Edit: we got our weeks mixed up (sorry) so this essay will be Patreons only until the 20th of Feb.
Books are portals. Windows into a shared past. Communion between the living and dead. Well worn volumes adorn the shelves, collecting tales told and retold throughout the millennia. Myth and magic. Hopes and fears. Captured in black ink on yellowed paper.
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Written language is one of humanity’s most incredible and magical creations. The ability to set down events, stories, beliefs; to create plans, orders, and instructions which could be followed hundreds, even thousands of years later; to record the voices and personalities of other humans, real and unreal, and transmit them into the mind of reader. This is magic, pure and simple, but a magic we have become so used to we cease to see it as such. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
While I’m (mis)quoting people I may as well throw in this, much more perfect than I could ever have written, definition of magic(k) from Alan Moore:
“Magick, in its earliest forms, is often referred to as “the art.” I believe that this is completely literal. I believe that magick is art, and art whether that be writing, painting, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magick. Art is, like magick, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language of magick seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is supernatural events. A “grimoire,” for example, the book of spells, is simply a fancy way of saying “grammar.” Indeed to cast a “spell” is simply to spell; to manipulate words to change people’s consciousness. I believe this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a shaman.”
People who love Folklore, myths, and legends also tend to love books on the same. We all have our little collections, our prized volumes, and out go-to books when we want to look things up. Many of us also have those books which we first stumbled across in school libraries, or on the shelves of an older relative which first kindled our fascination with strange things. The terrifying Black Shuck, with his single, glowing, red eye from the Usborne book of Monsters, the photographs of what remained of the unfortunate victims of Spontaneous Human Combustion from Unexplained Magazine, a real photograph of the face of a “were-wolf” (actually a man with the medical condition hypertrichosis) from the Readers Digest: Into the Unknown.
What are books of Folklore then, if not books of magic. Re-recording tales of old, often tales which would have been lost otherwise. Cataloguing, categorising, comparing, contrasting, but above all preserving. There is magic in all art, in all books, but I would argue that there is nothing quite so like a genuine, real life Spell Book than a well written book of Folklore.