Summoning up nothing

Some years ago, as part of the research I did while writing my novel Sephirot, I purchased a copy of Richard Cavendish's book The Black Arts.  It's a comprehensive look at the darker side of human beliefs, quite exhaustive and well-written (it's unclear how much of it Cavendish actually believes is true; he's pretty good at keeping his own opinions of out it).  I was mostly interested in the section on the "Tree of Life" from the Kabbalah -- the Sephirot of the novel's title -- but as is typical for me, I got sidetracked and ended up reading the entire thing.

There's a whole part of the book devoted to magical rituals, summoning up evil spirits and whatnot, and what struck me all the way through was the counterpoint between (1) how deadly seriously the practitioners take it, and (2) how fundamentally silly it all is.  Here's one passage with a spell for conjuring up a demon, taken from the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon), a seventeenth-century sorcerers' grimoire much used by the infamous Aleister Crowley:

I conjure thee, O Spirit N., strengthened by the power of Almighty God, and I command thee by Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes, and the most powerful Princes Genio and Liachide, Ministers of the Seat of Tartarus and Chief Princes of the Throne of Apologia in the ninth region.

Which is pretty fucking impressive-sounding if you can get it out without laughing.  This would be the difficulty I'd face if I was a sorcerer, which is undoubtedly why even after typing all this out, no evil spirit appeared.  I guess snickering while you're typing magic words is kind of off-putting to the Infernal Host.

Anyhow, if you chant all that and nothing happens -- which, let's face it, is the likeliest outcome -- the book then takes you through an escalating series of spells, gradually ramping up in the intensity of threats for what will happen to the demon if it doesn't obey you.  Ultimately there's this one, which is pretty dire:

O spirit N., who art wicked and disobedient, because thou hast not obeyed my commands and the glorious and incomprehensible names of the true God, the Creator of all things, now by the irresistible power of these Names I curse thee into the depths of the Bottomless Pit, there to remain in unquenchable fire and brimstone until the Day of Wrath unless thou shalt forthwith appear in this triangle before this circle to do my will.  Come quickly and in peace by the Names Adonai, Zebaoth, Adonai, Amioram.  Come, come, Adonai King of Kings commands thee.

Which, apparently, is the black magic equivalent of your dad saying "Don't make me ask you again!"  The whole thing is even more effective, the book says, if the magician chants all this while masturbating, so that when he has an orgasm "the full force of his magical power gushes forth."

Kind of makes you wonder how teenage boys don't summon demons several times a day.

Crowley absolutely loved this kind of rigamarole, especially because it involved sex, which appears to have been his entire raison d'être.  The book tells us that he "used this ritual in 1911 to summon a spirit called Abuldiz, but the results were not very satisfactory."

Which is unsurprising.  This, in fact, has always been what is the most baffling thing to me about magical thinking; that it simply doesn't work, and yet this seems to have little effect on its adherents.  For a time during my late teens I got seriously into divination.  Tarot cards, numerology, astrology, the works.  (I hasten to state that I never tried to conjure a demon.  Even at my most credulous, that stuff exceeded my Goofiness Tolerance Quotient.)  After an embarrassed and embarrassing period when, deep down, I knew it was all nonsense but wanted desperately for it to be true because it was so cool, I gave it all up as a bad job, decided rationality was the way to go, and pretty much never looked back.  (I do still own several Tarot card decks, however, which I can appreciate both from the fact that they're beautiful and from a touch of shame-faced nostalgia.)

But it's astonishing how few people go this direction.  The combination of confirmation bias (accepting slim evidence because it supports what we already believed) and dart-thrower's bias (noticing or giving more weight to hits than misses) is a mighty powerful force in the human psyche.  Add to that the fact that for certain miserable members of humanity, hoodwinking the gullible into belief is big business, and it's sad, though no real wonder, that when I type "astro-" into a Google search, "astrology" comes up before "astronomy."

Anyhow, those are my thoughts for a Monday morning, spurred by my looking for another book and happening to notice the Cavendish book still on my bookshelf.  It resides with various other books on ghosts, vampires, UFOs, cryptids, werewolves, and the like, and several with titles like Twenty Terrifying Unsolved Mysteries.  It's still entertaining to read that stuff even if I don't believe any of it.

On the other hand, if I get visited tonight by Abuldiz or whoever-the-fuck, I guess it'll serve me right.

****************************************

Wrack and rune

Yesterday I stumbled upon a post claiming that someone had programmed an artificial intelligence to cast magical spells, and that sent me down a rabbit hole that was way deeper than I'd expected.

The post was this:

So I googled "AI magical spells," and that was the last anyone saw of me for about four hours.

The first thing I ran into was an article in Vice about a GPT-3-powered AI interface called "Norn" that co-authored (so to speak) a book called A Chaos Magick Butoh Grimoire.  Butoh is a Japanese dance form that incorporates "playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, and extreme or absurd environments," but I haven't found any indication that it's connected with magic or the occult, so that's peculiar right from the get-go.  Alley Wurds, the human half of the co-authorship of the Grimoire, apparently tied it in by practicing Butoh moves until exhaustion and then going to the computer to see what Norn could create about the experience.  "GPT-3 has read a huge amount of stuff that it cuts and pastes together in a stream of consciousness free association manner, due to its lack of long term memory," Wurds said.  "So GPT-3 is like the subconscious mind of the internet expressing itself through cut-ups. I’m using my experience in the occult to direct this subconscious mind, rather than just my own."

