Friday, October 31, 2008  Dust of Bones  Don't miss our
interview over at The Tarot Channel, all about Magic Words: A
Dictionary.   We were surprised to discover the following magic
spell in a modern book of science magic tricks:  "Dust of bones
and witch's attire, I command you to draw some fire."  The spell
is recommended for setting a sugar cube alight with "genuine
witch's dust ... made from the scraping from the bottom of her
kettle after she made her brew ... The witches use it to draw
fire—lightning—from the sky to start their fires." (Nathan
Shalit, Science Magic Tricks, 1998).  This spell harks back to
an era when science and the occult overlapped. As Henry Adams
noted in his autobiography, "Science has proved that forces,
sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and
complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract,
without stop; that man's senses are conscious of few, and only
in a partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic
existence his consciousness has been