It's a Curse!

One of the things about living life as a practical magician is completely forgetting how freaked out non-magicians can become when encountering anything out of the ordinary. This story from Australia is case in point. A woman digging in her garden found an ugly ceramic ball that looked like a bad high school pottery project. But her friends on social media were convinced the object was part of some sort of curse.

A graduate found a "terrifying cursed" object in her garden after moving into her new home. Pals believed Kerri Moran's house may be haunted after she shared pictures on Facebook of a massive ceramic ball with a small coffin. She claimed she "dug the treasure up" but social media users said it is a sign of a creepy curse.

"I recently bought an old house and dug this treasure up in the garden. I have no idea what it is but my daughter hates it and says it’s bad juju," the woman wrote on Facebook. "It’s huge and heavy." But Kerri, of Brisbane, Australia, investigated the find and contacted the house's previous owners. And she soon found the object wasn't as sinister as it first appeared.

"She said her son did pottery in high school a number of years ago and was forever bringing 'crap' home. She would put them in the garden where the earth claimed this piece," Kerri posted. "My yard smells like burnt sage, my house of vinegar. All precautions were taken. Anyway, I have contacted my home’s previous owner. Mystery solved."

Alan Moore once commented that art should be considered magick, but I really don't think this thing has anything to do with what he was talking about. Sometimes a bad high school pottery project is just a bad high school pottery project. It is far more remarkable to me that so many people were apparently convinced that this weird object was some sort of sinister spell.

Actual curses just aren't that common in real life and objects don't cause bad fortune just by looking strange. This is one example showing that people should really know more about magick and how it works so they won't jump to bizarre conclusions.

OTO Member Wins Defamation Case

David Bottrill, a member of Ordo Templi Orientis in Australia, recently won a defamation case agaist a woman who shared a YouTube video accusing him of belonging to a "satanic and pedophile group." As should be obvious to anyone with half a brain who bothers to investigate, OTO is nothing of the sort. It is a fraternal order of magicians dedicated the system of Thelema, which may be approached in many ways - but which bears no resemblance to the cartoon "Satanism" of Jack Chick tracts.

A man who is a member of a little-known religious order has been awarded $18,880 for defamation after a woman shared a YouTube video on her Facebook page that made claims about him and his religion.

Australian man David Bottrill is part of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) fraternal religious order, which follows the writings of the late British occultist and magician, Aleister Crowley. According to Bottrill, members of OTO in Australia number around 100.

Bottrill claimed Katrina Bailey had defamed him by sharing a video on her Facebook page in mid-2017 that suggested he was a member of a satanic and pedophile group, who used his job to import children into Australia to facilitate pedophilia.

On Friday, the Australian Capital Territory Civil and Administrative Tribunal (ACAT) found in Bottrill's favour, saying Bailey had defamed him, and ordering her to apologise, take down the post, and pay $18,880.

The reality is that the only people who think that pedophilia and occultism have anything to do with each other are fundamentalist Christians, who made up phony "Satanism" in the 1980's to persecute members of minority religions. The idea was to get "Satanism" defied as child molestation so they could ban it, and then get all non-Christian religions classified as "Satanism" so they could become the American state religion. The whole concept was misguided, unconstitutional, and never would have worked - but there were those who "had faith" that God would make it happen anyway, and it ruined a lot of innocent lives.

I'll add that I've gotten really tired of this online nonsense over the last couple of years. The reason that people keep doing it is that lurid claims get them lots of attention and pageviews, and so far there have been few real consequences for promoting even outright falsehoods that go so far as to put lives in danger. With the upcoming lawsuits against Alex Jones over the Sandy Hook shooting and this successful civil case in Australia, that tide may finally be turning. Let's hope so.

A Secret Masonic Ritual?

There's a lot of talk on the Internet about Masons and supposed "secret rituals" carried out by "high degree members" that the rank and file don't learn about until they progress far into the depths of the organization. As one of those rank and file Blue Lodge masons, it's possible that stuff like this might be going on behind closed doors without my knowledge - but I have to say, I highly doubt it has anything to do with Masonic ritual.

