Читать книгу The Element Encyclopedia of 1000 Spells: A Concise Reference Book for the Magical Arts - Judika Illes - Страница 83

The impulse to work with saints can be too powerful to wait for permission—or sometimes even to ask for permission. This isn’t a problem with traditions with no “official” concept of sainthood. In a sense, all Jewish saints, for example, are “unofficial.” There’s no authority or criteria to make them official, although popularity conveys its own kind of official status. It’s between saint and person. What happens, however, within a system where these criteria do exist? What happens when, during what usually starts as a local phenomenon, people begin to recognize a saint’s capacity for miracles, without official recognition? Will people be patient and wait for the official verdict or will they create their own rituals? For those who are inclined to magic, the choice is obvious.

So-called “unofficial saints” are invariably tied to the Roman Catholic tradition, because it is the only tradition that insists on a lengthy organized bureaucratic procedure of conferring sainthood. There is a vast range of unofficial saints. What they have in common are consistent miracles performed following death. They may be accessed in magic spells in similar fashion to any other spirit.