The Magic of Books: From the Everyday to the Occult

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                The Magic of Books

          From the Everyday to the Occult 

               

  The ÞURSAKYNGI Loki and its Talisman

           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                        Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                       Abstract

An exploration of the idea of books as catalysts for transforming reality in glorious ways, exemplified by an occult text of extremely unusual form.

Printed Companions

Books, printed books, are my most prized possessions, but for a long time my focus has been on reading on the Internet, where texts float as ephemeral data, detached from their physical forms. 

Books have always been magical for me. Not just for the ideas they contain, but for their physical presence—the weight in the hand, the scent of paper, the silent invitation of their pages. In an age when most of my reading has migrated to the internet, I was recently reminded of this magic in a surprising way.

Between Ideas and Physical Form in the Magic of Books

Books are a form of magic. 

What is magic?

Magic is the sense of something beyond the mundane, beyond the intellectual, beyond the senses, beyond what is ordinarily fully graspable by the human mind no matter how well developed that mind is  in its intellectual and sensory capacities.

It is the ineffable spark that eludes full comprehension yet imbues life with wonder and inspiration, projecting possibilities that stretch beyond the limits of human understanding. It is the glimpse of life as glorious, terrifying, and awe-inspiring—life as mystery.

That's one way of looking at magic.

Books have been magical for me beceause of the universes they transport me to, invoking mental worlds that reshape one's  understanding of reality, configuring the cosmos through the architecture of thought, catalyzing mental constellations that shape the universe through the power of narrative and idea.

This magic is compounded by their physical form: the character of the binding, the texture of the paper, the scent of ink and age, the weight,  the typography and design-these material elements amplify the power of the written word, transforming books into vessels of meaning and mystery. 

They are material forms that magnify the projective force of the scribal progressions, the network of letters, through which meaning is often developed in a book, as though the physical and the verbal merge into a single conjuration.

Books, for me, therefore, embody this magic by creating mental universes—cosmic landscapes shaped by the interplay of ideas, words, images and the physical forms that house them.

The Encounter with the Occult Book Collectors Group

 I was privileged on the 28th of August 2025, to join the Facebook group Occult Book Collectors, an experience that reminded me of the power of books understood as physical instruments of knowledge.

This group is peopled by booksellers and bookseekers who live in the universe of books as magical objects, as constructs constellating the ineffable and the human made, products of human efforts to concentrate in three dimensions aspects of existence that amplify, rupture or contradict such conventional understandings of the nature of a material object, devotees of books  as talismanic forms, crafted to channel forces that transcend ordinary perception.

The Amazing Hybrid Unifying the Animate and the Inanimate 

I was particularly struck by this book presentation in the group by Jim Cerven  :

"For Sale:  ÞURSAKYNGI - Loki - 49 copies - Leatherbound Talisman Edition 2016.

Manuscript wrapped in genuine goatskin, accompanied with a talisman made of a birch bark marked with magical ink and blessed with a special Lokian Incense containing amongst many of its secret components human bone powder, wolf hair and elements from a venomous snake.

The embossed and vegetable-tanned goat-hides employed for the binding of this work are of the largest sizes available, in order for them to be possible to cut in the manner that allows the specific runic form to become manifested within their 'actually talismanic' binding, making so the physical form of each book a concrete part of the magic that it is meant to embody and transfer.

PayPal $650 + shipping, message if interested."

I'm amazed by the account of the items through which the talisman in the book was consecrated:

" a talisman made of a birch bark marked with magical ink and blessed with a special Lokian Incense containing amongst many of its secret components human bone powder, wolf hair and elements from a venomous snake".

Those elements take the talisman from its fundamental character as an inanimate object to one infused with qualities of animate forms-  "birch bark...human bone powder, wolf hair and elements from a venomous snake".

Those elements are themselves unusual, evocative of power that is not defined by being benign, to put it gingerly. 

Even the bark of the tree the talisman is made from might not be just any tree, but one that might be  known for its magical qualities.

Underscoring the ritual process through which the talisman and the book were constructed, the birch bark out of which the talisman is made is described as marked with a "magical ink", an ink I expect was concocted using the blend of standard ink making techniques and occult methods like those described above.

These components—birch bark, human bone, wolf hair, snake venom—are not mere ingredients; they are an alchemy of animate forces.

The book itself is not bound with paper, as books conventionally are but with goatskin.

Why?

Beceause the qualities of an animate entity such as a goat are vital for the magic the book is meant to be used for.

The binding of the book may therefore be seen as constituting a form of animal sacrifice the effects of which are concentrated in the book and which are unleashed  whenever the ritualistic processes described in the book are employed.

Even more remarkable,  this goat skin binding is meant to be cut piecemeal to be used as an element in the book's ritual processes.