The story sounds like something out of a bad movie, one of those "comedy of errors" films that asks how embarrassing things can possibly get. A former Australian mason apparently set out to distribute cheeseburgers to the homeless, but wound up naked inside a giant pipe organ with a toy gun and a remote controlled police car. Naturally, alcohol was involved.

A former freemason found drunk and naked inside a huge pipe organ has appeared in court accused of damaging the historic instrument - insured for more than $1 million. Glenn Langford was arrested on Wednesday after allegedly flooding the Brisbane Masonic Memorial Centre and setting off the fire alarms.

The 51-year-old faced charges at the Brisbane Arrest Court on Thursday and was granted bail. But he said his intentions were initially well-meaning and the night had got out of hand after downing a bottle of Johnny Walker whisky, 7 News reports.

The court was told he had been meaning to hand out cheeseburgers to the homeless. Food was left scattered on the floor of the grand hall of the heritage-listed temple in Brisbane's CBD, which features one of the biggest organs in Queensland.

It is feared the organ, installed in the 1930s, may be too damaged to be repaired despite it being insured for $1 million. Mr Langford is charged with allegedly damaging a number of organ pipes and destroying part of a decorative wall.

He was also discovered naked along with clothes, a remote controlled police car and toy gun. The magistrate heard from Mr Langford's lawyer who explained he had last week lost his job and was getting over the breakdown of a 16-year relationship. He was granted bail on the condition that he stayed more than 100 metres away from the centre in Ann Street.

'Things just got a little loose, I was out of it,' Mr Langford told 7 News. He apologised to 'all the righteous Freemasons everywhere'. 'I did have a lot of cheeseburgers to give to the homeless. I'm going to see a shrink and don't drink,' he added.

Maybe he's not drinking now, but if he really was a non-drinker and downed an entire bottle of whiskey - well, I suppose it actually makes sense that he took off all his clothes and climbed inside a giant pipe organ. Can you imagine waking up from that blackout? "Hey, where the hell am I, and what's going on? What am I supposed to do with this remote controlled police car? And where are my cheeseburgers?"

I suppose we'll just have to chalk it up as a cautionary tale of how Masonic charity can go bad. Maybe this is why American masons don't drink at lodge events.

Jedis in Australia

Believe it or not, this appears to be an actual thing. Since 2001, people have written in "Jedi" as their religion in Australia's national census. In 2011, it claimed approximately 64,000 adherents, just behind Sikhs and just ahead of Seventh Day Adventists.

The Jedi religion originally appeared in George Lucas' Star Wars films, but it also is true that Lucas came up with it by combining bits and pieces of other world religions. In the films, Jedis believe in a mystical energy called "the force" that binds all life in the universe together, and they are shown engaging in real spiritual practices such as meditation.

"Jedi" is also sometimes claimed as a joke religion like Pastafarianism, with atheists selecting it just to be funny. But Kylie Sturgess, president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, is trying to get atheists to stop doing that and mark "No Religion" instead for the 2016 census.

Jediism is inspired by The Star Wars series and patches together aspects of Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism, and other faiths. While some see it as a serious religious affiliation, others see the rise of Jediism in Australia as a reflection of the fact that the country is becoming an increasingly secular.

Australia’s religious landscape has changed significantly over the past century. In the 1911 census, just .4 percent of Australians chose “no religion” when asked about their religious identity. In 2011, 22 percent of Australians answered “no religion” in response to the census. With a few more percentage points, this group could potentially knock Catholicism, which at 25 percent is currently Australia’s largest religious denomination, out of the top spot.

An accurate portrait of Australia’s religious groups matters because, according to AFA, exaggerations in the data may “lead to groups wielding disproportionate influence within government.”

