The Witches Digest

A witch has been hired by a Lithuanian debt collector in a move to encourage those failing to make their payments to stump up the cash.

According to Metro, the credit crunch has taken its toll on those owing money in the eastern European country.

A company spokesman said: “Our new employee will help them to understand the situation, reconsider what is right and wrong and act accordingly.”

The witch in question, Vilija Lobaciuviene, describes herself as ‘Lithuania’s leading witch’ and is renowned for providing services as predicting the future and casting spells.

Technorati Tags: leading witch, pagan news, witch, witchcraft

When John and Suzy Burton decided to move to a smaller house, they informed the removal men that they would like to take a few precious stones with them.

To be more precise, 13 huge rocks from the garden.

Mr Burton, a druid, and his wife, a witch, were the proud owners of a stone circle which, they say, gives them positive energy.

So when the pagan couple left their historic £1million mansion, Abbotts Court in Weymouth, Dorset, a dozen men with a crane and a fleet of trucks took the rocks to their new home in Dorchester, ten miles away.

Neighbours watched in amazement as the stones, each weighing between half and three-quarters of a ton, were placed in the garden.

The couple - both antique dealers - had them aligned at special points around the extensive grounds of the £600,000, six-bedroom property to encircle themselves with energy.

Each was apparently placed along a ley line which runs from Maiden Castle, an Iron-Age hill fort near Dorchester, through to Maumbury Rings, a Roman amphitheatre.

Mrs Burton then invited 20 witches from her coven to dedicate the stone circle during a night-time ritual.

The 60-year-old - whose mother and grandmother were witches - said: ‘We had a blessing of the stones and we brought the energy back.

‘You could feel the energy circling the stones. We feel they are a place between worlds.

‘It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when you are near these stones - but it is something extremely powerful.

‘You can feel the energy pulsing around you, moving inside you - you feel at one with nature and get a real high.’

The stone circle was erected in the ten-acre grounds of 11-bedroom Abbotts Court by Thomas Burberry, founder of the fashion house, in the early 1900s.

Mr Burton, 64, and his wife, who teaches magic and witchcraft, discovered it when they bought the property in 1980 and planned to leave it as an historic landmark when they downsized and moved to Dorchester.

But the property developer who bought the mansion threatened to throw out the stones if they were left behind.

So the couple employed a specialist removal firm to rehome the rocks.

Mrs Burton, who has five children and 12 grandchildren, said: ‘It was a really big job bringing the stones with us.

‘We had to employ about a dozen rather burly men and a crane to transport it all - but it was well worth it. Although I think a few of the neighbours were a little surprised, on the whole I think it’s been really well received.

‘We are so happy finally to have it all sorted.

‘We were very upset at the thought of these stones just being dumped - but couldn’t think of how we could get them with us.

‘They’ve made such a difference to our lives. We were delighted when we realised we would be able to take the stones with us.’

Technorati Tags: druid, ley lines, pagan, paganism, sacred space, stone circle, witch, witchcraft

Witchcraft is being put on the curriculum for India’s primary schoolchildren in an effort to debunk superstitions that are behind scores of gruesome murders every year.

A belief in witches and the evils purportedly wrought by them – from famine to sporting failure – is widespread among tribal communities in the country’s impoverished rural hinterland. It is estimated that 750 people, mostly elderly women, have been killed in witch-hunts in the states of Assam and West Bengal since 2003.

In one the most horrific recent cases, a family of four of the Santhal tribe in Assam were stoned and buried alive for allegedly cursing a relative of the village chief. At least one attack in Assam culminated in the severed heads of two “witches” being taken as trophies and paraded in the streets.

Advocates for a change to the syllabus say that beliefs must be altered early if India’s witch-hunts are to be stamped out. However, the approach is being challenged by academics who say that witch-hunts are an economic phenomenon. Pointing to modern day Africa and Renaissance Europe, they argue that pensions, not education, are the best means of curtailing a belief in black magic.

Studies suggest that more “witches” are identified in lean years. In the 16th and 17th centuries, an estimated one million women were killed in Europe for dabbling in the black arts. The height of the slaughter coincided with a “little ice age” that made life much tougher, the historian Wolfgang Behringer has suggested.

Today, in the Meatu district of Tanzania, half of all murders are “witch-killings” and almost all of the victims are old women from poor households.

Raymond Fisman, a professor at Columbia University, told a recent seminar: “In Meatu, there are veritable witch epidemics now and again – certainly any time there is a bad crop year. Witches are the scapegoat of first resort. He suggested that “witches” were killed to make resources stretch farther. “Who are you going to knock off? You want the person who is the greatest consumer of household resources relative to that which they produce . . . it turns out that it’s grandma.”

Thus, the quickest way to eradicate witch-hunts is to introduce pensions for elderly women – to transform grandma from an economic burden to a wealth generator.

The tactic is credited with virtually ending “witch-killings” in the North Province region of South Africa in the 1990s.

Technorati Tags: witch hunt, witchcraft, witches

Talismans are important magical tools, dedicated to a specific goal.

They are considered to be one of the best ways to contact
universal forces and harness them so that they conform to the will of the magician.

