Doing It Wrong

These two idiots are making all of us authentic spellcasters look bad. A mother and daughter in Tyler, Texas are charged with stalking and harassment after creating "objects related to voodoo, witchcraft and satanism" and placing them on property belonging to their target. Here's the bottom line, folks - if you want to cast a curse on someone, you're doing it wrong if they see it coming. Real magicians don't bother to threaten anyone, because they know that their curses work.

Detectives with the Tyler Police Department claim Feagin and her mother, 46-year-old Kristina Ferguson, created the objects and then placed them in a property shared by the victim, her current boyfriend and the man's daughter.

One of the items was a picture of the victim with a red pentagram drawn across her face, with a burned blue candle beside the picture. This was placed on the couple's front porch on June 15, 2019.

The suspects allegedly placed a pair of black male boxer shorts with a note stating, "just thought you should know," on the victim's vehicle on August 1, 2019. Police said the mother and daughter also used a small voodoo doll with pins in its head, face, and heart, a burned blue candle, and symbols or "sigils" from the Raven of Antimony literature.

Each sigil represented "horror, death, pain, insanity, delusion, and destruction." A mason jar filled with sand was covered in these sigils and left on the victim's vehicle on September 13, 2019. According to the affidavit, the mother and daughter also left behind a black leather scroll wrapped in rope and dipped into a red substance.

Inside the scroll was a photo of the victim with a message written in Latin, along with the victim's initials and birth date. The Latin curse was threatening pestilence, bloodshed, fire and death. It was left on the victim's car on September 24, 2019.

According to the affidavit, using surveillance from the home of the victim and her boyfriend, detectives confirmed the dates of the offenses and saw Ferguson on the video placing some of the objects and then jumping back into the car with the daughter and leaving.

I find it absolutely maddening to see people working magick based on the implicit assumption that it doesn't work. If these two were actual spellcasters, they would never have placed anything on their target's property - or at the very least anywhere on the property where it would be found. No real magician ever threatens, or for that matter lets on in any way, that they are casting a curse on someone. If the spell is going to work, why would you ever give your target a heads-up that might allow them to prepare defenses?

That makes no sense unless you don't really think the spell is going to work, and you're hoping that you can manipulate your target into being scared of you. That's weak, and it's sad. As a technology, magick will work whether your target believes in it or not - but if you have doubts when you cast a spell it's likely to fail. Your consciousness is not the only component of your operation, but it's a big part of it.

So for a real spell, all you really gain by alerting your target is a potentially higher degree of difficulty. If someone find out you're cursing them and does something as simple as praying to whatever deity they worship to protect them, that's still basically another spell that your curse will have to overcome. True, it's not as effective as a full ceremonial operation, but it's still additional resistance.

Basically, the minute somebody threatens to cast a spell on me I know that they're a loser and that they pose no danger. If they were smart and capable of doing what they threaten, they would strike without warning or notification - just like I do on the rare occasions that negative magical operations are necessary.