Appalachian Folk Magick

Happy Independence Day! As we celebrate another turning of the wheel, for The United States' birthday, may we today investigate the practices and mindsets of those who dwell in the hills and lands of the Appalachian Mountains. For therein, their wisdom and magick hold great power and might--and insight into what our future holds.

WE ARE GOING TO SALEM!
Instagram: @beyondtheseaspodcast
EMAIL ME: beyondtheseaspodcast@gmail.com
Tarot Collaboration: @thefeatherwitchnyc
Weekly Book: The Cursed Towers
Podcast website: https://beyondtheseas.buzzsprout.com/
More info: https://www.kierandanaan.com/beyond-the-seas

Sources
-Richards, Jake (Dr. Buck). "Recipes and Charms." Holy Stones & Iron Bones, littlechicagoconjure13.wordpress.com/recipes. 
-Ward, Beth. "The Long Tradition of Folk Healing Among Southern Appalachian Women." Atlas Obscura, 21 November 2017. atlasobscura.com/articles/southern-appalachia-folk-healers-granny-women-neighbor-ladies.

Music
"Rising Sea" by Be Still the Earth
"Intimacy" by Ben WInwood
"Forest by the Sea" by Beneath the Mountain
"Godnattsaga" by Beneath the Mountain
"Irish Mountains" by Ben Winwood

Cheers Magick Makers, 
Kieran

Chapters

• 0:00 A Tap, Tap, Tapping
• 3:25 Grand tidings!
• 11:41 Granny Witches and Conjurors
• 23:52 Practicum
• 32:33 Outro

Transcript

We heard her cane tap, tap, tapping down the road long before we saw her.

Then the smell of tobacco on the wind that soon heralded her approach. 

Up from the top of the hill did we spy her, a vision in black.

From head to toe, enwrapped in the color of night. 

She tap, tap, tapped her way down the hilly road, her aged bones slowly descending. 

Wreaths of smoke enveloped her frail being, but suggested a cone of power within. 

Granny Witch was not one to trifle with.

Her mutterings and small laughter to herself came next on the wind, 

As she approached our home. 

And for a moment, she simply stood in front of the entrance, slowly taking in the wooden beams and frames. 

Then a knock, knock, knocking on the door with her well-worn cane. 

And a flick, flick, flicking of burnt tobacco leaves onto the ground. 

We opened the door, said our hellos, and were greeted with a slow look up into our faces. 

Her wrinkles bespoke of lessons learned long ago, her eyes deep caverns of knowledge and experience. 

From the depths of her cloak, she held forth a small black bag—pungent odors wafting forth from it. 

“I heard you need a healin’,” she said. 

Slowly did we nod our heads, knowing her folk remedies were filled with more than just simple herbs and roots. 

For we had never enlisted her help before, not until the others told us of her…abilities. 

“Well? May I come in?” she asked.

We stole a quick glance at each other, before stepping aside.

She took one step over the threshold and then another, breathing deeply of our house’s air.

And she nodded her head, her can tap, tap, tapping down the hall towards the sickroom.

And both we and she knew, that her work…

Was about to begin.

(transition music)

            Grand tidings and welcome to you on this, the Thirty-Fifth Episode, of Beyond the Seas. My name is Kieran and here we are again, back at it for another week. And this episode is dropping on the Fourth of July, for all my States listeners! Happy Independence Day! So happy to be here with you all as we sail our way through the summer. The Plugs Time: Instagram, @beyondtheseaspodcast, and Claudia’s account, @thefeatherwitchnyc, to follow not only the show’s updates and memes and whatnot, but also Claudia’s weekly reels on teaching the Tarot, one card at a time, one week at a time. Also, those five-stars go such a long way on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so please do give the show a rating and review if you have not yet already. And as always, magick makers, thank you for being here with me today. 

