Читать книгу The Element Encyclopedia of 1000 Spells: A Concise Reference Book for the Magical Arts - Judika Illes - Страница 90

Magic energy radiates from everything and everyone that occurs naturally on Earth to varying degrees, or is derived from naturally occurring parts. Some objects are sources of greater power than others. Frankincense, roses, and wild Syrian rue, for instance, permit greater access to magic power than many other botanicals. Certain areas are also sources of greater power than others, with “area” meant both in a literal and a metaphoric way.

Thresholds are border areas where one force, power, or element encounters another. These meeting areas are potentially the most highly magically charged of all. Thresholds exist everywhere: the seashore, that transitional area where ocean meets land; the foot of mountains, where land begins to rise; and caves, the subterranean thresholds between Earth’s outer and inner powers.

There are architectural thresholds: doors and windows. There are thresholds in time: twilight and dawn, where an incoming power approaches before the out-going power has completely dispersed. Life cycles are thresholds: the birth of a new baby, particularly a first child whose birth transforms someone into a parent. Death is a threshold between one existence and the next. Someone who lingers in a halflife is described as having a foot in both worlds, straddling the threshold. Any transformative ritual is defined as a threshold, by virtue of its very capacity to transform. There are thresholds on the body: the mouth is the threshold between thought and speech.

Thresholds are simultaneously the areas of greatest magical potential and also of extreme vulnerability. A vast percentage of protective amulets, rituals, and spells are designed to guard thresholds and the transformative process. In fact, every magic spell can be perceived as a transformative threshold, from a past that has left something to be desired toward the future that the spell hopefully produces.

Most thresholds consist of a simple boundary: with one foot you stand inside the house, with another you stand outside. If your feet are small enough and your balance is good, you can stand poised, neither inside, nor outside.

With one foot you stand in the river or ocean, with the other, you stand on the land. The ancient Egyptians called their country “the land of the red and the black,” because there was a distinct division, a visible dividing line between the black fertile land of Nile silt and the stark red land of the desert. You could literally stand with one foot in each color. Each color also typified a different kind of magic and a different spiritual ruler. The black belonged to Osiris, with his arts of orderly civilization; red belonged to his brother Seth, anarchic, chaotic Lord of Magic.

These are simple boundaries: you can hop from one to the other. There are also expanded, exponentially super-magically charged thresholds.