Summoning the Candyman (A Curse)

On Halloween night, my wife and I watched the 2021 Candyman movie. We had thought it was a remake rather than a sequel, and my wife had never seen the original film. Afterwards, I was explaining some stuff about the original movie when I mentioned that I had written a blog post on the Candyman a few years ago. I googled the title of that article so that I could show her, and when I saw the results, I was a little surprised to see a youtube video with almost the exact same title as my article.

My blog has been referenced in books, podcasts, other blogs and youtube videos before, and I am always happy to find out that what I write here is of interest to others. I don’t expect MLA citations or anything like that, but it seems like common decency for content creators to give credit where credit is due. My article was not the first time that Candyman and Purple Aki were mentioned together, but it is definitely the most comprehensive account of their relationship online. If you look back on it, you will notice that I was fairly meticulous about providing links to all of my sources. The youtube video I found was created a year after my blog post went up, and its description references “the theory that Clive Barker’s Candyman was based on the story of Purple Aki”. Now I did not come up with that theory, but I think it’s very safe to assume that anyone researching that theory in 2021 would definitely have come across my work on it. As I watched the video, I was taken back by how much the narrator sounded like me. Yes, he too is Irish, but the phrases he used also sounded remarkably like my own. I checked my blog post, and I discovered that he had basically just read out chunks of my article and presented them as his own research.

Not cool.

I left a comment on the original video, but the coward deleted it. I decided to put a curse on him. I thought the most apt punishment would be to send the Candyman after him. First off, I entered a trance state and did some free-writing. The result was a short-story about this stupid idiot getting his comeuppance. It’s a rather unpleasant piece of writing, so I’ll just link to a pdf so that my more sensitive readers don’t have to upset themselves. I here present Louis meets the Candyman.

Next, I converted the text file into a sound and played around with it a bit. I also created a short video with scenes from the original Candyman movie and some extremely potent images. The writing (or noise thereof) and imagery is really to just charge the curse with emotion. The catalyst for the summoning comes from the plagiarist himself. In the Candyman movies, the murderous Candyman is summoned when somebody says his name 5 times while looking in a mirror. Well, I went through the dirty thief’s video and discovered, much to my delight, that he names Candyman exactly 5 times. I isolated those 5 utterances and mixed them into the video, which is embedded below. This blog post is itself the mirror, reflecting Louis’s lowly deeds. By playing this video, the victim says Candyman 5 times in a “mirror” and thus seals his own death warrant.

I am entirely confident that this will lead to that dirty, little thief getting his muscles squeezed good and hard. Annoying rat voice on him too. Stupid dork.

Right, I’ll be back to posting about books from next week. Had to get this out of my system.

EDIT: After publishing this blog post, I sent it to the intended victim. He was cool about it and listed my blog post as his source of information. I’m not sure if I can stop the curse at this point, but I take back all of the mean things I said about him.

Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife

Conjure Wife – Fritz Leiber

Penguin – 1969 (Originally published 1949)

I really enjoyed Our Lady of Darkness (both times I read it), and I felt like it was time to revisit Fritz Leiber. Conjure Wife was first published in 1949. It’s the story of a college professor who discovers that his wife has been practicing witchcraft behind his back. He thinks this is a shameful load of nonsense, so he tells her to stop. Shortly after this, he realises that her magic has been protecting him from the spells of the other witches. It turns out that his wife isn’t the only witch on campus. Actually, most women are really witches.

Now, the title ‘witch’ don’t apply to all women,
but all women have a little witch in ’em
Fritz Leiber

It’s a pretty simple premise, but Leiber makes it work really well. The conflict is mainly psychological, occurring in the protagonist’s head. I read somebody comment that the novel’s description of women isn’t “generous”, but I don’t agree. The tension in the book, and there’s loads of it, is largely created by the unwillingness of the male protagonist to believe what is happening to him. He’s an idiot. The women are running the show here. This book is only demeaning to women if you think of witchcraft as a bad thing.

