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 Lately I’ve been dealing with some customers who in my opinion are clearly mentally ill and not the subject of magical or demonic attack, as they claim. Over the years, when someone has told me they are under demonic or magical attack, probably at least half the time I feel that they in fact are. But recently it seems that many people are not apparently under any external attack but instead are experiencing mental illness of some kind. I’ve been ruminating over the differences between magical attack and mental illness in terms of how they are presented to the magical practitioner quite a bit and would like some help from those of you out there who have any experience along these lines. I would like to come up with a more systematic way of defining the differences between actual magical attack and mental illness, something more in the field of reason than intuition. Because it seems that many of the people I speak to who are in fact mentally ill IMO have things in common with each other, as if aspects of a culture produce a particular sort of craziness. Even the way they speak seems to have something in common rather than differing a good deal by individual, as is usually the case with any random person. This got me thinking. So here are some questions.
 From the perspective of cursing:
If you or anyone you know has practiced attack magic, what typically were the results intended and did they include insanity? Or was it more along the lines of physical injury, loss of job or status, breakup of relationship, and other stuff? IME, little attack magic if any involves driving another person crazy, but maybe that’s just what I’ve run into. Maybe just the torment involved of sending a spirit after someone is enough to drive the target mad, whether that was the intention or not? Because every one of the people whom I have deemed mentally ill claim that they are under attack from human individuals (witches, warlocks, covens, Voodoo priests, etc.) rather than simply being glommed onto by passing evil spirits, as a Christian might believe. Yet I have not run across many magic practitioners who tell me “I am trying to send a demon after someone to drive them nuts or to harass them mightily.”
 When someone is in fact cursed:
When you have encountered people who you are certain are under magical attack, especially through spirits that some person has sent to harass the person, what have been the effects you notice immediately, if any? I have noticed for instance that when talking to the person, I feel an unpleasant buzzing sensation in my head and get a headache. Sometimes I have felt extremely tired after talking on the phone to someone who is strongly targeted. I am interested in any kinds of sensations or reactions that practitioners out there have had when dealing with someone who they are pretty certain is under some kind of magical attack. Do you get any physical sensations? Or is your determination of the actuality of the attack based on the individual’s description of what they are experiencing (nightmares, weird physical effects that have no medical cause, a series of physical injuries or monetary disasters that seems more than coincidental, etc.).
 When someone is mentally ill rather than cursed:
When you encounter someone you believe is mentally ill although they claim demonic or magical attack, what is it that says to you that it’s mental illness they are dealing with and not magical attack? Someone mentioned to me one of the differences is that mentally ill people seem to demand immediate and repeated action and attention. From my own experience, I thought this was true. People under demonic attack seem not to call repeatedly on a daily basis, demanding I do something about their situation. Instead, they call, hesitantly describe their situation (hesitantly because sane people are aware that in our society, demons are not generally considered to be real), and ask for ways to combat the attack. In every case that I recall, the individual was under attack because of some ordinary thing–someone was mad at them for having an affair with someone else they wanted for themselves, or someone was trying to keep the individual from winning a court case against them–pretty mundane concerns, in other words. In contrast, in my experience the people I have considered to be mentally ill generally could not give any reason for the attack or claimed that their attackers just wanted their soul, fitting in with Christian ideas and/or with the concepts of the Satanic panic of the eighties. Likewise, sex seems to be involved much more with the mentally ill people. For instance, people have told me that demonic forces sent to harass them by witches were making them have sexual thoughts, or that people around them were actually demonic and causing their sexual organs to be stimulated from afar. And of course there are the people who are certain they are being attacked because they are very extraordinary (descended from great priests, etc.). Those are easy to spot, IME.
I would like to hear if others have noticed any commonalities with the folks they have run into in terms of who is targeting them and why. It would be helpful to all of us, I think, if we could come up with any commonalities that might help us recognize the difference. Also, I have wondered just how often it is the case that someone who is mentally ill becomes a sort of magnet for random spirits screwing around. Along the lines of the concept that the mentally ill are touched by the divine (which I am not putting forward as a helpful idea), are mentally ill people more able to perceive the spirit world? Finally, if you have determined that someone is mentally ill rather than under magical attack, do you ever consider giving them magical means to deal with it?
This summer I never got anywhere near as many preserves done as I had hoped. It was just too hot, for one thing, and for another, I had too much to do. And I always bite off way more than I can chew. It’s like a personal rule. But my canning plan extended through February of 2012, so the other day, knowing it would be slow around the holidays, I got some stuff for making preserves–a ton of organic Barlett pears and some small blood oranges. I’ve been referring to the Pride of New York website to select which fruits and vegetables I preserve when. Right now, pears are considered to be widely available from storage. Blood oranges, in contrast, are a winter treat from far away. I could not resist their sunny, bloody-hearted selves, especially since they were modestly priced and organic. They’ve been releasing their fragrance on the kitchen table for the past couple of days, so I know they are super ready to process.
 Pears in bittersweet chocolate sauce in modern jars with antique glass lids So far I’ve put together pears in spiced caramel, pears in bittersweet chocolate, and pear preserves with ginger. The first two recipes are from Christine Ferber’s Mes Confitures and require mercilessly cutting the sugar by almost 2/3s. I don’t know what those Frenchies are thinking.  Well, maybe they are keeping their preserves in the cabinet or on the table instead of in the fridge once they are opened, because such high sugar will keep an open jar of jam from molding. You could use their preserves to treat wounds, I think. But IMO, too much sugar makes a preserve inedible. I’ve cut the sugar amounts to American levels, such as are represented in the source of the pears and ginger recipe, Canning for a New Generation. OTOH, I like the technique of the French recipes, where you prepare the fruit and mix it with the sugar, citrus, and spices, if any, and then let it sit overnight for the sugar to extract the juice and firm up the fruit so it doesn’t turn into mush when it’s cooked. I’ve seen British recipes using this same technique too, like in Preserves: River Cottage Handbook No.2 book. I actually have let the stuff sit in the fridge for two nights when I’ve been busy and it has not had any negative effect on the final preserves. If you’re into preserving fruits at all, give this technique a try. It works very nicely.
