Wizardry and magical promises in modern packages

ALL over the ancient world, concoctions were used through clandestine requests by citizens to sorcerers and sorceresses to inflict injury, mental disorientation towards submission, and death on specific victims. This often included unfaithful spouses to relatives for gain, to the competitive other, and even towards social elevation, and little has changed with the desperate. The perpetrators, on accusation and trial, were put to death (we’re not talking about an ancient world of fair trials).

Those who have had some reason to pay attention to the documentation of human origins concerning our legal and healing practices would come across some of this data on what was confronted and used for what purposes. There are lists of sinister personalities and poisons over the colonising era, and further back to the ancient world that point to a sinister stream in human nature that we invoke, based on our temperament and our ethical values. But some people are driven, out of unforeseen malice for the other; like the woman who gave a child a potion as a gift through a cake out of envy that he was brighter than her child. Luckily, the child survived, through some uncommon favourable circumstances.

There was a need to glance back to resonate with the fact that what is happening now in the following paragraphs is not to be interpreted as the world is ‘getting worse’. The reality is that we must become wiser to meet the evolution of the familiar.

The following content is a partial extract from a DISCOVER MAGAZINE MARCH 2012 article: CHEMISTS IN

THE SHADOWS: “The fastest growing trend is a more complicated class of compounds brewed up by trained chemists like P……. *……. who are searching for exotic steroids, or pursuing novel psychoactive compounds. In just the past two years, the use of synthetic stimulants that produce a meth-like high, and are marked as ‘bath salts’ has exploded. In 2010 alone, 41 new psychoactive substances were, by European nations, more than triple the amount identified in 2008, according to a report issued by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. (No similar statistics are kept in the United States, but many of the drugs end up here, too.)

DERIVATIVES OF PCP AND COCAINE

The new substances include derivatives of PCP and cocaine, as well as new forms of synthetic cannabinoids; compounds that are similar to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana.

SEE PAGE XXIII

Many of these psychoactive substances are little-known com-