While some of the magic in here is rather fantastic, a lot of it is the kind of stuff that I don’t entirely disbelieve in. It seems to me that Leiber had a very clear understanding of the nature of magic.

Fritz Leiber was a cool guy. I read somebody describe him as the link between Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, and apparently he corresponded with both. That itself is enough to impress me, but the books I’ve read by him are awesome too. I’ve heard that his short stories are some of his best work, so I’ll probably look at them next. I don’t know if there’s a specific collection that I should go for. Part of me wants to just read the horror ones, but I’m sure that’s dumb. Let me know if you have any recommendations.

Andrew Chumbley’s Golden Toad

ONE: The Grimoire of the Golden Toad – Andrew Chumbley
Xoanon – 2000

The first bit of this book tells how to kill a toad and let his body rot a certain way so that you can find the magical bone within that will allow you to summon Satan in the form of a horse. If you get on pony Satan’s back, he can carry you around the world in seconds.

The next part is a bunch of hokey poems. I understand that language can change people’s perceptions and that it can set the tone for magic, but this stuff sounds pretty silly when you’re reading it off a computer screen before going to bed on a Monday night. There was one cool line, “For the Devil’s Master am I, am I; the Devil’s Master am I” Parts in this section suggest that the practitioner is actually seeking control over humans rather than animals. I think the intention is actually just to gain self control. This reads as if it was co-authored by Severus Snape and Jordan Peterson.

The poetry section is followed by a weird fantasy story that was unbearable to read. My patience for this kind of crap is non existent at this point.

Magical bones from a toad? I wonder how many poor little toads were killed by the freaks who are into this crap. Chumbley wrote another, I think more academic, book about this topic that is probably far more interesting. I’m not going to read shit like this anymore.

Putting a Curse on my Noisy Neighbour

I usually just review books, but this is my blog, and many of the books I review are on occult phenomena, so I think it’s appropriate to discuss my own occult activities here.

About a year ago, I moved into a new apartment. I lived there comfortably for about two weeks, but then my upstairs neighbour started making a lot of noise, blasting music way past my bed time. I asked him to turn it down, and he was polite about it, but then it happened again a few days later. A pattern started to emerge, and our relationship quickly soured. Things got so unpleasant that when my teething baby would cry at night, this douchebag would get out of bed and turn on his stereo.

I’m not going to give out any more specifics, but I can say with absolute certainty that my neighbour was the dickhead in this situation. If you’ve ever had a similar experience, I’m sure you’ll understand. (If you’ve ever been the unapologetic noisy neighbour, find yourself a bridge and jump off it, shithead.)

The noise really got to me, but the arrogance and entitlement were the worst. Living under that prick made me miserable. I would happily have blasted him with some of the crap I listen to, but I have small kids, and for their sakes I didn’t want to escalate the situation. What got me through the year was the knowledge that we’d be moving again this summer. Even though I knew the situation was only temporary, the tension started to affect other aspects of my life.

I write for my blog every week, but I rarely do any creative writing. I’ve been meaning to do more, and I read somewhere that a good creative writing exercise is to just sit down and start typing. I decided to give this a go a few weeks ago. I immediately produced an extremely unpleasant piece of writing about what I’d like to do to my upstairs neighbour. It’s grim and certainly not for public consumption, but I liked parts of it, so I saved it with the plan to share it with some close friends after we moved away. (If some accident befell Dingdong before we moved out, the document would certainly have incriminated me.)

Knowing that we were going to move, I regularly fantasized about the few days at the end of our tenancy when the window for revenge would be open. I planned a bit of a dance party for the night before we left. I considered blasting some brutal power-violence or death metal, but I decided that repetitive, bass-heavy techno would travel better through our ceiling. I tried finding the perfect song to blare on repeat, but I couldn’t make up my mind, so I decided to make my own.

I think it turned out pretty well.

As much as I wanted to blast this at the cunt, it just didn’t seem harsh enough. This utter bastard deserved a lot worse than a couple of minutes of confusion/mild irritation. I decided to put a curse on him instead.

