Tag: occult

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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“With research sourced by the world’s greatest libraries, Robbins has compiled a rational, balanced history of 300 years of horror concentrated primarily in Western Europe. Spanning from the 15th century through the 18th century, the witch-hunt frenzy marks a period of suppressed rational thought; never before have so many been so wrong. To better understand this phenomenon, Robbins examines how the meaning of “witch” has evolved and exposes the true nature of witchcraft—a topic widely discussed in popular culture, though remarkably misunderstood.

First published in 1959, Robbins’ encyclopedia remains the most authoritative and comprehensive body of information about witchcraft and demonology ever compiled in a single volume. Lavishly acclaimed in academic and popular reviews, this full-scale compendium of fact, history, and legend covers about every phase of this fascinating subject from its origins in the medieval times to its last eruptions in the 18th century. Accompanying the text are 250 illustrations from rare books, contemporary prints, and old manuscripts, many of which have been published here for the first time.

Rossell Hope Robbins (1912-1990), an acknowledged authority on witchcraft, was one of the half-dozen Americans ever elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He authored over a dozen books and nearly 200 articles, including the definitive introduction to the catalogue of the Witchcraft Collection at Cornell University Library in 1979. He was a Commonwealth Fellow, Canada Council Professor, and he received grants from the Modern Language Association of America and from the American Council of Learned Societies. He also served as Chairman of the Middle English Division of the MLA, President of the Medieval Club of New York, research associate at Harvard and Columbia Universities. Robbins has lectured extensively on medieval topics and witchcraft at universities throughout the world.”

How Feminist Movement Drew Ideology From the Occult

The English Romantic poet Percy Shelley, who died in 1822 at age 29, played a significant role in developing the ideas of the feminist movement, author Carrie Gress says. 

Ideas of the “the occult, smashing the patriarchy, and free love” played a significant role in Shelley’s writing and ideology, says Gress, author of the new book “The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us.”

Shelley was a “barbaric man” who was “involved in the occult,” Gress says. His wife was Mary Shelley, author of the 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” she notes, and Shelley drew on the ideas of her parents—a vision of a “women’s revolution where there’s no monogamy, there’s no marriage, all of these things are just erased, and people just live this bucolic life without any reference to their human nature.” 

Shelley’s ideology contributed to the modern feminist movement, a movement that has led to what Gress calls “The End of Woman.”

Gress, also a fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the history of feminism and explain how the feminist movement has harmed women and left women unfulfilled.

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Of memes and magick

Deep in the labyrinthine tags of TikTok, a group of teenage occultists promise they have the power to help you change your life. ‘Manifesting’ influencers – as they’ve come to be known – promise their legions of viewers that, with the right amount of focus, positive thinking and desire, the universe will bend to their will. ‘Most of these people [who manifest] end up doing what they say they’re going to do and being who they say they’re going to become,’ insists one speaker on the mindsetvibrations account (600,000 followers). Another influencer, Lila the Manifestess (70,000 followers) offers a special manifestation (incantation?) for getting your partner to text you back. (‘Manifest a text every time.’) Manifest With Gabby tells her 130,000-odd followers in pursuit of ‘abundance’ about ‘5 things I stopped doing when learning how to manifest’ – among them, saying ‘I can’t afford.’

It’s not just TikTok. Throughout the wider wellness and spirituality subcultures of social media, ‘manifesting’ – the art, science and magic of attracting positive energy into your life through internal focus and meditation, and harnessing that energy to achieve material results – is part and parcel of a well-regulated spiritual and personal life. It’s as ubiquitous as yoga or meditation might have been a decade ago. TikTok influencers and wellness gurus regularly encourage their followers to focus, Law of Attraction-style, on their desired life goals, in order to bring them about in reality. (‘These Celebrities Predicted Their Futures Through Manifesting’, crows one 2022 Glamour magazine article.)

It’s possible, of course, to read ‘manifesting’ as yet another vaguely spiritual wellness trend, up there with sage cleansing or lighting votive candles with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face on them. But to do so would be to ignore the increasingly visible intersection of occult and magical practices and internet subcultures. As our technology has grown ever more powerful, our control over nature seemingly ever more absolute, the discursive subculture of the internet has gotten, well, ever more weird.

Sometimes it seems like the whole internet is full of would-be magicians. ‘WitchTok’ and other Left-occult phenomena – largely framed around reclaiming ancient matriarchal or Indigenous practices in resistance to patriarchy – have popularised the esoteric among young, largely progressive members of Gen Z. The ‘meme magicians’ and ‘Kek-worshippers’ – troll-occultists of the 2016-era alt-Right – have given way to a generation of neotraditionalists: drawn to reactionary-coded esoteric figures like the Italian fascist-mage Julius Evola. Even the firmly sceptical, such as the Rationalists – Silicon Valley-based members of tech-adjacent subcultures like the Effective Altruism community – have gone, well, a little woo. In an article for The New Atlantis, I chronicled the ‘postrationalist’ turn of those eager to blend their Bayesian theories with psychedelics and ‘shadow work’ (a spiritualised examination of the darkest corners of our unconscious minds). As organised religion continues to decline in Western nations, interest in the spooky and the spiritual has only increased. Today, witches might be one of the fastest-growing religious groups in the United States.

Magic, of course, means a host of things to a plethora of people. The early 20th-century anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard used ‘magic’ to describe the animistic religious sentiments of the Azande people, whom he deemed primitive. There is folk magic, popular in a variety of cultures past and present: local remedies for ailments, horseshoes on doors, love charms. There is fantasy magic, the spellcasting and levitation and transmogrification we find in children’s novels like Harry Potter. And there is magic-as-illusion, the work of the showman who pulls rabbits out of hats. But magic, as I mean it here, and as it has been understood within the history of the Western esoteric tradition, means something related to, yet distinct from, all of these. It refers to a series of attempts to understand, and harness, the workings of the otherwise unknowable universe for our personal desired ends, outside of the safely hierarchical confines of traditional organised religion. This magic comes in different forms: historically, natural magic, linked with the manipulation of objects and bodies in nature, was often considered more theologically acceptable than necromancy, or the calling on demons. But, at its core, magic describes the process of manipulating the universe through uncommon knowledge, accessible to the learned or lucky few.

The canny reader may note that magic as I’ve defined it sounds an awful lot like technology, given a somewhat spiritualised sheen. This is no coincidence. The story of modernity and, in particular, the story of the quixotic founders of our early internet (equal parts hacker swagger and utopian hippy counterculture) is inextricable from the story of the development and proliferation of the Western esoteric tradition and its transformation from, essentially, a niche cult of court scientists and civil servants into one of the most influential yet least recognised forces acting upon contemporary life.

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