Putting Christ back in... Halloween?

Every year about this time, evangelicals start stepping up the pressure on Christians to discourage them and their children from participating in Halloween, an event that they see as celebrating Satan.  Some of the devout even believe that demonic curses can be transmitted via Halloween candy.  This has made the candy manufacturers sit back, in the fashion of Jabba the Hutt, and say, "Your fundamentalist mind-tricks will not work on us.  Bo shuda."  Then they give a nasty throaty chuckle and respond by bringing out the Halloween candy even earlier each year, until eventually they'll be putting out next year's candy on November 1 of this year.

Most of the rest of us just seem to find the whole thing unintentionally hilarious.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paul Hermans, Halloween in Uikhoven 27-10-2020 19-07-07, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The evangelicals, who in this fight see themselves in the role of Luke Skywalker, are not going to give up and let themselves be eaten by the Sarlacc (i.e. Satan), so every year, they gird their loins and prepare for battle.  This year's sortie, which I swear am not making up, is called "JesusWeen."  At first I thought, especially given the cringe-y name, that this was some sort of parody site intended to ridicule the fear-mongering, but it seems to be entirely serious.  Meant to encourage Christians to do something more than hiding inside and locking the doors on Halloween, JesusWeen suggests some bold and proactive steps, to wit:

• handing out Bibles or scripture verses instead of candy;
• putting up signs in your town, encouraging people to give up participating in Halloween;
• having prayer circles with neighborhood children instead of joining in trick-or-treating;
• and going door-to-door on Halloween night, evangelizing and trying to get the demonic-candy purveyors to see the error of their ways.

All of which makes me wonder if these people have ever met any actual children.  I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, if my friends and I had gone trick-or-treating, and a family had handed out scripture verses instead of mini-Milky Way bars, they would still be trying to find their house underneath the mass of toilet paper.

You have to kind of admire the JesusWeen people for their Daniel-in-the-lions'-den approach to winning a battle against impossible odds.  And however medieval their beliefs seem to be, no one can accuse them of being in the Dark Ages with respect to electronic networking. They have a JesusWeen chat, are on Twitter (@JesusWeen), and have several videos on YouTube.  They seem quite optimistic -- their website says, "Jesus Ween (Oct 31st) is expected to become the most effective Christian outreach day ever and that's why we also call it 'World Evangelism JesusWeen Venue: In Every Country, Every City, Every Street, Every Home.'"

I dunno.  That seems kind of like wishful thinking to me.  I'm doubting that Bibles are ever going to be the draw for kids that candy is.  My guess is that no one who wasn't already a believer is going to have some kind of epiphany because of JesusWeen, and once you get a reputation for inviting trick-or-treating kids into your house for a prayer circle, you probably won't be getting many visitors on Halloween night, except maybe the police.

So that's the news from the evangelical movement.  Whatever else you can say about these people, they're consistent -- once they decide something, they follow through.  I almost hope that we have some show up at our door on Halloween night, just for the amusement value.  Maybe I'll hand out Richard Dawkins books.

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A singular scientist

Science has become the realm of specialists, and I am by nature a thoroughgoing generalist.  (Less kind words like "dilettante" and "dabbler" have also been applied to me.)  The result is that although I have a decent background in a good many areas of science, my knowledge of most of them is shallow at best by today's standards.  Even though I taught biology for over three decades, papers in peer-reviewed journals in most realms of biological science -- immunology and biochemistry come to mind -- lose me after the first couple of sentences.

One exception is the field of evolutionary biology and its sibling, evolutionary genetics.  These subjects have been something of a fascination of mine since I was in college, and looking back, I rather wish I had pursued them as a career.  My AP Biology students always reacted with tolerant amusement at my obvious excitement once we got to those topics, so at least my background was put to some good use.

This love for evolution and genetics is why I was absolutely thrilled when I heard that the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was the eminent Swedish researcher Svante Pääbo.  Pääbo is the founder of the field of paleogenetics -- the use of DNA from fossils to reconstruct the evolutionary history of a species.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons The Royal Society, Professor Svante Paabo ForMemRS, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Pääbo is best known for his accomplishing something no one thought was possible: extracting DNA from fossilized bones.  His attitude when told something is impossible is, "Watch me."  Working at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Genetics in Leipzig, Germany, he developed a pioneering technique to extract DNA from bones, first the mt (mitochondrial) DNA, which is passed only through the maternal line, and finally the nuclear DNA.

