Hobby Lobby Stole Gilgamesh

Well, sort of. The owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores are also the owners of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. As reported here on Augoeides, the museum got in trouble in 2017 and 2018 for displaying stolen artifacts. Now the museum is in trouble again, over a cuneiform tablet known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet that was stolen from Iraq.

U.S. federal prosecutors are seeking the return to Iraq of a roughly 3,500-year-old clay tablet purchased by the Hobby Lobby arts and crafts store chain for display in the Washington, D.C.-based Museum of the Bible. The cuneiform tablet is described as "stolen Iraqi property" in a civil complaint filed Monday.

The complaint details part of the journey of this fragment of the oldest known creation tale — from a palace library in ancient Mesopotamia to its present location in a Department of Homeland Security warehouse in Queens, New York. It alleges that a major international auction house, unnamed in the complaint, obscured the provenance of the tablet, known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, when it sold the tablet to Hobby Lobby in 2014.

Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations seized the tablet last year from the Museum of the Bible, which, it said, cooperated with the investigation. Hobby Lobby's owners are the founders of the Museum of the Bible. The prosecutors said the 5-by-6-inch tablet, which Hobby Lobby purchased for more than $1.6 million, is considered the property of the Iraqi government and should be returned.

How many times does somebody have to get in trouble over stolen goods before it becomes clear that they are a thief? I ask this because, as I pointed out in my previous articles, Hobby Lobby was able to obtain a "religious exemption" due to their "sincere religious beliefs" that allowed them to deny contraception coverage to their female employees.

Down With Satire!

I'm sure glad I don't live in Saudi Arabia. That's true for a lot of reasons. But today it's because back in September the country decided to criminalize online satire of religious values. I mean, I'm sure that if I lived there the anti-witchcraft squad would come for me long before the online satire police, but still. I do a lot of pointing and laughing at silly religious folks here on Augoeides and in Saudi Arabia I probably am breaking the law.

“Producing and distributing content that ridicules, mocks, provokes and disrupts public order, religious values and public morals through social media...will be considered a cybercrime punishable by a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of three million riyals ($800,000),” the tweet said.

The country’s cyber crackdown has raised concerns among human rights groups, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—son and heir to the elderly King Salman and considered the power behind the throne—seeks to maintain the crown's tight control of society.

The government has used broad anti-terror legislation to prosecute dozens of citizens for their online activities, much of it on social media platforms like Twitter. In September 2017, the government asked Saudis to report any social media behavior “harming the state's reputation.”

Authorities even repurposed an app—launched in 2016 to help civilians report traffic violations and burglaries—to make it easier for Saudis to report each other. Announcing the new initiative, the interior ministry tweeted: “When you notice any account on social networks publishing terrorist or extremist ideas, please report it immediately via the application.”

As if satire and terrorism are the same thing. Am I a terrorist because I'm funny? Obviously I don't think so. But the truth is that Saudi Arabia is a pretty messed-up place, with all kinds of ridiculous civil liberty restrictions including this one. Since the article is months old I have no idea how many people may have been charged under this new law, but even if nobody has it's still a problem. Laws like this let the police criminalize dissent, which at this point should be allowed in any modern nation.

This Noah's Ark Floats

Forget that piker Ken Ham and his "Ark Encounter" attraction. Anybody with enough money and free time can build a giant replica of the famous ark from the Bible. But whereas Ham built his in the middle of a field with no thoughts of any kind given to seaworthiness, Dutch businessman Johan Huibers built an ark replica that actually works - you know, as a ship. The vessel is currently parked in Holland and Huibers now has plans to sail it to Israel - a homecoming, as it were, for the recreated ark.

Devout Christian businessman Johan Huibers built the huge vessel, which has already sailed on Holland’s Maas River. He built the boat over five years ago to the exact specifications listed in the Bible – making it 390ft-long, 75ft-high and containing 12,000 trees worth of wood.

And now, he is ready to take it to Jesus Christ’s birthplace after announcing plans to set sail to Israel. He said: “My preferred destination for the ark is Israel. This is a copy of God’s ship. It only makes sense to take it to God’s land.”

Maybe that right there is the reason that Ark Encounter isn't attracting the attendance that Ham originally hoped for. I mean, it's a Noah's Ark and it doesn't float. He could have at least built it in a big pond or something, but I suppose given the many schemes that went into raising the money a functional boat was out. That means Ham is left with a Noah's Ark that just doesn't work - and really, that's kind of boring. At least the Creation Museum is supposed to have Jesus riding a dinosaur.

