I don’t know much about the occult. Read quite a significant amount in the hope of having more genuine and dependable info but I’ve to admit that I’m still in the dark. Why are many of us really eager to know more about such things? Well it might be a tricky and slippery question as we’d have our own motives. Months back someone I know warns me not to shake hands of anyone I don’t know. Well, that sounds a very strange warning as shaking hands is the most natural thing you do when you meet people strangers or otherwise.
Yes, I asked him what he meant. He says that was the new way of criminals practically sending into open eyed comma, as they’ve administered some anesthesia into your system. Haven’t I heard that before? Indeed I have. The only thing is that this time the warning was “Don’t shake hands with….” while before it was mostly “Don’t eat or drink with others…” Why? Well, they’d put some potent herb or such things into the food you eat or into your drink and render you defenseless. In that state it is said they could make you do whatever they wanted.
Such talk is common. You can say much of the city must have heard such stories at some stage in their lives. The only thing is no one’s coming up with some proven issues or events so that people could put up their defenses in case they come across such scenarios.
A few years back some fellow I used to go to school with returns home for a visit after practically decades. It was some mixed homecoming. While finding old friends and acquaintances was the greatest of enjoyment also learning that quite a number of them haven’t made it this far was sad. Anyway we were talking all kinds of issues with this friend whose reserved and humble demeanor seems to have survived the years when the name of a person we knew and lives in the European country our friend resides. I can tell you that in these days almost overnight behavioral flip flops finding a friend you used to have the utmost respect for not having even an inch to the wrong side of life is a sort of blessing.
The person whose name cropped up, my friend tells me, was doing well. But it was a statement so sarcastically said I knew he was trying to hold some things back. But I thought I must have overplayed things since he told the guy asked him to buy some book. So what’s the big deal with a friend asking another friend to buy him some book? Well, maybe not much. But the person we were talking about had this reputation of being a book hater. Never has anybody heard him discussing any book he read. In fact he mocked his friends for buying books, “Why are you squandering your money?” Now this very guy asks his friend to buy him one.
As curious as I was I asked him the title of the book he was supposed to buy his friend. He told me, and without any exaggeration I almost shouted “What!” My friend was taken aback at what he was seeing. How in the world could the title of a book create such reaction, and from someone who thinks himself, at least as a moderate book enthusiast. He just dug his quizzical eyes into me without uttering a word. So the ball was in my court and I have to explain myself.
Now the book he mentioned was thought to be religious text. Initial reaction would have been that the guy probably nearing the last quarter of his life was seriously concerned about his prospects of making it all the way to Heaven. But that wasn’t all there was to it. Conventional wisdom has it that some who knew it deep enough could also use it for occult practices. At hearing this my friend was shaken to his marrow! There and there he decides not to buy the book since it would be implicating himself in such ugly things.
After a couple of weeks he flies back. A month hasn’t passed since he returns when he broke to me some news about the person with the book request. Being in the early stages of his sixties he was looking for a very young wife all the way from Ethiopia and the only way he could manage was through other doors as conventional doors wouldn’t be that easy to pass through due to the four decades of age difference.
Someone supposedly with such ‘skills’ (Skills!) promised him that if he could get someone to big him the book form the homeland things would be easy. The person goes finds another person who indeed got him the book. And what happens? He finally gets a seventeen year old girl for a wife all the way from Addis! That could be one of those tricky coincidences or there could be other things confusing and difficult to understand.
On the other hand you’d be pardoned to think that since our brethren in western countries have more opportunity in search of knowledge and info about issues which they want to know about more. Also the lucky ones who were blessed with advanced education especially in the Western world acted as we expect to. How do we expect them to act? Now the answer to this question wouldn’t be nice.
Well much of the time we expect them to shun everything local, cultural and traditional and reinvent themselves in the form of the societies they were in. So any person in such a situation isn’t expected to have some book of ‘occult’ just because his limbs which have started to make noises demanded younger blood. Well the person we talked about happened to be highly educated in a couple of the best universities in the world. That didn’t prevent him from acting as the illiterate laborer in some not-so-imposing Addis hamlet would have acted.
Recently a guy I know tells me on late morning a middle-aged woman suddenly comes towards him and begins saying “I wanted to talk to…” he says he immediately raises his hand and warns her not to come any closer. He said the lady was somewhat surprised and turns back mumbling some words.
“What made you act like that?”
“I don’t know!” he says. But later talking about it he said it must be all the stories he hears about not socializing with strangers that prompted it to snap at the woman he never met.
Researchers! Researchers! Researchers! Researches are what we need to save us from being confused over such issues we’ve been talking about and other equally important things. Next time you thrust your hand for a handshake with some stranger for one reason or another and they refuse to shake hands don’t blame them as there is quite a volume of not nice stories about handshakes out there.
BY EPHREM ENDALE
The Ethiopian Herald September 29/2024