This resulted in disquieting shit like the following:

The knowledge ritual involves chanting a mantra.  The mantra must be repeated while walking deosil [clockwise] around the boundary of the circle, and then stopping at each of the four cardinal points to meditate upon the knowledge you seek...  You sit down, repeat the mantra, and visualize a pentagram glowing with light.  Once this pentagram is fully visualized, you must carve the pentagram upon your flesh, and repeat the mantra yet again.  You carve the pentagram upon your chest, and feel the blood trickling down.  Repeat the mantra.  Once you are ready, you then pick up your ceremonial blade and stab it through your chest, killing yourself.  You repeat the mantra as you die.  This causes your soul to be released from your body.  The knowledge you seek will appear in your mind.

So, upside: you get to find out the knowledge you're looking for!  Downside: you're dead.

Unsurprisingly, the hyper-religious and hyper-paranoid (the Venn diagram for those two sets would have considerable overlap) are seriously freaking out about stuff like this.  Allowing soulless machines to learn how to cast magic spells and summon demons and whatnot is going to open a portal to hell and release Cthulhu and activate the sigils of evil and the gods of the underworld alone know what else.  But I was having a hell of a time trying to find out where the original post -- the one about the AI casting runes -- came from.  There was a lot of shrieking hyperbole about how evil it was and how we were all doomed, but no one seemed to know for sure where it had originated.

It took me an inordinate amount of time to figure out that the runes weren't created by an AI at all, and had, in fact, zero to do with AI.

They were a set of rune designs developed by author Brandon Sanderson for his Cosmere fictional universe.

Emphasis, of course, on the fictional part.

I shoulda known.  Just last week a woman in Texas became internet-famous for posting on Facebook that parents shouldn't let their kids watch Hocus Pocus 2 because the characters in the movie "could be casting any type of spell [that]… could be coming through that TV screen into your home," and that it could "unleash hell on your kids."

Ignoring the fact that once again, Hocus Pocus 2 is a work of fiction.

So yeah.  That's how I spent my afternoon yesterday.  You'd think I'd have learned by this time.  Run into something like that, immediately say, "It's the conspiracy nuts freaking out over fiction again," and forthwith moving on to some more productive enterprise, like attempting to explain quantum physics to my dog.  But I guess I should look on it as a public service.  I delve into these things so you don't have to.

You're welcome.

****************************************

Cough analysis

So for today's Tempest in a Teapot, we have: Hillary Clinton's health.

A couple of days ago, Clinton collapsed at a 9/11 ceremony, and her doctor ascribed it to a combination of dehydration and pneumonia.  The internet has been buzzing lately regarding the "coughing fits" she's had at speeches, ascribing it to everything from pleurisy to lung cancer.  Because, of course, (1) it couldn't be that keeping a schedule that would kill most of us outright might have some health impacts, and (2) it's clear that she's the only prominent politician who has ever fallen ill.  The incident where President George H. W. Bush puked on Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa was just, um, a fluke.

Or something.

So naturally, over at the r/conspiracy subreddit 19 of the 25 top stories are about Hillary Clinton's health.  Several claimed that she actually died of a stroke (or, in other versions, was hospitalized), and that subsequent appearances were actually a "body double."  More than one site has said that the Democratic National Convention is "scrambling to replace her" and is "in total panic mode."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But no one is as far off the deep end as the YouTube user who goes by the handle "Styxhexenhammer666," which would be the odds-on favorite for winning first place in a "Most Self-Consciously Metal Pseudonym" contest.  "Styxhexenhammer" goes on at length about Clinton's health issues in a video entitled "The Cleveland Cough: Hillary Clinton has begun to Degrade in Health due to Our Magick" and which you all must watch.  Because it's just that wonderful.

What we find out from "Styxhexenhammer" is that he and "tens of thousands of others" have been putting spells of magick on Hillary Clinton.  (The "k" means that it's real, unlike the fake "magic" that people like David Copperfield do.)  And we find out that what "Styxhexenhammer" does is use music for his spells -- some of them are originals, but he can turn covers into magickal spells, too.  Like when he sings The Electric Light Orchestra's song "Evil Woman," it turns into a Spiritual Weapon of Great Force, not just a rehash of a cheesy 70s song that wasn't even that good when it was first released.

But apparently from all of the songs and other magick being launched Clinton's way, her health is in a serious tailspin.  I guess it's understandable, really.  After all, if someone sings "Copacabana" in my vicinity, I become physically ill.  It's hard to see what connection that has to the lyrics, however, unless you count the "punches flew and chairs smashed in two" part, just thinking about which could explain why I have a headache right now.

What strikes me about Styxhexenhammer's video, however, is how well-spoken and articulate he sounds, juxtaposed against what he's actually saying, which is seriously loony.  He goes into how you can shield yourself from such psychic attack, but very few know how to do so; and that a political campaign, being made of dozens or hundreds of power-hungry people, is even more vulnerable than "your typical sheep-like individual."

"It gives me great pleasure," he tells us, "that there are very many people who will never cast their vote for Hillary Clinton because of the actions of people like me."

Is it just me, or does this represent a nice blend of confirmation bias and megalomania?  "I've been singing hostile songs in Hillary Clinton's general direction, and now she's got a bad cough.  Yes -- that was me doing all of that."

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that people get sick.  Even presidential candidates get sick, sometimes.  This does not mean that they are dying (nor even that their aides think that they're dying), that they're so ill that they need a body double, nor most certainly that the whole thing is due to evil spells cast by someone who fancies himself a magickian (what would be the "practitioner of" form of this word?  If you pronounce "magickian" with a hard "k," which it certainly looks like you should, it sounds kind of silly).

