Augoeides

Ghost in the Window

2012-01-26T17:03:00.001-06:00

Demolition supervisor Robert Johnson got a surprise when reviewing photographs he took of a building that he had just demolished in the English city of Kendal. In one of the photographs, he saw a figure standing in one of the windows. Furthermore, the apparition was identified as that of the deceased previous owner by her son, David Grimshaw.

The 59-year-old was stunned and added: ‘I’m totally convinced – no one else looks like that. She had glasses and big earrings and she used to wear a dress with a bow at the front.’

While some may think the ghost is just a mere reflection, Mr Grimshaw remained convinced. He said: ‘She used to stand in that room for hours on the phone – it was the guesthouse reception and she took bookings from there.

‘She would have been horrified if she had known the house was being demolished because it was beautiful, so maybe that is why she’s turned up.’

The demolition team had felt an eerie chill at Meadowbank House. Worker Stuart Shan said: ‘The day before we took the photo, I noticed the chandelier swinging on its own.’

In my opinion the figure's precise features are hard to make out, so Grimshaw's identification may be due to the mosaic effect. However, it is pretty clear to me that this is the image of a woman, and you can see what looks like a necklace and an earring on the side of the woman's head that is visible.

This is one of the better ghost photographs that I've seen. It does not look like a reflection to me, but rather like a person standing inside the building. In fact, it's so good my immediate thought is that it's just a picture of somebody inside the building who wasn't supposed to be there. But if the demolition crew thoroughly checked the interior and nobody was there, it may be that something paranormal was indeed happening at the site.

De-Baptism?

2012-01-25T18:04:00.005-06:00

I've long been of the opinion that the ritual of infant baptism as practiced by many mainstream Christian denominations is essentially pointless from a spiritual and magical perspective. My reasoning? If we assume that the Christian concept of salvation is based on spiritual realization, we must also take into account the basic truth that nobody else can do spiritual work for us. The problem with infant baptism is quite simply that while participating in a religious ritual led by another person can help speed one's spiritual progress, an infant really has no idea what is going on. Some babies just cry through the whole thing and find the water used unpleasant, which seems to me as about as far from a genuine spiritual awakening as I can imagine.

While baptism does serve a social function, it seems to me that people could get their socialization in clubs or organizations that are not religious in nature. This strikes me as a better state of affairs on the grounds that it would ensure that human politics and spiritual realization do not become conflated with each other. I'll add that this is not limited to churches, and the same point could be made about many magical orders and societies. There's a reason that when Aleister Crowley first put together his plan for A.'.A.'. he forbade socialization among its members. He had seen firsthand what political struggle had done to the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and had played a significant part in it himself acting as Mathers' representative in London during the "revolt of the Adepts."

Several new websites are now offering "de-baptism" certificates for those who wish to formally leave their Christian Churches. While requesting a certificate from a website is at least as pointless as an infant baptism ritual from a spiritual perspective, its political significance cannot be overlooked.

The idea of getting "de-baptized"-- or having your name officially deleted from the baptismal registry-- is relatively new, but one which the Catholic Church is beginning to take seriously, and with grave concern.

The movement may have begun just a decade ago when Terry Sanderson, head of the National Secular Society in Britain, posted an unofficial "de-baptism certificate" on the society's website, mostly as a joke. To date it has been downloaded at least 100,000 times.

"It was a joke to begin with, but now it has taken on a new significance because there are so many people who are anxious to leave the church that they are actually taking it seriously now, and they want some way to make their break with the church formal," Sanderson told VOA. "Often the church won't acknowledge their desire to leave."

Many disenfranchised ex-parishioners have begun to take it a step further, seeking official, legal acknowledgement for de-baptism. For instance, 71-year-old Frenchman Rene Lebouvier recently filed a lawsuit against the church after his initial request to have his name crossed off the church's baptismal registry was denied. Last October, a lower court in Normandy ruled in his favor, making him the first man to be officially de-baptized, though a local bishop has filed an appeal.

The very existence of de-baptism demonstrates the extent to which people have become angry with the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of ongoing scandals and the continued embrace of political positions very much at odds with those of the modern world. It remains to be seen if the current surge in de-baptisms represents a trend, or if it is simply the latest Internet craze that will fade as quickly as it emerged.

Demons in the Bahamas

2012-01-24T18:26:00.009-06:00

The islands of the Bahamas in the Caribbean Sea have a fascinating paranormal history. In the early 1900's psychic Edgar Cayce predicted that evidence for the existence of the continent of Atlantis would be found in 1968 or 1969 near the island of Bimini. It so happens that in 1968 an unusual formation was discovered off the coast of the island, usually referred to today as the Bimini Road. This formation consists of a line of flat rectangular stone blocks that suggest the possibility of human origin. However, a number of geologists have also pointed out that similar stone structures can occur naturally, as the stone of which the road is composed tends to fracture along flat and rectangular lines giving the appearance of an ancient pavement.

According to this latest story from the region, ancient Atlanteans are not the only paranormal forces that may be loose in the Bahamas. According to Bishop Neil Ellis of Mount Tabor Full Gospel Baptist Church three demonic spirits are also plaguing the islands. In a recent speech Ellis described these demons and their evil intentions.

"Sexual immorality," he told the large crowd, "is the oldest of the three. It's been assigned (to The Bahamas) since the early 1800s. "It has taken root in the lives and psyche of Bahamians." The demon's task - sexual immorality - he said was designed to "keep God's plan for you, from you, destabilise the Bahamian family" and "replace God with himself (the demon)".

He said that the demon of sexual immorality was evident in our society when one saw the high level of "promiscuity going on". Fornication and adultery, he said, are "literally glamorised". Speaking of the "sweetheart syndrome" - one of the three sub-assignments under the main assignment of the sexual immorality demon - "has striven and now become accepted as our normal way of life". As for homosexuality and incest, it was "rampant and ragged in the Bahamas", he said.

Calling up the second demon --financial instability -- Bishop Ellis said it was a demon "sent directly from hell primarily to enslave the people of the Bahamas. "It was designed," he said, "to keep you working, but keep you broke."

"The majority of the people in The Bahamas are one pay cheque away from poverty", he said, adding that there is an agreement between the first two demons. Poverty, caused by demon no 2, "allows demon no 1 to driver persons in poverty to sexual immorality".

The last demon, he said, is widespread throughout the Bahamas, as many are operating in "obeah and voodoo. It has been full blown in our country and it has been for some time." The demon of witchcraft, he said, is designed to "manipulate, intimidate, separate, segregate and control", he said. "It is not assigned to kill you. It is designed and assigned to terrorising until it drives you insane."

Bishop Ellis said this "demon" uses confusion as one of its major weapons. "This spirit will try to bring confusion to the home, the marriage and the family. There are divorced and separated people who love each other, but can't live together. Witchcraft!"

Or in the latter case, maybe they just can't live together without being constantly at odds. That happens all the time, demons or not, in many parts of the world besides the Bahamas.

As a ritual magician, my first thought here is that in order to truly banish a demon you need to know its name. Evangelicals often name demons according to what they do, such as "demon of witchcraft," but in the Bible even Jesus needed to know a demon's name in order to cast it out and I certainly hope that Ellis does not consider himself a better exorcist than the Son of God. My next thought is that social problems can arise on their own without the help of demonic forces. For example, why propose demons as the root of financial instability when oligarchs around the world time and again have proven that they can do it on their own?

Bishop Ellis claims that God has given him a special prayer to banish these "demons," and I sincerely hope that it works, especially in terms of improving the Bahamanian economy which has suffered a lot from the global financial crisis. I just think that even if paranormal forces are involved, there's also a lot of practical mundane work that's going to need to be done to really help improve peoples' lives.

On Visible Manifestations

2012-01-23T12:15:00.005-06:00

After a busy couple of weeks I'm looking back over some of the topics that have come up on the blogosphere during this last month. One of these is the discussion of visible manifestations during evocations. The discussion was started off by an article from Frater Ashen, which was followed by two others from MC and one from RO. The general consensus is that visible manifestations of spirits do occur in the course of the work, and usually people who say otherwise have little experience with working grimoire magick. I would agree with this, which may seem a bit surprising at first in the context of my published work. On page 112 of Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy you will find the following:

The determination of a ritual’s success or failure should depend on only one factor – whether or not the objective of the operation is achieved. It should not make any difference whether or not you see the spirit, whether or not you hear unexplained sounds, or even whether on not your spell focus explodes as you complete the conjuration. Such things are side phenomena unrelated to the operation at hand, and obsession with them can lead to a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the magical arts.

To clarify this a bit, with the Enochian angels you generally have to use some sort of scrying device like a mirror or crystal in order to see them. This lines up perfectly with the the history of the system, as this is how John Dee and Edward Kelley originally communicated with the angels and I assume this method would not have been necessary had the visible manifestations associated with those angels been more strongly perceptible. Furthermore, I would not necessarily characterize an interest in evoking spirits to visible manifestation as "obsession." While such manifestations are rare when working with Enochian angels, I also know from experience that they do occur when working with other grimoire systems.

The first Goetic ritual I was involved in was quite different from the Enochian work I was more familiar with, at least in terms of visible effects, as the Goetic spirit we evoked was visible without a mirror or scrying device of any sort. We were using a triangle suspended vertically from the wall, and once the conjuration was complete there was a definite visible form that seemed to manifest within it. It looked like the rough image of a face constructed from the shadows of the room, except that I was able to move my head from side to side, change position, and so forth and still see it, as though it were physically drawn within the triangle.

I was impressed enough by the image that after the ritual I tried playing with the lighting and so forth in the temple to see if I could duplicate what I saw, but after a whole lot of experimentation found that I could not. Furthermore, during the ritual the visible manifestation did appear following the conjuration and seemed to vanish along with the license to depart, so I can only conclude that this was in fact the visible manifestation of a spirit. For the ritual we had carefully followed the instructions from the grimoire, and so I have to say that like Ashen, MC, and RO my first question for somebody who did a Goetic evocation and didn't see anything would be how carefully those instructions were followed. It seems that adherence to the source material has a lot to do with whether or not you get a visible manifestation at all, as most authors on the subject suggest.

The thing about that ritual, though, was that other than the manifestation it was a complete bust. The information we got from the spirit was inaccurate and the charges we gave it were not carried out. So here's where I differ from some practitioners - I don't consider that a successful evocation even though the spirit was clearly successfully evoked. To me magickal success is about the results, not the phenomena, and I have yet to see much evidence that there is a direct correlation between the intensity of a spirit's manifestation and the successful achievement of measurable magical objectives. That's what I mean when I say that I judge magical rituals from their results.

In this regard it seems my perspective is quite different from that of practitioners like Frater Ashen, who considers the experience of evoking spirits profound and well worth the effort for its own sake. I don't see it that way in the context of my personal magical practices, but its also true that from the standpoint of magical practice as a whole visible manifestations are certainly an area in which there's a lot more research to be done. I'd be interested in seeing if the intensity of a manifestation corresponds to any sort of physical measurement, like an EMF detector, and whether or not the images can be photographed or recorded like some ghost phenomena can be. If anyone's done that sort of work and is willing to discuss it, feel free to share.

Witchcraft Beliefs and Cultural Paranoia

2012-01-17T16:25:00.002-06:00

I've often commented that I'm glad to be living in the United States instead of Africa, particularly those countries where belief in witchcraft and magical practices is widespread. As a practicing magician I put a lot more stock in the effectiveness of magick than most Americans do, but at the same time it's clear to me that in societies where most people share those beliefs the results can lead to witchcraft accusations and vigilante actions against completely innocent individuals. Because the effects of magick are subtle it can be hard to tell who might or might not be using it, so a sort of cultural paranoia can arise surrounding such practices. This recent article from Kenya advises readers on what to look for in order to spot people who might be using magick in the office, and is a perfect example of the sort of thinking this paranoia engenders.

Do their moods change inconsistently without reason, sometimes friendly, other times incredibly hostile? Do they fall asleep on their desks, looking dazed, as the boss waits for that time-barred assignment?

Do you have workmates who carry the same bag everyday, mostly yellow or brown in colour even if it is dirty and torn and belongs in the dustbin? And why has this other one been wearing the same green coat for the last ten years, or that greyish old sweater the whole year, whether it is hot or cold?

Do they reject a hug or handshake all the time?

Do they refuse to take office tea and always remove their shoes and walk around the office bare foot? Do they visit the toilet more than three times a day? Do they sneeze whenever the boss summons a colleague to his or her office? What about the male colleagues who never wear socks?

It could be a coincidence, but chances are one or all these people have been visiting a witchdoctor and the witchdoctor has given them strict instructions on what to do to survive at the office.

Instructions may include the colours to wear to work to please or confuse bosses and what to put under his or her carpet to earn promotions, office trips and excessive per diem at the expense of others.

See the pattern? In effect, anything even marginally unusual or out of the ordinary in terms of one's office behavior can constitute "proof" of witchcraft-related activities. This includes financial trouble of whatever sort, since maybe the person in question is just not doing well enough to replace his or her coat or bag with a new one. Even if many people here in the states think I'm crazy to believe in, let alone practice magick, I'll take that over my co-workers scrutinizing my every quirk for evidence of magical manipulation any day.

More on Mississippians and Mayans

2012-01-06T14:14:00.003-06:00

In the update to my post on the dubious Georgia Mayan Ruins story, I noted that there very well could be an ancient Native American city at the Brasstown Bald site, but that it was most likely built by the Mississippian culture rather than the Mayans. The Mississippians are known to have settled in the Mississippi River valley and throughout the southeastern United States, and they were builders like the Mayans despite being a distinct and separate culture. A recent archaeological dig near St. Louis, Missouri, has now shed more light on the ancient settlement of Cahokia. The site was once thought to be a seasonal encampment, but these most recent findings have shown it to be the largest Mississippian city ever discovered.

Cahokia, which is near Collinsville in Illinois, was initially believed to be just a 'seasonal encampment'. But experts now think it was a location of much more significance.

Mr Lawler wrote: 'A millennium ago, this strategic spot along the Mississippi River was an affluent neighbourhood of Native Americans, set amid the largest concentration of people and monumental architecture north of what is now Mexico.

'Back then, hundreds of well-thatched rectangular houses, carefully aligned along the cardinal directions, stood here, overshadowed by dozens of enormous earthen mounds flanked by large ceremonial plazas.

'Cahokia proper was the only pre-Columbian city north of the Rio Grande, and it was large even by European and Mesoamerican standards of the day, drawing immigrants from hundreds of kilometres around to live, work, and participate in mass ceremonies.'

It's also important to note, as you can see in the artist's rendering above (click for higher resolution), that Mississippian cities and Mayan cities have a number of architectural elements in common, such as pyramids, plazas, and so forth. The Mississippian culture flourished from around 700 to 1400 CE, so the timing also lines up with the dating from the site in Georgia. Therefore, even though the Brasstown Bald ruins are unlikely Mayan it may be that the site conceals another large Mississippian settlement similar to Cahokia.

Kopimism Church Recognized in Sweden

2012-01-05T15:50:00.003-06:00

Is file-sharing a religious act? According to the Church of Kopimism, a new religion recently recognized in Sweden, the answer to that question can be yes. Kopimism considers file-sharing to be central to its beliefs and practices, which raises some interesting questions from the standpoint of international copyright law.

Kopimism gained recognition as a religion just before Christmas after applying three times to the Swedish government agency Kammarkollegiet. Not only is file-sharing considered its central sacrament, the CTRL+C and CTRL+V shortcuts for copying and pasting are viewed as sacred symbols.

The group is run by Isak Gerson, a 19-year-old student of philosophy, who is now the spiritual leader of Kopimi, the people who follow the tenets of this new religion, which does not explicitly support illegal file-sharing, but the general free exchange of information. There are likely millions of unknowing adherents of Kopimism throughout the world.

While this might sound like something akin to the idea of the Jedi religion, it could have a monumental effect on the legality of various laws against illegal file-sharing, as internet cuts and website blocks could be seen as religious persecution, a violation of a fundamental human right.

I think most people recognize that the founding of Kopimism is analogous to what L. Ron Hubbard did with the Church of Scientology when he founded a religion in order to keep the Food and Drug Administration from going after dianetics - a clever hack to the system rather than an expression of spiritual belief. Still, it is true that the tenets of Kopimism sound a lot like the old "hacker ethic" which has been around since the beginning of the computer age and is essentially a coherent philosophy in its own right.

Church of Ice

2012-01-04T20:27:00.004-06:00

Back in August I covered the inflatable church created at the behest of a creative Russian missionary who was having trouble getting permission to build a permanent house of worship. A century ago villagers from the German town of Mitterfirmiansreut ran into a similar problem and came up with their own unique solution - they built their church out of snow and ice. Ever since that time, the building of a snow church every winter has become a local tradition.

The snow church is part of a long-tradition in Mitterfirmiansreut dating back more than 100 years. The ritual harks back to when town authorities denied a formal request from residents to open their own traditional house of worship. So the petitioners decided instead to erect a church out of nothing but snow and ice.

"It was meant as an act of provocation," Catholic Church Dean Kajetan Steinbeisser told ABC News. "Believers from the village got together and built a snow church because they didn't have a church here."

The ice sculpture reportedly cost more than $200,000 to create and was delayed for several weeks by unseasonably warm weather. Thousands of visitors are expected to visit the mini-cathedral before it begins to melt away.

The interior of the church, shown above, is quite beautiful and looks like an excellent ritual space - that is, so long as the participants can handle the cold. Like the United States, Germany is having a warm winter season, so if you're in the area and interested in visiting the snow church you may want to do so as soon as you can. There's no telling when the weather might turn warm enough to start damaging the structure.

The Egely Wheel

2012-01-03T13:42:00.004-06:00

Over the weekend an old friend of my neighbor's dropped by and brought with him a rather curious instrument called an Egely Wheel. This device consists of a wheel mounted on a very low-friction pivot so that it can spin freely along and a sensor that monitors the spin rate. Supposedly the wheel can measure the flow of Qi, spinning faster in response to its presence. As most of you already know, I've been interested in the intersection between magical practices and technology for some time, such as the integration of EMF detectors into evocation rituals.

Although some of the basics of the phenomenon are not yet fully understood, extensive control experiments have proven that the rotation of the wheel during measurements is not driven by heat, convection, or electromagnetic energy. The inventor, Dr. George Egely, a Hungarian physicist PhD formerly with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, is an expert in the field of energy transfer processes. After thousands of sessions with over 1500 test subjects, he found that those with the highest levels of "Life Energy" could make the wheel turn faster. Internal electronics measure the speed of rotation, and the state of the art flashing, colored LED display lights up your score, from 0 to 400 (the "average" range is near 100).

The first challenge with the Egely Wheel is to isolate it from anything in the environment that might affect it. The wheel is very sensitive so it moves a little on its own just sitting there. You also need to pay attention to air currents in the room, since even breathing on the wheel will make it spin wildly. I did find that I was eventually able to get it to spin fairly quickly, and this is key - it would only spin that way when I held my mind a particular way. Not my hands or my breath, but my mind. I found that particular detail rather intriguing.

Of course, the skeptic in me is now trying to work out what exactly is making the wheel move. I read some Chinese studies years ago suggesting that an important component of medical Qigong is the emission of infrasonic waves from the hands that impart physical energy to the patient in a particular way, and that more experienced Qigong masters seemed to be able to emit much stronger waves. If this research is accurate such waves would certainly be strong enough to move the extremely sensitive wheel. We also set up the EMF detector alongside the wheel for a bit to see if there was any correlation between the two, and were unable to find any.

The Egely Wheel is a rather expensive device for just playing around with, but since I now know someone who has one of these I'm going to see about integrating it into an evocation ritual to see if the wheel spins in the presence of a spirit. As always, I'll keep you all up to date on my findings. Has anyone else ever worked with one of these devices? I would be interested in hearing any accounts that readers are willing to share.

Priest Fight

2011-12-29T11:10:00.002-06:00

Every year between December 25th and the Orthodox celebration of Christmas in the first week of January priests clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, believed to have built on the site of Jesus' birth. This year, though, peace and understanding appear to be in short supply, as Palestinian police were forced to storm the church in order to break up a fight between Greek and Armenian Orthodox priests who had been working on cleaning the church.

Several dozen Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests were cleaning the interior of the church Wednesday morning when, according to witnesses, two of them began fighting. The fight quickly escalated, and soon, 50 to 60 priests were exchanging blows with broomsticks.

Bethlehem police were sent in to quell the fighting, Palestinian police Maj. Ahed Hasayen said. "This is an internal problem related to the Nativity church only. The Palestinian police had to interfere to stop the clashes as soon as possible to avoid devastating consequences," he said.

According to tour guide Ghassen Tos, the fight, while intense, was short in duration. “This did not last for long as soon as the Palestinian police interfered and succeeded to halt the clashes immediately,” he said. There were no reports of any serious injuries.

It's unclear from the report what the priests were fighting about. Cleaning house is one of those activities, though, that has a lot of potential for bringing out anger. This is not the first such fight, either - in 2007 priests from the same denominations were involved in a similar altercation. Maybe these two groups should take turns at the necessary cleaning tasks instead of trying to work together in the future.

Happy Easter, Everybody!

2011-12-28T10:28:00.004-06:00

This is the time of year when we celebrate the most important holiday on the Christian calendar, the occasion of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Oh, wait...

As it turns out Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci recently made this same error in his holiday message to the Vatican, confusing Christmas and Easter. The mistake was quickly corrected on the Prime Minister's web site, but my guess is that the Vatican was not amused.

In his festive statement, which was distributed by his office, he said that Easter is the most important holiday in the Catholic world. He went on to congratulate the official Vatican and all Catholics on the occasion of the resurrection of Christ, rather than his birth.

The prime minister went on to say that he hoped the Easter festivities would bring the Kosovan Catholics 'more warmth, hope and success' as well as 'progress in society, harmony and peace'. When officials in the prime minister's office noticed the error a second statement appeared on Thaci's official website, offering glad tidings over the festive period.

One thing I will say is that Thaci is a Muslim like the majority of Kosovars, and for anyone who doesn't celebrate Christian holidays this is an easy mistake to make. While Easter is officially the most important holiday on the Christian calendar, celebrations for Christmas around the world tend to be much more elaborate. This disparity has a lot to do with the push by American department stores in the 1920's to massively increase the significance of gift-giving so as to boost their sales. Finding a commercial tie-in for Easter has proven a lot more difficult - I mean, how many eggs can one person really buy?

Korean Weather Mourns Kim Jong-il

2011-12-27T15:00:00.006-06:00

According to news dispatches from the world's only necrocracy, North Korea, the death of the nation's supreme leader Kim Jong-Il was mourned not only by his people, but by weather systems across the country. The weather events that reportedly were caused by his passing a week and a half ago included cracking ice, a snowstorm, and an "illustrious sunrise."

The state-controlled "news agency" claims that ice ruptured with an "unprecedented loud crack" at Chon Lake on Mount Paektu on Saturday morning. Mount Paektu was the site of a military camp used by Kim Jong-il's father. It is also where the country claims Jong-il was born. (However, historians maintain Jong-il was actually born in Siberia in 1942, where his father was in hiding away from Japanese troops.)

And the so-called miracles apparently aren't limited to cracking ice. The KCNA reports that a huge snowstorm followed the ice capade, which itself immediately was followed by an illustrious sunrise which lit up the words carved into the mountainside, "Mt Paektu, holy mountain of revolution. Kim Jong il."

North Korea's unique political system is a synthesis of Stalinism and Confucian ancestor-worship. When Kim Jong-il's father Kim Il-sung passed away the elder Kim was designated as the nation's "Eternal President." Kim Jong-il, meanwhile, assumed the title of "Supreme Leader." Whether the younger Kim will retain this title in death as "Eternal Supreme Leader" remains unclear, but whatever the case, the weather in North Korea appears to be none too happy about the whole affair.

Georgia Mayan Ruins a Hoax

2011-12-23T10:01:00.006-06:00

Yesterday Raw Story and a number of other web sites passed along a report that a ruined Mayan city had been discovered in northern Georgia. This story made its way across the Internet, spread in part by how implausible it seemed. The Mayans, whose civilization covered the Yucatan peninsula and other portions of Mexico and Central America, were not thought to have settled anywhere in the continental United States. So either this was an incredible, groundbreaking archaeological discovery or an outright fraud. Sadly for those of us who would like to be able to visit a Mayan site that's closer than Mexico, it proved to be the latter.

According to the report, picked up from a fly-by-night Web pub called the Examiner, a small group of archeologists led by University of Georgia scholar Mark Williams discovered the 1,100-year-old city “on the southeast side of Brasstown Bald in the Nacoochee Valley.” Only, the report “is not true,” according to Williams, reached by email. “I have been driven crazy by this.”

The original story was written by one Richard Thornton — who claims that “like most Georgia and South Carolina Creeks, I carry a trace of Maya DNA,” and that his ancestors came to North America fleeing “volcanic eruptions, wars, and drought” — and it has certainly caught fire across the Twitter/blogosphere thanks to the general obsession with the 2012 Mayan prophecies. (Even the venerable Washington Post interrupted its regularly-scheduled news rapportage to alert readers that “a second brick found at a Mayan ruin also contained the Dec. 21, 2012, date.”)