            And now, artistic and literary updates. It’s the last week of the show in Colorado, and my heart is slowly getting heavier: I love it out here. The company, the cast, the show, the story—Sherlock. It’s gonna be hard to give this one up, magick makers—but that’s always how these theatre shows end. Thus, there are a few tickets still available on thesilco.org, for this weekend’s final shows. Pick em up now before they are gone, especially by those who love to walk-up. And now, the book: I have been soaking up so much of the experience in Silverthorne that I put a pause on the audiobook. The Cursed Towers and the Witches of the Coven are not going anywhere, and I cannot wait to dive back in once I start heading back to New York next week. So, if you haven’t already, snag yourself a copy and catch up! Let’s all travel with the witches of old together. 

            And now, the Card of the Week! When I heard about this card, the first thing I said was “Oh geeeeez! Oy!” But it is reversed, so that does lessen the pain a tad: we are working with the Six of Swords, Reversed this week. Let us look at its upright meaning: leaving behind that which you know is best to move on from, but not necessarily wanting to. There is a heaviness to the card. Now, however, with it being reversed, there is a caution to stay put. Really think about what tides, currents, energies are attempting to drag or pull you away from the path you are on. Contemplate whether those new paths and the leaving behind of certain things is truly what you want. I personally see road blocks ahead, things that are standing in the way of your true path—that are able to be removed by you because it was you who put them there. So revisit those internal blocks and walls that you willingly or subconsciously placed, so as to allow your true potential to flourish. Woof, we have a lot of work to do this week, magick makers. 

            And now, the Wine of the Week! You all know me at this point and my love for a good, affordable wine. And with it being the last week in Colorado, I really wanted to stretch a buck and make things last. Thus, we are going back to the Bota Box. Yes, you heard correctly: the Bota Box. NOW. I am all about a good boxed wine, y’all know that. And this one does not disappoint: I picked up the Pinot Noir, because we have had a lot of fancy wines these past few weeks. And surprisingly enough, it tastes like strawberries: like that is the first thing you taste. Which I LOVE. It is a tad sugar-y, which is not my ideal cup of tea. But if you like strawberries, then grab yourself a sustainable form of wine and dive in, kiddos. Pair it with hot tubs nights, a relaxing ritual at the end of a long show week, and sharp white cheeses. And good conversations with friends on the nature of life and reality. 

            And, finally, this week’s topic. Since today is the day of our independence, I thought something within the confines of our country would be a wonderful foray to celebrate the day. Now, of course, we all mostly come from away here in America—which is its own storied topic and history. Suffice it to say that a large portion of magickal belief arrived on these shores with the immigrants who traveled here. These traditions and practices have been practiced and handed down for hundreds of years, and I cannot wait to dive into the spells and lore of the magick of the Appalachian Mountains. 

            Ergo, grab your favorite bottle of red, find a comfy chair, and close your eyes as I tell you the tale of Appalachian Folk Magick—and take you…

            Beyond the Seas.

            (transition music)

            There are a nuanced variety of different forms of magick that we today know of and practice: ceremonial, druidic, chaos, Enochian, etc. Of course, those are the more academic and upper crust styles of the Craft—but what of those who learn at her mother’s knee? Or his father’s lap? The magick and crafts that are passed down through the generations of the common person, the common hero. Herein, we now have the opportunity to investigate the Craft of those who live in those remote villages, towns, and havens—far from the urban, city dwellers. The knowledge and traditions out there run deep and long, filled with heart and family. There is a great power there, in that regard. 

            Ergo, to the Eastern Seaboard of the United States do we now turn our attention. Specifically, the Appalachian Mountains. Here, the lore of the healers and the midwives and cunning men is known broadly as Appalachian Folk Magick, or more specifically Granny Witches. There is a wonderful article I found that explores this topic and area—and branch of the Craft—and I cannot wait to share it with you. 

            It comes from Atlas Obscura, and follows a particular practitioner, Byron Ballard, in the Appalachian Mountains. The article itself is titled “The Long Tradition of Folk Healing Among Southern Appalachian Women.”

