And of course she’s not alone. Countless thousands of thoughtful and intelligent people have had experiences of a kind that they call religious. James paid them the compliment of taking these experiences seriously, and produced a classic of psychological insight. But could there be a Varieties of Magical Experience? Could the mental universe that produced witch bottles and sigil, and grimoires, and the whole idea of magic itself, be rich enough to sustain an examination of that sort? This rhetoric of systematicity also characterizes many of the alchemical writings from antiquity, especially the works of Zosimus of Panopolis, a Greek writer from 3rd–4th century ce Egypt. Alchemy consists of the transformations of the qualities of matter (from grey lead to gleaming gold, from clear crystal to purple amethyst, etc.), as well as, in some texts, of spirit or soul. In processes sometimes compared to the work of the creator god, the alchemist purifies his object (be it matter or soul) from undesirable qualities and then imbues it with new virtues. The extraordinary efficacy of the procedures involved in such transformations is further marked by the extraordinary complexity of the performances, involving specialized knowledge that only a learned magician might know. Much of the technical knowledge seems to come from Hellenistic systematizations of the secret lore about stones and metals, and the 5th century bce philosopher Demokritos is often credited as the original founder of the art, which he received from Persian magicians like Ostanes (PM 3 35–64 Martelli = CAAG II. 42.21–43.22). Here are 15 of the best poems about magic, sourced from a variety of cultures, traditions, and poets, both ancient and modern. Included are poems about witchcraft, fairies, and enchanted woods, as well as the magic of love and the magic of awareness. If you enjoy these magic poems enough, perhaps you’ll consider practicing a little magic yourself. Maybe even by writing magical poetry. “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton Please send no more than TWO poems on the theme (any additional poems will not be sent to the judge). Read Ilya Kaminsky’s “ We Lived Happily During the War,” which imagines America’s end. What kind of magic appears in these poems? What purpose does it serve? What is true about this story despite all that is fictional about it?

November 2023, 6.30pm. Roundtable discussion about Poetry & Magic, featuring Professor John Tresch (Warburg Institute), author Iain Sinclair, and professional witch Dr Kate Tomas.And like a spell, a poem is born of intent and uses specific ingredients. Poetry is shadow work, a way of mining the depths. And through that act, it is a torch of illumination. Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). I find it endlessly fascinating, and I call that world “imaginary” not to disparage or belittle it. Imagination is one of our highest faculties, and wherever it appears, however it “bodies forth / The forms of things unknown” (Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), I want to treat it with respect. At its most intense it becomes a kind of perception, as in William Blake’s notion of “Twofold Vision”, by which he means what we see when we look “not with but through the eye”: the state of mind in which we can “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”. Other poets describe something similar: in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” he recalls a time “when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream.” Thomas Traherne’s vision of “orient and immortal wheat” in the everyday corn comes from the same apprehension. My name is Legion: for we are many’ Ramona Herdman Winner, Hamish Canham Prize 2017. Members' Poems - Getting Out Experimentation: moving away from stereotypes into technical innovation, poems were seen to be a ruthless rejection of the past, a deviation from the usual reader expectations.

One point worth making is that aesthetics, together with theories of poetics and literary criticism, does not operate in a vacuum, but within a community of shared approaches and understandings. Typically, they are academia-based, and so written for fellow academics and their captive students. Their insights are important – indeed indispensable – for countering the half-truths that float around the poetry world, and for insisting that poetry maintain some depth and substance, but the young poet may wish initially to sidestep these abstruse matters and join another community, that of poetry itself. Poetry also has its beliefs and patterns of excellence. Its insights have to be acquired by participation – by writing and having that writing evaluated by fellow poets, by being able to appreciate a wide range of work, and by acquiring the crafts of literary composition. Henk S. Versnel, “Beyond Cursing: The Appeal to Justice in Judicial Prayers,” in Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 60–106; and Versnel, “Some Reflections on the Relationship Magic-Religion” Numen 38, no. 2 (1991): 177–197. The best treatment of the topic remains Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Near the end of his life, Dante settled in Ravenna, Italy under the patronage of Guido da Polenta, where he died September 13 or 14, 1321. Although The Divine Comedy caused an immediate sensation during his life, Dante’s fame waned during the Italian Renaissance and was later revived in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many scholars have examined the structural unity of the poem, discussing the relationship between medieval symbolism and allegory within the poem’s three sections and exploring Dante’s narrative strategy. Others have marveled at the seemingly inexhaustible formal and semantic richness of Dante’s text. With its various enigmatic layers of philological and philosophical complexities, The Divine Comedy has received scrutiny by critics, literary theorists, linguists, and philosophers, who have cherished the immortal work precisely because it translates the harsh truth about the human condition into a poetics of timeless beauty.

