Stuff: But you can still write off that eye of newt.

In 2010, possibly fearing occult reprisals, the Senate of Romania rejected a proposal to impose a tax on professional witches. But it would seem that, just like us more mundane folks, witches can't avoid those inevitable taxes forever. The New Republic reports that Romania's new legal definition of self employment will require that withes fork over 16% of their income to the state. That's right, Brumhilde, the tax man cometh.

As goofy as this sounds, there's two strange and noteworthy undercurrents here. First, there's the unsettling degree to which the Romanian government seems happy to concede to widely held superstitions. If this were just a case of widespread magical thinking, it would be unfortunate enough; but the larger danger is the conspiracy-minded thought this kind of logic leads to. In 2010, after receiving a surprisingly thorough beating at the polls, then presidential candidate Mircea Geoana blame his defeat not on policy positions or the will of the people, but on an attack by occult forces:

Not only did Geoana snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, however, but he proceeded to invite ridicule upon himself and his party by claiming that he had lost the ballot after being attacked with “negative energy” by a parapsychologist employed by the wily [incumbent, Traian] Basescu.

This occult assault wrecked his concentration during a televised debate, he complained, and was part of a strategy by his rival’s election team to harness the mystical “power of the purple flame” by wearing purple ties, socks and other accoutrements on certain important days.

Second, there's the unfortunate specter of ethnic unrest. TNR reports:

It's no surprise that the Romanian government has been eager to tap into this sometimes ostentatious stream of wealth for years. But could its new tax on witchcraft be motivated by more than money? Witches' main activity is fortune-telling, an occupation that has long been associated with the Roma population (often called "Gypsies"), toward whom prejudices run deep. A 1991 poll revealed that 41 percent of Romanians believe that the Roma should be "poorly treated," and a 1994 study found that Romanian newspapers might have directly incited hatred toward the Roma. And this negative attitude toward the group has shifted little since then. As far as I am aware, the Romanian government has not drawn any connection between the new tax legislation and anti-Roma politicking—and the Romanian embassy did not respond to my phone calls or e-mails—but some Romanians still think that the new taxation is an attempt to satisfy latent prejudice by drawing attention to and taking money from a marginalized population. As writer and poet Andrei Codrescu sees it, the new law represents "a cheap populist, nationalist move" that "plays well to the yo-yo's."

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True Crime: "I still have 83 more women to kill."

The francophone Afrik News has a story on the proliferation of serial killers across Africa and the unique problems they pose to nations that often lack the investigative and communication infrastructures to identify, track, and capture such criminals. Drawing extensively from the work of Stéphane Bourgoin, an expert on African serial killers, the article paints a nightmarish portrait of these predators. Along with the police organization and data sharing issues that would hound detectives and researchers in any country, the article points out the way in which local cultural traditions can, for lack of a better word, normalize serial killing in some African communities. From the article:

And while these rampant murders are are sometimes not linked to tradition, most of them are. In southern Africa, sangomas [midwives, healers and soothsayers] call on hired killers who, for the pleasure of killing end up as serial killers, provide them with some of their tools of work. The sangomas sometimes prepare concoctions containing human body parts. A beverage brewed from a child’s sexual organ, for example, is believed to cure impotence.

"Muti killings", murders committed by puncturing the organs of a living person, is the cause of hundreds of deaths per year. "Africa registers more crimes related to cannibalism and vampirism than anywhere else in the world". Eating someone means capturing the soul and spirit of that person. And the victims’ blood are believed to contain life. It is no secret that fetish priests and some traditional worshipers believe that by drinking human blood they either become immortal or are reborn. "This kind of belief explains the acts committed by the two Kenyan serial killers: Philip Onyancha, who drank the blood of his victims and George Otieno Okoth, who collected human hair.

Besides the "muti killings", it can be noted that across Sub-Sahara Africa, many of those often labeled as witches or wizards, mostly by fetish priests, are poisoned, drowned, hacked to death with machetes or buried alive at will in an attempt to deliver their souls from the snare of the ‘devil’. Here again, a killer could evoke witchcraft in order to be given the leeway to kill to satisfy his whim. Only last year, a Zimbabwean judge, Justice Ndou, ruled that 32 year old Vusumuzi Ndlovu’s unshakable belief in witchcraft was an extenuating factor to spare him from the southern African country’s legally imposed punishment, after he killed his neighbor whom he accused of witchcraft.

