Clear Cosmology: The Elements - Quintessence

Spirit. Soul. Aether. Azoth. Prana. Quintessence, the fifth element.

Due to the nature of our research, we find ourselves obliged to start our exploration of the elements with this most misunderstood feature of ancient phenomenology.

Obligatory "Leeloo multipass" reference.

Because this topic is the subject of so many jokes, we’ll have to get them all out of the way.

What isn’t Quintessence?
Quintessence is not love. Quintessence is not family. Quintessence is undoubtedly not the friends we made along the way.

The talking horse program lied to you.

What are the Qualities of Quintessence?
Unlike the other four elements, Quintessence is not easy to relate because it does not have a discrete material correlate. 

This presents a contradiction because quintessence is both the non-material element and is present in all matter.

What is Quintessence?

Quintessence - the element of animation.

There is no standardized image for quintessence, though it is often represented
with a circle, an eight-spoked wheel (indicating motion), a spiral, and the
Seal of Light created by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

What does that even mean?
All matter in the universe is potentially animate in the minds of the ancients. That is, it has an essence that governs its actions. Any material that acts in the world has animation.

In Pythagorean thought, this element was a fluidic substance, an etheric field that filled all things in the universe, not unlike the Force in Star Wars.

All four material elements are regarded as having more or less animation relative to their densities, as seen in the vertical model described in our Four Elements article.

Earth has little to no animation,* but it cannot be denied that water flows and the sea tosses, nor that the wind blows, and that fire consumes and dances and casts light and imparts its animation to substances subject to its heat.

Animation, however, is a more sophisticated concept than more movement/less movement. It has two dimensions of consideration that are relevant to our research. These are the anima/animata (particular/general) axis and the masculine/feminine (shaping/generating) axis.

*Compiler's Note: The subject of animated earth will be covered in the *Earth* article.

Anima/Animus
You, dear reader, may already have some of your own ideas about what a “soul” is. Perhaps you think of it as the mind of a person that survives past death, the origin of ghosts and demons, and all manner of supernatural things. Perhaps you’re an atheist who thinks that souls are made-up nonsense.

Well, you’re wrong in both cases.

Both of these positions come from a misunderstanding of what a soul is. Even since antiquity, so much has been hitched to the term that a very simple, easy-to-grasp idea has been buried in ambiguities and associations.

Let’s tackle the disbelief in souls:

    1) Go outside. 

    2) Find a bug. 

Does the bug move? If yes, it has a soul because that’s what a soul is.

If it isn’t moving, it doesn’t have a soul. Because it’s dead.

Let's do another:

    1) Find a houseplant. 

    2) Does it photosynthesize? 

    3) Does it grow? 

If yes, it has a soul because that’s what a soul is.

Yes, even this thing. Unless it's plastic.

A soul, or animus, is simply the animating force of a discrete thing. You have a soul. Your dog has a soul. Your ficus plant has a soul.

Does a thing act under its own power? Does it respond to forces acting upon it? Does it move, grow, or shrink?  Then it has an animus. The soul is the animating principle of the particular, simple as.

What about-
The notions of disembodied souls, immortal souls, and things like moral charge are secondary developments. They are personal/religious beliefs beyond the scope of this article. Our concern here is the baseline, lowest-common-denominator understanding.  These innovations in the notion of animus will be explored in future articles, as will the soul/spirit distinction (or lack thereof).

Can one thing have more than one soul?
Many cultures believe in multiple souls or the soul in numerous distinct components, where the loss of one lead to illness or death. This includes the dualistic notion of souls found in the Platonic/Homeric tradition, 19th-century Spiritualist belief, and ancient Chinese thought (Hun and Po).

Other traditions had even more complex notions of the human soul, including the Norse and, most famously, the Egyptians (whose soul could have anywhere from 3-8 facets, depending on source). The traditional beliefs of the Hmong of Southeast Asia hold that chronic conditions may be caused by the loss of the soul of a particular body part, which must be called back to the body.

Don’t be afraid to play with poly-animate thinking in your own storytelling!

Animata
In anthropology, animism is the belief in individualized animating forces. In the same discipline, animatism is the belief in impersonal animating forces.

Is there a cosmic force that you regard as being impersonal, which is to say, without individuality or persona? Do you view luck as a force rather than a willful actor (like "Lady Luck")? Then luck is an animatistic force. 

Charms like this attract luck as a force rather than signifying
devotion to a person or persona of luck.

You can readily find other animata elsewhere. Lightning is regarded as an animatistic force in many cultures, as are miasmas. Hell, you could consider the radiation coming off of uranium ore to be animata.

Radiation knows no reason; it cannot be negotiated with; it simply is.

An incredibly influential animatistic notion in modern fantasy fiction is mana. Mana is a supernatural concept from the cultures of Oceania and Polynesia. Mana is as definitionally diverse as the cultures that believe it, but the through-line is that it is a potent supernatural force that can be invested in deities, persons, places, and things. In some places, the mana held by tribal chieftains was thought to pollute the very ground they walked on with supernatural potency, causing people to become ill if it wasn’t ritually dispersed.*

*Anecdotal: This compiler cannot find old education materials from the anthropology lectures this compiler attended more than a decade ago.

A derived form of this concept is endemic to fantasy, especially in video games, where it is a manageable resource that fuels the abilities of spellcasting player characters.

90% of our memory of Diablo II consists of staring at this thing.

Animatistic forces such as mana provide many opportunities for storytellers, not just because they serve as a convenient resource for “fueling” magical action but because of their potential side effects!

Suppose magic can be engaged as an impersonal substance with predictable behaviors and lingering effects. In that case, it encourages the storyteller to consider the long-term consequences of magic that don’t stem from the retribution of an intelligent supernatural actor.

Paizo’s Golarion setting has a region known as the Mana Wastes, full of magical dead zones and pockets of unpredictable wild magic due to a conflict between two powerful magical empires in the distant past.

Masculine and Feminine
These are terms with a lot of baggage, especially in the current political climate, so we’ll cut to the chase and use the Hermetic definitions:

Masculine - That which shapes but does not generate.

Feminine - That which generates but does not shape.

Observe that the upward-oriented triangle (masculine) and the downward-oriented triangle (feminine) find union in the hexagrammatic Seal of Solomon. This will be explored further in our article on the [Pentagram].

Masculine and feminine are the binary characteristics of universal animation, the shaping and generating principles, respectively. All observable animation shapes, generates, or demonstrates some admixture of the two. They can either be creative or destructive. The actions of the sculptor and the vandal show the opposite polarities of shaping, while the soil of the field and the rust of the plow reveal the creative/destructive dimensions of the generating principle, nurturing the plants of the field or breaking a tool down from purposed shape to its constituent matter.