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I, Abrasax, shall deliver. Abrasax am I! ABRASAX ABRASICHO'OU, help little Sophia-Priskilla. Get hold of and do away with what comes to little Sophia-Priskilla, whether it is a Shivering Fit—get hold of it! Whether a Phantom—get hold of it! Whether a Daimon—get hold of it! I, Abrasax, shall deliver. Abrasax am I! ABRASAX ABRASICHO'OU. Get hold of, get hold of and do away with .|.|. what comes to little Sophia-Priskilla on this very day, whether it is a Shivering Fit—do away with it! Whether a Daimon—do away with it! ( PGM LXXXIX 1–27) Cp. the important study of Fritz Graf, “Prayer in Magic and Religious Ritual,” in Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, Faraone and Obbink, 188–213. By the way, don’t feel constrained or pressured by ideas of “good poetry,” or popular poetry. These are poems for you; they’re magic. They’re your essence. They’re not meant to be published or shared with the world. Write the poetry that speaks to you. In your voice. In whatever language you want to write in. Of course, he hadn’t done anything of the sort, and he eventually convinced the man of this – and helped him recover. But, later on, I would witness events that I could only describe with the word “magic.”

Of course the answer is both. It then lies with us, the readers, to cast these spell of each poem with our own intention, again and again, as we conjure and unify with the world we seek. The historiola, the recitation of a myth to illustrate the desired effect, represents the most elaborate form of such metaphors but rarely appears in Greek magic, in contrast to its more frequent use in Egyptian and other Mediterranean traditions. For an analysis of a notable exception and broader consideration of the historiola in the Greek evidence, see Sarah Iles Johnston, “Myth and the Getty Hexameters,” in The Getty Hexameters: Poetry, Magic, and Mystery in Ancient Selinous, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 121–156. What kinds of things do you think of when you think of magic? Do you believe in magic? What communities or culture consider magic to be real or important? What purpose does that serve? It says, “I won’t tell you the truth, but I’ll tell you a part of it.” Poetry gives you clues. It asks you to think. It reveals according to its own rules. That’s why we always ask, “But what is it about?” Since the objectives of magical practice are beyond the power of ordinary humans, the performer must somehow access extraordinary power to achieve such extraordinary results. The magician may call on a variety of non-human powers, ranging from the supreme lord of the universe through a number of gods who specialize in certain areas to the spirits of the restless dead. Often the power employed is not explicitly invoked, but the desired result is articulated in some kind of performative utterance—I bind so-and-so, his tongue and hands, ... etc. Although modern scholars have often taken the way that the divine power is invoked to mark the distinction between religion and magic, classifying supplications to the divine as religion and commands to divinities or straightforward performative utterances as magic, the ancient evidence shows that such a distinction was rarely significant. Many examples combine the forms, using supplicative subjunctives and direct imperatives in the same plea (e.g., DT 25.13-14, 16-18 = Gager 46), and the modern critique of magic as working automatically, ex opere operato, stems from later Christian theological debates, specifically Protestant critiques of Catholic ritualism. In the ancient evidence, it is the departure of the performance from the normal and familiar patterns that marks it as magical, what Malinowski refers to as the “coefficient of weirdness.” The strangeness of the performance may be analysed in terms of the rhetoric of its expression, the “poetics of the magic charm” as Versnel calls it, noting the use of devices such as metaphor and metonymy, repetition and emphasis, vivid imagery and poetic language. 15Modernist poetry is said to cover the years 1890 to 1920 and includes Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis among many others. In reality the themes of Modernism cover a period of more than one hundred years, ending in the late twentieth century. Broadly speaking the features of modernist poetry include, in varying degrees: No doubt more could be said, but the starting poet may be feeling impatient. Theorists, like clever lawyers, can prove anything, and it is all too easy for an atrocious piece of writing to be defended by irrefutable standards. Are there not more practical ways of assessing poetry? Magic may thus be defined as a discourse (that is, not a thing, but a way of talking about things) pertaining to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer. 2 Greek magic is then the discourse of magic within the ancient Greek world, which differs in various ways from the modern discourse of magic, as well as other ancient discourses of magic: Hebrew, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Phoenician, and even Roman. One of the ends for which magic may be used, however, is indeed to bring harm upon another person, and the category of curses includes many that fall within the discourse of magic. Curses aimed at hindering a rival in a wide variety of contexts appear not only in the literary evidence, but also in the material evidence of curse tablets, most often lead lamellae inscribed with the text of a curse. The contexts may be the more implicit competitions of business or personal rivalries or the explicit contests of public performances such as the theatrical or athletic arenas or the law courts. The extraordinary efficacy of these magical curses appears as a form of cheating within the contest, and it is notable that such curses are never boasted of as the means by which a rival was defeated (in contrast to strength, speed, or even cleverness), although rivals might accuse each other of cheating by use of magical curses. 8 Whether you see magic as a literal force that influences your life or as a fantastical idea, there is no better way to describe it than through poetry. Poems About Magic

