Daemonic Versus Demonic Realities

The word 'daemon' comes from an ancient Greek belief that certain nature spirits and demigods (called 'daemons') served as intermediaries between the Gods and men.

Daemons were originally neither good nor evil. They often possessed both positive and negative traits, but they did tend to be tricksters with a darker than average sense of humor. They could become corporeal fleshy creatures or incorporeal spirits and phantasms at will.

People were most likely to encounter daemons when they themselves were faced with major life changes or transformative events. Such encounters were rarely without danger, but they gave life a depth and a degree of meaning that is utterly lacking when all is calm and under perfect control.

Change is rarely all-good or all-bad, but it is almost always frightening. Encountering a daemon almost was a sign that deep and major change was on the way, either personally, culturally, or both.

Christianity Demonizes Daemons

The Christian Church was the first to divide and separate the daemonic realm into a struggle between evil supernatural creatures versus good supernatural creatures with humans in the middle. This was a substantial departure from the original Greek concept of varied and naturally ambivalent creatures that mediated between people and the Gods.

Now, instead of the daemons standing between people and the divine, between the natural and the supernatural, people stood between good and evil daemonic forces that were themselves supernatural. Humans moved to center stage, the demons to either wing, and the Gods of antiquity were kicked out of the drama entirely.

The evil intermediaries came to be known as demons; the good ones were called angels. Angels supposedly carried messages from (the one True) God and did God's work when God was in the loo or at the grocery store or whatever.

Demons, by contrast, did the Devil's work and either tried to seduce human beings into evil by stealing their souls, or else tormented the good and the holy out of sheer resentment of their relentless goodness and holiness.

Discernment suddenly became a hot topic. Good demon or bad demon? How to decide, what to do, what to do?

Clergy stepped up to 'help', and thousands of people were burned alive and tortured to death to save their souls and cleanse them of unholy daemonic associations.

With the dawn of the Age of Reason, demons also came to be associated with ignorance, while angels were trivialized as fluffy tokens of a kind of naive trust in a benevolent higher power. This trivialization further exacerbated the Christian divide between good and bad demons that was already well underway, and also tended to discredit and belittle the daemonic realm in general.

Weirdly enough, during the transitional period between the Middle Ages and the Age of Enlightenment, many learned men of the Church practiced alchemy, science, and angelic/demonic magic side by side without feeling any conflict of interest whatsoever--but this eclecticism did not last.

By the end of the 17th century, magic, daemons, and even most forms of religious belief were pushed aside by science, which declared itself the one and only true way to know anything about anything.

Daemons and Demons

Over the course of modern history, the term 'daemonic' has been significantly altered and transformed into the term 'demonic'.

The complex, mercurial nature of the daemonic realm has been successfully reworked in the popular imagination into something terrifying and wholly bad.

This re-imagining of the daemonic is a serious perversion of its original and true nature.

The main difference between the daemonic and the demonic then is the pejorative taint attached to the latter term. Daemons have literally been demonized: first by the Church, and then by science.

Depth psychology (Carl Jung, James Hillman) preserved something of the original daemonic realm in the form of the Jungian archetypes and the concept of personal inner daemons that drive creativity (kind of like a muse, only more relentless).

Depth psychology instead made the polarization of the daemonic an inner/outer affair. Demons were neither good nor bad but they resided inside the personality: they were defined as psychological phenomena without physical substance. This too is a significant departure from the original meaning.

Are Daemons/Demons Real?

Yes. Yes they are. But you have to expand your understanding of reality in order to accommodate them, and you also have to let go of the need for total personal control, and embrace instead the notion that personal transformation is a major part of life, that tranformation is ongoing and unavoidable, and a that it is a worthy goal and one of the great joys and adventures of being a creature.

Until that happens on a grand cultural scale, the daemons/demons are likely to haunt and scare us, and scientists are likely to keep turning up their noses at them and laughing.

Who Says God Doesn't Have a Sense of Humor?

I

I've been frazzled and frustrated lately over several intractable 'problems' that I think I'm going to just let go as I seem to have no clue how to fix them. The other night I asked the Univerise, God, the ghost of Elvis, anyone really who might have some bright ideas... for a sign.

The next day, even though I hadn't told him I did this, my BF showed me the photo above online.

He thought it was funny.

I do too.