It remains to be seen how eventful the voyage to Israel would be. Huibers' ark collided with a Norwegian Coast Guard vessel back in 2016 in an Oslo harbor, and while neither ship appeared to sustain much damage it also is true that Noah didn't have to worry much about precision navigation. A ship shaped like the Ark is just plain unwieldy, which means that it will probably take some work to get it from the North Sea to the Mediterranean Sea and finally to the Middle East.

Still, with Huibers' Ark such a voyage is actually possible. With Ham's, not so much.

Hobby Lobby Returns Stolen Artifacts

For those of you who haven't been following along, I covered the story of Iraqi artifacts stolen by the owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores last summer. Coincidentally - or perhaps not so much - Hobby Lobby is the same company that argued before the Supreme Court that it had "strong religious convictions" that women should be deprived of health care coverage for contraception. As I noted at the time, apparently those "strong religious convictions" aren't so strong as to preclude the owners of the chain from engaging in the theft of more than three thousand artifacts looted during the fighting in Iraq.

But at least according to this article, the case has a (relatively) happy ending. The stolen artifacts are on their way back to Iraq, which is a good thing for the museums and universities that will see their collections returned. On the down side, Hobby Lobby worked out a settlement in which they admitted no wrongdoing and nobody went to prison.

The dealers working with Hobby Lobby falsely labeled the shipments as "ceramics" and "samples" and illegally shipped them to Hobby Lobby stores and two corporate offices, according to the DOJ.

Hobby Lobby's president last year opened a Bible museum in Washington said to contain some 40,000 biblical artifacts. At the time of its settlement with ICE and DOJ, Hobby Lobby said that it should have exercised more oversight in its acquisitions.

"In 2009, Hobby Lobby began acquiring a variety of historical Bibles and other artifacts. Developing a collection of historically and religiously important books and artifacts about the Bible is consistent with the company's mission and passion for the Bible," it said in the July statement.

"We should have exercised more oversight and carefully questioned how the acquisitions were handled," Hobby Lobby President Steve Green said in the statement. "Hobby Lobby has cooperated with the government throughout its investigation, and with the announcement of today's settlement agreement, is pleased the matter has been resolved."

The DOJ said Hobby Lobby had pledged to set up policies on the buying of cultural property, provide necessary training to its personnel, hire qualified outside customs counsel and customs brokers, and submit quarterly reports to the government on any cultural property it buys for eighteen months.

Santa's Grave

The modern-day version of Santa Claus has a lot in common with the version of Jesus found in modern Christianity. Santa Claus was originally based on a real historical person, Saint Nicholas, a Turkish bishop who lived during the fourth century and was known for helping the sick and the poor. However, Santa Claus has accumulated so much additional baggage over the last few centuries that he would be unrecognizable to anyone who knew the real Saint Nicholas.

Now Turkish archaeologists claim that they have discovered the grave of Saint Nicholas, and plan on excavating the site in order to confirm the existence of his remains.

Turkish publication Daily Sabah reported Tuesday that an undisturbed gravesite discovered under a church in the Antalya province may belong to the saint. The head of the province’s monument authority said the gravesite was discovered as archaeologists performed digital surveys of the ground below St. Nicholas Church. St. Nicholas Church is in Antalya’s Demre district, which is known as the birthplace of Santa.

“We believe this shrine has not been damaged at all, but it is quite difficult to get to it as there are mosaics on the floor,” Cemil Karabayram said, according to the Daily Sabah. Each tile in the mosaics has to be scaled, one by one, and removed as a whole, Karabayram said. He said he is optimistic that St. Nicholas’ remains can be reached.

Newsweek reported that the claims conflict with previous narratives that placed the saint’s bones, known as his relics, in Italy. Catholics and Orthodox Christians believe that the Basilica di San Nicola, in Bari, Italy, is where his remains lie.

St. Nicholas was initially buried in 343 A.D. at a church in Demre, but his bones were taken during the Crusades in the 11th century, Newsweek said. The belief was that the relics were taken to Italy at that time. Turkish experts now believe that the bones stolen centuries ago actually belonged to an anonymous priest, the news magazine reported.

I personally believe that the modern story of Santa Claus is a lot like what happened with the story of Jesus. Some historians believe that no historical Jesus ever existed, but personally I think it's more likely that there was a historical person who led the sect established by John the Baptist when he was imprisoned by the Romans. It's not even unlikely that his name was Yeheshua, as it was a common Jewish name of the period.

However, I also think that the Jesus story in the Gospels was compounded with so many additional mythological elements that many of the events attributed to him probably never happened - just like how the real Saint Nicholas never lived at the North Pole, flew around in a sleigh, kept reindeer, or distributed presents around the world. He apparently did have a white beard and gave poor children gifts, but that's where the resemblance ends.

Leaked Daesh Documents Really, Really Boring

Daesh, the Islamic State group currently waging a civil war in Iraq and Syria, has shown itself to be pretty effective at managing propaganda, portraying itself as an organization of religious purists fighting for their Islamic faith. However, continuing with Friday's "banality of evil" theme - or alleged evil, in the case of the Bohemian Grove - I came across this article posted on the aptly-named website War is Boring.

According to the article, a cache of leaked Daesh documents show the group to be little more than another petty bureaucracy. Not only that, despite the image put forth of a principled band of holy warriors, it seems that the group's recruiters did not particularly care how well new recruits understood Islam or how obedient to the faith they appeared to be. Much of the time, the questions regarding Sharia law and religious obedience were simply left blank.

The bulk of the files are personnel documents, a kind of job application or file a recruiter fills out when a fighter first joins Daesh. It’s basic — just 23 questions that tells readers all about the new recruit.

Name, address, blood type and birthday are all required. So is information about the wannabe jihadi’s family. The Islamic State also wants to know how its recruits made their way into the Caliphate, which routes they took and who recruited them.

The more interesting questions come later when the registrar must explain the applicant’s level of understanding of Sharia law, how obedient they appear and what special skills they possess. The people doing the paperwork often left these spaces blank.

Which is hilarious and humanizing. I immediately imagined two normal schmucks sitting at a table in a dry desert town. “Have you heard of Sharia?” the interviewer asks.

“No,” the other replies. “But I want to fight.”

“That’s OK,” the first responds. “I’ll just put you down as a ‘beginner.’”

So it would seem that in the end, Daesh is just another fighting force trying to carve out their own piece of the Middle East. The leaders of the group may consider it the vanguard of a new Islamic Caliphate, but as far as the recruits doing the actual fighting, how they see Daesh is anyone's guess. The personnel files sure don't help to make much sense of their attitudes, though the recruiters themselves don't seem to care much about who they're bringing in. I suppose they must have quotas or something, which override any real principles.

It leaves me wondering if all of Daesh's atrocities are simply a giant version of the Milgram experiment, in which the foot soldiers go about following orders without question because their commanders absolve them of all responsibility. It's especially easy to tell people that their religion demands they kill a bunch of people if they don't actually understand what their religion has to say about it.

Destroyed Iraqi Statues Were Replicas

Here's some good news out of Iraq, for a change. Back in February, Islamic State militants released footage of themselves destroying "priceless ancient statues" at a museum in the city of Mosul. However, it has now been confirmed that most of those artifacts were replicas of the originals, which are safely housed at a museum in Baghdad.

At the time the video was released, some experts noted that the statues in the video crumbled more like plaster than stone, and some appeared to be reinforced with modern metal poles. Also, it makes sense for museum officials to guess Islamic State might try something like this and replace the real statues. Still, now we know for sure.

The terrorist organisation released shocking footage at the end of February purportedly showing jihadis destroying 3,000-year-old artworks with sledgehammers in their northern Iraqi stronghold.

But now Baghdad museum director Fawzye al-Mahdi has ridiculed ISIS' propaganda exercise, claiming the genuine priceless Assyrian and Akkadian statues and sculptures are still safely in his possession in the Iraqi capital, adding that those in Mosul were plaster cast replicas.

Speaking to German news programme Deutsche Welle, Al-Mahdi said: 'None of the artifacts are originals... They were copies. The originals are all here.' The museum director's claims appear to back-up those made by experts on the Iraqi statues.

Within hours of the original ISIS propaganda video being released, analysts questioned why the statues appeared to crumble so easily. Others stated that they couldn't possibly be 3,000 years old as some of the are clearly held together by iron poles - a considerably more modern practice.

It shouldn't surprise me when fundamentalists have it in for artifacts created by previous faiths, but I suppose I find it as silly as a bunch of Christian extremists raiding a museum to smash statues of the Greek gods. Most people in our culture just see Greek mythology as history rather than a competing religious system. It should also be noted that even in the latter case, relative to both Christians and Muslims the number of Greek pagans is pretty minuscule.

If your faith is really so weak that you find it threatened by images that haven't been part of a widely followed religious system for hundreds or even thousands of years, maybe you should question your own devotion to your beliefs rather than trying to wipe out evidence of the history that came before. But clearly this simple observation is lost on these folks. I'm just glad that in the end the statues survived.

So Muslims Discovered America?

On November 15th Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech at a meeting of Latin American Muslim leaders challenging Christopher Columbus' supposed discovery of the Americas. Historians now agree that Columbus was not the first European to see or set foot in the Americas. However, Erdogan went on to explain that Muslims made contact with the Americas in 1178 AD, and therefore the Muslim world should be credited with the "discovery." While the Arabic world was more advanced than most of Europe in the twelfth century and a voyage from one of those countries would not have been strictly impossible, we know of no records indicating that one was ever undertaken.

Quoth Erdogan: “Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus….Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast.” The conservative Turk referred to a mention in Columbus’ diary of a hill in Cuba shaped like a mosque.

Spain was busy ejecting Muslims from Spanish land, pushing them back to the Strait of Gibraltar. The Moorish Kingdom of Granada surrendered to Spanish King Ferdinand V in 1492, the year that lives in infamy among the surviving Taino people in the Caribbean. Columbus would have known what a mosque looked like, but finding Muslims in the “New World” would have been a terrible calamity, since his King was at war with Muslims and his “right” to claim the land and enslave the occupants was based on the Doctrine of Discovery.

Erdogan’s remarks were met with derision among academics and quickly became a partisan political issue in Turkey. On November 18, The Guardian reported that Erdogan was doubling down, quoting him, “very respected scientists in Turkey and in the world…supported his claim. Some youth of our country have begun objecting to this without doing any research or paying attention to discussions.”

There are two serious problems here with Erdogan's assertion. The first and most significant is that America was actually "discovered" by the ancestors of modern day Native Americans, not Europeans. While the dark ages were going on in Europe, both North and South America were already populated by plenty of people. The second problem is that even if Muslims reached the Americas in 1178 AD, the Vikings did it around 1000 AD. They even established a settlement in what is now Newfoundland. The first Viking known to have landed in the Americas was Leif Erickson, who converted to Christianity just prior to his voyage. However, Erickson was following the voyage of Bjarni Herjólfsson, a Norse pagan who is believed to be the first European to see North America.

So the first European to see the Americas was pagan, and the first European to set foot on the continent was a recent Christian convert who himself grew up pagan. Christopher Columbus' voyages may have kicked off European colonization of the Americas, but they took place nearly five hundred years later. It's not clear who Erdogan's "respected scientists" are, and if he's going to make extraordinary claims like this he should at the very least name his sources.

Unknown God Discovered in Turkey

Archaeologists working at a 2000-year-old site in Turkey near the city of Doliche recently found a basalt stele that appears to depict a previously unknown deity. Enough is known of ancient religious practices that such discoveries are relatively rare, and this one appears to be from Roman times, a period for which a fair amount of historical documentation exists.

The deity is depicted on the stele as a bearded man surrounded by what appear to be images of leaves and vegetation, suggesting that the deity was associated with plant growth and fertility. They may also indicate an association with a particular plant. Some ancient cults grew up around the use of entheogens, and I can see where the image of the god emerging from the leaves might allude to the use of some such plant in a ritual context. Or perhaps the god was associated with a particular crop grown in the region.

The sanctuary’s grounds reveal much about the continuity of religious beliefs over time, as it is made up of various constructions and renovations of different time periods – from a wall from the Iron Age, and the Roman-age foundations from 2nd century A.D., through to its use as a Christian monastery in the time of the crusades. The excavation has revealed finds from all periods of the site’s history, now including a basalt stele featuring a unique Roman relief and depicting an unknown god.

The stele measures one and a half meters (five feet) and was being used as a buttress in a wall of the Christian monastery on the sanctuary site. Archaeologists suspect the image represents a fertility or vegetation god. AlphaGalileo quotes Dr. Michael Blömer from the Cluster of Excellence, describing the find, “The basalt stele shows a deity growing from a chalice of leaves. Its long stem rises from a cone that is ornamented with astral symbols. From the sides of the cone grow a long horn and a tree, which the deity clasps with his right hand. The pictorial elements suggest that a fertility god is depicted.” The beard composition and arm posture echo back to similar Iron Age depictions.

My first thought from the original description was that the "tree" to the deity's left might be a vine and that the "chalice of leaves" suggested Dionysus, but none of the leaves appear very grapelike and there are no actual grapes depicted on the stele. So that's most likely incorrect.

Assuming that the leaf images are not generic, identifying the particular plant they depict could provide some insight into the deity's true nature. Hopefully, as the excavation continues more evidence will come to light that will help archaeologists learn more about this unknown god and the practices associated with his worship.

No Muslims on Mars?

In an effort to spur interplanetary colonization, Dutch company Mars One is planning a mission to Mars in 2023. The catch is that while the technology exists to get travelers there, without some major breakthroughs between now and then it will be a one-way trip. Mars doesn't have the infrastructure that would allow colonists to build a return rocket, so anyone who opts to go may very well be stuck there for the rest of their lives. This doesn't sit well with the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the United Arab Emirates, which has issued a fatwa against Muslims participating in the Mars One mission.

Promoting or being involved in a one-way trip to the Red Planet is prohibited in Islam, a fatwa committee under the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the UAE has ruled.

“Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam,” the committee said. “There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.”

Whoever opts for this “hazardous trip”, the committee said, is likely to perish for no “righteous reason”, and thus will be liable to a “punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter”.

The committee, presided by Professor Dr Farooq Hamada, said: “Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe is an issue agreed upon by all religions and is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Quran: Do not kill yourselves or one another. Indeed, Allah is to you ever Merciful.”

The one-way nature of the mission would give me pause as well, but as a Thelemite my opinion is that if somebody wants to go its their own business. It also sounds as if the fatwa may be lifted once a suitable technology is developed for a return trip. But until then, the result is likely to be fewer Muslims in the initial wave of colonization. That is, of course, if the mission manages to get off the ground at all. Nothing like it has ever been attempted, and it remains to be seen if the organizers can really meet their commitments by the target date.

Mars One has issued a response to the fatwa. It can be found here.

Anti-Witchcraft Squad Versus Twitter

Saudi Arabia's anti-witchcraft squad, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, is back in the news declaring war on Twitter. The religious police have announced a crackdown on the popular social media site, targeting accounts that "promote sorcery and witchcraft." And as I just added Augoeides to Twitter in January, I suppose that includes bloggers like me, so I won't be visiting Saudi Arabia any time soon. Not that I had any such plans.

Saudi Arabia’s feared religious police authority has decided to launch a war against what it described as vice and sorcery accounts on Twitter inside the conservative Gulf kingdom, saying it aims to destroy all those accounts.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice said it had formed special teams to track those accounts and arrest those who are behind them.

Quoted by the Saudi news network Al Arabiya, the Commission’s spokesman Ahmed Al Jardan said its members are watching those accounts which “are spreading vice and witchcraft” through the country’s society.

“We will track down all those who are behind these accounts whether they are men or women…we are determined to eliminate these accounts before they become widespread and out of control,” he said.

Twitter played an important role in organizing the "Arab Spring" revolutions in the Middle East, a bullet that Saudi Arabia has so far managed to dodge. The religious authority's motive here is clearly political, and I imagine that to them "sorcery and witchcraft" will look a lot like political activism. After all, it's pretty unclear how tweets about magical practices could "become widespread and out of control." Political protests, on the other hand, can topple governments if they become large enough. Witchcraft is just a convenient excuse for hunting enemies, as it has been for centuries.

Anti-Witchcraft Squad Still Going Strong

Maybe it was all just a publicity stunt after all. Back in October I covered the Saudi Arabian government's efforts to rein in the so-called Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, known to readers of this blog as the anti-witchcraft squad. At the time, it sounded like the government was serious about cracking down on abuses or at least trying to mitigate the bad press surrounding several high-profile executions on the charges of witchcraft and sorcery.

Unfortunately, as The Atlantic reports, the anti-witchcraft squad has kept up the persecution game despite the government's supposed reform of the unit. While there has been no news of executions since the October announcement, charges are still being levied and those convicted can face lashings and long prison terms.

The campaign of persecution has shown no signs of fizzling. In May, two Asian maids were sentenced to 1,000 lashings and 10 years in prison after their bosses claimed that they had suffered from their magic. Just a few weeks ago, Saudi newspapers began running the image of an Indonesian maid being pursued on accusations that she produced a spell that made her male boss's family subject to fainting and epileptic fits. "I swear that we do not want to hurt her but to stop her evil acts against us and others," the man told the news site Emirates 24/7.

According to Adam Coogle, a Jordan-based Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch who monitors Saudi Arabia, the relentless witch hunts reveal the hollowness of the country's long-standing promises about liberalizing its justice system.

Death by Telepathy!

IO9 reports that telepathy is suspected in the deaths of four Turkish engineers. The deaths were originally classified as suicides, but a new report touches on the possibility of paranormal influence. If it pans out, that's a pretty neat trick - you know, if you happen to be the sort of person who needs to get some pesky engineers out of the way and have no qualms about how that happens.

Four engineers working for a Turkish defense company died under mysterious circumstances originally labeled suicides. A report by the Inspection Board of the Prime Ministry suggests that telepathy may have been used to cause the deaths.

The report cites neuropsychologist Nevzat Tarhan, who asked prosecutors "not to disregard the possibility of telepathy causing severe distress and headaches in the victims, giving them a tendency to kill themselves." All four engineers had been undergoing psychological treatment before their deaths.

Now even though I don't necessarily discount the possibility of telepathy in general, the fact that the alleged victims were undergoing psychological treatment strongly suggests to me that skepticism is the way to go in this case. Because the reality is that mentally illness drives patients to suicide much more often than telepathy does, and nothing about the case makes me suspect anything unusual beyond that.

I'd be a lot more willing to entertain the notion of killer telepathy if, say, we were talking about four mentally healthy individuals who killed themselves out of the blue. My suspicions would be further heightened if all four were involved in a specific defense project, the derailment of which would benefit some powerful interest group. Of course, even then, you would need to rule out staged assassinations before invoking psychic powers as an official explanation.

How Far They've Fallen

Remember Saudi Arabia's deadly anti-witchcraft squad, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices? After being responsible for a series of brutal executions of accused magical practitioners, the Saudi government reined in the organization last October. They likely did so because the religiously motivated prosecutions looked a little too much like classic witch hunts and they were getting a lot of bad publicity. That's a good thing for any Saudi in danger of being targeted, but at the same time this is just pathetic.

At least three men attending an annual culture festival in Saudi Arabia were kicked out of the country after religious police officers deemed them "too handsome" to stay. The men, delegates from the United Arab Emirates, were minding their own business at the Jenadrivah Heritage & Cultural Festival in Riyadh when members of the mutaween suddenly "stormed" the pavilion and removed the men by force.

"A festival official said the three Emiratis were taken out on the grounds they are too handsome and that the Commission [for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices] members feared female visitors could fall for them," the Arabic-language newspaper Elaph reported this week. The Emirati delegates were subsequently deported back to their home country.

I mean, seriously? This is a group that used to inspire fear by beheading suspected witches, and now they're busy chasing good-looking people out of the country instead. That's like a former President of the United States speaking at a shopping mall opening. Apparently, instead of the formerly dreaded anti-witchcraft squad the Commission for the for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices is now little more than the eminently mockable sex appeal police. I suppose that means they can still chase after witches, but only if they happen to be attractive ones.

The Eighth Plague

A common misunderstanding of magick places it in the realm of the supernatural. This is fundamentally inaccurate, as the natural world and material world are one in the same. A truly "supernatural" magical process, to my way of thinking, would exist outside the bounds of the natural world and therefore be unable to influence it in any way. On the other hand, if magick is more properly seen as a part of nature rather than separate from it, the possibility of paranormal influence in fact becomes more plausible. Take one of the most famous magical operations of all time - the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Back in 2010 I discussed the possible physical basis of the Biblical parting of the Red Sea, and now Egypt is being struck by a plague of locusts just before Passover, the Jewish feast commemorating the exodus from Egypt.

This time, even the Israelis are worried that the locusts are out to get them. "They may not have ruined Pharaoh, but they could ruin us," one farmer, Tzachi Rimon, told Israel's Channel 10 TV. Locust swarms have the potential to wipe out agricultural crops, and it's been eight years since such a serious assault has hit Egypt's Cairo region and Israel, said Keith Cressman, the senior locust forecasting officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's headquarters in Rome.

"They came from the Sudan-Egypt border after breeding in December and January, flew north along the coast to nearly Suez, then got caught in some winds associated with a low-pressure system over the central Mediterranean to Cairo," Cressman told NBC News in an email. The weather system moved eastward, and on Monday, changing winds carried the swarm to the northern Sinai Peninsula and Israel's Negev Desert, he said.

The point here is, that like the parting of the Red Sea, there are natural explanations for such phenomena. Locust swarms do strike from time to time and are unpredictable. The point of working magick is to align the probabilities of the natural world such that the event you're attempting to conjure happens at just the right moment. Real magick doesn't look like fireballs or lightning bolts shooting from your fingers or any other movie-type manifestation that depends on physical energy appearing out of nowhere. It just looks like luck - incredible, amazing, and totally out-of-the-ordinary luck.

Bad Wizard

Stupid criminals and the paranormal only occasionally overlap, but when they do the result is often especially hilarious. An Iranian man wanted to rob a bank, so he paid a wizard for spells to make him invisible. Arriving at said bank, he quickly discovered that the spells did not work as advertised.

The man explained to the court that he had paid five million rials (just under £290) to a wizard imposter, who in return gave him a set of spells to tie to his arm. The fake sorcerer explained to him that the spells would make him invisible, and that he could then rob banks all he wanted.

The man’s ill-fated attempt to rob the bank started to go wrong after he entered the bank and started randomly snatching money from the hands of customers, before they decided to act quickly and overpower the ill-fated thief.

Now anybody who knows anything about magick will tell you that this is not going to work. The "invisibility spells" that you can find in the old grimoires and so forth don't actually make you transparent, but rather shift the attention of people around you so that you can go about your business unnoticed. They won't fool a security camera and they certainly won't allow you to grab cash out of somebody's hand with impunity.

Ancient Israelite Temple Discovered

Those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible often fail to realize how long many of the stories it contains survived as oral tradition before being written down. The text of the Torah is believed to have been compiled following the Babylonian Captivity which ended in 538 BCE, but includes many accounts dated much earlier. These include the stories of David and Solomon, regarding which little hard evidence exists. Many experts have argued that at the very least the power and wealth of Israel during this "Golden Age" was exaggerated, as such a prominent nation should have left behind more traces of its influence.

Now a new archaeological discovery made in Israel may help to settle this debate. The site at Tel Motza, west of Jerusalem, was once home to a temple that dates back to what are believed to be the early years of King David's reign.

According to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the finds -- which include 2,750-year-old pottery figurines of men and horses -- provide rare evidence of a ritual cult at the beginning of the period of the monarchy.

“The ritual building at Tel Motza is an unusual and striking find, in light of the fact that there are hardly any remains of ritual buildings of the period in Judea at the time of the First Temple,” excavation directors Anna Eirikh, Hamoudi Khalaily and Shua Kisilevitz told The Times of Israel.

The Jerusalem Post noted the rarity of the find, given that "around the time of Hezekiah and Isaiah, Judaism abolished many ritual sites" so the Temple in Jerusalem could concentrate its symbolic power.

This consolidation of power may prove an absolute boon to researchers hoping to unearth details regarding Israelite religious practices that went on centuries before the Captivity. One of the problems with excavations in places such as Jerusalem is that the city is quite small and within it most sites have been built up and torn down multiple times over the course of the last three millennia. In comparison, the Tel Motza site was abandoned and as a result is better preserved. It will be interesting to see if the data that can be gleaned from it matches the Biblical accounts, or if it reflects something entirely different.

Saudis to Rein In Religious Police

For awhile now I've been covering the sometimes deadly antics of Saudi Arabia's anti-witchcraft squad, the so-called Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. At first some of the stories were amusing, but they rapidly devolved into classic witch persecutions similar to those going on in parts of Africa and Asia. In Saudi Arabia they were all the more terrifying because they carried the government's stamp of approval. It seems, though, that even the Saudis are becoming fed up with this out-of-control organization. The committee's new chief has pledged to limit some of the civil liberties abuses for which the group is well-known around the world.

“The new system will set a mechanism for the field work of the committee’s men which hands over some of their specialisations to other state bodies, such as arrests and interrogations,” Al-Hayat daily quoted religious police chief Sheikh Abdullatiff Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh as saying. Agents of the body known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice will also be banned from carrying out “searches without prior approval from the governor,” he said.

