Monday, June 4, 2012

Now That's A Spell!


In the past I've mused on how possible it would be to summon a lighting bolt to strike a specific target, and commented on how something like that would probably be the closest a real magician could get to replicating fantasy-novel class magick. You need to have the right underlying condition, an ongoing thunderstorm, but circumstances in which lightning is going to strike somewhere nearby the required probability shift to make it strike where you want is a lot lower than what you might initially think - to the point that on a good day a good magician could probably make it happen. According to this story out of Congo, such a thing might have actually happened recently during a soccer match.

Accusations of witchcraft have been launched after a blast of lightning reportedly struck dead an entire football team in Congo, whilst their opponents were unharmed.

Daily Kinshasa newspaper L'Avenir explained: "Lightning killed at a stroke 11 young people aged between 20 and 35 years during a football match. The athletes from Basanga [the home team] curiously came out of this catastrophe unscathed."

According to the Congolese newspaper, 30 other people had received burns at the weekend fixture.

Suspicion of nefarious magic was aroused not just because one team was untouched but because the games was in the balance with a one-all scoreline.

Now this always could have been a coincidental freak accident, but it's a remarkable enough one that I know I would suspect a spell if I had been there and watched it happen. Soccer magick is quite common in Africa, as I've covered on this blog a number of times. If the score of the game was a factor it suggests that the spell was cast not long in advance of the strike, which makes it all the more impressive. Since weather magick relies on something akin to the butterfly effect of chaos theory to work, the more immediate the spell the more powerful the magician. I'll have to see if I can replicate a controlled lightning strike with my methods one of these days, though hopefully I can find a situation to test it on that won't involve the loss of life.

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6 comments:

Unknown said...

It seems more likely that someone came up with another way to do weather magick than that they are good enough to pull that off in that short a time frame. Not that it is impossible just the one seems more likely than the other.

Scott Stenwick said...

Without more information it's hard to say one way or another. But if it really is some sort of new technique that's, say, an order of magnitude better than anything else out there, all I can say is that I sure would like to learn it!

Anonymous said...

People put a lot of emotional investment in the football teams that they support. Perhaps the person(s) who pulled this off drew on the crowd's emotions/energies to fuel the spell.
Another theory is that the opposing team were themselves the sacrifice...

Unknown said...

I remember reading (I think on Rob's magick blog)about how if you want to get real time manifesting you need to back date your spell. Maybe this guy was doing something similar, have you ever tried anything like that?

Anonymous said...

Backdating a working..hmmm.. I was going to say that I've not had success with this and point to work done to help a football team win. But then I remembered that this did work on occasion for weather magic. So the short answer from my perspective is "it depends".

Scott Stenwick said...

It would be interesting to work on better techniques for channeling the emotional energy of a large group. I can think of various ways that could be done, but given the required circumstances it's a lot harder to test than solo rituals. The sacrifice angle might worth looking into as well, since I know that such practices do play a part in African muti magick.

I can't say that I've had much luck either with explicitly backdating workings as far as making it part of the statement of intent goes (ie. "go back to this point in the past and do x"). Sometimes I get an effect but it's no better what I get if I just specify the ends I want without worrying about how they come to pass.

If you take a successful working and trace causes and effects back to the source after the fact I can often point to some element in the past that would have had to shift to produce the result I experienced, but I tend to look at it more like a Schoedinger's Cat-type situation - since I'm unaware of the whole chain of events before it manifests the whole system can be treated as a wavefunction which "collapses" once the outcome is known.