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Christian Day's magical skull "Robert" has been a source of much amusement around the blogosphere ever since his group of "warlock-craft" practitioners posted their awful binding ritual on YouTube. But all laughter aside, skulls do play an important role in many systems of magick from around the world. An apparent example of this was recently discovered at an archaeological site in India. There many skulls were found intentionally buried close together forming what appears to be some sort of platform, which suggests they were placed that way for use in some sort of magical ceremony.Prof. R M Shadaksharaiah of the department of history and archaeology in Karnatak University told `The Times of India' on Tuesday that irrespective of the carbon-14 tests determining the period of the burial of skulls, the reason for such arranged burial was witchcraft.
He pointed out that the lower jaw and the rib cage were missing. "Skulls were placed systematically, just like tiles on a floor. The manner in which they were kept clearly suggests it to be a platform of skulls made purposefully for performing some black magic or ritual," he said.
I'm not familiar with the various Indian systems of magick appropriate to the period in which the skull platform was constructed, but I imagine that casting a spell while standing upon it would have been suitably impressive. In fact, that reminds me of this hilarious article by Lionel Snell on "Over-The-Top-Occultism" or OTTO.
When the 70's occultist says "there's no point in using a silver censer when a coffee tin serves just as well", the OTTO initiate replies "there's no point in using a coffee tin when a 800 year old human skull looted from the ruins of a Mexican temple serves just as well."
Words to live by, those.
6 comments:
Well, your publisher sure loved my work. He just reviewed my book, rather favorably I might add. One might even say it was one of my best reviews and Robert was right there on the cover. You can read his review (and many others) at: http://www.amazon.com/Witches-Book-Dead-Christian-Day/dp/1578635063
Kisses,
Christian
Now Christian, I never said you couldn't write. Apparently you can, which is great. I actually find the subject of your book interesting, because one of the areas with which many modern witches don't work is with the spirits of the ancestors. But pagan practitioners throughout history generally have.
The trouble with doing group rituals is that unless you're careful they can sink to the least common denominator and what you can be left with is (A) a magical goal as shockingly stupid as bothering to "bind" a celebrity and (B) a ritual like that total embarassment you all apparently thought was cool enough that the world just HAD TO SEE IT.
For all I know you're a totally competent practitioner when you're working on your own. Or maybe what you posted on YouTube isn't the real ritual - that wouldn't surprise me either. After all, if what you were really going to do to Charlie Sheen was, as Lorelei originally commented, "sacrifice him," I'm sure you're smart enough to know that a death curse over something as pointless and ridiculous as his use of the word "warlock" would get you really bad press.
Yes, but what I know as a master of media and having worked at ad agencies for years is, there is no bad press. There are the goals of the strategy and the strategy did what I wanted it to do. There is always collateral damage, hurt feelings, or random people pointing and snickering at anything someone wants to do. But, at the end of the day, I look at what the goal was and if I satisfied it. Charlie Sheen and his of the word warlock was the means to an end and the ends were met. The word Warlock is increasingly being used across the magical communities, everyone's debating it, and I'm going to win my sushi bet with Raven Grimassi, who I bet I could bring that word back into vogue within five years. I managed to get massive publicity for Salem, increase the sales of my shops by 100, 500, and even 1,600% over last year's sales [because I don't care if they point and snicker with one hand if there's a dollar bill in the other], massive publicity for me, massive publicity for Robert, and, more importantly than anything else to me, get that much further to the goal of winning a sushi dinner. I'm not a thin person. It should be obvious I will go to great lengths for a free meal and winning a bet isn't bad either. The word Warlock will come back, whether I get the credit for it or not. That much I have determined. This was never about TMZ for me. TMZ is the tabloid era's answer to Associated Press. By having five stories on TMZ, I then got hundreds of radio shows as far off as Australia, where I could then talk about the intricacies of Witchcraft, the word warlocks, the rights of minority religions, and whatever else I felt like talking about. I knew what buttons to push to get the platform I wanted and if I all I have to endure is the random snicker by people completely lacking the insight to know what I was really doing (because, frankly, it was obvious to every friend of mine in the marketing industry, none of whom were wrapped up in which direction Raphael was in), so be it. The goal was met. Not only did I not lose a single supporter in the Pagan or magical communities that I already had to begin with, I got more and every one of them gladly offered up reviews to my book. The most amusing thing to me about all of this is that, whatever anyone can say about what we all did, we did with our real names. We stuck who we are out there with the brand of the very core of who we are. We didn't use pseudonyms like Barrabbas to make sure we wouldn't be held accountable for our words later. We took both accountability and responsibility, which is more than I can say for 99% of the cowards in the Pagan community. I'd rather be vilified as me than be celebrated as somebody else. :)
Oh, I think if you had stated outright that you planned on killing Charlie Sheen with a spell the publicity from that would have far outweighed the notoriety it generated for you. Especially when it failed.
Now I suppose if all you set out to do was to get Charlie Sheen to quit calling himself a Warlock I agree - you succeeded. But with all the wonderful things in the world that you could have worked magick to accomplish this is what you choose? Seriously, how sad is that? Unless, I suppose, it's all that your group has the power to do - and that's sad in its own way as well.
Did you just not read what I wrote? Are you this outside of the social spectrum that you can't understand my response?
Let me put this in two words for you that your brain can understand:
P U B L I C I T Y S T U N T
In that most simple regard, our ritual worked perfectly. It was shown all over the world, even in Australia. Heck, a friend of mine told me it was on every news channel in Philly. Are you this wrapped up in the structure of ritual that you are that blind to a ritual's intent?
The fact that it worked in a magical sense and he was fired the following day is irrelevant. I used Charlie Sheen to A) get everyone talking about the word "Warlock". They are. B) Get tons of new business for my shop. I've gotten it. C) Stop him from using the word warlock. Well, he was fired and then admitted that he wasn't a real warlock, but that's neither here nor there. I got what I wanted either way. The ritual worked most effectively. I'm famous and random bloggers like you talk about me even weeks after the incident itself has left the news cycle. Have you no concept of how much power that gives me? LOL
I'm not familiar with Indian history, but it does bother me a bit that the official opinion is that "black magic" is the only explanation. Perhaps so, but the first thing that popped into my head was the Paris catacombs and other burial rituals that involve the laying out of remains in a particular pattern, and/or discarding of some of the remains.
Over-the-top or not, though, standing on a platform of skulls would be pretty badass.
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