Borley Rectory again - The Banishing (2021)

There has been a rash of films in the past few years based on the Borley Rectory narrative. This is the first this year (and there's a second called The Ghosts of Borley Rectory later in the year) and I bought it because the online reviews were almost unanimously positive.

I have read nearly everything about Borley Rectory (ever since a copy of The Most Haunted House in England I found in our local library was my entry to weird shit years ago) but I have not kept au courant with this rush of films. 

The whole Borley mythology makes it difficult to turn into a film, because even if you just wrote a script giving the reported incidences as written, it would be like one of those overdone sixties Amicus films and frankly, nobody would believe it was true. Which, frankly, it probably wasn't.

This one takes an unusual tack by focusing on the relationship between Lionel (rector of Borley in the 1930s) and Marianne Foyster. It is an interesting tack because it brings to the fore the tension between a rather stuffy husband and his young and flighty wife. It also brings to the fore the true nightmare that marriage would be if the wife can't have children.

Another thing which is better than in most films is they have used a house which feels like the rectory - at least according to the pictures before it mysteriously burned down after the insurance was mysteriously dramatically increased. The film gets the isolation right.

It does depart from the narrative of the haunting and makes it actually rather more dramatic. It takes the classic horror film path of letting the tension build up. This is clearly a departure from the haunting and it's slightly naughty to describe it on the case as a true story when it is to my mind based on the said true story but not as close as implied.

I do quite see why though. There is a problem with the literature, which can be clearly split down the middle into the totally credulous and the totally disbelieving. None of the literature investigated the haunting in a sufficiently controlled way, and when you take into account the effects of local legend, stressed and isolated people, and the fact that many of the phenomena could have been explained by the building itself, you are left with very little. If you then account for investigators who were either credulous or have been shown to cheat at other times, you are left with very little indeed. My opinion is that the most likely phenomena to be supernatural would be the apports, and the noises in the church but not the noises in the rectory.

I can see that the story would provide a rather boring film except for the real fanatics. Films like a clear story arc and the film invents stuff to create that, which is fair enough. A story of rambling rectory, local gossip, rector who makes the mistake of involving a publicity mad paper salesman turned ghost Hunter, new rector with nymphomaniac bored wife, and the house being burned down in the most obvious insurance scam ever - frankly this isn't the arc the public wants.

So the thing to do is forget any Borley connection and enjoy this as the superlative horror it is.

Quack Remedies

High time I got round to the post I have mooted for ages about quack remedies, prompted by an altercation I had online with someone promoting the highly dangerous Gerson protocol for cancer treatment. Don't just believe me, here is what Cancer Research UK has to say about it:

Gerson therapy involves a specific organic vegetarian diet with nutritional supplements and enemas. There is no scientific evidence to use it as a treatment for cancer.

Summary

• Gerson therapy uses a specific organic vegetarian diet, nutritional supplements and enemas to treat cancer
• There is no scientific evidence that it can treat cancer or its symptoms
• Gerson therapy can have severe side effects Source

The way the therapy is described is the point: there is no scientific evidence that it will treat cancer. Personally I think coffee enemas can only end in years. It is also significant that it is a cancer treatment because naturally people with cancer get very desperate and are taken in.

Unfortunately we live in an age where people don't know how to marshall scientific evidence and believe things which have no real evidence. There is a particular way of doing scientific research which will show that you will keep getting the same result to a statistically significant number of times with the same intervention as long as all the other variables are controlled. The highest level of evidence is that provided by what are called double blind randomized controlled trials, where neither the scientists or the testees know what is being done.

You don't have to read the boring research - in Britain you can tell if a treatment is evidence based because you can get it on the NHS. You can't get homeopathy or chiropractic for example. This is because they don't work. I do like the quaint homeopathic remedy of bits of the Berlin Wall to treat feelings of isolation!

The biggest barriers to getting treatments which work are the alternative remedies industry and the internet.

The good news is that if you eat a balanced diet with lots of fruit and vegetables, little fat and sugar, drink moderately and don't smoke, exercise regularly and deal with stress, you are already doing all you can to extend your life using the power of food. There are otherwise vanishingly few food treatments and the vast majority of supplements are a total waste of money.

