Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold

Serpent Songs is an anthology of the voices of traditional craft: the words and works of those who remain untamed, cunning folk, exorcists, pellars, sorgin, witches and mystics. A collection of fifteen essays, introduced and curated by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold.

At the Crossroads' tells the stories of what happens when the Western Magical Tradition encounters the African Diaspora and Traditional religions, and vice versa. It is a mixing and a magic that speaks of a truly new world emerging.

Palo Mayombe: The Garden of Blood and Bones is an initiate’s account of this much maligned cult whose central nigromantic mystery is the prenda, the cauldron containing the human skull or bones, reanimated by living spirit.

Ifá: A Forest of Mystery by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold is a major study on the cosmology, metaphysics, philosophy and divination system of Ifá, written by a tradition holder and member of the council of elders, known as the Ogboni society, of Abeokuta, Nigeria.

Exu and the Quimbanda of Night and Fire is the companion to Pomba Gira. Together they give the most complete account of this sorcerous cult. Exu is the fusion of Umbanda, Angolan sorcery, European demonology and Kardec’s Spiritsm, erupting in a uniquely Brazilian cult of practical magical action. Spells, workings, hierarchies and origins are all given in detail.

In Obeah: A Sorcerous Ossuary, Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold teases open this Caribbean mystery and reveals a crooked path into the hidden world of Papa Bones and Sasabonsam with a short monograph concerning the history of this incoherent cult and the ways in which power is bestowed upon and wielded by the Obeahman.

In Seven Crossroads of Night, Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold sets forth the foundation for Quimbanda in theory and practice, presenting a blueprint for the themes that generate the variety of ways Quimbanda can be approached.

Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold’s Pomba Gira & the Quimbanda of Mbùmba Nzila is a significant study on the cult of Pomba Gira, the most comprehensive work in the English language on the Devil’s mistress, whose Brazilian cult has bewitched so many.

In The Canticles of Lilith we meet a power that adorns herself in absence, whose true persuasion consist in the cult of reverence and self-deification where this terrible, amoral force finds its apotheosis as the stellar and cosmic root of movement in itself and from this the shadow of all things visible and tangible.