You know, here in the United States where society officially treats sorcery as a harmless delusion (usually), we've got it pretty good. As frustrating as it is not to be able to talk to people at the office Christmas party about what you spend most of your personal time doing, it's better than sorcerors have it in parts of the world where people actually believe in magic.
I've been monitoring Google's news stories lately for occult stories. The news occultists make globally is bad news for the sorceror. 45 people accused of using sorcery to spread cholera were lynched by mobs in Haiti. A guy was expelled from a country because the government suspected he was doing sorcery to aid his friend in an election. And he probably was, honestly, but getting him expelled from the country won't likely lessen his meddling.
Kinda sucks to be a sorceror, in most places, especially when shit goes wrong.
Of course, that's true in our private lives too, isn't it? Even among pagans and magicians, if you're going through troubles, don't your friends or family assume it's your fault, that you've done some magic that is having some kind of unexpected consequence? And it really doesn't help that they're right sometimes either.
Still, at least I don't get lynched and shit.
Head for the Red: The ongoing adventures and insights of a magician's attempts to accomplish the Great Work.
I monitor the same things on google news, and yeah, it gets a bit depressing from time to time. I'm grateful I live in a place where people simply think I'm an eccentric weirdo, rather than actively evil.
ReplyDeleteI too look out for news articles on this just to see how different attitudes are to magic in other parts of the world. Living in the UK means that (what I call) the "law of unintended stakeholders" is not as severe as say in Ghana or Saudi Arabia.
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