It has been quite a while since my mom passed, but I am often reminded of her in many little ways every day. Anyone who has dealt with loss can understand that, and it usually hits you when you least expect it. This time, it was because I was groaning while bending over to pick up my laundry to take to the washer/dryer combo unit.
As a note, never buy the GE Ventless Combo Washer Dryer. It sounds awesome, but cleaning its ventless slot and the filters is a nightmare. Anyway, that’s way off target, but this machine haunts my thoughts every time I do laundry.
While lamenting my age and back as I bent, I clocked a first edition of The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish on my shelf. This book, which takes an in-depth look at a history of the occult, satanism, and the so-called Black Arts, was one of my mom’s cherished books. It was prominent on our bookshelves near her many, many issues of Fate Magazine. But when we moved to our house on Fremont in Pocatello, it ended up in a box in the garage. More specifically, the former owner had put a bunch of old doors across the rafters over the car to use as storage. And it was in a box up there with a number of other books and magazines. Once it was in the top of the garage, it was out-of-sight, out-of-mind.
Sometime during my high school years, I would walk to school and regularly stop at book shops downtown. Some of them were shops that bought used books. I often traded in books that I had finished reading for other books that I wanted to read. This was on top of the many library books that I would check out and read.
Most likely because I was a weird kid, a teenager–which is weirdness by design, and we had no idea where the book had wound up, she got in her mind that I had sold her book. Not only that, but I had sold it for drug money. And, of course, nothing I could say would dissuade her from this idea.
Now, I drank with friends a few times in Junior High and sometimes in High School, but mostly, I was a good kid. And I hadn’t done drugs of any kind other than sparing alcohol or hydrocodone prescribed by my dentist for routine dental work fueling a future opioid crisis. But she was convinced I was doing drugs and that I was selling her stuff to buy them.
It was many years later when we were moving her into my sister’s home so she could take care of her that I found the box containing the Black Arts. Even then, though her mind was sometimes scrambled, she was convinced I had bought another copy just to prove it to her, even though it had all of her notes and highlights and relevant clippings from Fate Magazines that matched up with entries in the book.
The Black Arts had its 50 year anniversary in 2018, and is still a great research text for writers who are interested in digging into the world of the occult. It’s mostly surface-level stuff since it covers a large amount of information. It does not have the luxury of digging deep into the topic, but it will give writers a great starting point to figure out where to dig since there is a ton of information out there.
The 50th anniversary edition is available on Amazon.
Don’t sell it for drugs. Believe me, it’s not worth it.