Mother Mystic's Musings

I recently purchased The Conjure Cookbook by Talia Felix, purely out of curiousity.  I don’t make conjure oils for commercial sale myself, although I do infrequently make them for my own use.  My first question, who is Talia Felix?  A Google search turns up other books she has authored, but no biographical information.  Without knowing anything about this author, I was a bit skeptical about the content.  My skepticism increased when reading the introduction and she states her purpose as “to promote knowledge of traditional formulas” as she understands them and “offer some better alternatives to many popular recipes”.  Checking the sources of the recipes in the back of the book shows a good portion of them are, in fact, her own invention.  Others, listed simply listed as “commercial” makes me wonder if she simply back-engineered the ingredients of different commercial oils!  No doubt this would make the makers of these oils unhappy! There is a lengthy bibliography which lists the much discredited Herman Slater’s The Magickal Formulary, various herb catalogs and commerical oil websites sprinkled among other commonly read books.

I  see no new or “secret” information revealed here, and wouldn’t recommend this book for anyone’s collection.  What disturbs me is the trend among those new to magic to latch onto anything with the words “hoodoo”  ”rootwork” or “conjure” in the title and accept the contents as solid information.  Ms. Felix may have a talent as a perfumer but as far as conjure recipes go, I find most of hers lacking.