The Poison Path Herbal
The Poison Path Herbal

Author: Coby Michael

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-09-28

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 164411335X

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• Explains how to work with baneful herbs through rituals and spells, as plant spirit familiars, as potent medicines, and as visionary substances • Details the spiritual, alchemical, astrological, and symbolic associations of each plant, its active alkaloids, how to safely cultivate and harvest it, and rituals and spells suited to its individual nature and powers • Shares plant alchemy methods, magical techniques, and recipes featuring the plants, including a modern witches’ flying ointment Part grimoire and part herbal formulary, this guide to the Poison Path of occult herbalism shares history, lore, and information regarding the use of poisonous, consciousness-altering, and magical plants. Author Coby Michael explains how, despite their poisonous nature, baneful herbs can become powerful plant allies, offering potent medicine, magical wisdom, and access to the spirit realm. Detailing the spiritual, alchemical, astrological, and symbolic associations of each plant, the author explores their magical uses in spells and rituals. He focuses primarily on the nightshade family, or Solanaceae, such as mandrake, henbane, and thorn apple, but also explores plants from other families such as wolfsbane, hemlock, and hellebore. He also examines plants in the witch’s pharmacopoeia that are safer to work with and just as chemically active, such as wormwood, mugwort, and yarrow. The author shares rituals suited to the individual nature and powers of each plant and explains how to attract and work with plant spirit familiars. He offers plant alchemy methods for crafting spagyric tinctures and magical techniques to facilitate working with these plants as allies and teachers. He shares magical recipes featuring the plants, including a modern witches’ flying ointment. He also explores safely cultivating baneful herbs in a poison garden.

The Witches' Ointment
The Witches' Ointment

Author: Thomas Hatsis

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-08-17

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1620554747

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An exploration of the historical origins of the “witches’ ointment” and medieval hallucinogenic drug practices based on the earliest sources • Details how early modern theologians demonized psychedelic folk magic into “witches’ ointments” • Shares dozens of psychoactive formulas and recipes gleaned from rare manuscripts from university collections all over the world as well as the practices and magical incantations necessary for their preparation • Examines the practices of medieval witches like Matteuccia di Francisco, who used hallucinogenic drugs in her love potions and herbal preparations In the medieval period preparations with hallucinogenic herbs were part of the practice of veneficium, or poison magic. This collection of magical arts used poisons, herbs, and rituals to bewitch, heal, prophesy, infect, and murder. In the form of psyche-magical ointments, poison magic could trigger powerful hallucinations and surrealistic dreams that enabled direct experience of the Divine. Smeared on the skin, these entheogenic ointments were said to enable witches to commune with various local goddesses, bastardized by the Church as trips to the Sabbat--clandestine meetings with Satan to learn magic and participate in demonic orgies. Examining trial records and the pharmacopoeia of witches, alchemists, folk healers, and heretics of the 15th century, Thomas Hatsis details how a range of ideas from folk drugs to ecclesiastical fears over medicine women merged to form the classical “witch” stereotype and what history has called the “witches’ ointment.” He shares dozens of psychoactive formulas and recipes gleaned from rare manuscripts from university collections from all over the world as well as the practices and magical incantations necessary for their preparation. He explores the connections between witches’ ointments and spells for shape shifting, spirit travel, and bewitching magic. He examines the practices of some Renaissance magicians, who inhaled powerful drugs to communicate with spirits, and of Italian folk-witches, such as Matteuccia di Francisco, who used hallucinogenic drugs in her love potions and herbal preparations, and Finicella, who used drug ointments to imagine herself transformed into a cat. Exploring the untold history of the witches’ ointment and medieval hallucinogen use, Hatsis reveals how the Church transformed folk drug practices, specifically entheogenic ones, into satanic experiences.

Veneficium
Veneficium

Author: Ann N. Thomson

Publisher:

Published: 2019-08-28

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780578570136

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Peregrine Hale is an apprentice witch who is pursuing the arts of Hedge Crossing and poisonous plants, an art forbidden since 1692. When she accidentally pulls a gorta across the Hedge, she learns of a twisted plot. With the assistance of a mandrake fae and Inquisitor, she must use the poison arts to save her town and avoid the Inquisition's wrath

Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome
Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome

Author: Clifford Ando

Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9783515088541

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Law is a particularly fruitful means by which to investigate the relationship between religion and state. It is the mechanism by which the Roman state and its European successors have regulated religion, in the twin actions of constraining religious institutions to particular social spaces and of releasing control over such spaces to those orders. This volume analyses the relationship from the late Republic to the final codification of Roman law in Justinian's Constantinople.

The Green Mysteries
The Green Mysteries

Author: Daniel A. Schulke

Publisher:

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 9781945147111

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The Green Mysteries is the product of twenty-five years of experiential research on the spiritual and occult properties of plants. Presenting a vast array of trees and herbs from many spiritual traditions, this exhaustive compendium examines their folklore, magical uses and spiritual essences. While presenting the material through both magical and mythopoetic narrative, the stance of the book is also grounded firmly in supportive disciplines such as botany, chemistry, and anthropology and also includes up to date phylogenetic and pharmacological findings. Interspersed with the encyclopedic plant entries are short narratives addressing such concepts as the Witches' Flying Oinment, intoxicating incense, the herbal dimsension of Alchemy, and the 'Green Saints' such as Al-Khidir, the medieval Wildman, and the forest-dwelling Nymphs who nourished the Greek gods. More than a mere collation of previously existing works on plants, much of the material is drawn directly from the author's private field notes, diaries, and manuals of magical operation, presented in an angaging narrative style. Illustrated with with over 270 original illustrations by Benjamin Vierling, commissioned for the project.

