Thomas K. Johnson is an academic who translated 37 books of Swedish folk magic as part of his PhD thesis in 2010. These books comprised of spells that had been passed down through generations of the “wise people” From these translations, Johnson picked out all of the spells involving stuff that comes from graveyards (dirt, bones, coffin nails…) and compiled them into this macabre collection.
The Graveyard Wanderers: The Wise Ones + The Dead in Sweden
There’s spells to stop birds moving, to hex and un-hex a gun, to turn invisible and to kill a tree. Most of these spells involve mixing graveyard dirt into different things and then spreading it on whatever you want to affect. Another common way to invoke the magic of the dead is to hammer a used coffin nail into something. Doing so to a horse shoe will render the horse lame, and doing so to a piece of shit will give the shitter a bad case of diarrhea. Seriously. If you can’t find a coffin nail, but still want to give somebody the trots, you can also fill a human bone with your victim’s shit and then let a river flow through the bone. (My advice would be to let it flow over your hands too, unless you want to be a Mr. Shitty Brownfingers.) If you want help from the dead in raping a woman, stick a coffin nail in her piss. (I’ve heard from a reliable source that a more efficacious way of achieving this goal is to drink a pint of bleach.)
Speaking of piss, to cure a child who has had a stroke, their mom should piss in a skull and then give it to the kid to drink. If there’s no skulls handy, mom can just piss in her hand and give it to her thirsty whippersnapper that way. (It was only a year ago that I reviewed another grimoire that used a lot of piss magic.) If you want to turn invisible, plant some peas in a human skull and when they grow, put them in your mouth. If you want to get really close to a bird without it flying away, make a mask out of a human skull and approach the bird while looking through the eye sockets of the deceased. There’s also a cool section in here that describes making a belt from the skin of a corpse’s abdomen. When created properly, this belt allows its wearer to turn into a werewolf.
I quite enjoyed this book. Many of the spells are ridiculous, but this is folk magic, and it made me think about what ordinary people valued and how they tried to make sense of the world a few hundred years ago. It reminded me of The Black Books of Elverum, another collection of Scandinavian spells. Only 180 copies of the fancy embossed cover hardback of Graveyard Wanderers were printed, but a paperback copy is now available for anyone who wants this in their library.
Nocturnal Revelries 