It’s the Feast of Saint Patrick, so time for us to clear something up:
St. Patrick was definitely a magic user. A Christian, sure. A Bishop even. But also a badass mage.
From my scholarship on St. Patrick (by which I mean reading several connected Wikipedia articles, and some of the websites they cite) I know that he was a 5th-ish century Brit who was a) captured and enslaved by Irish pirates as a kid who b) God saved by telling him to be ready for escape at the right time, who then c) became a Bishop and went back to the area of his captivity to evangelize.
Those bits are history, which come from his own surviving letters. The writing of his hagiography didn’t happen for like another two centuries, however, and those stories are where we get into some problematic stuff. Patrick is a difficult Saint to love what with all his being canonized for doing his best to wipe out native Irish religion and colonizing it with Christianity. The myth about his having “removed all the snakes from Ireland” could be interpreted as referring to the druidic practitioners, not the wiggly ground reptiles.
The prayers attributed to St Patrick are interesting, therefore, because they have a distinctly pagan bendt to them.
The most famous of these is St. Patrick’s Lorica aka St. Patrick’s Breastplate. You can take a look now, but I’ve also copied a modified version of the text below, with some of my commentary.
Scholars fight about whether it’s 5th vs. 8th century (quite a big gap). It gets called a “prayer”, but looking at the text it is very very obviously not a prayer. At least, obvious to me, and should be to anyone who studies Christianity or magic or the intersection of the two like I do.
Prayer is conversational. It has speaking-to characteristics. You address your petition, praise, or concern to God. This … this is a magical spell. Specifically it’s a binding to make a ward. The speaker binds God to themselves to act as a shield or a sort of preemptive exorcism.
Now, I don’t read ancient Irish Gaelic, but the translations into English still preserve the gross structure of the text: It opens with an invocation and binding of the Christian Triune God to the speaker, followed by a historiolic binding of Christ’s storied life, a binding of various virtues, bindings of the spiritual essences of various holy people, binding the elements (not just the usual fire, air, water, earth but also lightning, and the sun and moon) – all to work a thing.
The thing worked is a divine shield against “every hostile merciless power which may assail my body and my soul,” examples of which are enumerated in the next section: demons, vices, murderous intent, etc., the last grouping of which is also elements-related: “…Against every poison” (plants/earth), “against burning” (fire), “against drowning” (water), and “against death-wound” (presumably air?).
The final section is a somagram – which is a word I’ve just made up, meaning a magic you do on your body to position things spatially. Basically using your body as a map for the magic. Roman and Orthodox Catholics making the Sign of the Cross on their bodies is one example of a somagram.
In the Lorica, the speaker puts Christ not just “on” but in specific places with respect to the body: “before me, behind me, within me..” and “…on my right hand, on my left hand,” etc., building the physicality of the shield. Such proclamations are accompanied with gestures and bodily movement. I’ll speak more on somagrams in a later post.
Finally, there is a brief Latin prayer as a coda.
So the question comes up, how do you take the shield off?
Does the spell just ‘wear off’? Or was it supposed to be paired with a similarly formal “doffing” spell where (one imagines) the speaker would thank God for the protection, and ya know, go back to being an unbound human again?
Depending on how you read “I bind unto myself today” that could just mean “for just today”, which would maybe naturally lapse when the sun sets (or maybe when the sun rises again) so you’d have to renew it each day. But it could instead be a lasting spell that could end up being terribly exhausting for the speaker who hasn’t figured in a method to take God off again.
To my dismay, this concern was apparently NOT in the mind of the Victorian hymn poet C. F. Alexander who in 1890 turned the Lorica into a bloody hymn. It’s called “I bind unto myself today” and it is most familiar to Anglicans and Roman Catholics, but the the latest edition of the Presbyterian Hymnal: Glory To God has it too (#6 for those following along at home) which means you and your congregation can do a group binding (with no apparent means of taking off the armor again!) at the Sunday worship service of your choosing. Great.
I have found Armor Magics to be particularly useful, and this is a great template to use for Christian magical practitioners so I wanted to share my own recipe for how I make the Lorica:
Elroi’s Embellishments of St Patrick’s Lorica
I don’t want to go through so much effort to put on a powerful magic shield that I can’t then un-do later at my own discretion, so when I use this ward (and I use it a fair amount) I build things into the architecture of the spell that definitively give it an end time: I use “unto myself for today” instead of just “today” and I write it down on a piece of paper I tie on to my body in a way that can later be un-tied, and the paper burned so I can control when to end the work.
I write it out by hand (rather than printing out a typed sheet) as I do for much of my longer works. I find that the act of writing it is itself an intentional practice, and the work is more effective for the labor.