It was Pääbo's technique that allowed researchers to determine the placement of our near relatives the Neanderthals and Denisovans, the latter using only eight fossil fragments from sites in Russia, China, and northern Laos.  Without Pääbo's work, much of what we know about our own prehistory would still be a mystery.

Pääbo is also a remarkably humble, genial man.  When he received the call of his win, he was incredulous, and thought he was the victim of a prank by his friends.  A bit of questioning established that no, he had in fact clinched the highest honor in the scientific world.  Characteristically, in a press conference shortly afterward, he directed the attention outward from himself to the subject he loves.  "The thing that is amazing to me," he said, "is that we now have some ability to go back in time and actually follow genetic history and genetic changes over time."

Others were more effusive about the contributions of this soft-spoken gentleman.  "Nobody believed him [about extracting fossil DNA]," said Leslie Vosshall, neuroscientist at Rockefeller University.  "Everyone thought it was contamination or broken stuff  from living people.  Just the mere fact that he did it was so improbable.  That he was able to get the complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal was viewed, even up until he did it, as an absolutely impossible feat...  He's a singular scientist."

Indeed.  I remember reading papers by Pääbo and his colleague, the late Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, when I was in graduate school, and being absolutely fascinated by the light they shone on the genetic underpinnings of evolutionary biology.  That one of my science heroes won the Nobel Prize makes me very, very happy.  

I congratulate him, and wish him many more years of blowing our minds with his groundbreaking research into our own deep past.

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I'm so blue

Since we haven't looked at loopy claims from the alternative health crowd in a while, today we're going to check out a site that tells you how to make "Blue Solar Water."

According to the site with the euphonious name "Ho'oponopono," making "Blue Solar Water" is simple.  Here's how a "Blue Solar Water" enthusiast, Mabel Katz, explains it:

1. Get a blue glass bottle.  Any color blue, from light blue to dark blue will work.
2. Fill with tap water and cover with a non-metallic lid -- cork, plastic, even cloth wrapped with a rubber band will work because the purpose of the lid is just to keep the dirt and bugs (that Love Blue Solar Water) out.
3. Place in the Sun for an hour or more.  Mabel comments that when left longer, it is sweeter.
4. When done, your Blue Solar Water can be stored in the refrigerator in any container -- glass, plastic, etc.
5. ENJOY!  How Much Blue Solar Water to drink?  Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len once shared that, for the sole purpose of CLEANING memories, he drinks a gallon and a half of Blue Solar Water a day!

So, yeah.  "Cleaning memories."  Katz tells us that it's useful for erasing your memory, which I find a troubling idea.  I already have to re-enter a room three times to remember why I went there.  I'm not sure I need anything that's going to make me forget more than I already do.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Blue glass bottle, England, 1871-1920 Wellcome L0058775, CC BY 4.0]

But that's not its only use.  Check it out:

• Add some to your Coffee, Tea, Cocoa, Juice, etc.
• Add Blue Solar Water to everything you cook -- Pasta, Soup, Oatmeal, scrambled eggs, etc. Remember, just a drop of Blue Solar Water will solarize all of it.
• Add some Blue Solar Water to your washing machine when washing clothes.
• Spray some in your dryer.
• Add it to your radiator to make your car hummmm.
• Add it to your bath water.
• Spray yourself with Blue Solar Water after showering.
• Spray rooms with Blue Solar Water.
• Gargle with it.
• Wash Floors with it.
• Wash your car with Blue Solar Water.

These are just a few of the ways that we have used Blue Solar Water. Have FUN with it and be Creative in finding new ways to CLEAN with Blue Solar Water.

I'm reminded of the old Saturday Night Live sketch about New Shimmer -- "It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!"

I have to admit, that none of the listed applications are a problem, if any of that floats your boat (and I'm sure that "Blue Solar Water" will make your boat not only float, but "hummmmm.")  After all, it's just water.  Like, plain old water.  So if you get a happy feeling by spraying water all over your house, then don't let me stand in your way.

There's a problem, however.  I live in upstate New York, where the sun only comes out when it thinks no one is looking.  How can I "solarize" my water when the sun isn't shining?  Well, fortunately, Mabel Katz is way ahead of me:

[A] very small amount of Blue Solar water, even one drop, added to regular water will solarize it.  You can also solarize it under an incandescent clear light (blue bottle) for an hour, or an incandescent blue light (clear bottle) for an hour.