If you choose to make your own talisman there are several things that you need to consider:

Materials
Design
Energy & Belief
Charging

Materials

Talismans can be made from a variety of different materials, some suggestions include:

Silver, Gold, Copper, Clay,
Porcelain, Vellum, Glass, Bone, Leather and Paper.

You will need to give
consideration to the practical uses of the talisman before you choose your material.
A paper talisman for increased prosperity may be suitable if you are keeping it in your wallet, but not if you intend to wear it as jewellery, where it would likely become damaged.

Any material used should to make a talisman should not have previously been used for any other purpose.

Design

The design of the talisman should mean something top you personally.  You may wish to use:

Magic Squares
Sigils
Astrological Symbols
A Poem
Words written in a Magical
Alphabet
Your Own Design

Be creative, combine symbols where necessary.  For example a talisman designed to protect the home could have a house and pentacle etched into it.

There are many excellent books and websites on the subject of symbols, we have included a few below for your convenience.

Energy and Belief

While making and empowering a talisman you must remain clearly focused on your goals and your ability to bring them to fruition.  There is no point in making one if you do not believe that it will work for you.

Personal energy is vital, and reinforces the power held in your subconscious mind. 

Charging

Once you have crafted your talisman you need to programme and consecrate it.

The area in which you will do this should be clean and tidy, you may want to light candles and incense, play relaxing music and place a vase of flowers in the room.

Purify yourself beforehand by taking a bath and dressing in clean clothes (natural fibres are best).

Sit comfortably and meditate on the goal of the talisman.  Take it in your projective hand (the one you write with) and tell it what its purpose is.  You can make this statement as simple or elaborate as you like. 

Feel the talisman becoming warm in your hand, when you feel it is time either store the talisman until it is needed, or put it to use straight away.

It is best to store a talisman in a pouch or box as you would do crystals or Tarot cards.

Thank the universe for its
energies.

© Dawn Gribble 2008
From the Witches Digest Lammas 2008

Technorati Tags: craft ideas, making a talisman, pagan, wicca, witchcraft

In Nigeria, rogue pastors prey on fears of black magic to drum up a lucrative trade in ‘exorcisms’

Five-year-old Utitofong can never go home. She has a loving family and has committed no crime, but her neighbours want her dead. Like thousands of children in the Niger delta of west Africa, she has fallen victim to an outbreak of virulent superstition that sees innocent young people condemned as witches. They can be driven from their villages, tortured or killed.

When her father died, Utitofong was blamed for having caused his death by witchcraft. Her mother spent more than four months’ wages on exorcisms, fearing that her daughter would be killed by hostile villagers. But when the money ran out and a pastor proclaimed her a lost cause, Utitofong had to leave home for ever.

There have been Christians in Nigeria since the 19th century. While the majority hold moderate beliefs, an extreme minority has harnessed existing superstitions about black magic and turned them into a lucrative trade. Up to 15,000 children in Nigeria’s Akwa Ibom and Cross River states alone have been branded witches by rogue pastors, who charge large sums to “exorcise” them.

Sam Itauma runs the Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN), a makeshift shelter and school in Eket for 150 children who have been deemed to be possessed. The children bear the horrific scars of witch-branding: acid burns, machete wounds and severe malnutrition.

A man from Ibaka in Akwa Ibom, who calls himself “the Bishop”, has made a fortune conducting “exorcisms” of children, claiming that they are possessed by the devil and eat human flesh. He told an investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches that he had killed “up to 110 people” who were identified as witches.

Gary Foxcroft, a Briton who is director of Stepping Stones Nigeria, a charity that works with children abandoned because of their supposed “possession”, describes the situation as “an absolute scandal”.

The distribution of a video claiming to explain how to “diagnose” those possessed is blamed. The film, End of the Wicked, is distributed widely across the Niger delta by the Liberty Gospel Church, a powerful evangelical sect with some 150 branches in the region. Its graphic images of apparently possessed children eating a human carcass, and being inducted into covens, have fuelled an epidemic of paranoia.

But more damaging than this are the film’s directions on how to spot a child witch. It tells viewers that an infant under the age of two may be possessed if they scream in the night, experience ill health or get a fever.

Dispatches: Saving Africa’s Child Witches, Channel 4, Wednesday 9pm

Technorati Tags: black magic, child witches, exorcism, witchcraft

An internet video has appeared on YouTube showing Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin being blessed by a Kenyan witch-hunter.

The video shows Ms Palin taking part in a 2005 service at a Pentecostal church in Alaska where a preacher Thomas Muthee calls for witches and other Palin enemies to be defeated.

In the video Ms Palin can be seen standing before Mr Muthee with her head bowed as her hands are held by two members of the congregation.

There was no immediate reaction from the Republican campaign to the second internet video to appear in recent weeks that concerns Ms Palin’s religious beliefs.

Earlier this month, a video surfaced from a speech Ms Palin had given to students in June at her former church in Alaska where she said US forces in Iraq had been sent on a “task that is from god.”

Ms Palin said in the video: “Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right.

She added: “Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [soldiers] out on a task from God.”

Technorati Tags: religious intolerence, republican, sarah palin, witchcraft