            “‘Put it in some booze,’ [Ballard] says, and you’ve got yourself an elderberry tincture that can help fend off any number of nasty coughs and colds. It’s not native to the area…but vervain can act like ‘rocket fuel’ for any magic or healing work you’re trying to do. And mugwort? Put the leaf inside your pillowcase, she says, to help promote lucid dreaming.

            “Equal parts paganism, down-home Protestantism, and stubborn Southern practicality, Ballard’s is a specific manifestation of a long-standing Appalachian folk healing tradition that combines an intimate knowledge of the land beneath her feet, a few recited prayers and charms, and a couple of everyday items that she likely picked up at her local corner store: salt, twine, marshmallows, and mason jars.

            “Ballard’s pagan practices may have actualized later in life, but the roots of it are deep and familial, a passed-down gift from generations of Appalachian mountain women—her great-grandmother was a local healer, and her grandmother was a self- and community-identified witch that possessed a gift for precognitive dreams. Out of necessity and pragmatism, women, like those in Ballard’s family, used what they had on hand to cure ills, tend to the dying, and deliver babies in their communities.

            “By Ballard’s own definition, it’s medicine and midwifery, omen-reading and weather-working. It’s using ‘keen observation, common sense… and folkways to affect change.’

            “Appalachian folk healing goes by many names, depending on where it’s practiced in the region and who’s doing the practicing: root work, folk medicine, folk magic, kitchen witchery. Ballard dubs her own practice hillfolks’ hoodoo, and some Southern Appalachian natives would never think to call it anything but the work of the Lord.

            “Regardless of naming conventions, Southern Appalachian folk healing modalities—using plants, prayers, herbs, and dirt to heal illnesses, ward off evil, and protect the home—reflect the vibrant cross-section of people who initially inhabited the area from West Virginia down into Mississippi.

            “The first people to employ the use of natural Appalachian resources, coupling them with spiritual prayer and ritual, were the Cherokee and Choctaw. In A Modern Appalachian Folk Healer, Edward Green discusses how influential this indigenous knowledge was to the education of Clarence ‘Catfish’ Gray, one of West Virginia’s most well-known folk healers.

            “‘Catfish relates that his ancestors learned much of their herbal medicine from local Indians,’ Green says. ‘And it was an Indian from North Carolina that gave Catfish real faith in the curative value of herbs…’

            “The Scots-Irish, Ulster Scots, and English—rural people who carried with them a reverence for nature and understanding of medicinal plants from the Old World far predating modern medicine—came later. Upon their arrival, they fused these Native American methods with their own.

            “This early European arrival to the New World South also coincided with Europe’s religious transition to Protestantism, a conflict that led to the violent persecution of people who did not adhere to prescribed, Christian religious practices.

            “Religious xenophobia saw many non-Protestants classified derogatorily as witches and persecuted, though many were simply lay healers, practitioners of herbal medicine whose philosophies were rooted in a spirituality that venerated nature instead of a single monotheistic deity. A few historians have speculated that these potentially pagan practitioners…went underground or fled to the New World, where their methodologies could have been suppressed or absorbed by Christianity.

            “Indeed, one of the unique characteristics of Southern Appalachian folk magic or healing is the way it combines all of these elements. ‘Like everything else in the South, there’s a combination of European, African, and Native American influences,’ says Sara Amis, Southern writer, instructor at the University of Georgia, and practicing pagan.

            “According to T.J. Smith, Ph.D., folklorist, and executive director of the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Mountain City, Georgia, however, many mountain healers practiced their folk medicine through a strictly Protestant lens, believing they were fulfilling a duty as Christ-followers to help those in need. Some, he says, would even balk at the notion that grinding herbs to heal a sore, performing a ritual bath, or saying a prayer or chant to cure a burn was connected in any way to pagan practice or ideology. They believed that their ability to use plants and prayers to heal the sick was a gift from the Divine.

            “…There were other Appalachian folk healers that saw no connection between the healing work they did and any religious practice at all. Using elderberry from the yard to cure a cough or catnip tea made by your neighbor to fight the croup was simply common sense.

            “‘Their understanding of these things came out of necessity,’ says Smith. ‘They were forced to be very pragmatic and self-reliant,’ two of Appalachian culture’s foundational tenets.

