ENTRY NO. 01
Fortuna & Plutus
Greco-Roman · c. 8th century BCE – 4th century CE
The oldest Western personification of wealth isn't a spirit to be commanded but a goddess to be placated — because luck, the Romans insisted, cannot be owned.
Attested
Fortuna had a major state cult, with a large sanctuary at Praeneste (modern Palestrina) built around an oracle that dispensed fate by lot. Cicero and Livy both discuss her cult's political weight in Rome.
Plutus, the Greek god of wealth, appears as early as Hesiod's Theogony, and is the title character of Aristophanes' comedy Plutus (388 BCE), in which the god is blind — explaining, satirically, why wealth is distributed without regard to merit.
Sources: Cicero, De Divinatione; Aristophanes, Plutus; Hesiod, Theogony
Tradition
Fortuna's wheel — raising and toppling fortunes at random — became a stock image in medieval and Renaissance art and later in tarot's Wheel of Fortune card, though the card's iconography is a medieval Christian gloss, not a Roman one.
Modern prosperity practice sometimes invokes Fortuna directly (candle work, small offerings), but this is a contemporary revival rather than a continuous cult practice — Fortuna's Roman worship did not survive as an unbroken folk tradition into the present.
ENTRY NO. 02
Jupiter Talismans
Renaissance Hermeticism · 15th–16th century
In planetary magic, wealth is not a thing you draw to yourself — it's a frequency you tune into, and Jupiter is the tuning fork.
Attested
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) assigns each planet a metal, day, angel, number-square, and set of correspondences; Jupiter governs expansion, honor, and material increase, its metal is tin, and its day is Thursday.
Agrippa draws heavily on the earlier Arabic grimoire known in Latin as the Picatrix (11th century), which gives detailed instructions for planetary talismans, including ones for wealth and favor.
Sources: Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia Bk. II; Picatrix (Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm)
Tradition
Modern ceremonial magicians and astrologers still construct Jupiter talismans — often a sigil drawn from the planet's magic square, consecrated on a Thursday during a favorable Jupiter transit.
Popular culture has flattened this into "Jupiter = money luck" shorthand, which loses Agrippa's actual framework: expansion and honor, of which wealth is only one expression.
ENTRY NO. 03
Parnassah
Jewish Folk Practice · Talmudic era – present
Jewish tradition doesn't have a separate word for "prosperity magic" — it has פַּרְנָסָה (parnassah), livelihood, and centuries of prayer and custom built around asking for it honestly.
Attested
Parnassah — sustenance or livelihood — is a recurring petition in Jewish liturgy, including within the weekday Amidah. Historian Joshua Trachtenberg's Jewish Magic and Superstition (1939) documents amulets (kameot) inscribed with divine and angelic names used for protection and sustenance in medieval and early modern Jewish communities.
Source: Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, ch. 8–9
Tradition
Folk custom in some communities holds that Psalm 67 was arranged, in some manuscripts and printed amulets, in the visual shape of a menorah, and is recited for livelihood — a scribal-artistic tradition rather than a claim in the psalm's text itself.
Reciting Psalm 23 or giving tzedakah (charity) before a request for parnassah is common devotional practice; these are pious customs, not spells in the ceremonial-magic sense, and conflating the two misrepresents both.
ENTRY NO. 04
Fehu
Germanic / Norse · Elder Futhark, c. 2nd century CE onward
The first rune of the Elder Futhark literally means "cattle" — because for the people who carved it, livestock was portable, growable wealth.
Attested
Fehu is the first rune of the 24-rune Elder Futhark. Its reconstructed name is cognate with Old English feoh and Gothic faihu — "cattle" or "movable wealth" — the same root that gives modern English "fee."
The Old English, Norwegian, and Icelandic rune poems (recorded in medieval manuscripts, centuries after the Elder Futhark's active use) gloss Fehu-type runes with lines about wealth, strife over wealth, and gold as a source of discord.
Sources: Old English Rune Poem; Icelandic Rune Poem (Page ed.)
Tradition
Whether runes were used for divination or spellcraft in the pagan period, versus primarily as a writing system, is genuinely disputed among runologists — Tacitus's Germania (1st century CE) describes a lot-casting practice, but doesn't name runes specifically, and the link is inferred, not stated.
Modern rune magic — carving Fehu on candles or coins for wealth work — is a 20th-century revivalist practice, drawing on the rune poems' wealth imagery but not documented as an unbroken ritual lineage.
ENTRY NO. 05
Money Drawing
Hoodoo / Rootwork · American South, 19th century onward
Hoodoo's money magic is the most systematized in this ledger — a working tradecraft of oils, roots, and floor washes, built by enslaved and free Black Americans out of African, European, and Native American folk sources.
Attested
Folklorist Zora Neale Hurston documented rootwork practices, including money-drawing formulas, in fieldwork published as "Hoodoo in America" (1931). Harry Middleton Hyatt's mid-20th-century interviews with Southern Black practitioners, later published as Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork, are the largest single documentary record of the tradition.
Sources: Hurston, "Hoodoo in America," Journal of American Folklore; Hyatt, Hoodoo — Conjuration — Witchcraft — Rootwork
Tradition
Named formulas — Fast Luck oil, Money House Blessing wash, mojo bags carrying High John the Conqueror root — are still made and sold by working rootworkers today, largely through oral apprenticeship rather than published grimoires.
Since the late 20th century, commercial "hoodoo" products have proliferated well beyond the documented tradition; sourcing a formula to Hurston or Hyatt versus a modern retail label is not a minor distinction to practitioners.
ENTRY NO. 06
Iron, Clover, Coin
European Folk Custom · medieval – present
Most household luck charms weren't designed by any one tradition — they accumulated, the way folklore does, and their "correct" form is often just whichever version reached you first.
Attested
The horseshoe-as-luck custom is recorded in English folklore from at least the 17th century, tied partly to iron's folk reputation for warding off malevolent spirits and partly to a legend involving St. Dunstan shoeing the Devil.
Four-leaf clovers are simply a rare genetic variant of white clover (roughly 1 in several thousand); their "luck" association is recorded in English sources from the 17th–19th centuries, without a single traceable origin point.
Tradition
Whether a horseshoe should be hung points-up ("to hold the luck in") or points-down ("to pour luck out on the household") is a genuinely regional disagreement with no settled answer — both versions are widely practiced.
Carrying a coin for luck (a "lucky penny") and Chinese cash coins used decoratively for prosperity in feng shui are parallel but distinct traditions with different cosmologies; treating them as interchangeable folk-luck objects flattens both.
ENTRY NO. 07
The Great Work
Alchemy · Hellenistic Egypt – 18th century
Alchemy is the one tradition here where "getting rich" and "getting free" were, for centuries, argued to be the same operation — historians still disagree about how literally that was meant.
Attested
Alchemical texts from Hellenistic Egypt through early modern Europe describe transmutation — turning base metal into gold — as a real, physical operation attempted by working alchemists, some employed specifically to produce gold for patrons.
Historian Lawrence Principe's research on figures like Robert Boyle has shown many alchemists pursued transmutation as literal chemistry, not solely as symbol.
Source: Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy
Tradition
From the 19th century onward — especially through Mary Anne Atwood and later Carl Jung — a rival reading took hold: that "gold" was always a cipher for spiritual perfection, and the real laboratory was the alchemist's own psyche.
Scholars of alchemy generally treat this "spiritual-only" reading as a real but later interpretive layer, not the original intent of most working alchemists — the two readings coexist in modern practice, often without the distinction being made explicit.