Palo Mayombe - The Garden of Blood and Bones. A Grammary of Creole Sorcery

Hardcover. 8vo. iv + 240pp. Light grey cloth attractively illustrated and lettered on upper board in white, spine lettered in white, glossary, bibliography, index. Four tipped in colour plates of the author's prendas, and the firmas/signatures of the principle spirits rendered in pen and in. This is the hardcover Blood and Bones edition of this new title, which comes in a strict edition of 639 hand-numbered copies. An initiate's account of this much maligned religion and cult whose central nigromantic mystery is the cauldron containing the human skull or bones, re-animated by living spirit. Written from inside the cult, With access to rare materials, pamphlets, booklets and unpublished field notes, this is the most comprehensive study of Palo Mayombe to date. Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold traces the roots of Palo Mayombe from its origins in African sorcery, to its flowering Cuba as a New World Creole religion and cult. In drawing parallels with both the Ancient Greek practices of Necromancy and Nigromancy, and the Grimoire tradition, Nicholaj also illuminates the Western Tradition, showing what we have lost in our denial of the dead and the cult of the ancestors. The magical head of Palo Mayombe in it's three legged iron cauldron has implications for understanding our own histories, whether Odin, Baphomet, Bran, John the Baptist or Orpheus. The Garden of Blood and Bones gives explicit detail of the workings of Palo Mayombe for good and ill. The method of divination, the herbs, animals, trees and plants, powders, baths and waters, the songs and chants. It presents a complete living system one which embraces both the arts of healing and resurrection, and those that remove life. Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold is an anthropologist and psychologist who over the course of the last fifteen years been studying, both academically and practically, African and Afro-derived cults in the New World.