Hey, remember that piece of writing I mentioned? I figured out how to use it. I only had to alter it a little bit to turn it into the text of a curse. Here is a heavily redacted version. (I’ve moved out, and I have no intention of ever having any contact with that dickhead again, but posting the full text would still be a poor idea.)

I imported the unredacted version of the above text file into Audacity, a sound editing program, as raw data. Doing this basically turns any file on your computer into noise. I then found an image of my neighbour on google images and did the same thing to that. (The image atop this post isn’t actually him.) I then reduced the playback speed of the sound of the image so that it was closer to the length of the sound of the text and panned the sounds of the image and text to opposite sides. Next, I stretched them both again and amplified the sound to make it more audible.

This was the noise through which I would wreak vengeance, but magic doesn’t have to be minimalist, so I imported this sound into FL Studio and heaped a bunch of effects on it to make it sound sick. I also added a recording that I made of the actual noise coming from upstairs. This ingredient charged my baneful magic with real emotional power. It’s also satisfying to think of my enemy directly suffering from his own wrongdoing.

Poppets (“voodoo dolls”) have been used by witches for millennia. The idea is that you make a doll that looks like the person you want to affect, then you do things to it and hope that this has an effect on the real person. It is common practice to place a lock of the victims hair, a toenail clipping, or something that belonged to them inside the poppet. Some magicians use photographs. These elements are believed to strengthen the link between doll and victim, thus making the sympathetic magic more powerful. A series of incantations are uttered over the doll, and these are what activate the link.

The sound that I have created works in a similar way to a poppet, but I know it will be more effective. It contains an image of my victim, and this image is being forced to become one with the textual incantation. The image of his arrogant face and my vision of his suffering will literally become one. The malefecarum is being charged by the audio recording of my victim’s transgressions, made while I was in a frenzy of the blackest hatred. The basic magical theory here is sound (excuse the pun), but I have more reasons to believe it will be effective.

This is the sound of his doom.

Magic doesn’t work if the practitioner doesn’t believe in it. Magic, as far as I understand it, is not supernatural, and magical acts don’t depend on chance or luck or the fairies; they depend on the will of the magician. I don’t believe my neighbour will suffer because I want it to happen and I’ve read too many books about Aleister Crowley. I know my neighbour will suffer because I will him to suffer. I am the magician, and I control my black magic. My poppet isn’t going to lie in the back of my victim’s chimney or under his porch. It’s going after him.

We moved out a few days ago, but we were able to keep the keys to our old place so that we could clean it before the new tenants arrive. I repeatedly played my spell whenever I could hear my enemy upstairs. I didn’t play it loud enough so that he could complain about it, but it was definitely loud enough for him to hear.

Then at the end, I did play it loud. I accompanied the noise with some ritualistic psychodrama. I filmed the whole thing, but I’m only going to share the final segment where I accompany the noise with the thin, dissonant whine of my blasphemous flute. (Flutes are the favoured instrument of Azathoth, the Nuclear Chaos, so I thought this would be apt.)

That’s a wizard hat not a klan hood. My neighbour was white, and fuck the KKK.

I have no doubt whatsoever that he heard me, but as he had seen me moving my furniture out on the previous day, he probably thought that I was just being petty and noisy for the sake of it. Little does he know that the noise I played was heralding his ruination.

I’ll be checking the papers for his obituary daily.

Satan Wants You – Arthur Lyons

Satan Wants You – Arthur Lyons
Mayflower – 1972 (First published 1970)

I’ve probably read enough books about the history of witchcraft and Satanism, but this book is called Satan Wants You, and it has a naked babe drinking out of a human skull on the cover.

The first part of the book is the history of the Devil, witchcraft and the Black Mass. This was fine, but I don’t think I learned anything that I didn’t know already.

The second part of the book is a sociological analysis of Satanism. This book was written during the late 1960s, and Satanism back then was quite different to what it is today. The Church of Satan had only been operating for a few years, and none of the other Satanic groups discussed here are mentioned by name. I assume the approach of sociology has also changed quite a bit since this book was written. Honestly, the latter half of this book is outdated and extremely dull.

