The Musical Innertube - Blast from the Past - Cory Hutcheson's New World Witchery

DON

And today on the Musical Innertube, we thought we'd celebrate Halloween in the best possible fashion, and that is by returning to Cory Hutcheson, who is a folklore expert, and he's going to talk about the fact that witches still exist. He has a book out called New World Witchery, which you can find in your local bookstore. I did. I picked up a copy. It's very interesting. And it's also got a lot of weird stuff in it, and we'll talk to him about the interesting and the weird how. Are you Cory?

CORY

I find that I love the weird, the weird is what makes it all worthwhile. So, thanks for having me back. Glad to be back here.

DON

I think so.  You know, John and I revel in the weird. We have for years.

JOHN

Why else would I still be together with Don?  I mean, come on! If I didn’t like the weird, you know?

CORY

Always gets a little weird, for sure.

DON

So, I would think that most people would not necessarily be surprised that you contend that we still have witches around, but I don't think it's the witch that everybody, like the witch from the Wizard of Oz, that everybody's thinking of. Witches are quite different in your opinion, right?

CORY

Sure. Yeah. And it's one of those funny words, right, like, "witch” can mean different things to different people. So, for some people, they hear it and it's, you know, instant sort of scare, right? They're very scared of it. Some people hear it. They're like, yes. Give me some of that. I want to be a part of that. So, it just kind of goes all over the spectrum for folks, people get this image in their head. Like you said, Margaret Hamilton was, I think, sort of the default for a lot of people, but then a lot of people also sort of have this, you know, the sexy 70s which, you know, from all the was it the Mario Bava films or whatever the, you know, the ones that rise from the grave and have incredible eye makeup and start pursuing the villagers through town. So yeah.

JOHN

They always seem like they're ready to go to a party. You know, come out of the grave, they're all made-up. Their hair is perfect. Then, like in the song.

DON

And they all look like Winona Ryder in Heathers, you know?

CORY

Well, they're very well rested. Clearly, they've been in the grave for awhile.

JOHN

Yes. For centuries that, yes, like you said, the eye makeup is beautiful. It's interesting about that, but it's also part of the thing of, you know, the undead being somehow weirdly sexual. Speaking of weirdness, you know, there is something about that connection between, you know, vampirism and witches and sexuality, which, you know, everybody is aware of, but it doesn't not talk about it, cause it's too icky.

CORY

Yeah, I mean, you look at kind of how Halloween is, right?  Halloween supposed to be the celebration of, not celebration, but sort of recognition of death and the scary parts of life. And you know, you go to any college Halloween party, you can find somebody dressed as like a sexy turtle. And it's like, how, how did that happen? But there it is.

DON

Sexy nurses and all that sort of thing. Now, we think of witches as flying on broomsticks and casting spells. And I think probably the casting spells part is the most relevant when we're talking about - well, let me back up just a second. Wiccan, is that what they're calling them?

CORY

There's a whole, I mean, you've got multiple categories, so people who can temporarily practice witchcraft fall into a lot of different categories. Wiccan is probably the best known of them because it's a religious form of witchcraft practice, although even then, some Wiccans will say, well, we don't really even call ourselves, which is because they're trying to distance themselves from some of the negative meanings of that word, but a lot of them do embrace that and say, yeah, we do magic, which can mean a couple of different things. Sometimes it's just sort of religious rituals, spiritual rituals. Sometimes it is, you know, spells to accomplish things. Although there are very specific rules about how they engage with that spell work. Some of some of its stuff that people would recognize, you know, from everyday lives. Checking your horoscope in the daily paper or something like that or, you know, the power of positive thinking kind of stuff where you're just sort of supposed to concentrate on something to sort of help bring it into fruition or whatever. It's kind of a wide, wide range of things that you could sort of attribute there. But Wiccan, yeah, absolutely is one of the biggest categories there for sure.

JOHN

We hear a lot about practicing Wiccans today- and I'm just wondering, how do Wiccans, how are they different from other kinds of witches? What are some of their essential and particular characteristics?

