The Magical Art of Unbewitching

Unbewitching is the archetypal stock-in-trade of conjure doctors, cunning-women, wise ones, healers, medicine people, witch-doctors, and spiritual workers the world over. It is the removal of the 'crossed' conditions that may arise from the magical violence perpetrated by enemies against us. The dissolution of deliberate hauntings. The abjuration of demonic harassment. Not to mention various occasionally downright aggressive "best-defence" tactics against the sorcerous ruination of body, mind, and soul. In this class, magician, diviner, and historian Dr Alexander Cummins will lead us through a host of early modern means of avoiding, countering, destroying, and even reversing and returning the maleficia of deliberately orchestrated hexes, curses, blights, and banes. We will do so with a heavy emphasis upon the folk magical and grimoiric techniques of early modern British cunning-folk - those local wise-women, "white witches", village wizards, and conjuring parsons who served their communities by preventing, diagnosing, and curing the bedevilled, the haunted, and the pixie-led, as well as the cursed and 'over-looked'.

This lecture will provide attendees with advice and cautions on using divination to confirm adverse spiritual influences and conditions; charms for protection against the witchcrafts and sorceries of our enemies; and detailed examination of a host of operations of counter-magic, reversal work, and hex-breaking. It will also demonstrate how many traditional workings of unbewitching British folk magic can be adapted from their pre-modern contexts for contemporary use and application.

Dr Alexander Cummins is a contemporary cunning-man and historian of magic. His magical specialties are the early modern grimoires, divination (especially geomancy) and the myriad folk necromancies of working with the dead. His published works include Nazarth: Pillars of Gladness (Hadean Press, 2022), The Art of Cyprian's Mirror of Four Kings (Hadean Press, 2021), An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magicke (Scarlet Imprint, 2020) with Phil Legard, and A Book of the Magi (Revelore Press, 2018), as well as articles for both occult and academic publications.

Dr Cummins is a founding editor of the Folk Necromancy in Transmission series for Revelore Press, and a co-host of the podcast Radio Free Golgotha.

His work, classes, and services can be found at www.alexandercummins.com