#conjure magic

[conjuremanj]

High John. & How To Contact Him.

Let talk a little about John. On my other post I spoke about the three johns. Today I want to speak on the spirit of John.

High John the Conqueror is a highly respected and elevated spirit within traditional southern Hoodoo, and yet he is still a very mysterious and undervalued spirit. There's not much written about him except the stories told in the south.

I think they name him High John because he resemble the same traits that the root have it gave him the balls to do what needed to be done. That's why the root looks like male balls.😅 When you look a southern culture the term high means someone in charge like a sheriff the man in charge and the other john roots are the deputies.

His stories show us that he is a spirit of black resistance, liberation, and joy - He is called a trickster, because he tricks the system, and his oppressors.

High John de Conquer (pronounced conker) who is said to have been an African prince sold into slavery in the Americas, but whose spirit was never broken. Another traditional story is John falls in love with the Devil's daughter; the Devil sets John a number of impossible tasks, but his daughter helps John by giving him magical tools to complete the tasks and also warns John that the Devil plans to kill him whether he succeeds or not. So John and daughter steal the Devil's horses; they're pursued but escape by shape shifting.

But High John the Conqueror is a spirit (and High John is the root) that has been worked with in various ways for protection, money, love, luck, victory over obstacles and hardships, and to enhance a male sexuality.

Most of these uses being added post enslavement as Hoodoo and the spirits within it adapt to the needs of it's people (because all and all High John is for his people and our needs).

Now there is alot of debate over the plant High John is derived from, and while that is important to know, what is also important is that the spirit of High John is been called into the root.

Now the High John roots are actually very powerful on it's own, you can use them with the assistance of you guardian Angel, spirit guide, deity etc.

Now the root it self is called Ipomoea Jalapa, which is a variety of morning glory plant manufactured in Veracruz, Mexico. Introduced to the United States.

Day of the week: High John's day is on a Thursday.

His main Color is Purple: given his royal nature. He eats traditional food, but if you divine you can go further and feed him other things as well.

Playing Cards and have some patience.

Drink: he has a preference for rum or whiskey.

So you got the root, now what? Now you can set up a space for High John's spirit. When setting up his the altar give him his own space. You can add the root on the altar with his offerings. Add you candle, and oil, Don't put a photo because there isn't any real pics of him. You can write his name on the candle

If you cannot setup a space, remember you can always carry High John root on a necklace, in a small bag or in your pocket with Johns blessings it. Now this is going to be without the spirit of John.

Once you have it prepared it to be used for your you need to wake it up, spit or pour rum or whiskey over the root, and blow cigar smoke over it.

Say a prayer to god. Then ask John to come forward.

Fed: The roots should always be fed, prayed over, and being prepared with the spirit of High John. Feed the root with his oils, Florida water is good Holts he likes.

You can say a prayer inviting the spirit of High John into your home and life, ask High John to protect you and your home from any and all enemies and those who attempt to oppress you.

Is A Jack Ball A Real Thing? No it's not that's a new age thing strated by lucky Mojo.

To contact High John Spirit to ask a question. Take you root wrap a string around it. Or you can make a jack ball to be use for divination.

First take your casa or chalk and draw a cross add 5 sold circles as seen in photo above the 5th circle in the center of the cross. Place the root in the center of the cross.

Starting from the top left. Under the circle Write N for no then to the right Y for yes. Then repeat at the bottom. Above the circle on the bottom left write Y for yes on the other side N for no.

Summonings His Spirit For Assistance: If you are summing his spirit start with creating a altar just for him (mentioned above) a shot of brown liquor or Holts cologne and a candle. Bless it. Now once you do all that the root is now ready for High Johns spirit and you can use the root to call him.

Now do not turn root in to powder or break a piece off and use it as a regular root again he doesn't like that, if you do it like that it will become just a regular root a low deputy again and the spirit will leave the root won't work.

To ask questions. Take brown liquor or Florida water he also like Holts Cologne. (small bottle) and put a dab on each circle and root as a offering. Take your root pick it up and tap it three times on the center of the cross. Then ask your question.

If you have any questions let me know.