So just like the 2012 nonsense, this "discovery" turned out to be entirely made up. The archaeologist who supposedly led the team who found ruins at the site was never even there and various other "facts" included in the report are similarly invented. As I've mentioned before, what clinched it for me on the 2012 hysteria is that the Mayans didn't "disappear" at all. They still live in the Yucatan and Central America and many of them practice their traditional religious beliefs. Whenever they get asked about their calendar and the supposed end of the world by New Agers, the answer is always the same - the doomsday scenario has nothing to do with the Mayan culture or religion. If the real Mayans don't even believe it, why should anyone else?

UPDATE: While it's possible that there are ancient Native American ruins at the Brasstown Bald site, they almost certainly are not Mayan. The Mississippians are known to have constructed settlements in northern Georgia, and while they built cities somewhat similar to those found in Mexico and Central America there is no known historical connection between their culture and that of the Mayans.

Anti-Witchcraft Squad Proves Deadly Again

2011-12-22T13:53:00.005-06:00

Back in September I covered the story of a Sudanese man who was executed in Saudi Arabia after being convicted of practicing sorcery. The man's arrest and conviction were due to the efforts of Saudi Arabia's "anti-witchcraft squad" known as the Mutawa'een. Now this oppressive organization has proved deadly once more, with the execution earlier this month of a woman arrested in 2009 on similar charges.

The London-based newspaper, al-Hayat, quoted a member of the religious police as saying that she was in her 60s and had tricked people into giving her money, claiming that she could cure their illnesses. Our correspondent said she was arrested in April 2009.

But the human rights group Amnesty International, which has campaigned for Saudis previously sentenced to death on sorcery charges, said it had never heard of her case until now, he adds.

A Sudanese man was executed in September on similar charges, despite calls led by Amnesty for his release. In 2007, an Egyptian national was beheaded for allegedly casting spells to try to separate a married couple.

What continues to strike me as both tragic and ridiculous about cases like these is that even if these executed individuals were frauds, elevating their actions to capital offenses is practically the definition of "cruel and unusual punishment" that the Founding Fathers sought to ban in the United States Bill of Rights all the way back in 1789. Despite worldwide outrage from organizations like Amnesty International the Saudi anti-witchcraft squad shows no signs of easing up their investigations, which is bad news for anyone seeking to practice esoteric spirituality within their jurisdiction.

When Jesus Tanned?

2011-12-21T17:21:00.007-06:00

New research performed in Italy suggests that the discolorations on the Shroud of Turin could have been produced by ultraviolet light. By exposing pieces of linen to bursts of light in the ultraviolet spectrum, researchers have been able to replicate many of the same characteristics observed in the fibers of the mysterious Shroud.

Italian researchers at the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development say they believe the image was created by an ultraviolet "flash of light." However, if that theory is true, it remains a mystery as to exactly how that technology could have been implemented at the time of the Shroud's creation. While the technology is readily available in present day, it was far beyond the means of anyone around pre-20th Century.

The Turin Shroud is said to be the burial cloth of Jesus, but has long been believed to be a fake, created during medieval times. It is currently kept in a climate-controlled case in Turin cathedral. Scientists at the Italian agency have reportedly spent years attempting to recreate the Shroud's imagery. 'The results show a short and intense burst of UV directional radiation can colour a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin,' the scientists said.

One of the reasons I've always been skeptical of the idea that the Shroud of Turin was in fact the burial cloth of Jesus is a problem of geometry. Let's say that you take a mannekin and lay it down on a slab, then cover the face with some sort of paint. If you then lay a cloth over the body to take an impression the image you get looks nothing like what's found on the Shroud. Because the cloth falls around the head when it covers the mannekin's face the image made by the paint will come out much wider than the original. As you can see from the image above, however, the face on the Shroud shows no signs of this sort of distortion.

While the ultraviolet light idea is intriguing, this geometric problem would mean that not only would Jesus have to have emitted ultraviolet light, but prior to that happening the cloth would have to have been lifted some distance from the body so that the resulting image would turn out like that from a camera. I heard an interesting theory years ago that the Shroud may have been an early attempt to produce a photograph using medieval technology. If a cloth is treated with chemicals and exposed to sunlight passing through a lens or even a small aperture for a long enough period of time the ultraviolet rays will discolor portions of the cloth and create a photograph-like image. It seems to me that these new ultraviolet findings could provide evidence that some similar method was indeed involved.

UPDATE: Morgan has more, offering up his own hypothesis that the Shroud is in fact the burial shroud of Frater RC, whose alleged time of death lines up with the carbon dating performed in 1988. Maybe he's onto something there.

One More Stonehenge Mystery Solved

2011-12-20T14:36:00.002-06:00

Stonehenge, England's most famous megalithic structure, has inspired occultists and paranormal investigators for centuries. Archaeologists working at the site have finally solved one of the monument's enduring puzzles - where the rocks used by the ancient builders originally came from. This site has finally been identified as Craig Rhos-y-felin in South Wales, more than a hundred miles from the Stonehenge site.

Over the past nine months, the researchers compared mineral content and textural relationships of the rhyolite debitage stones found at Stonehenge and were finally able to pinpoint the location to within several meters of their source. Ninety-nine percent of the samples could be matched to the rocks found at Craig Rhos-y-felin, which differ from all others found in south Wales.

Further research should help the researchers eventually understand how the rocks made the long journey to Stonehenge sometime between 3000 and 1600 BC. "Many have asked the question over the years, how the stones got from Pembrokeshire to Stonehenge," said Dr. Richard Bevins, National Museum Wales. "Thanks to geological research, we now have a specific source for the rhyolite stones from which to work and an opportunity for archaeologists to answer the question that has been widely debated."

A hundred miles is a long way to move such immense rocks, but from what I've seen a number of ideas have been proposed that would have been plausible using the technology of the time. All of them would have involved an enormous amount of time and effort on the part of the builders, but if we are to assume that Stonehenge was a very important if not central religious site expending such effort upon it would not necessarily be unexpected. A site like Stonehenge is one more reminder that even though the ancients had access to less technology than we have today, they were just as intelligent and inventive as modern people in terms of working with what they had.

Shop Augoeides for the Holidays!

2011-12-19T17:24:00.004-06:00

As all of you probably noticed awhile back, I've completely given up on the Google ads. Frankly, I'm continually amazed that banner advertising is something companies are willing to pay for. I've never purchased anything off a banner ad myself and don't know anyone else who has either. On top of that, the ads that used to run across the top of my blog page attracted so few clicks that they were essentially worthless and at the same time mildly annoying. So now I've come up with a new way to generate a small amount of income for this site without costing my readers anything in terms of time or money. I originally set up an Amazon Associates store to capture commissions off my books, but quickly realized that it would work for any other product Amazon carries as well. Call it the Augoeides Store.

So here's the deal. If you still have holiday gifts to buy and are planning on ordering them from Amazon anyway, you can support this website at the same time. Clicking on my store link above will take you to the Amazon home page, just as if you had typed amazon.com into your browser. The difference is that every purchase you make will send a small commission my way. You can also just click on the link and bookmark it for later use. Ordering through my store instead of the Amazon homepage costs you nothing, as Amazon would otherwise just keep those commissions while charging you the same price. So if you're already planning on making some Amazon purchases and don't have your own associates store, please consider taking advantage of mine and helping to support my writing.

Thanks much, and happy holiday shopping!

Enochian Synchronicities

2011-12-16T13:10:00.004-06:00

Back in the late 1990's there was something of a shift in the approach taken to Enochian magick. Up until that time most practitioners had pretty much accepted the Golden Dawn approach as published by Israel Regardie and articulated by Gerald Schueler, who had at that time written several introductory books on the system. One of the big points of contention when working with the Golden Dawn system was the elaborate pronunciation system believed to have been developed by Wynn Wescott. This pronunciation system linked the Angelic language to Hebrew by inserting Hebrew vowel sounds into difficult-to-pronounce clusters of consonants. In the late 1990's, though, a number of authors came to the conclusion that the best pronunciation system was that recorded by John Dee himself during his scrying sessions with Edward Kelley. Today Dee's pronunciation is used by most of the practitioners I know, which is quite different from the situation a decade or so ago. There is still some disagreement regarding how to read Dee's notations for particular words, but the insertion of Hebrew vowels is for the most part a complete non-starter.

Over the past few years it seems like another shift is on its way. The rise in popularity of grimoire magick has renewed interest in studying Enochian magick as a grimoire-based or at least grimoire-influenced style of magick. The Golden Dawn system relied on an elaborate series of Qabalistic associations to link Enochian into the order's version of the Tree of Life, and in fact there are still quite a few magicians who have found that dialect of the system useful. On the other hand, it seems like these days more and more people are working "old school" and many of the recent books on the system reflect this approach. These include Aaron Leitch's The Angelical Language Volume I and Volume II, Stephen Skinner's Practical Angel Magic of John Dee's Enochian Tables, and of course my own Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy, which includes modern ritual forms but still preserves the original structure of the system for those who would rather work with it that way. In addition, one of the first books published based on the original approach, Geoffrey James' The Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee is still in print. It was first published in 1983, so it seems to have predated the recent trend by almost thirty years.

I mention this more grimoire-based approach in reference to two recent posts by Frater AIT, a Golden Dawn initiate, who has started working with a more stripped down originalist approach to Enochian and is publishing his results. You can find those posts here and here, and while his results are somewhat preliminary they are nonetheless quite interesting. If we really are seeing another shift in Enochian studies back toward the original source material that strikes me as a pretty cool thing. Back when I first started working with the system I adored James' book (back then, the Heptangle edition, which I still use from time to time) and felt a lot more lukewarm about Schueler and even Aleister Crowley's Liber Chanokh, which essentially summarizes the Golden Dawn approach. It's very clear to me that while Qabalistic associations can be found within the Enochian system, it's essentially a more complex and sophisticated version of grimoire magick rather than a fundamentally Tree-of-Life-based cipher with questionable Egyptian attributions. That's not to say anyone who's getting good results with Golden Dawn methods should nonetheless stop working that way - far from it! It's more to suggest that anyone who has found the Golden Dawn methods lacking like I did should take a look at the grimoire approach and see if it works better for them.

So does all this really constitute a new trend? I certainly hope so, and not just because I want to sell a lot of books. Unlike any of the other grimoire systems that have survived, with Enochian we have transcripts of the original sessions that led to its creation. In effect, this provides ritual hackers like myself with the "source code" to delve much more deeply into the system and perhaps even shed more light on the inner workings of the entire grimoire magick approach to ritual work. As I see it, the people who are out there conducting similar experiments to mine the better, especially if like Frater AIT they are willing to share some of their results with the community at large.

Wingnuts Outraged Normal Muslims Exist

2011-12-15T10:53:00.006-06:00

I'm usually not a big fan of using the term "wingnut" to describe people who hold extremely conservative political beliefs. I'm not a conservative myself, but I can nonetheless see that all too often the term is used as a smear that communicates little real information besides vehement disagreement with its target. However, the group behind this latest controversy really worked hard to earn the name. It's not just that they're very conservative, but also that they're at the same time unbelievably stupid, ignorant, or both.

So here's the story. The Learning Channel recently began running a series called "All-American Muslim" about Muslim families living in the United States. The biggest takeaway from the series is that just like American Christians, American Muslims are actually pretty normal. This simple fact completely incensed a conservative group called the Florida Family Association, which went on to successfully lobby many companies including the Lowe's Hardware chain into pulling their ads from the show. The basis of the complaint appears to be that since Muslims are terrorists, none of the people on the show are real Muslims. The stupid, it burns.

Lowe's pulled the advertising after groups including the Florida Family Association complained to the company. In its letter, the family group wrote that the show was not portraying Muslim Americans realistically. The letter also stated: "Clearly this program is attempting to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad and to influence them to believe that being concerned about the jihad threat would somehow victimize these nice people in this show."

The idea that all Muslims are inherently terrorists, which is what this letter clearly implies, is so dumb that it barely merits a response. However, the success of the Florida Family Association's campaign unfortunately demands one. Nobody is denying that Muslim terrorists exist, but there is a huge difference between liberal American Muslims and followers of the Taliban or Al Qaida. Furthermore, as with most religions Muslim extremists represent a small but admittedly determined minority. I might as well declare that all Christians share the beliefs of Hutaree, which would be equally ridiculous.

This Guy Has to be a Magician

2011-12-09T13:25:00.006-06:00

Remember my attempts back in June to identify the precise nature of the dead weasel spell unleashed in Hoquiam, Washington over the summer? In the comments Rob did come up with some possible ideas, but at the time nobody really knew whether this was some sort of magical operation or just a very strange one. However, more recent evidence suggests that the weasel-unleasher is a magician after all. He was just acquitted of wrongdoing in connection with the weasel assault.

A jury acquitted a Hoquiam man who was accused of breaking into a home and throwing a dead mink at another man during a confrontation that made weasel headlines across the country.

Defense lawyer Chris Crew said Monday the Grays Harbor County jury found 33-year-old Jobie J. Watkins of Hoquiam not guilty of burglary.

Crew said witnesses provided inconsistent accounts and the "prosecution failed to prove a link to the mink."

It's not a mink, it's a martin, dammit! And now I punch the author of this article. What I find incredible is that a jury could possibly think that anyone would just make the story up. It's way too weird, which suggested it being a spell in the first place. But a magician could probably pull it off using a really powerful spell for obtaining legal victories. If you have access to decent collection of grimoires, you can find a lot of those all across the Western Esoteric Tradition.

I've never seen a necromantic version, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist. I wonder what sort of dead animal you would use. Liber 777 lists elephant and spider for Libra, which rules legal proceedings. The former is completely impractical unless you could work with a piece of ivory rather than an entire body, but the latter is quite easy to obtain almost anywhere. On the other hand, neither mink, martin, nor weasel appear anywhere in the 777 animals column, so Watkins is probably using a totally different set of attributions.

Did Tiger Woods Finally Get That Sorcerer?

2011-12-08T11:26:00.004-06:00

Golfer Tiger Woods first showed up on my spiritual technology radar back in 2009, when I came across the bizarre announcement that the "First Church of Tiger Woods" was disbanding in the wake of his personal scandals. I commented at the time that perhaps Tiger's "worshippers" were giving him a paranormal advantage at golf, citing a study that found other elite golfers inexplicably did not perform as well as usual when playing against him. From a statistical standpoint, this is precisely the sort of effect a spell would be likely to have, and I commented that with the spell broken we would have to see how well the "greatest golfer in the world" could play without it. I was at least partially joking at the time, but given the last two years my words seem oddly prescient. Tiger failed to win a single tournament during that time, falling from being the world's top rated golfer to a much more pedestrian #52. This week, though, he finally pulled off a win at the Chevron World Challenge.

The former world No. 1 won the Chevron World Challenge on Sunday at sun-drenched Sherwood Country Club, his first victory in 749 days. Woods, who vaults from No. 52 to No. 21 in the world rankings with the win, knocked in birdie putts of 15 and 6 feet on the final two holes to defeat Zach Johnson by one shot. When the last putt disappeared, Woods said he can't remember what he was thinking — "I think I was just screaming something," he said — and he emphatically punched the air and broke out into a huge smile.

It was his fifth victory in the tournament that benefits his foundation, his first since 2007, and 83rd win worldwide. He finished with a 3-under-par 69 to wind up at 10-under 278. Johnson came home with a 71. Paul Casey finished solo third at 5 under.

Since the spring following the disbanding of his "church" I've been recommending that Tiger hire himself a professional sorcerer to get his paranormal advantage back. Does this recent win finally mean that he might have taken my advice, or come to the same realization on his own? The Chevron World Challenge is not a major tournament, but it did include some very good players, so it seems to me that makes for a solid "maybe." It remains to be seen how well he does at larger tournaments now that his losing streak is officially broken. If he starts racking up the wins like he did years ago, I'll be pretty confident that he's found a way to get the magick back - literally.

Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy Reviewed

2011-12-07T12:57:00.005-06:00

Morgan has a post up today about coming across four transparently phony Amazon reviews for a book that just came out. Whether or not this is a bot or somebody switching accounts is hard to say without looking at the book in question which is not named, but either way it's a pretty obvious attempt to game the Amazon review system. Here's a tip to any would-be bot programmers or review spoofers - it's really easy to check your other reviews, and that's hard to fake. If every review of a particular book is posted on the same day, and each of those four reviewers has only ever reviewed the exact same two items anyone with half a brain is going to be able to figure out that something is up with a couple of well-placed clicks and a modicum of critical thinking skills.

Let me also reassure you all that the book in question is not my new Enochian book, Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy. So far it's garnered two reviews, one from Michael Cecchetelli at The Lion's Den and another on Amazon from Christopher Feldman, better known online as Enochian magician Christeos Pir. I've summarized those two positive reviews here at my author website, with links to the originals. So far the book has been well-received, by real magicians rather than bots or clones, and while the temptation is always there to post a bunch of glowing phonies I would rather that my readers get the real scoop from actual people. If you're interested in grimoire magick, Enochian magick, or both and haven't done so already, click here to check out Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy. Real practitioners agree with me that you will not be disappointed!

Isn't That Convenient?

2011-12-06T11:27:00.004-06:00

Hardly anyone likes paying taxes. That basic truism has fueled much conservative sentiment here in the United States for decades, and our country is hardly an exception. Recently the African nation of Swaziland ruled that pastors and religious organizations will not be exempt from taxation. This prompted religious leader Bheki Thwala to post a convenient reason on Facebook for pastors to refuse paying taxes - because the money would be used for witchcraft rituals!

In a controversial post on social network site Facebook, Thwala posted "Why should we be taxed, when the money is to be used for witchcraft in the name of culture?"

At the time of going to press yesterday afternoon, Thwala already had 72 comments.

Interviewed after his church service yesterday, the leader of the Sword and Spirit Ministries alleged that it was a known fact that witches were hired to perform certain rituals at cultural events which, however, he did not specify.

"All I am saying is I do not want my money to pay witches in the name of culture," said Thwala.

He alleged that when the country was busy with certain traditional ceremonies, tinyanga were then fetched and were paid to perform certain rituals.

On Facebook Thwala added that he would continue to pay tax, as long as he was not working against what he existed for. "Culture and witchcraft are two different things," he said.

Thwala is right that culture and witchcraft are two different things, and I would have to know more about the ceremonies in question before I could decide whether or not they constitute magical operations. My best guess, though, is that they do not, since most celebratory rituals are not performed in order to produce any sort of change in accordance with a statement of intent. For a ritual to be considered magick such a goal is essential, though the change desired may involve personal consciousness, material circumstances, or both.

What strikes me as so disingenuous about this complaint is that surely the entire budget of Swaziland does not go to pay for traditional ritual celebrations! If that's in fact the case the country has far more serious budget problems than pastors paying these new taxes is going to fix. It seems to me more like criticism of taxes here in the United States based on the fact that some of the money collected goes to the National Endowment for the Arts, which does fund some works that are intentionally offensive in nature. The thing is, compared to the entire federal budget the money that funds the NEA is tiny, a drop in a very large bucket, and such complaints seem like pretty transparent attempts to justify simply not wanting to pay anything.

Scientific Demonstration of Contagion Links

2011-12-05T09:00:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago some discussion arose in the comments section of my Hexing on Facebook post surrounding the different kinds of magical links. There are two basic kinds of magical links, generally referred to as Contagion and Similarity. A contagion link is formed between two things that have directly interacted with each other and a similarity link is formed between two things that resemble each other or share a particular property. For some time now my working hypothesis for contagion links is that they are mediated by the known scientific principle of quantum entanglement.

One of the remaining questions surrounding this idea was whether entanglement can be scaled up to macroscopic objects or if the effect is limited to subatomic particles. If the latter were found to be true, that would essentially disprove the entanglement hypothesis, since the main objects magicians use links to affect are macroscopic in nature. However, according to this recent experiment entanglement can be scaled up, so the hypothesis remains intact. Physicists at the University of Oxford have apparently succeeded in entangling two macroscopic-scale diamonds at room temperature.

"I think it's an important step into a new regime of thinking about quantum phenomena," physicist Ian Walmsley of England's University of Oxford said."That is, in this regime of the bigger world, room temperatures, ambient conditions. Although the phenomenon was expected to exist, actually being able to observe it in such a system we think is quite exciting."

Another study recently used quantum entanglement to teleport bits of light from one place to another. And other researchers have succeeded in entangling macroscopic objects before, but they have generally been under special circumstances, prepared in special ways, and cooled to cryogenic temperatures. In the new achievement, the diamonds were large and not prepared in any special way, the researchers said.

"It's big enough you can see it," Walmsley told LiveScience of the diamonds."They're sitting on the table, out in plain view. The laboratory isn't particularly cold or particularly hot, it's just your everyday room."

It's worth noting that since diamonds essentially consist of a single gigantic carbon molecule they're among the easiest objects to test for this phenomenon. But there's no reason to think that the effect is limited to such objects, especially given the long tradition in the magical arts of influencing people and things this way.

The experimental procedure is interesting enough to quote here as well.

Walmsley, along with a team of physicists led by Oxford graduate student Ka Chung Lee, accomplished this feat by entangling the vibration of two diamond crystals. To do so, the researchers set up an apparatus to send a laser pulse at both diamonds simultaneously. Sometimes, the laser light changed color, to a lower frequency, after hitting the diamonds. That told the scientists it had lost a bit of energy.

Because energy must be conserved in closed systems (where there's no input of outside energy), the researchers knew that the "lost" energy had been used in some way. In fact, the energy had been converted into vibrational motion for one of the diamonds (albeit motion that is too small to observe visually). However, the scientists had no way of knowing which diamond was vibrating.

Then, the researchers sent a second pulse of laser light through the now-vibrating system. This time, if the light emerged with a color of higher frequency, it meant it had gained the energy back by absorbing it from the diamond, stopping its vibration. The scientists had set up two separate detectors to measure the laser light — one for each diamond.

If the two diamonds weren't entangled, the researchers would expect each detector to register a changed laser beam about 50 percent of the time. It's similar to tossing a coin, where random chance would lead to heads about half the time and tails the other half the time on average. Instead, because the two diamonds were linked, they found that one detector measured the change every time, and the other detector never fired. The two diamonds, it seemed, were so connected they reacted as a single entity, rather than two individual objects.

In addition to giving us a clearer picture of the contagion aspect of magical links, this discovery has implications for everything from quantum computers to faster-than-light communication. Entanglement has been found to have a limited lifespan, but so far nothing has emerged to suggest that the effect is limited by distance. It remains to be seen if any such limitations emerge from future research.

A lot less research has been done on similarity links, mostly because the physical principles behind them are less obvious. My working hypothesis is still that they are mediated in some fashion by Rupert Sheldrake's proposed morphic resonance principle. Sheldrake's latest book on the subject was published in 2008 and I haven't read it yet, instead basing my hypothesis on his older works. The new one is on my reading list, and I'm hoping that it will suggest some new ways in which similarity can be tested scientifically. Still, it's nice to see this level of progress on contagion, since after all any technology that advances far enough is going to have to include magick and the inner workings of consciousness at some point.

Teen Exorcist Squad!

2011-12-02T10:25:00.007-06:00

I missed this story when it came out back in August, but it's just too good to pass up. Evangelist Bob Larson of Spiritual Freedom Churches International runs a school for exorcists, where students are taught to break curses and cast out demons. After discovering that his own 16-year-old daughter Brynne, pictured on the far right, was a gifted exorcist he went on to train four other teenage girls with similar talents, and claims them to be particularly effective at the art of overcoming demonic possession. So I suppose the teen exorcist squad is kind of like what Charlie's Angels would be if Charlie was a total douchebag.

The Vatican’s chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, has revealed that he alone has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession. So if the forces of darkness start getting the upper hand, who should you call? Evangelist Reverend Bob Larson of Spiritual Freedom Churches International - and his remarkable school for exorcists.

‘Think of it more of an exorcist franchise,’ Rev Larson tells MailOnline exclusively. ‘The Church just can’t keep up with demand. But I have 100 teams of trained exorcists working all over the world, and outbreaks of demonic possession are getting out of control. ‘Our phone lines are ringing constantly - we receive up to 1,000 individual requests monthly, and we travel to countries like Africa, Ukraine, England and even Australia.’

But while his teams include exorcists aged up to 70, one group of his protégées are causing waves in the religious community. They are teenage girls. Savannah Scherkenback, 19, and her sister Tess, 16, are Rev Larson’s latest graduates from his school for exorcists. ‘We have found that our female, teenage exorcists are particularly effective at curing the possessed,’ says Rev Larson, whose daughter Brynne is a supernaturally talented exorcist.

So why do I say douchebag, you ask? I've written on exorcism before and believe it to be a legitimate ritual practice, and there's no reason to think that these girls couldn't be genuinely good at it. The trouble is Larson himself.

