V-Magica!

The People Have Spoken
In a rousing vote, the people have spoken. Recieving 50% of all votes cast, the people have demanded I address the topic of magic. Nevermind the fact that 4 total votes were to be had. I don't have time to discuss "poll validity" and "sampling". For this article, I will revisit one of the pillars our great Western society is built upon.

This is America
It wasn't a very long time ago that magic wasn't just primarily a source for authors to make money. Today, little kids dress up for halloween as little ghouls and zombies and wizards. But let us travel back in time to the 1600's, where that wasn't the case.

The scene is colonial Massachusetts. This is almost a 100 years prior to an event I referred to in The Apprisal's  inaugural post, The Boston Tea Party. Or as I like to refer to it "That one time we made 40 Million Gallons of Lipton". Anywhooooos, back to the scene of colonial Massachusetts. It was the late 1600's, and brave settlers traveled 1,000's of miles to reach this new land to escape religious persecution.  Their means were simple, and had to work the hard earth everyday. It was a hard life, and they slept on hard beds. They traveled on ships over hard seas and ate hard fruit for food. The human species has faced some astounding hardships and circumstances throughout the history of time. But it was about to get harder.

Witches
Witches. There were a bunch of witches.These witches were up to no good and displayed typical witch-like behaviour, doing such felonious criminal activity as:

• Making People do things, such as crawling under furniture, making weird sounds, or having outbursts and being identified as the cause by girls under the age of 12
• Being a Homeless Beggar
• Re-Marrying because of Money
• Reading Books about Witches
• Voicing Skepticism about the Possibility of Witches
• Wearing Black Clothing

It was with great urgency that the good, god-fearing people of Massachusetts organized and brought in these witches for examinations. These great people acted swiftly (as you should, in matters dealing with witches) and imprisoned all these magic-practitioners. From April til May alone in 1692, they were able to round up 62 people who practice arts of magica and praise their dark lord Satan (over 150 witches total). Some of these people died in jail, as I'm sure they were confused as what to feed witches. It is 2011, and I would not know what to feed a witch if confronted with that situation.

It was about this time a resident named Cotton Mather wrote a letter to one of the judges, which I will paraphrase/ reenact below as I envision it:

"Dear Judge John Richards:

What's up my main man. How is the Fam? We should grab a Samuel Adams equivalent sometime and kick it. I don't think we can order a Samuel Adams at our local tavern because the historical figure that is the beer's namesake has not been born yet.
I just want to say very legibly that I AM A BIG FAN OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING WITH THIS WHOLE-WITCH TRIAL PROJECT. THERE ARE DEFINITELY WITCHES AND YOU GUYS ARE DOING A REALLY GREAT JOB. You guys are solid.
Maybe it's just me, but I just wanted to point out that a lot of evidence seems to be from peoples dreams and visions. I know I know, 'legal proceedings' was never really my thing. I just wanted to give a little constructive criticism and maybe we can hit these witches with some hard evidence? It just, you know, kind of seems like it would be easy to make something like this up. Anyways, catch you on the flip.
-The Cotton"

Luckily, they did not take Cotton Mather's advice. Due to a very streamlined and efficient judicial process, they were able to charge these witches with witch-crimes of different levels. 8 of the more serious witches were hung in harmony at the same time, others had various punishments. But usually hanging.

Giles Cory

Giles Cory, a soon to be convicted witch, decided to not enter a plea in the court. Well, as I talked about earlier, time is of the essence when dealing with witches. Sometimes if you are building something, you need something other than your Phillips-head screwdriver and a 10mm ratchet. You need to dig deep in the toolbox and pull out the right tool- in this case, it was "Peine forte et dure". This is the practice of restricting a person's limbs and stacking rocks on their chest until they enter a plea. Giles did not make it to trial. A fun fact- the most common method of execution by crushing in history doesn't involve rocks. It involves elephants. Oh Boy!

Witch Cake
Although testimony worked very well for indicting witches, they employed some science as well. I would probably classify this as "non-traditional"

"At some point in February 1692, likely between the time when the afflictions began but before specific names were mentioned, a neighbor of Rev. Parris, Mary Sibly (aunt of the afflicted Mary Walcott), instructed John Indian, one of the minister's slaves, to make a witch cake, using traditional English white magic to discover the identity of the witch who was afflicting the girls. The cake, made from rye meal and urine from the afflicted girls, was fed to a dog.
According to English folk understanding of how witches accomplished affliction, when the dog ate the cake, the witch herself would be hurt because invisible particles she had sent to afflict the girls remained in the girls' urine, and her cries of pain when the dog ate the cake would identify her as the witch."

Conclusion
Thanks to the hard work of the early settlers, America continues to be primarily witch-free. I would also feel prosecutors of today have a lot to learn from these trials, as they were able to convict 26 of 26 people making it into a formal trial.

Enjoy your weekend!!!
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Sharing Is Caring

This week, I have brought 4 web/series of tubes/links for you to put your eyeballs on

Charlie Sheen's Twitter- Pure gold and magic

Big Think-A website dedicated to bringing information written by hundreds of different "experts" in their given fields. A lot of celebrity types participate.

Cracked- A very funny site that I finally visited. Example A: 6 Giant Blind Spots In Every Movie Alien's Invasion Strategy

Facebook- A great website for connecting with friends. You should check it out.