You can easily tell these quack remedies. They have testimonials. They will say they are ancient (in other words date from the times we were ancient at forty). Are all natural. There is a full list of red flags here.

Things have reached such a sorry pass that people don't believe medicine works any more. The ridiculous belief that vaccines cause autism persists with no evidence whatsoever. Diseases which were thought conquered have had a resurgence because of these dangerous clowns.

Currently most dangerous is the refusal to quake before the coronavirus. The evidence is very clearly that while the vaccine does have some risk it is always better for you and everyone else to have the vaccine than risk having the virus. The only alternative is lockdowns and isolation because you can't have an economy if you're dead. If you want the whole picture there is a very good discussion with the evidence in answers to an actual vaccine sceptic in the comments here.

What does this have to do with witchcraft, especially as witches are known for peddling herbal remedies? There are two answers to that. The first is that witches are also supposed to be wise and real wisdom means consenting to a treatment which has some chance of working. It also means not wasting money on shit which won't work or will harm. Can you tell I've had enough of idiots over the past couple of years?

The other thing is that in addition to the objective effect of medicine I mentioned above, the mind has a great effect on health and this is where the magic comes in. I have left it last because of course the placebo effect is incredibly difficult to pin down in research, and is virtually impossible to control for. However I am sure anyone would agree that going about things with a mindset that you are actually going to do everything you can to change things, can only help. We all know Uncle Al's definition of magic as the art and science of causing change in conformity with will and that applies here. It also means the magical tools, even if they are the magical tools of remembering to take medication and turn up for appointments.

I am in two minds about mentioning him because his presence here will seem to contradict what I've said above about evidence but I'm bringing him up for a particular reason. Plus you wouldn't know it was a post by me if it wasn't completely contradictory. There was a controversial psychiatrist called William Sargant (1907 to 1988). In the age of psychotherapy he poo pooed it completely and usually without a valid evidence base pursued the physical treatments of the time, most of which are defunct, such as lobotomy, abreaction, insulin coma therapy. The only treatment of this vintage still in use is ECT because (you guessed it) it has a valid evidence base in RCTs. One of the things you don't read about him now was that at the time he had an exceptional success rate with these ineffective treatments. Unfortunately because he refused to participate in research this was only ever anecdotal. The reason he appears here is that it is thought these treatments were more successful for him because he thought they would work. His belief made them work.

This is not to say that anything will work if you believe it will (see, I'm a witch, I knew you were thinking that). The treatments he was working with had other variables involved that contributed to them working and his belief in them only increased the success rate. For example, in the 1950s mental health professionals thought Deep Insulin Coma Therapy was an effective treatment, because it had worked in trials. However these trials weren't controlled enough and when better controlled trials were done and the actual coma was taken out, it was found what made people better was the nursing care!

To summarize: prescribed treatments on the NHS are evidence based in the UK, and beyond a normally healthy lifestyle no special supplements are usually needed. Therapies outside the NHS are best avoided because they can actually be harmful. If you are unfortunate enough to have cancer, please follow your medical team's advice.

Since we are in the middle of a pandemic, I will not give credence to any conspiracy theories or nonsense about the coronavirus and thus possibly cause deaths. I will not enable comments promoting nonsense.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster: A Witch Perspective

Personally I find that the Pastafarians are very principled, intelligent people. In fact they're almost witches. But a witch insight into their noodly religion throws up some interesting insights.

First a little history.

As F Scott Fitzgerald once observed, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. By this measure, the religion of Pastafarianism is the creation of a first-rate mind.

There are two contrasting explanations for how Pastafarianism (officially known as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) came into being. The first is that an invisible monster, comprising a tangle of spaghetti flanked by two meatballs, created the universe after a bout of heavy drinking. For hundreds of years, his followers – pirates, mainly – worshipped in secret. Only recently has it become better known.

The second explanation is that Bobby Henderson, a young physics graduate from Oregon State University, wrote to the Kansas Board of Education in 2005 to protest against a proposal to teach “intelligent design” alongside evolution in secondary schools. The arguments supporting a scientific basis for intelligent design, he wrote, apply just as well to a universe created by a flying spaghetti monster. Source

The first and most immediate observation is that I looove intelligent design because it paints fundament-alists firmly into a corner. The particular corner is that if creation shows God's design, then he very cunningly designed the human male with his g-spot best reached up the bum. Don't blame me, it's God who designed us for gay sex.

