Holy Soda

I drink a lot of soda, so if there was a magical ritual I could perform to imbue it with magical energy that would speed my spiritual progress I would be all for it. The truth is that since water holds a magical charge just about any drink can be magically empowered by tracing a sigil over it while visualizing your desired goal, and soda should behave the same way in a ritual. Apparently one Norwegian Church thinks so too - thanks to recent freezing temperatures the Church's water taps were not working, so the priest substituted lemon soda for water in a baptismal ritual.

Priest Paal Dale, from the town of Stord, about 150 miles west of the capital Oslo, improvised during a recent cold-spell by dabbing the fizzy drink on the baby, daily newspaper Vaart Land said on Tuesday.

So does it work? From a magical perspective the situation is unfortunately rather muddled.

The Christian Church teaches that infant baptism is necessary to wash away original sin, but in my opinion the Augustinian doctrine of original sin is rooted in a mistranslation rather than any sort of genuine theological principle. In the Gospels, the Greek word metanoia was translated into the Latin paenitentia, the root of the usual English translation, "repentence." However, in Greek metanoia carries with it none of the connotations related to the redress of past wrongs that are associated with both the English term and its Latin root. To Augustine reading the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Gospels, it must have seemed clear that in order for one to "repent" some past wrong must already be present. Hence the doctrine of original sin, which is supposedly supported by the text of Genesis and yet is not found in Judaism.

At this point metanoia could probably be used in English with no real loss of meaning. We already have words like "paranoia" which have a similar structure and "meta" has moved from online forums into the general vernacular. "Meta" means above or beyond and "noia" is derived from nuos, mind. The word doesn't mean anything related to wrongdoing at all, but instead refers to awakened or expanded consciousness that changes your perspective on the world. When someone tells you "repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" what they really should be saying is something like "awaken, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Returning to the original language puts a rather different spin on Christian spirituality, one centered on consciousness rather than bad behavior.

Furthermore, spiritual awakening is not something anyone else can do for you. Baptising an adult and baptising an infant are two completely different things, because in effect with an adult baptism whatever spiritual awakening that may occur is triggered by the participant's reaction to the ritual, not the ritual itself. For an infant unaware of his or her surroundings this is simply not possible and therefore the argument that there is any benefit to baptizing babies is not supported by a magical understanding of the universe. In Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica a child must be 11 years old before he or she can go through a baptismal ceremony, and in my opinion that is as it should be. Baptism has a different theological meaning in EGC than it does in Christianity, but I am of the opionion that in order to benefit from either form of the ritual one must be old enough to be aware of what is going on.

This leaves me with the conclusion that the baptism by soda could not have possibly worked in terms of creating any sort of spiritual benefit for the child, but to be fair the same would be true if water was used. For an adult baptism it would be harder to say whether the soda would be more or less efficacious.

Evolution: The REAL Story

Thanks to the Internet, we have many more opportunities to be appalled with our fellow human beings than our poor disconnected ancestors of twenty years ago could possibly imagine. I doubt that people are any worse overall than they were back then, and in fact a good argument can be made that at least to a degree digital networking has helped bring people around the world together. However, the reason that we see so much more unbelievable ignorance these days is that if someone says something truly idiotic those comments will live on for all time as an unending running joke, an example that just about anyone can pull up to support the statement, "Hey, at least I'm not as dumb as that guy!"

The following message was sent in e-mail to several of the bloggers over at Pandagon because apparently they were unaware of the "real story" of evolution. Apparently I'm ignorant as well - I always thought that evolution was a well-documented scientific theory that describes how genetic mutations allow populations of organisms to adapt and over time differentiate into different species in response to environmental conditions. But according to this guy it actually begins with the Adam and Eve story from Genesis and degenerates into hot monkey sex. No, not between Adam and Eve, between people and actual monkeys. It's either a new religion or insanity at a level that is rarely witnessed.

I made a halfhearted attempt to quote and comment on this particular piece of craziness paragraph by paragraph but there's just too much of it for me to ever finish in a short period of time. Factual errors, theological errors, scientific errors... I mean, where would I even start? Besides, the commenters at Pandagon did a much better job of skewering this steaming pile of nonsense than I ever could. Just read it, and be content with the knowledge that no matter how stupid you may be there's somebody out there who's even dumber.