Satan Wants You is only 170 pages long, but it’s so boring that it took me a couple of weeks to force myself through it. It would be of interest to a person researching what people in the late 60s/early 70s thought about Satanism, but there are plenty of more accurate and/or more entertaining books on the same topic.

As I was writing this post, I started to wonder how many books on this subject I’ve read. I looked through my index page and realised it was more than I remembered.

These are just some of the books that I have read that cover very similar material to *Satan Wants You*. Check my index page for links to my reviews of these books.

Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Witch

Anton LaVey – The Satanic Witch
Feral House – 1989 (Originally published at The Compleat Witch in 1971)

I read the Satanic Bible in January 2014. I originally bought a copy to leave on my coffee table when guests were over as a joke. When I read it, I was amused by much of it but never took it too seriously.

I’ve changed quite a bit since 2014. I got married, became a father and got a real job. I suppose I’ve grown up. I don’t think of myself as a particularly good person, and I think it is everyone’s responsibility to prioritise their own well being, but I have no time for anyone who fails to see the importance of treating others with patience and kindness. I have also spent more than a sensible amount of time posting in “satanic” message groups on facebook over the last few years, and almost every Satanist I have encountered has been an utter imbecile.

The world has changed since 2014 too, almost definitely for the worst. I know that politicians have always been awful, but the political leaders and decisions of the last few years have largely been horrible. A philosophy based on greed and hedonism seems the exact opposite of what the world needs right now.

All of these factors have led me to the conclusion that The Church of Satan and its followers are a gang of dorks. Despite this, I decided to read Anton La Vey’s The Satanic Witch. This book’s cover boasts that it is designed for “women cunning and crafty enough to employ the working formulas within, which instantly surpass the entire catalogue of self help tomes and new age idiocies.” Bullshit. It’s designed for insecure losers who don’t value their individuality.

I had heard that this was embarrassing nonsense, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how stupid it truly is. The 1989 edition begins with an introduction by Zeena LaVey, the author’s daughter. Zeena claims that she became a Satanic Witch at the age of 3 and discusses how she learned that sex could be used as a tool while she was still a child. She talks about looking at her father’s porno magazines as a kid and how she got pregnant when she was 13, two years after she first read The Satanic Witch. These details are provided in attempt to depict Zeena as sexually liberated, but their real effect is to make Anton look like a seriously shitty parent. How are we supposed to take his book of advice for “women who want more control over their lives” seriously when he was such an atrociously irresponsible father? Even a shit father probably cares more about his kid than a stranger, and if LaVey couldn’t prevent his child from getting raped and impregnated at 13, how will he be able to do anything for anyone else? (I know that you shouldn’t blame a rape victim’s parents for their being attacked, but I think its different when the parent is giving their child access to pornography and books on sexual manipulation.)

I managed to get through the first few chapters of ridiculously outdated mysogonistic nonsense, but I gave up when I got to the “LaVey Personality Synthesizer”. LaVey sets out a range of people and shows which type of partner these folks will be compatible with. He writes as if he was an expert psychologist, but we all know he was just a baldy wanker.

I was going to try to paraphrase the sections of the book that I got through, but it’s too excruciating. There’s no sense to any of this utter hogswash. The only thing this pathetic pile of shit will teach anyone is what kind of women dorky little fuckboys like the author are attracted to.

Part of my reason for tryjng to read this pile of crap was that I had heard of a book called The Satanic Warlock that is essentially an updated version of this book intended for the incel crowd. I am still curious about reading this one even though I am sure it’s even worse than The Satanic Witch. Part of my motivation to review The Satanic Warlock is to write a mean spirited review that will hopefully hurt the feelings of the author and his readers, but as Anton LaVey is dead, I have no such impetus to delve any further into his work.

This is the first book of non-fiction that I have discussed this year, and it was a real stinker. If anyone has any recommendations for occult/Fortean/weird non-fiction books that don’t absolutely suck, please send them my way!