These ideas of masculine and feminine as principles are damn-near universal, finding clear articulation in the West in Neoplatonic/Hermetic thought and in the East in Taoism (Yin/Yang). These definitions cut through the formal magical traditions, such as alchemy and Solomonic sorcery, and are an essential feature of many conceptions of enlightenment. 

In alchemy, the state of enlightenment is communicated through the Philosopher’s Stone and its anthropomorphic icon, the Rebis. The Rebis is a bicephalic man/woman figure that expresses the hypostasis (transcendent unification) of these cosmic animating principles and, thus, a wholly liberated creative will. 

This has global parallels, as can be seen in the androgynous bissu shamans of the Bugis culture in Thailand, as well as in the Maya-region shaman priests known as mother-fathers (Quiche: s. Chuchkahaw, pl. Chuchkahawib.)

The bissu Puang Matoa Saidi.

The universality of these definitions will become more apparent throughout this archive’s development as we explore both cosmological structuring and magical practice. Additionally, we’ll review the numerous other associations wrapped up in “masculine” and “feminine” in our article on the Tria Prima of alchemy.

What about the sexes?
The sexes, male and female, are downstream of these animating forces. Sex is subordinate to masculine and feminine; masculine and feminine are not subordinate to sex.

Alternative Expression?
Perhaps you’re uncomfortable with the terms “masculine” and “feminine.” This might be for personal reasons, or these words won’t play well with your target audience. Are there other framing devices available?

Yes. Many.

Let's look at just one.

Wyrd: Fire and Ice
According to Nevill Drury in The Watkins Dictionary of Magic, the concept of wyrd (Norse urd) is the notion in Anglo-Saxon sorcery that the universe is a complex interplay of the conflicting forces of fire and ice.

A quick internet search shows that…this may not be the normative case, as wyrd is usually used to describe fate, and the symbol for wyrd is a web describing the interplay of forces governing destiny.

This might not represent fire and ice.

The Neopagan movement may have influenced Drury’s definition, and unfortunately that movement is not always accurate in recreating ancient beliefs.

However, the ancestral mythology of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse share Germanic origins. Norse mythology tells us that the universe was created by the violent meeting of fire and ice in the Ginnungagap (“yawning void”). 

If fire and ice are the primordial duality in Germanic folklore, that’s a perfectly acceptable framing to exploit! If all animation in the universe is a consequential result of the clash of ice and fire, thinking of wyrd in terms of the interplay of fire and ice is valid, even if that may not have been how the Anglo-Saxons would frame it.

Sidenote: If anyone is interested in correcting us, feel free to namedrop a source.

Would we substitute?
While forces like fire and ice are rich in texture, they’re limiting as both refer to tangibles and come from people living in harsh northern environments. Such a framing would be unsuitable for a story set in a world primarily influenced by Egypt or Mesoamerica, as in both regions, ice would be a sufficiently uncommon phenomenon to prevent it from being thought coequal with fire (sun, stars, volcanic activity, etc.).

One of the significant advantages of the shaping/generating dichotomy is that it’s abstract enough to avoid these sorts of hiccups. It allows enough room for characters and cultures to make their own culturally relevant (if cosmically imperfect) interpretations without leading to logical inconsistencies in the fundamentals of your story's systems.

In Summary
Quintessence, or soul, is a much simpler concept than its cultural baggage might suggest. A firm grasp of the simplest, most basic definitions will serve you well as you develop into more complex subject matter.

Bibliography

-Drury, N. (2007). The Watkins Dictionary of Magic (First South Asian). Watkins Publishing. 

-Freidel, D. A., Schele, L., & Parker, J. (2001). Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. Perennial. 

-Mythology & Fiction Explained. (2017a, October 17). The creation of the Universe - Norse mythology. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9h08JOcSY 

-National Geographic. (2017b, January 15). Shaman performs rite to protect a man’s soul from the underworld | national geographic. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxIXIi1kR0 

-Paizo, Inc. (n.d.). Mana Wastes. PathfinderWiki. https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Mana_Wastes

-Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, April 25). Bissu. Wikipedia. https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bissu 

Edit History:

-5/15/2023: I briefly expanded the section on the multi-part human soul to provide some better starting points for research for readers. Also added some piping.

Magical Practice: What is Magic?

There’s a significant problem in tackling this question because nearly any definition I have found in my research has mistakenly emphasized only one dimension of magic.

Aleister Crowley, in his 1929 work Magick in Theory and Practice, presented this formulation (original formatting preserved):

“MAGICK

is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with the Will."

The late Nevill Drury, who penned The Watkins Dictionary of Magic and The Watkins Dictionary of the Esoteric, gives this definition:

“Magic The overarching name given to the body of techniques and ritual practices used to harness the secret powers of nature and to influence events for one’s own purpose.”

We could provide other examples of definitions for the word from other sources, but they’re all in the same direction: They are all concerned with magic as a craft.

The Problem with Craft
Alright, they’re all concerned with craft. This archive is concerned primarily with assisting fantasy storytellers with understanding historical inspiration. Aren’t a lot of fantasy writers obsessed with their magic systems? How do these definitions run against that grain?

We here at Damigeron's Dungeon believe this approach is counterproductive because magic refers to a quality and an action. The craft falls under action but fails to communicate anything about quality. 

Let’s look at a few examples of magic as quality.

Jack and the Beanstalk
We all know the story of Jack and the Beanstalk: boy sells his starving family’s most valuable possession and gets magic beans instead of what he was supposed to buy. His mother furiously throws them out the window, and the following day, they’ve grown into a giant beanstalk that reaches up into the clouds, with a giant and a goose that lays golden eggs, a golden harp, or something of that nature.

Art by Walter Crane (1845-1915)

Where, in this story, is the “Science” (knowledge) and “Art” (trade/craft/skill) of magic? Where is the “technique” or “ritual practice?” What secret powers were “harnessed?” Who “influenced events for their own purposes?”

The story hinges on Jack’s mother not appreciating the value of the beans because she thought her son was scammed. There is no intentionality to the end of the road, to the giant’s home or to the golden goose. There is no craft in the story; the beans are simply magic because. 

If the growth properties of the beans qualify as magic and the narrative conveys no magical craft, then a craft-exclusive definition of magic is unsuitable in the generic.

Magical Magnets
The attractive power of magnets is now well-understood by science, and proper magnets no longer fall under the domain of the mystical, but that doesn’t mean they weren't considered magic in the past. Further, there are other kinds of magnets in the magical record.

Lecouteux’s source on this appears to be Aristoteles de lapidibus. Unfortunately, we cannot verify this, as the only English work we’ve found that might go over a translation of that text looks to be behind a paywall. (We’re not paying $58.00 for access to one paper.)