Witch Hunting in Gambia

I find the possibility of government regulation of magical practices disturbing enough, but last week in Gambia the world saw what happens when government forces team up with self-proclaimed witch hunters - massive persecution on a scale that is extreme even for Africa.

Around a thousand suspected witches were rounded up, drugged, and forced to confess to practicing witchcraft. Amnesty International believes that most of the victims were released after less than a week, but the crackdown by the Gambian government does not appear to be over. It remains to be seen how many more people will be hunted down and arrested.

Most victims were held for three to five days and all are believed to have been released, Amnesty spokeswoman Eliane Drakopoulos told The Associated Press. But many have been terrorized by the campaign and fear it could spread, she said.

The dictatorial regime of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh initiated the mass arrests not for any public safety reason or even because of unrest but because he believed that witches had attacked his family.

Authorities began inviting "witch doctors," who combat witches, to come from nearby Guinea soon after the death earlier this year of the president's aunt. Jammeh "reportedly believes that witchcraft was used in her death," the London-based rights group said.

Apparently in Gambia a "witch doctor" is not a magician but a witch hunter. Whatever they call themselves, their tactics are reminiscent of the Inquisitions of Europe during the Middle Ages.

Since then, "witch doctors" — accompanied by police, soldiers, intelligence agents and Jammeh's personal guards — have forcibly taken about 1,000 alleged witches from their villages and spirited them to secret locations, Amnesty said. About 300 of them were taken to Jammeh's personal farm in his native Kanilai, east of the capital, the group said.

Oddly enough, Jammeh is apparently some sort of a magician himself, though of course when you're the one in power the authorities don't come knocking on your door to arrest you.

In 2007, Jammeh declared he had discovered a cure for AIDS and began treating patients inside the presidential palace, using herbs and incantations.

Amnesty International has called for a stop to the persecutions and continues to work toward bringing those responsible to justice.

Blaming Satan

Some strands of Christianity seem to talk about the devil more often than they talk about God or Jesus. According to the beliefs of some of these churches, Satan is always lurking in the bushes and taking a personal interest in tempting believers into sin. While the official theology of even these Christian churches gives lip service to the idea that God and Jesus are far more powerful than the devil, there is little explanation for what is in practice a theology more similar to Manicheanism, the idea that the universe is caught in a battle between a good deity and his evil counterpart who is his equal and opposite.

This thoroughly un-Christian worldview also supports pretty questionable deflections of blame by those caught acting improperly. "The devil made me do it" is a cliche that is at least a century old and yet there are still individuals out there who invoke it rather than taking responsibility for their actions. A woman in Washington State was recently charged with stealing $73,000 from the church where she worked as an administrative assistant, but she insisted that Satan was to blame for her actions.

Papers filed with a theft charge Wednesday in Snohomish County Superior Court say the 62-year-old Arlington woman told detectives "Satan had a big part in the theft."

The Everett Herald reported the woman was accused of forging the pastor's signature on 80 checks from the Arlington Free Methodist church. She was fired in February 2008.

Actually, unless this woman was possessed by a demon and vomiting pea soup while she was writing out those forged checks the devil had nothing to do with it. Even if the devil exists and bears any resemblance to the caricature that is often bandied about by Christian preachers, the idea that he would take an active interest in the life of one individual person for the sole purpose of prompting her to steal some money from a church is pretty laughable. As if a theft like this would rise to the sort of cosmic or at least global significance that might draw the attention of the ultimate evil.

The saddest thing about this story is that the religious angle obscures what might very well be the real tragedy of the situation.

She told detectives she used the money to cover household expenses because she couldn't stand the thought of losing her home.

$73,000 is a lot of money for household expenses, so maybe this is just another excuse. If she really needed that much money in order to keep her house, however, it seems to me that the real devils are the mortgage brokers who pushed her into taking out such a large loan and the employers who have resisted paying living wages in this country for years. Maybe that's who Christian "spiritual warriors" should really be out there rebuking.

Need Rain?

If you happen to be in India and need rain, the people of the state of Assam know exactly the thing to do - hold a wedding celebration for two frogs!