“Answering the religion question thoughtfully and honestly matters because it benefits all Australians when decisions on how to spend taxpayer dollars are made on sound data that accurately reflects modern-day Australia,” Sturgess said.

As I see it, if you're really a Jedi you should go ahead and answer Jedi. On the other hand, if you're not religious and just checking the box as a joke, "No Religion" would be a more accurate answer.

The Star Wars films were inspired in part by the works of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and the Jedi religion as presented does resemble a simplified distillation of Daoism and Buddhism. I don't see why it's any sillier than the "lite-Buddhism" followed by a large percentage of New Agers just because it originally came from a film.

In the United States, because of the separation of church and state it would make no difference whatsoever. I don't know enough about Australian politics to comment on how the census relates to tax dollars being spent, but for those who consider the Jedi religion a legitimate spiritual path, I don't see why they should have to hide it.

The Threat to Christian Marriage

This one Christian marriage, anyway. A Christian couple in Australia has vowed to divorce if same-sex couples gain marriage rights in their country. I suppose that's really the only way to construct an argument where the "threat to straight marriage" makes any sense, but it sure sounds stupid to me. Apparently these two are so entitled that if their religion can't define marriage, they want no part of it. Either that, or they're just grandstanding for the media and will in fact do no such thing.

A Canberra couple have vowed to get a divorce, ending their "sacred" 10-year union, if Australia allows same-sex couples to legally marry. Nick Jensen and his wife Sarah believe widening the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples threatens the sacred nature of the union and leaves the door open to polygamy.

The Christian couple have been happily married for over a decade, have no intention of separating and hope to have more children. For all intents and purposes they have a healthy marriage. But in a novel protest against any successful move to legalise same sex-marriage in Australia, Mr Jensen wrote in an article published in Canberra CityNews on Wednesday that they are prepared to divorce.

Personally I favor a model of marriage in which the civil and religious components are entirely separate. You have a "civil union" that establishes legal rights, and then you can have any religious ceremony you want that a church is willing to perform, or you can skip the whole thing altogether if you're not religious. When I officiated a wedding for a good friend last year, I had to get myself registered as a "minister" with an online church so that it would be legal. That's silly. Everything would work better if the ceremonial and legal aspects had nothing to do with each other.

Let me also point out, though, that the "slippery slope to polygamy" argument really doesn't hold up well, even under my preferred model. In principle I have no problem with more than two people getting married, but the additional legal framework that it would require is massive. Marrying someone establishes them as your uncontested next of kin for all sorts of legal purposes - but let's say you're married to two people and wind up near death in a coma. One spouse wants to take you off life support and the other doesn't. Who decides?

A living will can address that one issue, but there are many others that work the same way. Marriage has a value to society in terms of streamlining legal issues precisely because you can only be married to one person at a time. The minute more than one has to be considered, that advantage disappears, which is why I think legal marriage involving more than two people is a long way off. Same-sex marriage, on the other hand, does nothing that requires a new framework because it works just like opposite-sex marriage as far as the law is concerned.

Turnabout is Fair Play

Like most people in the Information Technology industry, I find censorship incredibly stupid. Despite decades of research on the hypothesized link between violent media and criminal activity, no definitive evidence has ever been found. While news sources like to put forth the claim that experts overwhelmingly agree that there is a connection and that it is a significant problem in our society, a recent large survey shows that this is far from the case.

With those points in mind, you can imagine my reaction to a recent petition delivered to Target Australia that prompted the store to stop selling the new Grand Theft Auto 5 video game on the grounds that it depicts "graphic" sex and violence. But that's when the story starts to get good. A group of people who presumably thought the whole thing was as dumb as I do started their own petition to ban sales of a book that likewise contains plenty of sex and violence - the Bible! Not only that, it attracted about as many signatures as the original petition.

