Animal Births in Nigeria

No, not the regular kind that you have all the time on a farm, something far more disturbing. Or at least it would be if it made any sense. According to this story from Nigeria, a woman named Chipo Mahuda claims to have given birth to birds, frogs, and mice after being cursed by her lover's wife. This is one of those stories that any skeptic will tell you is either definitive proof of paranormal activity or completely fraudulent. Some of the other weird stories from Africa such as the car-thief-turned-goat could possibly be explained as simple mistaken identity - a person steals a car and abandons it, leaving the door open for a wayward goat to climb into the driver's seat. But this one?

When visited by the news crew, Chipo confirmed the chilling development. “I conceived after cheating with my neighbour, Learnmore, last year in December. We had several confrontations with his wife and she threatened me with his delivery of animals if I was to continue dating Learnmore and I strongly suspect her of bewitching me. I was already five months pregnant and I couldn’t stop as Learnmore demanded to have sex with me in the bush and at Waterloo farm where he works.

“I could not believe her words until 30 July when I started hearing strange voiced from my stomach similar to the squeaking of a mouse and of small chicks. Suddenly I felt serious labour pains and had a stomach ache. I went to Waterloo clinic and when they pressed against my stomach, they heard the squeaking. When they saw a mouse coming out of my privates they couldn’t find a solution and referred me to Marondera Hospital,” she narrated.

OTO in the News

Here's the sort of press OTO should be getting. Note the complete lack of Illuminati nonsense or similar nattering on about how the Order controls the politics and finances of the world (spoiler: it doesn't!). Also, the serious perspective of the article is refreshing in contrast to treating the Order as some kind of freak show just because we take an alternative approach to spirituality - like several British press outlets did earlier this year.

“I had always been interested in the occult and alternate religious traditions, even though I started off as a ‘good little Christian boy,’” said the body master, David, who asked that his last name not be used. “In the back of my mind, I knew I needed something else.” David looked into Buddhism, Wicca and New Age beliefs. But then he began to read about the OTO’s most famous leader, Aleister Crowley.

“Ever since I heard that name, he always had a grip on me,” said David. “I decided I need to go experience a Gnostic Mass, and I found Sekhet Bast Ra. At first, I thought it was the strangest thing I’d ever seen in my life, but I wanted to go back.”

Founded in Germany by Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss, the secret society gained most of its prominence early in the 20th century, when Crowley, dubbed by the press as the “wickedest man in the world,” took the order to newfound worldwide fame. Although he was widely demonized, his work and rituals transformed the order into what it is today, with the Law of Thelema — “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” — the OTO’s guiding principle.

According to David, however, this isn’t an excuse to go wild. Quite the opposite, actually. “It never implies, at least to me, ‘Do whatever you want.’ The true will — some people might say is destiny, some might say fate, but I think it’s more than that — is what you are here to do. There are people who are following their true will without even knowing about Thelema. It’s a guideline that anyone can follow to [become] a better person.”

I suppose the truth is a disappointment to anyone who believes that we run the CIA and divulge secret pass codes at our initiations that can be used to make our enemies disappear or comb through their NSA files, but really, the idea that occultists wield incredible political power wasn't even true in the nineteenth century, let alone today. On the other hand, there are plenty of situations in which the power to control one's mind is a whole lot more useful - and that's something Thelema really does teach.

It's Full of Stars!

Could this be the work of the Elder Gods? An Oklahoma City restaurant owner came into work last Friday to find a concrete monument weighing hundreds of pounds on the front lawn. The monument bore a metal plaque claiming the land on which the restaurant sits for Azathoth, one of the Elder Gods of H. P. Lovecraft's pantheon. Does Oklahoma City hide a secret cult of Azathoth-worshippers driven to claim land around the town for their infernal lord?

The concrete pillar is rough in texture and appears to have been ripped from its foundation and somehow ended up in the front lawn. “We came into work Friday morning, and we had this lovely concrete block out here,” Paseo Grill owner Lesley Rawlinson said.

The wording on the block is even more bizarre than its arrival. “It says ‘In the year of our lord 2012 Creer Pipi claimed this land for Azathoth,” Rawlinson said. “It’s kind of a problem that we’re stuck with, a very heavy problem.”

Rawlinson says she has contacted the Oklahoma City Police Department. The monument has not been reported stolen, and police say, unfortunately, the owners of the Paseo Grill are responsible for getting rid of it. “What do we do with it and where do we take it?” Rawlinson said.

