Lucky Charms in the First World War

Leo Ruickbie’s chapter ‘Lucky Charms in the First World War – Industrialized Magic’ is published in Katharina Rein’s anthology Magic: A Companion (Peter Lang, 2022).

CFP: Death, Dying and Disposal 13

Death, Dying and Disposal 13 Ritual, Religion and Magic Conference 6th-10th September 2017 University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK  In popular western culture the number 13 is often unlucky, evoking superstition, or witches. Yet there were 13 members of the last supper, Friday the 13 is lucky in Italy and in Judaism it is the…

Faustus

The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

Black Magic Code

“It began with a letter to a dead man…” My article ‘The Black Magic Code’ on Trithemius, cryptography and nigromancy published in Abraxas Journal. For more details see http://fulgur.co.uk/shop/abraxas/abraxas-journal-issue-6/

Reinventing the Renaissance Occult

Review of ‘Reinventing the Renaissance Occult in Modern and Postmodern Culture’ now available at http://jwmt.org/v2n20/reinventing.html Five hundred years ago the occult – what we think of as ‘the occult’ – was taught in university and practised by many of the foremost personalities of the age. Still it was persecuted. Dangerous. Between the Church and the…

New Article on Magic

I saw him do it. On national TV. Took a voodoo doll out of his pocket and wrapped a thread around it. His victim was watching him, not quite believing. But when he’d finished, could she move her arms? Legs? In the July 2010 edition of Paranormal Magazine you can read my latest article on…

Dealing with the Devil

This paper given at Reinventing the Renaissance Occult, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, 14 November 2009, explored the development of the Faustian Pact, looking at how the Renaissance magician Faustus came to be condemned as having made a pact with the Devil, and how this condemnation itself came to be a pattern for magical practice. Pacts…