A Plague on Both Your Houses

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Whether you worship Elvis, Freya, or the Salmon of Wisdom, you're welcome here! We've even reserved a section for people who crave diet soft drinks of yesteryear. A toast to TaB cola, beverage of champions!

The faeries have hidden my copy of Deliver Us from Evil, by Cindy Jacobs. But that's okay, because I finished reading it recently, and good riddance.

Mrs. Jacobs, a prophetess who is in every way occult herself, only in service to Jesus, wrote Deliver Us from Evil to warn good Christians about the perils they face from the Pagan Menace. What happens, though, is that by the end of her book she all but admits that real evil doesn't come from Wiccans, but from nasty folks in her own rank and file. Oh yeah, and from kids who read Harry Potter. Let's not forget Harry Potter.

Mindful that this is the 21st century, I have to ask you: Did you know you can curse someone to death? Me neither. This is news to me. But according to Cindy Jacobs, you can actually throw a death curse on another person, and they'll keel.

Sounds like she's reading Harry Potter on the sly.

I'm having trouble believing this death curse scheme. Wouldn't George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the lady who writes parking tickets downtown all be pushing up daisies by now? I don't deal out death curses myself, but I'm sure there are at least two or three Americans who have wished a lingering plague upon the Bush and Cheney households.

As for the parking ticket gal, I actually heard a citizen tell her he wished she'd just go die. She didn't even break her stride. There were more tickets to write.

Mrs. Jacobs has personally survived two death curses. She described how it feels to get hit by one: inability to breathe, certainty of imminent death, cold chills, immobilization. It took serious prayer to bring her back from the brink.

I once had symptoms like that, and fairly frequently. Took some mild anti-anxiety medication to bring me back from the brink. Except I never was on the brink. I recognized the symptoms of panic attack. They aren't pretty, but they can be tamed.

There's a lot of cold shit in Deliver Us from Evil, but one of the coldest passages is Mrs. Jacobs's warning to people going into hospital for surgery or other medical emergencies. Apparently this moment of peril is when you're most likely to get hit with a death curse.

As if being sick isn't bad enough, you gotta worry about someone cursing you to death? And this is the religion of a third of the human population of the globe? Why?

Well, I can answer that one. Because the vast majority of Christians aren't wingnut morons, that's why.

If you are ready to believe that a person can wish death upon you, and then it happens, perhaps you've never raised a teenager. My daughter The Spare once told me she hoped I'd die soon so she could have all my stuff! How come I'm still breathing?

Maybe death curses don't work right away, at least if you're not already in Intensive Care for something else. Maybe they just get stored in a curse databank, and when you're 87 ... boom! Curse hits, party over, outta time.

Mrs. Jacobs says the only way to work up immunity to death curses is to be on perfect footing with Jesus. Which makes me wonder how she suffered through several of them. Maybe she had a weak moment and allowed herself to read a couple of chapters of Harry Potter.

Let's leave the death curses right where they belong: in moldy old writings by long-dead dudes like Shakespeare. And Saint Paul.

Enjoy all your days,

FROM ANNE
THE MERLIN OF BERKELEY SPRINGS