"The curse," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

"The incantation," from Dicks' English Library of Standard Works, 1884.

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

Renowned magic headliner Jeff McBride tweets:

Is Conley's HEXOPEDIA considered the "NEW magic?" or is "HEX-O" the OLD magic renewing itself? Perhaps"HEX_O" is the Phoenix of THIS generation?

Meanwhile, check out how we illustrated the chapter headings for McBride's book The Show Doctor, now in softcover.

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.

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.)