CORY

Sure. Yeah. The religious context of that is really big, because there it is a religion for those practicing, even other forms of what we might call traditional witchcraft or these kind of religious witchcraft practices. They view it as a religion. It's part of the spiritual worldview they have, and for them they're looking at a connection with what they consider sort of the gods that existed before Christianity. So, they'll oftentimes connect with, for example, Norse pantheons, Thor, Odin, Freya, people like that. Or they'll connect with Greco-Roman pantheons. So, they're just kind of turning back to stuff that it, you know, they looked at and they said, oh well, you know Christianity, we can see that there's been a lot of problems that have been caused by institutional religion over the years. I don't think we can deny that, you know, the Inquisition happened! So, sure, they're looking at that and saying we don't really want to be a part of that history. So, let's look at the stuff that existed maybe before or around that and see if we can find value there. Because you know, those people, they tried to live good lives too, you know, by their own moral codes. What can we do with that today? What can we add in? What can we, you know, make relevant for us now? And they also, you know, see, it's oftentimes very nature based, very earth based spirituality. So, a lot of people who are very interested in sort of environmentalism see this connection between the god of a river and the river itself, and they can sort of say like, oh, well, if I'm paying respects to this river god, I can also clean that river up as a sort of way of engaging with worshipping, celebrating that god. And so, they can kind of connect these two areas of their life and it can be really, really moving and powerful. And that's very different, I think, even though you still have these images of, you know, like we said, the Wizard of Oz, which is kind of floating around out there. There's a sense they want to differentiate themselves from that image, which is rooted in some, you know, anti-Semitic tropes and it's rooted in some, you know, negative stereotypes and things like that, that also have to do with, you know, how people viewed independent women at certain periods of history too. Fastest way to get labeled a witch was to not need a man at certain points in history.

JOHN

So it's a way to suppress, I think, female freedom in a lot of places that you know. The way of the horrible ways of punishing witches was a way of punishing women who lived their own lives outside of the village, or outside of the social group.

CORY

For sure. I mean, you look at Salem - and I mean, Salem, there's a whole can of worms you can open there, because there aren't people practicing the kind of sort of satanic witchcraft that people are trying to bring to trial in Salem and, you know, people get hung for this. But you know, people are practicing various forms of folk magic and things like that. They're doing divination, they're doing, which was to protect themselves, ‘cause it's just part of the worldview at the time. But the people who get accused, are oftentimes involved with sort of land disputes with one another. One woman, Bridget Bishop, she operates a tavern out of her home. So, she doesn't need, you know, anybody's support because she's sort of supporting herself and that lines her up as a target pretty quickly. JOHN

Mm-hmm.

DON

So, let's talk about some of the things that that are associated with witches that still kind of permeate the thought nowadays. You were talking earlier about spells. There's spells, there's potions and, you know, again, when I think of potions, there are like, stores, craft stores and that sort of thing, in my town, in Harrisburg, where you go in and they have different herbs and remedies and that sort of thing that kind of bring to mind, the fact that witches – although their potions are made out of bats eyes and, you know, lizard wings and things like that. But it's still kind of reminiscent of that, isn't it?

CORY

Absolutely. I mean, it's worth remembering that there is some scholarship, and I’m not going to say it's absolute, but there is some good scholarship that says, you know, that sort of like famous, you know, “wool of bat” and “tongue of dog” and “eye of newt” and “toe of frog,” those are actually folk names for various herbs that you could find in the area. So, you know, “wool of bat” might be mullein leaf, right, which would be used in a certain kind of, you know, tincture or brew or something like that, that you might use to treat something. And Shakespeare just kind of picked up this terminology and said, oh, that sounds nice and spooky. Let's turn it into a witches’ potion even though it was, you know, being used and people would just say, oh, give me some bat’s wool for, you know, for this thing I need for you know, flushing worms out of my system or something like that. It was just kind of renaming these things and giving them kind of a spookier connotation.

DON

A package of bat legs please!

CORY

Right. And you think about, like, it sounds silly now, but like if you went into - I don't know if either of you are like, old fashioned candy aficionados or anything like that. I love me some “old man candy,” I say.

