Enchanted Objects

A horseshoe above the door was never about luck. Salt at the threshold was never about flavor. Cunning folk and rootworkers and Shinto priests and Bakongo banganga were reading material physics the academy did not invent vocabulary for until 1880.

Tillie Treadwell brings the folklore, firsthand experience and evidence into one volume, where they meet groundbreaking scientific connections- the Bakongo nkisi crossing the Atlantic into the Hoodoo mojo bag, the Japanese tsukumogami waking after a hundred years of being held, cymatics research showing how vibration organizes matter into form, piezoelectric collagen in bone and silk, infrasound at nineteen hertz, biological traces that may be what holds an Environmental Access Point open, and much more- modern instruments catching up to what the cunning folk already knew.

Inside, you will learn to tell a recording from a presence, invite consciousness into a vessel of your own, and release one when the relationship has run its course. You'll also learn about the material sciences that explain the how and why behind inhabited objects. An esoteric exorcist with over a decade of success, a lifelong experiencer, a writer with one foot in the laboratory and one foot in the parlor, Tillie has spent her life inside these sciences.

This book is your formal invitation to the lab. Will you accept?