Bob Larson's radio show used to run out here in Minnesota, and he's quite simply the worst kind of extreme Christian evangelist. During the 1980's he went out of his way to stoke the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic that ruined countless lives. He's a true believer in repeatedly-disproven nonsense like Illuminati-run covens of Satanists numbering in the millions. He rails against anything even marginally paranormal as demonic, fictional or not, and seems to believe that the only way Christians to be safe is to avoid any manifestation of popular culture. Any Christian who really tried to follow his teachings would wind up in a bunker, cowering with their Bibles and survival seeds.

It's not that Larson believes the world is going to hell. It's more like he believes it already has and he's the last line of defense against the encroaching forces of evil, a great big Luke Skywalker out there all alone on a heroic crusade against the dark side. Even if these girls are supremely talented one wonders how much of this poisonous worldview they have absorbed. Are they going around casting out demons of Dungeons & Dragons, like Larson used to do on his show, or evil forces evoked by the tales of Harry Potter, as mentioned in the article? Or are they taking precautions to make sure the forces they're exorcising are real demons? On the one hand, the article mentions that like the Vatican they require a psychological assessment before engaging in an exorcism to rule out mental illness. That's a very good thing. But then there's this:

In the last month Rev Larson and his team has rid a wife of an evil curse, after she was cursed by a Nigerian witchdoctor over the Internet that ‘dark demons would attack her in sleep’.

Umm, I think I've probably gotten five copies of similar spam e-mails over the last couple of years. So far, no demons, and believe me if I found myself in a battle with one my readers would be the first to know. I originally linked to an article about this new Nigerian 419 scam concept back in 2006. Here's a word of advice to Bob Larson - you might want to teach your exorcists that it's incredibly difficult to cast a curse or send demons when your magical link consists of "undisclosed recipients." Even if it could be done easily, in Africa magick is a profession and practitioners expect payment. With the millions of messages that spammers have to send out to get any significant response they would go broke long before they could pay anyone to cast all of those curses.

The Scientology Cruise That Never Ends

2011-12-01T10:58:00.004-06:00

The Church of Scientology's Sea Org has got to be one of the oddest ideas out there among new religious movements. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church, served in the US Navy and decided that his new religion needed a Navy of its own. The result was the Sea Org, an organization within the Church with military-inspired uniforms and some sort of ill-defined mission that requires its members to spend their time sailing the oceans on ships owned by the Church. The Sea Org has a reputation for strict discipline and cultish behavior, but the latest accusation against the organization made by a woman named Valeska Paris goes far beyond that. Paris claims that she was essentially kept as a prisoner on board the Scientology ship "Freewinds" for twelve years.

In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC News) Lateline program, Paris claims that Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige sent her to the ship when she was 18 in order to prevent her family from pulling her out of the organization.

"I was basically hauled in and told that my mum had attacked the church and that I needed to disconnect from her because she was suppressive," she said. "He decided the ship, and I found out two hours before my plane left, I was woken up in the morning and I was sent to the ship for 'two weeks.' "

Paris was born into a Scientology family, but her mother quit the group after her husband committed suicide, blaming Scientology for coercing him out of a self-made personal fortune of more than a million dollars.

Instead of the promised two week stay, Paris found herself unable to leave the ship without an official Scientology escort and was often forced into hard labor on the lower levels of the ship for stretches as long as two full days. "It's hot, it's extremely loud, it's smelly, it's not nice. I was sent down there at first for 48 hours straight on almost no sleep and I had to work by myself," she said.

With just about any other organization these charges would be hard to believe, but unfortunately Scientology has cultivated a reputation that at the very least makes them seem plausible. It's not just the Church's history of odd controlling actions and extravagant fees, but also the apparent mentality within the group that it is under attack and surrounded by enemies. The constant lawsuit threats the Church makes over trivial offenses don't help either, like years ago when it threatened to sue "the Internet" over the existence of Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology on the grounds that "Scientology" was trademarked. In response, the administrators of the offending newsgroup changed its name to alt.butthead.religion.sue.sue.sue. Yeah, Scientology came out of that one looking great - NOT! If Paris' account turns out to be true, it sounds like the organization's reputation will likely suffer a lot more.

Mental Illness and Human Sacrifice

2011-11-30T16:46:00.004-06:00

Normally these two terms are rarely mentioned in the same breath, but in the comments on yesterday's article RO posted a link to this story from Virginia, South Africa. Back in April, Chane van Heerden and Maartens van der Merwe lured a young man to a cemetery and killed him as a human sacrifice in some sort of occult ritual. They then dismembered the body and buried most of it, keeping the victim's eyes, ears, and facial skin. Where mental illness enters the picture is that Van der Merwe was diagnosed as schizophrenic as a teen and while Van Heerden was never officially identified as mentally ill, at her trial social worker Marilise Vergottini testified that the young woman's behavior had been odd throughout much of her life.

Vergottini said Van Heerden displayed strange behaviour, even as a young girl.

When her mother told her that dolls come alive at night, Van Heerden blindfolded her own dolls and bound them with shoe laces, said Vergottini.

Van Heerden's meeting with her co-accused Van der Merwe led to a disastrous partnership.

"They together [in a relationship] are a disaster. It created a platform for their behaviour," Vergottini said.

Van der Merwe was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 14.

Vergottini said when Van Heerden and Van der Merwe met, they discovered they both had fantasies that were not normal to the rest of the world.

The couple watched the television series Dexter, in which a serial killer is the hero, reading it as condonation for their own activities.

One of the old urban legends floating around the occult community here in America is that magicians who are careless or practice improperly run the risk of developing mental illness. I put up a post on this topic back in 2007 and the reason I say urban legend is that I've become more and more convinced over the years that it simply is not true.

Anyone who's studied psychology will tell you that mental illness is relatively common, with some form of it afflicting as much as 25% of the human population, so of course there are some magical practitioners who suffer from it. However, there's no real evidence that anyone can acquire such a condition by practicing magick, even if those practices are done incredibly poorly. As I note in the older article, usually the only real risk of poorly done magick is that it won't work. Fantasy and occult television shows, movies, and stories commonly include the trope of the minor magical mistake that produces catastophic results, but the only world in which you're likely to see that happen is a fictional one.

So what to make of Van Heerden and Van der Merwe? It seems pretty clear to me that both are mentally ill individuals and have probably been afflicted for most of their lives. Furthermore, the two are unusual in that only a small percentage of such people ever act out violently. The schizophrenic murderer is another fictional trope that in fact rarely happens in real life, but this case appears to be the exception that proves the rule. It seems that the two became dangerous when they got together because their respective illnesses fed off each other to produce a deadly outcome. My best guess is that their occult interests were a symptom of those illnesses rather than a causal factor, just like their fascination with the serial killer drama Dexter.

I'm glad to see that these two were convicted despite their respective mental illnesses simply because it means that they will never again get the chance to murder anyeone on the basis of their delusions. But the evidence of the case strongly suggests that those delusions were there long before either of them studied occultism or performed a ritual.

Moral Panic, Anyone?

2011-11-29T11:08:00.006-06:00

The case of the West Memphis Three may have happened nineteen years ago, but as this latest bizarre story shows the the media is still going completely crazy over any crime that appears to involve occultism. According to initial reports, two young women got together with a man they met over the Internet, then tortured and stabbed him to death in a Satanic sexual ritual. No, wait, actually there was no murder, the supposed "ritual" involved no occult or Satanic components, the stabbing was apparently consensual cutting that got out of hand, and the man is not pressing charges. Wow. That went from "batshit insane" to "poorly executed BDSM scene without safewords" in about two seconds. But of course the news media outlets prefer the former fabricated account.

While at the apartment building, police were approached by Rebecca Chandler, 22, who stated, “I think you are here looking for me.” Chandler told cops that she had engaged in sexual relations with the Arizona man “and that the cutting was consensual but that it got quickly out of hand.”

Chandler claimed that her roommate--whom she identified only as “Scarlett”--was “the one who did the majority of the cutting” during the incident. Chandler, police reported, “also made reference to ‘Scarlett’ possibly being involved in satanic or occult activities.”

Chandler was placed in custody at the scene. During a subsequent search of the apartment, investigators seized copies of "The Necromantic Ritual Book” and "The Werewolf’s Guide to Life,” a humor book. The former book promises to enable a reader to “share consiousness with the Angel of Death.” Paperwork seized from the home was described by police as the “7 Pentacles” of planets. Additionally, a black folder was described as an “Intro to Sigilborne Spirtits,” an apparent reference to “The Sigil-Born,” metaphysical entities that are “occultic practitioners” of necromancy, the purported ability to contact the dead.

As an aside, in the Thoth Tarot the Seven of Disks is titled "Failure," which in this case seems about right.

It's clear to me that Chandler's roommate is no occultist. For those of you who were practicing magick in your twenties, think about it - how many occult books did you own? If it was less than a dozen I would be surprised, since by the time I was in my mid-twenties I probably owned hundreds. In my experience this holds true even for many practitioners who aren't well-off, since there are plenty of places you can find heavily discounted books on magick. But what did the police find when they searched the apartment? One Leilah Wendell book on necromancy, a humor book about werewolves, a folder with some spirit sigils, and paperwork referencing the aforementioned "Failure" Tarot trump. That's it. This young woman may have had an interest in necromancy, but from these limited materials "an interest" looks to be as far as it went.

Salon also has an article up by the auther of the aforementioned werewolf book discussing his feelings about being drawn into this case. I read it as a cautionary tale, because I know that if I sell enough of my own books on magick the day is going to come when somebody involved in a crime will own a copy and police will seize it as evidence. Then I'm sure the media will do the same thing as they did here and try to link my books on "evil Enochian magick" with devil worship or who knows what else, completely ignoring that Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy is about conjuring angels and the prayers of John Dee included as part of that process would not sound even remotely out of place at a Christian revival.

When I posted on the release of the West Memphis Three back in August I wrapped up that article by expressing my hope that it would represent the last gasp of the "Satanic panic" of the early 1990's. From the reaction to this case, though, I now realize that was a vain hope on my part. Sensationalism sells, so the media is going to keep blowing this stuff out of proportion as long as they can get away with it. I'm glad to see that the real facts surrounding this case came out fairly quickly, but at the same time I'm sure that the original made-up story is going to be set in a lot of peoples' minds for some time to come. It's not the sort of thing one easily forgets.

Celebrities Prove Illuminati Are Real

2011-11-28T12:12:00.007-06:00

Remember my exchange with the Illuminati? I have yet to get any of my friends to admit to writing the mysterious letter that showed up on my front door after that post, but let's just say I have strong suspicions and we'll leave it at that. The whole concept of a real Illuminati as envisioned by conspiracy theorists is fundamentally ridiculous, and even sillier is the notion that various celebrities are secretly doing their bidding by embedding subliminal messages in their music. Back when theories about secret messages in music were first making the rounds, psychologists tested whether it was feasible to transmit information that way and concluded it doesn't work at all. You would think that if the Illuminati were so wise and powerful they would choose a functional method of brainwashing. At any rate, last week Slate put up an article about these pop-music conspiracy theories which makes for some entertaining reading.

Welcome to the world of pop-music trutherism, a bustling, grassroots exposé industry in which Eminem is one of many performers called out by anonymous instigators for Illuminist sympathies. The best conspiracy theories go all the way to the top, and this one goes all the way to the top of the charts. Jay-Z? An “Illuminati puppet.” Lady Gaga? An “Illuminati whore.” Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Beyoncé, Rihanna—Illuminati agents all. (Michael Jackson and 2Pac, it turns out, were victims of Illuminati-ordered assassination.) The Illuminati investigation unfolds sloppily but vigorously across countless sites, from YouTube to Twitter to fan discussion boards to dedicated shops like VigilantCitizen.com. The trained eye can spot Illuminati sartorial choices, like goat-themed jewelry and T-shirts, worn in ostensible tribute to Baphomet, a horned pagan deity who intrigued Aleister Crowley. There is Illuminati semaphore, such as framing one’s eye with the palms tipped together in a pyramid shape or otherwise isolating an eye to evoke the “all-seeing eye” on the back of a dollar bill, an image with Masonic origins. There are Illuminati lyrics, like Eminem’s mention of a “New World Order” on “Lose Yourself” or the references he and Jay-Z have made, separately, to a mysterious, powerful figure they call the “Rain Man” (the theorists are apparently unfamiliar with Dustin Hoffman’s IMDb page).

Don't get me wrong, I know there's a real global elite controlling much of the world's economy - Forbes Magazine publishes a list of the top 400 American members every year. It's also conceivable that a significant percentage of them have used magick to help build up their wealth, since becoming that rich without inheriting it requires incredible luck and that's one of the things magick is especially good at. But why would they bother with something as pointless as engineering pop-music messages when they can spend their money lobbying against financial regulation and get a lot more bang for their buck? I highly doubt that they care much about the content of popular music as long as it sells, and the idea of a unified conspiracy is belied by the fact that many of the super-rich can't stand each other and often work at cross purposes.

More Mullet Cult Arrests

2011-11-25T09:00:00.001-06:00

The Amish Beard Wars saga continues! On Wednesday, the FBI and Ohio police launched a raid against Sam Mullet's Bergholz Clan compound, arresting seven members of the sect including Mullet himself and three of his sons. The seven face federal hate crime charges in connection with hair and beard-cutting attacks on other Amish women and men, allegedly ordered by Mullet and carried out by members of his group.

Seven men were in custody and expected to be arraigned Wednesday. They include Mullet and sons Johnny, Lester and Daniel, Tobin said.

All of the men were sleeping when the FBI and local police showed up at their homes before dawn Wednesday, Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said. Three men initially refused to come out of their rooms, but all seven were arrested without incident, he said.

Authorities were planning to hold a news conference Wednesday afternoon to explain why they charged the men with hate crimes, Tobin said.

The attacks came amid long-simmering tension between Mullet's group, which he established in 1995, and Amish bishops. Arlene Miller, the wife of one victim, said several bishops hadn't condoned Mullet's decision to excommunicate several members who previously left his community, saying there was no spiritual justification for his action.

I'll say it one more time. The guy's name is Mullet, and his followers go around cutting hair. As Morgan noted on the original thread, you really can't make this stuff up. I'll add that hate crime laws draw a lot of criticism, but this is precisely the sort of situation for which they exist. In a previous interview, Mullet implied that from a legal standpoint cutting hair was no big deal, when as an Amish bishop he knew full well how important hair and beards are to members of his faith. Hate crime statutes allow these sorts of religious attacks to be prosecuted based on their significance to the victims, not just on how serious they might seem to members of society at large with different beliefs.

Ghost Sex

2011-11-24T09:00:00.002-06:00

Of all the things I'm thankful for this holiday season, one of them has to be the recent discovery that in the afterlife ghosts can still get it on. At least, that is, according to Diana Carlisle, an Ohio woman who claims that her grand-daughter took a photograph of two spirits frolicking in her living room. The photograph in question is shown above with the circle around the supposed ghosts added by Metro, and you can click to enlarge it.

'It looked like... like ghosts having sex,' she told the Fox affiliate TV channel in Cleveland. 'You can see the lady's high-heeled shoes.'

Ms Carlisle claims the phantoms have been having a scream of a time for a while but she was unable to document it until her four-year-old grand-daughter took this picture. The snap supposedly shows the outline of a shoulder and arm, which are above a white ghostly figure.

If true, these spooky shenanigans will be a landmark in the study of paranormal activity, with experts previously unaware that spirit sex was possible. Investigator David Jones told the Huffington Post it was highly unlikely that ghosts were engaged in intercourse, but did admit he was curious about the house.

One of the most intriguing things about this and other ghost photographs is that they rarely look much like what eyewitnesses report seeing. I have to admit, my first thought when examining the Carlisle photo was not one of amazement at being exposed to ghost porn. Like most spirit photographs, it just looks like a blurry mist or vapor. While skeptics contend this is the result of the mosaic effect, in which our brains fill in whatever we expect to see, most ghost photographs are so much less detailed than the corresponding eyewitness reports that I wonder if some other mechanism might be at work.

A possibility I've considered is that what a person experiences when encountering a ghost might be in part a sort of psychic projection, in which non-physical details are perceived along with the physical aspects of the manifestation. The latter could therefore be photographed, while the former could not. Of course, if I'm wrong and this is simply a case of mosaic in action, the next question that needs to be asked is why Diana Carlisle would expect to see ghosts having sex in her living room. So either explanation could make for an interesting story.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

"Witch-Hunter" Charged With Murder

2011-11-23T10:07:00.003-06:00

When I covered the political death spell story last week I noted that traditional healer Jimmy Motsi's denials of being a witchcraft practitioner likely could prove important to his future well-being given that he lives in Zimbabwe, a country with a long history of witchcraft persecutions. As if to bolster my argument, the next day this story, also from Zimbabwe, showed up on the newswires. It seems that Dankeny Mpofu, a self-proclaimed "witch hunter," is being put on trial along with Thethela Ben Tshuma, who hired the hunter to kill his brother - who he suspected of casting spells against him.

Charges against them are that on September 25, 2008, Mpofu approached Tshuma who was not feeling well and told him that he was a witch-hunter and that his illness was being caused by his elder brother, Mqatshelwa Tshuma.

Mpofu offered to allegedly kill Tshuma’s brother on his behalf in return for payment with a beast. Tshuma allegedly agreed to have his brother killed and promised to pay Mpofu the beast as soon as the job was done.

He allegedly led Mpofu to his brother Mqatshelwa. On arrival they found Tshuma seated outside his house and Mpofu who was armed with a hammer allegedly struck him twice on the head and he died on the spot.

To cover up for the offence the two allegedly carried his body and hung it in the kitchen to appear as if he had committed suicide. However, the offence came to light a few days later when a dog was seen in the village carrying a human arm.

Can I just say one more time that I'm really glad I don't live in Zimbabwe? There are a lot of reasons for that, but the biggest one is that being a magick blogger and esoteric author would in effect put a huge target on my back. I will say that it's good to see the authorities prosecuting this case because there are still a lot of African witchcraft killings that never even lead to arrests, let alone trials, but the unfortunate victim here is still dead whether or not his killers wind up convicted. Was he a magical practitioner? The truth is that I have no idea, and I don't think Tshuma knew either. If this case turns out to be like most of these witchcraft killings, he just got sick and was looking for someone to blame.

Tears of Stone?

2011-11-22T11:09:00.005-06:00

I like to tell people I don't believe in anything supernatural, but I have a strong belief in the paranormal. To my way of thinking this position is largely axiomatic, in that I figure if something exists at all it's part of the natural world, whether it's material, spiritual, or some combination of the two. Here's a case that might be an extremely rare medical condition or might be the result of some process that touches on both the spiritual and material realms. Either way I see it as paranormal - that is, a phenomenon that lies outside the bounds of everyday experience. Doctors in India are examining the case of a young girl who appears to "cry stones" from her eyes.

Physicians in India have been left shocked after discovering seven-year-old Kura Nitya cries stones from her eyes.

According to a local newspaper, Kura has been excreting stones from her right eye for the last two weeks but doctors are not sure what is causing the phenomenon.

On average the young girl weeps between 12 to 25 stones a day. Nitya says she doesn't feel any pain but her right eye swells before the stones drop out.

Her grandfather Gopal Reddy says he first noticed the strange happenings in October. 'Initially, we thought it was some divine power and prayed to God for this phenomenon to stop,' he told the Star online.

The girl's parents have seen several different specialists but none have had an answer.

Ophthalmologist Dr Kalyan Chakaravarthy said Nitya was healthy and he could find no reason as to why she was weeping stones.

The stones are currently being tested in order to determine their composition. The most logical medical explanation is that they're calcified material of some sort, since calcium compounds are usually the hardest materials found in the body. If they're composed of actual stone, though, something far weirder must be going on, since the human body normally doesn't produce such substances.

The Groping Ghost

2011-11-21T11:53:00.004-06:00

Doris Birch of Kent, UK has been dealing with an unusual and disturbing paranormal manifestation haunting her apartment over the past four months - a groping ghost. While it's not unheard of for ghosts to touch living people during the course of traditional hauntings, according to reports they rarely are as determined to do so as this one seems to be.

'It's like an octopus,' she told This Is Kent of the spirit. 'It started four months ago. I was lying in bed when I felt this creepy pair of hands.

'I kicked frantically and it went away. Next time it came I hurled the duvet on to the floor!

'But the ghost keeps coming back. I've tried sleeping without the duvet. But it started shaking my mattress.

'I even threw the mattress off the bed and bought a new one but it has made no difference.'

Doris, who accepts many people 'are going to think I am mad', emphasised that, despite living alone, she is 'not lonely' and feels she may need to 'call in the Ghostbusters': 'I told the vicar and he said it is a lost spirit.

'What I want to know is, why has it got lost in my flat?'

Perhaps the octopus reference hints at something more sinister than a mere ghost, such as one of the Lovecraftian Deep Ones trying to push through into our reality from an alternative universe. Or maybe this particular spirit just finds the afterlife boring and is looking for some action. In my experience earthbound spirits aren't exactly the brightest bulbs, so to speak, in that they usually are those spirits that can't figure out how to move on properly.

For most hauntings a good set of banishing rituals will probably do the trick, provided that they extend into the macrocosmic realm. Sometimes pentagram rituals don't do that on their own, so I generally also recommend banishing by hexagram to really clear out a space. As long as you catch the ghost within the field when it goes up, the spirit should be sent on to wherever it belongs.

Alien in the Fridge

2011-11-18T11:16:00.003-06:00

The White House may have no evidence of alien contact, but for a woman in Russia the proof has been right there for the last two years - in her refrigerator. The woman, Marta Yegorovnam, claims that an alien spaceship crashed on her property two years ago, and that when she went to investigate she found the extraterrestrial pilot had not survived the landing.

Ms Yegorovnam then lovingly wrapped the creature in plastic and shoved it in the fridge, not uttering a word to anyone.

The remains have apparently been examined by the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, although this has not been confirmed.

Paranormal writer Michael Cohen said the ‘possibility that this might be a genuine alien should not be discounted’.

But astronomer Dr Ian Griffin told Metro: ‘If aliens were smart enough to travel vast distances between the stars, they’re probably smart enough to avoid being stored in a fridge for two years.’

The creature in the photograph does look pretty weird, although there have been many hoaxed alien bodies over the years and this one falls well within the limits of basic special effects. We'll have to wait and see if Russian scientists do indeed get a chance to run tests on the body, or if it mysteriously disappears before any such investigation can take place.

One thing that strikes me as odd is that the body looks to be in pretty good shape for a creature that died two years ago, even allowing for the effects of refrigeration. My other thought is that Reptilians are supposed to be taller.

Couple Charged With Political Death Spell

2011-11-17T13:17:00.005-06:00

Zimbabwe is one of the many African nations in which the existence of magick is not only accepted but considered a part of regular life. This extends into the political sphere, as is illustrated by this case of a couple alleged to have hired Jimmy Motsi, well-known as a traditional healer, to cast a death spell on five rivals within the country's ruling Zanu PF party. According to the charges Zvenyika Machokoto, a party official, and his wife believed that these individuals stood in the way of their political careers.

In his evidence, Motsi said he was approached by Machokoto at his rural home in Mt Darwin and was driven to Dorowa where the ritual ceremony was to be held.

On the actual date when he wanted to kill the five, Motsi prepared bottled water and asked Machokoto to call out the names of the five saying the exact fate he wished on them.

On the recorded transcript, Machokoto is heard mentioning the names of the five saying they were a stumbling block in his political career.

Motsi said the five were supposed to die through an accident or any other mysterious sudden death.

At the same time as he made these allegations, Motsi insisted that he was not in fact a traditional healer and that he had omitted some key elements of the ritual. This claim isn't all that surprising, since being known as a malevolent spellcaster in countries like Zimbabwe can prompt accusations of witchcraft and sometimes even lynching by angry mobs.

“The names of the five were being called as a way of placing them in the bottle. They were supposed to die from that ritual had it not that I omitted some of the important elements of the ritual,” said Motsi.

“I am not a traditional healer or a wizard, but I know that with the powers invested in me I would be able to kill all of them though I realised it was not proper.

Even Moses caused death of the Egyptians while Elijah caused serious droughts and what would you call that?” Motsi said.

Personally I say magick is magick regardless of the deities or entities that you call upon, and plenty of grimoire magicians conjure spirits by calling upon the Christian God. But this distinction may prove important for Motsi's future well-being, as most people in Africa and for that matter elsewhere tend to see Christianity and witchcraft as opposing forces.

A New Meditation App

2011-11-16T10:10:00.004-06:00

A while back I posted on an iPhone app developed by the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland for people interested in joining the priesthood. Now meditators have gotten in on the game with a new app for both Android and iPhone intended to get more people meditating. Called "Buddhify," the app provides basic meditation instructions and is being marketed by emphasizing the stress-reducing aspects of the practice.

The Buddhify app introduces users to restful mindfulness meditation practices by allowing them to select from 32 audio tracks to hear instruction from either a male or female voice.

