Worst. Ritual. Ever.

Salem, Massachusetts is an odd place. The town is famous because a bunch of innocent people were mistaken for witches and executed there in 1692. So its fame derives from the killing of fake witches, not the presence of real ones. If you were looking for a town in which you might find the genuine article based solely on history, Salem wouldn't be it. Despite this, the city has transformed itself into perhaps the largest witchcraft-themed tourist trap on the entire planet over the last several decades.

Judging from the recent events surrounding the hexing of Charlie Sheen, it's clear to me that despite the executions all those years ago plenty of the town's fake witches never left. In fact, they appear to have founded their own fake tradition, in which effective spell-casting takes a back seat to looking spooky, wandering around in Renaissance Festival attire, and dredging up all the free tabloid press coverage and tourist dollars they can muster.


According to serial eyeliner abuser Christian Day's updated website he is now the world's most famous warlock. I suppose that could be true, seeing as Charlie Sheen now admits he was only joking around, Julian Sands played a fictional character, and the other six people in the world besides Day who call themselves warlocks have never been mentioned on TMZ. Fame has little to do with competence, however, and the fact is that the "binding spell" on Charlie Sheen that brought Day his fame is one of the worst rituals I've ever seen in my life - and trust me, I've been around long enough to have attended some that were pretty bad. The thing is, nobody involved thought any of those rituals were awesome enough that they needed to be posted on YouTube for the whole world to see. Let's take a look at Day's masterpiece and bask in its awfulness.



0:40 - Lorelei gets some points for wearing red rather than the otherwise ubiquitous black of her and Day's gothy hangers-on and for apparently having a really cool athame, unless those jewels in the hilt are plastic. Red is attributed to Mars and is just as appropriate for a curse as is black. But she loses those points almost immediately when she casts the circle incorrectly. In witchcraft the circle is a protective barrier that encloses the place of working and needs to be cast around everyone present. Lorelei, however, just casts it around the altar and main operators, leaving most of the people present outside it. Bad form. One of my friends noted that her outfit is pink rather than red and just looks darker because of the lighting, so that would in fact make it inappropriate for a ritual such as this. Maybe that makes the overall score for this section negative.

1:14 - When calling the four archangels the directions for Gabriel and Raphael are swapped, replacing the order used in both Wicca and ceremonial magick with one adapted from a Kate Bush song. Are these people for real? Either this is another stupid mistake or the Salem witches practice a style of witchcraft I've never encountered. To my knowledge there is no legitimate tradition that has ever led off with Gabriel in the east. And no, this isn't the order used in the traditional Jewish prayer either, which is said as follows:

May Michael be at my right, Gabriel at my left, Uriel in front of me, Raphael behind me, and above my head, the Shekhina—the Divine Presence.

2:10 - Day now uses his skull named Robert (!) to call upon the dead. He gets points for wearing a really cool cloak but loses them for, as usual, wearing too much eyeliner. As far as the skull being named Robert, I don't know enough to make a determination. If the skull actually belonged to, say, one of his ancestors who was named Robert, from a necromantic standpoint that would be pretty effing cool. But I'm guessing that's not the case, which makes it rather sad.

Now, in most traditions in which the spirits of the dead are called upon an offering should be made at this point, a step that is conspicuously absent. When I stated at the beginning that Lorelei cast the circle incorrectly maybe I was wrong. Perhaps the gothy hangers-on outside it were left there as an offering, so that the spirits of the dead would have the opportunity to nibble on a bunch of angst-ridden souls as payment for their presence and help. Is this the sort of thing Moloch was talking about when railed against magicians taking up necromancy as some kind of fad? Looks like it to me!

3:00 - Day whips out his Anubis-head rattle and shakes it vigorously at about 3:30 once the other operators have made various statements related to the goal of the ritual. I guess this is supposed to pass for raising power. While in his media statements Day claimed that his and Lorelei's group was trying to "help" Charlie Sheen, Anubis is the psychopomp and this gesture along with all the black in the room is really most appropriate to "works of malediction and death." One wonders if that's the real psychic intent going on here with more positive language being substituted for the cameras. Either that or the rattle the only tool like it Day owns because his big tourist event is the Festival of the Dead, for which Anubis is legitimately the most appropriate Egyptian deity.

4:15 - Lorelei finally binds Charlie Sheen, using a spell she seems to have picked up from the film The Craft. What is it with this group and pop culture? They know that spells from songs and movies aren't real, right? I mean, I know that Fairuza Balk is a practicing Wiccan and served as a sort of unpaid ritual consultant so the spells aren't quite as bad as usual in The Craft, but still.

Note that this "binding" is cast using the name Charlie Sheen, which is a stage name. Sheen's real name is Carlos Estevez, which is the name one would need to use to make a binding spell like this work properly. The intent of the rite preceding the final binding is also rather muddled, with several people speaking at once punctuated by intermittent choruses of "so mote it be!" If you want a spell like this to have an effect you need to have your whole group on the same page and make a single, concise statement that covers all your bases rather than having each operator make up their own on the spot.

4:55 - The ritual is over and the circle is closed. That took what, five minutes? Some spell. I know, short spells can sometimes work well, and making an incoherent mess like this longer wouldn't have helped it any. The only good thing I can say about it is that I'm glad it was over quickly.

Unsurprising to real magical practitioners, the only effect the spell might have had is to ruin Sheen's first show in Detroit. His next performance in Chicago went much better, but as he reworked the show between performances it's hard to say whether or not this is simply a case of a veteran actor adapting his presentation to his audience. I'm guessing the first show was just bad, and that this ritual most certainly had nothing to do with the reviews. Sheen's still here and still famous, while Day is left complaining about being defamed by a stupid stoner comedy that nobody wants to see. Where the two of them go from here remains to be seen, but the trends are already not looking so good for Salem's would-be warlock.