Black magic

In his own broken way, yes.

Gallafile is constantly checking the boy's temperature, looking for the fever of dark magic, but in doing so, he is the one making the boy sick.

He is silently, persistently teaching that child that he is already half suspect.

He makes the boy an outsider in his own home.

Because I am putting myself in his shoes, and I'm getting frustrated with him.

It's hard not to.

If he knows or at least strongly senses that his father suspects him of being tainted by dark magic, and his response to that is to intentionally seek out dark magic to prove that he isn't tainted, isn't that just pure, unadulterated arrogance?

It is hubris.

I'm sure you've seen the spiritual permeating across interests and especially across the political spectrum in the past eight to ten years.

Whether it's the convergence of witchcraft and feminism, the popularization of political wellness which has ritual components, the appearance of crystals in the Los Angeles mayoral race, the conspiratorial intimations about black magic on the right, or Even the worries about how spiritual forces connected to COVID or AI or whatever topic is the most important or centered in people's lives at the time, you can find it everywhere.

People have been trying to interpret the world through a spiritual lens that religion or often doesn't seem up to.

But the political realm has so overwhelmed people's perceptions that instead of being transformed by the spiritual encounter or pursuit, it seems like the spiritual encounter and pursuit is being grafted on to already established worldviews.

We need people that can actually do this work, separating truth from falsehood, separating real magical and spiritual activity from where it's been overwhelmed or dominated by the political sphere or economic need or whatever, to find the genuinely and sincerely held interest in spiritual life and pursuits, and to diminish the influence of the former in favor of encouraging the latter.

One expert that I trust and appreciate so deeply on these matters, someone that for me does actually occupy that role, whether he would claim it or not, is Thomas Waters, lecturer of history at Imperial College London and a guest on this show before on episode 98.

Back on that episode, we used his book, Cursed Britain, A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times, as a springboard to discuss the victims of witchcraft and also the ways witchcraft is used by victims.

Through Thomas's excellent scholarship, it became impossible to simply label witchcraft as a tool of the other or of feminism or as an anti-capitalist pursuit, as is posited by some misguided or even willfully dishonest scholars.

So it was, you know, a shift certainly from first to last.

And I think this one seems less Practical Magic and more Dark Magic.

Yeah.

Right.

Cause we saw hints of it.

Certainly there's been some darkness plaguing the Owens women up to this point.

But this is like very dark magic, very hexes and curses and all that kind of stuff that we see play out in, pretty pretty aggressively but it you know just on the whole it's a little bit less whimsical I liked some of the whimsy that we saw in some of the other books but more than anything I think I'm just curious to see how they're going to adapt this one for the movie because it is there's a lot of action here and so I do think that it could translate pretty well to the big screen and But as we know, the original Practical Magic was pretty different than the original book.

So, you know, I'm really curious how it's going to play out on the screen.