Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
December 1, 2025
Cusack M. Carole
Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), founded by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in 1981 after the end of Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions, blended chaos magick, art, and esoteric practices while drawing on imagery of destructive cults. The group ended in 1991, just as the World Wide Web emerged. In the decades since, TOPY and P-Orridge have been rediscovered and venerated by contemporary occultists. This article examines TOPY's magickal frameworks to assess their significance for esotericism, popular culture, and political rebellion, emphasizing artistic and creative methods as sources of spiritual power. Chaos magick and individualism strongly shaped the nature and impact of their activities.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
September 1, 2024
Dendup Chophel
In a Bhutanese village with established religious pluralism, shamanic mediumship serves as both a formulaic, mimetic retention of history and an indeterminate, fluid improvisation. Mediums become sites for multisensory communicative dramas between ontologically distinct but relational spirits who negotiate their standing with the community. The phenomenal and phantasmal beings remain present in the village lifeworld, entangled in an ethics of care requiring dedication from both spirits and community. The paper unpacks the poetics, poiesis, and politics of metaphorical, cryptic, silent, and gestural codes through which charismatic mediums reinforce social order, examining how the lifeworld of Chungsekha village is lived, experienced, and discursively reconstructed through phantasmal and multisensory dialogues.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
September 1, 2024
Isabell Herrmans
Spirit communication among the Luangan Dayak of Indonesian Borneo is an ambiguous endeavor that relies on multisensorial forms of interaction—olfactory, sonic, visual, gustatory, and kinesthetic—to make spirits present and responsive during shamanic healing rituals. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article describes two dialogic encounters: one involving games played with spirits, and another involving spirit possession of a shaman. The unknowability of spirits and ritual outcomes encourages diversification of curing techniques, ritual genres, and poetic registers. Luangan rituals use beautiful ancestral language, joking, and perspectivism to both cultivate and cut spirit relations, making sensory resonance a central preoccupation in mutually making and unmaking human conditions and spirit dispositions.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
September 1, 2022
M. Fletcher
Liber Israfel, an invocation of the Egyptian god Thoth, is a key text in Aleister Crowley's literary corpus, forming the basis of a theory of magical invocation in his work Magick in Theory and Practice and used extensively in his personal magical practice. A precursor of Liber Israfel played a role in events leading to the reception of The Book of the Law, the founding text of Thelema. Despite its significance, the text has received little scholarly attention. While it is recognized as indebted to a ritual by Crowley's mentor Allan Bennett, a comprehensive analysis of its iterative composition is lacking.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
June 1, 2022
Carole M. Cusack
Necromancers in early Tudor England were generally not involved with the dead, and secular courts showed a curious disinclination to prosecute magic, while ecclesiastical courts punished it harshly. The book examines two case studies: William Neville, a minor poet who consulted a cunning-man and faced Thomas Cromwell in 1532 but was not convicted, and the Mixindale Fellowship, nine men tried in the Archbishop's Court in 1509 for treasure hunting with demonic conjuration, who were convicted of heresy, excommunicated, and did public penance. The authors challenge assumptions that magicians worked alone and that institutional Christianity uniformly opposed magic, highlighting the complex accommodations between permissible and prohibited occult practices.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
December 1, 2015
Silvia Tomášková
The book examines three cross-cultural encounters between Native informants and Western interlocutors: Lakota holy man Black Elk with poet John Neihardt, Mazatec healer María Sabina with mycologist R. Gordon Wasson, and Carlos Castaneda with Yaqui don Juan. The author argues that these Westerners were not genuinely interested in understanding their Native partners, but instead sought hallucinogenic or out-of-body experiences. He contends that Western scientific thinking, particularly anthropology, has been inadequate for grasping shamanism and native spirituality. The reviewer criticizes the book for ignoring decades of anthropological scholarship on ethnopoetics, magic, multiple ontologies, and shamanism, noting that many anthropologists have addressed these topics.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
December 1, 2007
Deward E. Walker
This book review describes a reprint of Charles Hudson's 1979 work on the black drink, a caffeinated tea made from Ilex vomitoria used by Native American tribes of the southeastern United States for ritual purification. The volume includes articles on the plant's botany, its importance among southeastern Indians, its prehistoric origins and distribution, its function among the Creeks, and its adoption by non-Indians for medicinal and recreational purposes. The book contributes to ethnobotanical and ethnographic literature on ceremonial plant use and ritual purity, and is recommended for both lay readers and researchers.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
December 1, 2025
Lilith Dorsey
Over the past two decades, the online presence of African Traditional Religions (ATRs) and Afro-Magick has grown and shifted significantly since Douglas E. Cowan's 2005 book Cyberhenge. Drawing on decades of personal practice and study of Vodou in Haiti and Benin and Voodoo in New Orleans, the author—an engaged priestess, teacher, and community member—analyzes key innovations and catastrophes affecting these traditions. The piece offers an insider perspective on how digital spaces have transformed the practice, representation, and community dynamics of these religions, highlighting both opportunities and challenges that have emerged in the internet age.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
December 1, 2023
Stewart Clelland, Paul Ferguson
An English translation of Book II of the early modern German ritual magic manual The Book of Abramelin the Mage is provided, based on a newly discovered manuscript. This translation is the first complete English version of a longer, distinct text that differs from the two previously available English translations and more closely resembles the version in the earliest known manuscript.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
June 1, 2012
Frank Klaassen
Modern psychological conditioning and ethnographic studies of contemporary magic can illuminate how medieval ritual magic affected its practitioners. A classroom experiment on dream divination, combined with analysis of primary medieval magical texts, suggests that these rituals produced genuine subjective experiences in practitioners. Understanding these experiences as psychologically conditioned phenomena allows greater sympathy with medieval copyists and practitioners and reveals subtle organizational patterns in the texts themselves.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
December 1, 2011
Marco Pasi
Aleister Crowley's effort to reinterpret occult practices through a naturalistic and psychological lens conflicted with his self-conception as the founder of a new religion. Examining his views on spiritualist phenomena, yoga, and magic reveals that Crowley saw his life as a continuous arc of spiritual development. Although he absorbed the influence of authors like William James and Henry Maudsley to modernize traditional occult interpretations, he stopped short of fully naturalizing or psychologizing magic.