[vanilla-cigarillos]

Rootwork Amulets

When you get into the intermediate sector of rootwork (A.K.A. Conjure, Hoodoo), you’ll begin seeing amulets. These amulets are typically small and are meant to either attract or dispel chosen intentions/impacts with the wearer.

They are typically made from natural materials (preserved animal parts, plants, bones, stones, etc). 

Ankh Amulet

Probably one of the most popular you’ve seen, the Ankh amulet is meant to represent both the masculine and feminine energies as well as everlasting life. It is also believed by some to represent everlasting life, others believing that when used properly it can help to protect against disease.

Other Amulets

While amulets can genuinely be made from just about anything, there are a few common examples that you’ll probably start noticing once you begin to look. Some of these examples include:

Alligator foot (good luck with money)

Crossbones (absorbs negative energy)

Catclaw (draws power)

Rabbit foot (fertility/good luck)

Wishbone (good luck/wishes)

[torpublishinggroup]

This advertisement is for The Lies We Conjure, the new contemporary supernatural thriller from Sarah Henning.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Thirteen witches. Two ordinary sisters. One locked-room murder. This whodunit is giving Knives Out meets The Inheritance Games with magic. 

An eccentric old woman approaches sisters Ruby and Wren with an offer too good to pass up: attend a fancy dinner party posing as her granddaughters for two grand each. Sounds like a great arrangement—what could possibly go wrong? Literally EVERYTHING! 

Shortly after arriving at the mysterious Hegemony Manor, the hostess is dead and a killer lies among the dinner guests. Did we mention the guests are all powerful witches? Ruby and Wren must solve the murder if they hope to make it out of the manor alive.

[n-jostcn]

the song of achilles — madeline miller

night shift — stephen king

euripedes — anne carson

circe — madeline miller

a conjuring of light — v.e. schwab

west wind — mary oliver

the song of achilles — madeline miller

the fragile threads of power — v.e. schwab

[gent-illmatic]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Against Lore

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: "just add the word 'modified.'"

As in, "Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes."

Jim's big idea was that gun people couldn't help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word "modified" hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer's advantage: a gun person's imagination gnaws at that word "modified," spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person's impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. "Modified" puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter's lies.

Yes, writing is lying. Storytelling is genuinely weird. A storyteller who has successfully captured the audience has done so by convincing their hindbrains to care about the tribulations of imaginary people. These are people whose suffering, by definition, do not matter. Imaginary things didn't happen, so they can't matter. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were less tragic than the death of the yogurt you had for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, whereas R&J never lived, never died, and don't matter:

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

Hijacking a stranger's empathic response is intrinsically adversarial. While storytelling is a benign activity, its underlying mechanic is extremely dangerous. Getting us to care about things that don't matter is how novels and movies work, but it's also how cults and cons work.

Cult leaders and con-artists know that they're engaged in mind-to-mind combat, and they make liberal use of Jim's hack of leaving blank spots for the mark to fill in. Think of Qanon drops: the mystical nonsense was just close enough to sensical that a vulnerable audience was compelled to try and untangle them, and ended up imparting more meaning to them than the hustler who posted them ever could have dreamt up.

Same with cons – there's a great scene in the Leverage: Redemption heist show where an experienced con-artist explains to a novice that the most convincing hustle is the one where you wait for the mark to tell you what they think you're doing, then run with it (scambaiters and other skeptics will recognize this as a relative of the "cold reading," where a "psychic" uses your own confirmations to flesh out their predictions).

As Douglas Adams put it:

A towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Magicians know this one, too. The point of a sleight is to misdirect the audience's attention, and use that moment of misattention to trick them, vanishing, stashing or producing something. The mark's mind is caught in a pleasurable agony: something seemingly impossible just happened. The mind splits into two parts, one of which insists that the impossible just happened, the other insisting that the impossible can't happen.

You know you've done it right if the audience says, "Do that again!" And that's the one thing you must not do. So long as you don't repeat the trick, the audience's imagination will chew on it endlessly, coming up with incredibly clever things that you must have done (a clever conjurer will know several ways to produce the same effect and will "do it again" by reproducing the effect via different means, which exponentially increases the audience's automatic imputation of clever methods to the performer).