So that's convenient.  She even has an answer for what to do when you run out, or don't have time to "solarize" any more water:

You can also use it mentally.  Mentally repeat "Solar Water."  This will work when you REALLY cannot prepare it or have access to it.  God will do it for you ONLY when you cannot do it physically.

Which raises magical thinking to a whole new level.  "Here's how to make the magic water... but really, all you have to do is think about magic water and the magic will happen!"

So anyhow, many thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link.  It's a little troubling that every time I think I have plumbed the depths of human gullibility, I find that there are many more circles of hell still below me.  Maybe I need to gargle with some "Blue Solar Water" and erase the memory, because if I do any more headdesks, I'm gonna end up with a concussion.

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Flotsam and jetsam

One of the topics I keep coming back to here at Skeptophilia is the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence.  I have to admit, it's a bit of an obsession with me, and has been ever since I watched Lost in Space and the original Star Trek as a kid.

As with so many things, though, this fascination runs headlong into my staunch commitment to rationality, hard evidence, and the scientific method.  The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program has, to date, found no particularly good candidates for a signal from an alien race.  The Fermi paradox -- Enrico's famous question that if the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is so high, then "where is everyone?" -- brings us to the rather depressing answer of the three f's, about which I wrote in detail a couple of years ago.

UFO aficionados point toward all of the sightings of alleged alien spacecrafts, and the more skeptical of them rightly insist that even if it's only a small fraction of them that aren't dismissible because of the usual explanations (hoaxes, camera glitches, natural phenomena mistaken for UFOs, etc.), those few are still worth investigating.  Physicist Michio Kaku, who has gained a bit of a reputation for being out in the ionosphere on the topic, said, "You simply cannot dismiss the possibility that some of these UFO sightings are actually sightings from some object created by an advanced civilization… on the off chance that there is something there, that could literally change the course of human history."

But the fact remains that at present we have zero scientifically admissible evidence for the existence of ET. 

Not so fast, says physicist B. P. Embaid, of Central University in Venezuela, in a paper available at arXiv (but not yet peer reviewed).  Embaid has been studying minerals found in meteorites, and he found two -- heideite and brezinaite -- that he says are superconductors that can only be synthesized in a laboratory.

And therefore, the meteorites in which they were found are fragments of a wrecked spaceship.

In Embaid's favor is the fact that heideite and brezinaite are weird minerals, and have never been found in a single natural terrestrial sample.  Brezinaite was created in 1957 by carefully layering chromium and sulfur; heideite eleven years later, by chemically combining chromium, iron, sulfur, and titanium.  Since their first synthesis, both minerals have been found in meteorites, but they have never been seen otherwise, even in ore samples rich in the constituent elements.

So, Embaid says, these are technosignatures -- relics from a technological civilization.

Predictably, my response is:

But I reluctantly must add that I need a good bit more than this to land myself squarely in Embaid's camp.  There's an important word I left out of my statement regarding heideite and brezinaite never showing up in terrestrial samples -- yet.  Recall that the element helium was first discovered on the Sun, from its characteristic spectral lines, long before it was detected in Earth's atmosphere.  I'm also reminded of the discovery in a meteorite of nonperiodic quasicrystals, a form of matter not thought to be naturally occurring anywhere, by a team led by physicist Paul Steinhardt (and which was the subject of his fascinating book The Second Kind of Impossible, which I highly recommend).  It's always tempting to assume that what we know now represents the final, definitive answer, and forget that nature has a way of surprising us over and over.

So could the discovery of two odd superconducting minerals in meteorites mean that we're looking at the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked extraterrestrial spacecraft?  Sure.  We shouldn't dismiss that possibility simply because the bent of a lot of scientists is to scoff at UFOlogy; that is in itself a bias.  But based on what we currently have, it is way premature to conclude that the anomalous meteorites are technosignatures.  

Now, if a meteorite contained some superconducting materials laid out in a pattern reminiscent of a circuit board, then you might have me convinced.  That, after all, is how the Tenth Doctor figured out what was going on in "The Fires of Pompeii:"

And hey, if a piece of evidence is good enough for the Doctor, it's good enough for me.