Our example from that source text is what Lecouteux calls the “magnet of fingernails.” 

The magnet of fingernails has a few bizarre properties. First is that it’s incredibly soft, yet impervious to being scratched by iron or diamond. Despite this imperviousness, it will crack when in contact with blood. 

Second, and more importantly, it will rip your fingernails off.

Why? No clue. What we know is that it pulls nail clippings to itself like iron filings to a regular magnet, and if it gets in contact with the nails still on your fingers, they’re coming off.

Say goodbye to these!

This particular magnet does not appear to be a manufactured material (as some of the others), meaning that the stone's fingernail-tearing field is intrinsic. That also means that intrinsic magical properties extend beyond the genre of fairytales!

Mount Zimurc’s Burning Stone
According to the European legends of the great Oriental Christian patriarch-king, Prester John, the zimur stones of Mount Zimurc burn continuously, so hot that they must be picked up with iron tongs. This legend likewise tells of a freezing stone with the opposite effects. The northern threshold of Prester John’s palace is made of freezing stone, and you must bear a burning stone to survive passage through it, while the southern entrance was created with the burning zimur, and one had to carry a freezing stone to survive the intense heat.

Image taken from Maddy's blogspot, information taken from Lecouteux.
Actual source unknown to this compiler.

The same stories claim that the zimur stone could be crafted into vessels that could cook food without fire.

One might be inclined to argue that these properties are “natural” because they are intrinsic, like the magnet of fingernails. However, we cannot back up that assessment; modern science has not observed and verified such things. They contradict scientific understanding, not just because they are clearly fictional, but because they are irrationalities that defy normal rules of cause and effect.

This finally brings us to our definition of magic.

What is Magic?
For our definition to be useful, we need to be all-inclusive of everything magical while being entirely exclusive of everything else. To this end we cannot define magic as a science in the modern sense, nor would parascience be a sufficient descriptor.

The word demands two distinct definitions:

Magic (Generic) - That which circumvents the normal rules of cause and effect by virtue of novelty.

Magic (Craft) - The art and science of circumventing the normal rules of cause and effect by virtue of novelty.

These definitions include everything described under magic as a craft and all irrational, parascientific, and inexplicable supernatural phenomena.

This excludes the body of modern science, which (relevant to this discussion) refers to implementing novel means to determine normal cause and effect, which is not magic.

This also excludes implementing knowledge of normal cause and effect to enact change in the world to alter the outcome of events or manifest one’s will, which would qualify as engineering.

Extracting Value
These definitions of magic are all-inclusive, leaving room for the high-minded, systematized parascientific approach observed in some practices and employed by many a fantasy author while also allowing for recognition of the unique qualities and blunders that fall outside of intentional action.

Storytellers with this in mind can make more deliberate decisions about how they go about systematizing or deconstructing magic in their own stories.

When we next return to this topic, we’ll go over the broad strokes of how people practice and think of magic.

Bibliography

-Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. 1929. 

-Drury, Nevill. The Watkins Dictionary of Magic. First South Asian ed., Watkins Publishing, 2007. 

-Lecouteux, Claude. A Lapidary of Sacred Stones: Their Magical and Medicinal Powers Based on the Earliest Sources. Inner Traditions, 2012. 

-Maddy. “The Legend of Prester John.” The Legend of Prester John ~, 5 Mar. 2016, https://maddy06.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-legend-of-prester-john.html. 

Intriguing Instruments: The Magician's Tools

Here at Damigeron’s Dungeon, we are interested in tools. Tools for writers. Tools that help writers tell their stories, convey character, and engage their audience. These tools provide incredible utility across numerous fronts.

The tools we’ll be talking about today are, conveniently, literal tools.

The magician’s tools.

What are the Magician’s Tools?
The magician’s tools are a standardized set of tools employed in Western magical practice, which correspond to the four elements: the pentacle (earth), the cup (water), the wand (air), and the sword (fire).

Ripped from a .pdf scan of the 2004 Indian publication of Nevill Drury’s The Dictionary of the Esoteric. This compiler has the 2004 UK edition in hard copy.

The Standard Set
Before we get into the virtues of the magician’s tools individually, we want to sell you what the tools are to you as a storyteller: a standard set.

A standard set is a consistent set of expected components. Any audience, in prose or visual media, will recognize a standard set, and with familiarity comes engagement. Once they start picking up on these recurrent features, be it in story structure or in diegetic articles (things within the story's world), the audience is rewarded for paying attention with a sense of understanding. When the storyteller takes advantage of this understanding, they can exploit it for foreshadowing or subverting audience expectations. You can only deliver a compelling twist if you've mastered the audience's expectations.

We see standard sets employed for character design in media all the time: from the four elements (Avatar: The Last Airbender) to the four humors (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), the zodiac (Saint Seiya), the Major Arcana of the Tarot (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders). These devices give you a set number of roles to fill, themes and motifs to work with, and expectations to realize, subvert, or subvert through novel realization. The limited nature of these sets helps to provide a consistent aesthetic while also providing room for some incredibly creative interpretation and reinterpretation.

In the case of the magician’s tools, all four are physical objects that any single character can carry and interact with, and each is an avenue for characterization. Suppose the toolset is, in fact, standard across multiple characters. In that case, the contrast in behavior between characters can be isolated along these avenues, allowing the audience to compare and contrast the characters through direct parallels.

A standard set of tools is even more valuable in visual media as it creates a shared visual language. The standard set becomes a reference point for meaning, providing the audience with a manual for interpreting character design choices.

Using standard sets gives the storyteller an easy tool for building characters and worlds and a tool for the audience to engage in the work more actively. The more actively engaged your audience is, the better!

Why the Magician’s Tools?
So, I’ve made a quick case for standard sets as a category and even touched on standardized sets of tools, but that hasn’t said anything about the value of the magician’s tools in particular. There are several practical reasons, but let’s examine why the magician’s tools are the magician’s tools.

Pentacle: This is often a medallion, a disk, or may be drawn upon the ground. The pentacle is just another name for a pentagram, which represents the universe (the circle) and all the phenomenology of the five elements (the unicursal, five-pointed star). The pentacle, therefore, represents the universe as a stage on which all the elements interact. This is the passive feminine.

Cup: The cup is the partitioning of matter from general to particular, the first measure, from water to this water. It is a womb, a receptacle where the previously chaotic potential is put to ordered purpose by an active will. With the instruction of the shaping will, the generating potential is realized, and something new is brought into the world. This is the active feminine.

Wand: Also, the rod or club. The emblem of authority, the wand directs the attention of man, spirit, and element, manifesting the magician's will by direction. This is the passive masculine, like the king on his throne (Major Arcana: The Emperor).