On a separate note, yesterday marked the 6 year anniversary of my first post on this blog. I’ve written more than 300 posts and reviewed roughly 450 books. Here’s the list of everything I’ve covered. Thanks for reading!

The Black Art: Rollo Ahmed’s Plagiarism of Montague Summers

The Black Art – Rollo Ahmed
Senate – 1994 (Originally published 1936)

In 1935, right after The Devil Rides Out was published, Dennis Wheatley’s publisher asked him to write a non fiction book about the occult. Wheatley claims he was too busy at the time (he did eventually publish one in 1971), but he recommended that his publisher get in touch with his yoga teacher, a peculiar character named Rollo Ahmed. Rollo Ahmed claimed to be an Egyptian expert on the occult, but he was actually from Guyana, and while he certainly knew a bit about the occult, much of this knowledge was probably acquired as a means to make his business seem more legitimate. Ahmed, you see, was a conman. He told stupid people he would counter black magic curses that had been put on them for money. He also told old women that spirits had instructed them to loan him a bunch of money. He was arrested and charged for doing this kind of thing on at least 3 occasions, and he served at least one month’s imprisonment with hard labour.

rollo-ahmed Mr. Ahmed

I bought a copy of Ahmed’s book on black magic more than 5 years ago. It cost me one Canadian cent. I started reading it at the beginning of May this year, but it was so boring that it took me 3 months to get through its 280 pages. I finished 30 other books in the same period, forcing myself to read a few pages of this trash when I was between novels. This book is the reason that this blog has seen so little non-fiction in 2020.

But did this book really suck, or have I just read too much of this kind of crap to get any enjoyment from it? Maybe it was a little bit of both.

This is supposed to be an overview of the history and practice of black magic. Ahmed did a good bit of research for this book, but he doesn’t provide any sources for most of what he is saying. This book might be of interest to individuals who are researching what people believed about black magic in the 1930s, but I wouldn’t want to rely on it as an accurate historical account.

There’s 21 chapters in here. Some are specific to time frames (pre-history, the dark ages, modernity…), some are specific to areas (India, China, Greece, Rome…), and some are specific to occult phenomena (werewolves and vampires, necromancy, alchemy…). There’s no organisational principle behind this structure, and the chapters themselves are often just lists of descriptions of practices that Ahmed either took from other texts or made up himself. I’ve come across a lot of these stories and descriptions in other books, and the stuff that was new to me wasn’t terribly interesting. Around the same time that I bought this book, I reviewed the similarly titled The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish. That book covered much of the same information that’s presented here, and Cavendish managed to cite his sources. I’m not saying that you should go out and read that one either, but it was probably better than this pile of garbage.

blackarts Similar title, cover and contents

Another obvious point of comparison here is Montague Summers’ work. Summers and Ahmed moved in the same circles, and they both were acquaintances of Dennis Wheatley and Aleister Crowley. Despite his apparent credulity, Summers’ books are the measuring stick against which all other 1930s occult histories should be compared. In the course of my research for this post, I discovered evidence that strongly suggests that Ahmed plagiarized Summers when he was writing The Black Arts.

For me, the most interesting part of this book was the chapter on the magic of Great Britain and Ireland. There is an account given of a vampire priest in Ireland that sparked my curiosity, perhaps because this is one of the only parts of the book where Ahmed cites his source. He claims that he read the story in the October 1925 edition of The Occult Review, an old occult periodical. I was intrigued by this and decided to consult the source material. It turns out that the October 1925 edition of The Occult Review contains no such story. R.S. Breene’s ‘An Irish Vampire‘ article was actually published a month later in the November edition. Big deal, anyone could make that mistake, even an expert. Well, it turns out that an expert did make that mistake. In his 1929 book, The Vampire in Europe, the Reverend Montague Summers quotes Breene’s article in full, but he mistakenly cites it as coming from the October edition of The Occult Review, 7 years before Rollo Ahmed makes the exact same mistake in his book. Coincidence? No way. It’s been a long time since I read any non-fiction by Summers, but I would be surprised if further research didn’t show more instances of Ahmed plagiarizing his work. (Here is a scan of the original story for anyone interested in the Irish priest turning into a vampire.)

montague-summers-vampire-books Summers’ Vampire books were later retitled. I own both, but have only read the first one.