JOHN

(laughing) “Old man candy.”

CORY

You know they have these licorice drops, right, that are called crows, and you can go and buy these little licorice buttons called crows.

JOHN

That's true.

CORY

And if you went in and said, okay, give me a package of crows, and somebody heard that, and they had no idea what you're talking about, they would certainly look at you go, like, “Are you a witch? Why are you buying a package of crows?”

JOHN

Yes.

DON

Yeah, and what about, you know, casting spells, like, that's always been the big deal about, and tied in also with like, voodoo dolls and things like that. What's the thinking behind that?

CORY

Sure, I mean, the idea is, it kind of comes down to two things: like affecting like, or like infecting like. So you have what's called sympathetic magic, where two things resemble one another, so whatever you do to one thing will happen to the other thing. Or contagious magic, which is where you touch something that has magical qualities to something else, and the magic sort of spreads. Then that can be used positively or negatively, right? Like you can use it for anything. If you want to have more money, right? Maybe you rub your hands with something green or gold to attract money to you, right? One spell that I've run into in a few different systems involves putting a magnet or a loadstone, which is a natural magnetic stone, at the bottom of a bowl of change, and we keep adding whatever pocket change you have to it, and t's supposed to start drawing more money into your life and more money into your household. So it's just this idea of, like, oh, you see these things, they're sort of like affecting like. There are types of magic where, like you put something down and somebody walks over it they pick up the magical effect of that. So, if you wanted to leave a curse, you might leave a mixture of graveyard dirt and sulphur and red pepper wherever you knew they were going to walk, they'd walk over it, and then, ha ha ha, they're cursed, right? They're going to, you know, have a really bad day that day, right? So that's kind of the two mechanisms that we see operating in magic. There are other things too. There's you know, summonings, where you're interacting with spirits and calling them to you and stuff like that. But the two big ones for spells are really sympathetic and contagious magic.

JOHN

A lot of these things that we're talking about here are very old. I mean they come over on the boat with our earliest settlers, and I'm talking about the European strain of magic. And I'm wondering, does our present soup of traditions, is there any aboriginal magic, any indigenous American magic in that?

CORY

Sure, absolutely. There's a lot of Native American influences on various practices that have evolved in North America. For example, there's a practice called hoodoo, which people mistake for voodoo. Voodoo's actually a religion that comes from Haiti, and even then comes back from sort of West African practices and things like that. I mean, it's very, very, very much misunderstood actually. But hoodoo is a magical practice that was practiced by largely African American people who were enslaved at the time, and even kind of after slavery, were still continuing to practice this system. And a lot of what would happen is they were trying to adapt the things that they had learned to practice in their African culture before they were enslaved and brought over to North America. But once you get here, the stuff that you have available is just totally different, right? Like, you know, if you have an herb or a plant that you're used to using in West Africa, there's no easy approximation of that here in North America. But what they found was the people who really knew all of that stuff were Indigenous Americans. And so there would be these connections made between enslaved peoples and the indigenous peoples of the area, who would then sort of teach them like, oh, well, this plant is good for that. And this plant is good for that. And, you know, this stone can do this thing. And so that starts to get picked up by people practicing hoodoo. We even see that up in Pennsylvania, where we have German settlers, and the Pennsylvania Germans had - it's not exactly, like, excellent relations with Native Americans, there were certainly conflicts, but you know William Penn did try to honor some of those treaties and try to interact positively with indigenous peoples, the Susquehannocks in the area, and so there was some interaction between the Pennsylvania German settlers and the Pennsylvanians in the area, sharing information even to the point where one of the healing systems found in the central Pennsylvania area, in Pennsylvania German it’s called “braucherei,” which just means trying to heal. But a nickname for it is “powwow,” and we're not 100% sure why it's called that. It could be a derivation from the word power, but it could also be something they picked up from Algonquin language as well. So there could be some lingering connections there. And again, the herbal plant-based stuff is also getting picked up as they sort of adapt to this new landscape.

