Browse:Cater-Cornered: Magic of the Diagonal (Volume 1, entries 2870)
Cater-Cornered: Magic of the Diagonal
Volume 1, entries 2870. Source context: THE DOCTORS AT WORK: REPORTS FROM LAYMEN → SHRINES: ALTARS - CANDLES - SAINTS; NEW ORLEANS AREA → (2) CANDLES. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 2870
Now the second way for to get your photograph and do something to it. They can take and burn lights against your photograph and have it right in the house and you don't know it. And have it, your back - see, you know your back to the out[side] and your face to the wall, like nailed to the wall. And have everything dark around there. And you'll die from that bed, right in that bed there. (Do you burn candles to that?) Yes, sir, you burn you a black candle to hit.
(Just one candle did you say?)
Just once - that's to the picture, if you want to harm anybody.
(Where do you put that picture? Against the wall?)
You put 'em in the four corners of your house - just like you got the four corners right here, you got four cormers here.
(Yes.)
Well, you see, you can take and set your bed like this here, cater-corner, and make that be the four corners right here and nail it right in that four corners, but right down where no one can't see it, see. And burn you a black light and never let that light go out. As fast as that light - when you see that light getting smaller, have you another candle ready and light it. I'll guarantee you in nine days' time, if you don't be out of that bed [and be] in the hospital, you be in the morgue.
(You'd be where?)
You'd be in the morgue - be dead. [The preceding four corners are sacred in hoodoo because they came from the Bible and are guarded by four angels controlling the four winds (Rev. 7:1). The diagonal is also sacred, the altar often being so placed in a room (p.129, line 45). The reason? The diagonal, as the longest distance in the flat square world of ancient magic, permits the altar to bestride and manage all existence. More- over the diagonal itself is a cross, a fortifed one - its two ends with equal short portions of the adjacent sides forming two tau crosses, joined at the feet at the center of the square, and thrusting outward two "T-crossings" barbed like a double-pointed spear >. Perhaps I should add, one diagonal equals one stroke of the cross; two diagonals complete the cross, Greek or St. Andrews - the structure of the flat square world.] [Our informant, by pushing back the diagonal of the room into one corner of the room, makes the corner the four corners or the complete room (PART EQUALS WHOLE, p.21). Actually the enclosed space is triangular and three-cornered, but magically the bed becomes both a diagonal and an altar. Despite the fact that neither you nor your picture is in that bed, "you'll die from that bed, right in that bed there."]
[For another diagonal, see 2843, p.819; for bed as altar, see 2874, p.829.]