Dennis Wheatley knew both Summers and Ahmed, and there are multiple theories about characters from Wheatley’s books being based on these men. I have written several times about the Canon Copely Syle from To the Devil – A Daughter and how this character is clearly a mix of Summers and Crowley, but some people have pointed out that the evil Canon has a frightening Egyptian manservant who is probably based on Ahmed. If this is so, I reckon Wheatley understood the relative importance of both men to the annals of occult history.

“a manservant of a type that one would hardly have expected to find in an Essex village. He wore a red fez and was robed in a white burnoose. His skin was very dark, but only his thick lips suggested Negro blood; and C. B. put him down at once as an Egyptian.” – This description (presumably based on Ahmed) might seem a bit racist today, but by Wheatley’s standards it’s really not bad.

I want to include a quick note on my sources here so that I don’t seem like a hypocrite. The biographical details I’ve included are from Chris Josiffe’s articles on Rollo Ahmed in Fortean Times 316 and 317 (July and August 2014). The stuff about Ahmed’s influence on Wheatley’s characters are from this article on Wheatley’s site. All of my other sources are self evident.

I’ve been reading and reviewing books on the occult for a long time now, and my interest seems to have waned a bit recently. I believe that this is largely due to wasting my time reading so many awful piles of boring nonsense written by idiots. The Black Art wasn’t as bad as some of the shit I’ve read, but it contained little that I haven’t come across before. I ask you, my dear readers, can any of you recommend me occult/Fortean non-fiction books that are strange, interesting and preferably widely available? I’m happy to read about Black Masses and alien abductions, but I’d like a new slant on things. Maybe a Black Mass performed by aliens? Please leave a comment, tweet me or email me if you can think of anything that would fit on this site. (Remember, you can skim through my index page to see what has already been reviewed here.) Thanks!

Daughters of the Devil – Charles LeFebure

Daughters of the Devil – Charles LeFebure
1971 – Ace Books

The blurb on the back of this book describes its contents as “true stories of unparalleled sadistic erotica”. The front cover claims that it contains “Chilling accounts of fourteen women who used their terrifying powers of Darkness and Evil to inflict Pain for Pleasure!” It’s called Daughters of the Devil, for Christ’s sake. Can you imagine my delight when I found a copy of it for 5 dollars?

I mean, realistically, the book was shit, and I had known exactly what to expect. A few years ago, I read a book called The Devil’s Own by Peter Robson, and I had the feeling that this would be very similar. I just checked my copy of that book, and unsurprisingly, it was put out by the same publisher, Ace Books. After rereading my review of that book, I’m surprised at how similar it is to Daughters of the Devil. Charles LeFebure wrote two other books for Ace, Blood Cults and Witness to Witchcraft, and I reckon it’s safe to assume they’re the same kind of crap.

The chilling accounts in here are very sensational, and rarely convincing. Some of them are about real people, but I can’t find any evidence for the others. (This was my same complaint when I read The Devil’s Own.) When I googled some of the names in here, the only result I found was somebody else who had read this book complaining about the same lack of evidence.

I’m going to briefly describe each of the accounts in here in case anyone is interested.