Apart from that titbit calculated to have fundament-alists foaming at the mouth, intelligent design is totally dreary and has the slight problem to overcome that we have a goddam tail bone. Evolution is more intelligent (plus the empirical method doesn't claim to have all the answers) and Pastafarianism is more fun.

However if it is a spoof, from a magical point of view there is a danger in creating gods. Consider for a moment the Simon Necronomicon:

Both the introduction and the book's marketing make sensational claims for the book's magical power. The back blurb claims it is "the most potent and potentially, the most dangerous Black Book known to the Western World," and that its rituals will bring "beings and monsters" into "physical appearance". The book's introduction gives readers frequent warnings that the powers it contains are potentially life-threatening, and that perfect mental health is needed; otherwise the book is extremely dangerous. It claims a curse afflicted those who helped publish the book. It also claims that the Golden Dawn methods of magical banishing will not work on the entities in this book. Source

The reason I bring up the Simon Necronomicon is that in a magical world view thoughts are things. If you think something, it is actually created, but not necessarily visibly on this plane. I don't think for an instant that when Lovecraft brought the Necronomicon thought form into being it would take on the independent life that it has an would become an actual paperback grimoire used by kids unprepared for the consequences. This book gives many examples of the real world results of using a grimoire, and the warnings are true.

The application to the FSM of course is that the monster is another thought form which has become an egregore and taken on its own existence. Without meaning to he has created a god and in fact the page I link at the top says that it's as if things are just happening on their own.

So be careful what you think!

Let's end appropriately with an FSM hymn.

Witch Food: Cornmeal Porridge

Wonderful things, oats. You hear their praise sung all over the internet, that a bowl of porridge will keep you going for ages. Personally I don't find that, and find I get hungry quickly. Hence this recipe, because I personally don't get that with cornmeal porridge and find I don't get hungry for ages, despite the incredible amount of sugar in this recipe. It's a recipe what I came up with myself, because the recipes I found online seem to make it unnecessarily difficult. They also seem to require things I couldn't find in the shops.

You need cornflour - personally I use the course sort. You can find it among the Caribbean foods in the supermarket. If you live somewhere that isn't ethnically diverse it's just polenta. Cornflour is yellow but you can make it with maize flour, which is white and then you have the porridge called mielie pap in South Africa.

You need less of it than you think, about half a cup for one person. 

You add sugar or artificial sweetener - more than you think you should because cornflour isn't very sweet. If you want to reproduce the flavour of the instant pots of this you find, add some banana milkshake or cinnamon.

You can wet it with milk or personally I use milk powder and water from the kettle. It needs to be more wet than you would think, certainly wetter than oat porridge ready to cook.

If you're doing it on the hob just heat it gently, stirring frequently until thickened. There is absolutely no need for the lengthy cooking times you read in recipes which aren't sensible like this one. Gentle heat because it tends to spit.

If you do it in the microwave give it three or four blasts of 30 seconds on full, stirring in between, until it's thick.

At this point add some condensed milk which is the authentic secret ingredient.

Incidentally I must be old because I love both condensed and evaporated milk and see that the internet have rediscovered condensed milk sandwiches.

Totally unrelated to the subject, have a Madam and Eve cartoon about the mother's ongoing war with the mielie lady:

Golden Dawn Tarot Decks 1

This post is intended as the background to a review I intend to do for a new tarot deck coming out this week.

I have commented here before about my interest in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's approach to the tarot. The reason for this is that this approach is what lies behind the ubiquitous Rider Waite tarot - Waite and Colman-Smith published an exoteric version of what they (mostly Waite, because he was a higher grade) knew about the order's understanding of tarot. In fact the order was primarily responsible for first making the connection between the qabalah and the tarot. The way the order revealed the knowledge to learners was by a series of knowledge lectures (strictly lections, rather, because they were written down) and initiations into the knowledge and energies of each degree.

