Magic comes from the magoi, Persian priests. Even the word was borrowed. Look up where your own first name comes from.
The trump in a card game comes from tarot’s “triumphs”, the old name for its picture cards. Lay out three cards and tell a story with them, left to right.
This project started because the world needs magic. Magic is confidence in the world.
We carry the past around with us. A mother once searched nine days with a torch for her lost daughter. Crowds once walked twenty kilometres together, shouting a god’s name. Those people are still somewhere in us. That’s a lot of company.
Most of it travelled before it reached us. The Greeks said their god Dionysos came from the east. Tarot began as a card game in Italy, in the 1400s. The witches’ year of eight festivals was put together in England in the 1950s. Borrowed and mixed on the way: that’s how it stayed alive.
Magic can be everywhere. It can be a candle, or a line of Greek that still does something to you two and a half thousand years after it was written.
And magic is confidence in the world. A ritual is something small you do with your hands, as if it matters. It works on you first. So we read the old sources properly and give the line numbers, and then we light the candle anyway.
The torch: Homeric Hymn to Demeter 47–50. The walk to Eleusis: Herodotus 8.65. Dionysos from the east: Euripides, Bacchae 13–22. The eight festivals: Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 1999.
The old pictures on this site come from museums and libraries that set them free, with the credit under each one. Our share cards and posters are ours, so ask us first.