So that's our dive in the deep end for today.  I'm hoping that no one takes this as incentive to sing at me.  Because it could be worse than "Copacabana."  It could be "The Piña Colada Song."  Or "Seasons in the Sun."  Or, heaven forfend, "Muskrat Love."

I don't even want to think about what the magickal outcome of those would be.

Spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam

Yesterday I got a spam reply on one of my old Skeptophilia posts.

It happens pretty often, and I usually just ignore them, being that (1) I'm not stupid enough to reply, and (2) I have no particular interest in black-market anabolic steroids, penis growth pills, or helping out exiled Nigerian princes.  But this one was so funny that I read it aloud to a student of mine who happened to be hanging around, and we both had a good enough laugh that I thought I should share it here.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So here it is, along with some interspersed editorial comments from yours truly.

ATTENTION TO THE WHOLE WORLD:

Not just me, eh?  You want the whole world's attention?  That's pretty ambitious.

Hello and blessed are you who found me.

Well, you found me, technically.  But hello back atcha.

My name is DR SHAKES SPEAR, and am here to help you change and transform your life in the most positive way possible.

Is that William Shakes Spear?  Huh.  I thought you had Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil four centuries ago.  Shows you what I know.

I use the power of white, black craft and Wicca and voodoo spell casting to help people just like you they get the love they want and the money they deserve.

Did you even read my blog, dude?  You are seriously barking up the wrong tree.

My love spell offer amazing and quick results. Do you want to find your soulmate?

Already have, thanks.

Do you want to reunite with a past lover and make him or her love you again?

Merciful heavens above, no.  My past lovers are past for a reason.

Do you need to bind a troublemaker from causing problems in your relationship?

Unless you count the fact that my dog takes up way more than his fair share of the bed, I think I'm fine in that regard.

With my spell casting service, I can cast a love spell on your behalf that will help all of your wishes and dreams come true. I also do other custom spells, such as money spells, job spells, friendship spells, and good luck spells.

Versatile, that's you!  But you have to wonder why, if you can just cast money spells, you are trying to bilk money from a poor struggling writer.

You may have already tried the power of spells and prayers to get what you want.

No, "hard work" and "a reasonable supply of brainpower" have always worked for me.

Although it is true that everyone has the ability to cast spells and perform magic, spell casting is like a muscle.  Everyone has this 'muscle' but the more you use it, the stronger it gets, and the more things you are able to do with it.

Well, that's a mighty fine sales pitch.  However, the muscle it mostly made me think of was the gluteus maximus, because you seem to be talking out of your ass.

If you are not an experienced spell caster, your spell may not be as strong, and the results not as quick as you may desire. GET YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVE HERE AND BE FREE!!

Ooh, I can't wait for my problems to be solve!

Hello to people that want to be Great,

Hi there.

Note: This Spell casting do not have any effect on any one, But just to get your problem solve ok.

Ok.  But if it do not have any effect on any one, how the hell do it get my problem solve?

Get your problem solve in master...You can get the bellow problems solve here.

Yes, those bellow problems can be a bitch, it's true.

1. Bring back lost lover, even if lost for a long time

Cf. my previous comment about lost lovers.  They can stay lost, thanks.

2. Remove bad spells from homes, business & customer attraction etc.

Now you're talking.  If you could cast a spell that would make 9th graders less annoying, I'd be much obliged.

3. Get promotion you have desired for a long time at work or in your career.

Promotion?  To what, administrator?  That'd be a big "nope."  For me, being an administrator falls into the "just shoot me now" category.

4. Remove the black pot that keeps on taking your money away

So that's where it's going!

5. Find out why you are not progressing in life and the solution

If you could progress one of my novels to "bestseller" status, I'd take back everything I said about you.

6.  Ensure excellent school grades even for children with mental disabilities

Who needs the Common Core, when you have Dr. Shakes Spear?

7. I destroy and can send back the Nikolos if requested

I'm not going to request, because I have no idea what the fuck that even means.

8. We heal barrenness in women and bad issue and disturbing menstruation

I'm disturbed just thinking about this one.

9. Get you marriage to the lover of your choice

Too late, because I took care of that one myself.  But it's a nice offer.

10. Guarantee you win the troubling court cases & divorce no matter how what stage

Shouldn't #10 come before #9?  Just saying, you know, as a pitch.  As is it seems like getting the cart before the horse.

11. Mental illness & bewitched

What about them?  

12. Extreme protection for those doing dangerous jobs like security guards, Bank manager, cash transporters, etc

Not teachers, eh?  No "extreme protection" for us?  Just your ordinary, garden-variety protection?

I can help you, and I want to help you. Read through my words and CONTACT ME VIA:shakesspear23@yahoo.com OR shakesspear23@gmail.com AS MY POWERS ARE SO STRONG AND VERY EFFECTIVE AND HAS NO BAD EFFECT INSTEAD IT HAVE A VERY GOOD RESULT AFTER CASTING THE SPELL.

Maybe you should work on a spell for getting your caps lock unstuck.

So, there you have it.  A tasty meal of spam, courtesy of Dr. Shakes Spear.  I strongly recommend against sending anything to the email addresses, because of course that only would alert Dr. Spear that (s)he has a fish on the line, and pretty likely result in your being inundated by further offers.  So unless you have a particular need for steroids or penis growth pills, or are feeling a sudden desire to help down-on-their-luck Nigerian princes, it's probably best just to press "delete" and forget about it.