Sword: The magician wields the sword, performing his will actively in the world. It is a device of direct, aggressive action. This is the active masculine (Major Arcana: The Charioteer).

Image of the Aces shamelessly ripped from http://overthemoon-oraclecards.blogspot.com/ , original source A. E. Waite's Tarot deck from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).

Practical Considerations
Stepping away from the mystical qualities of these tools, depending on the kind of story you might be trying to tell, there are practical concerns. 

Diegetic concerns involve the practicability of the tools themselves. In your more typical medieval fantasy narrative, all of these tools are readily available and fall into the realm of basic traveler’s gear. Could you imagine your hero going on a journey without a cup (or waterskin, drinking horn, or a bowl)? What about a walking stick? It would be perfectly normal for someone traveling a great distance to carry a hanger or other weapon to defend themselves. These are all things your magician would have with them even if they weren’t a magician! It also encourages them to be resourceful if they get separated from their belongings.

Pentacles are trickier. What if the practice of magic is illegal? Jewelry can be hidden under clothes or hidden in pouches or pockets. If their magic requires a more literal stage, they may draw it in the dirt with their shoe or use powder on hard surfaces.

A Step Further
We can now move past the traditional tools themselves and back into something more meta: the abstractions that govern the magician’s tools:

• The Stage
• The Vessel
• The Instrument
• The Tool

The Stage: The place of magical action, either literally in a platform or demarcated space or in more representative form, in the medallion, the disc, the coin, the shield ring, the combat shield, the roundel, etc. 

Magic is an abstract notion, so particular actions performed must be elevated out of their material particularity. They must operate on the abstract plane of ideas to achieve action-at-a-distance. On or before the stage, he may thrust his sword in the direction of his target in malice and thus wound their spirit (which may be creatively interpreted a million different ways). Alternately, the magician might create a potion of reagents whose literal chemical contents may be poisonous but perform an offering of the concoction from the magical stage, pouring out the brew from his cup to the patient and thus confer the symbolic associations of the reagents to the patient’s spirit.

The magical stage indicates, clarifies, and elevates activity into the dimension of magical phenomena. 

The Vessel: The vessel is a womb in which creative potential is generated and the particular conceived. This may be the standard cup of water, chalice, goblet, or bowl, but it may also be the crucible, oven, or the furnace as womb. Unshaped matter or broken/dis-purposed material goes in with an ordering intent, and what comes out is a new, realized thing. Chaos to order, order to chaos, or from one order to another.

Alternately, it can deny action by indefinite holding, as King Solomon imprisoned the demon Kunopaston in a phial.

The Instrument: The instrument is any device that directs, be it by authority in the case of the wand or rod by directing attention, or physically, in the case of the fan or the oar. Musical instruments, too, can serve this function, altering the space in range of hearing and exciting the audience. The tool governs relationships between things and passively shapes the space of magical action by changing those relationships indirectly.

The Tool: The sword is a tool that performs a direct action. In the case of a literal sword, that direct action is to cut and destroy. 

Deliberate destruction can directly shape the world by removing the undesirable or more carefully employed to create something new. In the hands of Marduk, the sword was a creative tool used to split the dragon Tiamat in two. He used Tiamat's halves to make the dome of the heavens above and the land of the earth below. Similarly, the sculptor takes his chisel and destroys the stone medium until it is an acceptable shape, and the stone becomes a particular thing, such as a statue, a frieze, or a block. Carpenters do the same, deliberately destroying wood until it is the desired shape, and it ceases to be just material and becomes a purposed object.

With the tool, the magician performs the desired magical action, personally removing or transforming something in the world as the direct agent of change.

Taken from the 2001 Benjamin Rowe digitization of Eliphas Levi’s The Dogma and Ritual of Transcendental Magic: Part I. On top of numerous other symbols in this pentagram, you can see the four tools of the magician: the disc, the cup, the wand, and the sword. Additionally, you can see two ritual daggers.

Can the Magician’s Tools be Substituted?
Of course!

In the previous section, I mentioned a handful of substitutes that fit the function of the relevant abstraction. Each of these substitutions suggests a wildly different relationship between the magician and the universal phenomena of the elements. Not only are the traditional tools subject to near-infinite permutation but there are a nearly infinite number of opportunities for substitution, which expands the creative possibilities for magical expression in your narrative and a more excellent vocabulary for the language of your character design!

In the future, we will do an in-depth analysis of each tool for the meaningful qualities of permutation and a detailed analysis of a host of substitutions.

What About Substituting Elements?
Substituting one elemental association for another is perfectly fine, too. Historically, there has been some argument over the associations between wand and sword, with the leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, MacGregor Mathers, stating that the wand is the instrument of fire (with the wand as a torch) and the sword the instrument of air. This is especially present in matters concerning the minor arcana of the Tarot.

There has been some suggestion that Mathers was lying to obfuscate arcane knowledge from the uninitiated with his own deck (I can't cite an exact source, but I've seen it in multiple places). However, we cannot ignore that the minor arcana of the Tarot leans into a subordinate-active and dominant-passive masculine dynamic in the treatment of the Knight and the King cards for each suit. This dynamic is definitely worthy of exploration, as it adds another layer of complexity.

Some of our substitution examples violate elemental prescriptions, treating the crucible and the oven, both associated with fire, as being in the same category as the cup, the water instrument.

This can have far-reaching consequences on your characters’ magical practice. Resourceful characters will mix and match in a pinch. Still, characters whose magical style is typified by these altered elemental associations should hold a worldview reflected in such substitutions.

What About Other Tools?
We have limited this list to the four elemental tools for brevity. Some of you reading may have done your own research already and know that often other tools are involved in ritual magical practice. First, as shown in Levi’s pentagram in the “Why the Magician’s Tools” section, is the dagger (often called the “athame”), which is employed in numerous activities in the ritual, both for magical and strictly utilitarian reasons. Usually, such daggers have unique qualities, such as the color of their handle.

Additionally, if you’re familiar with the Wiccan practice, the witch's tools, which can further include the thurible/censer, the candelabra, the scourge, altar cloth, ritual cords, the besom/broomstick, and the cauldron.

Those familiar with the Key of Solomon will know that it calls for "the knife, sword, sickle, poniard, dagger, lance, wand, staff, and other instruments of magical art.” That is, in fact, the entire title of a chapter of the work. According to Joseph H. Peterson, some of these are repeated misidentification of the same tool, conflating synonymous terms, or misunderstanding obscure Latin.

Clavicula Salomonis, Mathers translation, Plate XIII.

Clavicula Salomonis, Mathers translation, Plate XIV.