A girl gets involved in a Satanic cult. They have orgies and sacrifice a fetus during a black mass. This account references Crowley, H.T.F. Rhodes and the Abbé Guiborg’s Black Mass. It wasn’t believable, but it was a pretty good start to the book.
Carletta Pantucci and her Daughters of Isis were a weird cult of lesbians that bred babies that they intended to raise as virgin cultists. They told the future by bloodletting women’s groins.
There was a weird convent where nuns were crucified and whipped by a perverted priest and made to watch him fuck their Mother Superior. This was all done in the name of Christ.
Caroline Langley, a one time friend of Aleister Crowley, commits acts of black magic, sometimes to kill people. I can find no evidence of Crowley ever knowing a Caroline Langley.
A six month old curséd baby poisons a boy with witchcraft and the boy’s hand is amputated.
Obango, the “Ga witch” from Ghana, bled ate and killed victims, 15 of whom were related to her. Ga witches have sex with animals.
Annie Palmer, the rich voodoo priestess decapitated some of her slaves and raped others with snakes. (This one has some basis in fact.)
Gdoma, an ugly Asian witch, coerces young people into sexing each-other up. LeFebure claims she’s very evil, but she doesn’t sound that bad really.
Some Mexican woman ran a sex school for children in her house. She killed two abusive husbands.
Caterina Sforza, a real Renaissance woman, is here described as ,’the most wicked woman of all time’.
A Chinese child sex-slave grows up to start her own brothel in which random johns are taken to the secret rooms downstairs and tortured to death. The events in this story allow for no possible way that anyone could ever discover what had happened – there could be no evidence – but somehow the author is able to tell the tale. The lady died without any trial or case against her. It’s a cool story even if it’s completely fabricated.
I got a bit into this one before I realised that I had actually heard it, or at least a version of it, before. It’s the story of Edward Arthur Wilson, the mysterious Brother XII, and his Madame Zee. Plenty of the details listed here are entirely false, but Lefebure’s fabrications don’t actually make the story any more interesting than it really is. I have another book on Brother XII that I have been meaning to read for a long time. I’ll definitely come back to Lefebure’s account when I get around to that one.
Charlotte Gilbert leads a cult that worships cats and ritually sacrifices dogs because they are cat’s natural enemies. Her cult is a breakaway of the Glastonbury Essenes, a real order that supposedly worships aliens.
The last account is of Catherine Deshayes (La Voisin), the abortionist and satanist involved in the Affair of the Poisons. This is the sensational account you’d expect.

Most of these stories contain little truth, and none of them are erotic. There is a fair bit of sadism though. This book is made up of descriptions of horrible women that probably never existed. The titles of this author’s other books sound very good, but they’re surely of the same quality. I’ll buy them if I ever see them for very cheap, but I wouldn’t be bothered hunting them down.

The Black Books of Elverum

the black books of elverum.jpg The Black Books of Elverum – Mary Rustad
Galde Press – 1999

In the 1970s, Mary Rustad, a lady in Norway, was looking through the farmhouse that she had recently moved into. This house had belonged to her family for centuries, and it was filled with old junk. She found two curious books in a box in the attic. When she opened them, she realised that they were books of magic spells, compiled or collected by her ancestors. The books supposedly date from the late 1700s/early 1800s, and research proved that several of Mary’s ancestors had been involved in a witchcraft trial in the 1600s. It seems as though witchcraft ran in her family. These books were the real deal, forgotten grimoires of black magic. The Black Books of Elverum is a translation of these two handwritten grimoires.

lucifer elverum.jpg This cool picture of Lucifer is included, but I don’t think it’s from the actual grimoires.

The spells in here seem pretty silly. Some are appeals to Jesus, others are appeals to demons, but some are just recipes or instructions that don’t have any spiritual element. (The ones on how to abort a fetus basically just tell the woman to drink a bunch of poison.) These books offer insight into the fears, customs and beliefs of Norwegian farmers, and I reckon they’re of more interest to historians than they are to occultists. Who needs a spell to make themselves horny in an age when viagra and internet porn are so readily available?

spell to make yourself horny.jpg (Just in case your wifi is down)

Some of the spells in here are very specific. There are two to be used against a thief who leaves his turd behind him after he has carried out a burglary. This is really convenient when you want to send the Devil out after the miscreant who shit on your carpet and nicked your telly.

