![]() ![]() ![]() German settlers bring this tradition to America. Using Psalms magically strikes a particular chord in Germany, where the lists of Psalms and their uses was translated, Christianized, and widely circulated to the point where, by the 18th Century, it's a deeply embedded part of German folk magic traditions. Books of Jewish mysticism and folk magic in translation begin to be printed and to circulate around Europe. A substantial portion of the community would also have been multilingual, speaking not only Hebrew and Yiddish, but also the vernacular language of wherever they resided. Literacy was a religious obligation for Jewish men, and manuscript texts of the sort of books which were now in high demand in the larger culture, like the Sefer Shimmush Tehillim, were readily available. The European Jewish community as uniquely positioned as a source for material in this rush. ![]() In the Early modern period, there was also a huge demand for books on "Natural Philosophy", a category which embraced not only philosophy, but what we would nw call both magic and science. Like any other publishing rush, some genres were more popular than others. The early days of printing saw a mad rush of demand, so much that it in some ways outpaced what had so far been written in any given language, so it was also a golden age of translation. Manuscript lists of which psalm was to be recited for what reason were widely circulated across Europe, and one of these lists was committed to print, in Hebrew, in Sabbioneta in Northern Italy in 1551 as the Sefer Shimmush Tehillim - The Book of the Uses of Psalms. Much of Jewish folk magic is focused on the power of words and speaking, and by the Fourteenth century assigning specific psalms to specific troubles was common in the wold of Yiddish-speaking Europe. The practice of reciting psalms for protection from disease, evil, or injury derives from Medieval Jewish tradition. This is a tradition present both in Appalachian and African-American traditions, and it's one of the few folk magic practices that we have a good idea of how it came to be. In folk magic traditions across North Carolina, Psalms are recited to ward off illness, protect against evil, to cure illness, and as many other uses as there are psalms. ![]()
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