ETC Sacred Texts

Bygone Beliefs

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is an excerpt from a scholarly reference work on occult sciences, written in the late Victorian or Edwardian period, surveying the history and practice of talismans and amulets across Western and Near Eastern traditions. It opens by distinguishing talismans (astrological symbols engraved on planet-aligned metals or stones) from amulets more broadly, then surveys the latter category: Egyptian figures, Paracelsus's electrum alloy, birth-stones assigned to zodiac signs, herbs gathered under favorable planetary conjunctions, and folk items like the horseshoe and the Italian horn, which the author traces back to lunar symbolism. The bulk of the piece explains the systematic doctrine behind talismanic magic proper — the ancient correspondence of seven planets, seven metals, and seven days of the week — which required the maker to select material, timing, tools, robes, incense, and invocations all aligned to a single governing planet, effectively making the finished talisman a "silent evocation" of that planet's spirit. A notable digression in a lengthy footnote highlights a numerically surprising discovery: when the ancient Chaldean planetary order is arranged by selecting every fifth planet, the associated metals fall in precise descending order of atomic weight — a sequence the ancients could not have known — which the author presents as genuinely puzzling rather than dismissing as coincidence. The tone is that of a skeptical but fair-minded antiquarian, willing to call theories like the Doctrine of Effluvia "manifestly absurd" while still treating the underlying historical material with serious attention. Readers interested in the intellectual history of Western occultism, astrology, or folk magic will find it a dense but well-sourced primary survey.

Bygone Beliefs

Related pages View as graph →