JOHN

So, it's a melting pot like so much else about America is, you know. We don't know why “braucherei” is called “powwow.” Somebody, somewhere must have - I mean, I'm not even sure what you do with “braucherei.” I mean, what happens there, you know, and why it might be likened - I mean, a powwow was sort of a meeting, isn't it? It's sort of a consultation?

CORY

So, the Algonquin term would refer to a group meeting, a group gathering. And so, there's a sense that like, they would have these doctors, these “brauchers” who are healers, they would meet, sort of exchange ideas or potentially exchange power. They would actually, you know, pass the power - and I should say this is a very Christian based system. There are older versions of it and there are certainly versions that come from pre-Christianity, and some of the charms do as well. But the way that it was largely practiced in Pennsylvania for many years, there was definitely a lot of Christianity in that. So, I should, I should say, you know, just because something is magical doesn't mean it's not also connected to Christianity.

JOHN

I think Christianity is pretty heavy on the magic. I mean, that's probably part of part of its appeal. And I'm speaking as a guy who goes to church. You know, I think there's something pretty powerful in the rituals, and I think one of the reasons the church didn't like magic very much and tried to punish it wherever it found it is, it was pretty close to what it was already doing. Otherwise, it wasn't punishing it because it was different it was punishing it because it wanted the territory and it was encroaching, wasn’t it?

CORY

If magic happens because you can point to an angel or a divinity, or God, or Jesus or a priest, then it's a miracle, right? But if it's just Joe down the street, if Don starts healing people left and right, it’s what we think of as sort of, you know, one of us? OK. Don, we gotta give you another label and which is a pretty easy one to give.

DON

So, yeah, I'm flirting with Satan.

CORY

Yes.

DON

Seriously, all of the witches -there were saints that were associated with God, and then there were witches who were associated with the devil. So yeah, I'm sure that that had a lot to do with it. When I was talking about talking to you about this program with another person recently, he said, “Oh, yeah, my sister says she's a witch.” So, I'm wondering, is this sort of a thing now? I mean, obviously, there are not covens of witches that meet in the woods at night. Or maybe there are.

CORY

There probably are!

DON

This is a sort of a thing, though, where people can consider themselves, or women - or men, I guess - can consider themselves witches, or involved in this sort of thing. And I  don't want to say it's a cult, but is that kind of what we're talking about?

CORY

Yeah, I mean, a cult just means that, you know, any group of people sort of collected around an ideology. You know, there can be, I mean, for a lot of people, they look at Christianity and say, well, that's sort of a cult as well or was a cult when it first started. Obviously, you know, Romans certainly viewed it that way. But you know what we look at today? You know the people who are practicing this, it's an empowering thing, right? It's a sort of reclaiming something that has been called, that's been bad, right? So you see a lot of people who are coming from backgrounds where they have been hurt religiously or treated badly by their home religion, they'll look for this because it says no, you can have power, and you can make choices for yourself, and you can make these decisions. You can do the spell work, yourself. You don't need a priest or an intermediary to do all this stuff. Or you'll have people who may not have religious trauma necessarily in their background, but they do see it as a sort of like a way to say that they are powerful, or that I want to go out and make a difference in the world, whether that is physically doing, you know, physical things for my community, or whether that is spiritually and through this sort of magical work. So, people are reclaiming this, and it's huge. At one point it was labeled by Pew Research as one of the fastest growing religions in America. It's been surpassed by the "nones” lately - not the ones wearing the penguin outfits, but the people who profess no belief. But it's still a very big religion. And, I mean, there's, I think the estimates like 1 to 2 million, potentially, in North America.  It's not huge, it's a very small percentage of the population, but it's a significant one.

JOHN

Wow.

CORY

And you do have, I mean it gets a lot of attention. We have Wiccan characters that show up on television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and there's even a Scooby-Doo movie that had Wiccans in it, so it, you know, has some traction in the culture, even while there's also still - it still kind of gets maligned, too, because of the sort of “satanic panic” mindset of the 1980s and 1990s. It sort of lingers, I think, for a lot of people. And they say, oh, you know, are these the people who are playing the scary Dungeons and Dragons and, you know, they're going to go out and sacrifice their children? No, they're not. They're absolutely not going to. They're much more likely to be, you know, going out and planting trees than they are to be, you know, trying to lure children into a cauldron.