Not for nothing, Jim Macdonald advises his writing students to study Magic and Showmanship, a classic text for aspiring conjurers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/11/13/magic-and-showmanship-classic-book-about-conjuring-has-many-lessons-for-writers/

There's a version of this in comedy, too. The scholarship of humor is clear on this: comedy comes from surprise. The audience knows they're about to be surprised when the punchline lands, and their mind is furiously trying to defuse the comedian's bomb before it detonates, cycling through potential punchlines of their own. This ramps up the suspense and the tension, so when the comedian does drop the punchline, the tension is released in a whoosh of laughter.

Your mind wants the tension to be resolved ASAP, but the pleasure comes from having that desire thwarted. Comedy – like most performance – has an element of authoritarianism. You don't give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs.

Same goes for TTRPGs: the game master's role is to deny the players the victories and treasure they want, until they can't take it anymore, and then deliver it. That's the definition of an epic game. It's one of the durable advantages of human GMs over video game back-ends: they can ramp up the epicness by "cheating" on the play, giving the players the chance to squeak out improbable victories at the last possible second:

https://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/03/behind-the-screen.html

This is so effective that even crude approximations of it can turn video-games into cult hits – like Left4Dead, whose "Director" back-end would notice when the players were about to get destroyed and then substantially ramped up the chances of finding an amazing weapon – the chance would still be low overall, but there would be enough moments when the player got exactly what they'd been praying for, at the last possible instant, that it would feel amazing:

https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director#Special_Infected

Critically, Left4Dead's Director didn't do this every time. As any showman knows, the key to a great performance is "Always leave 'em wanting more." The musician's successful finale depends on doing every encore the audience demands, except the last one, so the crowd leaves with one tantalyzing and imaginary song playing in their minds, a performance better than any the musicians themselves could have delivered. Like the gun person who comes up with a cooler mod than the writer ever could, like the magic show attendee who comes up with a more elaborate explanation for the sleight than the conjurer could ever pull off, like the comedy club attendee whose imagination anticipates a surprise that grows larger the longer the joke goes on, the successful performance is an adversarial act of cooperation where the audience willingly and unwillingly cooperates with the performer to deny them the thing that they think they need, and deliver the thing they actually need.

This is my biggest problem with the notion that someday LLMs will get good enough at storytelling to give us the tales we demand, without having to suffer through a storyteller's sadistic denial of the resolutions we crave. When I'm reading a mystery, I want to turn to the last page and find out whodunnit, but I know that doing so will ruin the story. Telling the storyteller how the story should go is like trying to tickle yourself.

Like being tickled, experiencing only fun if the tickler respects your boundaries – but, like being tickled, there's always a part where you're squirming away, but you don't want it to stop. An AI storyteller that gives you exactly what you want is like a dungeon master who declares that every sword-swing kills the monster, and every treasure chest is full of epic items and platinum pieces. Yes, that's what you want, but if you get it, what's the point?

Seen in this light, performance is a kind of sado-masochism, where the performer delights in denying something to the audience, who, in turn, delights in the denial. Don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need.

What your audience needs is their own imagination. Decades ago, I was a freelance copywriter producing sales materials for Alias/Wavefront, a then-leading CGI firm that was inventing all kinds of never-seen VFX that would blow people away. One of the engineers I worked with told me something I never forgot: "Your imagination has more polygons than anything you can create with our software." He was talking about why it was critical to have some of the action happen in the shadows.

All of this is why series tend to go downhill. The first volume in any series leaves so much to the imagination. The map of the world is barely fleshed out, the characters' biographies are full of blank spots, the mechanics of the artifacts and the politics of the land are all just detailed enough that your mind automatically ascribes a level of detail to them, without knowing what that detail is.

This is the moment at which everything seems very clever, because your mind is just churning with all the different bits of elaborate lore that will fill in those lacunae and make them all fit together.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm about to give some spoilers for Furiosa.

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FURIOSA SPOILERS AHEAD!

