So Now the Vatican Likes Harry Potter?

While I disagreed with the arguments put forth by the Roman Catholic Church when it issued the recent ban on Reiki, at least from the standpoint of univalent Christianity they made some sense. If you believe that the use of your own deity's spiritual power is automatically good when applied according to doctrine while any other use of spiritual power is automatically evil, it follows logically that you would be opposed to any magical practice that is not part of your own spiritual tradition.

For years the Roman Catholic Church has come out against the Harry Potter books and movies on similar grounds. Because the books and films portray the use of magick and magick is considered evil by the Church this is to be expected, although a lot of people over the years have pointed out that since Harry Potter is a work of fiction it is not exactly teaching anyone the magical arts. I mean, I would love to be able to levitate something just by flicking a wand and intoning "wingardium leviosa" - but of course it doesn't work that way.

Strangely enough, the Catholic Church appears to have finally seen reason in its review of the latest Harry Potter film. Contrary to all of the Church's previous statements, a positive review of the film was recently published in the official Vatican newspaper. So what changed? Here's what the review had to say:

"There is a clear line of demarcation between good and evil and [the film] makes clear that good is right. One understands as well that sometimes this requires hard work and sacrifice," the newspaper judged.

The broadsheet paper also praised the film's clear message that "the search for immortality epitomised by Lord Voldemort" was wrong. It even approved of the film's treatment of adolescent romance amid the halls and corridors of Hogwart's, saying that it achieved the "correct balance" and made the teenage stars more credible.

Aside from the comments on adolescent romance I don't see how any reviewer could have missed these points upon viewing the first film, let alone the sixth. Was Voldemort not "evil enough" for the Vatican in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone?

Let's see - he killed Harry's parents, murdered unicorns and drank their blood, tried to steal the sorcerer's stone twice, and tried to kill Harry multiple times (or at least ordered Professor Quirrell to do so). That seems pretty evil to me. And seeing as Voldemort killed the unicorns and tried to steal the sorcerer's stone in order to obtain immortality, hasn't the message that trying to obtain immortality as Voldemort does is wrong been there the whole time?

As recently as last year, the same Vatican newspaper condemned the Potter books.

The newspaper wrote: "Despite the values that we come across in the narration, at the base of this story, witchcraft is proposed as a positive ideal.

"The characterisation of common men who do not know magic as 'Muggles' who know nothing other than bad and wicked things is a truly diabolical attitude."

The newspaper called the teenage boy wizard "the wrong kind of hero", comparing the books unfavourably with two other British children's classics, the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

I'm left rather confused here, to tell the truth. While I'm of the opinion that the original condemnation of the books and films was pretty silly, the Roman Catholic Church is usually pretty consistent in its positions. Could it be that the previous denunciations were simply based on the presence of buzzwords like "witchcraft" in the story and only now someone actually sat down and watched one of the films?

Roman Catholic Church Bans Reiki

This actually happened back in March, but I only heard about it this weekend. The Roman Catholic Church has published an evaluation of Reiki, a form of Japanese energy work used for healing, and declared it to be incompatible with Christian belief.

According to a USCCB press release, the guidelines describe Reiki as a healing technique “invented in Japan in the late 1800s by Mikao Usui, who was studying Buddhist texts.”

It characterizes Reiki therapy as teaching that illness is caused by “some kind of disruption or imbalance in one’s ‘life energy.’”

A Reiki practitioner is believed to be able to effect healing by placing his or her hands in certain positions on a patient’s body to “facilitate the flow of Reiki, the ‘universal life energy,’ from the Reiki practitioner to the patient.”

“Reiki lacks scientific credibility,” the U.S. bishops’ guidelines state, adding that scientific and medical communities have not accepted it as “an effective therapy.”

“Reputable scientific studies attesting to the efficacy of Reiki are lacking, as is a plausible scientific explanation as to how it could possibly be efficacious,” the bishops’ guidelines add.

Reiki has many of the same problems as ceremonial magick in terms of being subject to scientific evaluation. The practitioner is such an important variable that repeatable experiments are difficult to set up and most of the healing effect is based on probability shifts. So in order to really do a good scientific study you need an enormous sample set to determine whether or not the practice is working.

