Issue nº 104
Witches and pardon
On 31 October 2004, resorting to a feudal law that was abolished the following month, the town of Prestonpans in Scotland granted official pardon to 81 persons – and their cats – executed for practicing witchery in the 16th and 17th centuries.
According to the official spokesman for the Barons of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstoun, “most of them had been condemned without any concrete proof – based only on the witnesses of the accusation, who declared that they felt the presence of evil spirits.”
There is no point in recalling once more all the excess of the Inquisition, with its torture chambers and bonfires of hate and vengeance. But there is one thing that is very intriguing to me in this news item.
The town and the 14th Baron of Prestoungrange & Dolphinstoun are “granting pardon” to the people who were brutally executed. Here we are in the heart of the 21st century and the descendants of the real criminals, those who put innocent people to death, still have the right to “grant pardon”.
In the meantime, a new witch hunt is beginning to gain ground. This time the arm is no longer red-hot iron, but rather irony or repression. All those who, in developing a gift (generally discovered by chance), dare to speak of their capacity, are mostly either looked on with suspicion or else prohibited by their parents, husbands and wives to say anything about it. Having interested myself from an early age in what they call the “occult sciences”, I came into contact with many such people.
I believed in charlatans, of course. I dedicated time and enthusiasm to “masters” that later on dropped their masks, revealing the total void in which they found themselves. Irresponsibly, I took part in certain sects and practiced rituals for which I had to pay a high price. All this in on behalf of a quest that is absolutely natural to man: the answer to the mystery of life.
But I also met many people who were truly capable of dealing with forces that were far beyond my understanding. I saw time being altered, for example. I saw operations without anesthesia, and on one of these occasions (precisely a day that I had woken up with many doubts about man’s unknown power) I placed my finger inside the incision made with a rusty pocket knife. Believe it as you wish – or ridicule it if that is the only way of reading what I am writing – I have seen metal being changed, cutlery twisted, lights shining in the air around me, because somebody said that would happen (and it did). I was almost always with witnesses, generally skeptical. In most cases these witnesses went on being skeptical, always thinking that it was all just a very clever “trick”. Others said it was “the work of the devil”. Finally, a few believed that they were witnessing phenomena that went beyond human comprehension.
I have seen this in Brazil, France, England, Switzerland, Morocco, and Japan. And what happens to most people who manage to, let us say, interfere with the “immutable” laws of nature? Society always considers them as marginal phenomena: if they cannot explain, then they do not exist. The vast majority of these people also fail to understand why they are capable of doing astonishing things. And for fear of being labeled charlatans, they end up suffocated by their own gifts.
None of them are happy. They all await the day when they can be taken seriously. They all await a scientific answer to their own powers (and in my opinion I do not think that is the solution). Many hide their potential and end up suffering – because they could help the world, and they do not manage to. Deep down I feel that that they are also waiting for the “official pardon” for being so different.
Separating the wheat from the chaff, and not growing disheartened by the giant amount of charlatanism, I feel that we should ask ourselves once more: what are we capable of?
And then go out and seriously develop our immense potential.
New book
“The Zahir” is being published all over the world this year. Click here for more information.
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