Last night, we went to see Furiosa, the latest Mad Max movie, a prequel to 2015's Fury Road, which is one of the greatest movies ever made. Like most prequels, Furiosa functions as a lore-delivery vehicle, and as such, it's nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Fury Road hints as so much worldbuilding. We learn about the three fortresses of the wasteland (the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gastown) but we only see one (The Citadel). We learn that these three cities have a symbiotic relationship with one another, defined by a complex politics that is just barely stable. We meet Furiosa herself, and learn something of her biography – that she had been stolen from the Green Place, that she had suffered an arm amputation.

All of this is left for us to fill in, and for a decade, my hindbrain has been chewing on all of that, coming up with cool ways it could all fit together. I yearned to know the "real" explanation, but it was always unlikely that this real explanation would be as enjoyable as my own partial, ever-unfinished headcanon.

Furiosa is a great movie, but its worst parts are the canonical lore it settles. Partly, that's because some of that lore is just stupid. Why is the Bullet Farm an open-pit mine? I mean, it's visually amazing, but what does that have to do with making bullets? Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal – the solarpunk Green Place is a million times less cool than I had imagined it. Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal and stupid: the scenes where Furiosa's arm is crushed, then severed, then replaced, are both rushed and quasi-miraculous:

https://www.themarysue.com/how-does-furiosa-lose-her-arm/

But even if the lore had been good – not stupid, not banal – the best they could have hoped for was for the lore to be tidy. If it were surprising, it would seem contrived. A story whose loose ends have been tidily snipped away seems like it would be immensely satisfying, but it's not satisfying – it's just resolved. Like the band performing every encore you demand, until you no longer want to hear the band anymore – the feeling as you leave the hall isn't satisfaction, it's exhaustion.

So long as some key question remains unresolved, you're still wanting more. So long as the map has blank spots, your hindbrain will impute clever and exciting mysteries, tantalyzingly teetering on the edge of explicability, to the story.

Lore is always better as something to anticipate than it is to receive. The fans demand lore, but it should be doled out sparingly. Always leave 'em wanting more.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

[disastersappho]

aabria’s misfits and magic 2 creature personifications of schools of magic: a guide

weugan- evocation. magic of amplification. rewards healing, intensifying, leaning into your strengths.

hellbenders- conjuration. magic of creation. rewards calling forth new things into existence, materiality, physicality.

qohlye- divination. magic of knowledge and truth. rewards seeking and questioning.

tadeshacourt- abjuration. magic of curtailment. rewards protection, dampening, concealment.

seegenpelater- enchantment. magic of convincing. rewards justification, manipulation, and mentality.

bat w/fishtail (name TBA)- transmutation. magic of alteration. rewards change, diversification, adaptation.

[purplebass]

2023 books a darker shade of magic by v.e. schwab (reread)

Magic was a living thing---that, everyone knew---but to Kell it felt like more, like a friend, like family. It was, after all, a part of him (much more than it was a part of most) and he couldn't help feeling like it knew what he was saying, what he was feeling, not only when he summoned it, but always, in every heartbeat and every breath. He was, after all, Antari.

[shrews-art]

I really love how separately Lila, Kell and Holland are literally the most powerful people between all worlds and also smart and resourceful and skilled but. You leave them together in a room for TEN MINUTES and disaster follows

[gumbuk9]

soon i am getting a new laptop that i will have to use in public, and i am thinking of doing the most arcane, malevolently set up, Doug Rattmann crazy levels, most incomprehensible Linux setup on it, so that nobody who isn't me, or atleast is not familiar enough with the specific linux utilities, can use it.

so that in the event i happen to leave the laptop unattended in public, (which i do not plan on doing, as i innately keep my backpack on me 100% of the time, so much so that multiple people have found it offputting, but in the event it do) nobody knows how to work it, or how it even works.

currently i've only a few ideas, such as - using i3wm with a fully rewritten key configuration, including having some common windows shortcuts such as alt + F4, ctrl + shift + esc, ctrl + alt + del, et cetera pull up premade messages heckling you for trying them - using only command line tools like feh, mpv, nmtui, & others for basic tasks - possibly automatically lock the session while the machine is in use if you fail to enter a password into a window, probably one it doesn't open automatically so you also need to know what fucking program to start from a terminal to enter a password you also need to know. (and possibly not have the program in the $PATH for extra evil)

LINUXPOSTERS OF TUMBLR - i call to you in a time of peril - heed my call, give me your most diabolical ideas on making an installation as hostile and arcane as you can. the machine doesn't even have to be 100% usable by myself, i'm fine with it being annoying as fuck to use if it means that it's bafflingly unusable to those around me.

no holds barred. if it's funny, or actively hostile to a user, or both, you may suggest it.