Murder Was Not a Crime
Murder Was Not a Crime

Author: Judy E. Gaughan

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0292779925

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“Explore[s] with impressive scholarship cases of unlawful killing in the regnal period, the early and mid-republic and the post-Sullan era.” —UNRV.com Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, Murder Was Not a Crime describes a legal system through which families (rather than the government) were given the power to mete out punishment for murder. With implications that could modify the most fundamental beliefs about the Roman republic, Gaughan’s research maintains that Roman criminal law did not contain a specific enactment against murder, although it had done so prior to the overthrow of the monarchy. While kings felt an imperative to hold monopoly over the power to kill, Gaughan argues, the republic phase ushered in a form of decentralized government that did not see itself as vulnerable to challenge by an act of murder. And the power possessed by individual families ensured that the government would not attain the responsibility for punishing homicidal violence. Drawing on surviving Roman laws and literary sources, Murder Was Not a Crime also explores the dictator Sulla’s “murder law,” arguing that it lacked any government concept of murder and was instead simply a collection of earlier statutes repressing poisoning, arson, and the carrying of weapons. Reinterpreting a spectrum of scenarios, Gaughan makes new distinctions between the paternal head of household and his power over life and death, versus the power of consuls and praetors to command and kill.

The Crime of Poison in the Middle Ages
The Crime of Poison in the Middle Ages

Author: Franck Collard

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 031334700X

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This book will lead readers into a medieval culture of ambition, greed, and jealousy that motivated men and women to take the lives of individuals who trusted them. Collard examines the perception of the crime of poisoning in the West in medieval times, from about 500 to 1500 AD, exploring the ways the alleged crime was perceived in contemporary minds. His primary sources are chronicles that cover the entire medieval period and legal texts that are limited to the late medieval centuries. In order to portray the culture of murder by poisoning in the West, it was necessary to take into account Byzantine and Islamic documents as well as ancient texts such as the Scriptures and the writings of Roman historians, both of which were widely known in the Middle Ages. This book will lead readers into a medieval culture of ambition, greed, and jealousy that motivated men and women to take the lives of individuals who trusted them. In these pages, French medievalist Franck Collard examines the perception of the crime of poisoning in the West from about 500 to 1500. His primary sources of information are chronicles that cover the entire medieval period and legal texts that are limited to the late medieval centuries. In order to portray the culture of murder by poisoning in the West, he takes into account Byzantine and Islamic documents, as well as ancient texts such as the Scriptures and the writings of Roman historians, both of which were widely known in the Middle Ages. The resulting volume is concerned with the criminal actions that involve poison and not poison as such. Poisonous substances as such are described only when necessary for an understanding of a crime. What is important here is an examination of the ways the alleged crime was perceived in contemporary minds. Poisoning avoids the use of violence. It was committed without a drawn weapon or bloodshed in a world in which wounds, swords, knives, and clubs represented aggression and in which the flow of blood determined the gravity of the crime. Necessarily involving preparation and secrecy, it was often perpetrated treacherously during a meal, a particularly heinous act in a universe that was united by the companionship of a meal and the sociability of drinking. The special horror associated with poisoning resulted from the treachery of those close to the victim-and a sudden death that prevented a final confession of sins.

Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World
Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World

Author: Paul Mirecki

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9047400402

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This volume contains a series of provocative essays that explore expressions of magic and ritual power in the ancient world. The essays are authored by leading scholars in the fields of Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern studies, the Hebrew Bible, Judaica, classical Greek and Roman studies, early Christianity and patristics, and Coptic and Islamic Egypt. The strength of the present volume lies in the breadth of scholarly approaches represented. The book begins with several papyrological studies presenting important new texts in Greek and Coptic, continuing with essays focusing on taxonomy and definition. The concluding essays apply contemporary theories to analyses of specific test cases in a broad variety of ancient Mediterranean cultures.

Nemo non metuit
Nemo non metuit

Author: Fabrizio Conti

Publisher: Trivent Publishing

Published: 2022-10-30

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 6156405429

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"Nemo Non Metuit": Magic in the Roman World has the ambitious goal of discussing some of the fundamental themes in the development of the idea of magic, in all its facets, in the long chronological span of the Roman world, between the 8th century BCE and the 5th century CE. At the same time, this volume is the result of a team effort that has brought together both accomplished scholars and young researchers at the beginning of their scholarly careers. Altogether, this ample work is the result of a synergy that brought together different approaches to the study of Roman magic. The broad content of this volume includes studies on magical gems of Etruscan, Greek and Phoenician background; curse tablets; amulets targeting malaria; erotic spells; the use of veneficia or poisons for magical purposes; judicial prayers in Roman Britain; witches in the literary tradition; the role of women in the matter of magic and divination; the figure of the "Orphic witch" in the age of Augustus; sorcerers and rivals of Jesus Christ; early-Christian sermons against magic and superstition; the fight of late-antique Church against magical powers. By addressing such a diverse spectrum of topics, this volume aims to challenge traditional views and open new paths of interpretation in the reconstruction of a long-term cultural-historical object such as magic in connection to the Roman civilization.