Sanctum of the Craft

Patrons of Sanctum of the Craft received notes that detail the history of the Minor Arcana today, spanning from the Chinese Money Cards of the seventh century CE to the introduction of the Mamluk style decks into Europe in c. 1370 CE. The notes also included a bit of a rant by our instructor Akiima Nicholls Shields where she disagreed with another Tarot history, and a detailed explanation of the possible structure of the Topkapi deck (also called the Istanbul deck) from the fifteenth century CE.

Patrons and students of Sanctum of the Craft received 86 pages of digital notes on Ergot and L*D today. These notes belong in many of the series our primary instructor, Akiima Nicholls Shields, is completing, including her Witch's Poisons in Depth series, the Witches Entheogens series, and the History and Traditional Use of Emmenagogues, Abortifacients, and Contraceptives series. The notes record the scientific name, common names, etymology, ancient history, recent history, incidents of poisoning, toxicology, chemical constituents, adverse effects, clinical studies, medicinal uses, magical and ceremonial uses, household and culinary uses, identification, where to find it in the wild, harvesting and storage, dosage and recipes for both ergot and L*D.

We have moved our in-depth course on Death Ritual and Magic to our public YouTube channel. We hope to post a new class every week to two weeks. This first class in the course explores why it is so difficult to define "death" and some of the models for doing so.

The link is in the comments.

Patrons of Sanctum of the Craft received the notes for the Judgement card in our ongoing Tarot in Depth series.

The notes explore the cultural history that inspired the card, the shifting imagery from the 1400s to the modern day, and divinatory interpretations upright and reversed for general, past, present, future, love, money, work, health, spirituality, LGBTQIA centered readings, and common card combinations. It also includes how it was interpreted in the systems of Waite and Smith, Mathers, the Golden Dawn, Crowley/Thoth, Etteilla, Case/BOTA, Ouspensky, and Theirens.

It's Friday the 13th, so I'm sharing the video where Ian and I debunked a lot of the misinformation about it that floats around online:

Friday the 13th - Recording of a Facebook Livecast This is a recording of the Sanctum instructors' livecast on Facebook on the topic of Friday the 13th - debunking misinformation and covering the history of b...

Patrons of Sanctum of the Craft received a poster of the 11 surviving Trumps of the Visconti di Modrone set of I Trionfi cards today.

Patrons of Sanctum of the Craft received 68 pages of notes this week on The Sun card as part of our ongoing Tarot in Depth booklet series that accompanies our Mastery of Tarot course series. The notes explored the historical influences on the card from the ancient world, the shifting imagery on the card from 1450 to the twenty-first century, its interpretation upright and reversed for general, past, present, future, work, love, money, relationships, health, spirituality, and lgbtqia centered readings, questions to answer when the card is drawn, common card combinations, and its interpretation in the systems of Waite-Smith, Crowley/Thoth, Mathers, The Golden Dawn, Etteilla, Ouspensky, Theirens, and B.O.T.A./Case.

The live recordings of our Witch's Poisons in Depth year one course series are being posted to our Patreon for even free members to enjoy. Year two is enrolling now - we have so far taught two classes on Coca.

A new Ask a Witch video is live on our public YouTube that answers the question,

"....do you know any good sources where I can learn more about the ancient Greek origins of Goeteia?"

The origins of Goeteia are in the ancient funeral lamentations performed by women. The Ask a Witch video explores the shifting definition of the term from the eighth century BCE to the tenth century CE in Greek and Byzantine sources.

The notes went out to Patrons several days ago as a Patreon exclusive.

To watch the video, go to:
https://youtu.be/J5WGxZL2rE0

Patrons and students of Sanctum of the Craft received an in depth article today on the history of goeteia, the use of goos (lamentations in grief sang to the dead) by goetes to call the dead up from the Underworld in ancient Greek writing.

The video of the instructor teaching the information will be on our free, public YouTube within a couple of days.

This week's Ask a Witch answers a question sent in on our Discord server, "Are there any ways to safely release rage without it harming someone? Like a spell or ritual to express my anger and let it out so I can focus on other things?"

