became popular among the Pennsylvania Dutch and by 1725 had an English version. This letter, which was supposedly written by Jesus, promised that those who carried it could not be damaged by guns or swords, but anyone who did not copy and pass it on would be cursed by the Christian church. Chain letters with promises and curses are still common, of course, with the Internet having given them a whole new life. Spell books that purported to teach good magic and instructed readers on how to contact and control various spirits were passed down within families. One such collection, called Der Lange Verborgene Freund (The Long-Lost Friend), was compiled in1819 and 150 years later was still being carried into battle by recruits from Pennsylvania who went to Vietnam.
Religion and magical thinking are so intertwined that scholars still argue over where the dividing line is. Some Puritans would open the Bible to a random page and cite the first verse their eyes fell on as a way of getting divine guidance about their eternal fate. Many spells and invocations ended with âin the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.â In some instances the Bible was also used to determine criminal guilt or innocence.
Today the Bible is often used in magical workings by people who claim itâs the best spell book ever written. Christo-magic is common in Pentecostal and Holiness traditions, although they would not call it magic. Saint magic is popular among Catholics. Hoodoo, an African American magical system that also calls on Jesus and the saints, is outside-the-church Christo-magic.
Even when they oppose magic, religious crusaders sometimes aid it. Their fierce opposition gives magical workings publicity, credibility, and a fearsome cachet that they would never otherwise have. Early Dutch and German American traditions told of grimoiresâmagical books so powerful that people who started reading them would become entangled in the words like flies in a web. The book would hold them fast unless they began to read it backwards to the place where they first started or until a Christian healer released them. The idea surfaced again during the American Satanism scares of the 1970s and 1980s when anti-cult investigators were so frightened of occult books that they warned it might be dangerous to read them and recommended synopses or overviews as safe substitutes.
Religion and magic have always intermingled and at the same time repelled each other. Religion tends toward supplication, whereas magic sets forces into operation, commands, and demands. It relies on the power of objects, of symbols, of numbers, of words, and ofhuman will. It empowers human experience over doctrine. Religious people wait on God; magical people push. Magic cuts out the clergy, dispensing with their role, usurping their power. And instead of telling people that they should not want what they do want, magic tries to help them get it.
In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists helped further push Americans away from depending on religious authority as the only avenue for supernatural power when they put forth three main metaphysical doctrines: â(1) the immanence of God, (2) the fundamental correspondence between the various levels of the universe, and (3) the possibility of âinfluxâ from higher to lower metaphysical levels.â
âAs above, so below,â is one of the most commonly quoted magical tenets, and once again the idea that God might be within or immanent meant for the Transcendentalists that there was no reason to look to religious authorities. Divine power could be tapped into by anyone who realized it was there and knew how to gain access to it. Walt Whitman was a journalist of little renown until he read Emerson, who fired him up with visions of such magnificence that he became a poet of considerable mysticism. He wrote in his typically robust and earthy style in Song of Myself:
Divine am I
Religion and magical thinking are so intertwined that scholars still argue over where the dividing line is. Some Puritans would open the Bible to a random page and cite the first verse their eyes fell on as a way of getting divine guidance about their eternal fate. Many spells and invocations ended with âin the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.â In some instances the Bible was also used to determine criminal guilt or innocence.
Today the Bible is often used in magical workings by people who claim itâs the best spell book ever written. Christo-magic is common in Pentecostal and Holiness traditions, although they would not call it magic. Saint magic is popular among Catholics. Hoodoo, an African American magical system that also calls on Jesus and the saints, is outside-the-church Christo-magic.
Even when they oppose magic, religious crusaders sometimes aid it. Their fierce opposition gives magical workings publicity, credibility, and a fearsome cachet that they would never otherwise have. Early Dutch and German American traditions told of grimoiresâmagical books so powerful that people who started reading them would become entangled in the words like flies in a web. The book would hold them fast unless they began to read it backwards to the place where they first started or until a Christian healer released them. The idea surfaced again during the American Satanism scares of the 1970s and 1980s when anti-cult investigators were so frightened of occult books that they warned it might be dangerous to read them and recommended synopses or overviews as safe substitutes.
Religion and magic have always intermingled and at the same time repelled each other. Religion tends toward supplication, whereas magic sets forces into operation, commands, and demands. It relies on the power of objects, of symbols, of numbers, of words, and ofhuman will. It empowers human experience over doctrine. Religious people wait on God; magical people push. Magic cuts out the clergy, dispensing with their role, usurping their power. And instead of telling people that they should not want what they do want, magic tries to help them get it.
In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists helped further push Americans away from depending on religious authority as the only avenue for supernatural power when they put forth three main metaphysical doctrines: â(1) the immanence of God, (2) the fundamental correspondence between the various levels of the universe, and (3) the possibility of âinfluxâ from higher to lower metaphysical levels.â
âAs above, so below,â is one of the most commonly quoted magical tenets, and once again the idea that God might be within or immanent meant for the Transcendentalists that there was no reason to look to religious authorities. Divine power could be tapped into by anyone who realized it was there and knew how to gain access to it. Walt Whitman was a journalist of little renown until he read Emerson, who fired him up with visions of such magnificence that he became a poet of considerable mysticism. He wrote in his typically robust and earthy style in Song of Myself:
Divine am I
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