The Bible as a Magical Book

In every tradition in this file the Bible is a working book as well as a holy one. It is opened at a psalm and laid on a sick person, placed under a bed or a pillow, carried against the body, used to swear an oath, set on the work table, and read aloud over water, candles and hands. This is not a misunderstanding of scripture by the unlettered: it is a way of reading that European charm magic shared, and in the Black American South it had a particular ground, because the Bible was the book a people were given and the Exodus was the story in it that named their condition.

The Bible's use is physical and verbal at once. A psalm is said a set number of times; the book is opened at a text and the text is left open on the page; it is placed under a bed to stop a person wandering, or under a pillow for dreams; a paper petition is folded inside it; it is sworn on. The text is also the source of the words of command, and the same verse may be a prayer in church and a working in the yard, without the practitioner seeing any contradiction.

Outsiders have consistently patronised this practice - treating the psalms as spells while treating the faith they belong to as superstition - and the patronising is the ethical problem, not the practice. The people who said the 91st over a child's bed were praying, and the same book was the one they were forbidden to read and then learned to read. A writer who lifts the psalm work out of that history and sells it as 'bible magic' has taken the technique and left the ground it stands on.