Enid Baxter Ryce’s new book on spells reclaims the power of the spoken word.

Spells are one of many ways in which the power of language manifests itself. To name things means to be in control of them, to define the world, to impregnate it with one’s politics and wishful thinking – through prayers at night, casting a love spell to secure someone’s feelings or insisting on “The Gulf of America.”

“Who isn’t interested in magic?” asks Enid Baxter Ryce, a local author, poet, herbalist, visual artist and filmmaker, who also happens to be a descendant of three Salem witches. She just published Ancient Spells and Incantations: Echoes of Magic Through the Ages and Across Cultures.

Belonging to the sphere of magic and religion, spells and incantations have been with us longer than recorded history. They belong to the oral tradition, where the rhythm, the rhyme and the power of repetition plays a huge role.

Baxter Ryce spent countless hours leafing through old books, including witches’ trial transcripts, collecting spells preserved in Latin, Old English, Celtic, French and other languages. In the U.S., 19th-century Pennsylvania was a region abundant in such traditions.

If you want to manifest dancing in your house (meaning the party started but nobody has picked up the beat), you might want to follow an old Danish solution and write the phrase “Ellon Agron Gramaton” on an aspen leaf and place it beneath the threshold. There is a special spell you cast when travel is urgent, and one for the lady afraid to face her landlord. Many of the spells accompany ancient medical practices, others seem to come with certain herbs as rhymed instructions and serve to support the memory of the healer and their students.

Ironically, as Baxter Ryce explains, spells were collected by those who wanted to fight them – the inquisitors and the colonizers who wrote down some of those outrageous habits to demonstrate their evil nature and the need to convert the pagans.

“Snitches get witches,” Baxter Ryce observes.

To her, what we learn from this oral tradition is how unchangeable human nature has been through ages. “We share the same vulnerabilities, fear and wish for the same things,” she says.

Ancient Spells and Incantations by Enid Baxter Ryce book launch party 6-8pm Friday, April 10 at Downtown Book & Sound, 213 Main St., Salinas. Author talk 5pm Thursday, April 16 at El Gabilan Library, 1400 N. Main St., Salinas. Both events are free. enidryce.com