Episodes
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Recent incidents of killings in the name of superstition show the dark side of India's progressive society. And all is being done in the name of bringing peace, harmony and prosperity to those involved.
When all efforts fail to keep hope alive and living on a steady keel, then a large number of people in India still turn to black magic and superstitious practices for quick-fix solutions.
The so-called curators, known as ‘Tantrik', or ‘Baba' (occult and black magic practitioners), claim to be able to resolve issues of marital discord, or health and financial problems. Not only do the poor or uneducated fall victim to their claims, but the educated and the elite of society do as well.
Early this week, in one of the cities of West Bengal, a beheaded body of a local Ayurveda doctor was found near a temple. His head was found near a crematorium with some flowers, incense sticks and blood. “This made the foul play of black magic very clear,” local police said.
Similarly, a few months ago in the Southern city of Hyderabad police detained 14 alleged black magic practitioners accused of cheating people. They had a distinguished clientele including politicians, sports personalities, students and housewives.
Another incident, reported in a remote village of the western state of Maharashtra last year, was about the arrest of a childless couple for allegedly killing five young boys, as a self-proclaimed devout sage told them ‘it would help the woman to conceive.'
These gruesome cases, the authorities say, suggest that fraudulent and exploitative practices are being performed extensively across India.
So many people get caught in the middle of false beliefs, blind faith and superstitious practices. Indians are already availing themselves of astrology, palm-reading, numerology, tea leaf prophecies, and such, and black magic only makes things worse.
The ability to reason ceases when problems surround us, and the ‘practitioners' take advantage of that opportunity.
Though education plays a pivotal role in eradicating such practices, the widespread use of black magic also needs to be dealt with from a legal standpoint.
There is a thin line between faith and superstition that needs to be defined in law, as these practices and rituals performed in the name of God may be an expression of faith to some.
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Among the rural peasantry of South Asia, there is a tendency to attribute the misfortunes of life to the attacks of demons and ghosts. Serious attempts to incarnate the gospel message in this context must, therefore, seek to understand this cosmos of malignant spirits and its relevance to the everyday life of the villager. Within Indian folklore, the term ‘bhoot’ represents a large amorphous category of spirit beings with common distinctive characteristics.
Spirits in rural India are the ones that bring the colour and nuances to the country’s ‘ghost-o-pedia’. They nest in trees, they call out to strangers in the silken voice of a seductress, they raid fish markets in search of fresh catch, they throw themselves in the hair of women who attract them and they snatch food out of the hands of children.
The fish-loving ‘mechho bhoot’ of Bengal has made quite a name for itself. It resides in trees near water bodies in villages and calls out to fisherfolk on their way to the market and back. The formidable ‘nishi daak’ (a voice that calls at night) has no gender. It adopts the voice of a beloved and lures the victim out of the house.
We’ve all heard tons of ghost stories, but what does science have to say about ghosts? Unfortunately, there really isn’t any concrete scientific proof of ghosts existing.
Nearly every ghost sighting can be explained by science or some sort of logic. One of the most interesting discoveries explains why some people think they feel the presence of ghosts.
It’s due to infrasounds. These are extremely low sounds that we humans are unable to hear, but fans, wind turbines and traffic can produce them.
Although we can’t hear these low sounds, we can feel them. These low frequencies can trigger distinct psychological effects, including things like discomfort, a sense of panic, and an overall sense of something being out of place.
Places where people have reported many ghost sightings also happened to have things that produced infrasound. Once people removed infrasound-causing objects, like fans, the ghost sightings suddenly stopped.
Another reason some people think ghosts exist has to do with electromagnetic fields. Researchers have found that electromagnetic fields may be able to influence an individual’s perceptions as well as their surroundings. In other words, it can make them hallucinate and see crazy things like ghosts!
Speaking of seeing things, there are also reports of people thinking they saw visions of ghosts while they slept. This unfortunate case is known as sleep paralysis. This is when your mind wakes up before your body, causing you to have a paralyzed effect while you’re in bed. This also creates a waking dream effect, in which some people have reported seeing paranormal figures attempting to hurt them.
We might also believe ghosts are real, simply because we want to. If ghosts did exist, it would mean that the afterlife is real, which is a belief that comforts a lot of people today.
So if ghosts were real, we’d probably never have to say goodbye to our loved ones. We could communicate with them, feel their presence, maybe even spend some quality time with them.
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Episodes manquant?
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This question is more than a mind-bender. For thousands of years, certain people have claimed to have actually visited the place that no eye has seen, and no human mind has conceived, and their stories very often follow the same narrative arc.
A lot of people talk about encountering a being of light. Tales like these are thrilling in part because their tellers hold the passionate conviction of religious converts: I saw it, so it must be true. According to a Gallup poll, about 8 million people claim to have had a near-death experience (NDE), and many of them regard this experience as proof of an afterlife—a parallel, spiritual realm, more real, many say, than this one.
It’s an inversion, almost, of the old philosophical puzzle: If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you are certain that you saw something (or felt something or heard something), does it mean that it’s empirically proven? And if you are predisposed to want to see something, are you likelier to see it, the way Harry Potter saw his dear departed mother in Hogwarts’s magic mirror? And finally, if you see something while you are stressed or unconscious or traumatized in some way, does that circumstance delegitimize the veracity of your vision? This is the trouble with NDEs as a field of scientific study: you can’t have a control group. Most people on the brink of dying do die (and so cannot describe what that process is like), and those who survive approach the brink in such different ways—car accident, stroke, heart attack—that it’s impossible to compare their experiences empirically. But over the years, science has posited a number of theories about the connection between visions of heaven and the chemical and physical processes that occur at death.
Since at least the 1980s, scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological defence mechanism. In order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all of the features of an NDE—a sense of moving through a tunnel, an out-of-body feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, intense memories—can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquiliser frequently used as a party drug.
If our conscious experience totally depends on the brain, then there can’t be an afterlife—when the brain is gone, the mind is gone. But it’s not that simple. Even when the brain seems to be virtually disabled, people are still having these experiences. there may be a great deal more to mind and consciousness. If we could prove there is life after death, you might view yourself and your life with a renewed sense of wonder and appreciation for what you have now.
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Life. Death. And the beyond. It’s more than what you can comprehend. You're looking at the world through a keyhole. You spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole. To see more, to know more; and now, on hearing that it can be widened in ways you can't imagine. you reject the possibility. The language of the mystic is as old as civilization. But if that offends your modern sensibilities you can call them energies that shape reality.
The harnessed energy, drawn from other dimensions of the universe, casts spells, conjures weapons and makes magic, the magic of life, death and beyond.
For death is what gives life meaning. To know your days are numbered and your time is short.
The realms of magic and illusion are stemmed in centuries of mystery and darkness. The sorcerers of ancient times were believed to possess supernatural powers that allowed them to command and control the forces of nature. The pages of history are filled with accounts of wizards, witches, warlocks and magicians who became renowned for their otherworldly abilities.
Many such mysteries, unexplainable phenomenons and spooky events never fail to catch our attention. Some of these events lead to new discoveries while others turn into spine-chilling ghost stories.
I’m Neel Shah, your guide through these vast absurd realities. Follow me as we discover uncanny stories of black magic, ghosts, spirits, superstitions & unexplainable deaths. Join me and explore these tales of terror.
