Death by Magic

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 291, 8 December 1928, Page 13 (Supplement)

Death by Magic

Dreadful Results of “Wishing You Evil”

TZ’EMAL PASHA is loathed by the old-fashioned Turks because of his modern ideas. They hate his allowing women to go unveiled, they are furious at the felt hat being substituted for the fez and angriest of all because the priests have lost their power.

It has recently been noticed that hundreds of the banknotes which bear the head of Kemal have been mutilhted. Both eyes have been punched with a sharp pin. There is a meaning in this, a very sinister meaning, for the people responsible have done it in the belief that they are working mischief on the object of their hatred, and that in the end he will go blind.

We laugh at such a superstitution, but have we any right to do so? What about the Fifth of November? Do we not make effigies of anyone who happens to be unpopular at the moment, and burn them? Is not this exactly the same idea—a remnant of the old superstition that, by making an image of your enemy and torturing it, you could inflict similar pains on the real person?

The belief that you can get rid of your enemies in this fashion is by no means extinct even in this twentieth century. An odd case camo to light in London not long ago when a man was seen setting fire to a little wax image outside the Italian legation. A small crowd collected and up came a policeman whereupon the man walked off. Nothing remained but a little pool of wax and a few large pins, but it is believed that the image was meant to represent Mussolini who is, of course, unpopular with some of his compatriots. The-man was possibly a Sicilian, for in Sicily the belief -lingers that wax figures skewered with

inns and burned slowly will cause great pain and lingering death to their originals.

Another Italian method of calling down vengeance on one’s foes is the rite known as “lemon pitching.” The lemon is stuck full of pins,” at the insertion of each of which the worker of the spell says “Malo Saluta,” believing that each pin will cause a violent pain in the head of him against whom the spell is directed. The pierced lemon is then secretly hidden in the house of the obnoxious person.

“Wishing to death” is a common affair in the Gilbert Islands in ’he South Seas. A man, say, is turned down by a girl whom he wishes to marry, and desires revenge. He obtains a strand of her hair, ties it around his leg and keeps it there for three days, at the end of which time he burns it, at the same time invoking the evil spirit called Raku-ncne. That same night the spirit is said to visit the scornful girl in a drcam, and by morning she is insane. Her body swells terribly, she sits moaning for hours until a rigor seizes her and she dies. We have this on the authority of a well-known British official who has been an eye-witness of tho results of the invocation.

The strangest case of the kind on record is English in origin. A certain French scientist was accused of cruelty in tho matter of vivisection and was warned by an English woman possessing occult powers to cease these practices on penalty of death. He laughed at the threat, yet within a very short time ho was dead. Tho lady herself had never left England yet sho calmly asserted that she had killed him. Names cannot, of course, be given, but the facts are as stated.