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Lost beneath the waves

Ever heard of the Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod?

If not, I hadn't either. Those of you with a linguistic bent might surmise from the name that the kingdom had something to do with Wales, and you'd be right.  The sad tale of the lost Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod is one of the dozens of inundation myths (although using that last word may be inappropriate, as you'll see in a moment), including the Breton city of Ys and the Arthurian legend of the Kingdom of Lyonesse.  Both were allegedly destroyed for their wickedness by drowning in the ocean.  If this puts you in mind of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional land of Númenor, that's no coincidence; Ys and Lyonesse were part of the inspiration for Tolkien's doomed kingdom of the Second Age of Middle Earth.

The less-famous Kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod has some striking parallels.  Originally made up of a broad, fertile valley west of Wales, the land was swallowed up by the sea and now lies beneath Cardigan Bay.  Instead of the sinfulness that did in Ys, Lyonesse, and Númenor, Cantre'r Gwaelod was supposedly destroyed by negligence; in the Black Book of Carmarthen, a thirteenth-century document that is the earliest surviving manuscript written entirely in Welsh, the unfortunate kingdom met its doom because a maiden named Mererid who had been tasked with tending a well fell asleep, and the well overflowed and flooded the entire land.

What, exactly, Mererid was supposed to do about a well that was flowing so fast that it could inundate a whole country while someone was taking an afternoon nap is uncertain.  But in the legend, the poor girl got the blame, and so the matter has stood.

But what separates Cantre'r Gwaelod from other lost-lands myths, including the most famous one -- Atlantis -- is that the Welsh version may actually have some basis in fact.

The Gough Map [Image is in the Public Domain]

Two researchers, Simon Haslett, Professor of Physical Geography at Swansea University, and David Willis, Professor of Celtic History at the University of Oxford, found evidence on one of the earliest maps of Great Britain of two low-lying islands in what is now Cardigan Bay.  The document, called the Gough Map after its last owner prior to its donation to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, dates back to the fourteenth century, although many historians believe it to be a copy of an earlier map.  And it indicates that parts of Cardigan Bay were once dry land, and further, that the contours and terrain of these islands are reminiscent of the descriptions of Cantre'r Gwaelod from the Black Book of Carmarthen:

This study investigates historical sources, alongside geological and bathymetric evidence, and proposes a model of post-glacial coastal evolution that provides an explanation for the ‘lost’ islands and a hypothetical framework for future research: (1) during the Pleistocene, Irish Sea ice occupied the area from the north and west, and Welsh ice from the east, (2) a landscape of unconsolidated Pleistocene deposits developed seaward of a relict pre-Quaternary cliffline with a land surface up to ca. 30 m above present sea-level, (3) erosion proceeded along the lines of a template provided by a retreating shoreline affected by Holocene sea-level rise, shore-normal rivers, and surface run-off from the relict cliffline and interfluves, (4) dissection established islands occupying cores of the depositional landscape, and (5) continued down-wearing, marginal erosion and marine inundation(s) removed the two remaining islands by the 16th century.  Literary evidence and folklore traditions provide support in that Cardigan Bay is associated with the ‘lost’ lowland of Cantre’r Gwaelod.

So it looks like we may have here another example of a legend with some basis in fact.  A good many of the inundation myths -- including, very possibly, the Great Flood in the Bible -- might have come from the fact that at the end of the last Ice Age, the seas were rising, and previously dry land such as Beringia (between Russia and Alaska) and Doggerland (between England and continental Europe) were drowned.  Cantre'r Gwaelod, perhaps, was a victim of the same sea level rise -- but unlike the others, we appear to have a map showing exactly where it lay.

And maybe once and for all we can absolve poor Mererid of any responsibility for its demise.

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The nose knows

The first few years my wife and I were married, we had a dog named Doolin.

At least I think Doolin was a dog.  The story is that she was born to the unholy union between a border collie and a bluetick coonhound, but there's credible evidence she was an alien infiltrator from the planet K-9, sent to study humans by pretending to be a humble house pet.  My observations suggested that she was far smarter than humans but had only recently mastered pretending to be a dog.  She is, far and away, the weirdest dog I've ever met, and I've had dogs pretty much my whole life.  She figured out how to unlatch our gates (and let herself out) by watching us; we ultimately had to put carabiners on the latches to stop her from going on walkies by herself.  She valiantly attempted to herd our four cats, an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful.  Of her many odd habits, one of the funniest was that she was never without her favorite toy, a plush jack that she carried around in her mouth -- always pointing the same way.  (We tested this by taking it from her and sticking it in her mouth the other way 'round.  She dropped it, looked at us as if we'd lost our minds, and picked it up from the other direction.)