Poems are not created by recipe, or by pouring content into a currently acceptable mould. Shape and content interact, in the final product and throughout the creation process, so that the poems will be continually asking what you are writing and why. The answers you give yourself will be illustrating your conceptions of poetry. Once again, those conception will develop – eventually to include experiences more viscerally part of you, since poems are not a painless juggling with words. The label of magic appears in a variety of evidence from the ancient Greek world, but the different kinds of evidence provide different kinds of self-labelling and labelling of others. Works of the literary imagination, from early epic to late novels, provide some of the richest and most detailed descriptions; these depictions, however, are not meant to be portrayals of the real world, but rather of the way magic works in the imagination. Other texts, such as histories or law court speeches, provide a more accurate depiction of how the label was applied in the real world, but they tend to be more limited in their details. The material evidence, including not only epigraphic and papyrological texts but also artistic representations in various materials, provide a more direct witness to what the ancient Greeks were actually doing, especially for the self-labelling of magic, but such evidence is always scattered, fragmentary, and difficult to interpret. Intellectualism: writing became less emotional, more analytical. Posing more questions than answering them. Unsent Letter Fragment, Document Number 19055437, February 17, 1948, Museum of Immigration Pippa Little Members' Poems - Identity You’ll dedicate each line or stanza to a specific idea or feeling you’d like to conjure, let go of, or release. Each line, in effect, will give you the opportunity to focus your intention and energy. This is where poetry spells really get powerful since you can focus stanzas or lines on archetypes, gods, goddesses, guides, ancestral symbols, power colors, sacred sounds, or goals and conjurings.

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You can read more about weed witchcraft right here — Weed Witchcraft: A Ritual With The High Priestess of Smoke by Moxie McMurder, who writes, “Smoking the holy herb is a spiritual act, one that puts you in touch with the four elements and when practiced correctly can lift the veil reveal and nature's secrets.” Just remember to stay safe, be legal, and talk to a doctor before using any psychoactive substance. When I seek new poems by others or return to my favorite works, I am looking for this same experience. In this way the act of poetry is at root, a form of radical worship. Through its creation the creator is also changed—elements of the spontaneous, which are a hallmark of effective poems—contribute to a transformative rawness, or honesty. This in turn cultivates a sense of possibility. Cool observation: detached and depersonalized viewpoints and characters, usually informal, sometimes unfinished. Whether witches were “filthy quislings” or harmless village healers, they and those who believed in witchcraft and magic existed in a shared mental framework of hidden influences and meanings, of significances and correspondences, whether angelic, diabolic, or natural. Everything in the exhibition testifies to a near-universal belief in the existence of an invisible, imaginary world that could affect human life and be affected in turn by those who knew how to do it; and so do millions of other objects of similar kinds collected, exhibited, studied, or uncollected, unknown, lost, throughout the world and every period of history. As do legends, and ghost stories, and folk tales. If anything is a permanent fact of human nature, this is.