Backwoods Witchcraft: Conjure& Folk Magic From Appalachia by Jake Richards

This entry is part 36 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  Backwoods Witchcraft is kind of a memoir of Appalachian folk magic. This is the second book by Richards I’ve given a look. The first—Doctoring the Devil—was more recent, but also not particularly interesting to me: it’s more of a highly organized magical cookbook than a cultural history, and not the sort of thing I was really after.   Unfortunately, Backwoods Witchcraft ends up feeling a bit like a less-well-organized stream-of-consciousness magical …

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d12 of Divination, d4 of Sheep-Ankle

You know those ancient d20s they found in Roman and Greco-Egyptian excavations?   Well, this isn’t as cool as that, but I’ve just run across a reference (in Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook, which I posted about recently) to a Renaissance-era d12, and it was used for… divination, of course. (Dice seem to have been used both in divination and gaming, and the line between the two gets fuzzy at certain times in history, of course… like how lots of people today read their horoscopes in the newspaper for fun, but don’t base decisions on what they say.) That makes sense: 12 months of the year, 12 astrological …

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