On bats and rhubarb

Hey, y'all. It's my birthday. I have officially arrived at the midway point of my 30s. Jason will arrive here six weeks from now - which, as I often remind him, makes me six weeks wiser than he is.

My friend M. gave me a fantastic book called The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia, by W.F. Ryan, as a birthday present. It's part of the "Magic in History" series by Penn State Press, which makes it rather respectable. The language is definitely academic and research-based, but that doesn't make it any less of an interesting read - at least in my admittedly biased opinion.

I couldn't believe our luck! This was the perfect gift as far as the podcast is concerned. Recently, Jason and I decided to devote more of the story mythos to Slavic mythology. Alex and his family are Russian after all, and there really aren't all that many stories out there that work with this particular pantheon or world view. Plus, Russians are just plain awesome when it comes to sympathetic magic. What other group of people would have you wear a hawk's head next to your belly in order to win the affections of the one you love? This is only slightly less complicated than Plan B: "...you can take a bat, put it into a new pot, cover it with a new cloth, put the pot into an anthill, go home without looking back and with your ears stopped so as not to hear the squeaks of the bat, and return after three weeks for the bones, with which you will be able to draw the object of your desire to you."

Yeah, but who has that kind of time?

(Let it be said that my ancestors, the Czechs, used a frog instead of a bat, and that a similar process is used to make yourself invisible.)

The herbal magic section has all sorts of great suggestions. Rhubarb, for instance, has been known to roar and groan at sunset. (Now I have to go over to my friend J's house sometime in the early evening to listen to her garden, since I don't recall this happening in my grandmother's rhubarb patch. But maybe I wasn't listening hard enough.) You can do a lot with rhubarb... if you take some in your mouth, you can easily swim against the current. If you meet someone blighted by the Evil Eye, give them some rhubarb, and they have to reveal who blighted them. In the same regard - feed it to your wife and she'll tell you the names of her lovers. It's also a powerful laxative... but that doesn't seem quite as exciting or relevant.

Expect to see some of this stuff like this pop up throughout the podcast - especially where Olga is concerned. My mind is already swimming with possibilities of where to add bits and pieces of this treasure trove of information. (Thanks, M.!)

Meanwhile, if you're looking to get me a birthday gift, please avoid the following: bones of any kind (particularly bat), your sweaty clothes (apparently perspiration magic was big... big enough to be banned by the church), or a bouquet of rhubarb.