Although its name makes reference to Buddhism, a religion in which meditation plays a key role, the app is intended for use by anybody interested in mental wellbeing.

"The only prerequisite is having a mind," Rohan Gunatillake said. "Its origins are in the Buddhist tradition, but it's totally independent. It's a way of training your attention in such a way that it develops positive qualities in your mind."

The app also has a two-player mode allowing friends to meditate together.

Even though the app makes few references to spiritual realization, if it succeeds at getting more people to meditate those results should follow for at least a subset of them. The dashboard shown above looks a little hokey, but if that means more people see meditation as accessible and take up the practice I'm nonetheless all for it.

One of these days I should see about developing my own set of apps devoted to magical practices. I can imagine, for example, an "Evoker" app that would bring up the appropriate conjurations for spirits and so forth as you reach each phase of an evocation ritual. I could implement it by putting together some kind of standard ritual notation that would allow you to import a specific text file for the ritual you want to perform, and in fact the ritual template I include in Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy would be a good place to start as far as the structure goes. It wouldn't have that big a market, but I can immediately see how useful it could be for serious practicing magicians.

Hexing on Facebook

2011-11-15T13:33:00.007-06:00

The chairman of Malaysia's Islamic Medicine Association recently warned people not to post their pictures online at social media sites like Facebook, because those photographs could allow unscrupulous magicians to cast spells upon them.

Users of social media sites should not post their pictures online as they could be used for witchcraft, said Kelantan Darussyifa' Islamic Medicine Association chairman Zaki Ya.

He said that djin (spirits) are able to “connect” with humans through the Internet, including Facebook, Sinar Harian reported.

While this is technically accurate whenever photos are involved, in my experience there aren't that many capable magicians out there casting spells on random Facebook users. Even if there were, digital photographs are pretty weak as magical links go. A regular photograph that has captured waves of light bouncing off a subject can act as both a similarity link and a contagion link, while a digital photograph has to operate on similarity alone because there's no direct connection when the image consists of pure information.

“Once, I treated someone who became delirious because a spell had been cast on him while he was surfing the Internet,” said Zaki.

“A few days ago, I received an SMS from a father asking me to help his son who refused to go to school.

“The father suspected that his son had been influenced by a djin over the Internet,” he said when met at the USM Traditional Islamic Medicine Clinic in Penang.

He said the boy would create a fuss every time his parents forbade him from using the Internet and would even threaten to kill himself.

See, to me this last case doesn't sound like possession or anything remotely similar. It sounds like the kid is just a brat, and the fact is that children are perfectly capable of behaving badly even when they're not being attacked by spirits. My three-year-old sometimes throws tantrums when she doesn't get what she wants, but I expect her to grow out of it soon. If this boy is using the Internet I'm guessing that he's substantially older and never did.

UPDATE: Jack has more on digital links, and how you can go about blocking or shielding yourself from them. Jason has a related post up as well.

New Book on Neuroscience and Free Will

2011-11-14T10:15:00.005-06:00

In my previous post on Neuroscience and Evil I noted that the general perspective among neuroscientists these days seems to be the epiphenomenon model, in which consciousness is viewed as the experience related to having a bunch of neurons firing in particular patterns rather than the manifestation of choices or free will. While this remains the majority position, not all neuroscientists agree. One of these dissenters is Michael S. Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Gazzaniga wrote the excellent Nature's Mind back in 1994, one of the books that influenced my model of how magick works, and now has a new book coming out called Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain that argues against the epiphenomenon model and in favor of the existence of genuine free human will. Today Salon has an interview up with the author.

Gazzaniga uses a lifetime of experience in neuroscientific research to argue that free will is alive and well. Instead of reducing free will to the sum of its neurological parts, he argues that it’s time for neuroscience to consider free will as a scientific fact in its own right. Through fascinating examples in chaos theory, physics, philosophy and, of course, neuroscience, Gazzaniga makes this interesting claim: Just as you cannot explain traffic patterns by studying car parts, neuroscience must abandon its tendency to reduce macro-level phenomena like free will to micro-level explanations. Along the way he provides fascinating and understandable information from brain evolution to studies involving infants and patients with severed brain hemispheres (split-brain patients). The final chapters of the book consider neuroscience as it implicates social responsibility, justice and how we treat criminal offense.

Anyone wondering about the validity of the epiphenomenon model should go ahead and read the whole interview. I'm glad to see this conversation taking place, because the fact is that even though I think neuroscientists have done a fairly good job demonstrating that our behavior is more deterministic than we generally think it is, at the same time there's plenty of evidence that human beings are something other than automatons suffering from the delusion of self and that the choices we make are fundamentally meaningful. The car parts versus traffic analogy there is one of the best metaphors I've ever seen of making the distiction between neurons and consciousness clear, and I can't agree with it more strongly. Consciousness exists in its own right and arises from the interaction of neurons, just as traffic exists and arises from the activity of many car parts all working together.

This sounds like a really great book, and I'll have to pick up a copy.

The Daughter of God

2011-11-11T20:00:00.000-06:00

Salon has an interesting review up today of a book about a British woman named Mabel Barltrop and the religion that she founded in 1919, the Panacea Society. Even though I'm fairly knowledgeable on new religious movements of the last century, this organization is one that I had never previously read about. The group has survived until the present day, though there are only a couple of living members left still dwelling at its communal headquarters.

In February 1919, a small group of middle-class English women received a life-changing revelation. What they learned, Jane Shaw explains in “Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers” (Yale), was that Mabel Barltrop, a 53-year-old former mental patient living in the town of Bedford, was the incarnation of God. Mabel, whose late husband had been a priest in the Church of England, announced a new Christian theology, in which the Trinity was replaced by a foursome: God the Father and God the Mother, Jesus the Son and Mabel (or, as her followers began to call her, Octavia) the Daughter. She had come to conquer death and was guaranteed never to die. She had healing powers so strong that if she breathed on water or a piece of linen, it was transformed into a cure for any bodily ailment.

Octavia’s followers named themselves the Panacea Society, and they advertised her cures widely. Some 70 people came to live near her in communal housing in Bedford, and thousands more around the world wrote in to ask for a piece of the sacred linen. Over the years, Shaw writes, Mabel announced many refinements of her doctrine. She was forbidden to go more than 77 steps from her house; her garden, in Bedford, was the location of the original Garden of Eden; her late husband had been the incarnation of Christ; the souls of the departed were not dead but had flown to the planet Uranus to bide their time until they returned.

Now here's the part of all this that struck me as particularly intriguing. Aleister Crowley's The Book of Lies, first published in 1912 or 1913, contained the original version of the Star Sapphire, Crowley's Thelemic ritual of the hexagram. As part of that ritual the magician is instructed to make a series of statements, one at each of the four quarters.

East: Pater et Mater Unus Deus ARARITA (Father and Mother are one God ARARITA).
South: Mater et Filius Unus Deus ARARITA (Mother and Son are one God ARARITA).
West: Filius et Filia Unus Deus ARARITA (Son and Daughter are one God ARARITA)
North Pater et Filius Unus Deus ARARITA (Father and Daughter are one God ARARITA)

ARARITA is a notariquon or acronym for the Hebrew phrase "Achad Rosh Achdotho Rosh Ichudo Temurahzo Achad", meaning "One is His Beginning, One is His Individuality, His Permutation is One." So in effect the end of the phrase means something to the effect of "one God in unity." The Thelemic Star Sapphire therefore replaces the idea of the Christian trinity with Father, Mother, Son, and Daughter, just like the theology of the Panacea Society. I'm left wondering if Barltrop at some point got her hands on a copy of The Book of Lies or if this represents an independent emergence of the same basic theme around the same time period. Either way, the book sounds like it makes for some fascinating reading.

Witchcraft in Israel?

2011-11-10T09:00:00.000-06:00

In Africa, India, and Saudi Arabia it is fairly common for courts to hear witchcraft-related cases, but it's important to keep in mind that such trials can also happen in (supposedly) more developed countries. A Rabbinical court in Haifa, Israel recently levied a fine against a woman for practicing witchcraft as part of a divorce hearing.

The court reduced the value of the woman's ketubah, the amount her husband must pay her in the event of divorce, by half -- or about $25,000. However, the wife was acquitted of refusing to cook for her husband -- the least the court could do since her husband had committed adultery.

The wife denied her husband's charge that she practiced witchcraft, but she failed a polygraph test, leading the court to determine that she in fact had been practicing witchcraft.

Death is the punishment for witchcraft in the Torah, but the rabbis found a source that instead allowed them to mete out the financial penalty.

It seems to me that since a polygraph essentially measures anxiety it's exactly the wrong tool to employ in the middle of a bitter domestic dispute like this one. I have no idea whether or not the woman in question is a magician of some sort, but I will say that in a situation like this some anxiety is to be expected. This is especially so with a witchcraft charge, given that a conviction could mean facing the death penalty.

White House Denies Extraterrestrial Contact

2011-11-09T11:13:00.007-06:00

On Monday the White House Office of Science and Technology issued a statement denying any knowledge of extraterrestrial contact. They also denied that this non-existent evidence was being hidden by some sort of government cover-up operation as alleged by many in the UFO community. Of course, if the politicians were all Reptilian aliens whose agenda depended upon discrediting anyone who suspects their presence, that's exactly what they would say.

"The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race," Phil Larson from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy reported on the WhiteHouse.gov website."In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye."

The petition calling on the government to disclose any knowledge of or communication with extraterrestrial beings was signed by 5,387 people, and 12,078 signed the request for a formal acknowledgement from the White House that extraterrestrials have been engaging the human race.

“Hundreds of military and government agency witnesses have come forward with testimony confirming this extraterrestrial presence,” the second petition states. “Opinion polls now indicate more than 50 percent of the American people believe there is an extraterrestrial presence and more than 80 percent believe the government is not telling the truth about this phenomenon. The people have a right to know. The people can handle the truth.”

Apparently not, at least according to those who are still insisting that extraterrestrials secretly control our planet. But really, those beliefs are pretty far-fetched. Jack recently put up a post describing his problems with the "ancient alien" hypothesis and I agree with most of his conclusions. Modern people often assume that because we have more technology at our disposal we have to be a lot more intelligent than the ancients, when given how slowly evolution works it's much more likely that within the span of recorded history people have always been about as smart as they are now. They just had a different knowledge base to work with and a different set of priorities.

Anyone who contends that human beings could not have built the various monolithic structures throughout the world is completely ignorant of the fact that ancient cultures would have had their own genuises who figured out how to get the necessary tasks done. The same is true of the modern world, in that extremely wealthy people and gigantic corporations are plenty capable of dominating the planet without any help from beyond the stars. There's no reason whatsoever to imagine that the global elite would have to consist of evil shapeshifting space aliens in order for them to act like a bunch of douchebags.

Flame Strike?

2011-11-08T23:44:00.004-06:00

This is an older story, from September, but an intriguing one nonetheless. A man who died last December is believed to be Ireland's first victim of spontaneous human combustion. This is problematic, as most experts who have investigated the phenomenon are of the opinion that spontaneous human combustion does not exist and is quite simply impossible.

But an Irish coroner declared just that this week as the cause of death for 76-year-old Michael Faherty, who died in December 2010. The BBC reports that the finding is the first reported case of spontaneous human combustion in Ireland’s history.

Forensic experts originally attributed the blaze that killed Faherty to a fire in the fireplace of the sitting room where his body was found. But after a closer investigation, the coroner ruled otherwise. “The fire had been confined to the sitting room,” the BBC reports. “The only damage was to the body, which was totally burnt, the ceiling above him and the floor underneath him.” No accelerant was found nor any signs of foul play.

Coroner Kieran McLoughlin explains: "This fire was thoroughly investigated and I'm left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation."

Clearly this coroner has never played Dungeons and Dragons. The most telling clue is that damage was found on the ceiling above the body and also on the floor below it. That means only one thing to anyone who's ever played a Cleric character with access to fifth level spells - Flame Strike! Someone in Ireland must have mastered it, and I totally want to know how it's done. Because Flame Strike is awesome!

If anyone overseas has a line on this mystery conjurer, please let me know in comments. This is one opportunity that I don't want to let slip away.

Mapping the Luck Plane

2011-11-07T09:56:00.004-06:00

In my previous article on the luckiest city in America I commented that if some sort of pattern could be derived from the "luck ratings" of the 100 cities evaluated by Men's Health magazine, we might be able to get some sort of a handle on how magick interacts with geography in the United States. After running the numbers on the magazine's city ratings, the map shown here (click to enlarge) is the result, with The light blue points representing lucky cities and the purple points representing unlucky cities. Cities marked in green are neutral, and cities not included in the study are shown in gray.

Once I mapped out the points, I went ahead and connected them using a simple heuristic - that one set of lines connect the lucky cities to each other, a second set connects the unlucky cities to each other, and the lines do not cross. There are few outliers - Providence, RI is lucky but just far enough west that you can't draw a line to it from New York City without passing through unlucky Bridgeport, CT. Unlucky Stockton, CA is surrounded by lucky cities on all sides. And while according to the heuristic Denver, CO connects into the West Coast grid, it is a considerable distance from the other cities in the grid and might be an outlier instead. Also, the cities in Alaska and Hawaii are really too far away to be included in either of the continental grids.

Looking at the map, a pattern does become clear. Most of the West Coast is lucky. In the east a lucky swath runs from the area around Baltimore and Philadelphia between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. Once it reaches Kansas, the swath turns due south until it passes through Texas and Louisiana, reaching Houston and Baton Rouge. My original working hypothesis was that magical forces related to particular elements should follow the physical movement of the element in question. So Earth would move along fault lines, Water would move along rivers, and Air would move along with atmospheric currents. But with the way that the map looks, this analysis seems too simplistic. The lucky eastern swath sort of follows the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, but it runs north of the Ohio and west of the Mississippi, and cities on the river such as Memphis, TN and Little Rock, Ak, are distinctly unlucky.

Following the recent earthquake in Oklahoma I was looking up some information on the New Madrid Fault system and came across the following diagram showing the relative risk of earthquakes across the country. If you superimpose the two maps, you can see that there are some similarities.

If we adopt the operating assumption that the fault lines on the West Coast are somehow lucky, and the fault lines around the New Madrid formation and New England are unlucky, you can put together a model fitting much of the data in which luck follows major rivers but then is increased by lucky faults and decreased by unlucky ones.

In fact, there is a major geological difference between the West Coast fault lines lines like the San Andreas that represents the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates and those around the New Madrid fault which lie along the Midcontinent Rift System. On the West Coast, the fault lines are formed by tectonic plates coming together, whereas those on the rift are formed by the North American plate pulling apart.

This suggests a further rule that may help to explain the unlucky cities of the Upper Midwest. Minneapolis and Saint Paul are on the Mississippi, but Minneapolis is neutral and Saint Paul is slightly unlucky. The same is true over in Montana, where the Missouri River starts, and through the Dakotas. As the headwaters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the Upper Midwest and Upper West are areas where the water is moving away rather than coming together. It seems like once enough water has come together via the various tributaries areas around the major rivers start becoming lucky except when interfered with by the geology around the New Madrid area.

Still, none of that really explains Florida, which is by far the unluckiest state. It has little in the way of major rivers and is not geologically active. I have yet to look at atmospheric patterns, so there could be a clue there. The eastern swath sort of tends to follow the Jet Stream, so perhaps that could be a factor in the luckiness of the cities along it as well, and Florida's weather is rather odd since it sits between "hurricane alley" in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. But that's something I'm still looking into. Atmospheric changes are harder to pin down because they vary a lot by season.

What I would really like to see is the full breakdown of data, not the combined scores. It seems fairly reasonable to assume that different classes of lucky or unlucky events might be related to different elements in terms of the magical forces involved and the general spheres of activity in which they occur. The magazine article lists its sources, but if I want to build maps broken out by type of luck I'm probably going to have to put them together myself. So that remains a question for another day, and if anyone would like to look into it before I get to it I would love to see the results.

More on the Mullet Cult

2011-11-04T09:00:00.005-05:00

As I commented in my Amish Beard Wars post, I find it way more hilarious than I probably should that there's an Amish leader out there named Sam Mullet whose followers go around cutting hair and beards. It's as if growing up with that name draws you to bad haircuts or something. CNN has a new article up with some further information about Mullet's Amish sect that calls itself the Bergholz Clan, and the closer you look at it the more cultish it appears to be. You should read the whole thing, but some highlights are quoted below.

The CNN article features testimony from a former member, Aden Troyer, who was once married to Mullet's daughter Wilma but left the group in response to what he describes as cultish behavior on the part of its leader.

They say Mullet has created rules and punishments for breaking those rules that Amish folks had never heard of before.

The Amish typically resolve disputes within their community without the interference of law enforcement. But they say Mullet takes this to a whole new level.

"The way he's been treating and talking to people, he is not an Amish guy," Troyer said. "He is not your typical peaceful, loving Amish person."

Troyer said he eventually realized what he was getting caught up in and moved away from Mullet's compound, along with his two daughters.

There's a problem: Wilma did not. Three years after their marriage in 2004, the couple divorced, and Troyer received full custody of the girls.

Based on testimony from two of the beard-cutting victims, Ohio law enforcement officials believe that Mullet's group is behind the attacks, though Mullet himself was not personally involved in any of them. Nonetheless, he is suspected of ordering his followers to carry them out, and those targeted all had been involved in various disputes with the group.

Mullet's name emerged recently after several Amish-on-Amish beard-cutting attacks, in which most of the perpetrators are believed to be followers of Mullet's breakaway group.

Last week, the FBI announced that it was investigating the incidents to determine whether any federal laws had been broken. No further details were given.

Local law enforcement officials and members of the Amish community believe Mullet has created a cult and is singlehandedly responsible for orchestrating the beard-cutting incidents and other crimes in recent years. Mullet has not been charged with any crimes.

Above and beyond the beard-cutting attacks, Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla has heard other alarming reports from the Bergholz compound, and on one occasion was threatened by one of Mullet's sons - and here I though the Amish were supposed to be pacifists.

One came from a man who said Mullet put him in a chicken coop for 15 days in the dead of winter over a religious disagreement. The victim would not press charges.

"He was convinced that (Mullet) was doing him a favor," Abdalla said. "That's like me hitting you in the head with a two-by-four and telling you I'm doing you a favor … and you agree and say, 'Yes, you have done me a favor.' That's how domineering (he is)."

Because of Abdalla's involvement in these incidents and Mullet's distrust of law enforcement, the two have been at odds since Mullet moved to Jefferson County in the mid-1990s.

Abdalla said he even received death threats from one of Mullet's sons, which he believes was orchestrated by Sam Mullet.

"It was two in the morning, (and he's) telling me I'm a dead SOB," Abdalla said. "He was charged with threatening, harassing, what have you. He went to court (and pleaded guilty)."

That certainly sounds like cultish behavior to me. Not only that, the author of the article spoke with Sam Mullet himself and found the man evasive to say the least. While Mullet claimed that this was simply because he did not want to argue his case for the media, his terse comments don't make him sound particularly innocent.

"Can you perhaps respond to these allegations that you're running a cult?" I ask.

"People say a lot of things," Mullet says, a small, confident grin on his face.

"Are you running a cult?"

"No. It's not a cult."

"What about the allegations that you're behind the beard-cutting crimes?"

"Beard-cutting is a crime, is it?"

Another minute or so goes by as I attempt to glean more information. He repeats his claims from earlier that people "say a lot of things" before he politely dismisses me and heads back inside.

I could just as easily imagine those same words coming out of the mouth of Jim Jones or David Koresh, minus the beard-cutting comments of course. That's not to imply that Mullet is as dangerous as either of them proved to be - after all, beard-cutting is not really on par with poisoned Kool-Aid or stockpiled illegal weapons. But the psychology stikes me as remarkably similar.

While the term "cult" is often leveled indiscriminately at minority religious groups, there are some real distinctions between new religious movements in general and groups that are genuinely cultish in nature. Cults can more properly be characterized as organizations that seek to dominate the lives of their followers and in many cases lash out at perceived enemies. But the fact is that no cult leader believes his or her group is a cult - to them, it's just the way things are.

Please Come to Church Unarmed

2011-11-03T09:00:00.002-05:00

The state right next door, Wisconsin, recently passed a concealed-carry law, allowing those with valid permits to carry concealed weapons. This led Milwaukee's Roman Catholic bishops to issue the sort of statement on Tuesday rarely heard in countries outside war zones - they urged parishioners to come to church unarmed out of respect for the integrity of sacred spaces.

This seems like a completely reasonable, common-sense request, especially since the bishops are leaving the decision on whether or not to ban weapons up to individual churches. Except, of course, for the known fact that Patriotic American Jesus never goes anywhere without his M-16. So how can they expect him to show up for Mass without it?

"Intuitively, we understand that acts of violence, destruction, and murder are antithetical to the message and person of Jesus Christ and have no rightful place in our society, especially sacred places," the bishops said just before the law went into effect on Tuesday.

"We ask that all people seriously consider not carrying weapons into church buildings as a sign of reverence for these sacred spaces," they said.

The statement, issued by Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki and four other bishops, said a decision on whether to ban weapons was up to individual churches.

Minnesota went through all this years ago when our concealed-carry law passed, and the result was that most public establishments just put up signs banning guns. That made it difficult to carry one around with you if you planned on going into just about any business, church, or public building. At the same time, the Minnesota law hasn't caused any of the problems that its opponents warned about when it went through. Our law has worked by upholding the principle of individual rights - it lets people with valid permits carry guns, but at the same time gives business owners the right to keep people with them out if they so choose.

Still, if churches start banning weapons in Wisconsin Patriotic American Jesus is going to be pissed. And since he carries an M-16, that's never a good thing.

Alien Abduction as Astral Projection?

2011-11-02T09:00:00.002-05:00

Ever since the phenomenon of alien abduction was reported by Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, scientists have been trying to come up with an explanation for it that does not involve the presence of little green men from space. A group of scientists from UCLA now claim to have come up with a procedure by which many people can experience the presence of aliens as they sleep. The lead researcher on the team describes these experiences as the result of a "poorly studied state of consciousness," but based on the description given I think it's safe to say that we magicians know it as astral projection.

Volunteers underwent a series of mental exercises on waking, and of the 20 who took part, seven claimed to have seen aliens - from little green men to seven-foot-tall robots - as part of an out-of-body experience.

One volunteer, Craig, explained how he felt a floating sensation after falling asleep. 'I told myself to go see aliens. The next scene I was near a mountain in a clearing with trees around it. There was a space ship. There were two aliens with helmets on. They also had a type of robot with them,' he explained.'It was about seven ft tall and was silver in colour. The aliens did not appear to be friendly.'

However, lead researcher Michael Raduga said that the study proves that extra terrestrial experiences are merely a product of the human brain. 'Alien contact is not indicative of the existence of otherworldly civilizations, but rather of a poorly studied state of consciousness that people fall into inadvertently,' he said.

In the time before aliens such experiences were likely interpreted as visits to the fairy realm or something similar when reached inadvertently. These days, though, the experience often seems to be parsed using schemas from contemporary science fiction, which means space aliens. I'm not the first person by any means to suggest that astral projection and alien abductions might be part of the same phenomenon, but it would be particularly interesting to see the full set of exercises used by the subjects in this study. I'm guessing that to any practicing magician they will seem quite familiar.

Scientology Versus South Park

2011-11-01T09:00:00.002-05:00

Back in 2005 the television program South Park produced an episode mocking the Church of Scientology, which led to something of a scandal. Comedy Central refused to air the episode and Isaac Hayes, a Scientologist who voiced one of the recurring characters, resigned from the show on the grounds that it "makes fun of people's religions." It should be noted that Hayes did not resign over earlier episodes ridiculing Catholicism, Mormonism, and Judaism, not to mention the "Super Best Friends" episode from 2001 in which Moses, Jesus, Joseph Smith, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna, and Lao-Tzu act as a super-team to defeat the evil sorcery of David Blaine - who calls his religious cult "Blaintology." Nope, no making fun of religion there!

At any rate, the scandal was a testament to the touchiness of the Church of Scientology, which is famous for threatening lawsuits right and left at the drop of a hat, regarding critcism of its beliefs. What is not widely known is how far the Church went in "investigating" Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park's creators. A recently leaked document supposedly details various actions the Church took in order to embarrass the two of them, which if true pretty clearly cross the line into stalking and harrassment.

Former Scientology executive Marty Rathbun, who left the church in 2005, released an internal Scientology document on his blog detailing the investigation by the religion's Office of Special Affairs (OSA) — which he calls "the harassment and terror network of Corporate Scientology." The probe of Parker and Stone was apparently direct "retaliation for the South Park episode that exposed the religion's bizarre upper-level teachings," says Tony Ortega at The Village Voice. According to Rathbun, the OSA uses methods comparable to Cold War-era CIA and KGB "intelligence and propaganda techniques," such as investigation, threats, and infiltration.