Doolin, with her jack toy sticking out of the right side of her mouth, as it obviously should be

One of Doolin's most curious traits was an extraordinary sensitivity to us, particularly to Carol.  She seemed to watch us continuously for cues about what was going on, and sensed when one of us was upset or feeling unwell.  Most strikingly, Doolin always knew when Carol was about to get a migraine.  Starting about a half-hour before the symptoms began, Doolin followed Carol around like her shadow, and if Carol sat down, Doolin smushed herself right up against her.  It got to be that Carol knew when to prep for a migraine once she saw Doolin acting weird (well, weirder than usual, which was admittedly a pretty high bar).

I used to think that people claiming their dogs had a second sense about how they (the owners) were feeling was an example of people anthropomorphizing, or at the very least, exaggerating their pets' intelligence and emotional sensitivity.  Until I had lived for a while with Doolin.

After that, a lot of the stories I'd heard began to seem a good bit more plausible.

Just this week, some research supported the contention with hard evidence.  A team of scientists in Belfast studied the responses of four dogs to breath and sweat samples from thirty-six volunteers, before and after doing a stressful exercise -- counting backwards from 9,000 by intervals of 17, without using calculators or pen and paper.  The researchers laid it on thick, telling the participants that it was very important to the study to do the counting exercise quickly and accurately.  A wrong answer got a shouted "No!", followed by being told the most recent correct response and an instruction to pick up from there.  For most of us, this would be a pretty high-stress activity, and would cause stress hormones (like cortisol and epinephrine) to pour into our bloodstreams.

And the breakdown products of those chemicals end up in our breath, sweat, and urine.  What's remarkable is that the four dogs, which had been conditioned to be able to discern between samples containing those breakdown products from ones which did not, correctly distinguished the post-stress breath and sweat samples from the pre-stress ones 93% of the time.

I know that our current dogs are pretty sensitive as well (although nowhere near the level of acuity that Doolin had).  Cleo, our Shiba Inu rescue, is really keyed in to me especially.  I had a couple of seriously high stress things happen in the last couple of months, and whenever I was really in freak-out mode, Cleo followed me around with a very worried expression on her face.  Her curly tail is like a barometer; the tighter the curl, the happier she is.  And when I was struggling, her tail was sagging.  Clearly an unhappy dog.

Cleo the Wonder Floof

So I guess all this stuff isn't our imagination.  Dogs really do sense our emotional states, not by some kind of canine telepathy, but because of plain old biochemistry coupled with an extraordinary sense of smell.

Although I wonder about Doolin.  I still think she was an alien spy, and was relaying information about us back to the Mother Ship.  Maybe the jack toy was some kind of transmitter, I dunno.

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The Battle of Blythe Road

I've been interested in the occult since I was a teenager.  It started when I was about fifteen, on one of the annual trips with my dad to Arizona and New Mexico (mostly for hiking and rockhounding, as my father was a lapidary and avid rock collector), and stumbled upon a funky little old used bookstore in the town of Alpine, Texas.  It was there I picked up a book called The Black Arts: A History of Occult Practice by Richard Cavendish, which I devoured (and, incidentally, I still own).

I started collecting Tarot decks (again, which I still own) and other objets de magique, not to mention reading voraciously other books on the occult.  By the time I was in my upper teens I'd already begun to admit to myself that it was all rather ridiculous, but -- to paraphrase the famous poster on Fox Mulder's office wall in The X Files -- dammit, I wanted to believe.

There was a time while I was in college when my attraction for magical thinking did serious war with my training in skeptical, rational hard science, but eventually I had to admit that -- as far as I'd seen -- occult practice stumbles hard over one fact; it simply doesn't work.  There's never been a single rigorous test of magical claims in which the claim has proven to be valid.  It hasn't stopped people from believing in it all, of course.  I can attest that even despite my skepticism, I'm still drawn to it.  It's undoubtedly why I write paranormal fiction; it allows me to exercise, or perhaps exorcise, some very deep-seated desires about the way I'd like the world to work.