We have opted not to explore these expanded toolsets too deeply, as they’re particular to specific practices and not as broadly applicable, and they do map on neatly to the elements. While new tools can increase the sophistication of a practiced system in your story, larger sets are cumbersome and unwieldy and diminish opportunities for novel action compared to a more straightforward standard set.

Putting it All Together
The suggested rules of our standard set sound fine and dandy, but we have yet to see the above suggestions adequately implemented. To this end, we will provide four example characters: three with the standard set and one with substitution.

DONAR THE CRUEL
Donar the Cruel is a sorcerer tyrant, an aged but active man who believes all his eyes fall upon is subject to his will. His pentacle is a medallion on a string of beads wrapped around his left hand (the hand that takes), conveying that the whole world is in his sinister possession. His cup is a goblet of jewel-encrusted gold made from the tributes he has extracted from the noble houses he has brought to heel. His rod terminates in a dominating hand, index finger extended in command. His sword is short and narrow, its blade acid-etched with the infernal pact granting him his sorcerous powers.

EURIC THE KING’S MAN
Euric is one of the king’s men, a knight, and the king’s own cupbearer. He serves as an investigator of the royal house, cunning in magic. His pentacle is a signet ring bearing the mark of the royal house, which grants him authority in all the kingdom, secular and mystical. His cup is the badge of his office, given to him when he was appointed cupbearer. His sword is a straight, double-edged arming sword, the same sword he wears in travel and war: simple, straightforward, functional, the emblem of his subordination to his liege. He bears a processional mace for his wand, used during coronation ceremonies, with its gilt bronze head cast in the shape of the sun. Where Euric goes, he roots out threats to the kingdom, his investigations the shining, revelatory light of royal attention.

LEANNÁN THE TRAVELER
Leannán is a young man with some magical wit, off to seek his fortune. He sleeps under the stars wrapped in his cloak and only stands out from other men on the road by his bright eyes and broad smile. He uses his dirk to draw a pentacle in the dirt or carve it in a tree, if necessary. He keeps a small wooden drinking cup in his kit, in the same pouch as his horn spoons, flint, and iron. He never goes anywhere without his shillelagh, which he uses as a walking stick but can use to ward off troublemakers in a pinch. A short hanger (side sword) at his hip is curved with enough of a sharpened back edge to be useful both ways in a fight.

ULYSSES THE BLACK
Ulysses is one of the worst pirates around, named “the Black” for his all-consuming maliciousness. Not simply a pirate, he’s a magician even fouler than Donar the Cruel. He is a nihilist and acts only in the interests of satisfying his most basic and vulgar appetites. His pentacle is etched upon a whale's tooth, in line with his belief that all that exists is only to be devoured by an all-consuming void. Instead of a cup, he drapes a cape of net over his left side, unfurling it to snare whatever spirits he commands to do his bidding. His wand is a stolen telescope, which he uses to sight his prey and direct his crew, men, and spirit alike. He has a hanger at his hip, but for magic, he uses a harpoon, his every magical act in service of pulling in his prey. He cannot create; he can only destroy.

Conclusion
Any standard set provides a host of options for any storyteller, and any author of the fantastic would do well to consider the opportunities provided by severe exploration of these possibilities.

To that end, we will explore these tools in their dedicated articles, their general symbolism, their permutations, their alternative associations, and the same for their substitutions.

*    *    *    *    *

See Also:

Clear Cosmology

Introduction to the Elements

Intriguing Instruments

Instrument of Earth - The Pentagram [Pending]

Instrument of Water - The Cup [Pending]

Instrument of Air - The Wand [Pending]

Instrument of Fire - The Sword [Pending]

*    *    *    *    *

BIBLIOGRAPHY

-Academy, OTM. “The Role of Tarot Suit Emblems.” Over The Moon Oracle Cards, 14 Jan. 2016, http://overthemoon-oraclecards.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-role-of-tarot-suit-emblems.html. Primary image source A. E. Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).

-Drury, Nevill. The Dictionary of the Esoteric: More than 3,000 Entries on the Mystical & Occult Traditions. First Indian Edition ed., Motilal Banarsidass, 2004. Original Publisher Watkins Publishing Limited, London.
https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Esoteric-Nevill-Drury/dp/8120819896
https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Esoteric-Nevill-Drury/dp/1842930419

-Levi, Eliphas. Dogma Et Rituel De La Haute Magie, Part I: The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic. Translated by Arthur Edward Waite, vol. 1, Rider & Company. Transcribed and converted to Adobe Acrobat format by Benjamin Rowe, June, 2001. Page 25.
https://darkbooks.org/pp.php?v=1693947022 

-Mathers, Samuel Liddell MacGregor. The Key of Solomon the King, “Chapter VIII - Of the Knife, Sword, Sickle, Poniard, Dagger, Lance, Wand, Staff, and Other Instruments of Magical Art.” Www.sacred-Texts.com, 2003, https://www.sacred-texts.com/grim/kos/kos44.htm. Scanned at sacred-texts.com, July 2000. J. B. Hare, redactor. Reformatted August 2003. Plates XIII and XIV.

-Peterson, Joseph H., and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. The Key of Solomon the King, “Foreword”, Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC., Newburyport, MA, 2016, p. xiii.
https://www.amazon.com/Key-Solomon-King-Clavicula-Salomonis/dp/1578636086

Clear Cosmology - Introduction to the Elements v2.0

Compiler's Note: In a previous version of this article, we spent a great deal of text going over various elemental models that we weren't investigating and burying the lead, which is counter to the purpose of this article series. We apologize to anyone who read through that absolute mess.

THE ELEMENTS
Taking our first significant step into the abstract world of magical cosmology, we have opted to start at the ground level of material phenomenology. This subject should be something familiar to all readers: the four elements.

The four elements are an omnipresent motif in modern media. Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire serve as such a long-standing framework thematically that their use often degenerates into cliche. Whether the four elements are utilized with low conceptual resolution (Final Fantasy I) or with great care and attention (Avatar: The Last Airbender), many storytellers and game developers have found the model useful.

Despite the widespread and long-standing implementation of the four elements as an organizing model in fiction, our research has led us to regard this implementation as largely shallow, lacking in some of the model's most crucial features. Here, we want to demystify the four elements and maximize their potential as a tool for other writers.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE FOUR ELEMENTS
The four elements naturally map onto the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

EARTH/SOLIDS
Solids are typically opaque, dense, and heavier than the liquids or gases around them. The first point of reference for solids is the ground at their feet. On top of that, solid, opaque things were heavy and would fall down to other material of its kind. Therefore, nearly all solids were understood as earth or stone. 