In order to find a "direct line" to Parker and Stone, the OSA allegedly identified close friends of Parker and Stone, including formerly married actors John Stamos and Rebecca Romijn, "in an effort to find some weakness," says Kimberly Nordyke at The Hollywood Reporter. These people were then the targets of "covert information gathering" that included searching through their trash, purchasing their phone records, hacking their airline reservations, going through their bank records, and reading their personal letters. "They'll read stuff into the kind of alcohol you're drinking and how much. Prescriptions. They'll figure out your diet," says Rathbun. "They can find out a lot about you through your trash."

Frustrated that these methods weren't producing "any vulnerabilities to exploit," says Ortega, the OSA allegedly attempted to employ a film student as a mole to "get intelligence" about Parker and Stone directly from the studio where they worked. The group hoped the film student would be able get a job either as an intern at South Park or as a writer there. It's unclear whether this plan ever panned out.

The document reveals that the OSA kept careful watch over Parker and Stone's workplace, discovering what catering service they used for lunch, where the duo's parking spaces were, and the makes, models, and license plate numbers of their cars. But beyond that, "whether Scientology was ever successful at digging up dirt on the filmmaking duo or their friends is something we'll be trying to find out," says Ortega.

The Church of Scientology denies authorizing any of the actions outlined in the document, and it's always possible that these allegations are false and part of a smear campaign. However, this is also not the first time the Church has been accused of taking these sorts of actions against its critics. Meanwhile, the South Park episode in question, "Trapped in the Closet," has become one of the most popular episodes viewed online despite never airing.

Personally, I'm left wondering how strong the beliefs of Scientology can possibly be, since the Church seems to think that its followers are delicate flowers that will be harmed in some tangible way by seeing it portrayed in a negative light on a comedy show that pretty much rips on every religious persuasion out there. I mean, it's not like Aleister Crowley and Thelema have never been criticized or mocked, but I'm still practicing because for me the system works. As I see it, people can make fun all they want without having to worry about me digging through their trash.

Prostitute or Donkey?

2011-10-31T09:00:00.001-05:00

Longtime readers of Augoeides may recall the story of the shapeshifting Nigerian witch who attempted to escape a botched auto theft by transforming into a goat. According to this recent story, the art of shapeshifting is also apparently alive and well in Zimbabwe. A man there is claiming that a prostitute he spent the night with transformed into a donkey the following morning. How's that for a rude awakening!

A Zimbabwean man has told a court that he hired a prostitute who during the night transformed into a donkey, and that he is now "seriously in love" with the animal, state media said Wednesday.

"I think I am also a donkey. I do not know what happened when I left the bar, but I am seriously in love with (the) donkey," Sunday Moyo told the court, according to The Herald newspaper.

Moyo, 28, was arrested in the town of Zvishavane, about 300 kilometres (185 miles) south of the capital Harare on Sunday.

He said he had paid $25 for a prostitute, and was surprised Sunday morning when he heard people accusing him of having sex with a donkey.

Moyo has been charged with bestiality. The court has ordered him to undergo a mental examination, The Herald said.

What's not quite clear here is whether or not the woman in question was a witch who transformed herself into a donkey, or more alarmingly, a donkey with magical powers that transformed itself into a woman. The latter would imply that in Zimbabwe donkeys can be witches too. If so, this would be the first case I've ever encountered of an animal practicing the black arts on its own. It could also mean that the Nigerian witch might have been a goat all along who simply transformed into a human in order to drive off with a stolen car.

Either that, or this is just yet another case where too much alcohol was involved.

Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy is Out!

2011-10-28T09:00:00.005-05:00

My new book, Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy, is now available at Amazon!

The listing just went up so they don't have a cover image posted yet, but once they do it will match the one shown here.

I'm really looking forward to getting some feedback on the book's contents, since it's my first non-fiction work on magical practices. The focus of it is the magick of John Dee's Heptarchia Mystica, but it also represents the first publication in print of various ideas that have appeared here on this blog, such as my operant field method and several original Enochian rituals.

Click here to order your copy now, and enjoy!

Zombie Apocalypse - The Graphic Novel

2011-10-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

The Centers for Disease Control have managed to create a viral Internet sensation with their "zombie apocalypse" campaign. It turns out that reading about how to prepare for regular disasters is boring, but if you throw zombies into the mix all of a sudden people start finding the same material incredibly interesting. I guess werewolves were the new vampires and now zombies are the new werewolves. Or something like that. The CDC is continuing this highly successful campaign in a graphic novel that is now available on their website.

The comic book went live on the CDC's website on Friday, with no fanfare. It has already been a hit at New York's ComicCon, a gathering of fans and creators of comic books, graphic novels, games, and other media. There, Ali Khan, director of the CDC's Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, passed out copies and spoke on a panel titled "Zombie Summit: How to Survive the Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse."

"They went like hot cakes," David Daigle of the preparedness office says.

The comic begins with a couple, Todd and Julie, watching a news story about a strange virus that causes slow movement, slurred speech and violent tendencies. The newscaster says the CDC recommends the public avoid those with symptoms, gather emergency supplies and make an evacuation plan.

Todd checks the CDC's website where he finds information about the new zombie virus and a list of items he'll need for an emergency-preparedness kit. Just then, an infected zombie neighbor shows up at the door and tries to attack him.

The scene shifts to the CDC, where scientists are working around the clock to create a vaccine. In a cameo appearance, the CDC's Khan barks, "No, tell CNN I'll call them back later…" into a phone as a Dr. Greene calls the Strategic National Stockpile to prepare to release its supplies of medicine.

You can find the graphic novel here. I figure it's all a good thing, since disaster preparedness is useful whether or not zombies ever show up at your door and the information presented by the CDC is stuff that everyone should be familiar with. Let's just hope it's not being disseminated in advance of a real zombie invasion of which the rest of us are as yet unaware.

More Clown Shoes from Salem

2011-10-26T11:00:00.000-05:00

Last spring I put up several posts making fun of Salem, Massachusetts' push for witchcraft-themed tourist dollars, a situation profoundly ironic because in fact Salem has no history of real witches, but rather baseless accusations that got a bunch of innocent people killed in 1692. In light of this and the ridiculous commercialism that surrounds the place, back then I went ahead and dubbed Salem "the clown shoes of magick." Things died down for awhile over the summer, but let's face it, now it's almost Halloween. The clown shoes are back, at least for the next week.

Ghouls representing two downtown Halloween attractions, the Nightmare Factory and the Witch Mansion, have been confronting each other on the pedestrian mall that separates them.

In the latest incident, a demonic representative of the Witch Mansion was accused of "bumping" the zombies from the Nightmare Factory who were strolling on the mall walkway to lure customers into the store.

That followed an accusation by the Witch Mansion that zombies from the Nightmare Factory were shouting, "Witch Mansion sucks," during the city's annual Zombie Walk on the "Night of the Living Dead" commemoration.

Police were called to the scene but an employee of the Nightmare Factory told officers they were merely mouthing "White Sox," suggesting zombies from Chicago had invaded Salem.

To understand the conflict, you need to know businesses in Salem are fiercely competitive during the Halloween season, when thousands of tourists visit the haunted houses, witch museums and costume stores.

I guess you also have to understand that in Salem the ratio of idiots to smart people is apparently almost paranormally high, at least among those loud and stupid enough to make the news. It's a wonder that the whole place hasn't imploded yet from the sheer gravitational mass of epic fail contained within its borders.

Now, keep in mind that I'm not slagging on the town itself or everyone who happens to live there. Plenty of Salem residents are fighting the good fight, trying to emphasize the city's nautical history and genuinely amazing architecture instead of all this dimestore witch crap. I can't help but respect anyone with the fortitude to keep that up, especially during the silly season, and I wish all of them the best.

Alchemy - You're Doing it Wrong

2011-10-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

Here's another one of those "what was he thinking?" stories. It seems that a man in Northern Ireland decided that the best way he could possibly spend his day was attempting to transform excrement into gold by mixing it with fertilizer and putting it on top of a heater. Because alchemy, really! The result of his experiment? He started a fire that consumed his apartment and threatened those of his neighbors. Because that shit burns!

Recently, Paul Moran from Northern Ireland attempted to put a twist on the old lead-into-gold trick by turning feces into gold. No word on whether this modification to the recipe was out of necessity or a indomitable sense of adventure.

Either way, the process involved leaving feces, along with fertilizer, on top of a heater. While this process did not manage to transmute the feces into gold, it did manage to transmute his entire apartment into a blazing inferno.

Upon his arrest, Moran admitted to arson and endangering the life of fellow residents in the building by starting the fire, which is estimated to have caused £3,000 worth of damage. Judge McFarland who presided over the case commented that Moran’s endeavors were an “interesting experiment” but that they were obviously doomed to fail. He then proceeded to transmute the next three months of Moran’s life into jail time.

Here's what probably happened. Moran at some point sat down and watched Alejandro Jodorowsky's film The Holy Mountain, in which an alchemist does in fact transform feces into gold in a process that appears to involve a lot of heat and some additional chemical reagents. Knowing that Jodorowsky is revered by many as a genuine mystic, he figured that the film must have revealed the True Secret of Alchemy (TM) and went about trying to replicate the process with the materials he had at hand. As Paul Moran unfortunately found out, just because you see it in a movie doesn't mean that it's real.

Still Here!

2011-10-24T11:17:00.000-05:00

So, seriously, did anybody really think the world was going to end?

Now I'll ask the question - isn't it time the Christians of the world gave up on Dispensationalism? William Miller has been dead for more that 150 years, and false apocalyptic prophets like Harold Camping have been gnawing on the bones of his failed hypothesis ever since. It's just not happening, folks. Miller was wrong. I will grant that the Thelemic interpretation of the apocalypse differs radically from that espoused by Camping and his ilk, but at least for us it actually happened.

Since nobody outside the magical blogosphere pays much attention to what I write here, though, I'll make a prediction that I know will come true - we'll be going through all this again in 2012, and that apocalypse will fail as well. You can quote me on it and everything!

Today is the Day... Take 2!

2011-10-21T10:29:00.000-05:00

So this is it, folks. The end of the world. Today. No, really!

You see, that whole thing about the Rapture that never happened was all just a misunderstanding. Harold Camping didn't mean to imply that the world was going to end back in May, just that all the devout Christians everywhere would mysteriously vanish and there would be earthquakes and other natural disasters all over the place. And when neither of those predictions came to pass, that was just because God was being merciful and decided not to let them happen after all. He's apparently just not merciful enough to let people wake up tomorrow morning.

Except, of course, that I have this nagging suspicion the world isn't going anywhere, and once Camping's last remaining followers recognize that my guess is he'll be left praising the mercy of the Lord once more. What do you people want, anyway? God moves in mysterious ways! Which, I suppose, is why somebody like Harold Camping should be able to predict his every move and exploit those predictions to raise millions of dollars. Yeah, that's the ticket! There's a distinct "but God wants you to buy me a house in the Bahamas!" vibe to the whole thing, like back when all those other televangelist financial scandals hit years ago.

So just in case the world ends today, it's been great knowing all of you. Otherwise, we'll be adding one more confused end-times prophet to that ever-growing list. Will they never learn?

Just in Time for JesusWeen!

2011-10-20T14:56:00.000-05:00

I suppose I really should have held off on this one until next week, but seeing as the world is supposed to end tomorrow I wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to get a good laugh out of it. A group of Christians has decided that since Halloween is too damn evil to accept, it is their sovereign duty to reclaim the day by calling it "JesusWeen." This has to be one of the dumbest marketing campaigns that I've ever seen. Reasonable Christians understand that to most Americans Halloween is essentially a secular holiday that has little to do with the devil or witchcraft aside from the plastic crap that shows up at drugstores every year. Witches do celebrate the date as a holiday, but the idea that Wiccans and Pagans, even taken together, constitute anything but a tiny religious minority reflects ridiculous paranoia on the part of those who belong to the largest religious denomination in the United States by far.

JesusWeen is a non profit organization also known as JesusWin. We are focused on helping people live better lives through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. JesusWeen is a God-given vision which was born as an answer to the cry of many every October 31st. The dictionary meaning of Ween is to expect, believe or think. We therefore see October 31st as a day to expect a gift of salvation and re-think receiving Jesus.

Every year, the world and its system have a day set aside (October 31st) to celebrate ungodly images and evil characters while Christians all over the world participate, hide or just stay quiet on Halloween day. Being a day that is widely acceptable to solicit and knock on doors, God inspired us to encourage Christians to use this day as an opportunity to spread the gospel. The days of hiding are over and we choose to take a stand for Jesus. “Evil prevails when good people do nothing”. JesusWeen is expected to become the most effective Christian outreach day ever and that is why we also call it” World Evangelism Day”.

It seems to me that this sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, certainly before anyone coined the ludicrous name. I remember that when I was a kid there were a few families who would give out Jack Chick tracts along with candy on Halloween, and I never really thought much of it. If anything, my brother and I would read through the awful comics giggling the whole time, so hopefully this group has better literature at the very least. While I find the web site's alarmist propaganda quite silly, I can't say that I think there's anything wrong with handing out religious materials as long as these folks can refrain from being jerks about their beliefs. In fact, it makes me think that I should find a good source for inexpensive tract copies of The Book of the Law so I could hand them out to trick-or-treaters myself - you know, assuming the world survives that long.

An App for the Priesthood

2011-10-19T10:59:00.000-05:00

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has come up with a novel solution to its growing shortage of priests - an iPhone App intended to guide young people toward vocations within the church. The App includes information on the dioceses of Ireland, frequently asked questions about joining the priesthood, and connections to social media outlets associated with the church.

The new 'Vocations' app was designed by Father Paddy Rushe and developed by the company Magic Time Apps, based in Dublin. It is available to download for free from the Apple iPhone App Store, said the church.

Some of the features of the app, according to the church, are: Connection to Twitter and Facebook; Social networking at the service of vocations; Contact details and statistics on the 26 dioceses of Ireland; Frequently asked questions to assist a person to discern his vocation; News feed running from the national vocations website; Novel and cursory 'tests' to enable the user to reflect on vocation potential.

"Future updates will include a "prayer counter" to allow people pledge a period of prayer for vocations and a picture gallery which will include some images from the life of a seminarian," the church statement said.

This reminds me a bit of an April Fools prank from back in 1994, which claimed that Microsoft planned to merge with the Roman Catholic Church in order to "bring the services of Catholicism to the desktop." The church now appears to be moving toward such a future on its own, at least as far as smartphones are concerned. iConfession is apparently already a reality, and one wonders if iConversion or iCommunion might be on the way.

Magick in the Middle East

2011-10-18T12:40:00.000-05:00

I suppose it's no surprise to see this article discussing the widespread belief in magick throughout the Middle East. After all, Saudi Arabia is the only country I know of that has its own anti-witchcraft squad and witchcraft persecutions are common in the region. What I was not quite aware of, though, is the degree to which accepting the existence of magick is an integral part of Islamic belief. In Christianity and Judaism there seems to be a lot more flexibility on the issue, especially in Western nations. Whether or not that's a good thing is open to interpretation - I work magick so I know that it exists, but at the same time there's a lot to be said for living in a country where I'm not going to be hounded out of my home, assaulted, or even killed because of my practices. If I were living in Saudi Arabia, for example, I would need to keep my practices secret for fear of attracting attention from both my neighbors and the authorities.

Belief in black magic runs deep in Saudi society. The issue was raised last month when the quasi-legislative body Shoura Council granted permission for Moroccan women to work as maids in Saudi households. Hundreds of Saudi women complained to the Council that granting Moroccan maids permission to work was tantamount to allowing the use of black magic in their homes to steal their husbands. Saudi wives complained the issue was not lacking trust in their husbands, but their men were powerless to ward off spells.

While greeted with skepticism in western societies, Saudis would no more question the existence of black magic than they would Islam. Two surahs (chapters) in the Qur’an under Al Mi’wadhatyan address black magic and are often recited during or after prayer. Simply, part of being a Muslim is believing in the existence of magic.

In April of this year, members of the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice underwent special training in the Eastern Province to investigate black magic crimes.

Although also found in Christianity and Judaism, casting spells is particularly common in Oman, Sudan, Yemen, Morocco and Indonesia. Turkey is a secular Muslim country, but protection against evil eye is deeply rooted in virtually all aspects of daily life. Tools of witchcraft include using lizards, dead birds, photographs, hair, thread, dirt, blood and red ink. Hiding places to place the “spell” may be in bedrooms and under beds. Written spells generally contain the intended victim’s name and one or two words to state the intention to do harm.

This article also answers a question I asked in the original anti-witchcraft squad article - if magick is officially forbidden in Islam, how does the anti-witchcraft squad go about breaking spells? The answer is that there are particular passages from the Qur’an that are believed to counter spells, so these passages are "read with reflection" in order to mitigate or remove the effects of negative magical influences. Which I would refer to as magick in its own right, of course, but as in many other religious traditions Muslims draw a line between magical operations that are sanctioned and those that are not.

Let's Try That Apocalypse Again...

2011-10-17T10:49:00.000-05:00

Here we go again, folks. Remember Harold Camping, who predicted the Rapture back in May? We held a party to wish the world farewell, but then at the appointed hour absolutely nothing came to pass. Not that I really expected it to, you understand, since dispensationalism is basically a bunch of nonsense, but still, you never know. Camping's claim was that the Rapture, the completely non-Biblical series of events in which devout Christians get levitated out of their cars and stuff, would happen on May 21st and then the world would end five months later, on October 21st. That's this Friday. Camping is insisting that his end-of-the-world prediction will still come to pass, even though his Rapture was a complete bust.

He has now claimed Judgement Day did happen as he predicted and that the earthquakes he had warned of actually referred to people being shaken by fear at the thought of the world ending.

Mr Camping added God had chosen who to save on May 21 and that his decisions will become clear when the judgement period ends next week.

And he had some bad news for those people who had not already saved their souls.

'We can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgment of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on October 21, 2011,' the preacher wrote on his Family Radio blog.

'On that day the true believers (the elect) will be raptured. We must remember that only God knows who His elect are that He saved prior to May 21.'

In lead-up to his predicted Rapture, Camping's ministry spent an enormous amount of money advertising his prediction. Once it was shown to be incorrect, he announced that he would not be doing the same for the October date and so far has kept to his word. At the time I noted that Camping had probably decided that he would rather keep all further donations coming in for himself rather than spending them to alert the world, which means that this whole apocalypse thing might just be a big con conducted for the benefit of Camping and his Family Radio Network. Only time will tell, I suppose, and by time I mean the next five days.

The Luckiest City in America

2011-10-14T11:11:00.000-05:00

One of the most basic premises regarding magick is that it operates in the material world through the manipulation of probabilities. In other words, most successful magical operations essentially involve increasing the caster's luck in some particular situation. Various magical traditions have proposed ideas such as "power spots" and "ley lines," places where this sort of manipulation can more easily be accomplished. English folklore has long maintained that the magical lines of force that run through Great Britain can be traced by drawing lines between various megalithic sites, but here in the United States that's much harder to do. Native Americans may have used a similar system at one time, but with so much of their culture wiped out by European colonization it's hard to determine what that system might have been.

The solution, it seems to me, is that we should make use of our modern understanding of mathematics and statistics to create our own maps outlining places where lucky events happen on a more regular basis. If done properly, this should correspond to areas in which magical operations work better if we assume a normal distribution of high magical aptitude throughout the American population. While I have yet to see a full map of their data, as it turns out Men's Health magazine did just that. The results? San Diego is apparently the luckiest city in America. Baltimore, Phoenix, Wilmington, and Richmond also were high on the list, which might be one reason Rufus Opus has so many more blog followers than I do.

"Luck is basically our modern world's magic," said David Zinczenko, editor in chief of the magazine. "People need to believe in luck because it allows them to give a name to the randomness of life, and when you name something, you have more power over it."

To determine the most charmed towns the magazine analyzed data about cities with the most lottery and sweepstake winners, the most hole-in-ones on the golf course, the fewest lighting strikes, the least deaths from falling objects, and the lowest debt due to playing the lottery and race betting.

"San Diego's multiple jackpot winners, its low lightning strike count, and its low number of lightning-related injuries and deaths helped push it to the top," Zinczenko said.

Las Vegas, the gambling capital of the country, and another betting hub, Reno, Nevada, also landed in the top 10.

"It is in the top 10," Zinczenko said about Las Vegas. "And you have to remember that there would be no Vegas if all of the gamblers were lucky all of the time."

At the opposite end of the spectrum Lady Luck was shinning the least on Charleston in West Virginia. It was the town with the highest rate of deaths from falling objects, with four times as many as San Diego, and had no lottery or sweepstake winners.

So are these differences the result of magical structures that underlie the North American continent? I would have to do a more detailed analysis to see if the distribution is essentially random or if some other geographical pattern appears to be at work. You never know, it could always work out that San Diego's good fortune has nothing to do with ley lines and everything to do with the incredible supernatural power of a guy in a chicken suit.

The Future of Masonry

2011-10-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

As a past master of Braden Lodge #168 here in Minnesota, I'm proud to see our lodge featured prominently in this article from the Wall Street Journal on the future of Freemasonry, and the role that the Internet is playing in attracting new members to the fraternity. I would also like to congratulate our own Brother Matt Gallagher on doing a great job representing Masonry to the general public. While many Masonic bodies are still declining, over the last five years Braden has experienced healthy growth thanks to an influx of younger members.

Secrecy gives Masonry its mystique. Yet the Masons have lately realized that they'd be lost in oblivion if it weren't for the Web.

"I looked for pictures," Matt Gallagher was saying of his Internet search for a Masonic lodge worth joining. "I really wanted to avoid a bunch of 80-year-olds."

It was Thursday evening, almost time for fellowship night at the "very young" lodge he finally did join: Braden No. 168, housed on a shady street in a columned temple the Masons built in 1910.

Mr. Gallagher is 32 years old and between jobs. He was initiated by Braden in 2009, rose to Master Mason and now is lodge education officer.

It's a post that didn't exist for 290 years after Masonry came out of its historical shadows, in 1717, as a London club for enlightened gentlemen. Mr. Gallagher's Masonic tag, if his digital function had one, might be Worshipful Webmaster.

"I started a blog, Facebook, Flickr," he said, descending a narrow stairway to a faded meeting room with its old pool tables and portrait of brother George Washington. "I want video essays on our site," he added. "People need to know what they're getting into."

It's also worth noting that I'm not the only member of Braden who is also involved in the local body of Ordo Templi Orientis, and that there are quite a few additional members who are interested in ritual and esotericism of various sorts rather than simply treating the lodge as a sort of glorified social club. Besides a strong Internet presence and a younger membership, as I see it this serious approach to Masonic ritual and philosophy is part of what makes our lodge special.

The Braden Lodge web site is currently in the process of being revised and updated, but the new version should be available soon. You can find it here.

Psychic Theft

2011-10-12T11:59:00.000-05:00

While there are sincere people in the world who manage to make a living employing psychic abilities, stories like this one give a lot of credence to the notion that a significant percentage of those who claim such powers are little more than hucksters looking for a quick buck. A psychic working in Palmdale, California has been arrested and charged with convincing a 12-year-old girl to steal $10,000 worth of jewelry for her in exchange for lifting a curse that the psychic claimed had been placed on the girl's family.

Jackeline Lopez is accused of convincing the girl that horrible things would happen to her -- and her family -- if the so-called curse was not removed, Los Angeles County sheriff's officials said. Lopez told the girl that she could remove the spell for a monetary price, officials added.

Over the course of a month, Lopez encouraged the girl to bring jewelry from her parents' home in order to perform a ritual, officials said, adding that Lopez continually claimed the amount provided was not enough to remove the curse.

"Lopez allegedly conducted these psychic readings in her home's garage which she had decorated with numerous candles, chalk outlines, black caldrons, replicated human skulls, beads, dolls, and other similar items consistent with psychic readings," sheriff's officials said in a news release.

Eventually, the girl's parents noticed the missing jewelry and confronted her about it.

Lopez was arrested on charges of extortion and booked on $35,000 bail.

There are two big red flags here, which is probably why the victim of this scam is only twelve years old. First of all, there's no evidence whatsoever that prior to the diagnosis of the "curse" the girl and her family encountered any sort of unusual misfortune. Second of all, if a twelve-year-old girl came to me terrified that a curse had been placed on her I might just go ahead and perform a ritual to counter it for free, or at most charge an hourly rate similar to what I charge my IT consulting customers. It certainly would come to a lot less than $10,000.

After all, it's not like the spirits need the money. But apparently this confidence artist did.

Witch Fight

2011-10-11T14:31:00.000-05:00

Witchcraft accusations are common throughout much of the world, but I don't generally don't expect to see them taken very seriously by most people raised in Western nations. So this report out of England is surprising, to say the least. I also think this accuser is a little confused about the meaning of the term "white witch," in that she seems to think it involves casting curses.

Imogen Hope, 37, was given a conditional discharge today after being found guilty by a court in Halifax, northern England, of assaulting Samantha Pilling and branding her a "white witch", The Yorkshire Post said.

