Is This a Spell?

While we're on the subject of occult crime, or possibly occult crime, or for that matter just weird crime, here's a bizarre story from Boston, Massachusetts. A woman out walking her dog came upon a severed goat's head on the hood of her car, along with a photograph of her under the windshield wiper blades. Goats are commonly associated with the occult, though this also reminds me of that scene in The Godfather with the severed horse head in the bed. It might be less a magical ritual and more a terroristic threat.

Boston police said they received a report around 6 a.m. from a woman who said she was out walking her dog on Garfield Avenue when she noticed blood and the head of an animal, later identified as a goat, on the hood of her car. The 48-year-old woman also found a photo of herself tucked underneath the vehicle's windshield wiper blades. The woman told police she doesn't recall taking the picture or the time frame when it might have been taken.

Iris Robles says the victim is her cousin, a mother of four with a young son. "Like any other mom, she has a child she has to protect," Robles said. Animal control responded to the scene and removed the dead goat from the woman's vehicle but Robles says her cousin and family are left with questions, like who would do this? She has no idea whatsoever, and she has no enemies," Robles said. Why would someone want to terrify this mother of four?

Robles said, "They are insane, this is insane. They are so disturbing." People in the neighborhood are also confused and concerned about the gruesome and gory discovery. “Shocked, very shocked. Where would they even get something like that?” one woman asked. “Today with the horror and stuff, someone’s probably just trying to mess with someone’s mind to intimidate them,” Tom Flanagan said. “And that’s not OK,” a woman added after Flanagan’s comments.

Hopefully I'll be able to follow this story and post an update once the culprit has been apprehended. I'm wondering if this will turn out to be a (crude) attempt at magick related to, say, Capricorn - which rules the Evil Eye - or just a garden variety threat that some heavy metal kid or somebody like that thought would be scary. As I've mentioned here before, so few people are actually interested in occultism that it probably is the latter, but I'm not going to rule anything out without more information.

Personally I wouldn't cast a spell this way because I try to evaluate my results scientifically. If you let your target know that you're cursing them, they might change their behavior based on that knowledge rather than due to the spell itself. But I also know that not all magicians are concerned with such things.