Studies like this have been done with acupuncture, but they have taken many years to do. I remember some of those going on it the late 1980's when I was in college. One of my classes was on psychoneuroimmunology, and some of what it covered included attempts by neuroscientists to figure out what acupuncture was and how it worked. The most recent studies have shown a significant difference between subjects treated with needles and those who received no treatment, but there is little difference between groups in terms of whether or not the needles are placed in the "appropriate" locations for specific illnesses. Even after all these years, accupuncture looks like it's doing something, but scientists still aren't quite sure what.

Even though such a study of Reiki would be similarly difficult, it's kind of interesting seeing this scientific criticism coming from the Catholic Church. To be fair, the Catholics come out in favor of mainstream science at least as much as other churches do if not moreso, as in the debate over creationism in which the Roman Catholic Church sided with the scientific community even though it was originally a Catholic who came up with the 6000-year-old Earth model that modern creationists support. But doesn't the Catholic Church also teach that you can be healed by prayer? What makes Reiki different?

Examining descriptions of Reiki as a “spiritual” kind of healing, the guidelines say there is a radical difference between Reiki therapy and healing by divine power.

“For Christians the access to divine healing is by prayer to Christ as Lord and Savior, while the essence of Reiki is not a prayer but a technique that is passed down from the 'Reiki Master' to the pupil, a technique that once mastered will reliably produce the anticipated results.”

Shorter Catholic Church:

(1) Magick is okay as long as it's our magick, but otherwise it's bad.
(2) If magick works you shouldn't use it.

As a magician neither of those arguments makes very much sense to me. As far as (1) goes, many religious systems try to monopolize the magick use of their followers according to what they believe is the only "correct" or "authorized" system and the Roman Catholic Church has a particularly long history of doing just that going back over a thousand years. However, the universality of magical practices across different spiritual traditions would seem to imply that regardless of what any particular groups says, there are a lot of ways to make magick work.

I find (2) even more incomprehensible - it sounds as if the Roman Catholic Church is implying that you shouldn't make use of any magical practice that works well. I suppose this may just be an extension of (1) in that functional magick that doesn't fit the Catholic paradigm could undermine their monopoly on the "proper" use of magical powers.

Fiji Masons Arrested for Sorcery

There are certain parts of the world where it's a lot more difficult to be a Mason than it is in the United States. One of the things you learn when you get involved with Masonry is the extent to which the founding fathers tried to build our nation on Masonic ideals. In the early days of the United States Masonry took on many of the functions that had been performed by state churches in Europe, such as the consecration of buildings and other public works projects. Many other countries don't have this sort of history, however, and in some of those places being a Mason can get you into trouble with both your neighbors and the local authorities.

Apparently, one of those places is the island nation of Fiji, where 14 members of a Masonic Lodge were recently arrested on suspicion of practicing sorcery.

A New Zealand man spent a "wretched" night in a Fiji jail after police raided his Freemasons meeting when frightened residents suspected witchcraft, according to the New Zealand Herald.

The man, who did not wish to be identified, blamed "dopey village people" for the raid on the island of Denerau in which 14 members of the Freemasons Lodge of Lautoka were herded into police cars and jailed for the night.

Police also seized lodge paraphernalia, including wands, compasses and a skull.

The man told the Herald that Tuesday night's meeting was "interrupted by a banging on the door and there were these village people and the police demanding to be let in".

One of the hazards of being involved in a tradition with elements that are kept secret is that people outside the group are left to wonder what you are up to and why you have to keep your activity secret. I once knew someone who got involved in Masonry and after finding out what we actually did went around trying to find out how he could get involved in the "secret higher degree rituals" that he was convinced had to be going on. He eventually wound up quitting the fraternity because it wasn't nearly as exciting as those Jack Chick pamphlets implied. I think that since I and a number of my friends were members of the lodge and also practiced magick, he was of the opinion that there had to be more explicit magical work going on there. That was what the local police were thinking as well.

