Em or Spells and Counter-Spells by Mary Bramston, 1878.

From Captain Marryat's Novels, 1896.

From the Kaleidoscope yearbook of Hampden-Sydney College, 1901.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

This is how we imagine the yearbook at the witch's coven masquerading as a ballet school in the great film Suspiria.  Here are nine surprisingly occult illustrations from the Iris yearbook of Ward Seminary, 1906.  You'll recall that the iris flower figures importantly in Suspiria.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

From the Milady in Brown yearbook of Belmont College, 1908.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

"The invocation," from Seonee, or, Camp Life on the Satpura Range by Robert Armitage Sterndale, 1887.

"This gradually condensed and took at length a human shape."  From The Conquest of the Moon by André Laurie, 1889.

5x5 magic word squares are incredibly rare, with the Pompeiian Sator / Arepo / Tenet / Opera / Rotas being the best known by far.  (Futility Closet featured the Revel / Evere / Veoev / Ereve / Lever grid, which reads as a palindromic sentence though not as a magic square.)  But there are three other 5x5 word squares explained in The Young Wizard's Hexopedia, including this one: Balam / Avada / Labal / Adava / Malab.  Balam is a name for supernatural intuition, derived from the diviner called Balaam in the Torah.  Avada is an Estonian word that means "open."  Labal is the occult name for the revealer of all the mysteries of the Earth (described in The Lesser Key of Solomon).  Adava is a Marathi word for a winding road.  And Malab is a Somali word for honey, which is a code for "alchemical gold," which itself is a code for immortality.  Woven together into a grid, these words form a charm that conjures magic insight so as to reveal the mysterious pathway toward everlasting light.

An Indian Wizard by Arthur Lillie, 1887.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Here's a random page from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia, our painstaking reconstruction of a tome that wasn't in the window display of a spooky old bookshop.  (See the very strange history of this book here.)

Here's the macabre genie of knowledge (???) from The Booster, yearbook of the Morristown High School (Indiana, 1917).  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

We're honored that the renowned philosopher of magic Robert E. Neale (author of The Sense of Wonder) thinks we've stumbled upon the secret to world peace with our Seance Parlor Feng Shui project: 

Prof. Oddfellow has carried the logical approach to nonsense to even greater heights than before. The logic of two absurd systems logically joined into a masterpiece of faith for fools that could stop us from killing each other. My delight lies in making up meaning, but his talent in this is unsurpassed. This treatise will lurk about on our coffee table waiting to preside over a promising guest. In the meantime, I might play with feng shui myself.

Woohoo!