After Target Australia erred on the side of conservative moms, fans of the game or people who just didn’t like the idea of censoring a product because of its perceived vulgarity, created a new Change.org petition that requested that the store also ban the Bible… for the exact same reasons. From the petition (again, emphasis theirs):

"It’s a book that encourages readers to murder women for entertainment. The incentive is to commit sexual violence against women, then abuse or kill them to proceed or get ‘god’ points – and now Target are stocking it and promoting it for your Xmas stocking.

This is The Holy Bible. This book means that after various sex acts, readers are given options to kill women by stoning her unconscious, Setting them on fire, cutting off their hands, and killing their children!"

The Bible certainly has a disturbing amount of sex and violence. In fact, there have been whole books written on the subject. Oftentimes these passages are overlooked by modern audiences and can cause quite a shock to people who have never bothered to actually plow through the whole book.

Personally, I read the Bible all the way through twice while I was growing up Christian, and now I'm a Thelemite. You can't necessarily draw any sort of statistical conclusion from a single example, but I do find it amusing how far actually reading the Bible led me from fundamentalism. I also know several individuals who attended Bible college and are now OTO members, and have seen plenty of fundamentalists who for whatever reason don't seem to know the text of their own holy book.

As an example of the latter, I was very disappointed with Bill Maher's film Religulous for this very reason - it sure seemed like Maher picked weak targets. He interviewed an anti-gay fundamentalist who knew about the prohibition against male homosexuality in Leviticus, but seemed to be completely ignorant of Paul's remarks from Romans. I don't agree with the guy's position, but he should at least know the text well enough to argue it coherently. He's a full-time minister - isn't it his job?

At any rate, petitioning to ban the Bible here strikes me as a great tactical move. It highlights the ridiculousness of the original petition, and how Target Australia fundamentally erred by giving in to it. If the store doesn't want to sell anything that contains sex and/or violence it's their right, but it would mean removing a whole lot of stuff unrelated to this one video game. Also, if I were I Australian I would be looking for someplace else to shop that is less susceptible to hyperbolic nonsense.

Northern Territory to Repeal Witchcraft Act

The law prohibiting witchcraft in England was famously repealed in 1951, after which Gerald Gardner began promoting Wicca publicly. It seems that Australia's Northern Territory has yet to catch up, though this will soon be changing. The law in question is the same witchcraft act of 1735, which at the time was instituted across all the territories of the British Empire. Northern Territory Attorney-General John Elferink has announced that the territorial government is finally planning a repeal of this outdated legislation.

"It falls outside the gamut of modern sentencing," he said. "It's just a quirk that it is still operational law." Mr Elferink said the Witchcraft Act predated European settlement in Australia but was passed on along with many ancient British laws. It has already been repealed in England and many other jurisdictions. "It appears that this one has slipped through the cracks (in the Territory)," he said.

Mr Elferink said the Act had initially been set up to protect consumers and had replaced the 1563 version that allowed for witches to be burnt at the stake. But he "did not anticipate" any prosecutions in the future. Repealing the law would give Darwin's spiritual community some peace of mind. "I believe we have very fine and law-abiding tarot readers who would be fairly horrified to find out they've committed an offence that would see them pilloried on market day," he said.

All I can say is good riddance to a law that could be used to prosecute members of minority religions such as Wicca. I don't know if there are any other British territories in which the witchcraft act is still in force, but if there are I suggest they get with the program as well. Laws are funny things - it's always easy to pass more of them, but repealing them is another story, even if they have been on the books for hundreds of years and no longer bear any relation to the current state of society. I've often thought that all legislation should be subject in some way to periodic review to prevent this sort of thing from happening, though with politics being what it is, there are a lot of ways such a process could be implemented that would cause more problems than it solved.

When Priests Attack

When Jesus told his disciples to love their neighbors I'm pretty sure he was talking about the diametric opposite of this. Last weekend two elderly Australian priests living in the same building complex got into a fight over a parking space. In a scene one would usually expect to see in B-movie involving demonic possession or something, the altercation ended with one of them biting off the other's ear.