Naked dead guy money pants

Writing a blog like this one, the usual gist of which is that people believe bizarre things, means that I get the oddest emails sometimes.

Like yesterday, when I got a one-line email, to wit:

Once worn, the scrotum of the necropants would never empty of coins so long as the original coin remains.

That was it.  No explanation.  So I responded, understandably:

... what?

And in short order received the response:

You heard me.

So I was mystified.  Was this some kind of code?  If I responded, "The doberman barks at midnight," would I be allowed into the Sanctum Sanctorum of some secret society?  Or was the person who sent the email simply loony?  I finally decided on the direct approach, and responded:

Yes, I did, and am no closer to having the slightest idea of what you are talking about.

At this point, the emailer decided to stop playing coy, and sent me a link to a page of the website The Cult of Weird called "Macabre Icelandic Traditions: Necropants."  On the website we are told that "necropants" are a bizarre, and probably illegal, way to make money through black magic:

The Strandagaldur Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft in Holmavik tells the story of seventeen people burned at the stake in the 17th century for occult practices. The museum’s claim to fame is an exhibit showcasing the macabre legend of Necropants, or nábrók... 

According to legend, necropants could produce an endless flow of coins if done correctly.

To begin with, one would need to get permission from a living man to use his skin upon his death. After burial, the sorcerer would then have to dig up the body and skin it in one piece from the waist down. A coin stolen from a poor widow must then be placed in the scrotum, along with a magic sign called nábrókarstafur scrawled on paper.

Once worn, the scrotum of the necropants would never empty of coins so long as the original coin remains.

The website has a photograph of some (presumably real) necropants, or at least a fairly convincing facsimile thereof, which I would have posted here except for the fact that it looks basically like the lower half of a naked guy and I don't want to offend anyone.  So if you want to see it for some reason (and I may need several months of therapy after having looked at it myself), you can just go to the original website and take a look.

Of course, what this makes me wonder is two things: (1) how did anyone ever come up with this idea?  (2) And once they tried it, and it didn't work, how on earth did the tradition continue?  You'd think that once you'd gone to all of that trouble, and no gold coins dropped from the dead guy's naughty bits, you'd sort of go, "Well, there's another great idea that didn't work.  What a bunch of goobers we are," and go back to herding sheep, or whatever the hell they did for a living in 17th century Iceland.

But no.  Apparently enough people thought that this was a good idea that it somehow became a common practice, or at least sufficiently widespread to merit a bunch of people getting burned at the stake, and later, a display in a museum.  The whole thing leaves me a little flabbergasted, frankly.

But the person who originally emailed me actually had an interesting point (other than grossing me out completely) -- which was that a lot of these magic spells and so on have similar characteristics to the claims people now circulate on the internet.  "But before we had the internet you had to come up with something that people would actually repeat, for it to get around," he said, with regard to the Naked Dead Guy Money Pants.  "So it had to be something either too vague in its effects to be sure whether it was working, or too much trouble for people to actually do, as in this case."

Which explains it, I guess.  Me, I'm still a little perplexed at how someone could come up with the idea in the first place.  But when you think about it, it's not really that much weirder than (for example) Scientology.

Maybe back in 17th century Iceland, some guy made a bet with another guy in a bar that he could convince people that they could make money skinning corpses.  It's as good an explanation as any, and hey -- it worked for L. Ron Hubbard.

It's the voodoo, I tells you!

I just found something new for the Do-It-Yourself crowd; a how-to for making your own voodoo doll.

The idea of voodoo dolls has been around for a long time, long before honest-to-Baron-Samedi voodoo made its way from Africa into the Caribbean, and later to Central America, South America, and the Gulf Coast.  The whole thing is a kind of sympathetic magic -- creating an image of someone, often incorporating something from the person into the image (hair or fingernail clippings were common), and then doing something to the image in the hopes that the real person would respond in kind.  It was by no means limited to the Afro-Caribbean voodoo tradition; similar practices have been found in many parts of the world.  And like most magic, a lot of it was centered around getting the person in question either to have sex with you or else die.

Funny how those two seem to come up pretty frequently in these discussions.

In any case, the whole concept has been around for a good while.  Consider the following picture of a voodoo doll that is at the Louvre (and I'm using the colloquial name even given that this isn't really voodoo in the strict sense), from 4th century Egypt:

(image courtesy of photographer Marie-Lan Nguyen and the Wikimedia Commons)

Check the pin placement.  Not too difficult to tell what this magician was after, is it?

In any case, we now have a DIY guide if you'd like to try the whole thing out for yourself.  Here are some highlights:

Since this is an authentic method, only naturally available items are used. All you need is two sticks, a string, strips of fabric, adhesive and something to stuff the doll with, such as grass, pine needles, etc. Also, if you want to dress up your doll you will require pieces of cloth, buttons, feathers, etc. Since the doll is intended to resemble a living person, it is best to use that person's own belongings to dress the doll. Once you have gathered the paraphernalia, here's how to make it: 

• Take a long stick and a short one. Place the short one perpendicular to the long stick about a quarter from the top of the long stick. Tie up the two sticks with a string in an X-motion. When done it will look like the image alongside.
•  The two ends of the short stick will be the doll's arms and the short end of the long stick will be its head, while its long end will be the body of the doll.
• Wrap your stuffings around the sticks: starting from the middle, then wounding around the head, then an arm, then back across another arm, then down to the middle and finally to the bottom.
• Cover the doll with pieces of fabric using glue and stitching to make them cling to the doll. But remember to keep some part of the stuffing exposed at the ends of the arms, the head and at the bottom.
• Give the doll a face. Stitch two beads or glue down two peas for the eyes and another bead for the mouth.
• Now dress up the doll. Since the voodoo dolls are intended to resemble somebody, you should use belongings of the person the doll is intended to resemble to dress the doll. You can even put a piece of that person's hair in the doll.