WATER/LIQUIDS
All liquids flow over, down, and into the earth, seeking the lowest point. The first and most essential liquid is water. Therefore, all liquid behavior is framed by water. All liquids, regardless of their actual water content, can be categorized as a variety of water.

AIR/GAS
Gasses are thin and typically transparent to the point of invisibility. They are primarily perceived through physical contact: a gust of wind, a foul smell, a burning of the eyes. Visible gasses like steam, fog, or mustard gas flow up into the atmosphere, and even the dense gases coalesce over earth and water, resting above the lower elements. The most ergonomic way for the ancient man to summarize the entire gas phenomenon was by analogy of the air in his lungs.

FIRE/PLASMA
Controlled human interaction through ionizing, light-producing processes has been limited throughout our history to fire. It was the only means by which we could produce our own light, and our most significant light source was the sun, which burned our skin and heated the world. Naturally, we connected all light production to some variety of fire, as the fire was the only light source we could regularly and tangibly interact with. We also observed that flames rise upwards as though reaching for the lights in the heavens, which themselves appear to float upon the air.

The above descriptions seem straightforward enough, and in many works, they utilize most of these features to inform character, culture, and design. What are we on about when we say most models ignore one of the model's most crucial features?

ELEMENTAL VERTICALITY
The four elements describe a vertical hierarchy of superior-to-inferior elements.

(Diagram shamelessly copied from The Language of Creation)

We did not understand this until we read The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis by Matthieu Pageau. Pageau's book uses diagrams to describe the structure of biblical narratives and images and developed this model from Genesis 1, which represents the physical placement of the elements in the universe based on opacity and density.

Once we read this, we recognized the same model described in the Corpus Hermeticum, the body of Neo-Platonic texts that form the basis of the philosophy of Hermeticism, which in turn informed European alchemical and magical tradition. From the second book of the Corpus Hermeticum, Poemander, verses 6-7:

6. Then from that Light, a certain Holy Word joined itself unto
Nature, and out flew the pure and unmixed Fire from the moist
Nature upward on high; it is exceeding Light, and Sharp, and
Operative withal. And the Air which was also light, followed the Spirit
and mounted up to Fire (from the Earth and the Water) insomuch
that it seemed to hang and depend upon it.

7. And the Earth and the Water stayed by themselves so mingled
together, that the Earth could not be seen for the Water, but they
were moved, because of the Spiritual Word that was carried upon
them.

and 16-17:

16. And the Circulation or running round of these, as the Mind
willeth, out of the lower or downward-born Elements brought forth
unreasonable or brutish creatures, for they had no reason, the Air
flying things, and the Water such as swim.

17. And the Earth and the Water was separated, either from the other,
as the Mind would: and the Earth brought forth from herself such
Living Creatures as she had, four-footed and creeping Beasts, wild
and tame.

Anecdotally, this compiler has run into this model repeatedly in these texts, and the assumptions that come with this model are clear as day when one digs into magical tradition.

We'll refer to this model hereafter as the Hierarchy of Elements.

THE HIERARCHY OF ELEMENTS

Hierarchy? In my Cosmos?
We recognize why this feature has been under-utilized, as vertical hierarchies are tricky and often unfashionable. Many audiences would read "the superiority of fire" as a moral or value statement rather than a description of its normative spatial position. Why, if the Fire Nation in Avatar: The Last Airbender was given a model of the world that placed their inherited element closer to the stars, there'd be no convincing any of them they weren't rightful rulers of the world!

We recognize that Avatar's political and cultural considerations are not well-suited for this dimension of the four elements. However, Avatar is not the only story that can be told (or re-told) using these devices. Understanding the hierarchical nature of elemental phenomenology is essential to making an informed decision on whether to cut or incorporate. Regardless of your decision as a writer, it will most certainly be a decision after reading this.

Okay, so Hierarchy
This vertical hierarchy operates along the axes of density, opacity, animation, abstraction, and complexity, which are reinforced by the ancient notion of "like-attracts-like" (which can be directly observed as noted in the phenomenology of the states of matter).

(Diagram shamelessly refined from The Language of Creation)

EARTH
Earth is the densest material, composing the lowest point of our phenomenological reality. Earth falls to earth. Earth is opaque, too complicated for us to see through. Earth is the least animate and most feminine (generative) of the elements, passively generating stone, metal, and plant life. All other elements rest atop the earth.

WATER
Earth is less dense than earth but denser than air. Water flows together down to the lowest point it can reach. Water can be opaque, translucent, or transparent and possesses an opacity gradient at depth. Water is more animate than earth but less animate than air. Water acts upon earth, changing it to mud, facilitating chemical reactions, and instructing the plant seed to grow. Water is active on earth but passively conforms to the earth's shape where unchanged, and is brought to animation by the shaping of the wind which whips it into waves.

AIR
Lighter than water but denser than fire, air moves as if under its own accord. When it flows into a container (earth), it does not occupy the lowest point but instead the whole of the shape. When released, it escapes the earth and out of any liquid, up into the sky and out in all directions. It is usually transparent, more typically invisible, and far less complicated than earth or water. Air blasts stone and whips water but is compelled to move this way and that by the heat of fire.

FIRE
Fire is the lightest of the elements, the tongues of its flames not shooting outward into the atmosphere but reaching up to the celestial fires of the sun, moon, and stars. The inverse of opacity is not transparency, but the production of light and fire reveals and clarifies what is shrouded in darkness. Fire converts the complicated unknown into the simple known. Fire dances and imparts its animation to the other elements, changing the composition of earth, boiling water, and warming the air. Fire is the most masculine (shaping) element, forcing change onto the other elements, especially to the ends of an active human will. 

AETHER, THE FIFTH ELEMENT
The fifth element, aether, can be summarized as the principle of animation. The exact meaning of "animation" will be explored in its dedicated article, in conjunction with individual articles on earth, water, air, and fire (articles forthcoming).

VERTICAL SCARCITY

Is this Really Underutilized?
If Wikipedia is anything to go by, then yes! At the time of this writing, the verticality of the elements featured nowhere in the classical elements* article, which instead focuses on the interpretations of Aristotle and Proclus. While these are reasonably simple to understand, they don't translate well to a broader understanding of ancient cosmology, which was influenced heavily by the verticality of observed phenomena. 

The Aristotelian Model

The Proclean Model 

The dryness and relative temperature of the elements can have value in your narratives if that's how you choose to parse them. Still, the model needs to translate to an easily observed cosmic structure. This is how you get weird things like the plane maps from Dungeons and Dragons.

Unsure which sourcebook this map is from.

How do we read the orientation of the elemental planes? Is fire closer to the lower planes than the upper planes? Are they coequal with the material plane? What governs these choices of presentation? Without clear guiding principles, the subject is easily confused.