Can Intelligent Entities Move In and Out of the Dreams of Others?

Lucid dreaming is usually defined as the ability to maintain waking consciousness during a dream or to be able to control and direct one's own dreams.

In Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan series, the Mexican shaman Don Juan is always trying to teach the narrator to dream lucidly by reminding him to look at his hands.

Night after night Castaneda goes to bed intent on remembering to look at his hands in his dreams, and night after night forgets to look at his hands until he wakes up the next morning and realizes he hasn't done it.

The whole point of Don Juan teaching Castaneda to remember to look at his hands while dreaming is so Castaneda can then learn to move between dreaming and waking states freely, and so he can understand that the two realities are not that rigidly separate. Moving from one state to another at will is an important part of shamanic practice.

Learn to look at your hands in your dreams today, fly around in the body of a raven tomorrow.

It's all connected.

That's the idea anyway.

Every so often I have an experience with dreams that is lucid-like but is not exactly the same as what Don Juan was teaching Carlos. It's more passive and a bit unnerving.

What happens is that people and objects seem to move between my dreams and waking reality without any problem, blurring the line that might tell me where they are really from.

I know this sounds weird. But it happens with some regularity, if not all the time or even every week. Jung called this phenomenon 'synchronicity', but sometimes it gets way weirder than synchronicity. I promise to post an example later to illustrate what I'm talking about.

Recently I've been thinking about this a lot, about how our culture is one of the few on earth that insists dreams are 'imaginary' (as in 'not real'), and then goes on to rigidly separate dreams from waking life, discounting the importance of these (often incredibly vivid) experiences.

Some psychologists do interpret dreams, but interpretation is a very different thing from believing in a matter of fact way that the dream reality is as real in its own way as the material reality we all imagine we share while awake.

Psychology lays down a fairly rigid barrier between inner and outer, personal and cultural, material and symbolic. It's a dualistic system of thought. The Ego versus the Dynamic Ground. The personal versus the Archetypes. "Psychological states' versus bodily illnesses. Blah, blah, blah.

What if that whole way of framing it is wrong?

I think maybe it is.

In truth, we don't really have a clue what reality is. If you think I'm overstating that, then you've never taken a single philosophy class--or at least you've never stayed awake all the way through one, which is completely understandable.

What if there are intelligences, alien or earthly, that can move enter dreams and reality at will? Why should this be an impossibility? Shamans claim to do it. Freddy Krueger does it. Maybe all sorts of other being do it.

Maybe we even do it.

I also think some people have thinner boundaries than others in general, and that people with very permeable personal boundaries may well notice more wanderers between states than people who are more rigidly defined.

I think this could explain quite a lot of paranormal perceptions without making any value judgments about thin or thick boundaried people. Some people may just be born this way, just like some people are born good at math, and others have perfect pitch, and others are color blind.

We know some people claim to learn to be this way.

I think that truly "there are more things in heaven and earth" than we know.

I wish we could study them more seriously, without all the ridicule.

Possession

The issue of possession is a hot one in paranormal circles.

Some people fear every aspect of the paranormal and are convinced that even the most superficial flirtation with these topics will quickly result a complete loss of autonomy and forcible invasion by some dark aspect of the spirit world.

Other people believe that just about any activity is safe so long as you 'cast a circle of light' around yourself and ask your Higher Power for protection.

Still others believe that only relentless positivity and prayer can protect you from demonic assault. And then of course there's the idea that 'the devil made me do it!'--The belief that just about any negative behavior or attitude is the direct result of spirit possession.

I personally believe that all of these ideas about possession are misguided or wrong.

Let's look at them one by one:

Flirtation with paranormal topics is dangerous and invites possession. 

This is akin to saying that reading chocolate cake recipes makes you fat. The question of intent and self-discipline comes into play here. Are you reading chocolate cake recipes because you have a chocolate cake problem and can't think about anything else? Are you a person who eats NOTHING except chocolate cake and you are now exactly one pound away from death by morbid obesity? Are you one of those people who is powerless in the face of chocolate cake and have you been skipping your meetings?

People with a weak sense of self and people who have fantasies about power and control can get into trouble dabbling with the paranormal, but such people get in trouble with ordinary life, too. You may run into dark forces in paranormal work, that's true. You may also get robbed at gunpoint when you leave your house.