The frogs were joined in matrimony in a traditional ceremony in Hengrabari, in the northwestern Indian state of Assam. It wasn't the result of an amphibian romance, however, and neither of the frogs turned into a prince after being kissed.

Instead, it was an attempt to end the dry spell that has hit most parts of Assam over the past months, which has led to severe water shortages.

Because rain is so important to agriculture many of the magical practices of ancient cultures have to do with controlling the weather, especially rainfall. Rain dances were practiced in North America and it is believed that the association of blood with rain inspired the practice of human sacrifice in Central America. One of the largest mass graves ever found at a Central American site dates to a period in which a 50-year draught hit the region, and some scholars have hypothesized that the escalating sacrifices were an attempt to raise enough magical energy to bring rain after years of failing crops.

The tradition in India is not nearly so extreme.

' It's a traditional belief that when a frog marriage is performed, the Barun Devata [the rain-god] is pleased and the rain comes,' former councillor Bijoy Das told The Hindu newspaper.

The wedding of the frogs - male Barun (meaning wind) and female Bijuli (meaning thunder) - was accompanied by all the traditions of Assamese weddings, including songs and gifts presented to the bride.

In my own experience, weather-working is not all that difficult except that to some extent you have to work with what you have available. If there's no moisture in the air the best magician in the world can't make it rain, because as far as I know nobody has yet figured out how to reliably materialize physical substances out of nothing. The probability gradient involved in violating the conservation of mass principle is so steep that I suspect it may actually be impossible.

So what a weather-worker has to do is to first shift the weather patterns over the area he or she wants to affect so that moisture will be present. This can take several days depending on where upper atmospheric air currents are moving and so forth, but it is necessary. Once the conditions are in place you can go ahead and shape the atmosphere into a storm by visualizing how you want the air currents and moisture to flow together.

This usually works for me, but unfortunately the technique is intuitive enough that it is hard to explain. I just open an operant field, visualize what I want, and close it down using only the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. I can do it without the field, too, but it won't work as well. It's easier to cast for a clear day than for rain because it takes less of a shift to send clouds away than it does to summon them, and as a result friends often call upon me to summon clear days for their outdoor events.

So far my track record on weather working is quite good, though I've mostly conjured for clear skies and only tried to summon rain a couple of times. We'll have to wait and see how these frog newlyweds do for the people of Assam.

Christ is in the Pleats

The latest manifestation of Christ has appeared in the pleats of a seat cushion. Last week parishioners at a Roman Catholic church on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean noticed an image that appeared to be the face of Jesus in the folds of the cushion, prompting widespread celebration of the image as a sign from God.

Church officials limited access to the Jesus-Misericordieux church in eastern Saint-Andre's Cambuston district to a few minutes per visitor as traffic in the area ground to a halt.

Believers and curious onlookers pulled out cameras to take pictures of the cushion attached to the priest's chair.

Antoinette, an 82-year-old parishioner, said the face was a "divine phenomenon" as tears welled up her eyes.

"This church is a holy site," added Lise-May, another worshipper.

So many vistors arrived at the church from all across the island to view the cushion and take photographs of the face that the church put up four large tents on Sunday to accomodate everyone who wished to attend Mass.

A group of about 30 parishioners who had joined a Christian ceremony ahead of the Easter holiday had been the first to notice the particular setting of the cushion.

"This is not a miracle, it's a sign of God," said parish priest Daniel Gavard.

I'm not sure what the technical distiction is between a "miracle" and a "sign" according to the Roman Catholic Church, but I can say that as a magician I would love to investigate an actual paranormal image of Jesus. Unfortunately these phenomena are the most commonly reported "signs" simply because the folds of a cushion or clusters of clouds or even the burns on a slice of toast are random enough that every so often a pattern will emerge that suggests a certain image. Once an interpretation for such an image is suggested, human perception tends to work in such a way that you see what you expect to see.

I wonder how long it will be before the local excitement dies down and the cushion winds up on eBay. Given the past history of such items, it could probably raise a lot of money for the church.

Yoga in Schools

An article from today's Saint Paul Pioneer Press discusses a new program to teach kids yoga as part of their regular physical education curriculum. Teachers report that in addition to providing good exercise, yoga also seems to help keep kids calmer and more focused in their regular studies.

