Books And Spells 2
More books and spells for becoming a wizard with. First post here.
The Twelve Keys Of Basil Valentine. 16th-century alchemical tract. Written by an obscure Thuringian salt merchant. Republished in 1618 by Michael Maier, on the orders of Rudolf II of Prague, with crucial details altered or left out. Each chapter, or “key”, is a densely allegorical description of one step in the process by which the Philosopher’s Stone can be created.
Difficult to understand without detailed knowledge of Renaissance mystical traditions. Careful scrutiny reveals many minor alchemical secrets.
Magnum Opus. Creates the Philosopher’s Stone, allowing you to turn lead into gold and live forever. Necessary reagents include primordial sulphur, heavy water, Arabian saltpetre (extracted from phoenix dung) and hair from the head of a sworn and uncorrupted virgin, extracted at the moment of death.
Create Homunculus. Technique borrowed from Jabir ibn Hayyan’s Book of Stones. Bake a mix of biological reagents, including blood, wax and semen, in a gourd or glass jar for thirty days. Unpredictable - might create a perfect human infant or a malformed thing that screams until you kill it.
Universal Solvent. Recipe for the alkahest, an acid that can dissolve anything. Difficult to carry. Requires telekinesis or ghost hands to keep it in the air. If dropped, will eat its way to the centre of the Earth - weeks later, pissed-off underground monsters with big holes through their bodies will emerge.
The Tarsioid Psalms. Bought for a pound of tobacco by the anthropologist Nicholai Miklouho-Maclay from a Dyirbal man in Tully, Queensland, who claimed to have got it from the last surviving elder of the pygmy White Cockatoo tribe. Fragments of a shattered basalt tablet, inscribed with glyphs that bear a vague resemblance to the Brahmi script used to write Old Tamil.
Painstakingly reassembled and partially translated. Narrates the rise and fall of a nocturnal Pleistocene maritime empire, ruled from the Borneo jungle by shy long-fingered kings who ate insects and used pygmies as “day slaves”. Describes the techniques their scientists used to maintain social control.
Stretch Flesh. Rubberises a living human body, turning bones to a mutable cartilaginous substance and enabling the internal organs to be stretched like putty with minimal disruption to the system. Lets the subject crawl through tiny spaces. Must be reversed by caster before the flesh dissolves.
Twilight Zone. Creates a bubble of space in which loud noises and bright lights are impossible. More effective in closed rooms. Not quite total darkness but only those with excellent night vision can see. Good environment in which to contact ghosts - makes them 50% more amenable to summoning attempts.
Speak With Apes. Unlocks the universal language embedded in the temporal lobe of all primates. Freaks out monkeys, as they’ve long pretended to be dumber than they are. Requires you to eat a bit of living monkey brain - used by Qing dynasty chefs for the convenience of ambassadors.
Codex Zographensis. Illuminated manuscript in Old Church Slavonic, using the Glagolitic alphabet, produced by nameless scribes at the Ohrid Literary School in tenth-century Bulgaria. Discovered some time later by a Croatian diplomat in the archives of the Zograf Monastery on Mount Athos.
Contains a black synaxarion - a set of biographies of forgotten saints. These include Cordula of Cologne, patron saint of the headless, who led an army of eleven thousand decapitated virgins against the Huns, and Shenouda the Archimandrite, father of the White Monastery in upper Egypt, who converted the cynocephali along the coast of the Red Sea.
Study their miracles. Much can be learned.
Remove Head. Allows the caster to survive decapitation. Head and body still connected on the astral plane - killing one destroys the other. Involves a particular method of circular breathing. Easily taught to others but very difficult to know in advance if you’ve gotten it exactly right.
Speak With Wolves. Also works on dogs - their slavish devotion becomes creepy when expressed in plain language. Involves a tongue-numbing unguent of human fat and aconite. Wolves are proud but poor and mostly want to kill you, but will begrudgingly perform tasks for you in exchange for food.
Banish Vermin. Expels all creeping things - reptiles, insects, worms and even small mammals - from the consecrated area. Can save a farmer’s crops or devastate a small forest’s ecology. Law of fair exchange requires caster to designate a victim, who becomes magnetically attractive to the aforementioned vermin.
Book Of Mulek. Set of hieroglyph-embossed gold plates discovered in the 1830s by the mendicant João Maria D'Agostini, in a cave in Rio Grande do Sul. Tells the tale of Mulek, only son of King Zedekiah of Judah, who was driven from the Holy Land by Nebuchadnezzar II and commanded by God to establish a new Jerusalem in the Americas.
Inspired General Bento Gonçalves to proclaim the Riograndense Republic. Melted down by Pedro II at the end of the Ragamuffin War. Giuseppi Garibaldi, anticipating this, had made a copy of the text, and used Mulek’s mystical techniques to keep his troops from starving during the Great Siege of Montevideo. He passed it along to telephone pioneer Antonio Meucci, who spent decades studying the book in his Staten Island lab.
Feed Multitude. Enables the caster to infinitely subdivide a loaf of bread, making it possible for hundreds of people to eat from it. Bread can be used for no other purpose than to provide nutrients. It’s not “more bread” but different instances of the same bread - those who eat it may find their thoughts and feelings overlapping.
Free Mind. Completely liberates a human being from all bonds of faith, culture, family or morality. Generally turns them into a dangerous sociopath who will stop at nothing to achieve the pettiest of goals. Subject must be willing but does not have to fully understand what “complete liberation” implies.
Tropic Thunder. Conjures a driving thunderstorm, complete with lightning bolts and howling winds. Storm will go out of its way to hurt people and destroy property. Needs a few days’ preparation time, sacrificing cockerels and drawing sigils in the earth, so the air currents can line up.
Eight Effective Strategies. A treatise on occult warfare by the general Jiang Ziya, describing his victory over King Zhou of Shang and the malevolent fox demon concubine Daji. Reveals the secret techniques he used to overcome Daji’s legion of Heavenly Masters from Golden Turtle Island, breaking her Ten Death Traps and burning down her Forest of Meat.
Contains advice on how to solicit the aid of Immortal Burning Lamp, from the Prime Consciousness Cave on Mount Divine Hawk, and beseech the Jade Emptiness Palace for use of their Sea Conquering Pearls. Written in the eleventh century BC. Wang Yirong of the Qing Imperial Academy, who killed himself during the Boxer Rebellion, was known to have a Han dynasty silk manuscript of the text in his collection.
Publicly burnt by Qin Shi Huang, who was repulsed by its calm description of how cutting women’s feet off is often politically desirable, and handed down in secret by palace eunuchs. A favourite book of the obese diseased rebel An Lushan, who needed three men to bear him to his steam baths, and once crushed a horse.
Red Sand. Turns ordinary beach sand into a knife-sharp powder, which can flense an opponent’s skin off if blown in their direction. Scars eyeballs. Disfigures faces. Can be thrown if you have sturdy enough gloves, but most effective as a weapon if carried by a stiff breeze.
Bird Bottle. Lets you put a bird in a bottle. Doesn’t matter how big the bird is or how small the bottle is. Bird has to be alive. More than one bird can go into one bottle. Bird doesn’t have to be willing and is liable to be extremely angry when it comes out. Breaking the bottle releases all birds.
Blood Magnet. Rub an iron object with raw meat. Blood will be drawn to it - fountaining from any wound or scab. Even tiny cuts inflicted with a magnetised knife are often fatal. The iron “drinks” the blood, bulging and growing bloated - it needs time to digest once it’s had its fill.