Or, you may be the victim of a home invasion even if you NEVER leave your house for fear of being robbed. Stuff happens. As with everything in life, what happens during paranormal investigations is partially about you, but it isn't ALL about you. Possessing a living human being is not that easy a feat for the disembodied. I don't say it never happens, but it isn't that easy to accomplish.

Cast a circle of light and that will make you safe. 

In dealing with the paranormal or any other aspect of life, NOTHING will make you 'safe no matter what'. One of the most dangerous attitudes you can adopt in any context is that some trick of consciousness or ritual makes you 'safe no matter what'.

Discernment is a necessary skill for all aspects of life, and you can't put it down when approaching the paranormal, not ever. All that glisters is not gold.  Much of what looks bright and shiny and good in the world of the paranormal is dangerous, in the same way that the best con men are usually the most likable.

That said, tremendous confidence and an understanding of who you are and where you begin and end is an asset when dealing with the spirit world.

Much of what is hanging around the ether waiting to chat is akin the the guys who hang around dive bars all the time and want to buy anything in a skirt a drink. Keep your wits about you and don't be chatting up every stiff that floats by your Ouija board no matter how lit up your circle is. You have to know when to say 'buzz off' and when to call it quits. Not all inquiries are productive.

Protection from demonic assault/recovery from demonic assault. 

I have long noticed that the people most often featured in stories, books, and movies about possession are people who are trying very hard to be perfect, nice, and good every single minute.

Christians are especially susceptible to possession because they frequently believe that they must push away and deny their own personal darkness, and additionally, they are already used to giving away all personal authority and power to an outside entity: the Church. When dark forces invade their lives, they believe it is their piety that has attracted them, and in a way it is.



These people are are unbalanced; they have allowed another parasite (the Church) to make them weak and ill and now they are food for wraiths. Their fear of darkness is so huge, and their shame at their own darkness is so equally huge, that any kind of darkness can now use that huge reservoir of fear to magnify itself. The best possible protective course is the hardest one: Face the fears, look inside, make friends with yourself, all of your parts, the pretty and the ugly and the not so nice.

Often you hear these debates about, "Is it darkness coming from inside (psychological projection) or is it an actual dark external spirit? (demon or entity)" I think this is not really a useful question. The answer is often: "both, all of the above." The real issue is not where the dark force originates, the issue is the lack of balance, self-possession, and enormous fear present in the person under psychic attack.

Just as predators in the material world look for the weakest animals to eat, dark psychic forces look for people who fear their own darkness and are used to be being bossed around.

Check your intent

When approaching paranormal topics, check your intent and your attitude. If you are goofing around, expect goofiness and mischievous responses in return. If you are very fearful, expect to be intimidated and harassed. If you are curious and centered, expect to learn a few things.


Be careful. Don't isolate. Proceed with caution always.

And to thine own Self be true.

Thoughts on the Negative Uses of Enchantment

Enchantment is a word that has come to be associated with pretty things: sparkling Disney fairies, falling in love with a handsome cartoon Prince, quirky little spells cast on frogs that turn out fine as soon as a kiss is offered.

But magically speaking, enchantment has a more technical meaning, and its effects are not always so benign.

Chant

The word 'chant' is at the literal center of the word 'enchantment'. Chant is the practical tool or device used to en-chant; and the state of being soothed, changed, redirected, or controlled by chant is called 'enchantment'.

A chant can be made up of any repetitive collection of words used to produce a desired effect. When we think of chant today, we might imagine some primitive people dancing around a fire in scanty clothing, repeating a single syllable over and over again, (a scene featured in TONS of cartoonishly offensive B movies, including Tarzan flicks.)

Or maybe we remember chant as a familiar part of high school pep assemblies and the 'cheers' that were used (as chant) to whip up student emotions for essentially meaningless sporting contests. (We're #1!) Perhaps the soothing music sung by Gregorian monks springs to mind. Or the exotic mantras used in some forms of Eastern meditation to focus attention.

Chant has been confined by contemporary culture and thought in these familiar and polarized boxes: the trivial or the exotic,  the silly or the deeply sacred. But chant occurs in the middle too--all the time--in daily life, in the media, in advertising and 'spin', between our own ears.

When chant is taken for reality and puts us into a state of delusion with regard to the material world around us, we have entered a state of enchantment without even realizing it. This can be harmless, annoying, or deadly, depending on the purpose of the enchantment.