The next step is to baptize the doll in the name of the person you're trying to establish a link with.  You can consult the site for the exact words you're supposed to use.  Your doll is then ready to... um... use.

The writer seems to be having some misgivings at this point, because (s)he cautions, "(R)emember, using a doll for evil purposes has horrible consequences, since the person using the doll may suffer badly and even die for dark voodoo practices.  So you should never use voodoo dolls for anything wrong."  And later, (s)he puts in a rather comical disclaimer -- "Please note that I am not a vodouisan myself and this article is best read for informative purposes only.  Me or All About Occult will not bear any responsibility should you try to use the above mentioned method practically."

Righty-o.  We'll just let you completely off the hook, then.  But being fearless experimentalists, and also considering that the entirety of the foregoing is unadulterated horse waste, we here at Skeptophilia don't have the need for such disclaimers.  In fact, I not only give you my permission, I positively encourage you to make a voodoo doll with my image, and stick it full of pins.  I realize you don't have any of my hair or fingernail clippings (at least, I sincerely hope you don't, as that would be a little creepy), but maybe just having a reasonable facsimile of my fortunately rather unique face will be enough.  My photograph is over there in the right sidebar.  So have at it.  Feel free to skewer me, in effigy, to the wall, and I promise I'll post here to report any ruptured gall bladders or brain aneurysms I happen to suffer.

All in the name of the scientific method, you know.

Sanal Edamaruku and the death curse

A good many of the topics I discuss on Skeptophilia are serious, and more than a few are (or should be) rage-inducing. There are times when the idiocy people are driven to by superstition and credulity rightly makes rationalists furious.

Other times, though, the whole thing devolves into street theater.  Witness what happened to Sanal Edamaruku back in 2008.

You might know Edamaruku's name.  He's a skeptic and outspoken atheist in India, where he is the president of the Indian Rationalist Association and the founder and president of Rationalist International.  Edamaruku has, in the past few years, become something of a lightning rod in India for the fight against superstition, and in fact he was brought up on blasphemy charges last year after exposing a "weeping Jesus" statue in a Catholic church in Mumbai as a hoax.  (He left the country shortly thereafter, and is currently touring Europe and speaking out against the role of religion in government -- so the outcome of the charges is, as yet, pending.)

So a lot of what Edamaruku involves himself in is deadly serious -- his courage at fighting indoctrination and discrimination in one of the most thoroughly religious countries in the world is an inspiration.  But just yesterday, I ran into a video of something that he did that ranks right up there with some of the best comedy I've seen -- and that's even considering that the whole thing was in Hindi and I didn't understand a single word of it.

Apparently it all started five years ago when the minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh, Uma Bharati, accused a political rival of using the powers of a "tantrik" (a black magician) to harm her.  The magic of the tantrik had, Bharati said, caused her uncle to die, made her hit her head on the door of her car, and made mysterious blisters arise on her leg.

Well, Edamaruku was interviewed and asked about the claim, and he said that it was ridiculous.  No one, he said, could harm someone using magic.  And then, Edamaruku challenged the tantrik -- one Pandit Surinder Sharma -- to try and kill him on public television.

You should watch the video of the result.  Trust me.  It's brilliant.

It's hard to pick out my favorite aspect of this film.  The serious expression on Sharma's face, as contrasted to Edamaruku, who looks like he's trying not to burst out laughing.  The point where Sharma takes off his shirt, as if to say, "Okay, this magic will work much better if you can see my flabby chest."  The chanting, the waving around of a knife, the flicking of water droplets at Edamaruku, who stands there, an amused expression on his face, through it all.  Best of all, the point where Sharma asks for more time.

"Hang on," Sharma seems to be saying, "I'm not done yet.  Hold still while I kill you some more."

The ordeal lasted two hours (the video I linked is a six-minute excerpt), at which time the anchor declared it a failure, as Edamaruku had endured it all without a scratch (much less a mysterious blister).  According to one source, Sharma was baffled by his inability to magically hurt Edamaruku, and said, "You must worship a strong god who was protecting you the whole time."

"Actually, I'm an atheist," Edamaruku replied.

But it takes a lot to discourage a magician, and Sharma said that he wanted to try again, this time using "ultimate magic."  Here's an eyewitness description of what followed:

The encounter took place under the open night sky. The tantrik and his two assistants were kindling a fire and staring into the flames. Sanal was in good humour. Once the ultimate magic was invoked, there wouldn’t be any way back, the tantrik warned. Within two minutes, Sanal would get crazy, and one minute later he would scream in pain and die. Didn’t he want to save his life before it was too late? Sanal laughed, and the countdown begun. The tantriks chanted their “Om lingalingalingalinga, kilikilikili….” followed by ever changing cascades of strange words and sounds. The speed increased hysterically. They threw all kinds of magic ingredients into the flames that produced changing colours, crackling and fizzling sounds and white smoke. While chanting, the tantrik came close to Sanal, moved his hands in front of him and touched him, but was called back by the anchor. After the earlier covert attempts of the tantrik to use force against Sanal, he was warned to keep distance and avoid touching Sanal. But the tantrik “forgot” this rule again and again. 

