About EveryJaadu

EveryJaadu is a free guide to magic as people have believed in it, practised it and staged it, in every region of the world. It covers folk and ritual magic, witchcraft and sorcery, divination, amulets and charms, spirit work, ceremonial and esoteric magic, myth and legend, and the performing art of stage magic, and it keeps them distinct. It has pages on 224 entries so far, 87 rites and 6,399 more entries on the list to be written. The Indian thread is strong, and it is one thread among many.

Our stance

• Neutral on whether it works. Pages say "is believed to" and "practitioners hold", never "it protects". We do not endorse a claim and we do not sneer at it. Every entry has a place for how anthropologists, historians, psychologists and sceptics read the practice.
• Living religions are respected. Vodou, Santeria, Candomblé, Ifa, Native American and Aboriginal ceremony, Shinto, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism all have magical strands, and they are not filed under superstition. We use each community's own names and spellings.
• Closed knowledge is not published. Where knowledge is initiatory, sacred or not for outsiders, a page says so and leaves the detail out.
• Harms are named. Witch trials in Europe and Salem, modern witch-hunts and accusations of witchcraft, killings for body parts, fraud by fake healers and psychics, and abusive exorcisms are stated as facts, without voyeurism.
• No medical advice. Folk healing is described as tradition. There are no doses and no cures, and a person who is ill should see a doctor.
• Not a how-to. Rites are told in outline as customs. We do not give instructions to harm anyone, hurt an animal or take a drug, and curses are described as beliefs, never scripted.
• Stage magic is honest. It is an art in which the audience knows it is a trick. We cover its history, theory and famous effects, and we do not give away how a particular trick is done.

How it is arranged

Every entry is filed by region and country and, where sources allow, by place of magic; by kind of thing (tradition, rite, charm, oracle, substance, being, figure, text, illusion, belief); by purpose; by who does it; by belief world; by occasion; and by how alive it is: living, revived, fading, historical, legendary or performed. Rites are drawn as a ring of their parts and as a frame for each step, the calendar ties entries to days, and the concepts explain the words.

How a page is made

Names and facts come from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The text is written afresh with AI assistance from those sources only: the facts are kept and the wording is ours. A page then has to pass the pipeline's gates before it is published. It is compared with its source article, and a page that repeats a run of the article's words is rewritten or held back. It is checked for the structure of an entry: the fourteen sections, a summary, questions and answers, and the required fields. It is checked against the editorial stance above, so a page that claims efficacy, gives instructions or doses, or uses a pejorative for a living religion is rewritten or held for a person to review. Each page names its source and links to it and to its licence.

Pictures and drawings

Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences, each credited with its author and licence. No image on EveryJaadu is made by an AI image generator. Where there is no free photo, a drawing stands in: an emblem with the entry's colour and symbol, a strip showing how alive the practice is, a ring for the parts of a rite, and a frame for each step. The drawings are diagrams made by our own code from what a page says. They are not portraits of a particular object.

What is live

Today is rebuilt every day from the calendar: which festivals, solstices and days of the dead are on, the weekday tradition, and an entry of the day. New pages are written every day, the news wire is checked every few hours, and pages are re-read against their sources over time.

What EveryJaadu is not

It is not a shop, a reading service or a place to book a practitioner, and it does not sell charms. It is not medical, legal or spiritual advice. It is not the last word on any tradition: the people who keep a practice know it best.

Who is behind it

EveryJaadu is published by ClearTrust, a company that measures traffic quality for the advertising industry. ClearTrust pays for EveryJaadu and keeps it free. EveryJaadu is part of the ClearTrust IVT-Free Publication Network. IVT stands for invalid traffic: visits from bots and other fakes, which the network's sites are screened for. Editorial decisions are not for sale: sponsored placements are always labelled.

Get in touch

To suggest an entry, correct a page or tell us that something should not be public, write to everymagic@cleartrust.cc.