—FOREWORD—

"Check this out!” Brandy’s eyes glowed with excitement and squinted with mischief at the same time.

We were both fourteen years old, fumbling through a friendship that at least one of us wished was something more. Like me, Brandy was adopted, an odd bond forming around the mutual feeling of being discarded. Unlike me, however, she knew her birth parents, and had spent a couple weeks in the summer with them somewhere in the Bible-Belt.

Brandy hadn’t gone simply to spend time with them, to revisit the good old days before they abandoned her to the distant relatives that later adopted her. Her uncle had passed away. Before leaving, she told me that she was sure that “passed away” was too soft a term. He had committed suicide in his home, months preceding his death harrowed with mental illness. Among his last confessions to his family was the fact that he practiced Black Magick and that he had sold his soul to the Devil. He, and the whole family, believed that the Devil had come to collect. Being Protestant, the family called upon a “Deliverance Minister” rather than a Catholic Priest to exorcise the evil spirits from her uncle’s home, and from his body. After days of fasting and prayer and shouting at the Devil to leave, the Minister was the one who finally left, claiming that Brandy’s uncle simply had no desire to repent and forsake the Evil One that he had come into league with.

No one in the family was close to him, as he had shut himself away from nearly everyone for most of his life. But, Brandy was the only one he seemed to like at all. He had told her, when she was young and still lived with her family, that she was a witch. He said that her green eyes and red hair were signs of it, but that he could also sense it about her. She later told her mother what he had said and was warned against being alone with him again.

He died without a will, but in his final days he made his sister, Brandy’s mother, promise to bring Brandy to his home and let her take whatever she wanted, after which his meager estate could be divided however the family wished.

I expected her to return with suitcases filled with odd items, jewelry, or guns... something that would be fun to play with.

Instead, she returned with what looked like a small box, wrapped in black velvet cloth, tied up like a Christmas present with leather straps secured in a bow instead of ribbons.

“Check this out!”

Brandy tugged on one of the loose ends of the leather string, the bow bursting open, a flap of the black cloth falling away. She pulled the string off the package and removed the velvet covering far more slowly than I could have ever done.

Inside of this strange package was what looked like a journal. The cover was brown leather, and by the way that it was dirty, worn, and the way the spine was starting to crack at the edge, it had obviously been well-used. There was even some char in the center of the front of the cover, not like it had been tossed in a fire, but as if it had been briefly held over a flame.

Neither the cover nor the spine displayed any print, but when Brandy pulled open the cover, on the first page were the thick, black, handwritten words: Book of Spells.

Turning pages, what we had before us was not a journal, nor a grimoire translated and printed at a press, but a literal Book of Spells, each spell handwritten by a Sorcerer who had perhaps delved too deeply into the Black Arts and had gone insane.

The title of each spell was not simply written at the top of the page, but was drawn there, the multiple strokes of his pen nearly tearing through the paper at points, as if the author was obsessed with the titles of the spells, as if these contained power in themselves.

One page was titled “Fertility Spell” followed immediately by a “Spell to Cause Impotence.” There was a “Spell to Beguile Women” and a “Spell to Send Women Away.” I can remember seeing only one “Spell to Heal the Body if Any Disease,” while there must have been half a dozen spells to create illness in enemies, to cause blindness, tumors, and most crtainly a “Spell to Cause Madness.”

Each spell involved the placement of ritual candles around the Sorcerer or in front of him, fetish items belonging to a person to be affected, incantations, some in English and others in a language I’d never seen before, along with instructions on visualization, energy manipulation, and the calling upon the names of various spirits to help do the work.

Along with each spell, the author, Brandy’s uncle, had written notes of his experiences with the spells, sometimes in postscript, and in other cases written in the page margins or between previously written lines in smaller script.

As we turned through the pages of the Book of Spells, both of us speechless, dumbfounded by this treasure, the emphasis progressively departed from effects upon mundane life and became more transcendental, like a “Rite of Teleportation,” which in the notes seemed to be more a matter of astral projection or Soul Travel, although the author claimed to have physically materialized in a distant location and interacted with people there.

The final spell was a “Spell of Transmigration Towards Infinite Darkness.” It seemed that this was the last spell that he would perform, as there were no experiential notes, but some strange image, a sigil, drawn in blood, at the bottom of the last page.

“Which one should we do first?” I asked.

Brandy’s face contorted from intrigue to contempt as she looked at me and slammed the book shut.

“We’re not doing any of them!” she snapped back. “What? You want to end up calling this evil shit into your life, let it fuck you up until you end up crazy, too?”

I wanted to say yes. Within myself, I silently did say yes, but her expression told me that that was the wrong answer.

She wrapped the book back in its black, velvet cloth, wrapped the leather string around it, and made a tight bow of the ends of the string. Without a word, she walked to her bedroom, returning with empty hands and explanations of the chores she needed to attend to for the day, politely excusing me from her home.

I waited a couple of weeks to ask her about the Book of Spells again, hoping that somehow its power had seduced her and she was ready to practice from it.

“I burned it,” she said with the same nonchalance that someone might announce that they had thrown a piece of garbage away. It felt like someone with a giant fist had knocked me in the center of my chest. “It’s evil,” she insisted. “I wouldn’t wish those things on my worst enemies. And, look where it got my uncle!”

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even think. She had possessed a real Book Of Spells, written by a real Sorcerer. She couldn’t have burned it... she wouldn’t have. But, she never spoke of the book to me again, and I never asked.

As I’ve pieced together my own rituals and have written my own personal books of spells, I can say that I have done all that Brandy’s uncle had claimed to do, and much more. I also have come to know that I am not the only one, that there are Sorcerers and Witches in the world who have written by their own hands their own books of spells. I’ve learned that that first taste of real magick and real ritual was just that: a taste! What I’ve seen and what I’ve learned in my own work, and in working with other Black Magicians, is that, together, we possess secrets to immense power, and sometimes secrets of unspeakable evil.

I put out the call to all true Black Magicians to look through their own spellbooks and to find their favorite spells, so that we could put them together and give them to the world. In doing so, I know that we are collectively giving the public the keys to something that they may not be able to control. We are also giving them the chance, the choice, and the ability to try it for themselves and to see if they, too, are Sorcerers.

Are you ready to find out if you are a real Magician?

—E.A. KOETTING