Another technique I tried that is described in Mes Confitures (and in a slightly different form in Stocking Up) is homemade pectin, which is what helps things gel. It’s basically just cutting up apples, boiling them, and straining them out, although of course since it is a French book, the recipe calls for tons of sugar. But pectin can be made without sugar–the recipe is in the Stocking Up book–and I’ll do that next time. Right now I have many jars of sugary pectin on hand. This was the first time I tried using my homemade pectin in a recipe. It worked well on the pears in spiced caramel. I think. The other two recipes didn’t call for pectin. I am going to try it as a sub for liquid or powdered pectin in a couple of the Ball recipes, in particular, for the herbs in wine jelly recipe, which includes just wine, dried herbs, sugar, and liquid pectin. I’ve got tons of wine I’ve made that I can play with. I don’t like to have to buy pectin. I figure there will always be apples around. And if I remember correctly, in the past, most people grew crabapples just to make pectin out of them (they’re usually less hassle to grow than apples). For that reason, one of the trees at the top of my last to get when I have my own property is a crabapple.
These batches are all much smaller than my usual, each batch making 4-6 half pints (8 oz/224 ml). I wanted to try small recipes of these rich treats without ending up with tons of jars of stuff that I won’t use, because I still have jars of preserves from the summer before last, and those are some big 500 ml jars–a LOT of jam. But despite the small amounts, these recipes are plenty of work. Peeling, coring, and slicing pounds of pears takes a while, but it was pleasant to work in my warm kitchen listening to a Winter Solstice concert on the radio, cats wandering in and out to check on what the ape was up to. No snow to make it extra cozy; we’ve been having rain instead. Still, it is much nicer to do this sort of thing when it’s cold outside than when it’s hot and the humidity is over 80%. In winter, I really enjoy the gas stove with the extra-powered burner that can boil the water in my huge personal flotation device if I want to use it (not necessary this time). This coming summer, I hope to be doing a bit more dehydrating, which would save me many hours working with steaming, boiling pots. Doing a good job of dehydrating veggies still requires blanching, but that’s nothing compared to processing many pints of hot jam in a boiling water bath. Even if I start in the early morning, my small kitchen quickly becomes hellishly hot.
 Blood oranges in Cointreau & Framboise The blood oranges are being preserved with cinnamon and a combination of Cointreau and Framboise liqueurs, which I figured fit the taste profile of this fruit. That recipe is from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. I’ve used that book a lot. The stuff smells great. It is resting in the fridge tonight (this is not part of the recipe, but I’m doing it anyhow), and then tomorrow will be boiled and processed for five minutes.
Next week, I’ll start some pear wine. The cherry wine I made last summer has come out pretty good–surprisingly spicy, oddly enough. The blackberry was fab. The one big failure has been the carrot/ginger, but that is improving. It no longer tastes like a combination of rubber and petrochemicals. More like just ginger. I did add a LOT to it, sort of like the pears in ginger I just made, which is quite hot. But then, it’s winter, and we all need warming up.
 I’ve been doing a lot of talismans lately, and this is one of them–a flying talisman based on Kabbalah. It’s founded on the Hebrew name of the divine known as Harakh, which the three letters in orange stand for. This name has an angelic prince associated with it, Badoel, whose name is on the top of the talisman. Below is the verse from Job 39:26: “Doth the hawk soar by this wisdom?” And the word ya’aver (to fly/soar) is a numerical equivalent of Harakh and is in the middle of the talisman in black/quicksilver letters.
I thought Mercury was a good planetary rulership for a talisman dedicated to flying, since Mercury rules over travel and the acquisition of the magical skills, so I chose Mercury colors: a silvery ink to stand for quicksilver, black as a neutral color, and “cinnabar” (not real cinnabar, which is mercuric sulfide and poisonous, but a good imitation that has the same color, according to people who do reproduction medieval manuscript illumination). The only problem with the “cinnabar” ink is that it’s powdery when it dries, which makes it impossible to draw on and which means it can smudge. I usually erase all guidelines when I finish, but with this kind of ink, you have to be real careful and do a lot of cleanup. I probably won’t use it much anymore. This talisman was drawn on white goatskin on a Mercury day when the Moon was waxing. I used the Ashuritic script for the divine name and an ordinary script for the rest. I created the design myself but got the names from Jacobus Swartz’s Sacred Names book.
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Lately I’ve been dealing with some customers who in my opinion are clearly mentally ill and not the subject of magical or demonic attack, as they claim. Over the years, when someone has told me they are under demonic or magical attack, probably at least half the time I feel that they in fact are. But recently it seems that many people are not apparently under any external attack but instead are experiencing mental illness of some kind. I’ve been ruminating over the differences between magical attack and mental illness in terms of how they are presented to the magical practitioner quite a bit and would like some help from those of you out there who have any experience along these lines. I would like to come up with a more systematic way of defining the differences between actual magical attack and mental illness, something more in the field of reason than intuition. Because it seems that many of the people I speak to who are in fact mentally ill IMO have things in common with each other, as if aspects of a culture produce a particular sort of craziness. Even the way they speak seems to have something in common rather than differing a good deal by individual, as is usually the case with any random person. This got me thinking. So here are some questions.
From the perspective of cursing:
When someone is in fact cursed:
When someone is mentally ill rather than cursed:
