Chechnya Bans Wizards

Three weeks ago Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov called for a ban on "wizards and false healers" on the grounds that such practices are both fraudulent and forbidden by Islam. This would be just another story of a religious state banning magick, which unfortunately is all too common around the world, except that Kadyrov himself is a hard-core magick enthusiast. He may not be a wizard himself, but he is all too eager to sponsor their work - so long as they subscribe to his own religious beliefs.

Though Mr Kadyrov is taking a hard line on "forgers" who "discredit Islam," he has been eager to promote Islamic mysticism since he became president in 2005.

Folk belief is widespread in Chechnya, which many locals believe is a hotbed for Islamic spirits called djinns drawn there by the destruction from the wars, which killed tens of thousands and reduced much of the region to rubble.

Mr Kadyrov was the driving force behind the Center for Islamic Medicine in Grozny, the largest Islamic folk hospital in Europe where healers perform djinn exorcisms by reading Quranic verses aloud.

This would be hilarious if it were not being perpetrated by a state known for human rights abuses. As long as you're the right kind of wizard - that is, a Muslim exorcist - you get government support. If you're the wrong kind, though, like the rest of us, you get a visit from the security forces and may simply disappear in the middle of the night. So the sheer hypocrisy is pretty staggering. The thing is that in reality it's all magick, no matter what religious system you happen to subscribe to. There's something to be said for cracking down on fraud, but I strongly suspect at least some of those "approved" wizards are also not on the up and up.

Voodoo Paranormal

This probably won't end well. Years ago, I brought up the concept of a reality television show based on genuine practicing occultists. I noted at the time that main problem such a show would run into is that from the outside most of our practices either look pretty boring or downright laughable. If we're doing contemplative work, much of what we do is meditation. The internal landscape of what's happening during that practice might be profound, but to a camera it just looks like somebody sitting there. Even if we're engaged in more active magical work, most of what we do is put on odd clothing like robes and then wave funny-looking tools around while vibrating various names and words that have no significance to regular television viewers.

Apparently, though, somebody has now come up with the idea of adding magical elements to a regular paranormal investigation show. In the era before Ghost Hunters became a big hit a lot of those shows employed psychics, but the fact is that most of the material such individuals produced was vague and even the most detailed observations generally proved impossible to verify. The twist to this new show, Voodoo Paranormal, is that the producers are looking to integrate real Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Santeria practices into the show.

The production team is casting for its new unscripted paranormal reality show, Voodoo Paranormal.

"Voodoo Paranormal follows paranormal investigators as they investigate haunted locations in search of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins using sophisticated technology paired with vintage Voodoo spells."

The production team is looking for passionate people that are practitioners of Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Santeria.

Fake Bishop Nearly Infiltrates Papal Conclave

The Roman Catholic Church has lately had more than its share of problems. The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI has prompted accusations of everything from financial mismanagement at the Vatican Bank to a secret network of gay priests reported by the Italian news media. The extend to which these allegations are true remains unclear, but they have certainly stirred up a lot of bad press. And now, the conclave charged with electing the next Pope was nearly infiltrated by a man claiming to be a bishop of a non-existent Italian church.

The impostor, identified as Ralph Napierski, was reportedly caught sneaking into a gathering of cardinals. Before his ruse was discovered, Napierski had already passed by a security station manned by Swiss Guards and had even posed for photos with at least one high-profile (and real) cardinal.

According to USA Today, security became suspicious of Napierski when they realized his cassock seemed shorter than appropriate. Also tip-offs: Napierski wore a black fedora instead of a skull-cap, and his bright purple sash was actually a common scarf.

According to The Telegraph, Napierski told reporters he belonged to the reportedly non-existent Italian Orthodox Church. A blog that appears to be associated with Napierski claims he is a bishop of a Catholic order called the Corpus Dei, also said to be fabricated. Napierski's contact information on the blog points to an address in Germany.

Napierski was stopped before making it all the way into the conclave, but it's pretty impressive that he got as far as he did with his scarf and fedora. It seems that in addition to the other scandals threatening the Roman Catholic Church, heightened security also needs to be taken into account. As for Napierski, had he made it in this would truly constitute an epic prank on one of the world's oldest and most powerful organizations. It also would have been quite interesting to find out more about what really goes on within the sealed doors of the Papal Conclave.