A drunken and shouting Hope banged on Ms Pilling's door after returning home with new husband Keith from their wedding reception in the early hours of July 19, according to the Halifax Courier, then launched her attack.

Police were called by Ms Pilling's husband - who also grappled with Keith Hope - and arrested the new bride. They asked if she wanted to change out of her bloodstained wedding dress before being taken into custody, but she chose to wear the gown to the cell where she spent her wedding night, while her crestfallen husband stayed with his parents.

Hope, a nursery assistant who weighs just 50kg, had drunk lager and spirits before the altercation and told the court she could not remember landing three blows on mother-of-three Ms Pilling, leaving her with facial bruising and scratches.

The women's families have a long-running feud and Hope had accused Ms Pilling, a practicing pagan and student nurse, of putting a curse on her father-in-law - who lives in a house between the two women and their husbands and was recently diagnosed with cancer.

The difference between this happening in England versus certain other parts of the world? It ended with the accuser's arrest rather than an angry mob burning down the victim's home. Also, from the police report it sounds like a lot more alcohol was involved than is usually required in places where belief in malefic witchcraft is more of an accepted cultural belief. Granted, I don't think it's impossible that a curse could have been cast on Hope's father-in-law, but I do think it's unlikely. This strikes me more as a situation in which Hope found out Pilling was a pagan and decided that had to mean she was up to no good.

Amish Beard Wars

2011-10-10T10:16:00.001-05:00

Here's one of those stories that you just don't expect to see. The Amish, whose religion is normally based on humility and non-violence, are in the middle of a conflict that has already claimed the beards and hair of far too many. Apparently within the Amish community a bishop has arisen who fancies himself some sort of cult leader and has been ordering his followers to attack their fellows, returning with cut hair as proof that they carried out the attacks as instructed.

The attacks are meant to be degrading because Amish women do not typically cut their hair and married men usually grow beards as part of their religion, which traditionally shuns many modern amenities. The feud is believed to be the result of unspecified "spiritual differences," according to the Tribune-Chronicle.

The local sheriff, Frank Abdalla, explained to the paper just how serious the attacks are: "One Amish man told me he’d rather be dead than have his beard cut off."

Local police say that several of the victims have suffered minor injuries, although no charges have been filed, largely because of their reluctance to file police complaints. Community members have, however, reached out to the local sheriff in a bid to end the violence, and investigators intend to file charges of assault and burglary, according to the AP.

According to the Tribune, the group allegedly behind the violence is led by bishop Sam Mullet, who requires his follower to bring back clippings of hair as "proof" that the attacks are carried out. Attackers are both male and female, and in at least one instance have been sent to the homes of close relatives within the main Amish community.

So this guy is commanding his followers to go out and cut hair, and his name is actually Mullet. That's priceless. Still, it just goes to show that even a strict religious system like that of the Amish has its share of crazies. Now that charges are being pressed, hopefully Mullet will wind up in jail before he can harm anyone else.

UPDATE: Ohio police are moving quickly and have started making arrests related to these attacks. It sounds like Mullet himself, though, remains at large.

My New Book Cover

2011-10-07T10:16:00.001-05:00

I guess it's just the season or something. A few days ago Jason Miller posted the cover of his new financial sorcery book, and then last night Pendraig sent me mine for Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy. So here it is.

I still don't have a firm date as to when it will become available for purchase, but it's on its way to the printers so it should be pretty soon now. I'll post another link as soon as it's out, so watch this space for more details.

UPDATE: I just checked out RO's place and he has a new eBook available as well. 'Tis the season indeed!

An Exhibition of Amulets and Talismans

2011-10-05T16:55:00.000-05:00

If you happen to find yourself in London between now and February 26th of next year, here's an interesting exhibition that's going on at the Wellcome Collection. It's called "Miracles and Charms" and includes various amulets and talismans collected around a century ago.

Once carried around in the pockets of Londoners, the 400 quirky objects were amassed about a century ago by an Edwardian banker and amateur folklorist, who collected curious objects from sailors, costermongers (fruit sellers), and "mudlarks", children who once scavenged along the muddy banks of the River Thames.

"The objects themselves look ordinary but are actually extraordinary when you look at them carefully. They are a slice of life and there is something wonderful about them," head of public programmes at the Wellcome Collection, Ken Arnold, said.

I wish I could make it there myself, as I would enjoy having an opportunity to check and see how much magick is still present in the various objects after so many years. I've often wondered how much difference various materials make in terms of how long such a charm will last, and a collection like this provides a decent sample set.

In addition to four-leaf clovers and horseshoes for luck, the collection includes some more peculiar charms, inspired by folklore, ancient belief systems and a fear of witchcraft.

Mole feet would prevent cramps, a shrunken sheep's heart pierced with nails would protect cattle from witchcraft, and delicately carved hands from coral and shell were believed to avert the gaze of the evil eye.

The other question, of course, is the degree to which these objects work as advertised. Living traditions generally do a fairly good job of passing on effective lore, but at the same time a little scientific investigation couldn't hurt.

Neuroscience on Evil

2011-10-03T18:25:00.000-05:00

Slate has a piece up today discussing the current neuroscientific perspective on the problem of evil. I have a degree in experimental psychology, so I generally find myself in agreement with neuroscientists with one key exception. The vast majority of neuroscientists tend to view consciousness as an epiphenomenon of neural activity - that is, simply what we experience as the result of having a whole bunch of neural firing going on in our heads. From this perspective, will or consciousness does not initiate activity but rather reflects whatever activity happens to be going on in the brain. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one. It implies that we are essentially slaves to our brains, with no ability to change, evolve, or improve ourselves. As a magician, I find this to be a worldview vastly at odds with both my philosophy and my own direct experience.

Of course, people still commit innumerable bad actions, but the idea that people make conscious decisions to hurt or harm is no longer sustainable, say the new brain scientists. For one thing, there is no such thing as "free will" with which to decide to commit evil. (Like evil, free will is an antiquated concept for most.) Autonomous, conscious decision-making itself may well be an illusion. And thus intentional evil is impossible.

Have the new neuroscientists brandishing their fMRIs, the ghostly illuminated etchings of the interior structures of the skull, succeeded where their forebears from disciplines ranging from phrenology to psychoanalysis have failed? Have they pinpointed the hidden anomalies in the amygdala, the dysfunctions in the prefrontal lobes, the electrochemical source of impulses that lead a Jared Loughner, or an Anders Breivik, to commit their murderous acts?

And in reducing evil to a purely neurological glitch or malformation in the wiring of the physical brain, in eliminating the element of freely willed conscious choice, have neuroscientists eliminated as well "moral agency," personal responsibility? Does this "neuromitigation" excuse—"my brain made me do it," as critics of the tendency have called it—mean that no human being really wants to do ill to another? That we are all innocent, Rousseauian beings, some afflicted with defects—"brain bugs" as one new pop-neuroscience book calls them—that cause the behavior formerly known as evil?

The whole article is quite interesting, even though I disagree with its general conclusion. There's really too much to summarize except to add that it really makes no difference whether you call bad actions the result of brain dysfunction or evil intent from a social perspective. If you have a criminal who has demonstrated a desire to harm others, wherever that desire comes from, he or she needs to be removed from society. This is the basic function of prison - to keep the rest of us safe from such individuals. Many criminals do show decreased functioning in areas of the brain that control impulses, but at the same time it is possible to engage in activities with the express goal of improving your brain's executive function. That's much of what working magick is all about.

On the one hand, Thelema rejects the notion of metaphysical evil in much the same way as these neuroscientists do. From moment to moment, True Will is simply True Will and the right course of action is to follow it wherever it leads. On the other hand, in Thelema it is also considered essential to discipline the mind and the will so that an accurate impression of the nature of True Will can emerge, free from the limitations of condititioning programs that are essentially reactionary in nature rather than a manifestation of the authentic self. If there is in fact no such thing as Will, it would seem that Thelema is a pointless pursuit, but on the other hand, self-discipline is generally necessary in order to achieve the greatest possible success in life. Maybe that's why The Book of the Law so emphatically states that "Success is thy proof." When a method works it works, regardless of what you decide to call it.

Wait, Travolta is Immortal Too?

2011-09-30T12:45:00.003-05:00

According to various disreputable sources the world is secretly run by a cabal of powerful individuals with access to advanced spiritual and magical technology, such as the Philosopher's Stone that confers immortality. Recently actor Nicolas Cage was outed as a member of this secret society when a photo from 1870 emerged that appears to depict him. Now a second member has been identified - actor John Travolta, seen here in this photograph from 1860. This picture from Metro shows Travolta's face next to that of the man in the photograph, and actually it's a better match than the one of Cage.

The seller is asking for $50,000 for the ruby glass ambrotype photograph, which he says could be proof that John Travolta has been 'reincarnated' (not into a new being but an identical body, presumably).

'I believe this is the photograph of a very young John Travolta taken around 1860,' said the eBay seller. 'Of course, time travel can't be ruled out as well.'

Travolta is a highly-placed member of the Church of Scientology, the religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard to protect his Dianetics system from the Food and Drug Administration and at the same time relieve its adherents of their life savings in the most efficient manner possible. However, the actor's presence in 1860 reveals deeper and darker connections. After all, there was no Church of Scientology in the 1860's, and if the group really had access to time travel they would have sent an agent back in time to murder the founders of Operation Clambake two decades ago. So perhaps he is in fact an operative secretly inserted by the ruling cabal into Hubbard's organization - you know, to keep an eye on things.

Joking aside, here's a question for magical practitioners. In a room full of thirty people what are the odds that two of them will have the same birthday? Common sense would suggest that it's unlikely, but in fact if you try it as an experiment in probability you will find that the odds are quite good. This is because you can't think about it as the odds that any one person will share a birthday with somebody else in the room (29 picks from 365 for odds of 12.5 to 1 against or .08). Rather, you have to weigh those odds for each possible pair in the group and add them together (which works out as 1 - (365!/335!)/(365^30) = .71). So the real chance of two people sharing a birthday in a room full of 30 people is around 70%, much more likely than most people initially guess.

This same principle is also applicable to these celebrity doppelganger photographs. If you pick out a celebrity and ask what the odds are that in the many thousands of nineteenth century photos there will be one that looks just like them, the odds will of course be low. But what's going on here is comparing two large pools of individuals ([people photographed in the nineteenth century] with [current celebrities]). That two relatively close matches have been found so far should not be seen as surprising in that light. Given the odds, there are likely to be more out there. Understanding these sorts of probability exercises is also important for evaluating the probability shifts produced by magical operations, since calculating the shift is pointless if you have the probabilities wrong to start with.

Not A Christian Nation

2011-09-29T12:29:00.000-05:00

The notion of the United States of America being founded as a "Christian Nation" is quite popular among certain groups of conservative Christians. One of the most recent manifestations of this is the DC40 project, an effort led by a group of Christians who follow the teachings of a philosophy called Christian Reconstructionism. They believe that Christians have a special duty to take control of government and all other social institutions and establish a legal framework based on the Bible - in effect, implementing a sort of Christian version of Islamic Sharia law. According to their rhetoric this sort of society would be remarkably close to the one that the Founding Fathers envisioned. They also believe that the constitution's establishment clause has been misinterpreted to create the idea of a "separation of church and state" that the founders never envisioned and which is antithetical to their original goals.

In fact, though, the use of "God" in America's various founding documents implies nothing of the sort, and before I became a Mason this was not a usage that I fully understood. While it is true that not all of the founding fathers were Masons, many including George Washington were. Others like Thomas Jefferson were not, but nonetheless shared the same Enlightenment view of spirituality that inspires the fraternity to this day. In Masonry, the term "God" is generic, representing whatever deity each individual Mason professes a belief in. This is one of the biggest problems conservative Christianity has with Masonry - the fact that even if you personally happen to be Christian, when you participate in a Masonic prayer you might be praying with Jews, Muslims, Pagans, Hindus, or for that matter Thelemites like myself, all conceptualizing "God" in their own particular ways.

When the United States was established no religious denomination was declared as a state church, and that posed a problem for colonists who were used to a spiritual dimension being present in public life. All of the major European nations had state churches, but because America was founded in part on the ideal of religious freedom the establishment clause was included in the constitution to prevent the new nation from ever having one. Instead, the role that state churches played in European society was taken up by Masonry in the early days of the Republic. Here was a system that was spiritual, but at the same time inclusive and amenable to the new American sensibility. So when you see "God" in our country's founding documents, you should not immediately assume Jesus. Depending on the reader, it might just as well mean Zeus or Vishnu or Ra-Hoor-Khuit - and all of those would be valid readings.

This is the fundamental misunderstanding behind movements like DC40, which is essentially an attempt to use a form of Christian sorcery to enshrine this error into law. Christian Reconstructionism would be a dangerous ideology to magical practitioners like me if it ever became widespread, so it seems to me that as magicians our own special duty is to employ whatever powers and abilities we possess to oppose this nonsense. Despite making a lot of noise and managing to attract media attention, these groups remain a small subset of the larger conservative Christian community, and my suggestion to readers is that this would be a great time to conjure up whatever we can to make sure that they stay that way. In the end I actually tend to agree with conservative commentators who point out that only a small percentage of Americans will ever accept the society envisioned by Reconstructionists, but at the same time with movements like this one it's good to make sure.

I can't even quote the DC40 web site without a lot of work because it's mostly a bunch of pictures and media that looks suspiciously commercial. But if you're interested in checking out their "Prayer Guide" you can download it here. Be warned - it's a PDF and it's quite large. The Cliff's Notes version: it starts off with some reasonably good instructions on how to direct prayers, but then moves on to various statements of intent that when taken as a whole constitute an incoherent mess that a properly constructed spell will slice like a knife through butter. When the forty days start up this coming Monday, here's hoping that's precisely what happens.

Anti-Witchcraft Squad Proves Deadly

2011-09-28T12:06:00.000-05:00

When I last wrote about Saudi Arabia's anti-witchcraft squad my tone was mostly humorous, suggesting that the organization could be the basis for a television pilot featuring mismatched buddy cops who happened to be in the business of hunting down sorcerers and breaking spells. At the end of the article, though, I noted that since "witchcraft" is a capital offense in Saudi Arabia part of the squad's job is to round up people who could be killed simply for practicing their spiritual beliefs. Last week this is precisely what happened, as a Sudanese man convicted of practicing sorcery in 2007 was executed despite protests from Amnesty International.

A Sudanese man convicted of sorcery was beheaded by sword on Sept. 20, in Medina, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Gazette says the Interior Ministry issued a statement saying the African had “’Practiced witchcraft and sorcery,’ which are illegal under Shariah law.”

Abdul Hamid bin Hussein Mostafa al-Fakki, a migrant worker from Sudan, was arrested in 2005 in Medina on charges of witchcraft, by the Mutawa’een, the religious police known as the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. His trial was held in secret in 2007 and according to Bikyamasr al-Fakki was found guilty of “Producing a spell designed to lead to the reconciliation of his client’s divorced parents.”

It doesn't surprise me at all that al-Fakki was a migrant worker from Africa and therefore had little status in Saudi Arabian society, since for centuries witchcraft persecutions have usually fallen upon those with few resources to fight back against the authorities. I'm also very glad that I live in the United States, because if I lived in a country like Saudia Arabia I could probably be charged and maybe even executed just for writing blog entries discussing my ongoing magical work.

For the sake of religious freedom I hope that attitudes in Saudi Arabia surrounding alternative spiritual beliefs change, but I can't say that I'm holding my breath. After all, this is a country where a woman driving a car is considered a serious criminal offense. In light of that, what chance do magicians really have any time soon?

Crisis Apparitions

2011-09-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

CNN has a piece up today on "Crisis Apparitions," one of the most common paranormal experiences. We've all heard stories about seeing visions of loved ones at the moment of their deaths, and in fact these sorts of ghost stories make up a pretty high percentage of the reported sightings. They certainly are much more common than tales of aggressive ghosts driving people from their homes, even though these more extreme tales tend to be the ones featured in movies and Discovery Channel paranormal series. Still, the CNN article includes a number of stories that are quite engrossing in their own right, and their greater frequency means that perhaps they can give us greater insight into the nature of paranormal experiences than the more occasional accounts of poltergeists or angry spirits.

"We don't know what to do with these stories. Some people say that they are proof that there's life after death," said Steve Volk, author of "Fringe-ology," a book on paranormal experiences such as telepathy, psychics and house hauntings.

Scientific research on crisis apparitions is scant, but theories abound.

One theory: A person in crisis -- someone who is critically ill or dying -- telepathically transmits an image of themselves to someone they have a close relationship with, but they're usually unaware they're sending a message.

Sometimes you just sense the presence of someone close to you, and it seemingly comes out of nowhere.

Others suggest crisis apparitions are guardian angels sent to comfort the grieving. Another theory says it's all a trick of the brain -- that people in mourning unconsciously produce apparitions to console themselves after losing a loved one.

As I mentioned in my recent article on the anatomy of the mind, memory can be a tricky thing. We can't always be certain that what we recall is exactly what we experienced. I can imagine a scenario in which a person may be thinking of a loved one around the time they died, because most of us think about our loved ones quite often. When he or she later becomes aware of the loved one's death, the memory gets recast so that it is recalled as a full-scale apparition. That, at least, is the explanation most skeptics are comfortable with.

Still, the stories keep coming in and it's clear that some sort of unusual effect is going on, whether it's a quick of memory or an actual telepathic link. Scientific investigation is difficult because these events are so seemingly random, but if you find yourself having an experience along these lines that strikes you as unusual the best thing to do is what magicians do - write down a short account of what happened right away. That way you know that what you're remembering is what really happened, and if the account contains information that you could not possibly have known at the time you wrote it you will then have solid evidence of a genuine paranormal experience.

The Four Classical Powers

2011-09-26T10:31:00.000-05:00

I made a brief mention of using the four classical powers in elemental work over at Robert's place a couple of weeks back. I have found that many magicians, even some who make fairly extensive use of the classical elements in their work, are often unfamiliar with how the powers fit into the elemental schema used in modern magick. Much of the material in this article is adapted from John Opsopaus' Ancient Greek Esoteric Doctrine of the Elements, which I highly recommend that all modern ceremonialists familiarize themselves with in order to better understand how the elements relate to each other.

The doctrine of the elements began with the ancient Greeks, notably Empedocles and Aristotle. Empedocles proposed that four basic powers or qualities could be found in the natural world. These powers are Warm, Cool, Moist, and Dry. Warm and Cool are complementary powers, as are Moist and Dry. Aristotle went on to explain the nature of these powers in greater detail. The Warm power separates things, while the Cool power unites them. The Warm power also represents expansion and the Cool power represents contraction. The Dry power gives objects form and rigidity, while the Moist power is receptive and adaptive to its surroundings. Warm and Cool are considered active powers, whereas Moist and Dry are considered passive powers.

Aristotle further hypothesized that the elements of nature are what scientists now refer to as the states of matter, and that they arise from the four powers. The combination of these powers gives us the four classical elements, in the following manner:
As Earth consists of the other three elements in addition to itself, in effect Fire, Air, and Water have dual attributions, to Netzach, Hod, and Yesod respectively and also to Malkuth. The powers, as basic qualities of the natural world, are attributed exclusively to Malkuth, though they may be represented on the Tree of Life along with the elements for the purposes of the pentagram rituals. In terms of the four Qabalistic worlds, the powers represent Assiah, the material world, and the elements represent the joining of Yetzirah, the formative world, with the material world. In terms of the parts of the soul, the powers represent the Nephesh or animal soul and the elements join the Nephesh with the Ruach, or intellect.

Aristotle explained several ways in which one element could be transformed into another. Elements that share a common property can be reversibly transformed into each other depending upon the quantities involved. For example, since Water and Air share the Moist property, Water can be transformed into Air by exposing it to a greater quantity of Air, but if the amount of Water is increased so that the quantity of Water becomes greater, the transformation can be reversed and the Air will be converted back into Water. Also, a mixture of opposed elements can be irreversibly transformed by exposure to a third element. For example, if a mixture of Fire and Water is exposed to Air, the result is that the Fire and Water will be transformed into Air, taking the Warm power from Fire and the Moist power from Water. Opposed elements cannot be directly transformed into each other, but must instead go through the intermediate stage of transformation into and adjacent element.

Understanding of the primary and secondary powers is the key to understanding the interactions of the elements, as explained by Raymon Lull, who extended Aristotle's system. When two opposed elements interact, either Water and Fire or Air and Earth, they neutralize each other, producing a result that is either one or the other depending upon the quantities involved. However, if the quantities of the opposed elements are precisely balanced, they unify instead of negating each other. This union of opposites leads to the accomplishment of the Great Work of alchemy. Most magical orders seek to trigger this process in their initiates using the solve et coagula process. The elements are first isolated and developed, which is the solve phase of the work. Once this is complete, the coagula phase consists of invoking all four elements, and thus the two opposed pairs, in a balanced configuration in order to elevate the consciousness of the initiate into the sphere of Tiphareth.

The interaction of unopposed elements yields a result depending on the primary and secondary powers. For example, the process of evaporation can be explained as the interaction of Water and Air. The Warm power of Air negates the Cool power of Water, leaving the Moist power, which the two elements have in common. The result is Air, because it is primarily moist. The process of dissolving a solid, such as a salt, into a liquid solvent can be explained in the same way. The Moist power of Water is negated by the Dry power of Earth, leaving the Cool power. The result is Water, because Water is primarily Cool. Earth extinguishes Fire because the warm power of Fire is negated by the Cool power of Earth, resulting in Earth because Earth is primarily cool. Finally, combustion may be explained as Fire interacting with Air, in which the Moist power of Air is negated by the Dry power of Fire, resulting in Fire because Fire is primarily warm. Lull referred to these relationships as the “cycle of triumphs,” in which Air triumphs over Water, Water triumphs over Earth, Earth triumphs over Fire, and Fire triumphs over Air

A second cycle attributed to the powers is the organic cycle, which describes the processes of nature as they occur throughout the year. The vernal equinox corresponds to the Moist power, as it is the season of rain and melting snow. The moist power then gives way to the Warm power, which corresponds to the summer solstice, when the Sun is at its highest point. The Warm power gives way to the Dry power, corresponding to the autumnal equinox as it is the season in which life goes dormant in preparation for winter. The Dry power then gives way to the Cool power, which corresponds to the winter solstice, when the Sun is at its lowest point. Finally, the Cool power gives way to the Moist power at the Vernal Equinox and the cycle starts all over again.

All of these cycles and relationships between the powers and the elements are shown in the figure above, based on a diagram which first appeared in John Opsopaus' The Ancient Greek Esoteric Doctrine of the Elements. The diagram also shows the standard symbols for the elements and powers. I have modified the color scheme presented by Opsopaus so that the four elemental symbols are shown in the Golden Dawn colors, and the four power symbols are attributed to colors using a scale that I have developed based on the attributions of Hermetic Qabalah.

The powers have the following associations.

Warm - Analyzing, discriminating, separating
Cool - Loving, creative, unifying
Moist - Receptive, changeable, flexible
Dry - Grounded, stubborn, inflexible

In order to integrate the powers into the Golden Dawn elemental system, I have developed a color scale that includes both the powers and the elements. According to the Golden Dawn system, the following colors are attributed to the four elements.

Fire - Red
Air - Yellow
Water - Blue
Earth - Green or Black

This leaves two more secondary colors in addition to black and white. These remaining colors actually fit the powers quite nicely, according to the attributions of Hermetic Qabalah. I have attributed them as follows.

Warm - Orange
Cool - White
Moist - Purple
Dry - Black

The Warm power, as the power of discrimination and analysis, has a clear affinity with Mercury, the planet representing intellect. The natural color for the sphere of Mercury, Hod, is orange. The Cool power, as the power of union and unification, has an affinity with Kether, the sphere corresponding to the number one and therefore the point on the Tree of Life where all things merge together into a single whole. The natural color for Kether is white. The Moist power, corresponding to changeability and adaptability, has an affinity with the Moon, which represents shifting emotions and feelings, and also the chaotic unconscious mind. The natural color of the sphere of the Moon, Yesod, is purple. Finally, the Dry power, which is the power of giving form, has an affinity with Saturn, the planet of structure and containment. The natural color of the sphere of Saturn, Binah, is black. These attributions allow the powers and elements to be represented without any duplication of colors.

The process of internal alchemy can be augmented significantly by an informed application of these powers. By invoking the powers individually it is possible to accomplish the transformation of the various elemental aspects of the personality with greater precision. In practice, many magicians work with the four elements as if they embodied their primary powers, but treating the elements in this manner can lead to confusion stemming from the natures of the secondary powers which will also be present when an element is invoked. If what you need in your life is attributed to one of the four powers, it is far better in invoke it directly.

Florida Animal Sacrifices

2011-09-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

My "magick using dead things" file just keeps getting bigger. Authorities in Florida are concerned over a growing number of animals that are turning up dead, apparently sacrificed in some sort of ritual context, over the course of the last year. The animals involved include goats and chickens, many of which have been found decapitated.