Father Thomas Byrne, 80, battled 81-year-old Father Thomas Joseph Smith in their building complex yesterday in Perth, Australia, police say. After the fight, Byrne told Smith to pick something up off the ground; only when he got home did Smith realize it was his ear. So he wrapped it in a towel and rushed to a hospital for surgery.

When the two showed up in court, Byrne was sporting a black eye and Smith his newly reattached ear. A judge charged Byrne with grievous bodily harm and imposed tough bail restrictions: no going within 30 feet of Father Smith, no threatening him, and no communicating in any way.

I suppose it's a good thing that Byrne was polite enough to remind his adversary to take his severed ear with him. Perhaps he has his spiritual practice to thank for this, as I imagine it would be difficult for most people to act with even marginal grace after a fit of ear-biting anger. At the same time, wouldn't it have been infinitely better still if he hadn't bitten it off in the first place?

The Haunted Market

According to folklore, ghosts are usually found in areas that are isolated and get little foot traffic, like private homes and abandoned buildings. However, recent security camera footage from an IGA supermarket in Adelaide, South Australia seems to show that a ghost may have decided to haunt the market rather than, say, a spooky house somewhere across town. The footage shows a package of fruit rolls being thrown a significant distance in the middle of the night.

This has led store owner Norm Hurst to believe that supernatural beings could be at work, telling the Advertiser he thinks the 'ghost has a sweet tooth'.

Upon buying the store, Mr Hurst had been warned about a supernatural presence and he admitted that some 'strange things' have happened.

However, Mr Hurst added: 'I think it's pretty cool actually, it [the ghost] hasn't done anything nasty.'

The co-founder of Adelaide Paranormal Detectives, Jessica Pulvirenti, shored up the pro-ghost argument by claiming that the footage seemed to be genuine.

She added that it didn't look as though there were any wires around the product and also had a few tips for moving on nuisance spirits.

The footage was discussed on an Australian morning show, and while the idea that the package had just fallen was brought up it actually appears to fly a significant distance. My impression of the video is that it's clear enough that it's either a hoax or the real thing - it just looks too good to be a case of something randomly falling off a shelf. One warning sign is that the owner seems to think having a ghost is "cool," as that does provide some incentive for a hoax. But if the rest of the footage from the store shows that nobody was present, this could very well show real paranormal activity. The video is embedded below the cut so you can judge for yourself.

Australian UFO Files Mysteriously Missing

Everybody who knows anything about UFO's knows that a vast government conspiracy exists to maintain their secrecy. As was subversively revealed to mass audiences by Dan Aykroyd's character in the film Sneakers:

So the first meeting between President Eisenhower and the alien visitor happened in 1954. Ike said, "Sure, we'll give you all the cow lips you want, just give us your technology." And that was when the cattle mutilations started up.

Those are among the many secrets we're not being told by the people in power. The United States Government is hiding alien bodies from the Roswell Incident. It's building its own vehicles based on flying saucer technology at Area 51 - or was, until the place was exposed by a Discovery Channel documentary. It's covering up ongoing abductions, experiments, and probings by the enigmatic Grays. And every other government in the world has its own files detailing sightings, reports, and investigations of these bizarre phenomena, some of which undoubtedly point to the inescapable conclusion that space aliens are indeed among us.

That is, except for Australia.

As it turns out, the Australian military seems to have misplaced its records of UFO investigations dating back many years.

Political Magick in Australia?

Are dark magicians at work influencing the Federal Parliament of Australia? Pastor Daniel Nalliah thinks so, and is organizing what he calls a "prayer offensive" to combat these unnamed sorcerers. That is, he's casting a counterspell - as I've mentioned numerous times on this blog, any prayer directed toward a specific goal is exactly the same thing as casting a magical spell. What evidence does Nalliah have? Why, the discovery of a "black mass altar!"

The discovery of a "black mass altar" at Mount Ainslie in Canberra by a group of school students had inspired him to organise a prayer gathering at the area on Saturday.