Far more likely than any sort of Lovecraft cult is a clever prankster with enough of a grudge against the restaurant to target it for some reason. It's likely that they knew the restaurant would be responsible for removing the heavy pillar and wanted to cause them trouble. As the pillar looks to have been pulled from its foundation and may have been stolen, the restaurant is seeking the real owners. With something this distinctive you'd think that wouldn't be too hard.

Satanic Pony Sacrifice Isn't

One of the things that frustrates me about law enforcement and occultism is when weird, unexplained events are pinned on "Satanists" as if (A) such folks are running around all over the place and (B) they mysteriously behave exactly as represented in Hollywood horror films. You know, doing evil just for the sake of doing evil rather than any practical or logical reason. Given that motive is key in many criminal investigations I'll grant that it's awfully convenient to have a class of individuals who keep themselves totally secret and are motivated by nothing other than the desire to do "bad things" - except that in reality, such people are so rarely encountered that they might as well not exist. Even psychopaths, individuals who lack both empathy for others and a sense of remorse for their actions, generally pursue tangible and rational goals - they just do so at the expense of anyone who gets in their way.

So this story is no surprise whatsoever to me, and really shouldn't be to anyone else who thinks about it logically. In July, the body of a pony was discovered in Dartmoor, England. The body was missing several organs and appeared to have been mutilated, leading a livestock protection officer to speculate that "witches or devil worshippers" were responsible. It's unclear how killing and mutilating a pony would benefit such people, except perhaps in the sense of earning them extra unspeakable evil points for the day. Oh, and just to be clear, those aren't real things. In response to the officer's speculation, police dutifully investigated and fortunately spoke to actual experts who concluded that the pony died of natural causes. The apparent mutilation was simply the result of predation by wild animals after its death.

Russian Pastafarians Detained

Discordians sometimes comment that they aren't sure whether the tenets spelled out in the Principia Discordia are a joke disguised as a religion or a religion disguised as a joke. The same appears to be true of Pastafarianism, the beliefs articulated by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Originally created as a parody of Christian Creationism, Pastafarianism may be the first religion to go viral on the Internet, with professed followers all over the world. Last Saturday Russian Pastafarians held a "pasta procession" in Moscow that was broken up by police, resulting in the detention of eight participants.

Pastafarians wear sieves on their heads, worship The Flying Spaghetti Monster and believe that their religion was founded by pirates, their website says. They consider every Friday a religious holiday and do not take themselves seriously, it says.

Russian Pastafarians announced a “pasta procession” in Moscow and St. Petersburg to celebrate the birthday of US actor Robert De Niro who played a character nicknamed “Noodles” in Sergio Leone’s 1984 mafia drama Once Upon A Time In America, according to their web-posted statement.

However, Moscow authorities did not sanction the procession which was disrupted by riot police and activists with the God’s Will Orthodox group headed by Dmitri Enteo, according to a message by Russian Pastafarians on a social networking website.

The Russian government of Vladimir Putin has come down hard on the side of conservative religious beliefs recently, with the arrest of punk band Pussy Riot for performing their anti-Putin "punk prayer" in a church, legislation outlawing "insulting the feelings" of religious believers, and an outright ban on even mentioning the existence of homosexuality. And now they appear to be coming for the pasta strainers as well, or at least those who believe in wearing such attire on their heads. One wonders where this all will end.

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.

Can This Trope Finally Die?

The idea that people are "left-brained" or "right-brained" infiltrated esotericism from pop psychology, which to this day asserts that "left-brained" individuals are more analytical while "right-brained" individuals are more creative. Even when I was in college twenty years ago professors were working hard to debunk this notion, but for whatever reason it remained stuck in the popular imagination. Back then, it was known that in Americans language tended to be processed on the left while spatial information tended to be processed on the right - though it should be noted that children who grew up learning Asian languages were much more likely to have language represented on both sides of the brain.

This functional division severely undermines the "creative" designator for the right hemisphere, as it should be obvious that while the creativity of a painter would tend to employ the spatial processing of the right hemisphere, that of a writer would tend to employ the language processing of the left hemisphere. This was the main avenue of attack back in the early 1990's. Since then, brain scanning and related technologies have improved dramatically, giving us the ability to map localized neural functions in real time. Researchers recently ran a study using this technology and found what looks like definitive evidence that the "left-brain/right-brain" dichotomy is essentially meaningless.

"It's absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or the other side of the brain. Language tends to be on the left, attention more on the right. But people don’t tend to have a stronger left- or right-sided brain network. It seems to be determined more connection by connection," study researcher Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., said in a statement.

Anti-Witchcraft Squad Still Going Strong

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

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

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

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