The Face of Hocus Pocus

Photo by MonkeyMyshkin

The Dreadful Magic Power of Taboo Terms for Effluvia

Our disgust of effluvia and coinage of taboo terms for body substances is inseparable from voodoo. Steven Pinker explains how words for effluvia possess a dreadful magic power:

"Effluvia have an emotional charge that makes them figure prominently in voodoo, sorcery, and other kinds of sympathetic magic. People in many cultures believe that a person can be harmed by mutilating or casting spells on his feces, saliva, blood, nails, and hair, and that a person can be protected from harm if those substances are cursed, buried, drowned, or otherwise ostentatiously discarded. The potency of these substances is people's minds also leads them to be used in medicines or charms, often in homeopathic or purified doses. The emotion of disgust and the psychology of sympathetic magic are entwined. The psychologists Paul Rozin and April Fallon have shown that modern Westerners respect the laws of voodoo in their own disgust reactions, such as recoiling from an object if it merely looks like a disgusting substance or has been in contact with one in the past. Word magic simply extends this chain of associations by one link, and gives the words for effluvia a dreadful power as well." (The Stuff of Thought, p. 345)

Poolo si Bagumbah

Poolo si Bagumbah is a magical phrase for making a zombie rise and obey one's commands in the interactive drama "The Curse of Whately Manor" by Frank Branham (1992).

Magic Words Change as We Use Them

"Just as language will change as its speakers use it over decades and centuries, so the language that creates the world—the language that is the world—its Meaning, its Logos—can change as we use it, all of us human persons and others, and when it does the world in which we have our beings is remade."
—John Crowley, Daemonomania

In the Mouth of the White Squirrel

"But he found no word beneath the tongue of the reindeer, no magical word in the mouth of the white squirrel, not even so much as the beginning of a word."
—The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, 1922

Epigraphs as Magic Words

"On the next page the title again, and beneath it in small italics one of those little quotations ... many old books had, like a magician's distracting patter before his trick, more mysterious usually than the book that followed." —John Crowley, Love and Sleep

Thanks to Jim H. Moreno for naming our Magic Words: A Dictionary as a favorite resource for spell casting in fantasy role playing games.