To watch, go here:
https://youtu.be/JWQsRPfgYb4

Tonight's Death Ritual and Magic course covered necromancy in the Tanakh and Rabbinical texts, including debates as to whether necromancers were ventriloquists and whether having the skull of the summoned dead could make them speak on the Sabbath.

Next week we delve into Chaldean death ritual and magic.

Sanctum instructor Akiima Nicholls Shields answers a question sent to Ask a Witch by a neurodivergent student who has difficulties building a consistent magical practice:
https://youtu.be/wWZ2C7WRNIQ?si=WlQG_IGk_k6RYFl3

Patrons of Sanctum of the Craft received a 66 page booklet on The Star card today. It explored the cultural influences from Antiquity and the Middle Ages that may have inspired various versions of the card and the changing imagery of the card from 1450 to modern day. Then it delved into the divinatory aspects of the card upright and reversed for general, past, present, future, love, money, work, health, spirituality, and LGBTQIA centered readings, followed by common card combinations. Then it detailed the way the card was interpreted by Waite, Mathers, The Golden Dawn, Crowley, Etteilla, Ouspensky, Thierens, and Case.

Patronage starts at $1 a month.

The booklets for Patrons came in time to be mailed out before our instructors leave for their summer sabbatical.

One booklet covers the history of Death Ritual and Magic in the Neolithic Levant. The other is an in-depth exploration of the herb rosemary, including its history, magical uses, chemical constituents and toxicology, clinical studies and medicinal uses, culinary and household uses, identification and cultivation, harvesting and storage, and recipes.

A portion of our Witch's Poisons in Depth course, Year One, is being moved to our public YouTube channel. The portion of the class that thoroughly covers how an herbalist would make use of the information will remain private to seminary enrollees, but the history, magical uses, and some medicinal information will be moving to YouTube.

Year Two opens for enrollment June 15th!

Link to the class video in comments.

Sanctum just discussed the history of bone flutes in our Paleolithic Death Ritual and Magic class, part of our ongoing course on Death Ritual and Magic.

A flute from Hohle Fels created from the wing bone of a Griffon vulture >35,000 years ago. Here’s the raw material for the world’s oldest flute - the wing bones of the Griffon vulture
More in comment

How did the Osiris Cult spread and change the worship of Anubis? What are some of the differences between the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, and the Books of Going Forth by Day (commonly called the Book of the Dead)? How did the Greeks appropriate Egyptian culture for their fanfic?

Our instructor answered all of these questions and more last night in our Death Ritual and Magic course. Next week's class covers Canaanite and Hebrew Death Magic and Ritual.

Did you know that there are no surviving Devil cards from the Visconti-Sforza decks? But that doesn't mean they didn't exist; only that, if they did, they didn't survive to modern times.

Last night our Mastery of Tarot course went in depth into the changing imagery of the Devil in Medieval and Renaissance art and the evolution of the card's portrayal from the mid-1400s to the twenty-first century.

Enrollment in the course is still open. All previous classes were recorded and posted to the seminary website.

WESTERN MUSIC ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK

Or how my views on culture proved to be all wet

/// Around 1990, I started researching the social history of music. I knew this was a big topic, but I had no idea how big.

As it turned out, this project kept me busy for the next 25 years.

I was crazy to do this. I was trying to understand the role of music in human life going back to prehistoric times, and hoped to follow its evolution until the present day. This demanded intense multidisciplinary research at a scope beyond anything I’d attempted before.

Nobody wanted me to take on this mission. In fact, I’ve never faced such resistance in anything I’ve ever done.

Every publisher and editor I met during that period asked me to write about jazz—because my book The History of Jazz was a big seller and they wanted another book just like it.

When I tried to enlist their support for my bigger project, speaking in rapturous terms about music as a source of enchantment and change agent in human life, their eyes glazed over.

They didn’t want to hear it.

But I was persistent. This project was my obsession, and my motivation kept getting recharged—because I was learning things about music that other experts had missed.

