Book title and author: Spells, Charms, & Formulas by Ray T. Marlborough
Status: Finished
My overall rating of the book: 1/10
How does this book relate to my magickal practice?: I’m still seeking out as many resources as possible so that I can gather information that I can potentially use in my practice.
My personal thoughts/opinions: I like to think I’m generally a nice, understanding person, and I try to be someone who keeps his mouth shut if he doesn’t have something nice to say, but I have many, many thoughts about this book and I CANNOT stop thinking about them. Overall, I find this book frustrating. There are so many typos that I found myself wondering if anyone had actually done any editing on this book before it was sent to the printer. It felt like the author procrastinated until the day of the deadline, slapped everything down on the paper, and then the publisher sent it immediately to be printed without further inspection. I understand that typos are just a part of writing, but when there’s even one sentence that doesn’t start with a capital letter, that is inexcusable in my opinion – especially for a publisher at the level of Llewellyn. It’s not like it was self-published or published by a very small independent publisher. Granted, I don’t know much about publishing and how edits are made in future prints of the book, but I would assume that the publisher should be able to make “minor” changes such as capitalizing the first letter of a sentence or making sure that when the text references a specific page that the page being referenced is actually the correct page. The copy I have is the THIRTY-SEVENTH printing of the first edition, so I would expect the publisher to correct those errors by that point.
I have never had to annotate a book so heavily to be able to follow a procedure. There are times where “Steps one through five” of a specific working are referred to, but as someone with the memory of a walnut, I had to, multiple times, flip back through what I was reading to figure out what “steps” were being talked about. Maybe this is just my expectation of near-perfection from a published book, but if you are going to refer to a prior topic in the book you are writing, you should explicitly state “Steps 1-5 of Such-and-Such” so that it’s easier for the reader to follow.
I also found the insistence of sticking to measurements that no one currently uses – even at the time the book was originally published in 1986 – such as the dram, to be a turn-off from the information itself. What’s the deal with gatekeeping formulas by not using currently standard measurements? Why bother sharing your wisdom with someone if you’re not going to make it accessible to them? Maybe I’m just a “snowflake” millennial who likes to complain about things, but I find it irritating, especially when it comes to spiritual things, when people only put in the bare minimum of effort to make their knowledge accessible. I can’t begin to imagine how much work was put into this seemingly rushed, barely edited book; however, just because something is tradition, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be modernized to make the tradition easier to carry on.
(All that being said, there is a conversion chart in the book to help with measuring out a dram if one doesn’t have a way to measure drams already.)
In addition to some of the units of measurement being difficult to work out without dram measuring devices, there are several things that stuck out to me as highly questionable information. For example, the recipe for benzoin tincture is as follows:
Power [sic] two ounces of benzoin gum and add 4 oz. of water and 12 oz. of alcohol. Keep this mixture tightly capped and bottled for two weeks and shake daily. If you prefer, a teaspoon of glycerin may be added. After two weeks strain and bottle the liquid for use. (page 110)
First of all, “power” should read “powder” – one of the many typos I was referring to previously.
Secondly, what kind of alcohol is recommended? One would assume something like vodka would be able to be used. However, benzoin is a resin, and resins typically require a higher percentage of alcohol to dissolve than most vodkas contain. Most sources I’ve seen recommend 90% or more alcohol to dissolve resins, but the lowest I’ve seen recommended for dissolving resin is 80%, and most vodkas are bottled at around 40% alcohol. In addition, if one used a 40% vodka as the vaguely referenced “alcohol”, adding water would only further dilute the alcohol content, making it even more difficult to dissolve the benzoin resin. I question whether the recipe would even work as given. According to the Wikipedia article for benzoin, it is slightly soluble in water. As a former chemistry major, being slightly soluble in water means that at room temperature, and without the proper alcohol concentration, it is questionable whether the recipe for the benzoin tincture would work as written.