Now the tantrik wrote Sanal’s name on a sheet of paper, tore it into small pieces, dipped them into a pot with boiling butter oil and threw them dramatically into the flames. Nothing happened. Singing and singing, he sprinkled water on Sanal, mopped a bunch of peacock feathers over his head, threw mustard seed into the fire and other outlandish things more. Sanal smiled, nothing happened, and time was running out. Only seven more minutes before midnight, the tantrik decided to use his ultimate weapon: the clod of wheat flour dough. He kneaded it and powdered it with mysterious ingredients, then asked Sanal to touch it. Sanal did so, and the grand magic finale begun. The tantrik pierced blunt nails on the dough, then cut it wildly with a knife and threw them into the fire. That moment, Sanal should have broken down. But he did not. He laughed. Forty more seconds, counted the anchor, twenty, ten, five… it’s over!

Myself, I think Edamaruku missed a sterling opportunity.  I think when Sharma threw the "clod of wheat flour dough" into the fire, Edamaruku should have clutched his chest and fallen to the ground.  Then, when Sharma declared himself victorious, Edamaruku would have stood up and said, "Oh, sorry.  Just kidding."

I know that's what I would have done.  But I'm just mean that way.

I find it heartening that we have people like Edamaruku in the world, who are not afraid to expose the sort of credulous nonsense of charlatans like Sharma for what it is.  And the fact that he can do so with confidence and unfailing good humor (and on public television, no less) is an inspiration.  You have to wonder how many Indians were led to question the veracity of their beliefs by watching this spectacle.

In some religious philosophy, one is encouraged to laugh at the devil -- ridicule, it is said, is the one thing that Satan cannot stand.  I, however, would turn that around.  Laughter is one of the soundest weapons of rationality.  If we illuminate superstition with the clear light of science, it can't help seeming funny -- and our ability to laugh at it is the first step toward letting it all go.

Weekend wrap-up

It's been a busy week,  here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.  I and my investigative team (made up of my two highly-trained dogs, Doolin and Grendel) have dug up some wonderful stories that will hopefully not make you lose complete faith in the intelligence of the human race.

First, from Indonesia, we have word that there is a law being drafted that will make black magic illegal.  Not only will casting spells and harming someone be punishable by jail time, even claiming to be able to do so will be considered a criminal offense.  Khatibul Umam Wiranu, an MP from the Democrat Party, believes that these measures are necessary to protect the populace from evil magicians.  But, he cautions, any charges of witchcraft filed should be "based on fact finding, not [just] on someone's statement."

Well, that should at least make it less likely anyone's going to be arrested.

Other proposed changes to the penal code include increasing jail time for such crimes as having sex with someone you're not married to.

The best part?  Proponents of the new laws are calling this a push to "modernize" Indonesia's out-of-date criminal code, which was last revised in 1918.  Because worrying about who's getting laid by whom, and claiming that the creepy-looking old lady down the street is a witch, is so 21st century.


Go a few hundred miles north into China, and we find our second story, which is a "beauty treatment" called "huǒ liáo" that involves setting your face on fire.  [Source]

I thought that mooshing charcoal paste and nightingale poop extract on your skin was the dumbest beauty treatment I'd ever heard, but this one takes the prize.  Huǒ liáo consists of soaking a towel in alcohol and a "secret elixir," and the practitioner putting it on your face or other "problem area" and then setting it ablaze.  The practitioner is supposed to quickly smother the fire with another towel.  Don't believe me?  Here's a picture of someone having the treatment:

Nope, I see nothing at all that could possibly go wrong with that.

When asked about the treatment, a doctor who specializes in "natural cures," Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum, said, "While alcohol will help carry whatever is in the elixir into the body, it's not really necessary to light it on fire.  However, one explanation is that extreme heat triggers an adrenaline response which can shift your body's chemistry, improving some symptoms like indigestion and slow metabolism."

You know, if I want an adrenaline rush, I'll just go ziplining or ride a roller coaster.  Anyone who needs to set his/her face on fire in order to get an "adrenaline response" has other problems besides dull skin.


Next, we have a story in from Spain that someone has discovered a carving in some stonework in a cathedral that dates from the 12th century that depicts...

... an astronaut.

The carving, which apparently shows a guy in an Apollo-program-style space suit, is on the Cathedral of Salamanca.  Want to take a look?  Here you go:

 

 Of course, this has given multiple orgasms to the whole "ancient astronauts" crew, the ones who think that Chariots of the Gods is Holy Writ, who think the pyramids were built by aliens, and so on.  The only problem is, the cathedral was renovated in 1992, and this stonework was clearly added then by an artist with a sense of humor.  In fact, Snopes.com has a page on this claim, and they even found an article in a Portuguese newspaper that described the figure:

The renovation of the Cathedral of Salamanca in 1992 integrated modern and contemporary motifs, including a carved figure of an astronaut.  The use of this motif was in the tradition of cathedral builders and restorers including contemporary motifs among older ones as a way of signing their works.  The person responsible for the restoration, Jeronimo Garcia, chose an astronaut as the symbol of the twentieth century.

Well, that sounds pretty unequivocal, doesn't it?  Unfortunately, this hasn't convinced anyone except the people who were already skeptical, and all it's done is hooked up the Ancient Astronauts crew with the Conspiracy Theories crew, and now we have claims that the Spanish (and/or Portuguese) governments are covering up the evidence of ancient alien invasion, for god alone knows what reason.