Police director of operations Waisea Tabakau told Legend FM News in Fiji that the group were being investigated for "allegedly practicing sorcery", the Fiji Village website reported.

The 14 Masons were released the next day by order of the Prime Minister, but nonetheless had to spend the night in in a Fiji jail, which sounds other than fun. It just goes to show that superstition can be a powerful and dangerous motivator, though in this case the Masons escaped criminal charges and further injury. Many people accused of sorcery or witchcraft in that part of the world have not been so lucky.

Naturally, I think the story would be a lot more interesting if it turned out that they actually were practicing sorcery. Many of the elements of the Masonic initiation rituals have practical magical applications and when done properly I find those initiations to be quite magical, though they are more works of illumination than works of sorcery. If somebody really was out there practicing Masonic sorcery, I would be very interested in finding out what exactly they did and how well it worked.

So Genies Use Cell Phones?

In Bangladesh genies are the latest craze - genies who apparently use cell phones. Police there in the district of Gobindaganj have arrested 24 con artists in the last three months who contacted victims by cell phone, claiming to be powerful genies in order to cheat them out of as much money as possible under the threat of magical attack.

"It has become an epidemic here," said Farhad bin Imrul Kayes, police chief of Gobindaganj district.

"In the last three months alone we have arrested 24 of these so-called 'kings of genies', some of whom have even become rich in just a year," he told AFP.

The scammers would gather personal information about their victims beforehand, call them and speak "in a tone similar to Arabic," Kayes said.

Claiming to be genies who had descended from the sky, they would tell people to send money to a specific location, threatening a family tragedy if they disobeyed.

This scam sounds a lot like a spam e-mail I got years back - originating in Nigeria, of course - from a supposedly powerful magician demanding that I send money or else I would face a terrible curse. I sent no money and nothing noticeably bad happened to me, so if any curse was even cast in my direction it must have been a pretty ineffective one. I saw the same e-mail one more time and then it disappeared for good, so I'm guessing that nobody made any money off of it. Usually the e-mails that make con artists money keep coming and only go away when you add them to your spam filter.

Conducting this similar scam over the phone in a country like Bangladesh where belief in magick is common is most likely a lot more lucrative, at least in part because nothing says you have an effective magical link to your target like an e-mail addressed to "undisclosed recipients." Furthermore, the use of illicitly obtained personal information certainly adds to the scam's effectiveness, because the target is left wondering how the con artist could possibly have such information without some sort of magical power. Phony psychics commonly use this same trick and it can be very impressive even when dealing with someone who is on their guard.

Still, it leaves me wondering why the first thing a genie would do after descending from the sky would be to pick up a cell phone and start hitting random people up for cash. Aren't they supposed to be able to create gold or find hidden treasures or something? More to the point, wouldn't you think that it would be easier for a real larcenous genie to just appear in a puff of smoke and run off with your wallet rather than going through the hassle of making a phone call?

Italy is for Sorcerers

Here's another story from last week that slipped through the cracks. Apparently Italy is the place to be if you're trying to find work as a sorcerer, astrologer, or spiritual healer.

Nearly 18 percent of the Italian population -- 11 million people -- trusts self-styled sorcerers and healers, a consumer watchdog said in a report Monday.

The group Telefono Antiplagio found more than 16,000 cases of people being scammed by sorcerers and healers since 1994. There are 155,000 sorcerers and healers active in Italy.

Every day, 33,000 people see sorcerers or astrologers in Italy, the study found.

While 16,000 sounds like a big number from how it is framed in the article, what surprises me is how low it is. If 33,000 people see sorcerers every day that works out to about 174,652,500 visits over the last 14 1/2 years if we assume that the rate of visits remains constant. If there have only been 16,000 complaints, that means that less than .01% of all visits spark complaints.

Normal people do slightly better than that when trying to influence quantum diodes with their minds based on research done by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) project, and according to skeptics those results are not statistically significant. Nonetheless, I won't be surprised if I see them throwing this statistic around as proof of how fraudulent Italian magicians are.

It's also interesting to find out that the sorcery trade is pretty much the same wherever you go.

