When my Doktor Snake’s Voodoo Spellbook was published in 2000 it was all about African-American spiritual work, with a dash of chaos magick.
There were mojo hands, conjurations, and working with Papa Legba, and so on.
And the book chronicled my time spent with Earl Marlowe, the old hoodoo man from Trinidad.
The tradition I outlined was his tradition, though my eclectic influences had an influence on him.
One of the things that impressed me about Earl was he was also well-versed in clairvoyance and ESP.
Often he would say to me that, essentially, you don’t need the trappings of spell bags and paraphernalia.
They have their place. But essentially the magick was on a psychic and astral level.
“Dem old Victorian table-tappers knew what they doing,” he would say. “They’d conjure spirits you could see wid yo’ own eyes. And that get the job done.”
He and I did that. Many a time in an old graveyard we’d get phenomena happening, like ghostly mists and shadows taking on form.
Even today I have had weird creatures appearing in broad daylight. Whether that’s part of the alien phenomenon or paranormal creatures from another realm, I don’t know. My feeling is they are all the same thing.
Much of what Earl and I did involved psychic methods and trance mediumship.
Empty hand magick, I called it.
We’d do what is now called remote viewing, but our roots were in the Victorian seance rooms. We weren’t worried about the “science” like remote viewers are (as they came out of the CIA), we were concerned about getting the job done.
In other words:
RESULTS YOU CAN USE, BUT NOT PROVE.
We’d also do what I call Distance Influence — which is about remotely affecting a target, be it a person or situation. This didn’t involve paraphernalia. It was about psychically homing in and adjusting a situation via the astral.
It could also involve liaising with entities of one sort or another. All are shapeshifters and often tricksters so you have to be certain what you are dealing with. It can be a risky business — but for the practitioner, not the client.
Earl and I got into more than a few scrapes with the denizens of the unseen realm.
Nowadays I typically use the term “distance influence” rather than “spells”. Partly because Google and big tech — not to mention AI — tend to penalise the use of the word, mostly because of lot of unscrupulous people came online a decade back. So spells got lumped in with gambling and porn sites.
And with AI there is a left-brain bias, which means it is somewhat sniffy about the term.
Plus I mostly use the methodology of distance influence — echoing back to Earl and I working with trance mediumship.
And just like the CIA, I wanted a term that was a little more scientific sounding!
Naturally, the CIA, Russian Intelligence, and British intel, all have worked with what they termed “remote influence.”
While the book, The Men That Stared At Goats by Jon Ronson (2004), and the movie of the same name, might not be wholly accurate, they sort of were… and you can guess why.
They were about what I call “psychic killshots”.
Killing at a distance.
It wasn’t just Jon Ronson’s book either. David Moorhouse (a military remote viewer) hinted at it in his book Psychic Warrior (1996). So did Gen. Albert Stubblebine in interviews. As did Uri Geller when talking about his CIA/Mossad influencing stories (Geller’s tales, though, were entirely self-reported).
Earl and I used to talk about this.
He’d say:
“Some people gotta be bumped off coz they evil. Ain’t got no qualms about that. But half of our clients want somebody dead, and fo’ no good reason save they are riled about something, not coz the person is Adolf Hitler!”
We actually knew Uri Geller too. We liked him well enough. But Earl thought he was a blagger.
“That Uri like a used car dealer. Sell you a banger if you not careful. But he can do stuff, that for sure.”
Another thing Earl and I had go on a lot was “aports”. This is when objects appear out of nowhere.
I’d often get coins flying past me and landing on the floor. Nobody around to do that, and the coins would often be from other countries, like a US dime or European coins, none of which I had in my possession. In my wallet I often had US dollar bills, but no coins.
Earl commented on that once:
“The spirits giving you them as gifts. Use ‘em to power up your workings. You always know a spirit coin if it gets warm or hot to the touch. If you give one to a client and they feel it, they got the power too. They connected.”
Oh, and you can check out my Influence work at:
https://www.doktorsnake.com/influence/
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