            “Still, it’s not a huge leap of logic to make the connection between Old World European pagan philosophies and the characteristics of folk healing, as pointed out by Bonnie O’Connor and David Hufford in Understanding Folk Medicine. Such characteristics include an interconnectedness of body, mind, and spirit; elements of the mystical or supernatural; treatment of illnesses using ritual baths, cleansings, or offerings; a presumption of the highest goodness of nature; the recitation of spoken or written charms or prayers; and being born with a special mystical ability to heal.

            “Like an Appalachian midwife, a [so-called] granny woman would employ plants and herbs to help a woman through labor and delivery, but unlike a typical midwife, she may also recite a protective charm or chant to help ensure the health and survival of mother and baby.

            “Families in Appalachia were often far removed from doctor’s offices and hospitals at the nearest urban city centers, and cut off from the closest neighbor by the region’s rugged topography. The male physicians who would come to more remote Appalachian communities often charged fees for their services that many families couldn’t afford.

            “Midwives, granny women, and ‘neighbor ladies’ were critical in closing this gap of care. They received no formal medical training but were considered indispensable in their communities, working for barter rather than a monetary fee. They acted as obstetricians, pharmacists, herbalists, and nurses to Appalachian families. According to Foxfire’s archived interviews with women like Perry, they were also more trusted, and considered more effective, than city doctors unknown to the community.

            “Prior to the 20th century, a time when pregnancy and childbirth presented serious risk to maternal health, these powerful Southern Appalachian women were the primary healers, using passed-down knowledge of regional botanica, along with divination and prayer, to ensure the health of those in their charge.

            “These women knew that catnip tea or red alder tea kept infants from getting hives. They prescribed stewed down calamus root to help soothe colic. They put sulfur in the soles of shoes to help ease flu symptoms. And if someone came to them with a bad burn, they knew that blowing smoke and chanting the right words could talk the fire out.

            “‘These people were ingenious and incredibly pragmatic, practical thinkers who had an understanding of their land and their world that far outreaches anything most of us could claim today,’ says Smith of Southern Appalachians. ‘They were resolute in their stubbornness for living. And just because… they may have been isolated for most of their lives, they were still incredibly intelligent, and contributed a great deal to the American story.’

            “That pragmatism, that resiliency and fortitude have helped the people of Southern Appalachia preserve healing folkways that are as old and deep as the region’s fogged-soaked valleys and hills. Theirs is a land-proud culture that holds fast to its traditions, ones that are still being practiced in all new manifestations today.”

            Refill your drinking horns, your goblets, your chalices, for the second half of Appalachian Folk Magick, after this brief break. 

            (transition music)

            The long traditions instilled within this particular branch of the Craft are old and ancient, stemming from many lands and cultures. Though in my research, there are plenty of granny witches and conjuring men who do not consider the work they do to be anything relating to witchcraft—they see it, much like the article we discussed, as an expression of their Christian faith. Others, however, like Ballard, do view themselves as witches. Suffice it to say, potato/potahtoe. 

            Now, you may be wondering what specific workings and charms and spells stem from this area of the Craft. In my research, I found a wonderful man by the name of Jake Richards, also known as Dr. Buck, who wrote the book Backwoods Witchcraft: Conjure & Folk Magic from Appalachia. His website has a section dedicated to charms and recipes, and I thought I would share them here with all of you today. Some of these workings and charms contain bodily fluids and animal parts, so fair warning—he also implies to forage the parts of living animals from nature, after they have passed on. If you come across the body of an animal that has passed, and you are in need of some of its person so as to work a charm, ask the spirit of the animal for its blessing and give copious offerings before foraging. This type of magick is not for the faint of heart, it seems. So get your pens and papers out, so as to write all of them down. 

            From Dr. Buck, “For Good Luck: sprinkle new salt in your shoes. Carry the left hind foot of a rabbit. A rag with dried frog blood on it is carried in the left pocket. After acquiring the blood, bury the rag in the front yard for 8 days. On the ninth day, take it up and you’ll be lucky from then on. A bone from a black cat is carried. A bone from the front right paw of a possum is carried. Dried tip of a cow’s tongue.