"Each year, it's getting bigger and bigger," said Cheryl Crawford, a trainer for YogaKids International, an Indiana-based company specializing in yoga programs for children.

Crawford helped develop YogaKids Tools for Schools in 2005, which shows teachers how to incorporate yoga into kindergarten-through-fifth-grade curriculum. Since then, she has trained more than 600 educators nationwide.

"Kids are stressed," Crawford said. "Teachers see that this works."

Teachers using her program, and others like it, show flashcards with yoga poses to their students, who then go into the moves. They also teach how to breathe in a pose.

While what is being taught here is nothing like the sort of yoga that is used in magical practices and is instead based on the "exercise yoga" that is taught pretty much exclusively for physical fitness, it still sounds strikes me as a good idea. It's certainly a big improvement over some the awful stuff I had to do in gym class as a kid. When you're not that physically fit and a nerd to boot, trust me, dodgeball can really make you hate life and most of your fellow classmates. I would have much rather learned yoga, and apparently the kids involved in the program agree.

"They say they're feeling less stress," said Flaminio, a former Minneapolis schools social worker. "The attendances have changed because the kids don't want to miss yoga day."

One advantage of a program like this is that if later in life kids decide that they want to explore the more mystical side of the discipline the muscle memory for the various poses will already be present. The spiritual discipline of yoga is a lot easier to learn if you already can do the postures without too much trouble, because it makes it easier to concentrate on doing proper pranayama and cultivating the appropriate mystical states of consciousness that accompany a genuine practice.

Icelandic Elves

You might think that widespread belief in nature spirits of various sorts is confined to the same third-world societies that persecute witches and engage in various other superstitions that don't even make sense to trained magicians, but you would be wrong. An article today from Slate discusses the Icelandic belief in elves or "hidden people" (huldufólk in Icelandic). These beings are apparently similar to the Fey of continental Europe and the British Isles, and according to the article 54% of Icelanders refuse to deny their existence outright and 8% are certain that they exist. 3% of the population even claim to have encountered these beings personally.

The huldufólk are thought to live in another dimension, invisible to most. They build their homes inside rocks and on craggy hillsides, and they seem to favor lava formations. The port town of Hafnarfjördur, near Reykjavík, is thought to have a particularly large settlement of elves—as well as other mystical beings like dwarves (who also fit under the broad category of huldufólk). According to local clairvoyants, the huldufólk royal family lives at the base of a cliff in that town.

Not only do many Icelanders believe that these beings exist, they are also said to make trouble for land development and other public works projects that proceed without their approval. Mediums are often employed by construction firms to contact the huldufólk and secure their consent before moving forward with projects. Many believe that failure to do so can be dangerous, and even when all these steps are taken approval is not automatically granted.

When Icelanders try to build roads or settlements through elf dwellings, the elves are said to go bonkers—causing equipment failures and other problems. In the early 1970s, for example, contractors trying to move a large rock to make way for a highway near Reykjavík hired a clairvoyant, Zophanías Pétursson, after experiencing several minor mishaps. Pétursson detected the presence of elves and claimed to obtain a waiver from the supernatural creatures so that work could progress. But the elves weren't finished: A bulldozer operator who had helped move the stone fractured a water pipe that fed into a fish farm, killing thousands of trout hatchlings.

I've never encountered the Fey myself, though I've talked to a number of other magicians over the years who claim to have contacted them in isolated undeveloped spaces like the parks that line the banks of the Mississippi River here in the Twin Cities. Along the river valley there is a lot of green space even running right past both downtowns, so if such spirits can be found in cities at all Minneapolis and St. Paul strike me as pretty good places to look. Despite my years of magical practice I've always found clairvoyance difficult, so maybe it's more a lack of talent on my part than their absence that has prevented me from seeing or experiencing them over the years.

Like magick, nature spirits have been part of the human experience for many thousands of years, and only in the last century or so has much of the modern world rejected the idea that they could still haunt our streams and forests. Maybe in places like Iceland their presence is simply too tangible to be ignored and their numbers too great to be easily dismissed, even by those who might otherwise consider themselves unbelievers. Certainly any force, magical or otherwise, that has shown itself capable of causing real damage should be taken into account by those who find themselves in opposition to it.