Magic comes from the magoi, the Persian priests. Even the word is borrowed.Look up where your favourite word came from. It’s usually a trip.
The trump in a card game comes from tarot’s “triumphs”. Tarot began as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy.Read the cards as a story-starter, not a forecast.
This project started because the world needs magic. Magic is confidence.
We are the past, the present and the future at once. Whoever lit a torch to look for a lost girl, whoever walked the twenty kilometres to Eleusis shouting a god’s name, is still somewhere in us, and that is a lot of company to have.
We are all the cultures that ever lived, and that is what makes us powerful. The Greeks said Dionysos came from the east. Herodotus thought most of their gods had Egyptian names. The tarot came up through fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, and the Wheel of the Year was put together in England in the 1950s. None of it is pure. It was borrowed, carried and mixed, which is why it is still alive.
Magic is everywhere, which is another way of saying it is ordinary: a candle, a name said aloud, a walk taken on purpose, a line of Greek that still does something to you two and a half thousand years after it was written.
And magic is confidence. A rite is a decision, made with your hands, to act as if what you do matters, and it works first on the person doing it. So this site reads the old sources properly, gives the line numbers, and then lights the candle anyway.