Supplicium: The punishment inflicted by the Law.

Crimen Exceptum: An “excepted crime,” a term dating to the inquisitorial system of law; a crime for which due process and the usual standards of proof allegedly do not apply (eg., the Patriot Act rewriting U.S. Law to allow Islamic soldiers to be tortured and held indefinitely without charge–see also, “a note on scope“).

Crimen Magiae: A subset of the crimen exceptum, traditionally “the crime of practicing magic.” Herein, crimen magiae also includes “magical” crimes in which not only due process is suspended (eg., the Creative Frontiers case), but also the laws of physics (eg., 17-year-old Jeremy Barney’s case, in which years of alleged beatings and rape and torture left not so much as a scratch on his alleged child victims). Other magical crimes include occult(ed) crimes, such as the case of the West Memphis Three, wherein the prosecutors’ fantasies, ineptitude, and misconduct result in real crimes and real perpetrators remaining hidden, in darkness–i.e., occulted–while the innocent accused suffer in prison.

In my present projects, the debt I owe to others’ work (see bibliography & sources) cannot be overstated–but I want also to add a different perspective. Namely this: Magic(k) is real. Or, in other words: the question is not, Is Magic(k) real? but Does it work? In answer: We need look no further than any number of miscarriages of justice–whether metaphorical witch trials or literal witch hunts–to find evidence of the Art, precisely that which compels both authorities and the public to envision events that never transpired and crimes where none occurred, and to incarcerate or otherwise punish real people on the “evidence” of these visions alone.

Also: Witch-hunters’ crimes–that is, the crimes committed by authorities who chase literal or figurative “witches”–are real crimes. It is difficult to quantify with any accuracy the damage that has been caused by maleficium (injury caused by magic)—whether the practice of sorcery or voodoo or witchcraft or any variety of “spells” cast, throughout history, by earnest dabblers in sundry forms of magic—but one requires only time and an iron stomach to detail the effects of persecutions: 2,000+ years of assault, incarceration, torture, and execution of men, women, and children who, one day, found themselves accused.

While the English word “witch” dates back only so far, what witches stand for–the Satanic, the bestial, the horrific, the inhuman, all that should be feared and loathed–dates back much further. Nor do “magical” but “inhuman” beings belong only in the past. Right now, all over the world, “we” humans are drawing distinctions between “us” and “them” and deciding that “they” are not worthy of freedom and justice, that “they” are not worthy of life. One thing my research has taught me: the patterns are timeless. “We” just keep repeating them. My hope, if I have any left, is that seeing the patterns means “we” no longer have to “unconsciously” repeat these patterns.

Coda: The Parable of the Iron Chair

During the persecution of Christians in the second century, when they routinely stood accused of incest, sodomy, infanticide, and cannibalism, in addition to worshiping a beast–just as the Jews before them were accused, and as Christians would later accuse both “others” and their own–one tortured man by the name of Attalus summarized the irony of his final moments as he was “roasted alive,” while trapped inside, of all things, an iron chair.

Begging for mercy before a crowded amphitheater, Attalus cried as he burned: “What your are doing is indeed to eat men, but we do not eat men, nor do we do anything else wicked.”

It is unknown if Attalus, when he “cried,” did merely call out to the amphitheater, or if he wept.