The Book So Powerful They Banned It - The Secrets Of The Obeah Bible

For over a century, Jamaica has kept one book permanently banned at customs, listed alongside narcotics and firearms.

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A man in Chicago in 1898 took everything the lodges of Europe guarded under oath - the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic orders - and bound it into a 660-page volume. He put it in the mail. For a few dollars, he would ship it to any address on Earth in a plain wrapper. Seals. Talismans. The tables of the Kabbalah. Methods for healing a person you had never touched. Methods for reaching somebody a thousand miles away.

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Readers across the Caribbean called it the Obeah Bible. The author's name became a verb in another country's language, meaning to curse somebody.

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Today I take you through what is actually inside it - the correspondence system that is the grammar of every talisman anybody has ever carried, the protection shell you build in under a minute, and the sentence the author kept repeating across 660 pages that makes the whole ban look absurd.