Psalm Magic

The Bible is the working book of every tradition in this file, and the Psalms are its engine. Enslaved African Americans were given the Bible as Christian scripture and read it as a book of power: the psalms were said for protection, for a court case, against an enemy, over a bath, over a candle, over a mojo hand, and the practice crossed into white southern and Appalachian households, into Mexican-American healing and into the Caribbean. The corpus's solomonic_pentacles.json shows the same psalms used another way - a psalm carried as a talisman in the Solomonic tradition; this entry is the folk use, where the psalm is spoken and the speaking is the work.

A psalm is chosen for the case, said a set number of times, at a set hour, over the person, the object or the water, sometimes with a candle burning and the name of the person written on paper. The 23rd and 91st are the protection psalms and are said over houses, beds, baths and travellers; the 109th is the imprecation psalm and belongs to enemy work; the 121st is said for safe travel and the 133rd for concord in a household; the 51st belongs to repentance and to cleansing after a wrong. Printed tables exist that assign a use to every one of the hundred and fifty psalms, and they are printed compilations of the modern period rather than ancient authorities.

Psalm magic is where the traditions' relation to Christianity is most visible and most easily patronised. The practice is not a parody of devotion or a folk misunderstanding of it: the people who said the 91st over a child's bed at night were praying, and the same words did the work of protection. Outsiders who lift the psalms into a spell book while treating the faith they belong to as superstition are taking the technique and despising its ground. The imprecatory use - the 109th against an enemy - is the one the tradition itself argues about, and it is the psalm most often cited in warnings.