Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the desert global headquarters of the weird.

Right here in the Great American Desert, the Southwest.

Now, New Mexico calls itself the land of enchantment, and that's what you always call places filled with

spirits the spirits of place enchantment

Enchantment like so many words we've watered down means a lot more than thinking somebody is charming.

Which also doesn't mean what you generally think it does.

Unless your favorite website is like mine,

that etymology Online.

We are pretty much on a psychic tender date together.

You and I, if that's your favorite website.

Or maybe we're just already members of a secret order, a secret order that must soon make itself known.

Enchantment means that you have been enchanted. You've been won over because somebody did some magical chanting, and all of a sudden, as Buck Owens wrote and sang,

you got me under your spell.

Maybe somebody bought a charm from the Bruja and now you're in trouble, especially with

springtime on the way, the time of the horn gods.

You might dismiss it all as just glamour, but glamour is a spell too. That's what the word means.

Jameson's 1825 supplement to his etymological dictionary of the Scottish language has glamour gift as the power of enchantment.

Jameson's original edition, 1808, looked to Old Norse for the source of the word.

And Zuega's old Icelandic dictionary has glam-signing illusion, probably from the same route as gleam.

We ought to get Jackson Crawford on this show,

just so I can get the pronunciation for a couple of hundred old Norse words that always seem to be relevant to the topics on this radio program.

...