In true witch fashion I personally come at this backwards by not learning properly about astrology and the qabalah first but coming to the information about the tarot and kinda letting the other stuff sink in. I suspect the true definition of a hedgewitch is someone who nobody else will have in their coven or order. If you want to do it the hard way there are various warring groups claiming descent from the Golden Dawn and you can join one of them and go through the degrees. Anyway, through some lucky chances of history the order's teaching about the tarot was contained in a book called Book T which is out in public. It contains descriptions of the cards in the order's deck, meanings and ways of reading which are surprisingly close to fortune telling meanings. You can read it in this book and if you want to read almost all the available Golden Dawn material you can find it in this book. The order's tradition was that the initiate would make their own deck following the descriptions and I can't praise this practice highly enough. If you have been through the knowledge lectures and understand the colours, making your own deck will produce a powerful magical tool. Many of us don't have the ability or leisure to do this unfortunately.

There are some exoteric decks related to the Golden Dawn deck which may commonly be used. Rider Waite, of course. Paul Foster Case produced a deck intended to be coloured in but not drawn, the BOTA deck. In today's free thinking world BOTA tends to be criticised for being a bit dogmatic about what people should think, but there is nothing to stop you buying the deck and colouring it in Case's colours, the Golden Dawn colours or any other. My only criticism of it would be that it is clearly derivative of Rider-Waite but doesn't have pictorial minors, and they also don't follow the descriptions in Book T. There is also Uncle Al's Thoth deck. Bless him, he is the proof of the advantage for everyone else of battles in magical orders, because one of the parties is quite likely to reveal the order's secrets. His writings on tarot are very close to the orders teachings with a few corrections of his own. If you want a book on the Thoth tarot I would recommend the one by Lon Milo Duquette and I would also recommend his book on Qabalah. My only caution about the numinous Thoth tarot is that it doesn't like working with other decks so if you use it it tends to be your only deck.

The Golden Dawn Magical Tarot

There are a number of decks drawing more or less closely on Book T. My personal criteria for a Golden Dawn deck is that it should be close to the descriptions in Book T. Some decks have updated the colours and those will do for you if you have a thorough understanding of the tree of Life and the vibrations of the colours. But I don't.

There are a number of esoteric tarot decks which do not meet my criteria of being close to the descriptions in Book T, but nonetheless are influenced by the Golden Dawn and all have very good reputations as esoteric decks. They are the Servants of the Light Tarot, the Gareth Knight tarot and the Hermetic Tarot. The tarot as envisaged by the order is supposed to pop with colours as an essential link to the qabalistic tree of life, and this last one would fail on the basis of being black and white!

Of published decks which claim to draw directly from the Golden Dawn tradition, I will go through them one by one and give my humble opinion on which is best. Another problem we have is that because no original decks from the order are known to survive (although there are some drawings, and one of them, Yeats's drawing of the World in his notebook, illustrates this post) modern creators of the deck can't recreate something which would have existed then. On the other hand they have a high level of artistic freedom to stick to the descriptions but use their own style. I will go through them in ascending order of fidelity to Book T.

I would not recommend Lo Scarabeo's Initiatory Tarot of the Golden Dawn. It is highly praised for the fidelity of its court cards, and they have followed the order's deck in the Majors, particularly the Fool and the Lovers, which in the Golden Dawn deck are quite different to the way we are used to seeing them, however it tends to diverge in the minors.

The Golden Dawn Temple Tarot is rightly highly praised and gives the authentic feel of the Golden Dawn Temple. The cards fizzle with colour. However it is described as a modern reinterpretation so I would recommend it if you already have a good understanding of the qabalah and the colour scales. It may be more useful for path working than reading because the cards are 'king HUGE.

Next and most affordable of the currently two decks I would highly recommend is Robert Wang's Golden Dawn Tarot. I note from online reviews that you either take to this deck or you don't. It doesn't fizzle with colour and the minors tend to be much less colourful than you would expect, because the colours are intended to reference which part of the tree of life they are on, and that in this system is a whole layer of meaning. You can read the booklet about the deck here although it is very much a little white book and no more. I do recommend his more comprehensive book about tarot and qabalah very highly, and here and there he does comment about bits he missed out in his own deck, without giving a reason for it. I am currently chewing over this book slowly with much benefit.

Next comes my current favourite The Golden Dawn Magical Tarot by Sandra and Chic Cicero. This is the closest I know to the descriptions in Book T and comes in a box with a very informative book which I highly recommend.