"The type of altar discovered on Mount Ainslie pointed to a black mass and the work of dark forces wanting to cast spells on Australia and federal parliament," Mr Nalliah said.

"These days people don't think the devil is real but we have seen the bad effects of the spiritual being known as Satan and we believe there is a spiritual fight over the nation of Australia being fought in the heavens."

Asked what evidence of Satan there was in parliament, Mr Nalliah said: "The number of politicians who have serious marriage problems."

I would be interested to see what the divorce rate is for politicians compared to the general population in Australia. Something like half of all marriages end in divorce and I suspect being married to a politician is especially stressful, so I'm guessing that the rate would have to become pretty outrageous before it crossed into paranormal territory. I also find it pretty amusing how Nalliah leaps from the discovery of an altar to the apparently obvious conclusion (to him) that it was being used to cast spells on Parliament. Actually, the most popular spells tend to be for love, money, or revenge rather than the passage of some particular bill or referendum, so my guess is that if this altar was in fact set up by a working magician and not a bunch of kids fooling around those are the most likely spells that would have been cast.

This whole altar incident brings to mind a story I heard years ago. Back in the mid-1990's I did some work with a small magical group here in the Twin Cities for about a year or so. One of the members had a pretty remarkable imagination, to the point where just about any story he told had to be taken with a grain (or maybe a bucket) of salt. He once told me a story about being out in one of the parks down by the Mississippi River after dark and coming upon a "Satanic Altar." He destroyed the altar by smashing it to bits, but as he did so a black hand reached up out of the altar and tried to grab him. He got away from the apparition, but not before it managed to grab his hand. He then proceeded to show off a cut on his hand as "proof" that he had been attacked by a Satanic entity.

While I've seen enough weird things over the years that I've been practicing magick to know that such a story is not absolutely impossible, there are a number of factors that make me doubt its veracity. One of the current members of my magical working group was there that night, and he tells me that while he felt some sort of hostile presence, he did not see any apparitions or other measurable paranormal activity and the whole incident with the altar supposedly happened while the person who claimed to have experienced it was off in the woods by himself. Furthermore, since many of the pagan groups in town do public rituals in that particular park, the altar was much more likely to have been put there by a pagan than by a Satanist. Finally, the "black hand" is pretty over-the-top and I've never seen anything quite like it when working a ritual.

My guess is that what really happened is that for some reason the atmosphere in the park felt weird that night. It might have been a spiritual presence, but it also might not even have been paranormal - high-tension power lines run through the park and if the load was high that night the electromagnetic field might have been perceptible. My friend probably did find some sort of altar, freaked out, smashed it, and in the process cut his hand - he said that he destroyed the altar by smashing it with a walking stick, which would make a hand injury well within the realm of possibility. Maybe he even saw a shadow that looked like a hand and then put the whole thing together into a gripping yarn. I'm serious, in the old days this guy would have probably been a bard or something. He really could tell a good story.

So where am I going with this? Well, one of the things that I think magicians need to cultivate is a skeptical attitude toward claims of this sort. It's counter-productive to dismiss them out of hand like the hardcore skeptics do, but at the same time blindly accepting them as true is also problematic. Daniel Nalliah has clearly not learned his lesson here - he jumps from a fact (an altar was found) to an essentially unrelated conclusion (spells are being cast on Parliament). This the same logical fallacy that Scott Adams epitomized in one of his Dilbert books as "My car won't start. I'm certain that the spark plugs have been stolen by rogue clowns." I mean, it's possible, but is it likely?

Devil Baby?

Belinda Neal, an Australian politician, was rebuked today by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for claiming that pregnant rival Sophie Mirabella could give birth to a demon. This could prove costly for Rudd if Neal turns out to have inside information. After all, maybe she's just trying warn us of the impending Apocalypse.

If Mirabella gives birth to a son and decides to name him Damien she'll have my vote forever - because it would be really, really funny. Of course, my vote doesn't help her much seeing as I'm not Australian.