How far would one need to go to find a more striking description of a book's physical and ideational character as conjoined forms in efforts to create transformative effects?

 Unusual Contexts

Why did I join a group of occult booksellers and why am I using what may be described as an extreme example in illustrating the magic of books?

I am employing this example in representing something that is often implicit and perhaps even unsuspected, the potentially transformative and inherently magical character of books, qualities suggested through the measures taken to magicalize the book being discussed here but which subsist in any book of depth of insight,  quality of expression and beauty of physical form, a transformative quality inherent to such texts.

The occultist may dramatizes this potential through ritualized consecration, but even a philosophical treatise, a novel or a short story can conjure worlds, shift perception, and alter destiny. They are alchemical instruments, blending the material and the intellectual to spark new ways of seeing and being.

Initiation into Magic through Books

My own initiation into magic was through books. They not only shaped my thinking but inspired actions that altered my life, a process running from conventional texts, such as literary, historical and philosophical writings to occult literature, the latter from Western esotericism. 

Western Occulitism and the Culture of Texts

Western occultism is particularly rich in the culture of textualisation.  The focus is not on transmission by word of mouth, as some spiritual cultures might emphasize,   but on what can be communicated  through writing.

Ever since the explosion of Western magical culture enabled by the Golden Dawn and later by Wicca, Western occult movements and writings have grown exponentially, penetrating even into  the Lokian magic central to that book decription, Loki being an ancient Norse god defined in terms of trickery,  chaos and efforts to upset cosmic balance.

Exploring the Farthest Universes of Possibility 

Behind such efforts lies a deeper tendency: Western magic mines myth, cosmology, and spirituality, at times courting shadow and disruption as sources of power. 

Lokian magic, with its invocation of trickery and chaos, reflects a lineage reaching back to the Qliphoth of Jewish Kabbalah, the demonic inversions of divine emanations, central to the school Dragon  Rouge and the experimental ethos of Aleister Crowley, who turned even the traditionally “evil” into a crucible of transformation, a pioneering exemplar of what is conventionally understood as opposed to humanity or as destructive  approached as a source of creative insight and uplifting empowerment. 

Lokian/Lokean Magic as a Nexus of Possibilities 

Dagulf Lopston's "What is a Lokean" is a magnificent account of a philosophy of Lokean belief, in dialogue with Norse myth and his personal history with the deity.

( https://polytheist.com/orgrandr-lokean/2015/01/08/what-is-a-lokean/)

Particularly compelling is his account of the complementary creative and disruptive identity of the divine personage:

" Loki is in alignment with the happy accident: the quick, powerful shifts in fate, which can bring down nations and permanently alter our destinies. 

He is pure potential with no boundaries or expectations. That place of pure potential isn’t a place where human beings can live forever. 

Trying to live in that place of Loki’s pure energy of transformation can be extremely disorienting and disorganizing and I think this is where Loki’s reputation as a god of “chaos” truly comes from. 

Nothing can ever find completion or stable ground in pure potential, and it’s my personal belief that anyone who is deeply aligned with Loki will (sooner or later) need other stabilizing powers in their lives to ensure that the Lokean in question doesn’t become trapped in a whirlwind of potential with no direction."

The Necronomicon, the Lord of the Rings, the Silamilion, the Harry Potter Series and Beyond

The most prominent expression in the Western tradition of the idea of a  book  as a magical object,  is the Necronomicon, a fictional book created by short  story writer and novelist H.P. Lovecraft, a supreme master in occult fiction whose plots, characters, deeply evocative settings and unique use of English conspire to create magical worlds often rooted in the everyday but ripping open the borders of daily life to reveal abysses of possibility,  menacing and awe inspiring,a fictional book that has inspired efforts to create an actual version. 

J.R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, its mythic framework fleshed out in The Silmarilion and J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter series are novels constituting apexes in encountering the cosmos as a magical construct, in which narrative, characterization and language cohere to deliver something unique in world literature yet deeply irradiating the abysmal and the glorious in the human world. 

Thus, the magical book and books that have explicit ideas about magic at their  centre become more than literature: they are a crucible where matter and spirit, form and idea, converge.

Books as Magical Crucibles

What all these examples remind us is that books are more than objects. They are thresholds. They blur the line between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between ink and spirit. 

Whether in a talismanic goatskin grimoire or a simple literary paperback, the book retains its ancient power—the power to open doors where none seemed to exist, to reconfigure the imagination, and to reveal new dimensions of reality. A book is a  key—a permanent spell waiting on a shelf to be awakened by a reader.

Ultimately, the book ÞURSAKYNGI - Loki is a powerful, if extreme, symbol of this tradition.

 It embodies the idea that a book's physical form and its ideational content can be conjoined to create a truly transformative experience, a potent reminder that every book holds a certain kind of magic.