This deck is coming out this week and I have (unusually for me) pre-ordered it. I can't wait till it turns up. Judging by the book Zalewski wrote about the Golden Dawn tarot, if the deck is consistent it will be excellent and I will review it when I have it. The book is another one I recommend by the way, so to summarize my reading about the Golden Dawn tarot I move between chewing over Zalewski, Wang and Book T.

Agony Hound: I’m so scared for my daughter’s future with my violent ex if I die

This is a Dear Deirdre again.

DEAR DEIDRE: IF anything happened to me, I am terrified that my daughter might end up with her dad or his family.

I am 28 and a single mum. I left my ex-husband six years ago because he was violent and a drunk.

Thankfully, my daughter – who is now eight – doesn’t remember any of it.

My ex has never taken the slightest interest in her life or asked to see her.

The only contact she has is twice a year when she goes to his parents’ home for a few days. They don’t see my ex.

But this week, I woke up in a cold sweat with the thought that if I were to die, my daughter could end up with him or his parents.

He is named on her birth certificate. While I like his parents, I hate there being a possibility he could walk back into her life.

DEIDRE SAYS: It is very unlikely anything like that will happen to you in the near future.

However, I understand that you want peace of mind.

You need to take legal advice to understand where you both stand should he want to come back into her life more in the future.

Please get in touch with Coram Children’s Legal Centre.

They will understand the issues here and can support you.

The fact your ex has shown no interest in your daughter’s life to date would be a factor in any court’s decision.

The Hound says:

Dealing with solicitors can be very daunting however when it comes to this situation it is the only way to deal with it properly. In addition to what Deirdre says the Citizens Advice Bureau website has a lot of useful helpsheets and you can make an appointment to talk to them. They can help explain what needs to happen next.

Do you have any support with this? It sounds like your ex's parents have got him sussed so they may be supportive and any friends you have. If you often find yourself worrying about him, the effects of abuse can be long standing and include leaving you feeling jittery, worried and generally finding it difficult to get on with life. Talking therapy can help to process your own difficult experience and your local Improving Access to Psychological Therapies service should take a self referral, or you can talk to your doctor. I am sure that as she gets older you will find ways to tell your daughter that not everyone is kind and to recognise signs of possible abusive relationships. You won't be wanting her to experience it and helping her grow up with self confidence and a clear idea of what good relationships should look like, will help with that.

Mundane bit over, this is a situation crying out for some magic. In the craft we have a saying that where there is fear there is power, and it very much sounds like this is what is your situation.

If you want a book about Witchcraft to help you understand this Inna witchy way, I would recommend Starhawk's Truth or Dare. She talks about the way oppression gets into us. Another great mother of the witchcraft movement is Z Budapest. She is a very strong feminist and some people can find her too much, but I would specifically recommend a little book called The Goddess in The Office, because there is a lot in it about power and dealing with mistreatment.

Magically there are several things you can do and I think the first is taking stock of your situation because if you're anxious things can get out of proportion. I would like you to think about what your relationship with your ex was like. If it is too painful take it slowly. Look at the good things as well as the bad and as you are doing this make a mental note of your physical feelings and emotions. This is to help you decide what you want to do next.

If it is all literally too much, don't do it, put yourself in professional hands and be easy on yourself.

How do you feel after lifting the lid?

If you feel relieved or wrung out you may want to get rid of the thoughts and emotions. There are a number of traditional ways of doing this. First make something which represents your relationship - a picture, use something he gave you or say, a wedding photo. Make a ceremony to get rid of his influence from your life. You could burn it, put it in running water, flush it away, etc. The important thing is that it is the equivalent of a funeral in your head.

Now if he comes back into your mind, it doesn't mean you've failed, it means he has got in there the way abusers do. So do it again. Nothing wrong with that, these people are difficult to get rid of. You will notice as time goes on that something in you changes, and he has less of a hold. That's how magic works.

If instead you simply want to prevent him having access to your daughter, do all the legal stuff and also use a link with him. Not something that makes you think of both of you, but is definitely connected with him. Call it by his name. Keep doing that over some time until it actually feels he is in the house. Unfortunately this kind of magic does mean connecting with these people.

Once the object is completely identified with him, put it in a plastic box, cover it with water and freeze it. As you do this address it by his name and tell him in the present 'you stay away from name'. As a statement so you are announcing it. I love this magic and freezers are great for this - it's called a binding and won't hurt him but will stop him connecting with your daughter.