Just days ago, people in Port Saint Richie awoke to chicken feet tied with ribbons around their door knobs. Residents there speculated, "They're supposedly into Santeria or voo-doo."

Last Halloween, headless goats and chickens covered a Miami street, prompting neighbors to tell reporters, "It looks like witchcraft, some type of Santeria."

In Tampa several months back, a string of headless animals turned-up along the Bay at the eastern end of the Courtney Campbell Causeway. Coastal clean-up volunteers gasped at the discovery, calling it "gruesome."

June 23rd, a security guard found a cow's tongue in a box with 100 nails driven into it just outside the Hillsborough County Courthouse.

July 3rd, Sheriff's deputies found another box outside the Falkenburg Road Jail. This one held a white goat, two baby chicks, a rooster, and a dove -- all headless.

Back in July I covered those last two incidents here.

While there are a lot of Santeria practitioners in Florida, Dr. Mozella Mitchell of the University of South Florida explains that these sacrifices are not the result of conventional Santeria practices, but rather negative magical operations intended to produce specific effects. Mitchell is the chair of the department of religious studies at the university.

Those type of rituals and sacrifices, Dr. Mitchell says, are not associated with Santeria. She says they're individuals practicing some kind of black magic: trying to cast a hex to stop a liar, to free someone from jail, even curse someone with years of bad luck. In the worst cases, Mitchell says it can be someone practicing black magic to kill someone else.

"The powers in nature can be used for either good or evil," Dr. Mitchell says, "And there are those individuals who are evil and want to hurt other people and to use these various forces in nature to play tricks on people and hurt people, damage people." When we asked if any of that can actually happen, Mitchell quickly responded, "Yes, it can be accomplished. It can be accomplished."

I have to admit, it's nice to see an academic who takes magick this seriously. Many approach esoteric studies from a more skeptical perspective. It remains to be seen if there is any pattern to these sacrifices and if they are connected in some way. Could some sort of magical battle be underway among Tampa's magical practitioners? I suppose only time will tell whether or not they continue at the present rate.

Moon Bible Being Auctioned

2011-09-22T10:52:00.000-05:00

If you happen to be both a spiritual book collector and a space enthusiast like me, and also have a lot of extra money to spend, the perfect item for your collection is being auctioned tonight in New Hampshire. It's a King James Bible rendered onto microfilm that was brought to the Moon and safely returned during the Apollo space program. From a magical perspective that makes it one of the few holy texts in the world to have traversed the path from Malkuth to Yesod and back again.

A rare Bible that's been to the moon and back will have a new owner Thursday night - the complete King James version, framed in gold leaf, is under the hammer at an auction house in New Hampshire.

But whoever takes it home won't be able to leaf through it. It's a piece of microfilm, with the text of 1,245 pages shrunken down to the size of a postage stamp.

"It's the whole King James (Bible) on there. It's really cool," says Bobby Livingston, vice president of sales and marketing at RR Auction, which is handling the sale.

The Bible was taken into space three times before it reached the lunar surface, he said - first on Apollo 12, when it was stored in the wrong part of the spaceship and orbited the moon, but didn't land on it, then on the ill-fated Apollo 13, which had an explosion on board that forced it to turn back, and finally on Apollo 14.

If this Bible were in the form of a book that could be paged through it would be especially amazing, but given the expense of shooting something that weighs even a pound or so into space the microfilmed version was really the only way to go. I also find the series of mishaps surrounding this particular Bible interesting from a magical perspective. It's almost as if some spiritual force didn't want it to find its way to the Moon, but what to make of that I have no idea. Perhaps the flow of Mezla was simply more difficult to overcome than anyone expected.

The Anatomy of the Mind

2011-09-21T12:51:00.000-05:00

I presented a version of this article last week at my Masonic Lodge, Braden #168 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The version published here has been edited to remove specific references to the Masonic degrees, but most of the material remains intact. Readers of this blog should find my basic thesis relatively familiar, as I have written on this topic several times before - notably here and here.

Presentation: Modern neuroscience has reached some interesting conclusions regarding the workings of the mind, especially over the course of the last decade. One of the most important of these is that the psychoanalytic model, in which an “unconscious mind” directs our thoughts and actions, is probably completely wrong. There are brain functions that can be considered “unconscious,” but those functions lack the sort of coherence that would put them even remotely on par with our normal conscious awareness. Similarly, dreaming is not some “gateway to the unconscious” but rather a consolidation process in which memories are sorted and recombined.

The basic anantomy of the mind can be thought of as three distinct systems that work together. The first of these is the declarative mind, or thinking system. This is the portion of the mind that operates according to the general laws of reason and which processes information in the form of thoughts. When somebody asks you what you are thinking about, your answer is what your thinking system is currently processing. The second of these systems is the emotive or feeling system. This is the portion of the mind that produces emotional states. When someone asks you how you are feeling, what you are describing is the current state of your feeling system, whether you’re happy, sad, bored, frustrated, and so forth. These first two systems can be thought of as the “conscious” mind, in that you are always aware of what you are thinking and how you are feeling.

The third system is the conditioning system, which operates according to the principles of behaviorism. The conditioning system is essentially like a machine – its function is to repeat behaviors that have been positively reinforced. Because the conditioning system has no goals and does not think, the behaviors that it prompts can prove problematic. Often, when you do something and are left thinking “why on earth did I do that?” the usual answer to that question is that the behavior was reinforced at some point in the past. This system operates unconsciously, but to call it an “unconscious mind” is a mistake. It does not think in any declarative sense, and lacks the overall internal coherence that we generally associate with the concept of “mind.”

Taken together these three systems constitute what I sometimes think of as the “golden triangle” of consciousness. What we experience as a coherent mind arises from the interaction between them, and they can work together or they can get in each others’ way. If you ever have been in a situation where you have needed to do something difficult or uncomfortable but which nonetheless needs to be done you know how the feeling system can conflict with the thinking system. On the other hand, when you’re in a situation where what you need to do is also rewarding and fun you know how it feels when they work together.

When Masonry was founded the conditioning system was not well-understood. Pavlov was working with dogs in the late nineteenth century, but it was not until the twentieth that behavioral psychology really came of age. The idea of subduing one’s desires and passions is rooted in older ideas that Sigmund Freud integrated into the theory of psychoanalysis, the Victorian concept that the personality is simply a collection of wayward drives that must somehow be channeled into a socially acceptable framework. According to this model what we experience as our "conscious mind" is just the tip of a vast iceberg, with limited power to manage the whole of the personality.

Modern science tells us that this is simply not the case. I will submit that one of the key goals of the Masonic system is training our conditioning systems to work in harmony with our long-term goals rather than producing behaviors that sabotage them. Constantly working to restrain the behaviors that our conditioning system is telling us to repeat is draining and difficult, and there is an easier way – exploit the laws of conditioning ourselves and reinforce those behaviors that we know will lead to success.

So how do we do this? Psychologists have defined two basic types of conditioning, classical and operant. Classical conditioning is based on the work done by Ivan Pavlov in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He discovered that physiological responses could be conditioned in such a way that they could be triggered by a previously neutral stimulus. In his most famous series of experiments, he would present food to dogs and at the same time ring a bell. Once he had repeated this action enough times, he found that he could just ring the bell on its own and the dogs would salivate as if they had also been presented with food.

Operant conditioning is more useful for structuring one’s life. It essentially consists of conditioning goal-directed behavior through reinforcement, and is based on the work of John Watson and B.F. Skinner that went on during the middle of the twentieth century. A simple operant conditioning experiment involves a rat placed in a cage with two levers, one which dispenses food and one which does not. The rat will quickly learn to press the food lever whenever it is hungry and completely ignore the lever that does nothing.

Changing up this experiment demonstrates a practical method for managing our own conditioning systems. If the scientist sets the food lever to stop dispensing the rat will continue to press it for awhile and eventually give up. In behaviorism this process is called extinction and it is quite slow. Once the rat has been conditioned it will keep pushing the food lever for some time, even though no food is forthcoming. Humans often do exactly the same thing, repeating behaviors in adulthood which were reinforced in childhood but which no longer serve any purpose.

If the experimenter’s goal is to get the rat to start pressing the other lever and stop pushing the first one it is far easier to set the non-food lever to start dispensing food. As soon as the rat bumps into or incidentally trips the new food lever and realizes that it dispenses food, it will mostly ignore the first lever right away. This is because forming a conditioning loop is much faster than breaking one. So the key to re-aligning your conditioning system is to reinforce a different behavior in response to the same stimulus, which is much faster and much more efficient than simply suppressing undesirable behavior loops.

There are really only two rules that you need to keep track of when trying to reinforce yourself. The first is that whatever form of reinforcement you choose should be genuinely rewarding to you. It can be as simple as eating a piece of food that you really like, or as complex as replacing an undesirable behavior with one that you really like to do. The second is that the reinforcement should immediately follow the new behavior. The power of reinforcement is directly proportional to how quickly it follows the desired behavior, and even a few minutes will reduce its effectiveness substantially.

In Masonry and other mystery traditions, initiation also exploits the conditioning system. Research has found that in completely unfamiliar situations in which we have no idea what to expect a state is created called cognitive dissonance in which the conditioning system essentially puts itself into overdrive. One of the best ways to condition a person is to put them in a situation in which their awareness is heightened and nothing that is happening can be anticipated. This forms an ideal environment for impressing upon a candidate the basic tenets of Masonic philosophy. This is why in any mystery tradition it is a bad idea to read through a degree that you are about to take ahead of time. Knowing what is going to happen usually undermines the ritual's effectiveness.

Now in addition to the conditioning system, the feeling system can also act in ways that are in conflict with our goals. Its interaction with the conditioning system can produce fear responses based on prior experience which may or may not be relevant to your current situation. This is possible because the feeling system is closely tied in with memory, in that what is called a feeling-tone gets logged with every memory you form. So when you remember something you don’t just remember the content, you also remember how you were feeling when the memory was formed. If that feeling is unhappy, recalling the memory can “bring you down” and make you unhappy in the here and now.

This would seem to suggest that we are to a degree governed by our past emotional states, and for many people this is indeed the case. However, one of the most surprising things about feeling-tones and memories is that they are not fixed. A study that was completed only a couple of years ago showed that every time you recall a memory, it gets rewritten and its feeling-tone merged with your current mood. This is extremely counter-intuitive, in that we tend to see our personalities as relatively stable through time. The reason it seems that way is that your mind tends to call up memories with feeling-tones similar to your current mood. But like the conditioning process, this one can be worked with as well.

Emotive processing is more complex than conditioning and does not follow as regular a set of rules. However, I have worked out a couple of interesting tricks for managing memory. The first is to think about unpleasant memories when you are happy or in a good mood. The first few times you do this, you likely will make yourself feel worse, but if you keep in mind what you are doing it eventually can work very well. The unpleasant memory will be recalled, and then written back into long-term storage with a mixture of the original feeling-tone and the one in which you recalled it. The next time you remember it, the negative feeling will not be nearly as strong.

The other trick is more radical. You can use it to in effect erase a negative memory. In my experience the memory itself won’t be completely gone, but it will fade to the point where it hardly ever comes to mind and its details become hazy. The trick is this – when you recall a memory, there is a delay of around thirty seconds before it gets written back. If, in that interval, you can completely distract yourself with something unrelated to the memory you’re trying to get rid of, the “writeback” portion of the process will be interrupted and the memory will be slightly weakened. You usually need to do it a number of times to get the full effect, but once you do it’s remarkable.

Again, this is another piece that flies in the face of psychoanalysis, which was build on the idea that memories are stored forever and we only can’t recall everything that ever happened to us because the mind is somehow actively repressing them. This is not the case – memories fade all the time, and really all you have to do is keep yourself from thinking about them. Rather than “bottling up” the emotion, the lack of attention essentially “starves” the negative memory and over time it will eventually almost disappear.

This brings us to the final system of the three, the thinking system. Once you understand how the other two systems work, you’ll realize that the thinking system is remarkably easy to manage. If you want to think about something else, think about something else. Unlike the other two systems, the thinking system is full amenable to the activity of the will most of the time. Usually when you get stuck in a “loop” ruminating over something what’s going on is not that your thinking system is unable to disengage, but rather that it is continually receiving signals from one or both of the other systems.

One more word about the psychoanalytic model here – the key to understanding the thinking system to realize that what you are thinking is what you are thinking. This seems simple, but our cultural acceptance of the psychoanalytic model has obscured this simple truth for a long time. The idea that you have to constantly doubt yourself, wondering what you might “really” be thinking, is one of the biggest time-wasters out there because in the end there is no “really.” At one moment you might think one thing and at another moment you might think something else, but they both are real as long as they are present in your thoughts.

The basis of much Masonic practice is the cultivation of consistency and integrity in terms of one’s thoughts and actions. This is facilitated by the study of the liberal arts and sciences and the contemplation of the essential qualities of nature. The ease by which the thinking system can move from idea to idea can produce both ignorance, in which facts are disregarded based on arbitrary criteria, and hypocrisy, in which contradictory thoughts are not followed to their logical conclusions and resolved into a coherent worldview. Both of these are impediments to functioning optimally in most areas life.

It should be obvious from all this, then, that success in life is directly related to these three systems and how well they work together. When you have a goal that you wish to pursue, all three should be employed in a way that serves your objectives through the application of reflection, self-discipline, and reason. I would like to conclude this presentation with a quote from Liber Librae, one of the instructional texts from my own spiritual tradition of Thelema.

Fixed thought is a means to an end. Therefore pay attention to the power of silent thought and meditation. The material act is but the outward expression of thy thought, and therefore hath it been said that “the thought of foolishness is sin.” Thought is the commencement of action, and if a chance thought can produce much effect, what cannot fixed thought do?

Therefore, as hath already been said, Establish thyself firmly in the equilibrium of forces, in the centre of the Cross of the Elements, that Cross from whose centre the Creative Word issued in the birth of the Dawning Universe.

Discussion: One of the key points brought up in the subsequent discussion of this presentation is that since the conditioning system can perform some relatively complex tasks, perhaps my statement that it "does not think" is inaccurate. First of all, I believe that much of this criticism is related to terminology, in that in this presentation I define "thinking" in a very particular way, as declarative reasoning. If you instead are defining "thinking" as "any coordinated activity done by neurons" then, really, everything the brain does is "thinking" and you're left without any useful distinction between the three systems.

It's much like coining the term "emotional intelligence," which many parents embraced in order to convince themselves that their charming but otherwise stupid children could still be called "smart." I point this out not to downplay the importance of social skills, which are extremely useful and strong predictors of success in life. The problem is that treating any specific collection of skills as "intelligence" pretty much ignores the way that the term has been used for much of the last century, in addition to the debates surrounding it in cognitive science and testing theory.

There is also a more functional objection that I did gloss over in this presentation for the sake of brevity, the concept of assimilation. The conditioning system does not only run simple loops like the rat does with levers and food pellets, but in fact can link together whole series of complex behaviors that may be reinforced as a group. Driving a car is a good example. Remember how hard driving was when you were first learning? You had to think about things like where each foot went, how far you had to turn the wheel, when to hit signals, and so forth - but now if you're like most adults you just do it without thinking about much of anything besides where you want to go.

This is because all of the complex behaviors that make up driving have been linked together as a set of loops that the conditioning system can mostly run on its own. Walking is a similar process that has proven extremely difficult to program in robots despite its apparent ease. When these loops are running there are constant adjustments that need to be made in order to respond to the environment, such as when you suddenly find yourself walking over uneven terrain or in the middle of a traffic situation in which you are trying to avoid an accident. However, when I talk about the conditioning system lacking goals or motives what I am talking about is the fact that when adjusting for environmental conditions it remains essentially reactive in nature.

I think that comparing and contrasting this idea with the "unconscious mind" model will demonstrate the point I am trying to get at. In psychoanalysis your unconscious mind is conceptualized as having its own motivations that may differ from those of the conscious mind. It could even be "plotting against" the conscious mind, and initiating behaviors out of a desire to sabotage anything the conscious mind attempts. Freud explored this idea in the The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and it kind of amazes me that it ever caught on because when you explain it like that you can see that the whole idea is pretty silly.

But what people do experience is that the conditioning system can react to stimuli with behaviors that are maladaptive to a particular environment or circumstance. What the thinking system tries to do is fit various memories of these events into some sort of a narrative, when in fact the only "narrative" at work is that at some point in the past each maladaptive behavior was reinforced. So the tendency is to repeat them, whether or not taken together they make any sense - and because the conditioning system lacks coherence they usually do not.

Nicolas Cage: Immortal?

2011-09-20T13:41:00.000-05:00

This photograph recently listed on eBay has been making the rounds through the blogosphere. According to Jack Mord, a dealer in antique images, the photograph is of actor Nicolas Cage, and constitutes proof that Cage is some sort of immortal undead creature. Of course, Mord is asking a million dollars for the otherwise old but ordinary photo, so how objective could he possibly be?

The eBay listing for the photo reads: 'Original c.1870 carte de visite [a type of small photograph] showing a man who looks exactly like Nick Cage.

'Personally, I believe it’s him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire... who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so.

'150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.'

Morgan, meanwhile, weighed in yesterday with his own theory that rather than being a vampire, Cage is in fact an alchemist who has discovered some magical means of prolonging his life. Supporting Morgan's contention over Mord's is Cage's role as an ageless wizard in The Sorcerer's Apprentice and his producer role on The Dresden Files television series. And in fact, he very well could have been winking at the audience all the way through Vampire's Kiss - because, remember, in that film he didn't play an actual vampire, but rather a man suffering from some sort of vampire delusion.

Unfortunately for Jack Mord's million dollar payout, a close look at the face in the photo next to a picture of Cage reveals that while the two men have similar appearances they are not the same person. In the picture above from Metro, look where Cage's chin falls relative to that of the man in the antique photo. Adjusted so that their eyes are at the same level and their faces are of similar widths, you can see that Cage's face is much more oblong. Also, note the downward turn of the man in the antique photo's left ear. Both of Cage's ears lie flat against the sides of his head.

So the resemblance is most likely just a coincidence. It's also possible that this man might be a distant relative of Cage's, but sadly there's no way that he's an immortal.

Amish Men Arrested Over Safety Triangles

2011-09-19T10:39:00.001-05:00

Religious groups like the Amish that aschew modern technology have always fascinated me, at least in part because I'm such a technophile myself and the worldview seems so foreign to me. Recently a group of Amish men in Kentucky were arrested because they refused to place orange safety triangles on their buggies, and then refused to pay the subsequent fines. The men claimed that the triangles violate their religious beliefs.

A judge sentenced them to between three and 10 days in jail by Graves District Court, Kentucky for non-payment of fines on religious grounds.

The men said paying the fines would amount to complying with a law they believe violates their beliefs against wearing bright colours or trusting in manmade symbols for their safety.

The sentences varied depending on individual fines and court costs, which ranged from $148 to more than $600.

In respect of the their religious beliefs, the jail ordered dark-coloured jumpsuits rather than the usual orange versions.

As you can see from the photograph above, Amish buggies are practically invisible on the road after dark without the reflective triangles, so it's easy to see why traffic laws require them. Even if these men aren't concerned about their own safety there are still other motorists to consider. And while they may not make use of modern technology in their personal lives, whenever they use a modern paved road they certainly are taking advantage of the better pavement that can be laid using current machines.

What I find confusing about the Amish worldview is that they don't live without any technology at all, but rather pick and choose based on what happened to be current in the late nineteenth century. Amish clothing is based on what would have been considered "plain" during that same period, but at least for men changing styles have meant that at times similar clothing has been considered the height of fashion. I personally own a white collarless shirt that when paired with a black jacket looks more fancy than wearing a brightly colored tie, not less. However, in many Amish communities it would be a completely acceptable outfit.

At any rate, I hope that some resolution to this situation can be found that will take into account these men's religious beliefs and still protect motorists from running into buggies after dark. Maybe large white reflectors? Those at least would not incorporate bright colors.

The World's Worst Noah's Ark

2011-09-14T14:56:00.000-05:00

Take a look at the picture above. What is it? Part of a grain silo? A smokestack? Some kind of holding tank? Unless you guessed "Noah's Ark," you're flat-out wrong. A while back I reported on Johan Huibers, a Dutch man who has built an enormous replica of the Ark using the dimensions and instructions found in the Bible. This Ark, on the other hand, was cobbled together by a Chinese welder and turned out looking considerably less impressive.

Kho Jian, a metalworker from Louhe in Henan province, central China, is designing and building the craft using re-salvaged and converted oil tanks.

The 'Noah's Ark' will come at a cost of £20,000, and will be fitted with a range of mod-cons including a kitchen and bathrooms.

It will also use technology that is employed for space travel in order to keep it watertight - while also providing doors and windows.

'He believes we are heading for a world flood and he wants his own ark to save himself and his family,' said Kho, who aims to have the finished craft ready for delivery soon.

'He even wants wheels on it so he can tow it around and never has to risk being away from his ark for when the disaster comes.'

Here's the part I really don't understand. This thing is supposed to be 30 feet long and judging from the door in the image maybe 8-10 feet around. That's not very much space. 20,000 British pounds is about $30,000, and let me tell you, for that amount of money you can buy a used houseboat complete with trailer that's both bigger and a lot more comfortable. I know, because I was pricing them out last spring. So what's the point? If you want a boat and you have that much money sitting around, just buy a boat.

At the very least we can take comfort in the fact that China is nowhere near closing their Ark technology gap with the West.

The World's Most Famous Satanist?

2011-09-13T18:59:00.000-05:00

For anyone out there still wondering whether or not Tyler Durden of Fight Club fame is a Luciferian figure, actor Brad Pitt spilled the beans at a recent press conference. Discussing his latest film, Pitt explained that he owes his success to a pact with the devil! Here's the actual quote:

"I related it more to my upbringing, I grew up in a very Christian environment -- a very healthy environment and a loving a family -- but there were parameters that I didn't understand, that I questioned it, and it took me until my adult years until I could really try new things... That was satanism, it works really well, I made a pact and the movie came out, so... No, you're really dealing with certain things as you grow up and you've got to try things on for yourself and really figure out what works for you and what doesn't. I just relate to that time, it's a very personal time, it's a comfort system and you cut the tether and find yourself very on your own with nothing to hold on to."

Now, as you can see Pitt quickly implied that he was joking, but come on, that's exactly what a real Satanist would do! Also, note that his serious answer, about finding what works for you and not worrying about having anything to hold on to, is pretty much straight-up Luciferian philosophy.

Satanist or not, Pitt is right about one thing - he's a huge star, so whatever he's doing indeed "works really well."

Another Damn Vampire

2011-09-12T11:00:00.000-05:00

When I declared it to be shark-jumping season in vampire land it seems that I wasn't kidding. Three weeks ago a young man who claimed to be a 500-year-old vampire was arrested in Texas for attacking a woman and attempting to drink her blood. Now another vampire attack has been reported in Florida just in time, I suppose, for the True Blood season finale.

Milton Ellis, 69, told police in St. Petersburg, Florida, that he and Josephine Smith, 22, met on the street and went to the porch of a vacant restaurant to get out of the rain. He said he fell asleep in his motorized wheelchair and woke up to find Smith on top of him.

Ellis told authorities that she said, "I'm a vampire. I am going to eat you" and then began to bite him.

According to a police affidavit, Ellis was bitten on his arm and lips, leaving him bloody before he was able to escape and call police. He was later treated with stitches at a local hospital and released.

After arriving at the scene, police said they found Smith bloody and half-naked nearby, but that she had no memory of what happened and did not identify herself as a vampire, St. Petersburg Police spokesman Mike Puetz said.

I suppose it goes without saying that both the Texas man and this Florida woman are likely suffering from serious mental problems. Because they totally aren't vampires, at least not the sort who are centuries old and burn up in the sun. Some people who suffer from certain types of anemia do crave blood and sometimes describe themselves as vampires, but Dracula and the entire modern vampire genre it spawned are fiction only vaguely based on the original European vampire mythos. There's nothing undead about either of these two troubled individuals, and I hope that they can get some psychiatric help before they injure anyone else.

Now THAT'S Saturn!

2011-09-09T10:45:00.000-05:00

Check out this awesome picture of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini space probe. That's not CGI, it's what the planet Saturn really looks like from that particular angle, with the sun behind it illuminating the surrounding rings.

Taken by NASA's Cassini robotic orbiter, the shot was captured from the dark side of Saturn as the Sun's bright rays illuminated every piece of dust and debris circling the planet. Cassini has offered astronomers a never-before-seen look at Saturn and revealed more information about the planet than any craft before it. The craft has taken so many pictures of the ringed wonder that they were recently made into a short flyby film that looks like it was created by George Lucas rather than a robotic space explorer.

In Qabalistic magick Saturn is related to Binah, which encompasses both the vision of wonder and the vision of sorrow. It's considered both an astrological malefic and the lord of initiation. And in this picture you can see all that, and so much more. This is going to become my magical image of choice for years to come.