Third of all, what would the benefit of the glycerin be? What situations would the glycerin be beneficial in? Is it a texture/viscosity thing? Is it a preservation thing? I don’t think that one teaspoon of glycerin in 16 oz. of liquid (12 oz. alcohol plus 4 oz. water) would be enough to change the viscosity of the tincture in an appreciable way, and according to my knowledge of herbal medicine preparation, that percentage of glycerin wouldn’t be adequate to add any preservative property to the mixture.
Another thing that frustrated me was the lack of explanation/introduction where it would be beneficial: Chapter 10 is titled “Lagniappe”, but that term is never mentioned (unless I missed it) anywhere else in the book, and there’s no introduction or explanation about what “lagniappe” is – it just launches right into a ritual.
Upon Googling the term “lagniappe,” I found out that it refers to something extra given to someone, such as the thirteenth donut in a “baker’s dozen” or the little freebies included in an order from someone’s shop. I can’t find much in the way of how it relates to Hoodoo (the tradition that the formulas, charms, and spells are from in Marlborough’s book). I’m assuming that the ritual given is a preliminary ritual to begin another working, but it would be nice to know that explicitly before reading (or skimming) through multiple pages of ritual to get to where it says “Go on to doing the ritual intention, be it for financial blessings, health, to settle disturbed conditions, an uncrossing, etc.” Still, it doesn’t explicitly state whether it’s an opening ritual to lead into another ritual (such as creating a gris-gris bag), or whether it is a ritual for an unstated specific purpose in and of itself.
There is a passage that states “There is an oil called Zodiac Oil which is used to anoint astral candles in ritual” (page 126). It says that Zodiac Oil is “one oil which can be used for all the zodiac signs,” but there’s absolutely no mention about how to make it or recommended ingredients to keep an eye out for if trying to source it from a metaphysical shop.
Also on page 126 is a section titled “Basic Essential Oils”; in this section it says:
“Remember – two tablespoons of the flower or herb to two ounces of oil. If the scent is not as strong as you would like it to be, simply repeat using fresh herb or flowers until you are satisfied.”
Sorry, but that’s not how essential oils are made. Calling the resulting oil from infusing flowers/herbs in oil “essential oil” is flat-out misinformation. It’s not essential oil. Essential oils are created by a very specific process to capture the ACTUAL essential oil from the botanical. It’s possible that the author meant that the oils listed in that section are oils that are essential to the other formulas in the book, but there is a HUGE difference between essential oils and oils that are essential (i.e., necessary) for a formula. This misinformation, or (what I’m assuming is) purposeful misrepresentation of information, or at the very least ignorance and naïveté, is impossible for me to look past.
An interesting quote from the book: I marked a few passages as interesting while I was reading, but after going back through while writing this review, I honestly felt less and less inclined to share them.
All-in-all, would I recommend this book?: Honestly, no. I believe in supporting authors, but at the same time, I want the authors I support to put in the effort to produce quality work, and I’m on the fence about whether I would consider this to be an overall quality work. The fact that the recipe for something as basic as a tincture is that questionable, especially considering how frequently it is used in the formulas in this book, makes me question the validity of everything else. As harsh as it is, why should I trust an author with such numerous, blatant typos, questionable recipes and flat-out misinformation/misrepresentation of information? Some readers may find this book useful or inspiring to their practices, but I will likely not be wasting shelf space with this book for too much longer. I’m just thankful I got it from a used bookstore and that I didn’t pay full price for it. The only reason I rated this book a 1/10 and not a 0/10 was because there were a few tiny nuggets of information that could potentially be useful for me in my practice.
References:
Making a tincture of benzoin: How to Make a Benzoin Tincture — Botanical Formulations and How to Make Tincture of Benzoin for Homemade Perfumes | Hello Glow
Information about benzoin: Benzoin (organic compound) - Wikipedia
Definition of lagniappe: lagniappe - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
How essential oils are ACTUALLY made: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fvSoaDYXcL0
The original saga story got me curious about Norse myth and I started scanning bookshops (big mistake) but found this:
