(Extract from the article Traditional African Religions: some general keys. from De Dioses y Hombres blog. I invite you to pay a visit to it and read the full article here:

From the 5th of last October and until April 2018, at Alfonso XIII Botanical Garden of the Complutense University of Madrid, it will be able to visit an exhibition that delves into the use that human beings have given to plants, herbology , in its medicinal and magical aspects, in different cultures and at different social levels.

If we gather every practice of esoteric and occultist currents, some people call this group as "esoteric tradition" thanks to its spiritual features. They have in mind their origins. We can't avoid dividing them in esoteric and occultist branches by two different ways we have seen before in the previous article :

With most accuracy, Daxelmüller (1993) named one of the sections of his work Social History of Magic as "Jano's Head" . As we could see on the first part of these articles, magic was divided by origin, actions and goals in two big groups: magia naturalis and magia daemoniaca, one was good and the other mostly evil. This...

In Ancient Egypt, magic was closely assimilated with religion, and so with death. Magic was related to these events. First an idea, then a deity, Heka, who represented Power of Creation being previous to the most important gods. Its abstraction was identified with magical words, words for power. But Heka was not enough to represent magic in Egypt...

This world is far from the actual world we live nowadays. But thanks to the evidences preserved from ancient times, we can enjoy them as if we were at that precise moment in which the different methods to achieve the goal of each spell were carried out. We can enter this world full of texts and distinguish the different...

The word 'witch' ('bruja' in Spanish) has an unsure etymological origin. Some researchers think pre-Roman period, because of the similarities with Catalan language bruixa or Galician bruxa. . However we only know about its use and extension in Middle Ages. If we go to Ancient Times, latin was used to defined witches as maleficae term, which...

Many people believe magic has existed only after novels and fantastic literature, which is rising in modern days. But magic has existed since men started to search the purpose of life, asking questions about the world around, how storms were made and 'who' controlled earthquakes. During many centuries and on the first beginning of their adventure...

Putting an evil eye is a widespread belief since ancient times. It was originated from the power always associated to the gaze, not only human gaze but animal as well -specially the bird's. Gazes faithfully transmit what we think, because of that, in a case of envy we believe that a bad gaze can transmit a bad desire from...

Nowadays is hard to talk about esotericism and religions in New Age without the name of Aleister Crowley who is the most important occultist of the 20th century and as a figure for reference for some contemporary Satanism and indirectly for wiccan since one of the Wicca bases authors, Gerald Gardner, was inspired by him. Because of that here we...

The Newberry library, in Chicago, has opened a portal: Transcribing Faith inside the Religious Change project: 1450-1700 where it shows online scanned texts from these ages, with them it shows and evaluates the change in a spiritual and intellectual level which happened from Middle Ages to Modern Era.

Necromancers psichagogos, which meant that they were able to summon and manipulate the dead to achieve goals beyond divination. These necromancers were called goetis from goetia,, referred to dark magic intended to manipulate spirits or demons with evil intentions. This meant they were used to attract them to the world of living as well as for...