Purple Magazine
— The Magic Issue #42 F/W 2024

fennel faggots and infinite inversion: recipes for divine perception

food

by QUORI THEODOR

 

American artist Quori Theofor investigates the politics of vulnerability through the lens of food as a social phenomenon. They are a founding member of Spiral Theory Test Kitchen (in collaboration with Precious Okoyomon and Bobbi Salvör Menuez) and Circle Time School (in collaboration with DIS magazine and Telfar Global).

In this text, they create recipes based on the 16th- and 17th-century colonial history of witchcraft and how it relates to food. The question: is a recipe already a spell?

 

a lorica is a litany is a circle

good wife spell repellent

Witch cakes, also known as urine cakes for obvious reasons, are devised to repel dark magic. Colonial settlers like Goodwife Sibley, a key figure in the 1692 Salem witch trials, baked these cakes, ironically trying to repel witchcraft with … more witchcraft. The list of ingredients calls for human urine, specifically of “the cursed,” and the resultant cake, which resembles more than anything a spiky bagel, is then fed to the family dog or buried in the ground, the belief being that this ritual releases the individual whose urine has been used from any binding spells and protects against other bad fortune. Baking witch cakes was controversial in early Puritanical America, and Goodwife Sibley was blamed for opening the door to diabolical magic in her community, resulting in 20 wrongful executions in the ensuing witch hunt. Sibley, however, was spared the same fate.

A reclamation*:

1 1/4 cups warm human urine (of the person you want to benefit, perhaps yourself)

1 tablespoon maple syrup or barley malt syrup

1 package (1/4 ounce or 2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

540 grams bread flour

2 teaspoons sea salt

Follow instructions for cooking bagels, forming the rings with spikes protruding from the circle shape. The concept is that the spell is enacted by the alchemy of ingestion or emulation, so this can be eaten by friends or yourself, depending on your specific needs.

*Be mindful not to call forth the confused ancestry of this dish, calling in instead guides with clear and decisive values that connect to your own. Another experiential note to those who may be new: when calling in anything, don’t be charmed by playful spirits in the nether realms! They don’t operate by a spiritual logic of recovery and can cause great difficulties.

 

a scapegrace real boy

a tree that barks back

This period (late 1500s, early 1600s) is also where we get the term “faggot” or “flaming faggot,” as in queer people, who were used as kindling for the immolations of the witch hunt. To mask the smell of the burning flesh of queer people in Italy, people often threw the aromatic vegetable fennel onto the fire, too, which is where the Italian slang for faggot — finnochio (fennel) — comes from. I’m sure you will never roast fennel the same way again, so best turn this dish into an altar of queer depravity.

Recipe: Light the night candle for seven days. Turn off all the lights in the house 10 minutes or so before bed, and blow the candle out like a birthday cake each night before sleep. On the seventh night, make this recipe. The recipe itself is just roasted fennel, but the goal here is verticality. Try to get the fennel to stand as high as possible, maintaining a structure while in the oven. You may want to take out or lower the oven racks for this. Build a fennel tower, assembling the form with toothpicks (if you need them) after roasting the fennel, building higher and higher, letting parts fall and adding more raw fennel to prop it up. To go even higher (six to eight feet), you can also add an internal structure, poking the roasted fennel over a pipe/flange that is screwed into the table or a board. Once your tower is ready, make a vinaigrette and stand on a chair or ladder while pouring dressing on your fennel tower. You can then choose to recount nasty things about sodomy or yell inaudibly.

 

the threat of sanctity

goetia tummy time

Food “crimes” were very common during the 16th and 17th centuries due to mass famine. As a result, the records of witch trials often reveal “diabolical banquets” employed as evidence of demonology, a literal demonization of poverty. According to theorist Silvia Federici, feasting on roasted mutton and drinking wine were “considered a diabolic act in the case of the common people.”

Recipe: Prepare what you would consider a diabolical banquet and enjoy.

the most normal thing you can do is die

a (maleficium) portal to the present

Moving to the contemporary period, we consider more deeply:

What is the difference between a spell and prayer? If congruous, to what do we pray?

Each ingredient in a spell should be considered, or as poet CAConrad says, “Have a little
talk with it.”

In this way, any recipe book can be transformed into a spell book.

Recipe: Use a cookbook as a spell book, and notice what you have to adjust, if anything, to do that.

 

who said darkness was bad,

who said it wasn’t

light (decision) soup

One system for discernment is to make literal the phrase “hold it up to the light.”
Collect 20 edible items. Hold each item up to the light and consider it or “have a little talk with it.” From this process, choose 10 items to put in your soup.

As the soup is cooking, consider something you need to make a choice about. It can be something small or large. This is a soup to practice on, and the practice can be extracted out of the recipe. Visualize holding your topic in your hand, and then hold it up to the light (of god?). Let the light shine through the topic. See it from the light’s perspective. If you want to talk more with the object (physical or mental), start with describing out loud the situation as neutrally as possible, from the perspective of the light, as though you weren’t yourself involved.

As you eat the soup, see if you have reached a decision. Don’t repeat the spell until some time has passed.

Yes, changing your mind is okay. Photons are easily created and destroyed!

 

transmutation (doing bones a good turn)

cooking with the caim body

Get very warm, have a bath, or turn up the heat. Then drink ice water. Feel it in the belly when it arrives. Count how many seconds it takes to warm up.

Alternatively, put a fruit or vegetable in a plastic bag. Use a ratio for lacto-fermentation or some mother backwash from another ferment like kombucha or live vinegar. Put the
bag in your pocket, and go about your day. Throughout the day, fondle the bag, repeating, “My body is doing something.” Eat the contents with dinner at the end of the day.

Both can be used as a technique for alchemy in other spells.

[Table of contents]

The Magic Issue #42 F/W 2024

Table of contents

© Purple Institute

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