DON

As John mentioned earlier, you know a lot of this stuff comes from the old country, whether the old country is someplace in Europe or some place in Africa. And it deals with superstition, it deals with habit - you know, I'm thinking of, oh, I spilled salt and throw some over my shoulder, never walk under a ladder, you know, all those things combined with, you know, old wives’ tales that come from your grandmother and that sort of thing. Is that all woven into this whole pattern of magic?

CORY

For sure. Yeah. Superstition and folk belief are fundamental to a lot of practices. Now there are certainly folks that are going to come back and say they're trying to be rational, or they're looking at sort of the science of this, and all that. But I would say a huge amount of this is very much rooted in these kind of old folk beliefs and folk understandings. And superstition, it's kind of a dirty word for folks. But the way I like to kind of talk about it is we get what the word understanding means, right? Understanding means that you grasp something, you grok it from, you know, from start to finish. You really understand the rational process by which something happens, right, you understand if you want to clean your clothes, you got to put them in the washing machine, add the soap, turn it on, all that kind of stuff, right? Superstition comes from Latin words that basically mean “over-standing,” standing over something, and the idea is that you see that two things are connected, but you don't actually understand all the stuff between them, right? You see that if I do this one thing, this other thing happens. There's no rational reason for it to happen. No rational reason why I spill salt and throw it over my shoulder, I'm prevented from having bad luck, but I see that if I do it, it has an effect, And so it's really observational stuff like this, as people have been observing this stuff. And sometimes we find later on down the line - for example foxgloves a really good example, people were using foxglove as a folk remedy for when you had weak hearts and things like that, and they didn't necessarily understand the medicinal aspects of this. Well, it turns out it has a chemical in it that if you have too much of it, it will give you a heart attack. But if you already have heart conditions, they actually even still use it as a prescription medication, digitalis, as a way to regulate your heart so that you don't have a heart attack. It's one of those things where sometimes it's old understanding that just hasn't been proven yet. Sometimes it's just a sense that there's a connection between these things and, you know, and people are sort of adopting that and saying like, well, we don't need to rationally understand everything, we can accept the mystery and the wonder kind of under this stuff. And you know which is, which is our mysterious and wonderful and weird and magical. So, it all kind of ties together.

JOHN

Magic connects us with the world as it is. A lot of magic has been, you know, willow bark, for example, which the Indians found out if you chewed it, it could help make a toothache better. And if you boiled it water, you could drink it and alleviate pain. And now we have aspirin, and salicylic acid for that reason. So that magic is also a way of paying attention, and finding out the potential for surprising connections and surprising things that that nature can do. So it brings us closer.

CORY

I think if people really watched modern day, which is practicing what they were doing, they would be incredibly bored. It's really boring because it's a lot of like watching the signs. Watching birds fly, how many birds are over there? OK, let's pay attention to that. OK, let's pay attention to the color of these leaves and it's like constant note taking. That's one of those things people see that they're, like, it's not the Harry-Potter-flash-bang-waving-the-wand-and-sparks-go-flying kind of stuff. It is very much slow, very subtle kind of stuff, where you do a ritual, but it is, mostly you kind of observing the world around you and trying to manipulate or interact with it in these kind of very subtle ways. So yeah.

DON

Nothing like Bewitched, where, you know, a girl goes and tweaks her nose and things appear or disappear.

CORY

I’ve tried it so many times! It doesn’t work!

JOHN

It was such a cute nose!

CORY

It was!

JOHN

Maybe it's just hers that worked, you know. I don’t know.

CORY

Just Elizabeth Montgomery, only her.

JOHN

Oh my God, yes.

DON

If she twitched her nose at me, I’d do something!

CORY

Wouldn't you? Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't?

DON

Let me go to a couple of things specifically that you bring up in the book, the New World Witchery, which is available to bookstores everywhere. Something that John and I know about from our music backgrounds, and that is, that if you go to the crossroads, you're going to meet the devil and he's going to make you the best guitar player in the whole. universe.

