As a writer of relatively firm SF, it should be established that even in the magical ignorance of deep history, the spell components for "fireball" can't be bat guano.
They're naphtha and white phosphorus.
I remember in Brian Lumley's Cthulhu mythos novel The Burrowers Beneath, an ancient tome had the recipe to summon Azatoth, the nuclear chaos at the heart of the universe.
The recipe was basically a critical mass of U235
Follow
I've got to read those again. I always liked Lumley's spin on the Mythos.