Chant and Magical Thinking

I've been recently enjoying a weekly blog written by John Michael Greer called The Archdruid Report. 

Greer is an actual Druid, a practitioner of magic, and the author of a number of books on the topics of magic and myth, but The Archdruid Report is not about all that. Instead, it's about peak oil and sustainable living (another topic that Greer has written about extensively). The blog contains Greer's passing thoughts on contemporary culture and the major social changes already in progress.

Greer's June 2nd post entitled "Magical Thinking" veers uncharacteristically into his magical interests with a discussion on chant and on how Americans use to it all the time to convince themselves of things that are patently untrue--things for which there is not one shred of evidence. He points to the current oil blowout in the Gulf and the frantic conviction among many that "science can fix anything," which it can't, and that detonating a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the ocean is the way to go, which it isn't.

The longer crisis goes on, the more people come forward to insist that nuclear annihilation of the sea floor is the fix we need, even though this has never been tried--(The Soviets claim to have successfully stopped leaking gas wells on the surface, not on the ocean floor, by detonating bombs, but they also claim that they've tried this and failed--all claims, none of them addressing problems a mile underwater involving oil). Most experts say bombing the ocean floor is an atrocious idea that could have even graver consequences than the ones we already face.

One joke spreading through the internet right now sums the idea up this way:

QUESTION: What's worse than an oil leak at the bottom of the ocean?
ANSWER: A radioactive oil leak at the bottom of the ocean.

Greer points out the call for nuclear annihilation is a common chant in our culture, a chant associated with a form of magical thinking that asserts that destructive power fixes everything, and the bigger the destruction the more powerful the fix. It's a kind of phallic, militaristic enchantment, completely irrational, and we see politicians use it all the time as a way to pull people in and get their votes.

(Remember "Bomb, bomb, bomb--bomb bomb Iran"?)

In fact, much of what passes for discourse these days is nothing but clusters of chants repeated by the variously enchanted:

Americans are the hardest working people in the world.
America country can do anything.
The free market is self-regulating.
Taxes are tyrannical.
So and so is a [fascist/socialist...fill in whichever, it doesn't really matter].

All of these words are mindless and invoked to create the illusion of security and power. What you have to ask yourself is, who is invoking these chants and to what end? But of course, if you're already enchanted, you're not really capable of asking that kind of question.

That's the whole point of enchantment.

The Tower of Babel and Images of Apocalypse

At the end of his essay on "Magical Thinking" and the Gulf disaster, Greer talks about the image of the Tower in Tarot iconography and its relation to the Tower of Babel and negative uses of enchantment. Weirdly, (or maybe not) when I read this, I had just finished writing a review of Pontypool, the movie version of Tony Burgess's postmodern uber-zombie novel that addresses similar concerns--a review which I ended by talking about the image of The Tower.

Suddenly, The Tower seems to be everywhere. Yikes. 

Words have power and enchantment works, but at some point, too much of a bad thing leads to the collapse of meaning. When language is only used to control and obfuscate, to conjure destructive illusions and reduce people to their basest instincts, humans literally become zombies--mindless recipients of viral codes and commands--and society falls apart.

Greer thinks that society's fall will be long and slow, not apocalyptic. But there's good reason why zombies are suddenly replacing vampires as the paranormal creature du jour. Real zombies--the walking talking victims of negative enchantment--are everywhere these days.

Vampires & Zombies: Enchanters & Enchanted

 Zombies and vampires are actually mirror images of each other, narratively speaking. They speak to the most important oppositional obsessions of our age:

• Vampires are undead and powerful, zombies are undead and enslaved. 
• Vampires are undead and sexy, zombies are undead and repulsive. 
• Vampires are undead and sensitive, zombies are undead and barely conscious. 
• Vampires feed on living blood. Zombies go right for living flesh. 
• Vampires can only be destroyed with a stake through the heart. Zombies have to have be shot in the brain. 

You could say (simplistically) that vampires are the enchanters and zombies are the enchanted.

Vampires enchant and control. Zombies are enchanted and controlled.

Both are not exactly alive and not exactly dead.

Kind of like corporations and their employees, huh? Eat or be eaten. Predator or prey. Choose only one and choose now. These stories resonate because they speak to our actual experience as we feel it. They speak to us in an emotional and imaginal way, not an intellectual one. In some sense, they get at the truth of our condition much better than logical analysis ever can.