CORY

Oh yeah. Oh, yeah.

DON

How did that come about? And why are crossroads important in literature?

CORY

Sure. I've gotta ask, have either of you ever been tempted to do that?

DON

Well, you know, I don't play, but John?

JOHN

I've been there. I've been there, and instead of being made the best guitarist in the world, somebody with a pointy tail and horns, asked me for a 20. You know, I just, it was completely not what I expected. I mean, it's like a Grateful Dead Song, you know? I'm a friend of the devil, I just didn't know it.

CORY

Yeah, yeah! There you go, I love that! No, that's great!  It is. It's a fun legend that gets associated with Robert Johnson, although that may also be tied to another blues man named Tommy Johnson. Both were active kind of in the Memphis area in this sort of northern Mississippi area, so. But Robert Johnson is the one who's really associate with this legend because he has a song called “Me and the Devil,” and a song called “Crossroads Blues.” And so, people kind of connect all those things together. But crossroads have been a place where magic, particularly kind of weird, interesting, sometimes dark magic happens, where the scary magic happens, for a long time. Some of that comes down to, there's stories about the idea that, you know, that's where you'd hang your criminals. And so, criminals are, you know, hung across this place between life and death and stuff like that. But it doesn't seem to be directly that, it seems really to be about the fact that it is an intersection of two things. Whenever you have two things intersecting like this, the sea and the shore, right? There's a space there that isn't quite sea, isn't quite shore, right? It's not quite land. It's not quite water, right? And the crossroads are at that intersection, right? So anytime you have intersections, we call that a liminal space, a space between two other places. And that's a really strong place for magic, because normal rules no longer apply in a liminal space. You're always, you know, having to abide by, just sort of the rules of the “in between world,” or, as they would say in Stranger Things, the “upside down,” right?  The upside-down world. And so, because of that, everything that you do at these crossroads can have magical significance. Well, one of the creatures that you could potentially meet at the crossroads - and the crossroads, you know, we mentioned voodoo earlier, in voodoo religion there are spirits that dwell at crossroads that you go and you leave offerings for, but they’re really kind of like children, you leave them candy and things like that, so they're not menacing or dangerous - but one of these spirits that does show up, especially in European lore, is the devil. And I should say, the European lore about the devil is really funny, because sometimes they're talking about this sort of, you know, the Christian sort of satanic devil. And sometimes they seem to be talking about this kind of like mischievous wood spirit that comes out of, you know, Germanic lore and things like that, which is much closer to kind of how we envision, you know, the pointy-horned, goat-hooved devil. That's much more in line with the sort of the Germanic spirit-thing than anything we see described sort of biblically, where he's either sort of described as sort of human-like, or as a giant dragon, you know, depending on where you're looking. So, this kind of weird goat-footed creature that shows up at the crossroads, he'll make deals with you. He can give you things. He can, if you need money, he can find you money, yeah.  You need to get somebody to fall in love with you, he's got something for that, but it's going to cost you something. In in some stories, it's, you know, you pay a penalty, or you pay a price, you bring him an offering and he'll give you this thing. And in some cases, It's, you know, we get the lore about, you sell your soul to the devil, right? I don't know what he's going to do with it.  I don't know what it's worth. Why is he collecting all these souls?  It's not going to do much, At least mine’s not, I'm not getting much use out of mine these days anyway, so. Not much mileage.

JOHN

Seriously, you know, there does seem to be - I don't know if Americans are more or less like anyone else - but there does seem to be a hankering among many people to belong to a cohesive unit where everybody sort of practices the same beliefs and has the same attitude toward nature. You know, the groups that practice the kind of magic you're talking about. I mean, they're also part of that longing, you know, to be part of a meaningful group of people who see the world in the same way and have the same relationship to it. And yes, let's put magic on top of it, and also have superpowers.

