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At the crossroads we meet others who no matter race, creed or philosophy are made brothers and sisters by necessity for they too are fellow travellers.  It is this essential truism that bonds us together in a way that transcends what came before.  Regardless of whether our paths diverge or not we travel together, we share the adoptive parent that is the road.

I am not sure how Peter, Alkistis and Jake captured the metaphysical truth of the crossroads but they did.  It is not truly a forking of the way, a diverging of paths, it is the singular point from which all our paths radiate.  It is the singular point which reveals that truly all our paths are just the one path.  That we travellers of that road, no matter the direction we chose are moving together, are becoming more alike.  The road itself recreates us and the longer we spend travelling it the more our stories sound alike.  Anyone who has wandered knows that this is true.

Circumstance and shared trials brought together those old disparate practitioners who gave form and spirit to the spiritual creoles of the west, new languages born of immediate necessity and new Gods born of fresh circumstance.  Time and circumstance change, the road goes ever on.  These days getting an old world Necromancer, a Kimbandist, an Espiritista, a handful of disparate ceremonialists, a Vodoun, a pair of Palo and a cranky barely literate hoodoo (*cough* .. that would be me) to agree on anything is harder than teaching a collection of stray cats to perform as a synchronized swimming team.  Lord knows I have argued with half the authors who contributed to the text already. 

In this sense the editors mentioned above have outshone us all, sitting as they are at this new crossroad of technology and media exposure, they laid a trick on the lot of us.  We didn’t have to agree on anything to agree on everything, they gave us no subject upon which to reach a consensus, no philosophy upon which to jointly pontificate.  Clever bastards.  They had us meet around their digital fire and tell our stories from the road knowing that those stories would each intertwine with the other effortlessly because the road had made us all alike.  Like it does to all who travel it long enough.  To my own surprise I found myself nodding in agreement as a student of Bertiaux talked of how the creoles were the faith of the future and cracking open Allen Kardec to see what I had missed in my easy dismissal of the spiritualists.  Though they fall from our hand, it is the spirit of the world that rolls the bones.

Clever bastards.

The Patron Saint of the Badly Behaved

or Hadean Press Chapbook Review #1

Saint Cyprian - Saint of Necromancers (HADEAN PRESS)

As a wandering hoodoo I am long familiar with the iconic figure of St. Cyprian, a stalwart ally of the mercenary practitioners in both the North and South America’s as well as Europe.  The trouble with this figure, as Conjureman Ali suggests in his brief text regarding this paradoxical Saint, is that for some entirely inexplicable reason almost none of his lore has ever been translated into English out of the original Spanish and Portuguese.  Ali does us the great service of not dwelling over long on the fascinating permutations of St. Cyprians legend (couple of quick pages in case you live under a rock and have never heard of the patron Saint of necromancers, pagans and witches,) and gets straight to the business of translation.

Ali lays out the proper preparation of the three ritual oils, the first is remarkable similar in composition to Three Kings incense and I have no doubt would make an excellent general anointing oil (the use suggested within the text), a second which reminded me a lot of the old southern Cleo May recipes (and put to a similar use again according to the text,) the third though is unlike any of the compositions that I am familiar with and I shall have to give a shot.  This third oil is used in the consecration of St. Cyprians Amparo (along with a few of the more standard rituals) which out of all the workings in the brief text is in my opinion the true golden nugget.

The use of this amparo among Los Muertos to moderate the intensity of Santa Muerta’s presence was news to me but I can attest to its necessity.  When she is worked in an intimate sense she owns your ass.  She comes when she wants, she takes what she wants and she rides you when she feels like it.  I was entirely unaware that los Muertos utilized Cyprians amparo to mitigate the intensity of those exchanges and shall enthusiastically give that one a whirl. 

As an aside, I would pick on the scholarly lot considerably less if they took the time to provide resources like this more often.  I mean seriously, hundreds of years waiting translation!  It is my sincere hope that we will see more of those texts popularized in Latin America translated into English in the upcoming years.  Anyhow, I tip my hat to you Ali, a cat could never have anything but your Cyprian in 20 pages and I suspect they would do just fine.