Archive for the ‘Voodoo’ Category
National Paranormal Day May 3rd, 2021
May 4, 2021Rollo Ahmed Black Magician
October 28, 2015The second part of Christopher Josiffe’s piece on Rollo Ahmed can be found in this month’s Fortean Times. He lived in Harpsichord House in Hastings Old Town in the mid-1950s (according to electoral registers Abdul Said Ahmed and Theodora M. Ahmed lived there in 1954 and 1955). When I was going through parts of the huge Yorke Archive at the Warburg Institute I found a letter written in 1954 by Ahmed’s wife to Lady Frieda Harris asking to be put in touch with friends and followers of Aleister Crowley. In the same year the Daily Sketch carried a story about him, wherein he is described as a ‘black magic practitioner’ and ‘father of five, [a] dark-skinned slim man with white hair and a carefully trimmed Vandyke beard.’
Voodoo in America
March 3, 2015New Orleans has been declared America’s most haunted city (Klein 1999, 104), and tour guides-following the imaginative lead of Anne Rice-have attempted to overlay it with bogus legends of vampires and other spine-tingling notions. But perhaps the city’s oldest and most profound occult traditions are those involving the mysterious practices of voodoo. During a southern speaking tour I was able to set aside a few days to explore the New Orleans museums, shops, temples, and tombs that relate to this distinctive admixture of religion and magic, commerce and controversy.