The Spellcaster's Source Hoodoo and Voodoo Witchcraft Blog of Talia Felix

Anton LaVey, the dark lord of the Church of Satan , is one who you'd think had no time for scientific skepticism. I mean, this is the guy who codified Satanism and spread the gospel of magic and mysticism! Well, hold on to your torches and pitchforks and don't run him out of town just yet, because when we crack open the history books, we stumble upon a side of LaVey that'll make your head spin. (Was that devilish pun intended?) Picture this: Howard Stanton Levey, born on April 11, 1930, with a penchant for the occult and a résumé that reads like a carnival thrill ride. From joining the circus to playing the piano in nightclubs, his journey led to the founding of the Church of Satan on April 30, 1966. But here's the twist — beneath that sinister exterior, LaVey had a bone to pick with the wool-pulling "occultniks" who chugged down irrational claims like it was Kool-Aid at a cult meeting. He was actually the voice of reason in a sea of supernatural chaos. Now, t...

Those who have been following us here at the Spellcaster's Source blog for a long time might find some of their favorite old posts about general magic , free spells , witchcraft articles and so forth have disappeared from the web.  For a few years I've been trying to tidy up the blog, which has been online since 2009. It's been through different iterations of my main website, from Talia's Tarot to Lucky Temple to Hoodoo Online . As requirements to make the witchcraft blog "mobile friendly" also had the unfortunate effect of making it more difficult to search through the posts, there was good reason to simplify the content. It had built up over 600 separate posts at its peak, with no good way to search through them except by keyword. Originally I intended to delete nothing, but only to merge posts about similar subjects so they'd become easier to find.  However, as I've been going through everything, I've been finding more and more old posts that w...

  The mysteriously named jews harp, also called in early texts a jews trump, is a musical instrument that dates back thousands of years. It appears all over Asia and Europe, as well as in the Americas -- in fact, some of the earliest mentions of the Jews harp in the English language make their appearances in accounts of trading them in South America to the local tribes, who found the strange foreign instruments to be highly desirable.  The elevated status this instrument once held can be inferred from the medieval images at the Bayeux cathedral of angels playing the jews harp. While to a modern ear its springy, high pitched rattle sounds odd, perhaps even comical (probably no thanks to its use in providing modern cartoon sound effects) it is nevertheless used in some shamanic traditions as a trance inducing instrument. The sound can be very like modern synthesizer tones, the main difference being that a jews harp is primarily a percussion instrument with a very limited musica...

When it comes to magic books, especially about hoodoo, one usually is provided a selection of funky little pamphlets, often full of errors, aimed at practitioners or aspiring practitioners (These probably include my own books like Death and Destruction: How to Cast Magic Spells for Vengeance, Harm, &c. -- one thing about the little pamphlets is they don't sell well enough to make pro editors a viable option.)  But there are two other books I want to tell you about. These are not like those silly magic booklets. They are real scholarly works. They don't force you to believe everything, but they do help you understand things better. Even if you do magic, you can read these books and think of the information as true facts, not just beliefs. These are not corny little conjure booklets: these are actual scholarly works. Skepticism is presumed but not shoved down your throat, and it's easy for practitioners to read the contents as fact instead of records of belief. An advant...