CORY

Sure. Yeah. I mean, who wouldn't? Who wouldn't want that, right?  Your point there about that is also that when you put magic on top of it, you start to see nature as magic. You start to see nature as full of wonder, and if you think about the relationship we've had, especially over the last hundred, hundred-and-fifty years, to nature, where we've been, you know, industrial revolution, it's very much sort of transforming nature into a raw material or a resource to be exploited, right? And so, this vision of an enchanted world which could - you know, an enchantment doesn't have to just be like all, you know, sparkles and rainbows. It can be the scary, you know, talking wolf that lives in the dark of the woods and wants to, you know, devour you or something like that - but to see that world, to see the natural world around you as having the potential to be enchanted again, I think that's a big appeal for a lot of people for sure.

JOHN

And one of the things that's charming and encouraging about magic, however one defines it, is that it can reveal existence to be surprising and affirmative and wondrous. You know, the Webb Space Telescope - we see things almost on a daily basis that you just scratch your head and go, I never thought I would see it, right?  We carry our phones with us where we go now, you know. You couldn't do that when I was in high school.

CORY

Oh, no. I mean, yeah, you look at, you know, the computers that got us to the moon fill a room, and didn't have the computing power of, like, the iPhone in our pocket. And that is wondrous.

JOHN

It is wondrous! It deserves the name.

DON

Seriously! And how much of what you would call magic is actually science? You were talking earlier about the remedies where people would use foxglove, and it actually contains a chemical that is useful in treating diseases. So how much of medicine, how much of science is actually just folklore becoming discovered by, you know, people who dig into it and find the actual physical realities of it?

CORY

And I don't want to overstate that either, because, I mean, there's definitely a lot of stuff that's - there's a lot of old wives' tales, things that I would not recommend that you go and do because they will kill you. There are certain things you should definitely not be eating that you know that are not good for you. Like, there was a, there's a mountain remedy that was used for a long time called sheep's tea that basically was you would go out and collect the dung of the sheep and you'd brew it into a tea and you drink as a sort of spring tonic to flush your system. And I'm just going to say, I'm not recommending that to anyone. Not approved! But it's interesting, right?  And we do have this sense of like, people are just trying to deal with their problems. In an era where doctors are not readily available, of course you're going to try to find remedies that work for you. And people who don't understand how those remedies work might label them as magic. And then you get somebody who looks at that and says, well, you're doing magic. We can't have that, right? This really is something that you should be turning to a religious authority for, or some secular authority that this religious authority approves of, in some cases, perhaps. But so, yeah, there is definitely some connection between sort of learning this, you know, like I said, it's observational, right? You're observing patterns in nature as a way of sort of understanding what's going on in the world around you, that's a lot of how natural science starts too. It's just kind of you go in different directions. One of them is very sort of mystery, mysticism driven and one is very rationally driven and trying to, you know, understand the mechanisms. And so, you know, they're at least coming from similar desires. They just kind of have different directions and different outcomes.

DON

And in in the book you talk about different, you know - well, you take us through the house, basically, and say here's some magical stuff that's in your pantry, things that are used in cooking that are magical, but you even say that some of the cleaning agents -  there's a thing you have in there on Pine Sol as being sort of tied to magic. How is Pine Sol tied to magic?