Prosperity Gospel

According to the so-called "green" or prosperity gospel, God wants you to be rich. If you're poor, it's because you're not virtuous enough or pious enough or perhaps God just does not like you. Many critics have noted that this ostensibly Christian theology is diametrically opposed to the actual teachings of Jesus Christ, but the apparent contradiction seems not to bother the evangelists pushing it to their parishioners. And why should it? Green gospel pastors have airplanes, fancy cars, extravagant houses, and even private islands - you know, the personal tropical paradise that God needs them to have as a reward for spreading the good news. On the other hand, if this story out of Indiana represents the work of the almighty, he apparently doesn't care so much about trifling matters such as mortgage payments. The story concerns Steve Munsey, a green gospel pastor who looted so much money from his ministry that his church is now being foreclosed upon - even though Munsey himself is millionaire many times over.

As it turns out, the story is about Munsey’s church, Family Christian Center, which claims to have a weekly attendance of 15,000, making it one of the largest churches in the country. According to an investigation by the NWITimes.com, a paper covering northwestern Indiana, the judge presiding over the foreclosure proceedings told attorneys in court, “When I saw some of the expenditures being made in this church when there was a mortgage not being paid, I was astounded.” NWITimes reports that even as the church owed close to $100,000 a month in mortgage payments (not to mention mortgage payments on condos the church claimed to use for visiting clergy, and other unspecified bills in excess of half a million dollars), Munsey and his wife Melodye raked in “$2.9 million in total compensation from 2008 through 2011 from organizations connected to Family Christian Center, IRS records show.” In all, “The church annually spent $3.5 million in leadership compensation and had a $900,000 budget for travel and meals, a $500,000 housing allowance and $500,000 for jet fuel and other expenditures, according to the transcript. In 2010, the church paid $1 million for property in Illinois, the transcript states.” There’s more: an IRS investigation and tax liens, for starters.

What I find the most surprising about this story is that too many people apparently still haven't caught on that these "prosperity preachers" are almost universally corrupt. They spend all their time preaching about money because that's all they think about, and at the end of the day accumulating it is all that they want. Concern for the poor, one of the cornerstones of Jesus' teachings, falls by the wayside. After all, it gets in the way of the excessive salaries that let the leaders of these groups live like rock stars at the expense of not only everyone else but sometimes the very organizations that they rode to prominence in the first place. As I've mentioned many times before, a proper religion should be a system for producing spiritual experiences rather than a scheme to line some pastor's pocket.

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.

Beware the Thrift Store Demons!

Television evangelist Pat Robertson has been on a roll lately. Fresh off proclaiming that Islam is not a religion, he recently warned a viewer asking about thrift store purchases to watch out for demons that might be bound to secondhand items.

A concerned viewer wrote to Pat Robertson for advice on demons and thrift stores:

“I buy a lot of clothes and other items at Goodwill and other secondhand shops. Recently my mom told me that I need to pray over the items, bind familiar spirits, and bless the items before I bring them into the house. Is my mother correct? Can demons attach themselves to material items?”

Robertson’s answer?

”Can demonic spirits attach themselves to inanimate objects? The answer is yes. But I don’t think every sweater you get from Goodwill has demons in it. In a sense your mother is just being super cautious, so hey — it isn’t gonna hurt you any to rebuke any spirits that might attach themselves to those clothes.”

Robertson is technically correct that spirits can be attached to material items. We magicians call them talismans, for example, and there's no reason the sort of spell you use to create one couldn't be cast on a sweater or something. However, the real problem with his risk assessment is a complete lack of understanding about how the process actually works.

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.

Moving a Haunted House

One commonality in ghost accounts is that renovating a property often affects a haunting. In some cases a renovation will eliminate phenomena and in others it can dramatically increase them. Various explanations have been offered for these observations, from the replacement of old wiring eliminating electromagnetic fields that can cause people to feel "presences" to sentient spirits angered by changes to their former home. This story from Iowa may put such explanations to the test. The house in question is not merely being remodeled, but picked up and moved to a new site five miles away.

Weak ground conditions led the newest owner of the 1865 Iowa home, Sherri Meeker, to move the 100-ton structure five miles down the road. Naturally, it caught the interest of the Web. The old house, supposedly haunted by evil spirits, bears a resemblance to the one on “Nightmare on Elm Street” and is known around town as “The Haunted Mansion of Jasper County.”

Some locals swear it has a spooky past. The historical three-story, wood-frame house sure looks haunted. Local news station KCCI even spent the night in 1994 and heard lots of stories about Regina Long, thought to be the original owner, who was said to have been seen floating around. Mike Salier, the homeowner at the time, said in the KCCI story: “It's real. People think it's a lot of poppycock, but it's enough to make your skin crawl.”

Time will tell whether or not paranormal phenomena will be reported at the new location. If they are, that suggests hauntings are related in some way to the structure in which they occur. If they do not, and especially if the phenomena continue to be observed at the original location, it suggests that the physical location is more important than the structure. What's nice about this case is that since houses are so rarely moved and haunted houses are so rare, it provides an unusual opportunity for such experimentation.