In fairy tales, there's always a way to break a negative enchantment, to change the monster in the mirror back into a handsome prince or beautiful princess. A kiss will often do it.

In zombie and vampire lore, the only cure is death. Death ends up being a kindness, a respite, an object of constant longing and desire. 

It's important to point out here that in the Tarot, the pictorial story continues well after the image of the Tower is presented. There are other cards. Many of them. There are even cards that follow Death.

There are many, many Tarot card stories, and each of the stories is connected to all the other stories, and the whole collection is cyclic and ever-changing. Death itself is never the end, but occurs as a card halfway through the 22 cards in the Major Arcana. The Death card is symbolic not so much of finality and loss, as personal transformation through endings and destruction.

An ending is what we are after now--that much is certain--and on so many, many levels.

I for one will be very glad when this particular story is finished.

Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality

Several years ago I came across an amazing little book called Daimonic Reality by an Irish writer named Patrick Harpur. 

In Daimonic Reality, Harpur proposes that paranormal shapeshifting creatures do actually exist, and that they simultaneously inhabit both physical and spiritual realms, shifting back and forth between these realms at will.

Encountering one of these creatures is by definition a Big Deal.

Encounters with shapeshifters like Bigfoot, aliens, huge black cats, werewolves, and other paranormal entities are distinguished from sightings of ordinary animals by the intensely emotional quality of the experience, which can be so huge as to be disorient the experiencer for years.

Typically the person who encounters such a creature is deeply changed as a result. What's more, specific kinds of creatures have long running mythic associations with specific kinds of changes.

Harpur's point is that psychologizing strange phenomena in no way explains them; it simply retells a story from a perspective that makes less sense than the standard one used by almost every other culture except our own: Namely, something actually happened.

The word daimon actually comes from a Greek term meaning something like 'spirit of place.' Daimons were not the 'demons' of contemporary Christian lore, but much, much older entities that pagan peoples recognized as being associated with actual locations or natural landmarks.

Thus werewolves live in the deep woods, aliens descend from the sky, faeries disappear into circles of rocks, sea serpents inhabit lonely landlocked lakes, and trolls guard crossings, bridges, and borders.

Daimonic Reality is still one of my all-time favorite books on the paranormal, because it strikes me as being the simple truth of the matter. The book cuts through the endless annoying debate over whether paranormal creatures are material or psychological in nature, whether they are 'real' or 'imaginary'.

Harpur's answer is, "Both!"

It's a hard answer for most of us to get our heads around, and yet it instantly makes sense of the stories and firsthand accounts, which almost always are profound and unambiguous. Witnesses not only saw something real, it was so incredibly real and so memorable they tell the story for the rest of their lives.

I think that contemporary culture needs these stories so much. The created world is a mysterious living entity with a soul and a consciousness, and it seems to me that devaluing direct experience of its sentience bleeds life of color and meaning. Something goes missing when every damned thing comes with a 'rational explanation'. 

So often these rational dismissals are so convoluted and tortured that they are harder to believe and require more of an act of faith and a willingness to trust the authority than just taking the experience at face value, as in, "I saw Bigfoot."

Three words! Occam's razor, you know?

In a similar book,  The Terror that Comes in the Night,  folklorist David Hufford recounts his research on the 'Old hag' phenomenon which today goes by the more familiar term sleep paralysis, and in medevial times was known as an incubus or succubus.

Hufford very methodically and rationally comes to the conclusion that this specifc bit of folklore is grounded in an actual experience. We may not know the nature of the experience. But that doesn't make it less 'real'.

In other words, just because we have folk tales that are cross-culturally consistent, and just because an experience has a physical and perceptual component, there is absolutely no basis for concluding that something 'real' is not actually happening to people who have the encounter. 'Brain chemistry' explanations are non-explanations. They are philosophically bankrupt.

Hufford's book made groundbreaking and risky claims, but his work and his perspective are now widely accepted as valid. The book is very readable, though maybe not as much fun as Harpur's.

I personally believe we need our 'damned things' way more than we need rational explanations for them. We need our daimons. We need to encounter and respect mystery. Such encounters remind us  that the world is not composed of dead matter, and we are not located in the dead center of it.