Okaz daily also reported that the religious police agents will be prohibited from “standing at the entrances of shopping malls to prevent the entry of any person,” referring to attempts by agents to ban women who do not comply with the Islamic dress code and unmarried couples from entering malls. Relatively moderate Sheikh, appointed in January as the new chief of the religious police, has raised hopes that a more lenient force will ease draconian social constraints in the Islamic country.

While the article makes no mention of witchcraft prosecutions, I'm hoping that these new policies also mean that people will be freer to practice alternative religious beliefs without fear of arrest and possible execution. Saudi Arabia so far has a pretty dismal record in that department. I would certainly expect that the limitations on searches and so forth will make such cases more difficult to pursue, and hopefully that means we'll be seeing a lot fewer of them. Of course, even one instance of religious persecution is still one too many, and in that regard the anti-witchcraft squad has a long way to go.

Ghost Hunting in Saudi Arabia

In part due to the success of the "Ghost Hunters" television franchise, paranormal investigation of haunted sites has become popular here in the United States and in Europe. These investigations are not just limited to Western nations, either - ghost hunting goes on all around the world, as this story out of Saudi Arabia demonstrates. The Saudis just have a rather different take on how to go about it. Last week a group of Saudi teenagers broke into an abandoned and reputedly haunted former hospital and essentially trashed the place under the guise of hunting ghosts - literally.

"Teenagers sent text messages calling for an operation against some of the jinn who live in the hospital, and they broke into the hospital and smashed its facilities and burned 60 percent of it," Okaz newspaper reported last week. The rampage prompted angry press complaints the authorities were allowing the building to fall into disrepair.

Several films have since been posted on YouTube showing grinning young men exploring the building's deserted rooms in search of evidence of spectral activity. One showed blazing palm trees that had been torched by the ghost hunters. Jinn fever reached the point where the Health Ministry issued a terse statement on Monday disclaiming responsibility for the decaying building, which it said was privately owned and too decrepit to be revived as a working hospital.

A columnist in the English-language Saudi Gazette daily on Tuesday recommended that authorities form "a committee for the jinn" to help the owners of possessed houses.

I suppose that fits right in with the mandate of the Anti-Witchcraft Squad, and it would give the group something else to do besides arranging executions for accused magicians. On the other hand, given the squad's history I can only imagine that they would find a way to twist even ghost hunting into something very very wrong. I would hate to see anyone winding up charged with witchcraft and killed, for example, just because they reported some weird paranormal activity in their home.

Snake Transformations

So has anyone reading this blog ever transformed someone else into a snake? My guess is no, even though a South African pastor was recently accused of performing that very feat. While witchcraft accusations are common all across Africa, it seems that the current round of accusations against Stephen Zondo of River of Living Waters Ministries has struck a nerve - even here in the United States.

“People actually believe this is going on”, says Pastor Bob Houston of Charlotte, of Precious Blood Church group in Charlotte, N.C. that investigates cases of Satanism in the US. There have been violent protests outside that particular church, with community members vowing they will burn down the church”, he said.

Pastor Zondo blames local radio station, Thetha FM, for “spreading lies”. “Satan is a murderer and the father of lies”, according to the bible in John 8:44. “They have been doing it since last year when they came up with these allegations, in which they also claim that people have lost their lives", he said.

“If they strongly believe I’m guilty, why have they not gone and registered a criminal case against me at the police station, but instead they go to the radio station?” a defiant-sounding Zondo said.

But here's where the story gets really weird. Houston claims that in Saudi Arabia a woman really did transform into a snake - and he has a video provided by the dreaded anti-witchcraft squad to prove it. Of course, whatever is on the video doesn't move and looks more like the infamous Fiji Mermaid than any living thing, but I guess it's not like actual evidence is about to deter a true believer.

“We have investigated claim of people turning into snakes before and we attribute that to demons and witchcraft”, said Pastor Bob. “One case in Saudi Arabia there was multiple witnesses. As the story goes during theHajj a women on her way to Madina turned into a snake in front of a lot of people. The Video is taken by a Hajji after the women was taken to custody. Saudi government has kept it a secret”, he said.

I'll put the question out, though, just in case my natural skepticism has gotten the better of me. Does anybody out there happen to know this spell? If you'd like to share, I can think of a few people that I would be willing to try it out on. It's reversible, right?