Word: witchcrafts
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...inappropriate things. It could not last. His boss was a man called Beamish of whom he writes: "I was frightened of Beamish as I was frightened of all elderly administrators, officials, policemen, colonels and judges. There is a perpetual net for the butterflies. They can catch you for arson, witchcraft, sodomy, soliciting, contempt, vagrancy. They can prove you without means of support, unborn or dead. They can bury you in unconsecrated ground. You have to fly very hard to keep in the sun." Beamish finally demoted him with the memorable words: "You write doggerel and have been interfering with...
...back as World War I, Schweitzer expressed his dislike for the modern world outside: "In a thousand different ways mankind has been persuaded to give up its natural relations with reality and to seek its welfare in the magic formulas of some kind of economic and social witchcraft." Schweitzer has made his own reality; he lives in the Africa of 1913, hardly knowing or caring that a continent and a century have passed...
Langer also outlined the "polarization of attitutes among the population," as some people became fanatically pious engaging in flagellation, magic or witchcraft while others "gave themselves up to drunkeness and debauchery." He quoted a medieval source which spoke of "drunkards and whoremongers following their lasts with the sword of the pestilance hanging over them." Langer called this "the Boccacio effect, a common human reaction to the threat of impending death...
Before the seven-year Mau Mau scourge was eliminated in 1959, the British colonial government decided that it must counter witchcraft with witchcraft, and devised elaborate de-oathing rites, but they were not always successful. Once, when authorities persuaded tribesmen to abjure their bonds to the Mau Mau by sacrificing a goat, a Mau Mau agent slaughtered two dogs, nullifying the "goat oath" with the more potent magic of the "dog oath...
...soul. He is thus able to forstall his doom, so that he and the squire can wander through the ravaged countryside and closer to home as the game progresses. Along the way they encounter Medieval life in all its variety--from a young girl destined for the stake for witchcraft, to a family of simple traveling actors, significantly named, Mary, Joseph, and their child, Michael (Hebrew for "like unto God"). They move among people who, except for the actors, are obsessed with the dread of death and try to escape their fears through cruelty, crime, self-torture, and superstition...