Tag: occult

British Couple Killed To Make Witchcraft Potions in South Africa

A suspect who confessed to the killing of a British couple and to selling their body parts for use in witchraft (muti) has been released by South African authorities.

Anthony and Gillian Dinnis, both in their 70s and originally from Kent, England, disappeared without a trace from their farm in KwaZulu-Natal’s Mooi River area on 30 August last year.

After their disappearance, their children began receiving strange text messages demanding money for their release.

The couple’s gardener soon became a suspect. He later admitted to being one of three men who kidnapped the couple, before killing and dismembering them. Their body parts were then sold, or planned to be sold, by the suspects.

Despite the confession, and being refused bail, the suspect was released on 13 June this year. The National Prosecuting Authority has said there is “insufficient evidence” to proceed with the prosecution.

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Victims of a Nazi human sacrifice: Five skeletons discovered under Goering’s house at the Wolf’s Lair, buried naked surrounded by ancient talismans and missing their hands and feet are feared to have met a most terrible fate

As the monster who was responsible for creating the Gestapo and building the first Nazi concentration camps, Hermann Goering was one of Hitler’s most ruthless henchmen.

Yet nothing could have prepared a team of amateur archaeologists for what they were about to find in the basement of his former home in the Wolf’s Lair — the Nazis’ headquarters in what is now north-eastern Poland.

Set in dense forest, with barbed wire, guard towers and minefields all around, the once-impregnable complex of some 200 houses, bunkers and other buildings was where Hitler and senior Nazis planned the barbarities of the Holocaust and military campaigns such as Operation Barbarossa, their invasion of the Soviet Union.

They destroyed much of the base before fleeing the Red Army in January 1945 and today the mossy ruins are a tourist attraction drawing more than 200,000 visitors a year — among them a Gdansk-based team of German and Polish history buffs.

For years the archeological researchers have been unearthing ordinary items such as crockery and tools. But this month they revealed how, back in February, they entered the ruins of Goering’s once-imposing brick home and noticed a concrete ledge which had at one time supported a wooden floor. While digging for the nails which might have held it together, they found a human skull.

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“In his short 37 years, John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons embodied at least several different roles in one tormented but glorious life.
By day, Parsons’ unorthodox genius created a solid rocket fuel that helped the Allies win World War II and NASA send spacecraft to the moon. Co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corporation, a lunar crater was named after Parsons.
By night, Parsons called himself The Antichrist when he performed Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic rituals to create a new sort of human being that would finally destroy Christianity.
In a Pasadena mansion, the dark, handsome Parsons hosted soirees for the emerging literature of science fiction, visited by writers such as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and none other than L. Ron Hubbard, who later founded the Church of Scientology. With Hubbard playing his “Scribe,” Parsons enacted dark “Babalon” rituals to help foment a new occult age. Jack Parsons died suddenly in a huge, mysterious explosion that even today cannot be definitively explained. Was it murder? Suicide? Or just an accident?
Feral House’s paperback edition adds new photographs and an Afterword about Parsons’ “Black Pilgrimage.” One of the inspirations for hit television series, “Strange Angels.””

Witch hunts: Why were so few ‘witches’ killed in Wales?

Britain has a long and bloody history of burning people accused of witchcraft at the stake.

About 4,000 were sent to their death in Scotland and 1,000 in England, but curiously just five were killed in Wales.

In his new book, author and historian Phil Carradice tries to unpack this anomaly and finds several explanations.

He believes it is at least in part down to the Welsh language.

“Very few examiners or judges spoke Welsh,” said Phil, from Eglwys-Brewis, Vale of Glamorgan.

He also believes it could be explained by many of Wales’ small, rural communities being so reliant on their local wise women.

“They made potions and charms and were an accepted part of the community,” he said.

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‘Witch doctor’ sentenced to life for brutal attack on woman during ‘cleansing ritual’

A self-described “witch doctor” was sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting a woman during what he called a “cleansing ritual.”

Hassan Shalgheen, 45, was found guilty Tuesday by a jury in Georgia of rape, false imprisonment, theft by deception, battery and sexual battery for the February 2023 attack, and investigators say four other women later came forward to report similar experiences, reported WAGA-TV.

“Victims should not have to feel like they are alone when dealing with this type of crime,” said Gwinnett County district attorney Patsy Austin-Gatson. “We encourage people who have experienced such heinous crimes to come forward and we will get justice. We thank the team that worked on this case, and we thank the jury for returning a conviction.”

The victim met Shalgheen at his Duluth apartment to receive a “healing ritual to remove evil spirits,” for which she paid him a $200 deposit and agreed to make additional payments over 30 days, after booking an appointment through social media.

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“This eclectic collection presents a series of articles outlining Robert Anton Wilson’s unique perspective on the notorious scoundrel and mystic, Aleister Crowley – the Man, the Mage and his life’s work. The centerpiece, “Do What Thou Wilt,” recently liberated from the archival depths of Harvard University, is published here for the first time ever. In this, until recently unknown manuscript, Wilson examines and contrasts the pragmatic and theoretical revelations of Crowley’s system, Thelema, with various other contemporaneous scientific research into expanded consciousness. Lion of Light is fleshed out with an introduction and foreword by Lon Milo Duquette and Richard Kaczynski respectively, along with four additional pieces by seasoned explorers that shed light on the relationship of these two Masters, Wilson and Crowley.

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“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Like many of my generation, I was steeped to magical maturity in a technicolor broth stirred by the Holy Trinity of Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson. But when the subject is Aleister Crowley, I cannot possibly imagine a more informed, brilliant and insightful commentator than Robert Anton Wilson.