The Cassini probe was launched in 1997 and took a further 7 years to reach Saturn's orbit. The total cost of its overarching objective of studying the ringed planet stands at a staggering $3.26 billion. However, the wealth of information it has wrought — including amazing pictures like the one above, and recordings of massive lightning storms on the planet — have already made it one of the best investments in space exploration. Hopefully Juno — which began a 5-year trek to Jupiter just last month — will bring us some equally stunning shots of Saturn's neighbor.

Let's just say that I'm really looking forward to seeing those photos of Jupiter, as they promise to be similarly remarkable.

Ghana's "Witch Camps" Disbanding

2011-09-08T10:41:00.000-05:00

On the issue of witchcraft persecutions many parts of Africa are still struggling to pull themselves into the 21st Century. One of these is the nation of Ghana, which for years has operated what are essentially concentration camps for accused witches. Most of the unfortunates who have been sent to the camps are simply the same poor or elderly women on whom suspicion generally falls across Africa, India, and other parts of the world in which such accusations are common. In a positive development, the government of Ghana is finally taking steps to disband these camps and release the prisoners housed there.

Government will soon disband all witches camps in the country. That’s according to Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Akwasi Osei.

He says the practice of confining elderly women who are banned from their communities to such camps infringes on their human rights.

His comments come on the heels of similar calls by Deputy Women and Children’s Affairs Minister Hawa Gariba.

The minister, who toured the Nyani “Witches” camp near Yendi in the Northern Region recently, described the camps as a national disaster.

Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Akwasi Osei told Joy News a national conference will be convened next week to address the issue.

He said there were about six witches camps spanning across the three northern region where mainly poor, old, desolate, sometimes childless women are held in the name of witchcraft.

“Never have you seen a man …being accused of [witchcraft] and being sent there; never have you seen a young lady, beautiful, resourceful being accused; it is always the defenseless, vulnerable woman and when they go there…there are literally ostracised from the society and they are starved, they go through a whole lot of things including child labour,” he stated.

Of course, those in charge of the running the camps are opposed to this move, but fortunately it sounds like the government has mostly made up its mind to shut them down.

But managers of some of these camps have urged government to be cautious in their approach to disbanding the camps.

Alhassan Sayibu, who manages the Nyani camp told Joy News the focus should be on educating communities against the practice.

Because, naturally, all of these accused witches are of course magical practitioners, at least in the eyes of camp officials. The truth is that witchcraft accusations have a lot more to do with blame heaped upon individuals who have low status in their communities following misfortunes that generally have nothing to do with paranormal forces.

Vampires at Sea

2011-09-02T10:42:00.001-05:00

In my last post about vampires I commented that their trend is due to reverse any time now. Here's more proof - a vampire cruise! Talk about cashing in on the fad! Cruises are expensive, but apparently there's enough demand out there to organize such an excursion. I thought I remembered something about vampires and running water, but maybe that only applies to fresh water. After all, Dracula traveled by sea to England in Bram Stoker's famous novel.

Hundreds of vampire enthusiasts will sail Alaska's fabled Inside Passage in a summer 2012 cruise tailored to their interests that combines gazing at glaciers with a late-night costume ball, organizers said on Thursday.

The "Vamps at Sea" cruise is scheduled for late June, which is a time of near-constant daylight in the far north.

"They've got curtains and they can block everything out -- so it can be as dark as we want it," said organizer Linda Wolf, president of Los Angeles-based agency Cruises Cruises Cruises Inc, who is herself a fan of the vampire genre.

Is it just me, or does this sound like the worst possible time for vampires to be on a ship? Near-total daylight? You would think they'd want to do it the other way around, traveling in the winter when there's near-total darkness. After all, vampires are impervious to cold.

Still, the Vamps at Sea cruise promises to be special, said Buckwheat Donahue, executive director of the convention and visitors bureau in Skagway, a historic gold rush town that is on most cruise itineraries.

"This is going to be fun," Donahue said. "I can't imagine what people are going to be dressed like coming off the boat."

The group will sail on a Holland America ship, the Zuiderdam, and will hit the usual ports of call such as Juneau, Glacier Bay and Ketchikan.

But there will be other special features, including a late-night costume ball, a scavenger hunt and a vampire talent show, Wolf said. There is also a literary angle to the cruise, with vampire-genre authors scheduled to speak, including a relative of the late "Dracula" writer Bram Stoker, according to the cruise website.

As an author, let me just say that the concept of a vampire named "Buckwheat" is both silly and awesome in so many ways. I may have to use that in a story at some point. As far as the cruise goes, some of the events sound interesting to me as I am a fan of the literary vampire genre, but doing them in the company of a bunch of people who are running around in goofy goth makeup and constantly asking if they can bite my neck makes the whole thing sound like a lot less fun than it might be otherwise.

"Witch Craze" Seminar in Australia

2011-08-31T16:20:00.000-05:00

Here's an event that makes me wish I lived a little closer to Queensland, Australia than, you know, halfway around the world. Next week the University of Queensland will be hosting an academic seminar at its St. Lucia campus on the "witch craze" that went on in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The seminar will feature Professor Philip Almond from the Centre for the History of European Discourses, who has published several recent books on the subject.

During the period there were many demonic acts reported. On one occasion, a Lancashire Assizes court was told by one young female witness of the involvement of her grandmother and aunt in a sordid tale of murder, cannibalism and sexual misdemeanour.

During the lecture, Professor Almond will provide answers to many of the questions most commonly asked about the period.

Discussion points include Satanic cults, the persecutions of witches, witchcraft and the role and actions of demonologists during the period.

His most recent books in witchcraft and demonology include Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early modern England (2007), The Witches of Warboys (2008), and England's First Demonologist: Reginald Scot and the Discovery of Witchcraft (2011).

His latest book The Lancashire Witches: Politics, Persecution and Murder in Early Modern England will be published in 2012 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Lancashire witch trials.

So far I haven't had a chance to read up on Almond's work, but from the titles listed it sounds like they cover a lot of interesting material. Most academics who study these persecutions focus on the social forces that led community outsiders to be accused of witchcraft, and there are many countries in the world today where similar forces are still at work and causing a lot of harm. As a magician, I'm also interested in whether or not the accused may have been engaged in esoteric practices that met with disapproval from community and religious leaders - and how well those practices really worked.

Taking the "Wizard" Out Of "Triwizard"

2011-08-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

Back in April I commented on the inexplicable phenomenon of Muggle Quidditch, in which players run around a field with brooms that can't actually fly clutched tightly between their legs. At the time, it seemed to me that this was a case of Harry Potter mania gone too far. The whole idea is ridiculous. I mean, what's the point of trying to fly on a non-flying broom? Recently a similar idea showed up at Valdosta State University in Georgia - a "Triwizard Tournament" that involved no wizardry whatsoever.

Reade Hall is divided into four sub-hallways, two for each gender. This year, the Resident Assistants of Reade have adopted a Harry Potter theme for the entire residence hall. Each smaller hallway within Reade is decorated to reflect one of the four Hogwarts Houses: Gryffindor for the upstairs girls’ hall, Ravenclaw for the upstairs boys, Hufflepuff for the downstairs boys, and Slytherin for the downstairs girls.

As an icebreaker activity to start the school year, the Reade RA’s put together a competitive event this past Sunday which they nicknamed the “Triwizard Tournament.” Though the name is not necessarily accurate, the residents of Reade undertook a series of field-day style events, competing for points toward their respective Houses. These events included a broomstick race, an orange-passing relay, and a game of Dragon Tag among other games.

“My favorite game was ‘Gorilla, Man, Gun’,” said sophomore Engineering major Sarah McGrew, “-because I won serious House Points for Slytherin!”

Wow, that all sounds so magical - NOT. It sounds more like elementary school physical education. Now I do know that real magical contests, like trying to see who can produce the best evocation manifestation, or shift a quantum diode the most, or most effectively divine some unknown piece of information using the Tarot probably seem pretty boring to kids used to fantasy-novel spellcasting. Nonetheless, I keep holding out hope that one of these days a Harry Potter-inspired event will come along that involves something other than silliness.

So far that's turned out to be a real recipe for disappointment.

Another Thwarted Necromancer

2011-08-29T12:58:00.000-05:00

More from the Magick Using Dead Things file! German customs officials in Potsdam have confiscated a collection of ape body parts from an African-born man returning from the Congo. Officals believe that the body parts were destined for use in magical rituals, since in traditional African folk magick body parts from apes are believed to strengthen the effects of many ritual methods. And despite the man's claims, none of the parts seized sound particularly appetizing.

The haul - which included chimp heads, hands, internal organs and several penises - were discovered in the suitcase of African-born David Bueno, 41, who claimed he planned to eat them.

But contraband expert believe the parts were to be used in witchcraft and voodoo rituals where animal body parts are said to bring strength and power to believers.

A customs spokesman said: "This is increasingly common, sadly. These body parts are used in religious rites or medicine."

Bueno - who was on his way back from the Congo - is facing charges of trafficking endangered species.

It's interesting to see how deep the urge to deny involvement in magical practices goes with cases like this. The trafficking of endangered species is just as illegal whether you plan to eat them or cast spells with them, but Bueno nonetheless insists that his motive was the former. Of course, the fact that in Africa magical practitioners often wind up being killed by angry mobs is a pretty strong incentive not to identify yourself as a sorcerer or necromancer if you ever plan on returning to the continent.

Some African witch doctors go so far as to use body parts from human albinos in their rituals, so it's at least somewhat reassuring that Bueno appears to limit himself to apes. Still, with how close to extinction some of these ape species are African magicians should probably be busy researching alternatives if they want their school of magick to survive in the long term.

Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy Update

2011-08-26T13:24:00.000-05:00

Back in April I announced that my manuscript Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy had been accepted for publication by Pendraig Publishing. Since then we've completed the editing process and the manuscript has now moved on to layout. I still don't have a publication date, but the book is coming along nicely and I hope to see it available for purchase within the next couple of months.

Once it's in print Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy will be one of the few available titles on working practical magick with the Heptarchia Mystica, John Dee's grimoire that contains the conjurations and powers for the Kings and Princes attributed to the seven days of the week. This is the grimoire that may have helped to defeat the Spanish Armada in an epic battle that shaped the course of the British Empire for centuries, and the only portion of the Enochian magical system that Dee himself assembled into a grimoire structure. Based on the workings my magical group has done with the Heptarchia, it contains an extremely powerful and relatively unexplored system of magick.

Some of the information that will appear in the book consists of updated versions of material that was first posted here on Augoeides:

My thoughts on Angelic pronunciation based on Dee's original phonetic notations.
An overview of my Operant Field method of working with pentagram and hexagram rituals.
The AOEVEAE Enochian pentagram ritual and the MADRIAX Enochian hexagram ritual.
Creating magical fields with these two Enochian rituals.
The NAZ OLPIRT Enochian energy work exercise.
A completely updated version of my Heptarchial Ritual Template that has been reworked along technical writing lines to accomodate both modern and traditional grimoire practitioners.

In many ways this new version of the template is the section that I'm most excited about. Rather writing the book exclusively for either modern or traditional grimoire magicians, I have indicated where all the modern forms go if you want to use them, but also have included Dee's opening prayers for those who would rather use the grimoire as written and skip the pentagram rituals and so forth. Along with the template I include my own hand-drawn talisman designs that I use for the Kings and Princes, Dee's conjurations, modified versions of the original Christian prayers that are appropriate for Thelemic practitioners, and a number of other tweaks to the system that I have found to be very effective over the years.

I'm looking forward to the release of the book and I hope that many of you will be interested in checking it out. I'll post another update with a link as soon as it becomes available.

Inflatable Sacred Space

2011-08-25T10:16:00.001-05:00

Anyone who's been a member of a magical group knows that finding temple space can represent a serious challenge. Often you wind up stuck meeting in somebody's basement or garage, which leads to the problem of your group becoming too dependent on the one member who owns the space. That situation hardly ever ends well, and can produce some pretty serious douchebaggery. But Polish missionary priest Krzysztof Kowal has found a unique solution to the problem of providing a space for his Russian congregation to meet - an inflatable church!

Father Krzysztof, a Roman Catholic missionary from Poland, has had trouble gaining permission - and cash - to build a permanent place of worship in the Kamchatka peninsula - a 1,250-kilometre stretch located in far eastern Russia.

But long-time friend Robert Wojcik, who builds inflatable toys for children in Kolobrzeg, Poland, stepped in to help by offering to build a temporary church for the isolated congregation.

Money-raising efforts helped to pay for the alternative structure, which will remain open even in extreme conditions. During winter time, temperatures can drop to minus 40 degrees in the Kamchatka region.

There's no reason that an inflatable magical lodge couldn't be constructed along the same lines. You could build something custom with a bunch of Egyptian-looking features, or just go with one of the standard designs.

Now, there's still that whole issue of bouncing around during the circumambulations, but hey, that's what self-discipline is for - to keep everyone from laughing uncontrollably.

Real Witches Versus True Blood

2011-08-24T12:12:00.000-05:00

Why is it that whenever a fictional portrayal of magick becomes popular real practitioners seem to come out of the woodwork complaining that said portrayal is unrealistic? To my way of thinking people who get upset that fiction is fictional have way too much free time. While I will explain to beginning students that real magick is not like what you see in Harry Potter, that's mostly so they won't obsess about things like pronouncing words exactly correctly. I certainly have no problem with J. K. Rowling's books or their popularity - they're fantasy novels, and there are very few such novels that present magick with anything resembling realism.

The latest incarnation of this phenomenon surrounds the HBO television series True Blood, which this season features a coven of Wiccans opposing the vampires. Naturally, real witches are complaining about how unrealistically the witches on the show are portrayed - as opposed to, I suppose, the other denizens of the True Blood universe such as vampires, shapeshifters, fairies, werewolves, werepanthers, maenads, and so forth. As fan of campy horror films I do enjoy the show, but part of me keeps waiting for Djinni or Wendigos or who knows what else to show up that has nothing whatsoever to do with vampire folklore.

The series' fourth season has focused on Marnie Stonebrook (Fiona Shaw), a seemingly harmless medium and leader of a Wiccan group who becomes the physical conduit for Antonia, a long dead witch who is hellbent on vengeance against vampires who persecuted and burned her at the stake.

Marnie winds up as the mouthpiece for Antonia's spell to drive the bloodsuckers of fictional "True Blood" town Bon Temps into the daylight. And that sort of deadly revenge, say some modern-day witches, is what gives witchcraft a bad name.

"I'm absolutely disappointed with the portrayal of Marnie," said one witch -- and professor of biology at a college in New England -- who goes by the magickal name Taarna RavenHawk.

"When Marnie gives up her 'power within,' which is a witch's ability to practice the craft without harming others, it allows possession by Antonia who becomes the controlling entity. Marnie lets it happen. It's unconscionable a witch would act this way."

Because witches don't cast spells for revenge? Really? Based on the e-mail correspondence I receive from this site I would guess that money spells and love spells are probably more popular, but curses are up there too. Anybody who's lived in a town that's endured a "witch war" will tell you that witches most certainly do cast curses.

Elaanie Stormbender, a witch and mother of five who lives in Jackson, Mississippi, said all the members of the small community of witches to which she belongs are displeased with Marnie's behavior. "When witches invoke a spirit, they take precautions and retain full control to banish," she said. "Marnie didn't stay in control, so she's entirely to blame for giving herself over to being possessed."

Marnie's behavior also feeds into some people's fears about witches tampering with forces beyond their control, and the character's recklessness only reinforces this fear, said Stormbender.

While that's an accurate assessment of Marnie's actions, I don't think the show's writers are trying to frame it as a good thing - they're trying to show how much of a problem it is, especially in the latest episode.

Christopher Penczak, co-founder and president of The Temple of Witchcraft, a religious nonprofit organization based in southern New Hampshire that teaches witchcraft to students worldwide, also had concerns about Marnie's negative impact on the overall reputation of witches.

"Marnie does communicate with the dead but she comes into witchcraft lacking groundedness," said Penczak, author of "The Inner Temple of Witchcraft: Magick, Meditation and Psychic Development. "A witch who gets good training usually learns to balance that with discipline, strength and focus. I would have liked to see a witch who was more competent and had a clearer sense of will and purpose."

Another red flag for Penczak is how Marnie has begged spirits to enter her. He said modern-day witches don't look for spirits indiscriminately. In fact, they are very specific about what they want to summon. "They'd never say 'I'm opening the door to whoever wants to come through,'" Penczak said.

Being a witch is hard work, too, and a key complaint about Marnie is that she makes her job seem way too easy. Moreover, she actually raised the dead -- something real witches don't do. They just communicate with those who have passed on.

Well yeah, because real witches can't raise the dead. It's a technical issue, not an ethical one. But as far as inviting spirits goes it is true that the method here looks more like spiritualism than any style of witchcraft that I'm familiar with.

Suzanne, also known as Moon, a witch in Atlanta, Georgia, who declined to give her last name, has observed Marnie's huge appeal through the local online forum for solitary pagan practitioners that she created and manages.

"Since the new season of 'True Blood' began, I've seen an increase in new members who are in their teens and may be easily impressed by Marnie's display of power," she said. "It's dangerous when viewers think witchcraft, as Marnie does it, is so easy. For this reason she's a bad example."

And so is just about every other fantasy novel ever published. Just say a couple of magic words and you can do all sorts of stuff. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone you see an eleven-year-old Hermione repairing a broken pair of glasses, levitating a feather, and summoning sunlight out of nowhere pretty much on her first attempts just by pronouncing the proper phrases correctly. She studies a lot, but still it all comes remarkably easily. And that's the way fantasy novel universes work. True Blood is no different in that regard. Just as a point, how do we know that if vampires existed witches wouldn't be able to control them easily with spells? It's one of those meaningless questions like whether or not Balrogs have wings.

My advice to anyone bothered by unrealistic literary and media portrayals of magick is to write their own novel or film in which the magick can be more accurately represented. I did. Otherwise the whole argument is silly and pointless, because it should be self-evident that fiction will always be fiction.

Careful What You Pray For...

2011-08-23T15:34:00.001-05:00

As I've mentioned on numerous occasions, the difference between prayer and magick is mostly one of terminology. While there are some technical distinctions as well, such as the more complex forms employed by ritual magicians versus the intuitive approach that most systems of prayer tend to take, the basic idea is the same - the mobilization of spiritual forces to produce change in the world. Prayer does generally call upon a deity, but any school of magick that incorporates theurgy into its rites does the same thing, just in a more systematic way.

Back in April, Texas Governor Rick Perry declared a "weekend of prayer" for rain that would ease the ongoing drought in his state. The results of that weekend were not encouraging, though to be fair as a decent weather worker I can say with some confidence that the situation in Texas has been pretty dire all summer in terms of weather patterns for precipitation. If there's no moisture in the air you can't conjure rain, even if you can manage to slide atmospheric fronts around with impunity.

The thing is, that when all the elements are present it's important to be careful. It's all too easy to start something way more powerful and potentially destructive than you intend, and once a big storm gets going it's usually hard to stop until it runs its course. This last weekend at the Roman Catholic Church's world youth festival in Madrid, Spain stifling heat led the event organizers to pray for rain. The results were a lot more impressive than those in Texas - a freak thunderstorm forced the Pope to cut short his speech amidst the rain and lightning.

During the day, firefighters atop fire trucks had sprayed the crowds with water from hoses as pilgrims sought shade from umbrellas, trees, tarps and tents in a bid to stave off the near 40°C heat.

As night fell, a flash downpour drenched the crowd: With lightning in the night sky, the 84-year-old Pope was forced to skip the bulk of his speech and merely deliver brief greetings in a half-dozen languages.

Organisers told the crowd that they had asked for more water during the day when it was so hot and their prayers were answered. "With this rain, the Lord sends us many blessings," Pope Benedict quipped when he resumed his truncated remarks.

However, the storm proved much intense than the organizers likely intended, causing some damage to the venue along with a few injuries in addition to driving the Pope off the stage.

Six people were slightly injured when a tent collapsed. Some makeshift chapels set up on the field's perimeter were also damaged, forcing organisers to announce over loudspeakers that not everyone would be able to receive Communion during the main World Youth Day Mass.

Clearly there's still some magick in the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, but in the future it sounds like they need to be a little more careful how they wield it. Either that, or God's just less than happy with the current leadership and wanted to send them a message.

West Memphis Three Released

2011-08-22T10:55:00.000-05:00

Not all occultists remember the case of the West Memphis Three, but we should. When three young boys were found murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993 police investigators became caught up in what turned out to be one the last gasps of the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" panic. They identified three teenagers who had previously been in trouble with the law based on a rumor that one of the three had an interest in the occult, then obtained a confession from another after twelve hours of interrogation. The teen who gave the confession immediately recanted, claiming that he was coerced and threatened. Out of the twelve hours of questioning only the 46 incriminating minutes were recorded.

Prosecutors went to trial with what any reasonable person would consider a very weak case. They had no physical evidence linking the three teens to the murders, no murder weapon, and the only motive they proposed was "Satanic ritual," even though no evidence of anything occult was found at the scene. They managed to find a woman who claimed one of the teens had admitted killing the boys at a Wiccan meeting, but she could not remember anyone else who had been present or even where the meeting had taken place. Years later she would allege that police had threatened to have her child taken away unless she told them what they wanted to hear, and admit that she had made up the whole story. Despite all this, the teens were convicted of the murders.

After years of fruitless appeals and legal challenges the three were finally able to work out a deal with prosecutors that resulted in their release from prison after more than eighteen years. They changed their original pleas from "not guilty" to "no contest" in return for a sentence reduction to the eighteen years they had already served. Prosecutors likely took the deal because a new trial would require them to deal with more recent evidence, such as their witness recanting her testimony and new testing that shows none of the DNA evidence gathered at the scene match any of the three defendants, and the three likely took it because it meant getting out of prison right away instead of spending another year or more that a new trial could take.

The prosecuting attorney, Scott Ellington, said in an interview that the state still considered the men guilty and that, new DNA findings notwithstanding, he knew of no current suspects.

“We don’t think that there is anybody else,” Mr. Ellington said, declaring the case closed.

Asked how he could free murderers if he believed they were guilty, he acknowledged that the three would likely be acquitted if a new trial were held, given the prominent lawyers now representing them, the fact that evidence has decayed or disappeared over time and the death or change of heart of several witnesses. He also expressed concern that if the men were exonerated at trial, they could sue the state, possibly for millions.

So is this finally the end of the "Satanic panic?" Let's all hope so, especially those of us who study occultism and are open to the public about it. These days one would like to think that a case like the one prosecutors brought in the West Memphis Three murders would never result in a conviction, but the fact is that many people still see the occult as something scary and criminal even if all you are interested in doing is reading books on esoteric subjects. And some of those same people can wind up on juries.

Dude, You're Totally Not a Vampire

2011-08-19T11:04:00.000-05:00

Vampires in media and literature tend to follow a sort of cycle in which they become extremely popular for awhile, then fall out of favor, and then after a time start gaining popularity again. There was an upswing in the 1980's with Anne Rice, a hiatus through much of the 1990's, and then another upswing with the rise of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy went off the air in 2003, but at the same time the vampire mythos was being picked up in the novels of Charlaine Harris and a couple of years later Stephanie Meyer. Harris' novels were adapted into the HBO television series True Blood, capping a decade of the vampire's ascent.

We're finally getting to the point in the cycle where the vampire is set to decline once more. How do I know? Well, for starters, this. A 19-year-old Texas man has been arrested for breaking into a woman's home and trying to drink her blood, apparently convinced that he is a 500-year-old vampire.

Whether pop culture played a role in the attack remains to be seen, as 19-year-old Lyle Monroe Bensley awaits a psychiatric evaluation in jail on burglary charges in Galveston, Texas, southeast of Houston.

Found growling and hissing in a parking lot and wearing only boxer shorts, the pierced and tattooed Bensley claimed he was a 500-year-old vampire who needed to "feed," Galveston Police Capt. Jeff Heyse said.

Vampires have been a focal point of literature since Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, "Dracula". But fascination, particularly among young people, has peaked in recent years with the popularity of the "Twilight" books about teenage vampires and the HBO series, "True Blood."

"I think the vampire is a metaphor for the outsider and the predator in all of us," said author Anne Rice, whose Vampire Chronicles series has captured the imaginations of horror fans since the 1970s.

"We're all conscious at times of being alone, of being alienated, of being a secret self that fears exposure to the judgments of others. So we feel like vampires," she told Reuters.

Bensley is now being held in the Galveston County Jail on a $40,000 bond for home burglary with intent to commit a felony.

The woman, who lived about two miles from Bensley and did not know him, escaped the attack unharmed, Heyse said.

I guess if this guy was so easy to catch those super-special vampire powers must not have been working for him. Shouldn't he have been able to glamor the cops, or use super-speed to escape them, or just turn into a bat? Or is this guy some low-budget version of what we've all come to expect from the undead? The fact is that dangerous delusions about vampires tend to emerge when the archetype is at its peak, and this guy is totally not a vampire. It should be pretty easy to prove one way or another - just toss him into the sunlight and see if he explodes. Or, I suppose, sparkles, if you buy that Twilight nonsense.