In any case, this brings us to our last story, which is about a petition that is currently out there to save planet Earth from an extraterrestrial attack.  How, exactly, signing a petition is going to help, I don't know.  Maybe when the aliens get here, and are on the verge of blowing us to smithereens with their laser cannons, we can shout, "No!  You can't do that!  WE HAVE A PETITION!"  Maybe the idea is that if enough people sign it, governments will for god's sake do something, such as to deploy a protective shield around the Earth in the fashion of the historical documentary Men in Black III.  I dunno.

In any case, the petition has currently garnered a whole fourteen signatures.  They're shooting for 100,000.  You can sign if you want to.  Me, I probably won't.  My general feeling is that any species that modernizes laws by outlawing witchcraft and premarital sex, and considers setting your face on fire a beauty treatment, deserves everything it gets.

Symbol clash

"What does it all mean?"

It's a question you hear posed an awful lot.  The search for meaning is behind most of the world's religions.  It is a major driver for science as well; perhaps the only common ground science and religion share is that both stem from a quest to find connections, and explanations for what we see around us.  Humans are always looking for patterns and correlations.  It is one of the things we do the best.

Like any behavior, however, it can be applied too broadly, or in the wrong context.  The phenomenon of pareidolia that was the subject of this blog two days ago is one example.  I stumbled upon another one just this morning -- in an article that claims that thousands of companies deliberately include "occult witchcraft symbols" in their logos and advertisements.  (Source)

The article starts out reasonably enough, describing the use of symbols in various historical contexts, such as the use of the fish by early Christians to mark households who belonged.  Then, the author, Gabrielle Pickard, gets a little closer to the central point of her article by describing the use of the star-inscribed-within-a-circle symbol by Wiccans, and quotes one Wiccan source as stating that this symbol "cannot be mistaken as belonging to any other religion or deity."

Seriously?  No other culture could have, at some point, drawn a star within a circle, and used it to mean something entirely different?  At this point, we have crossed the line between symbols being used by certain people to mean something, and the symbol somehow having inherent meaning -- a contention that is ridiculous.  Just as language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication" -- with the exception of a few onomatopoeic words, there is no particular connection between a word's sound and its meaning -- symbols gain meaning only through context.  Outside of that context, the same symbol can mean something entirely different -- or nothing at all.

However, this doesn't stop Pickard from imbuing a whole bunch of corporate logos with sinister undertones.  The winged disc, she states, is an Egyptian symbol that connotes life after death, and has now been used in the logos for Bentley, Mini, Harley Davidson, Chrysler, Aston Martin and Chevrolet.  She also says that the symbol shows up in the "seemingly unrelated" contexts of Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians.

"Seemingly."  *cue sinister music*

But she still hasn't gone quite as far off the deep end as she's going to, because the next thing she introduces is the symbol of the "Vesica Piscis," consisting of two interlocking circles.  This symbol is part of "sacred geometry," she says, where it represents the vagina of the Goddess, and thus has "sexual associations."  And (horrors!) this symbol has worked its way into a number of logos, including Chanel, Gucci... and MasterCard!

Yes, people, next time you look at the two interlocking circles on your MasterCard, just remember that you are gazing at the Sacred Vagina of the Goddess.  I think I might switch to Visa.

At first, I thought she might just be commenting upon how ancient symbols have been co-opted by corporations, and have lost their meanings -- which would be an interesting observation.  As context changes, meaning changes.  But no -- she seems to be saying that the symbols all retain their original meanings, even for people who didn't know what those meanings were.  For example, until reading this article, I'd never heard of the "Vesica Piscis."  So, you'd think, any sexual connotations of the Gucci logo would have been lost on me.  But no, she says; she quotes one of her sources, The Vigilant Citizen, as stating that these symbols are "magically charged to focus the subconscious to perform particular tasks," and she goes on to say, "these logos are much more powerful than we may think...  It is only when we stop to look more closely that we can reveal more sinister and hidden ancient meanings behind those symbols."

It was a common claim amongst our ancestors that symbols and words had inherent meaning -- this is the basis of a lot of magical practice, where drawings, patterns, or even spoken words were thought to carry a sort of psychic charge.  (This is the origin of the magician's stock chant, "abracadabra" -- a word once thought to be imbued with tremendous power, and now usually laughed at.)  Of course, there's no inherent anything in symbols.  Symbols can mean one thing in one culture and something completely different in another -- witness the way the sentiment behind the one-finger salute is expressed.  In America, it's a raised middle finger; in France, it's done with the same finger, but palm upward; in some cultures, the equivalent is the thumbs-up gesture or the peace sign, which has led to some unfortunate misunderstandings!

So the idea that corporations are attempting to infiltrate our brains with magical symbols for some sort of malign purpose is ridiculous.  They choose their logos for a lot of reasons -- some historical, some cultural, and some just because they look cool.  Undoubtedly, a few do come originally from associations with the occult (such as the crowned snake in the Alfa Romeo logo), but as the context shifts, any sinister meaning that the symbol had gets lost.  The vast majority, however, are just there to be eye-catching and memorable, and as such are no more sinister than commercial jingles.  The bottom line is that unfortunately for the magical thinkers, everything doesn't have to "mean something."

So relax; you are not invoking sexual magic when you wear Gucci, and I am not summoning up Egyptian sun gods when I drive my wife's Mini Cooper.  To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a pair of interlocking circles is just a pair of interlocking circles.

Dead sheep, live elves, and a stuck willy

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we've got our eyes on three stories from far afield.