I'm currently halfway through Patrick Harpur's new book, The Philosopher's Secret Fire, and that one is pretty good too.

When I finish it, I promise to come back and share the secret.

(At least, I promise to come back.)

The Difference Between Glamour and Pishogue

Magicians are notorious for making things disappear. Typically they do this by controlling attention.

While the crowd is 'looking over there' the magician does something 'over here' and presto! An object appears or disappears in a seemingly impossible fashion and everyone has a bit of fun being amazed and amused.

Before the Age of Reason, however, such tricks were accepted as a part of daily life. Pranks of altered consciousness were played on ordinary humans by faeries and household sprites, by witches and sorcerers, by ghosts and demons, and by all manner of other supernatural forces.

Two specific types of trick--the glamour and the pishogue--were especially common and were regularly discussed.

A pishogue is when someone or something casts a spell over a person that confuses or changes how that person perceives an object. A glamour, by contrast, is when the spell is cast over the object itself in order to change how it appears or even to make it disappear entirely (or cause it to become invisible).

Faeries were said to be especially skilled in the art of pishogue. Faeries could easily alter human perception to make people see whatever they wanted them to see, and could appear to humans in whatever form they wished. (Many writers versed in faery lore believe that today's 'aliens' are actually the same faery folk our ancestors talked about as a matter of course.)

Faeries are notoriously private and don't appreciate human nosiness into their affairs. Their skill at deception and the alteration of human consciousness remain legendary to this day.

Glamours were more often cast by witches or sorcerers. The Malleus Malleficarum, the infamous 15th century text that allowed the Church to burn and torture thousands of women accused of witchcraft, goes into great detail on the matter of the use of glamours, especially in regard to stealing the male member or causing it to disappear altogether:

"...here is no doubt that certain witches can do marvellous things with regard to male organs, for this agrees with what has been seen and heard by many, and with the general account of what has been known concerning that member through the senses of sight and touch. And as to how this thing is possible, it is to be said that it can be done in two ways, either actually and in fact, as the first arguments have said, or through some prestige or glamour. But when it is performed by witches, it is only a matter of glamour; although it is no illusion in the opinion of the sufferer. For his imagination can really and actually believe that something is not present, since by none of his exterior sense, such as sight or touch, can he perceive that it is present."

It's easy to look at a piece of text like this one and conclude that the author must have been speaking metaphorically, but the quote is actually pretty clear: It says plainly that the guy whose dick has been glamoured off isn't dealing with impotence or a mere loss of confidence. He literally can't see a dick where once a dick used to plainly obvious.

Yikes.

Witches also cast glamours to make themselves appear to be beautiful when in reality they were hideously ugly or deformed. This is where we get the modern usage of the word 'glamour' as having something to do with sexy women's clothes and the proper make up and attitude. It's important to point out, however, that nothing that pedestrian was meant by the original term. Today's 'glamour' is a very watered down, tame version of the original concept.

It's odd how the everyday practice of magic has lost so much credence even though we absolutely know magic exists and that it is a powerful, amazing art. It's almost as if science has cast its own glamour over the notion of glamour itself.

Illusionists like David Copperfield successfully make large buildings disappear and Chris Angel hovers in midair, and we accept all these feats easily as long as it is a form of entertainment. We've given our consent, asked to be amazed, suspended our disbelief, and are happy when we get our wish.

Yet when we read defunct texts from the prescientific era we laugh off such claims as simple ignorance and superstition--as though it would be impossible to fool anyone who hadn't given advance consent. We are not all that comfortable with the idea that magic can be used against us when we don't want it, or when its aim is something other than entertaining games and fun. We know on some level that it can be used this way and is used this way, but we don't like it so we pretend it's all impossible.

The Church wasn't all that comfortable with that idea either. They responded rather badly. 

Basic principles of magic such as pishogue and glamour are still used today by the press, by Hollywood, by the government, by amateur and professional hypnotists, by psychotherapists, and most especially by the advertising industry. This is just a short list of the open uses of pishogue and glamour. Think of the art of 'spin' and how big a part of all our lives that art really is.

When I read accounts from alien abductees I often wonder about covert uses of these techniques.

Just because the Church reacted in a totally batshit manner to accusations of magic 500 years ago doesn't mean magic isn't real and isn't still being practiced today by those who know how.

We don't really need to roast anybody.

But it is food for thought.