spell, but I will share it regardless, because Mária de Medina -even though she couldn’t read- had a written copy of the prayer.
My Lady Saint Martha, worthy you are and saintly. By my Lord Jesus Christ you were cherished and loved; by my Lady the Virgin Mary you were hosted and welcomed. To the mount of Talarçon you went and beheld the live serpent; with your hyssop of water you sprinkled it and with your holy girdle you bound and delivered it unto the people. Just as this is true, bring so-and-so unto me, who was the person she desired to come to her, calm, placid and bound of hand and foot and heart so that he should love me and call me his lady and take pleasure in no one, if not me.
You’ll have to use your own discretion as to how to bundle this into a full blown spell. Provence says lavender for the love bit. Maybe something else for the binding/dominion bit.
History rocks.
I actually have that one in my book in the influencing section. St Martha is one of my favorites.
Whips and chains? Man, the ancients knew how to party =p
Pallas Renatus´s last [type] ..On Fearing the Self and dealing with it
My great-grandparents’ generation were partially illiterate. My grandparents’ generation were more literate than most in the USA today. Women and men alike (in my area of Appalachia the last witches belonged to those generations) could be called a witch: “witch” wasn’t gender-specific. Also, anybody could “witch”, verb, even non-witches, if they’d been taught, which was rare. Both noun and verb forms were terms of like and dislike. “Good”, “ill” or “bad”, “witch”, “cure”, etc.—terms of probity and the reverse—were invariably terms of convenience, just rhetoric, the exception being Sunday mornings, when people good and ill were in church. If you liked the person who cured your wart or your baby’s sore throat you just said, Such-and-such cured my wart or my baby’s sore throat, not that he or she was a witch.
The terminology these days seems taken from TV, and is pretty much in line with Davies.
“Magic” was doing card or coin tricks and “magicians”—all men, btw—gave shows at high schools and finished up by sawing their pretty half-clad assistants (always bleach-blonde young ladies) in half.
My point: not one grimoire, not even Long Lost Friend, was in or out of sight, anywhere. I suppose the Bible counts, but no one called it a grimoire, probably because no one had ever heard the word, and no one, good or ill, would have insulted the Bible with it anyway. I do not believe Davies’s distinctions were for a very long time as widely applicable as he supposes, though I don’t doubt they are now. Where such distinctions did exist, I suspect they were largely cultural—as deep as your skin color, your accent, and your pocket—and not primarily a function of sex, gender or literacy.
–
Hieronimo
@Hieronimo I’m only half way through the book which makes me think you’re talking about stuff that’s further along.
In Davies’s defense, he makes it clear how troubling the distinctions are, especially when you factor in that the church didn’t always consider astrological talismans or natural magic as “magic” (so could those practicioners be considered “witches” or “magicians”?)
@Jason I’ve read your book(s) a bunch of times. How is it I have this amnesia?? My best guess is that my mind now considers them “my” thoughts rather than originating from somewhere external to me.
@Gordon—What I said I believe, but I said it curmudgeon-wise. I was and am under the weather (or did the Devil make me do it?), Davies touches a sore spot and also makes an easy target, even though much of what he writes is of great value. I think Davies’s distinction (what defines a witch vs. a grimoire user, magician) is quite misleading and simple-minded. Reading the books of recent (Carlo Ginzburg began writing in the ’60s, so not so recent) interdisciplinary historians on the realities of witchcraft in Europe during the times of the witch trials, you see that many of the named offenders were men, and in many places literacy had nothing to do with it. You see this also in Salem and the other, overlooked, North American trials, too. Still the trials and everyone since focused and focus on mostly women as witches: for some other reason than numbers or illiteracy. See the educational film Witchfinder General for clarification. The works of Ginzburg, Eva Pocs and Emma Wilby sit mostly unread. (Wilby’s very recent Visions of Isobel Gowdie will bugger your mind, you need to read it.) Witches (and the thousands of words so translated) have always outnumbered magicians in the West, and worldwide. Magicians or grimoire practitioners seem easy to define; no other magic-users (I played D&D v.1.0) seem to be. It also bothers me that Davies does not address (does memory fail?) the huge influence the grimoires had on the ATRs, Hoodoo, Pow-wow, and so on. Also the recent flap over Ben Whitmore’s Trials of the Moon left me clutching furniture, hyperventilating. Our nomenclature—magician, witch, cunning man, the thousand words translated as either witch or shaman or magician, all nuance lost—has become fossilized, thus fossilizing an almost total ignorance. To paraphrase Disinfo, Everything we know is wrong.
Rant over. Please pardon any vitriol. ‘Twas my Muse (or fever) would have it so.