Humour

Five Things You Really Don’t Want To Know: Black Sorcery

Note: This article is hosted here for archival purposes only. It does not necessarily represent the values of the Iron Warrior or Waterloo Engineering Society in the present day.

To all you Harry Potter fans, the idea that people used to burn witches seems unfair and horrible. That’s because witches have been changing their image recently. If you were around in old times, you would know exactly why people used to hate witches.

Navajo Witches Used Ground Corpses as a Poison

In Navajo folklore, a witch is by definition someone who magically poisons people. Reasons for poisoning people can include: hatred, rivalry, theft, shits, and giggles. Of course, being witches, there was no reason to use normal poison. Instead, they would use “corpse powder,” which is… exactly what it sounds like. Witches would obtain corpses and grind the bones into powder—finger bones and the back of the skull were considered especially powerful. Baby bones, especially bones of twin babies, were the best source, which is sad. Other sources of corpse powder include dried fluids from incestuous necrophilia, probably in order to fit maximum horror in minimum words.

To poison people, the skin-walkers would blow the powder into their faces or throw it down the chimney of their house. If you breathed in the dust, your tongue would swell up and blacken and you would die horribly.

In their spare time, skin-walkers would put on animal skins and turn into werebeasts. They would then perform petty crimes such as housebreaking, assault and battery, and disturbing the peace.

Catalan Witches Were Perverts

In Catalonia, it wasn’t hard to become a witch back in the day. All you had to do was roll around in the sand, naked. Witches’ powers would diminish with time, so to replenish them, they would draw magical marks on their butts every so often. They would do this on the full moon, no pun intended.

Witches had the power to see through solid objects. Why yes, they did have the power to see through peoples’ clothes.  This is probably what worried the Inquisitors so much.

They also would have witch dances, wherein they would be naked (notice a theme here?) and dance in tight circles, slamming their asses against each other. Of course, they had sex with demons as well.

Icelandic Witchcraft Was Disgusting

Witches in old Iceland were deeply into biohazards. In a previous column, we discussed nabrok, which were pants made of a dead man’s skin. However, that is only the tip of the iceberg.

For example, supposing that there is a lock that you can’t open. You probably aren’t doing something legit in the first place, so you don’t have anything to lose. First, you go to a graveyard and dig up a corpse. Take some of the corpse’s fat, and put it in your mouth. You now draw a sign, lay it on the lock, and then blow into the keyhole while reciting a magical charm. This is called a bellyfat whistle, which is ridiculous! It isn’t possible to whistle with your mouth full.

If you want to exorcise a ghost, you should mix blood from a man, a fox, and a seal, and then draw a magical sign on skin from a horse’s head. Alternatively, draw a different sign on the skin of a bitch (a female dog, you idiot). When you are attacked by a lightning ghost (and I am not sure what that is, but it sounds badass), wave the skin at the ghost while spitting and peeing at it.

If you are a woman and want to steal random shit, you can raise a kind of goblin to do the work for you. First, dig up a rib from a graveyard, wrap it in wool, and keep it in your shirt. To feed it, you will have to carve yourself a third nipple on your thigh, which it will drink from. You can then send it to drink milk from your neighbours’ cows, and spit the milk into your containers. To get rid of it, just send it to pick up sheep poo until it explodes.

Greco-Roman Witches Were All About Body Fluids

The Ancient Greeks were famous for inventing logic, and the Romans for being practical and hard-headed, but in fact they were quite superstitious and were terrified of witchcraft. If you met their witches, you would be too.

Greco-Roman witches were into love spells and would often steal their crushes’ hair to make love potions. Hair isn’t so bad, but when they were done with their lovers they would turn them into animals. If someone annoyed them, or their lover left them, they would sneak into their house at night and pee on their face. Oh, and then stab them.

Witches would also remove peoples’ body parts, such as ears and noses, while they were asleep. They would patch the wounds up with wax or other random things, so the people wouldn’t realize it until much later.

English Witches Were Horrible

In ye olde Englande, witches used incredibly nasty items for mundane purposes. For instance, to make a new building lucky, you should place the dried body of a cat inside the walls. If you think that’s bad, the even older custom was to have a human sacrifice and brick up a person inside the foundation .

A Hand of Glory (mentioned in Harry Potter) was a severed hand of a hanged man, preferably a murderer. To preserve it, sometimes you dry it; other times you pickle it in a mixture of human and animal pee. There are a few different uses – making a candle from corpse fat and putting it in the hand would either give light only to you, or paralyze everyone around you. It will also unlock any doors you come across.

The candle should be made of a mixture of corpse fat, various herbs, and dried horse poo. Alternatively, set the hand itself on fire.

If you have a weak stomach…well, to defend yourself against people using these things, smear your door with a mixture of cat gall, chicken fat, and owl blood.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is why they used to burn witches.

Leave a Reply