I personalize it to be effective only on me and to have a delayed start. One option for that is to use ink that contains homeopathic concentrations of my own blood (more than that and you risk clotting your fountain pen closed), but another is to limit the identification to certain areas on the page. Let me explain what I mean.
I don’t typically want the shield to be active at the moment I’m writing it, I want it to be effective at a later moment of my choosing. So I set it up with a fuse. One way to set a fuse is to leave out the word “myself” from the writing everywhere it appears. Sometime later, you fill in the missing word and it is at that moment that the spell completes and becomes active. I don’t tend to use that method, because I tend to want to use the Lorica while traveling away from home and don’t tend to travel with my pen and ink setup handy. Instead, I draw four hollow cross shapes at the corners of the paper (as though they could be colored in) and write the opening incantation on each of the four sides, graphically tying the two together. To activate, I speak the opening invocation plus the Latin coda aloud, adding something of me to the inside of the cross shapes (saliva, blood). This has the added benefit of identifying the target “myself” as limited to me – which my co-Workers appreciate; it’s bad form to get one’s God all over everything. But it can also mean that you can write the spell up for someone else to use, and target the “myself” to whoever’s DNA marks the crosses.
Another option for the fuse might be to reserve the final intention for the somagraphy. That is, it doesn’t activate until you both speak aloud the “Christ before me…” section with the accompanying bodily gestures.
For my base written text, I used the translation favored by the Rosary Church, which I believe most literally translates the Gaelic, and keeps a lot more of the original pagan imagery. I then modified the text to suit my own needs as follows:
I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The three in one and one in three.
I believe the Trinity in the Unity
The Creator of the Elements.
I bind unto myself for today:
The virtue of the Incarnation of Christ along with His Baptism,
The virtue of His Crucifixion along with His Death,
The virtue of His Burial along with His Descent into Hell,
The virtue of His Resurrection along with His Ascension,
The virtue of His coming on the Judgement Day.
I bind unto myself for today:
Power in the virtuous love of Seraphim,
In the obedience of Angels,
In the hope of resurrection unto reward,
In prayers of Patriarchs,
In predictions of Prophets,
In preaching of Apostles,
In faith of Confessors,
In purity of holy Ascetics,
In the deeds of the righteous.
I bind unto myself for today:
The power of Heaven,
The light of the sun,
The brightness of the moon,
The splendour of fire,
The flashing of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of sea,
The stability of earth,
The compactness of rocks.
I bind unto myself for today:
God’s Power to lead me,
God’s Might to uphold me,
God’s Wisdom to teach me,
God’s Eye to watch over me,
God’s Ear to hear me,
God’s Word to give me speech,
God’s Hand to guide me,
God’s Way to lie before me,
God’s Shield to shelter me,
God’s Host to secure me.
I invoke today all these virtues
Against every hostile merciless power which may assail my body and my soul:
Against the snares of demons,
Against the seductions of vices,
Against the lusts of nature,
Against everyone who meditates injury to me,
Whether far or near, Whether few or many.
Against the incantations of false prophets,
Against the false laws of heresy,
Against the deceits of idolatry,
Against the harmful spells of witches, and smiths, and sorcerers,
Against every knowledge that binds the souls of mortals.
Christ, protect me:
Against every poison,
Against burning,
Against drowning,
Against death-wound,
That I may receive abundant reward.
Christ be with me:
Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
Christ in the fort,
Christ in the chariot seat,
Christ at the helm
Christ in breadth and length and depth,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same
The three in one and one in three.
I believe the Trinity in the Unity
The Creator of the Elements.
Domini est salus.
Domini est salus.
Christi est salus.
Salus tua, Domine, sit semper nobiscum.
Amen.
Some of my modifications are structural (I rearranged the order of certain lines to better group the intentions; all “against”s are in the same section now, for example) and others are for style (the opening four lines of the invocation is from the hymn here, not the literal translation).
I have also made many modifications for content, such as adding the word “harmful” in front of “spells of witches, and smiths, and sorcerers” and eliminating the line about “the black laws of heathenism”. Armor that keeps your teammate from being able to heal you is a bad idea. I use gender-neutral language (e.g. souls of “mortals” instead of “man”) and expansive language (purity of holy “ascetics” instead of “virgins”) when possible. I added the virtues of Christ’s “Death” and “Descent” to the mix because a lot of what I do involves Chthonic travel, and I particularly want to call in those aspects of Christ’s life in the historiola.
It’s possible that the Latin prayer coda at the end was added much later to the text, as a Christianizing token, but it’s also quite possible that it was included in the original as foreign-sounding god-words. I do include it but I leave it off of the paper entirely, speaking it aloud at the activation right after reading the invocation words.
I hope my example encourages you to make your own modifications of the Lorica, suited to your faith traditions and your own magical practice. Have a blessed Feast of Saint Patrick!
Yes And Further 