CORY

Sure! Well, so a lot of the people who were working on these kind of – so, turpentine was a very necessary agent for a lot of different applications. You need it for everything from, you know, painting to being able to do industrial cleaning and things like that. So, turpentine, which is derived from pine trees, had to be farmed, and so you had a lot of people doing these turpentine farms down in sort of the Gulf Coastal South. The people who were working on these farms were oftentimes African American people who were either under slavery at one point in time, or had sort of been turned into sharecroppers, or were being employed, but you know, I'm not going to say there were fair wages involved, but they were certainly, you know being put to put to work on these turpentine farms. Well, African American people developed these cleaning formulas based on this turpentine, this pine resin that they're creating. One, it smelled good, if you didn't use the actual turpentine, but you just used the pine resin, it smelled really good. And two, you knew that it cleared stuff away, right? You knew that it got rid of bad things around you. There were some historical, you know, connections and indigenous medicine that had to do with pine, doing pine needle tea or pine needle solutions that could clean things too. There's some European lore about that. So, it all kind of coalesced. And you have these people- there's one fella, wish I could remember his name off the top of my head, I think it's like, I think it's Millard something or other, but he saw some of these formulas that were being used in African American households and he said, well, why don't we just bottle that and sell that? Because this is it's a good, effective, cleaner and people are buying it anyway. But he didn't realize that, I think, a lot of people were actually using this because you weren't just cleaning away the dirt, you were also trying to clean away any kind of, you know, bad spirits that were in the household, you were trying to get rid of any bad luck that was in the household, because it wasn't just soap and water, right? You weren't using soap and water. This this pine very specifically was being used to strip away negative - I don't wanna say negative energy, because that’s not how they would’ve framed it, bad luck is a good way to think of it - so they're trying to strip away, all that bad luck and kick it out of the house, right? So, you pick up a bottle of Pine Sol off your shelf, you don’t necessarily know that's in there, but there's this whole history in it. And so much of it also is, you know, when we think about magic, magic is not, you know, we have these images of witches and magicians and things like that. And sometimes we imagine the sort of the wizard in this high tower, the Gandalf, right? And that seems very elite. Magic mostly was done historically by people who didn't have very much and didn’t have all that much stuff to rely on. So, they had to make do with what was around them. So, they found ways to turn, you know, the ingredients you'd pick up at the supermarket into magic. They found ways to pick up stuff that was just growing in the dirt out back of your house. They turned that into magic. So, it really is kind of the practice of people who were coming from poverty or coming from oppression and just trying to reclaim some of that power in their lives.

DON

Final question: when we look at the fact that Halloween comes up and entertainment always grabs Halloween by the throat, is there any positivity or any reality connected to Hocus Pocus One or Two?

CORY

Well, so I have to say I haven't seen the second one yet. I've heard it’s very good. I've heard it's a very good, you know, sequel. I wasn't, I think I was just the wrong age for the first one when it came out. So, I never really thought much of it. There is the whole, like, the Sanderson Sisters, I think are in Salem. So there's a whole, like, “Salem Witch Thing” that you could kind of go into and say, like, well, you know, were the people practicing witchcraft in Salem? Again, not quite the way that we would think of it, but they were certainly doing folk magic. And I think there's a candle that they light?

DON

Yes, a black a black flame candle. I only know that because I watched it with my granddaughter again.

CORY

Is it good? I hear it's good!

DON

 Well, yeah. It's pretty good, and it's fun, and it's got Bette Midler singing in it. So, you know...

CORY

There's your magic! If you're looking for your magic, it's Bette Midler singing, so, for sure. Yeah, I mean, candles do show up in magic. We do see them, it's because you're transforming something, anything, where you're doing something like burning a candle and it's slowly melting away, but it's giving off light. That's sort of a magical process. So yeah, certainly there's stuff like that that you can point to. But I  wouldn't rely on it for a reliable picture of what modern witchcraft looks like either.

DON

Probably not. Hey, Cory, thanks very much for being with us again and for taking us through...

JOHN

Such a wonderful show.

DON

...modern witchery.

CORY

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me back on! Yeah, this Is a lot of fun!

JOHN

And all the best with your book as well. It just is a is a wonderful read. You can open it almost anywhere and learn things you didn't know.

CORY

Thanks! That's the goal, right? That's why it's so big. That makes it the door stop that can hold your door open.

JOHN

I was wondering about the big-ness. Was this a, you know, a magnum opus for you? was this many years in the making?

CORY

Ah, no. This took about three years to put together. There was a photo, when I finished it, of the stack of books that I had used. And I literally built a book fort around myself. Like, imagine a pillow fort, but it's all books, from the research.

DON

Yeah, well, it certainly worked out and it is, like John says, it is a great read, and we would heartily recommend people go and pick it up at the store, because there's a surprise on every page, when you're talking about just every everyday things that we run into that wind up being connected in some way or another to magic and witchcraft.

CORY

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it!

DON

OK, and thanks for. Being with us again, Cory.

CORY

Thank you guys so much. Have a wonderful and happy Halloween!

JOHN

You too.