Boscastle

On the Sunday of the Pagan Conference, we all went down to Boscastle for the day. Boscastle is a small coastal village which is home to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, and they had agreed to let Conference goers into the museum free when we showed them our badges.
There are a lot of artefacts relating to the history of witchcraft, and information on famous witches of the past. One room is done out as a typical witch's cottage, with a tape on in the background talking about charms and spells. Upstairs is a case full of 'poppets' with pins in them - one sad case was a doll dressed as a nurse, with a nail through her belly, apparently made in 1941 by a nurse who had become pregnant, and who was hoping to cause a miscarriage.
Everywhere we looked there was something interesting, like the figure with a goats' head mask, holding a stang, (a sort of trident cum pitchfork) which was used in ritual magic.
It's a fascinating place, and we didn't really spend enough time there, because the Gloucestershire Pagans had booked lunch for 1pm at the nearby Cobweb pub, for 26 of us. The carvery was pretty good, and the pub itself was all flagged floors, low beams and local beer.
By the time we'd finished lunch the weather had worsened, but I was determined to get to the end of the harbour. I left my friends either sheltering in a gift shop or struggling along the path behind me, while I leaned into the wind, felt the hailstone coming in horizontally on my face, and danced along the path to the first harbour wall.
Up there, even I thought it was too windy to go any further, but I did take a photo to prove I'd been that far:

Back in the village, I treated myself to a yarn bowl from Roger the Potter at Boscastle Pottery. It's decorated in their unique mochaware style (with the use of a secret herb to make the tree like markings on the purple and green glaze). I've already used it to keep my ball of wool from rolling around the floor while I'm using my lucet.

The Avengers - Warlock

Even the Avengers veered into Dennis Wheatley territory on occasion, though they dressed it up with a plot about physicists who had secret formulas which a foreign power was trying to get hold of via their interest in the occult.
Here Cathy Gale is seen working at the British Museum as an anthropologist, when Steed goes there to consult her about the possible use of black magic against the physicist he's interested in.
Interestingly, the black magician does seem to have real power over people, summoning first the physicist and later Cathy herself to the place where the magical rites are taking place - with lots of hooded robes in evidence so that Steed can mingle with the crowd secretly.

Bell, Book and Candle

I've seen a lot of James Stewart films over the years, but this one seems to have passed me by until now. I saw it mentioned in a blog about classic films (I forget which one), thought it looked interesting, and sent off for it - and what great fun it is!
James Stewart had already starred alongside Kim Novak earlier in 1958, in Vertigo - this film is a lot more light hearted, with Kim Novak playing a witch who decides to seduce the batchelor who lives upstairs - James Stewart. To add interest, he's about to marry someone she detested at college. The film also has good roles for Elsa Lanchester as Kim Novak's auntie who lives upstairs (also a witch), Hermoine Gingold (another witch) and Jack Lemmon (Kim Novak's brother, and a warlock).
James Stewart is a publisher, so a further complication to the plot is a writer who is writing a book about the magical scene in Manhattan, aided and abetted by Jack Lemmon.
And then there's Pyewacket, the Siamese cat who assists with Kim Novak's magic - and has to do some pretty complicated things onscreen (apparently there were several cats in the role).
The cinematography is by James Wong Howe, so the film always looks gorgeous.
It's fairly obvious that James Stewart and Kim Novak are having hot sex from their very first encounter, but the only onscreen indication of this is a variety of passionate and fully clothed kisses, and one scene where they are sitting together on a couch, fully clothed, with their bare feet entwined.

Taoist Priestesses

So I've just spent a very happy week with my Young Man, during which we did a bit of brainstorming on my latest story. My Steampunk heroine is researching Chinese magic, and as a result, I've been attempting some online research. After a while, I discovered sites talking about Taoist magic, and I was delighted to find that there are Taoist priestesses. So Li Bic will be meeting someone like this in her search for a ritual good enough to fool a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn (she's putting her head somewhat into the lion's den in this one, tangling with real Western ritual magicians!).

Designing a Magical System

Too many rules? Not enough rules? How should it work in the world you've designed?

Jamie Schulz said this on io9 recently:

"Good magic systems have a framework, a set of limitations that is fairly clear to the reader, such that magic doesn't run the risk of blowing the internal logic of the story to Hell."

which I thought summed it up quite nicely.

I don't have too many rules - for one thing, I'd never remember them - but on the other hand I don't want a character to have a "get out of jail free" card whenever they need one. So I have five sorts of magic users, roughly speaking - they can manipulate one of the four Elements of Earth, Fire, Water or Air, or they can influence human (or animal) minds. So they can be powerful, but only in restricted ways - a Fire user can't float in mid-air like an Air user, for instance. I use bastardised Welsh terms for them, because I'm not a Welsh speaker but I wanted a Welsh flavour to it, so my family of fire users are called tanwch - tan for fire, and -wch is a suffix which makes a word into a command, like when Arafwch is written on the roads, meaning Slow!
I purposely didn't have any healing magic in my world, because I really think it's a cheat. If a character is wounded or sick, they shouldn't be able to leap up and do important stuff immediately - they should lie down and suffer for as long as it takes.
But then I added unicorns to my world, and unicorn horns in the Middle Ages were traditionally used for neutralising poison, and healing. They're pretty rare - but it is a "get out of jail free" card, as long as the user of the unicorn horn is a virgin, of course.