            “To draw customers: take your first urine of the morning and mix it with ashes of red onion skin and three cap fulls of whiskey. Use this to wash the doorstep of the property or simply pour it out in the driveway. Burn red onion skin on Friday at noon. Place four pennies in the inside corners of the property and cover them with a pile of new salt while telling it to bring you all sorts of luck.

            “To find a job: carry a red onion in the left pocket. Take a piece of string the exact measurements your right foot. Take three hairs from the left side of your head and carry this in a packet of newspaper. Carry a silver dime (minted before 1964) or one of your birth year in a flannel bag with goldenrod blooms, Solomon’s seal root, and horsehair cut to the length of your right pinky finger.

            “To incite new love: get three sticks from the nest of a dove. Soak them in a mixture of your urine (1/2 cup) to (1pint) whiskey for three days and bury under your door step for your preferred partner to walk over. Take a turkey feather and measure it with a red string on a Sunday. Wear this around your right wrist.

Bury your name and that of a potential love under a willow tree, on the east side where the morning sun first falls on the wood. Take a queen Elizabeth root and use it to measure your left ring finger. Where your finger ends on the root, carve out a hole about 1/2 a cent in diameter, and save the piece for later. Take a white hair from a black cat (usually happens in old age), the toe nail clipping of your little toe on the right foot, and some of their fluids or toe nail clippings. Place all of this into the hole and shove it in there. Plug it back up with the piece you saved and wrap the root in that place with a red string. Hide this in their mattress.

            “Get a lover to return: say their name three times while shuffling a new deck of cards. On the final recitation, pull a card from the deck. Keep doing this until you get a king (if they’re a man) or a Queen for a woman. Take this card and tape it to the head of the bed on their side facing out. Make a mixture of snuff, your urine, and honey. Smear this on the mouth each day while talking to them and saying their name, apologizing if you need to and so on. Get three sticks from a robin’s nest that has eggs in it. Don’t touch the eggs. Take these sticks and dip them in whiskey in which you’ve soaked your toe nails for nine days. Bind these sticks with their photo or their unwashed clothes and hang above the front door. Take a handful of salt and toss it into the fire each morning for nine mornings while saying their name and telling them to come back.

            " To keep the law away or keep them kind: use the above mixture of cinnamon and sugar for this as well in the same fashion. Take three Indian head pennies and nail them into the inside top frame of the door, facing outwards. Measure the door from outside, from the upper left corner down to the lower right corner with a red string. Piss in a bottle and shut it up with the string inside. Bury this in your front yard fist deep. Get some dirt from a church, horse hair cut to the length of the resident’s big toe, one hair cut for each person of the household, and three new pins. Wrap this into a packet of brown paper, tie it with a string and bury it at the right side of the front door. Take a stolen pocket knife and carve three small crosses above the doorway to the home.”

            It is clear that this magick works from the objects one has in the home, land, and common area. And what a wonderful reminder to us all: magick itself is truly simplistic. It arises from the mundane and is transformed into the extraordinary. Much like the Magician in the Tarot, it is the transmutation of the common into the uncommon, the alchemical wedding of As Above, So Below. And with the honoring of the ancestors, land, and generational wisdom, one understands the power of the Granny Witches and Conjuring Men in the Appalachian Mountains. Thus, may we all learn from their wisdom this day—and as we do, your magick, my magick…our magick…will always be made stronger…because of it. 

            (transition music)

            The stories, research, and production elements were done and edited, respectively, by me, Kieran, with sources attached in the description. If you want to be a guest on the show, or have a topic you wish me to explore and discuss, send me an email at beyondtheseaspodcast@gmail.com. And be sure to hit the follow button, on whichever platform you enjoy the podcast, and look forward to more content next week. Until then, seek the veil between the worlds, and allow yourself to travel…Beyond the Seas.