hill ways and knowings

I guess it's my age or something, but I'm to the point where I'm not interested in too much ta da! I want my magic to be all woven through whatever I do every day. This is one reason, I took so to Byron Ballard's book about hillfolks' hoodoo. It's those things your Grandma and your Mama knew but didn't say they knew because it was all so much a part of everything that they didn't imagine it was anything special.

Your Mom didn't announce now I'm going to do this great magical thing called make brown gravy. Yes! I'm going to take some flour, lard, and water and make biscuits and gravy. And we, who are hungry shall be fed.

No. She just made the damn gravy and those luscious big light brown biscuits that you'd like one of right now (if it weren't for that wheat avoidance thing you got your head around).

And her magic was that way too. Spilled the salt -- throw some over your left shoulder. She didn't know why. (Because when little things go awry, it meant to the ones older than your Mom and Granny, that there were mischievous spirits around and that pinch of salt over your shoulder both kept the meddling spirits busy (counting salt) and/or landed in their eye (mischievous spirits are most often behind you on your left side).

"Don't open an umbrella in the house," she'd tell you. She didn't know why other than, "Bad luck". ( The reason was because old time practical magic depended a lot on getting your message to the universe through "like calls like", the law of similarity. Raising the umbrella in the house where it wasn't raining meant "bring rain", or bad weather -- into your home.) If you raised an umbrella in the house right now, you probably wouldn't get bad luck, unless you raised the umbrella with intent and focus, but most old timers didn't chance it or "give place to the devil" (ie: those mischievous spirits)

Don't put a hat on the bed, Mom always warned me (so much so that I still don't). A hat on the bed indicated that the person in the bed was ready to take a big trip. Yes. By sleeping. Not a journey we want to go on anytime soon. I know (for a fact) that putting a hat on the bed will not kill anyone. But it's a bad prayer just the same and there is no reason to tempt fate, because your "prayer" could be answered.

What our forbears did was spellwork, but they wouldn't have called it that. And, by not knowing certain precepts, they sometimes simmered that knowing down into superstition -- blind obedience to half truths.

Still, it's not too late to relearn what our grandparent's grandparents once knew.