A wizard with a bible has entered the chat

One of my core memories of participating in International Mr. Leather was crystallized in an atrium of the host hotel. During a break from rehearsals, one of our judges was engaging a group of us with stories of past IMLs, and she shared that one year she moved the Bible in her bedside table while unpacking, and a bag of drugs fell. out.

No one really knew how to respond until this big, burly, bearded guy pointed at me and announced in a carrying voice, “I hit him with a Bible last night.”

Conversations in the room came to a standstill as everyone within earshot slowly turned to stare at me.

“Yes,” I said. “He did.”

I never got a chance to read my ballots, but I did rank surprisingly high overall, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this moment had something to do with that. The thing is, between growing up Episcopalian, graduating from a Catholic university, and exploring the improvisational nature of impact play,… intimate familiar with the Bible. So I feel comfortable contributing to the recent discussion about whether or not it is an important resource for Pagans.

And my position is basically: yes: we would all do well to have a Bible on hand. But only because it’s super useful for witchcraft.

For almost as long as they have existed, the contents of the Bible have been an important part of folk magic and folkloric witchcraft. Need a little pocket money? Read Psalm 72 aloud three times and mark the page with a dollar bill. Relationship crisis? Light pink candles while reciting the Song of Songs. Putting together a protective charm? Add a miniature Bible to your components. Coming into contact with an organized criminal syndicate? Write Revelation 21:8 on a piece of paper and burn it with some dragon’s blood incense.

In Backwoods Witchcraft: Magic and Folk Magic from Appalachia, author Jake Richards describes a method of summoning rain using Biblical passages, and there is a very old folk custom of bandaging wounds with pages from the Bible to promote faster healing. (Personally, I would disinfect the wound first and bandage it with sterile gauze, Than add a page from the Bible before you wrap the whole thing in an Ace bandage, but that’s just me.) While all of the above begs a question: if the majority of folk practitioners who incorporate the Bible into their work consider themselves Identifying Christians, can (or should) those of us from pagan backgrounds use the Bible in our proverbs?

And the answer is thunderous hell, yes, because chaos magic.

From a chaos magic perspective, the Bible is a source of power, if only because 2.4 billion people worldwide believe the Bible to be powerful. And if folk practitioners have successfully used selections from the Bible to achieve specific magical results, it stands to reason that we can tap into that same power by mimicking those actions. The theory here is rooted in the concept of morphic resonance, which at a basic level claims that everything that exists has its own memory. So, for example, Obadiah 1:6 can be used to find lost things for no other reason than that people have consistently used it to find lost things for years – the verse simply knows what to do and remembers how to do it. do it no matter who happens to put it to work.

The only requirement on the part of the practitioner is the belief that the verse can do its work.

I’m also reminded of how most 12-Step meetings end with everyone holding hands in a circle and saying a prayer together, often the Lord’s Prayer. This is sometimes seen as controversial, as it could potentially alienate non-Christians, but as a devout – you might even say professional – non-Christian, it has never bothered me. What we said wasn’t as important to me as the symbolism of what we did, which reinforced the fact that we were stronger in recovery as a group than as individuals. The words themselves didn’t matter; we honestly could have recited an article Weekly world news in unison and got the same effect.

I take a similar approach to Bible magic as a pagan and chaos witch. Whether or not I accept the existence of the Christian God, or have a relationship with Jesus or whatever, is irrelevant: where my faith should go is on the hypothesis that if following a given series of steps to achieving a specific magical goal has worked for other practitioners, then it will work for me too. And achieving those goals will increase my confidence in my abilities, which will further the development of what I believe I can achieve as a witch.

If we strip away all the trappings, the Bible is just a book, and like any book, it can be used as a tool or as a weapon (or as a paddle). How we choose to use it – or whether we want to use it at all – is entirely up to us, but it certainly shouldn’t be dismissed as a magical resource. As we often say in recovery, out loud or to ourselves, “Take what works and leave the rest.” In the realm of chaos magic, this applies to Bible magic as much as anything else.

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