Conjures need their google-fu

Well, folks, I’m taking a free online course called Power Searching with Google, which may turn out to be a godsend I didn’t quite know I needed. Because, you know, how do you find a pro-bono divorce lawyer?

But I’m not quite up to that speed yet. For the first lesson’s homework, I had to fine-tune a Google image search. You can learn a whole lot just by limiting images to a single main color! “Black and white,” for instance, is likely to turn up historical photos.

Well, anyhow, I thought I’d see what I could find by looking at images of spirit traps.

A plain search for spirit trap mostly turned up posters for a movie I’d never heard of.

I tried the blue filter, because most of the ones I’ve seen were made with blue bottles. This turned up a lot of anime screenshots, but nothing that looked remotely like a blue bottle on the first page of images.

Black-and-white was a little better — in fact, the first image was a diagram from Carolina Dean’s website. He knows a good deal about magic, so I thought that was worth a look. It’s an elegantly simple spell which could easily be adapted to proxy work for clients. Still, not quite what I wanted. I was looking for something that functions more like flypaper or maybe ant bait, rather than a course of antibiotics 🙂 So:

This piece of “spirit trap art” has no detailed instructions, so I have only a vague idea of how to operate it. I believe it makes magical sense, though. I’d like to know something about its provenance. It looks like it was invented by an artist who knew something about British or Appalachian magic.

This simple schematic is an elegant idea, possibly effective, simply presented. But — do you manipulate the diagram during prayer ritual? Do you build a box with a tiny spring-loaded door?

It is a riff on two very different cultural traditions — something of a mashup, typical of much modern American magical work. I know a few powerful people who work that way — but not many. And yet it is so elegantly simple, I bet it would work.

And then there was this, which I saw in the sidebar at http://crazy-bout-billie.blogspot.com/ — utterly irrelevant, and too good not to pass on 🙂

Most of the rest was black-and-white pictures of faces.

At this point I changed the query to devil trap.

Most of these involved sigils of five-pointed and six-pointed stars — very Key-of-Solomon-looking — like this, for instance.

Once again, no explanation for its proper deployment and use. The presence of dollar signs in the writing around the edge of the diagram is perplexing. Was this a Renaissance-era spell adapted by a modern worker to protect money luck or employment? It looks like all the S’s are crossed like that. Was there something magically dodgy about the letter S that required additional protection when you had to include it in a rite? But I digress.

Toward the bottom of the first page, though, I found this little amulet based on a Middle Eastern-style demon bowl — only $6.95! Aren’t you tempted to just buy that and pray over it?