*While Wikipedia is far from an ideal source, it's suitable for broad strokes and can be used as a rough gauge of public knowledge on (uncontroversial) subjects. The fact that the vertical hierarchy needs to be included in this article speaks to the ignorance of the subject on the part of Wikipedia editors and, by extension, the public.

VERTICAL VALUE

Okay, So What?
The vertical hierarchy of the elements is missing from our media, so what? Other than some thematic features that a few authors might exploit, there only appears to be direct application outside the elements themselves.

This might be the case where the elements themselves are descriptions of the normative phenomena in the universe. When ancient peoples witnessed things that violated this simple model, what they perceived was not a failure of the model to describe the universe but instead an instance that transcended the model. In other words, they were looking upon something divine.

Transcendence of Boundaries and Magical Substances
One of the most important advantages of the hierarchical model is that it places the normative states of matter on a ladder that scales from concrete at the bottom to abstract at the top. Materials transcending these boundaries therefore bridge the concrete and abstract, allowing room for idea to become instance, and for instance to touch platonic ideal. These substances and devices that cross boundaries are a vector for magical action, allowing you to start from the four elements and into more derived materials as vectors for magical action. Quicksilver is celestial for its metallic qualities but behaves as a simultaneous manifestation of earth and water, the passive elements of generation. Sulfur is a stone that burns brilliantly and produces a powerful fumigant, revealing itself as a simultaneous manifestation of fire and air, the shaping elements.

We can even find magic in seemingly mundane substances, like pumice!

Magical Pumice
Pumice is a volcanic orthoclase feldspar that is lightweight, porous, and full of gas cavities. As a result of its low density, pumice can float on water. The properties of density and buoyancy are well understood today and were understood well enough in the ancient world that they could sail the seas. However, not everyone had ready access to this material, and the idea of a stone that floated upon the water unassisted violated the very definition of stone! This categorical disconnect led to the mystification of the material and fabulous stories of willful stones that floated upon the sea at night and hid themselves from the sun by diving into the depths during the day (a sort of story that would later be conflated with pearls).

This "willful stone" that acted on its own desires by floating was imbued with magical powers and, in the romantic tales of Alexander the Great, was one of many mystical stones the young conqueror was said to have used. Under the name "eldor," these stones were attached to the harnesses of his men's horses, enabling them to ambush their enemies in the Land of Darkness.

If this one little deviation from normative phenomenology can spiral into sentient stones and magical powers, you have a framework that creates windows for magic constantly! The elements stop being boxes that you have to write within or bones you have to work off of, but a toolset that can bring to any instance to reinterpret mundane material into an opportunity for dramatic action!

TAKEAWAY
The hierarchy of elements not only serves as an organizing principle of cosmology but also as a valuable tool for the reinterpretation of all matter. They are as grand as the fixed structure of the cosmos and as versatile as any tool you carry in hand. The model is dynamic and naturalistic and leaves plenty of room for writers to refocus, reframe, and reinvent old relationships. 

Our future articles on the elements will explore the numerous ideas tied to the individual elements and the creative possibilities to be found there, and articles on transcendent materials are likewise forthcoming.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wikipedia

“Classical Element.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 May 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element.

Texts

Lecouteux, C. (2012). E: Eldor. In A lapidary of sacred stones: Their magical and medicinal powers based on the earliest sources (p. 137). essay, Inner Traditions.

Pageau, Matthieu. “Chapter 11.” The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis: A Commentary, Manufacturer Not Identified, Columbia, SC, 2018, p. 40.

Trismegistus, Hermes. “Book II Poemander by Hermes Trismegistus.” Magick Books Library, https://darkbooks.org/pp.php?v=1018287740.

Creature Feature - Milk Thieves

  Milk thieves are a category of witches familiar in the folklore of Scandinavia, naturally in service to the milk-stealing witch referred to as a caillebottière. 

Regardless of species, each milk thief is a profane amalgamation of human integuments like hair and nails, animal effluvia, wood shavings, body parts, and other offensive materials.

Brought to life by sorcery and other blasphemous action, these foul constructs would go forth and suckle from the teats of the neighbors’ livestock or from their milk jugs or even break into homes to lap up cream before returning to the witch’s pail or trough to regurgitate the stolen milk.

The Swedish Milk Hare

MILK THIEF DIVERSITY 

Milk thieves possessed several forms and names, including the milk rabbit, milk hare, and troll ball. Still, two, in particular, seem to have the most lore associated with them (based on this compiler’s limited resources on the topic). These are the troll cat and the tilberi.

THE TROLL CAT
The troll cat goes by many names: truss, skratt, smørkat, trollnøste, trollnøa, etc. It comes in two shapes, the most common being a ball, the other being a cat. 

Troll cats with these different shapes operate under different rules: the ball of yarn will roll around to absorb the milk, and injury done to it would cause it to rupture and spill its contents; the troll cat in the animal shape will sympathetically wound its witch via magical sympathy.

This difference in form comes from two influences: the physical phenomena conflated with milk thieves and the plasticity of magical concepts.

First, the dual forms of the troll cat are suspected by some anthropologists to be influenced by either hair vomited up by cattle (the ball) or by the Norwegian Forest Cat (the cat form, obviously). The second influence has to do with Scandinavian notions of the structure of the self, particularly the notion of hug.

Hug is the mental or perhaps sidereal self in Scandinavian mythology. Like many such notions, it’s impossible to pin down concrete boundaries for what the hug is other than an immaterial extension of the self that is not quite the soul or spirit, capable of influencing animate and inanimate objects at a distance. Relevant to the troll cat, the witch’s hug sometimes takes the form of a cat. Additionally, the witch must be buried with her troll cat, or she might leave the grave looking for it.

Because the zoomorphic troll cat has been conflated with the witch’s hug, the constructed familiar and the witch don’t have a clear boundary between them. An attack on the zoomorphic troll cat directly attacks the witch herself! 

While the troll cat serves as both a gateway to Scandinavian magical concepts and a holotype for the entire category of milk thieves, it cannot match the next milk thief in dramatic impact: the tilberi.

THE TILBERI
Initially, this whole article was dedicated to exploring Iceland’s tilberi, the foul spindle’s novelty so overpowering that this compiler spared only a handful of lines for the other milk thieves. Given what’s described here, we think you’ll understand.

To Make a Tilberi

If a witch desires to make a tilberi (carrier) or snakkur (spindle), she must wake up early on Whitsunday (Pentecost) and dig up the grave of the recently deceased. She shall remove a rib from this corpse and use it as a spindle for grey wool stolen from a widow’s sheep. For the next three Sundays, the witch will spit the communion wine onto the wool spindle, and it will come more alive each time. 