Most of my breakthroughs came through sheer perseverance, and relentless digging into primary sources (usually outside of the music field) that my peers had never even considered consulting.

Even today, I reap benefits from this intense work. I gained a deep understanding of how culture impacts actual flesh-and-blood people—that’s the core of my expertise. I often draw on it for what I publish on The Honest Broker.

But it took me fifteen years before I was ready to share the first results of this massive research project—Work Songs (2006) and Healing Songs (2006). Almost a decade elapsed before I was ready to publish the final installment of this trilogy, Love Songs (2015). These works, encompassing the entire history of human song, prepared me to write Music: A Subversive History (2019).

I believe this is the core of my life’s work.

The book I’m currently publishing in installments on Substack, Music to Raise the Dead, is the culmination of this enormous endeavor. It presents nothing less than an alternative musicology—a powerful way of transforming songs into sources of enchantment and a life-changing force for individuals, communities, and entire societies.

I’ve learned many things during the course of this work, but one of the most surprising relates to how musical innovations take place.

I repeatedly encountered exciting new song styles emerging in port cities, border regions, and the fringes of society—both geographical fringes and poor fringe population groups.

The best known examples come from the Americas. The dominance of US commercial music in the last hundred years relies, to an extraordinary degree, on African Americans. Their contributions led directly to jazz, blues, soul, hiphop, R&B, Afro-Cuban music, and a range of other important idioms.

Put simply, the most impoverished, marginalized people had the greatest impact on the music.

I always just took that for granted. But it’s surprising, no?

In the course of my research, I kept encountering the same influence of the outsider. I found it everywhere from the emergence of secular songs in Deir el-Medina in ancient Egypt to the rise of tango in Buenos Aires or reggae in Jamaica.

The outsider is everywhere in music history.

Consider, for example, the names of the musical modes—something else I long took for granted. They are named after population groups, but who were the Aeolians, the Lydians, and the Phrygians?

They were slave groups, conquered by the Greeks in Asia Minor. The Greeks also named some modes after themselves, but the more unusual or controversial modes were associated with slave musicians.

They don’t teach you this in music school.

So the next time you hear somebody talk about the building blocks of Western harmony, show them the map below. It’s not as Western as they think.

They will see that a dialogue between insiders and outsiders was shaping European music long before Europe even existed as a concept.

Now let’s examine the origin of the Western lyric song. The most significant innovator in the history of this idiom is Sappho, a singer-songwriter (if I can use the current-day terminology) who lived on the island Le**os, circa 600 BC.

But Le**os is on the absolute fringe of Europe, and is even today an entry point into the continent from West Asia. In 2015 alone, a half million migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq arrived on Le**os.

It’s safe to assume that Le**os was also home to a diverse population in Sappho’s day, with strong ties to West Asian musical traditions.

You might say that Le**os is like New Orleans, where jazz originated. The ingredients for innovation were the same in both instances:

- Located at a port on a major trade route
- At a border point or boundary between countries/cultures
- Boasting a diverse, multicultural population

New Orleans was the most diverse city in the United States at the time when jazz emerged. The population drew from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America—and this diversity was further supported by a constant flow of trade and visitors via the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s no coincidence that jazz happened here. This is precisely the kind of city where new musical styles evolve.

But let’s go back to Europe—because the story gets more interesting.

The most significant innovation in Western love songs after Sappho came from the French troubadours during the late medieval era. But how much of this music originated in France?

I was shocked to learn, during the course of researching my book Love Songs, that this deeply personal approach to singing about romantic love actually originated in Baghdad among female slave singers—slaves again as song innovators! And it only entered Europe via Spain after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

From there, the song styles came to the south of France, and then got disseminated throughout Europe. The French nobility took all of the credit, and most books still present the story from that perspective. But in reality, innovation took place at the fringes, and entered Europe via outsiders.

I’ve written elsewhere about Córdoba, which had the largest population of any European city in the 11th century. That surprises many people—but Córdoba had more people than London, Rome, and Paris combined.