There’s instructions on how to find witches in here. The curious are to go to a church on certain nights during the year and to wait near the church bells. Witches are apparently quite fond of gnawing church bells with their teeth, and will take any opportunity to do so. I had never heard of this before, but when I looked it up, I found a book that claims that this odd belief was also held in parts of Sweden. Witches were supposed to bite off bits of church bells to use in their potions. Jesus, I hope they had a good dentist.

This was a pretty cool book. It’s presented well, and the material is very interesting. It contains scans of original texts, and there’s an appendix recounting the 1625 court case against Ingeborg Økset, Rustad’s ancestor. The whole thing is pretty short too, so it doesn’t take long to get through. If you’re interested in Norwegian folk magic, you should definitely read this book.

Magica Sexualis – Emile Laurent and Paul Nagour

Magica Sexualis: Mystic Love Books of Black Arts and Secret Sciences
Emile Laurent and Paul Nagour
Falstaff Press – 1934

This is a rather curious book. A limited number of copies were printed privately in 1934, and one of these found its way onto the internet. I read it because I haven’t done any occult books in a while, and people seem to be more interested in the sexy ones.

Magica Sexualis is basically a compendium of information on the role of sex in different forms of occultism. The information within is fairly interesting, but it doesn’t seem to support any particular thesis. Each chapter deals with a different type of occultism and the corresponding role of sex. I don’t really want to go through each chapter, as quite a few were very boring (particulary the ones towards the end). The rest of this review is just some of the notes I took while reading through this strange book.

The authors claim that the medieval witch-craze was caused by poor people turning to Satan because they found Catholicism too hard. Although the authors believe in witches, they concede that their night ride to the Sabbat was drug induced, not real.
There’s a cool section on incubi and succubi. It’s mostly made up of anecdotes from the classic witch-texts, and much discussion is given to Sinistrari’s question about whether incubi use their own demon sperm or the sperm collected from men they rode as succubi.
In their description of the Black Mass, the authors describe how Satan would knead the dough of his unholy Eucharist on the buttocks of a recently deflowered virgin. That’s a pretty cool detail I can’t recall seeing elsewhere. There’s several accounts of Black Masses in here, including a lengthy quotation from the infamous scene in Huysman’s Là Bas.
There was a lad called Gaufridi who supposedly used to breath on people to make them love him. Before he was executed for his evil deeds, he claimed that he had used his power on his accuser’s mother and that his accuser might be his daughter. Haha, owned. Apparently his accuser lived the rest of her life being teased, “continually hearing the taunts of the people and heavy breathing and snoring wherever they went.”. This case actually set the precedent for the sentencing of Urbain Grandier during the Loudun Possessions 20 years later.
This book contains the following description of an interesting West African ass-dance:
There’s a big section on Catholic views on the sinfulness of sex that was pretty interesting. Quoting Krafft-Ebing, the authors blame religion for creating perversions, not preventing them. This section also gives details about the Scopts, a sect of Russian mentallers who liked to cut off their own dicks. “In the first period of their existence, the operation consisted of the removal of the testes by glowing hot irons; this mutilation was called the baptism by fire.” These lads would also mutilate a young virgin every Easter; “Her breasts were removed and then the participants in the ceremony awesomely consumed a portion of the holy breasts. The virginal victim was then placed upon the altar; the frenetic believers danced and sang about her until they were aroused to the highest pitch of sexual madness when they gave way to their cruel and bestial desires upon one another.”
Fucking Hell.
Saint Veronica Juliani had sex with a lamb.
Sunamitism is the notion that young flesh and sweat makes you young again. This comes from Abishag of Shunem, the child who had to sleep with the Biblical King David to maintain his vitality. King David was a paedo. Sunamitism is supposedly why teachers generally live longer than other people.
The chapter on the sex practices within certain religons is mostly boring, but it claims that Baal Peor was “the God Penis” and the male priests of Baal were teenage gay prostidudes who also pimped wuff-wuff dogs.

There’s also chapters on gross love potions, cures for magical impotency, werewolves, vampires, and Freudian dream interpretation. Like I said, there’s not much focus or cohesion here at all. It’s not an absolutely horrible book to read, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone for any reason.