Love is the law, love under will.” – Lon Milo DuQuette, author of The Magick of Aleister Crowley

“Two of the twentieth century’s most provocative thinkers – Robert Anton Wilson and Aleister Crowley – meet in this career-spanning collection of Wilson’s essays on magick and Thelema. RAW and AC go together like peanut butter and shrooms.” – Richard Kaczynski, author of Perdurabo and The Weiser Concise Guide to Aleister Crowley”

Ouija Board Spells Trouble for Kindergarten Teacher

A teacher in Milwaukee is under fire after it was revealed that she used a Ouija Board with her class of kindergartners!

The odd incident came to light when a parent complained to administrators that her five-year-old son was having nightmares and refused to be left alone following last Friday’s classroom Ouija session.

“They were shutting off the lights and making it dark and talking to spirits. That’s not something that should be at school,” the fraught mom told TV station WISN.

The unnamed educator says that the session came about after the kids asked to hear a scary story and that, when the class used the Ouija Board together, the children wanted to know about movie characters rather than residents of the ‘other side.’

She insisted to WISN that “I did not say there were spirits,” expressed regret that the seemingly silly exercise caused such dismay for her student, and promised that there won’t be any more Ouija sessions moving forward.

That may not be enough, however, as the distraught tot’s mom is pressing for the city to fire the teacher for the Ouija Board blunder.

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As Above, So Below? Are Cosmic Forces at Work on Earth?

When we think of wars, revolutions, populist uprisings, outbreaks of mass hysteria and other sudden social and political eruptions – even a popstar’s popularity or the latest fashion trend – we usually believe that at bottom there is some logical, rational explanation for them, even if we do not yet possess it. We are confident that we can understand these things through economics, psychology, race relations, religion, or as a reaction to ‘modernity’ or to some other factor that we can reason about, analyse, come to decisions on and take steps to alter and improve. 

Although the evidence sadly seems to suggest otherwise, we believe that ultimately we can learn how to control the factors that lead to these explosions. We can, if not eliminate the more catastrophic events like wars, at least minimise the disruptions they cause. In short, we believe we control our fate – or will be able to sometime soon. That is the whole modern project: man applying his intellect and will in order to make a better world, working to control events rather than be controlled by them, and steering history toward progress. We are not there yet, but it is just a matter of time.

But what if there are factors at work in these massive human events that are beyond our control? What if they are not a product of solely rational, calculable forces but are triggered by natural causes, even cosmic ones? What if the power behind these upheavals doesn’t come from the earth below but from up above, in outer space, from the moon, the stars, the planets and the sun?

We know that for a great part of human history that is exactly what many people believed. Until the advent of what we know as science in the early seventeenth century, the belief that the stars ordered our destiny was commonly accepted. Astrology, the art of foreseeing the turn of events on earth by charting the movements of the stars in the heavens, had for millennia guided emperors and kings the world over. In ancient China, India, and the Middle East, in classical Greece and Rome and throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the belief that “everything in the… cosmos was inextricably connected to everything else, no matter how great or how small” was as much common knowledge as the supposed Big Bang is today.1 

And that this arrangement was hierarchical, with changes in the heavens portending those on earth, was also accepted. It was generally agreed that the earth and everything on it was open to forces coming from beyond and that the wise men of antiquity understood these forces and benefited by them.

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“The true-crime cult classic that inspired the Netflix docuseries The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness and a companion podcast, The Ultimate Evil follows journalist Maury Terry’s decades-long investigation into the terrifying truth behind the Son of Sam murders.
 
On August 10, 1977, the NYPD arrested David Berkowitz for the Son of Sam murders that had terrorized New York City for over a year. Berkowitz confessed to shooting sixteen people and killing six with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver, and the case was officially closed.
 
Journalist Maury Terry was suspicious of Berkowitz’s confession. Spurred by conflicting witness descriptions of the killer and clues overlooked in the investigation, Terry was convinced Berkowitz didn’t act alone. Meticulously gathering evidence for a decade, he released his findings in the first edition of The Ultimate Evil. Based upon the evidence he had uncovered, Terry theorized that the Son of Sam attacks were masterminded by a Yonkers-based cult that was responsible for other ritual murders across the country.

After Terry’s death in 2015, documentary filmmaker Josh Zeman (Cropsey, The Killing Season, Murder Mountain) was given access to Terry’s files, which form the basis of his docuseries with Netflix and a companion podcast. Taken together with The Ultimate Evil, which includes a new introduction by Zeman, these works reveal the stunning intersections of power, wealth, privilege, and evil in America—from the Summer of Sam until today.”

SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE OCCULT: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

Belief in fairies, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena may seem to have little to do with science and its technologies. But such beliefs—often called ‘occult’—have a long shared history with science.

This story looks at the role played by imaging technologies, such as photography and X-rays, in the history of the supernatural, and how photographers and scientists like William Hope and William Crookes tried to use images to reveal a hidden world.

SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY AND WILLIAM HOPE

Can cameras capture ‘spirits’ invisible to the naked eye? From the mid-19th century onwards, many have believed so. The photographs below were taken by the British medium and photographer William Hope around 1920. After his photographic plates were developed, ghostly faces which had not been visible in the room itself mysteriously appeared. Hope and others claimed that they belonged to spirits of the dead.

The earliest known spirit photographs were taken in America in 1861, some years after the spiritualist craze began sweeping the world. Spiritualists believe that the spirit continues to exist and act in the world after death, including interacting with the living. Spectacular displays of ‘spirit’ phenomena during séances were central to spiritualist belief, from mysterious rappings to full-on spirit materialisations. Spirit photography seemed to empirically capture these often elusive phenomena, serving to confirm spiritualist understandings of reality.

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