[orions-garden]

Shades of Magic Dashboard Simulator

🌊thatwatermage Follow

rhy maresh was 19??? he should’ve been at the club

✨themagic-ofmagic Follow

2,435 notes

🤔celebrity-smash-or-pass Follow

1,752 notes

🏰low-royal Follow

i’m going on vacation during the essen tasch but someone tells me how it goes

⛰️icanmovemountains Follow

THE DARKNESS

🏰low-royal Follow

huh?

🗺️mapmaker-mapmaker Follow

the darkness

🏰low-royal Follow

oh ok.

12,478 notes

🏴‍☠️piracy-enthusiast Follow

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN THE SAROWS IS COMING IS COMING IS COMING IS COMING ABOARD WHEN THE WIND DIES AWAY BUT STILL SINGS IN YOUR EARS IN YOUR EARS IN YOUR HEAD IN YOUR BLOOD IN YOUR BONES

10,297 notes

⛵️faro-away Follow

arnesian sailors will be like i know a place and take you aboard their ship where their first mate (?) only speaks high royal and can use blood magic 🙄

724 notes

🦴no-bones-about-it Follow

what everyone thinks bone magic is:

what it actually is:

15,860 notes

[fermentedcherries]

🌙🦋hoodoo inspired witchy moodboard✨🔮

[torpublishinggroup]

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WHAT’S IT ABOUT

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[antaripirate]

maxim maresh, red london father of all time

[southernmermaidsgrotto]

Hoodoo, Rootwork and Conjure sources by Black Authors

Because you should only ever be learning your ancestral ways from kinfolk. Here's a compilation of some books, videos and podcast episodes I recommend reading and listening to, on customs, traditions, folk tales, songs, spirits and history. As always, use your own critical thinking and spiritual discernment when approaching these sources as with any others.

Hoodoo in America by Zora Neale Hurston (1931)

Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston (1936)

Tell my horse by Zora Neale Hurston (1938)

Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, editors (2003)

Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition by Yvonne P. Chireau (2006)

African American Folk Healing by Stephanie Mitchem (2007)

Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies by Faith Mitchell (2011)

Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System by Katrina Hazzard-Donald (2012)

Rootwork: Using the Folk Magick of Black America for Love, Money and Success by Tayannah Lee McQuillar (2012)

Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women by LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant (2014)

Working the Roots: Over 400 Years Of Traditional African American Healing by Michele Elizabeth Lee (2017)

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston (2018)

Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals by Luisa Teish (2021)

African American Herbalism: A Practical Guide to Healing Plants and Folk Traditions by Lucretia VanDyke (2022)

These are just some suggestions but there's many many more!! This is by no means a complete list.

I recommend to avoid authors who downplay the importance of black history or straight out deny how blackness is central to hoodoo. The magic, power and ashé is in the culture and bloodline. You can't separate it from the people. I also recommend avoiding or at the very least taking with a huge grain of salt authors with ties to known appropriators and marketeers, and anyone who propagates revisionist history or rather denies historical facts and spreads harmful conspiracy theories. Sadly, that includes some black authors, particularly those who learnt from, and even praise, white appropriators undermining hoodoo and other african and african diasporic traditions. Be careful who you get your information from. Keeping things traditional means honoring real history and truth.

Let me also give you a last but very important reminder: the best teachings you'll ever get are going to come from the mouths of your own blood. Not a book or anything on the internet. They may choose to put certain people and things in your path to help you or point you in the right direction, but each lineage is different and you have to honor your own. Talk to your family members, to the Elders in your community, learn your genealogy, divine before moving forwards, talk to your dead, acknowledge your people and they'll acknowledge you and guide you to where you need to be.

May this be of service and may your ancestors and spirits bless you and yours 🕯️💀

[gent-illmatic]