The title of this post comes from Philip Onyancha, shown under arrest above.

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Stuff: How David Bowie defended his sperm from sinister occult misappropriation.

A new bio of the Thin White Duke is going to include discussion of the occult's role in Bowie's post-Young American meltdown. From Starpulse:

In the book, Spitz writes, "While planning the follow-up to "Young Americans" (album), Bowie would sit in the house with a pile of high-quality cocaine atop the glass coffee table, a sketch pad and a stack of books. Psychic Self Defense was his favorite. Its author describes the book as a 'safeguard for protecting yourself against paranormal malevolence.' Using this and more arcane books on witchcraft, white magic and its malevolent counterpart, black magic, as rough guides to his own rapidly fragmenting psyche, Bowie began drawing protective pentagrams on every surface."

Bowie told the author, "I'd stay up for weeks. Even people like Keith Richards were floored by it. And there were pieces of me all over the floor. I paid with the worst manic depression of my life. My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating 24 hours a day."

Spitz adds, "Increasingly Bowie was convinced there were witches after his semen. They were intent on using it to make a child to sacrifice to the devil, essentially the plot to Roman Polanski's 1968 supernatural classic Rosemary's Baby."

A friend hooked Bowie up with New York-based white witch Walli Elmlark.

The author adds, "Elmlark quickly and successfully exorcised the pool. Angie (Bowie), who was living there at the time, noted that it started to bubble and smoke, and that it only rained outside David's window while the rest of the L.A. sky was clear. Elmlark wrote a series of spells and incantations out for Bowie as he continued to wrestle with the forces of darkness."

I haven't read the book, so I do not know if Bowie did defeat the forces of evil. The fact that the world didn't end at the hands of a half-demon/half-plastic android Bowie-Satan hybrid implies he won. But, then again, a possession by demonoidic entities bent on harming mankind could explain his musical output from "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" on. We'll have to wait for somebody to read the bio and tell us.

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News: Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang walla walla, bing bang.

I don't even know how to introduce this, so let's just cut straight to the article from the BBC about what appears to be a giant, possibly government-backed witch hunt in Gambia.

Up to 1,000 Gambian villagers have been abducted by "witch doctors" to secret detention centres and forced to drink potions, a human rights group says.

Amnesty International said some forced to drink the concoctions developed kidney problems, and two had died.

Officials in the police, army and the president's personal protection guard had accompanied the "witch doctors" in the bizarre roundup, said witnesses.

Gambia's government was unavailable to comment on the claims.

The human rights group asserted that many of those abducted were elderly.

The London-based rights group said the witch hunters, said to be from neighbouring Guinea, were invited into Gambia after the death of the president's aunt earlier this year was blamed on witchcraft.

To put this in scientific context, in 2007 the president of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, announced that he had developed a cure for AIDS. MSNBC describes Jammeh's treatment:

From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia’s president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient — a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.

He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.

“Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof,” President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound. “Mine is not an argument, mine is a proof. It’s a declaration. I can cure AIDS and I will.”

To properly work, the cure must be taken on a Thursday and, more troubling, the patient must stop taking any anti-retroviral medicine.

Though it is not clear exactly what he thinks he is doing, critics have suggested that Jammeh's faith in his herbal "cure" stems from his mistaken notion that AIDS is caused by some sort of intestinal parasite. He also claims to be able to cure asthma and high blood pressure.

To put this in a human rights context, Jammeh – who is, curiously enough, the Vice President of the International Parliament for Safety and Peace – has been linked to the deaths of 12 student protestors, at least 2 journalists critical of his administration, 44 Ghanaian immigrants, and 10 foreign nationals denounced variously as criminals and spies. In 2008, he announced that his government would begin a policy of beheading homosexuals. Several years ago, folks started an online petition to get the International Criminal Court to indict him for crimes against humanity.

Jammeh is actually serving his third term as president, winning the 2006 election with nearly 70% of the popular vote.

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