The top reason for seeing a sorcerer is to soothe a broken heart (46 percent), followed by health problems (25 percent), violence (22 percent) and trouble at work (seven percent).

These are also the sorts of things people usually are interested in when they e-mail me asking how to cast a specific kind of spell. Maybe if I lived in Italy there would be enough of those questions that I could justify making a business of it and quit my day job.

And Then They Came for the Astrologers...

With summer here I've been busier than usual and haven't been blogging as much. This story is from two weeks ago but still interesting enough to comment upon.

Things are currently going well for the government of Sri Lanka after its victory over the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group that has spent the last forty years fighting for an independent homeland for members of the Tamil ethnic minority. But according to Chandrasiri Bandara, an astrologer working for a pro-opposition newspaper, a planetary aspect beginning on October 8th of this year will create difficulties for the ruling regime. The Sri Lankan government responded to this prediction by arresting Bandara.

Chandrasiri Bandara, who writes an astrology column for a pro-opposition weekly, was taken in on Thursday, police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekara said.

"The CID (Criminal Investigations Department) is questioning the astrologer," Gunasekara said Friday, adding that they wanted to find out the "basis" for the prediction.

Well, let's take a look. While I'm guessing that Sri Lankan astrologers use the Vedic rather than the Western system so you need to adjust by about 22 degrees to determine the signs that planets fall into, all the aspects between planets are figured the same way as in the Western system. The main thing I see on the chart is that on October 8th Saturn goes into conjunction with Mercury in - I believe - Virgo according to the Vedic system.

The astrologer had predicted that a planetary change on October 8 will be inauspicious for parliament and the government may not be able to arrest rising living costs -- a prediction already made by private economists.

Since Mercury represents commerce and Saturn is the major malefic, this could be what Bandara was referring to in the prediction. Virgo is the sign most closely related to "reaping the harvest" and as a result it doesn't seem completely off the wall to suppose that such a conjuction could be inauspicious for macroeconomic policies. Mercury is a fast-moving planet, though, so the conjuction won't last for very long and an alternate interpretation might be some sort of short-term economic problem that will be overcome in the space of a couple of weeks.

The opposition United National Party condemned Bandara's arrest and accused the government of heading towards a dictatorship.

"The crime which Chandrasiri Bandara committed was publishing an astrological column which was adverse to the government," UNP general secretary, Tissa Attanayake, said.

Sri Lankan politicians take astrology seriously and most have their own personal seers who decide the auspicious times to launch any new programme or work.

Indeed, it's a bad sign when they come for the astrologers.

Ritual Tools and Extension of Self

There is a lot of discussion among magicians about the significance of magical tools. Some magicians have elaborate temples with extensive collections of magical implements while others prefer to use few if any physical objects in their practice. Yesterday I came across an article in which researchers claim to have found evidence that the use of tools alters the brain's perception of body shape and size. You need to register at the site to read the whole article, but registration is free and I have yet to be spammed by this particular website.

"To be accurate in doing an action with a tool, you need to make the tool become a part of your body," the study's first author Lucilla Cardinali of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Bron and Claude Bernard University in Lyon told The Scientist. "Your brain needs to take into account that the action is performed with something added to your body part."

The study was conducted by having subjects work with a gripping tool that was longer than the normal reach of their arms for a period of time and then conducting a series of tests to gauge whether or not they perceived their arms to be longer.

Cardinali, a graduate student with INSERM's Alessandro Farnè, gave people a mechanical grabber that extended their reach and found that people with the arm-elongating tool took longer to grasp and point to an object after the gizmo was taken away compared to before they held the tool. They then showed that this delayed reaction time is a normal response of people with naturally longer arms, thus indicating that tool users judge their arms to be longer than they truly are. The researchers also asked blindfolded participants to touch specific landmarks on their arm -- the elbow, wrist and middle fingertip -- and showed that people perceived these spots as further along the limb after having played with the gadget arm.

