Magic Songs

Magic Songs

Collected by Anne Twitty* * From a collection begun while working with Julia Blackburn, who found two of the poems.

Magic is a universal language, a technique for transformation. It works by binding or loosing, invoking, destroying, leading away. Wherever they were, the women who said or chanted these incantations had the same purposes—they wanted to stop the flow of blood or start the flow of milk, to ease childbirth, to send a fever back into the forest it came from. For them, the word was not the refuge of the helpless but a medicine or a thunderbolt, a sacramental tool. Their words were acts.

The child's mother first wipes her sexual organ with the shirt and
then the child's face, saying:
Flee marvel from marvel.
Here is a greater marvel.
White partridges flew by and brought white milk.
They pour it out of the stone,
they pour it round out of the stone.
One hand fastens the sleeve of the other.
The axe by itself cuts the Evil Eyes.
Let the Evil Eyes melt away
like bees over the flowers,
like lard on the coals,
like foam on muddy water.
We shall tread over the water,
we shall make the Evil Eyes wither and dry up,
that they appear no more

A southern Slav charm collected by Phyllis Kemp, who practiced medicine there before World War II, and made an extensive study of folk medicine/magic. (From Phyllis Kemp, Healing Ritual, Faber and Faber, London, 1937, p. 141.)

I dance a strong dance.
The god comes on the rainbow
to his shrine.
He comes with the red rain
and the blue.
It is the sign of the god.
He comes down here to earth.
Dance, all ye children of his!

From Ifaluk Atoll, an island south of the Marianas, where the women write all the poetry. This is an invitation to a god. (From Edwin Grant Burrows, Flower in My Ear: Arts and Ethos of Ifaluk Atoll, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1963, p. 353.)

I cut all witchcraft from you.
Hiao!
I cut off the rainbow curses from you.
Hiao!
I cut all spirit-husband harm from you.
Hiao!
I cut from you the evil talk
of the watering place.
Hiao!
I cut from you the harmful talk
of the firewood-gatherers.
Hiao!

From Adayme, Africa. The pregnant woman is bound with magic strings. Then, as the charm is said, line by line, each string is cut. First around the head, then the neck, then the waist, the knees and the feet. (From Hugo Huber, "Adayme Purification and Pacification Rituals," The American Anthropologist, v. 29, 1927, p. 178; Twitty version.)

Whose womb do I have for my womb?
The gull’s womb I have for my womb.
Whose womb do I have for my womb?
The sea-fowl’s womb I have for my womb.

Eskimo. For a woman in childbirth (From William Thalbitzer, The Ammassalik Eskimo, AMS Press, New York, 1914; Twitty version.)

Earth-Woman, Earth-Woman,
may you fall sick.
Your milk turn to fire.
May you burn in the earth!
Flow, flow, my milk.
Flow, flow, white milk.
Flow, flow, as I will.
My child is hungry.

Gypsy. The Earth Woman is thought to suckle children so that they refuse their mother's milk. She has many sister spirits child-stealers and child-destroyers like the Hebrew Lilith and the Islamic Karina—who appear to be destroying shadows, the woman's double. (From H. von Wlislocki, "Zauber und Besprechungsformeln," Ethnologische Mitteilungen aus Hungarn, v. 1, no. 1-2, 1887; Twitty translation.)

May the lion take you coming out of the thicket.
May he eat your flesh May your bones be lost.
May Gaweg beat you when he is angry.
May God protect me! How can weeping be stolen?

Ethiopian. A woman’s angry song. Someone else has taken her mourning song and sung it. Ethiopian women traditionally invent and sing the dirges for the dead. (From Enno Littman, Publications of the Princeton Expedition to Abys sinia, E.J. Brill, Leyden, 1910-1915; Twitty version.)

The woman who cannot nourish her child:
Let her herself take a piece of her own child's grave,
then wrap it up in black wool and sell it to traders.
Let her then say:
I sell it: buy ye it,
this black wool, and seeds of this sorrow.

Anglo-Saxon. (From J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine, Oxford University Press, New York, 1952, p. 191.)