Magic, ritual, and witchcraft
December 1, 2025
Cusack M. Carole
Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), founded by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in 1981 after the end of Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions, blended chaos magick, art, and esoteric practices while drawing on imagery of destructive cults. The group ended in 1991, just as the World Wide Web emerged. In the decades since, TOPY and P-Orridge have been rediscovered and venerated by contemporary occultists. This article examines TOPY's magickal frameworks to assess their significance for esotericism, popular culture, and political rebellion, emphasizing artistic and creative methods as sources of spiritual power. Chaos magick and individualism strongly shaped the nature and impact of their activities.
Magic, ritual, and witchcraft
September 1, 2024
Isabell Herrmans
Spirit communication among the Luangan Dayak of Indonesian Borneo is an ambiguous endeavor that relies on multisensorial forms of interaction—olfactory, sonic, visual, gustatory, and kinesthetic—to make spirits present and responsive during shamanic healing rituals. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article describes two dialogic encounters: one involving games played with spirits, and another involving spirit possession of a shaman. The unknowability of spirits and ritual outcomes encourages diversification of curing techniques, ritual genres, and poetic registers. Luangan rituals use beautiful ancestral language, joking, and perspectivism to both cultivate and cut spirit relations, making sensory resonance a central preoccupation in mutually making and unmaking human conditions and spirit dispositions.
Magic, ritual, and witchcraft
June 1, 2022
Carole M. Cusack
Necromancers in early Tudor England were generally not involved with the dead, and secular courts showed a curious disinclination to prosecute magic, while ecclesiastical courts punished it harshly. The book examines two case studies: William Neville, a minor poet who consulted a cunning-man and faced Thomas Cromwell in 1532 but was not convicted, and the Mixindale Fellowship, nine men tried in the Archbishop's Court in 1509 for treasure hunting with demonic conjuration, who were convicted of heresy, excommunicated, and did public penance. The authors challenge assumptions that magicians worked alone and that institutional Christianity uniformly opposed magic, highlighting the complex accommodations between permissible and prohibited occult practices.
Magic, ritual, and witchcraft
December 1, 2007
Deward E. Walker
This book review describes a reprint of Charles Hudson's 1979 work on the black drink, a caffeinated tea made from Ilex vomitoria used by Native American tribes of the southeastern United States for ritual purification. The volume includes articles on the plant's botany, its importance among southeastern Indians, its prehistoric origins and distribution, its function among the Creeks, and its adoption by non-Indians for medicinal and recreational purposes. The book contributes to ethnobotanical and ethnographic literature on ceremonial plant use and ritual purity, and is recommended for both lay readers and researchers.