If you don't feel you want to do the magical bit that's absolutely fine. Some people just want to hear what will happen and I'll tell you he won't make contact with his daughter, your only trouble will be stopping her contacting him as an adult so have a think how to explain it to her when she's old enough.

Like a Dog with a Bone

I'm not a surveyor but if structural concrete looks like this yesterday was the time to act

Despite definitely being a cat person, always having had cats, and being distinctly cat-like myself my rapport with dogs is growing. The goddess likes gay men and obviously likes dogs and so one of her little jokes is to make a status job with a bit of rough trade, turn into a total puppy with me. Thus embarrassing the rough trade.

I am also becoming more dog like in terms of worrying a bone. Even years ago I stayed in one work place over a decade partly because I liked the clientele but mainly to annoy the staff.

I must give a shout out to my deceased mother at this point because I learned from her how to be as awkward as hell. Unlike her, I don't self-sabotage with it because I don't have a personality disorder and can use it when I want to.

There is genuinely a divine part to this in terms of correcting the karma we have and witches are nothing if not the instruments of divinity in helping people correct their own karma. Not necessarily because they want to, but because you're not taking the piss and getting away with it.

Take the people who sold me my sofa. I haven't had it a year and the springs rattle, the fabric is bobbly and feathers keep coming out of it. I had a lengthy email exchange with their quality control people earlier this year and they told me the bobbling was to be expected, the feathers coming out was my fault because I don't shake the cushions every day and they ignored the rattling completely.

Can you tell that the rattling is about to be transferred to their heads?

I posted a review on trustpilot. I have to say even I was impressed with what a total cunt I was, and particularly made a point of including their feedback when I tried to tell them how crappy it was. Within 24 hours they put a reply saying how sorry they were to hear I wasn't happy and asking me to contact them. I will not be doing so - they had their chance to resolve it and didn't. So I posted a reply saying exactly that, and that they have all the information they need to put this right, and commented that this different approach was obviously because I had put it in a public review.

What makes this a magical and karmic act rather than just being a disgruntled customer? On the one hand we are well used to thinking that all acts are magical acts. In a magical worldview everything we do has ripples in different worlds and different areas. One of the goals of magical paths is to be so aware of everything that you won't get unexpected kickback and won't be one of those kids posting on forums that they've changed their mind about a spell and want to undo it.

On the other hand, to my mind what makes this magical and karmic is the element of consequences. If you complain about something and they resolve your complaint that is the limit of it. If you sue them and get a payout, that's also the limit, the company will be insured and they'll make you sign a NDA ending it. When a company fails to resolve something and they get potentially business-affecting poor reviews, that is their actions returning and giving them real-world consequences.

What they do now, I will add to my review but will not remove it so the difference in their customer service in private and in public is now apparent. They also have a very obvious trustpilot widget thingy on their website so it's the first thing people shopping there will see today.

In terms of witch values, it is very bad indeed to try to get away with things in private that show you up as a two-faced bastard in public. The company says that quality is a value of theirs but it obviously isn't. And now because of doing it across a witch it has bitten them in the bum.

I must be on a roll today because I have also stopped the tenant over the hall plugging his extension lead in to the hall socket by the very simple means of going out and unplugging it every time he plugs it in. Apart from using the building power he puts it right across the hall, dangerous clown. I haven't actually spoken to him, that wouldn't at all be in mother's playbook of driving people mad. I did email a picture to the concierge and I was actually quite impressed - within five minutes she replied to say she had sent it to the letting agent who would be giving them a warning.

The concierge is feeling a little fragile. I hasten to say that this isn't because of me, but I happen to know that one of the directors has been on at the management company for ages about the smell of damp in the basement, and I also know that every flat dweller in the world has been bothering their concierge because the collapse of Champlain Towers South is enough to make anyone nervous about a concrete building.

To be frank the Florida collapse sounds like exactly the sort of tragedy that should be avoided if people pay attention to the likely consequences of their actions. Critical safety concerns have been documented for around three years. I'm not necessarily saying this about the management of that building but there is a human tendency to try to get away with things and try to avoid the consequences of our actions. And it's exactly that attitude witchy intervention is aimed at changing.

You'll thank us for it in the long run.