On the third Sunday the tilberi is realized: a woolly snake or worm with grotesque, human-like faces at either end. It latches onto a wart that develops on the inside of the witch’s thigh and suckles there until ordered out.

Addendum: After publishing, we realized that the element of communion wine was worth examining further. There's more to this than the substantive blasphemy of rejecting communion thrice (the number of first substance), but also in what the communion wine represents: eternal life. If the blood of Christ can confer immortality to humans, surely it can confer life unto the inanimate and unliving!

Tilberi Activity
Writhing and wriggling, the tilberi is ordered by the witch to go out and steal the milk and cream of her neighbors. Full, it returns to the witch’s pail, crying, “Mummy! Mummy! Belly’s full!” and disgorges the ill-gotten milk into her pail or churn.

The tilberi obtained the milk by assaulting livestock, leaping onto the back of a cow, goat, or sheep and latching on to the teats. Sometimes, they were able to reach around both sides and attack two nipples at once.

Tilberi Hazards
The tilberi is a perversion of motherhood, a creation that exists only to parasitize the community for the sake of the witch’s gluttony. This poses a problem for the witch, as the ordinary course of human biology threatens her life. If she were to give birth without disposing of her tilberi, the familiar would latch onto the witch’s own breasts and suck the life out of her!

Disposing of a Tilberi
The tilberi, as far as this compiler has been able to ascertain, has no conflation with the concept of hug, which is to say that the tilberi is its own entity distinct from the witch. This means that the witch can dispose of the tilberi without damaging herself.

The witch can destroy the tilberi by giving it an impossible task. It can be told to collect all the sheep’s droppings in three fields or gather all the droppings in the mountains and stack them into three piles. Either of these gets the tilberi far away from the witch who created it, and it will work itself to death or be destroyed by the holy power of three (in reference to the Christian Trinity). Regardless of what kills it, this task reduces the tilberi to a rib spindle.

Protecting oneself from a Tilberi
For the folk afflicted by the witch-thief, protective magic is available for protecting livestock against her foul familiar. One makes the sign of the cross over the animal’s rump and udder and then recites a psalter over the animal’s spine, preventing the tilberi from mounting or latching. 

This magical ritual may protect the livestock but does little to stop the witch. To do that, the witch must be identified.

Identifying a Tilberi’s Witch
The first way to identify the tilberi’s witch is by investigating the community members’ butter. Butter made from the tilberi’s disgorged milk is supposedly rich in taste but visibly clumped, as though curdled. 

Once clumped butter is found, either the sign of the cross is made over it, or a stave known as the smjörhnútur (“butter-knot”) is drawn in the butter with a finger. If the butter melts away into a foam from either of these actions, it’s a sure sign that the source milk was stolen.

The smjörhnútur.

Alternately, they can also be identified by the cheese spell.

Still, the surest way to catch the witch is to catch her with the tilberi. Tilberi are quite fast, but if one chases a tilberi on a swift horse, they may drive it right back to its witch. Jacqueline Simpson identified several recorded instances of this in Icelandic Folktales and Legends, where the tilberi was tracked to the source and sought refuge under the witch’s skirt. In these instances, the women had the bottom of their skirts tied shut, trapping the tilberi, and witch and familiar were then put to the flame.

TAKEAWAY
This blog aims to make magical concepts, practices, materials, and creatures sensible to writers. For all its grotesque pageantry, the milk thief is an excellent device for putting the writer or their audience into the shoes of the people who told these tales.

For the modern writer, as much as the reader, it’s easy to be divorced entirely from ancient or medieval sensibilities. The notions of spells based on cheese or witches stealing milk seem silly to us because we live in a time of abundance like none other in the history of the world. We’re mostly divorced from the practice of animal and plant husbandry for sustenance because we’ve outsourced the task to industrial farms and supermarkets. The witches and their milk thieves, for all their apparent absurdity, tell us how vital dairy was for the survival of the common folk in these times and how close they were to the source.

To a modern American (at the time of this writing), a pail of whole milk is $20. Until the past couple of centuries, for some people, that pail was the margin that determined whether their children made it through the winter.

On top of the importance of calories, there’s also the question of trust. For most of human history, the overwhelming majority of the population has not been faceless bodies shifting from clique to clique in urban environments. They’ve been living in villages out in the countryside. They were bound by various means to the land they worked on, and therefore to a relatively small social circle, and were required to support themselves and their families and reciprocate labor with their neighbors. There were no police officers, what laws there were were hard to enforce, and it was necessary to depend on your community to survive. That dependence hinged on a fragile trust. Anything that sowed mistrust spread paranoia or undermined that trust wasn’t an attack on a single person but the entire social order.

Is it any wonder that such revolting things as the toll cat and tilberi came to be associated with the petty thief and the witch? These familiars were shaped by the disgust and contempt for those subversive social elements who would steal food from the mouths of children and turn neighbor against neighbor. That milk theft was an act that threatened the whole community for the selfishness and gluttony of a single person. 

These are the values of the agrarian folk, their sense of right and wrong dramatized in and framed by their material culture. Material culture matters to your character: what their food is, its availability, and how dependent community members are on that fragile social trust. Don’t neglect this in your world-building!

ON SOURCING AND FUTURE RESEARCH
Our starting-off point for researching this article was the relevant Wikipedia articles (as displayed in the Bibliography). While this is far from ideal, the articles are about non-controversial topics and can be regarded as good faith if not prima facie reliable. Some of the article’s sources have provided an excellent place to investigate related concepts, as in Alver’s Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies.

A cursory skimming of Kvideland’s book tells this compiler it’s an excellent resource for expanding on the hug/hugham concept, as well as the particulars of Scandinavian caillebottières and other witches, as well as a host of additional helpful information such as Finnish belief about the relationship between silver and the undead. All of this will need to be revisited in future blog entries.

An additional observation of these works is that many of the sources have been compiled by the same people. Alver wrote Nordic Folklore with Kvideland, Sehmsdorf, and Simpson, while Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend was written by Kvideland and Sehmsdorf. Also referenced is one of the few books of Claude Lecouteux’s that this compiler has yet to purchase!

The world of folklore and magical studies is a relatively small group of people who produce an absurd amount of content.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WIKIPEDIA

-“Hug (Folklore).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Dec. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hug_(folklore). 

-“Tilberi.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Dec. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilberi. 

-“Troll Cat.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Dec. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_cat. 

SOURCE TEXTS

-Kvideland, Reimund. “Concepts of the Soul in Norwegian Tradition.” Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies , Indiana Univ. Pr., Bloomington U.a., 1989, pp. 119–120. 

-Simpson, Jacqueline. “Black Magic.” Icelandic Folktales and Legends, Tempus, Stroud, 2009, pp. 173–174.