Tag: The Cunning Man’s Handbook

d12 of Divination, d4 of Sheep-Ankle

gordsellar0 Comments

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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Magic, Science, Inconsistency, and the Principle of Acceptable Variance

gordsellar4 Comments

I’m enjoying Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook, an exhaustive look at the practices of the cunning folk in England (and to some degree America) from 1550-1900, which I’m reading as research for the book I’m writing now (which has a cunning woman as a major character). Baker’s text is full of (ie. basically, completely composed of) countless examples of what folk magic involved in different moments during modern English history, and it also has lots of interesting observations on how much of what neo-pagans claim as history is actually just “invented tradition” (in the sense that Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger discuss in The …

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