Of course, I should interject here that the fact that it hasn't been validated yet doesn't mean it never will.  As I've said many times before about such matters as ghosts and the afterlife and cryptids, all I'd need is scientifically admissible hard evidence, and I'd have no choice but to change my mind.  But from my perspective, the times people have actually tried to do the occult have always devolved into something fruitless, silly, and... well... a bit banal.

And that brings us to the Battle of Blythe Road.

All of you will undoubtedly recognize the names of the major players in this calamitous non-event.  First, there was Irish poet W. B. Yeats; second, Samuel Liddell "MacGregor" Mathers (he added the "MacGregor" part because he was a Celtophile and didn't much like his solidly English-sounding given names); and finally, Aleister Crowley, British occultist and writer and self-styled "Wickedest Man in the World."  

Aleister Crowley in 1912 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The backdrop of all this is an occult organization called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded and ruled with an iron fist by Mathers, which held its meetings in a building on Blythe Road in London.  The Order had three levels; the lowest was initiatory, and involved study of esoteric philosophy including the Qabalah and other occult writings.  The second was where the good stuff started; once in the second order, you learned alchemy, astral projection, divination, and geomancy, and also (by some accounts) got to participate in some pretty hot-sounding sex rituals.  The third order was only for the crème de la crème, i.e., the people MacGregor Mathers liked.  It had a great many influential members -- not only the ones I've mentioned, but such luminaries as Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen.

The trouble started when Aleister Crowley, who was in the lowest order, demanded to be initiated into the second.  Yeats, who was quite influential in the Order of the Golden Dawn, spoke out very forcefully against Crowley's being allowed to take the step up.  Yeats and Crowley had hated each other pretty much from the get-go; a lot of it apparently stemmed from Yeats criticizing Crowley's poetry, something the latter did not accept lightly.  Yeats, on the other hand, was concerned with more than just literary output.  He took seriously Crowley's penchant for controlling and threatening people, not to mention his habit of having sex with anyone of either gender who would hold still long enough, and told some of the higher-ups that he was concerned that if Crowley learned the secrets of the second order, he'd use them for evil purposes.

So the leaders -- notably, not including Mathers -- told Crowley no deal.

Crowley, predictably, didn't take that well either.  He went to complain to Mathers, who was in Paris at the time, and Mathers sided with Crowley.  He did a solo initiation of Crowley into the second order, and gave him instructions for some spells to use against Yeats and his cronies.  Thus armed, Crowley came to the Golden Dawn headquarters on Blythe Road to open a can of magical whoopass.

What happened was nothing short of comical.  Crowley walked up the stairs, thundering the magic spells he'd learned from Mathers.  Yeats et al. were waiting for him at the top of the stairs.  When he was in range, Yeats simply kicked Crowley until he lost his balance and fell down the stairs.

And thus ended the Battle of Blythe Road.

Crowley retreated in disarray, but recall that he was not a man to admit defeat, and he decided to take revenge on Yeats (magically, of course).  He seduced the Irish artist Althea Gyles and asked her for help casting some spells on Yeats, but Gyles (for reasons unknown, but possibly related to the fact that Crowley was a skeevy sonofabitch) double-crossed him by snipping off a lock of his hair while he was asleep and sending it to Yeats, so the latter could come up with some Crowley-specific counter-spells.  So Crowley's second attempt to kick ass and take names also failed.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn never quite recovered from the infighting.  It splintered into bunches of schismatic offspring, such that at one point there were more secret occult esoteric orders in Britain than there were actual secret occult esotericists.  But what strikes me is that despite all this, the members still seemed to treat their practices with such infernal gravity that the whole situation began to resemble a bunch of little kids playing some kind of super serious game of Let's Pretend.  This, despite the fact that everyone knew that three of the most accomplished adepts -- Yeats, Mathers, and Crowley -- had a massive magical duel that was settled when one of them kicked another one down the stairs.

So anyhow, that's the story of the Battle of Blythe Road.  Like I said before, I would love it if I could report that there was all of this occult stuff done, à la Harry Potter dueling Voldemort, and sparks flew and crazy magic shit happened until the evil guy was vanquished by a powerful spell.  But as my grandma used to tell me, wishin' don't make it so.  More's the pity, because it sure would be fun to live in a world where Tarot decks told you the future and magic wands really worked.

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