Take a guess at answering this question: What were the five most populous cities in Europe in the year 1050 AD?

- Córdoba
- Palermo
- Seville
- Salerno
- Venice

Let’s put those cities on a map.

This is where secular culture emerged in Europe, laying the foundation for Western humanism and the Renaissance. But you’re gazing at Palermo and scratching your head.

Yet it’s true: Palermo had a population ten times as large as Rome back then.

I need to emphasize this point: the exciting centers of European culture during its formative years were port cities, or borderlands, or other multicultural centers. Innovation came into Europe from outsiders, especially via the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas.

Just stop and think for a moment about the importance of Venice in the history of music. Everything from madrigals to operas found their home in that bustling port city—a key connecting point between West and East in the modern imagination.

And what about Rome? In ancient times, Rome had been a dominant source of culture and innovation—but that only happened when all roads led to Rome (as the proverb goes). When Rome was a diverse, multicultural center, it exerted enormous influence. But when it lost its allure as a destination for outsiders, during the medieval era, Rome stagnated.

Rome later regained its luster. But that only happened when a new influx of outsiders showed up there. The same is true of Paris, London, Vienna, etc.

I’m focusing on music here, but the same forces shaped innovations in literature. For example, the sonnet—which we all associate with Petrarch and Shakespeare—actually originated in Sicily. It started on the fringes of Europe, and then migrated inland.

And if I had time, I could discuss how religious movements always entered Europe from outside—all those Roman mystery cults came from other countries and cultures. Even Christiantiy—which many people view as emblematic of European culture—arrived in Rome from West Asia.

This is the truth about Western culture nobody wants to tell you. People treat it like a monolithic system of established elites, but the exact opposite is true.

Let me lay it out for you:

1. Western culture only thrived because it drew on diverse outsiders.

2. The major sources of innovation are often located on the fringes of the Western world, because this is where outside influences enter the system.

3. Cultural historians rarely pay attention to water, but they really should. For example, the Mediterranean was a huge force in innovation and cultural transmission, but rarely shows up in your typical Western culture class.

4. It’s no coincidence that Greece—which has the largest coastline of any country in the entire Mediterranean region—was the epicenter of innovation in the classical world. Those 8,500 miles of shore land are a measure of Greece’s openness to the outside world.

5. The most innovative cities are also the most diverse, and not because diversity is a popular political slogan, but due to the simple fact that we evolve as a species by sharing and learning among others with different backgrounds.

6. Poor, disadvantaged groups have a huge impact on this process, because they make up a significant portion of the population in these borderlands. These include migrants, exiles, slaves, and other marginalized communities.

7. Given this process, even the term Western culture is misleading—because so much of it came from outside the West, strictly defined.

8. But this isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s actually a great strength. A culture that can assimilate the best of outside forces is stronger because of that skill.

9. I know this is true for music—because I’ve done the research. But we have good reason to believe that other spheres of culture follow a similar pattern.

I share this because I want to defuse some of the hostility to this cultural history. We don’t need to choose between ‘Western’ culture and diversity—they go hand-in-hand. The problems begin when we forget that important fact and start living (and thinking) in silos.

— Ted Gioia

Source:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/western-music-isnt-what-you-think

**os

Have you ever wondered what the earliest writings of the world found so far say about death, the underworld, ghosts, hauntings, and necromancy? We covered that topic on Friday and Patrons received 25 pages of notes on Mesopotamian Death Ritual and Magic today, spanning thousands of years of history.

Tonight's class on Death Ritual and Magic covered Mesopotamia from the Chalcolithic period to Antiquity.

We covered Sumerian, Akkarian, Assyrian, and Babylonian underworld beliefs, deities, the myths of Inanna/Ishtar, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the different types of ghosts, necromancy and exorcism, the use of human skulls in medicine and magic, and calling upon the ancestors for protection against harmful and malicious spirits.

Notes from this class will go out to Patrons tomorrow and the video will be posted to the Learning Management System in the next couple of days. Enrollment in the course is still open.