Let's begin with a tragedy in Wales, and hope things get cheerier as we progress.

In our first story, we have reports that the Beast of Bont is at it again, so you might want to cancel that walking tour in the Cambrian Mountains.  (Source)

Sheep farmers in Pontrhydfendigaid, a small town near Aberystwyth, discovered last week that twenty sheep had been "massacred" in a spot near Devil's Bridge.  This immediately conjured up memories of past attacks, which reportedly have been going on since the 1970s, and have been attributed to a loathsome predator nicknamed "the Beast of Bont."

In this most recent attack, local resident Mark Davey and his partner Annette made the discovery.  "The whole area just stank of dead animals and was quite sickening," Davey told reporters.  "I could see that the inside of the animals had been ripped out and body parts were lying all around.  I thought it could have been foxes or badgers but it was just the increasing number of dead sheep that started the alarm bells ringing in my head.  As we walked further we saw several more sheep scattered closely together, again as though some large animal had attacked them.  We were getting quite scared and wondered what the hell was doing this."

Myself, I would have wondered to the extent that I'd have gotten right the hell out of there.

"Each time we saw them we thought that something had quite clearly attacked them because they looked like they had been ripped apart," Davey said.  "It was a very strange feeling when we saw the sheep because some of them were lambs with just half of their bodies, or just the rear or the back legs left on the field.  I could also see a small lamb which looked to me as if it had been carefully placed in the corner of some building ruins.  This one was untouched but it appeared that it had been put there for a reason - maybe to come back to it later."

Police say that the pattern of sheep-killings resembles others that have occurred in the area.

Despite periodic reports of "large, puma-like creatures" in the Cambrian Mountains, no one has been able to obtain any kind of reasonably reliable evidence to indicate what might be responsible for the killings.  Thus far, only sheep and goats have been attacked, but police have instructed locals to "be vigilant when outdoors."  That's putting it mildly.  If this had happened in my neighborhood, I might become vigilant to the point of never leaving my house again.  I'm just brave that way.


Of course, if you don't want to meet weird things away from home, you can always have the weird things brought to your doorstep.  This is the philosophy of Arní Johnson, an Icelandic Member of Parliament who decided to bring a boulder housing "three generations of elves" to his front yard.  (Source)

Johnson first ran into the boulder in a nearly literal sense, when he was involved in a serious car accident in January of 2010.  His car flipped, landing forty meters away from the highway, damaging it beyond repair -- but leaving Johnson completely unharmed.  Johnson decided that it couldn't just have been luck, so he started looking around for what could have saved him, and then he saw this great big rock.

Now, I've been to Iceland, and I can say with some authority that great big rocks are a dime a dozen.  Iceland itself seems, in fact, to be one great big rock, with a little bit of ice and grass to break up the monotony.  But this was no ordinary rock, Johnson said; no, it was the home of some elves, and the elves had saved his life.

"I had Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, a specialist in the affairs of elves from Álfagarðurinn in Hellisgerði, Hafnarfjörður, to come look at the boulder with me," Johnson said.  "She said it was incredible, that she had never met three generations of elves in the same boulder before.  She said an elderly couple lives on the upper floor but a young couple with three children on the lower floor."

My first question is: how do you become an elf specialist?  Do Icelandic universities allow you to major in elfology?  If so, how do you study them, being that even people who think they exist say that they don't exactly wait around for you to examine them closely?  Be that as it may, Johnson was tickled with what Jónsdóttir told him, and decided to have the boulder moved to his home in Höfðaból in the Westman Islands.  Jónsdóttir said that the elves were fine being moved, but that he had to do it right.  "(The elves) asked whether the boulder could stand on grass.  I said that was no problem but asked why they wanted grass.  ‘It’s because they want to have sheep,’ Ragnhildur replied."  So Johnson is having the boulder ferried across to his home, wrapped in sheepskin "so the elves are comfortable."

After the horrors caused by the Beast of Bont, you have to wonder exactly why the elves want to have sheep nearby.  But we're hoping that the elves have no ill intent, and the whole story will end happily.


And a happy ending is more than we can say happened for an adulterous couple in Kenya, who discovered during an amorous encounter that a curse by the woman's husband had left them stuck together.  (Source)

According to the story, the husband had gotten wind of his wife's cheating ways, and had hired a practitioner of black magic to cast a spell on the wife.  The next time the wife and her paramour went at it, the unfortunate man found that he had basically been making love to one of those Chinese finger-traps.

Once the couple realized that their hook-up had left them unable to unhook, they panicked, and their shouts of alarm attracted the attention of the police and an increasingly large crowd.  Finally the husband arrived, and after the adulterous man agreed to pay the husband twenty thousand shillings in reparations, a pastor was called in, who prayed over the couple, and the two were able to separate.  It is probably just my sordid imagination that pictures this as being accompanied by a sound like a cork being pulled from a wine bottle.

I do have to ask, however; do Kenyan pastors have special prayers for this kind of thing?  "O Lord, we beseech thee to call forth thy mighty powers, and help this sinner free his wang, that he might go forth and never more boink another guy's wife, for yea, I believeth that he hath learned his lesson."


So, those are our stories for today -- the sheep-eating Beast of Bont, transporting elf boulders, and adulterous men getting their willies stuck.  Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we are constantly alert, bringing you only the finest quality journalism from the world of the weird.  "Ever vigilant," that's our motto.  That, and "Man, people believe some weird stuff, you have to wonder if we skeptics are justified in having any hope at all."  But that's kind of depressing, so we'll stick with "Ever vigilant."