This is one of those things that feels like basic common sense, but until now there has been little research testing the idea that tools can alter body image. Most of us have had the experience of driving a car, for example. While you're on the road the car feels like it's a part of you once your driving skill reaches a certain level. You don't think about each individual action you take as you drive, you just think "I'm going that way" and your brain and body automatically handle the necessary actions that make it so. This is true of many complex tasks in our day-to-day lives involving tools and implements.

Assuming that this research is accurate, it seems to me that the same principle could be applied to magical tools. In fact, it may be that the use of magical tools exploits this same principle in the service of spiritual evolution. As a magician you want to develop the realization that "you" are larger than the boundaries of your skin. Lon Milo Duquette describes this realization as "it's all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head really is." In practice, I have found the realization that my entire field of perception is in a meaningful sense "me" increases the power of practical magical rituals substantially. It's accurate in an objective scientific sense as well, since everything that we experience in the mundane world is mediated by our brains and what we usually experience as "seeing," for example, is actually a set of internal neural firing patterns that arise in response to patterns of light in the environment.

In my temple I have four small altars at the corners corresponding to the four directions. On each directional altar I have a candle of the appropriate color, a corresponding Egyptian deity statue, and the corresponding elemental tool. Using the model from the study, as I use each tool I perceive it to be a part of my body. It seems logical, then, that when I replace it at the corresponding quarter it would help to extend my sense of self in that direction. Using all four tools in sequence, as in a ritual like the Opening by Watchtower, should extend my sense of self to encompass the entire temple. Practices like the visualization of lineal figures at the quarters also help to accomplish the shift in awareness from the body to the entire working space, and at some point this realization "clicks" and becomes permanent.

While a magician can accomplish this realization without the use of tools by visualization alone, it makes sense to me that in our practices we should exploit every brain mechanism we can in order to speed our progress along the path. Tool use appears to be one of those mechanisms, so in the light of this new research perhaps those of us who generally work without tools might want to reconsider their use.

Is This a Real Practice?

One of the things you learn pretty quickly when studying true crime stories that are supposedly linked to esoteric practices is that prosecutors often exaggerate anything that sounds like an occult connection to sometimes ridiculous extremes. These exaggerations are usually obvious to magical practitioners like myself, but they sail over the heads of people who've never studied occultism and honestly have no idea what esoteric spirituality really entails.

For example, I've covered the case of Joy Johnson and Joseph Craig who were accused of sex crimes related to a "Satanic cult" that nobody in their area had ever heard of. The prosecutor went so far as charge one of their neighbors, I suppose in order to dig up somebody else so that he could justify the existence of a cult. In the end, however, the neighbor was released since it was pretty clear to the judge that she had nothing to do with any sort of cult, let alone any of the alleged criminal activity. Johnson and Craig remain charged with the sexual abuse of two other individuals and have yet to go to trial, but the "Satanic cult" elements have been completely dropped from the state's case - probably because the prosecutor made them up made them up when he found out the two practiced esoteric spirituality.

The conduct of the prosecutor involved in that story provides some context to this one.

A New York City woman has been accused of burning her 6-year-old daughter during a voodoo ritual and then ignoring her cries for help and sending her to bed.

Prosecutors say Marie Lauradin poured an accelerant over her daughter during a Haitian practice known as Loa and made her stand naked in a ring of fire, engulfing her in flames.

I'm not that familiar with Voudon, but I do recognize a few elements such as the ring of fire. I know that strong alcohol is also used in Voudon rituals, so that could be the "accelerant" prosecutors are talking about. However, I'm wondering if anyone out there can confirm whether or not this combination of the two sounds like something that Voudon practitioners actually do. Specifically, it seems to me that if it is common to have someone stand naked in the center of a ring of fire and then pour alcohol all over them there would be a lot more serious burn injuries going around the Voudon community than I've ever heard of. Or could this be the result of some serious technical problem in the ritual, like making the ring of fire too small or using too much alcohol?

I don't really know what happened here aside from the child being injured, but I also am well aware that statements from prosecutors can be profoundly unreliable when a case has anything to do with alternative religions or magical practices. Can anybody out there clue me in? Was this a poorly done version of a canonical Voudon ritual, or are portions of the charges outright fabrications?