Avada Kedavra - Carson Alfonzo

As a musician myself, I was intrigued by the brief chapter titled “Magic and music” in A History of Magic, Witchcraft, & the Occult. Even today we are far from fully understanding the effects of music on the brain, but interest in the field has grown dramatically in the past decade according to The Power of Music by Elena Mannes. For example, you might not be able to remember anything from a test you took in 11 th grade of high school, or even sophomore year of college (as a senior year student at TCU). Yet if a nostalgic song comes on the radio from when you were only 6 years old, you would be easily able to recite every single lyric and every single note as if you had studied the content yesterday. Therefore, for this reason and others, it is not surprising that over hundreds of years humans have associated music with magic. Even further, just as magic and witchcraft have been associated with the devil / demonic practices, so have different forms of music that have developed ...

I was fascinated by the chapter titled “Reading the Cards – the tarot” in A History of Magic, Witchcraft, & the Occult. It was only recently that I learned about the existence of tarot cards at all, and I was immediately interested in the practice. I visited a friend’s house for New Year’s Eve a couple years ago, and his sister had just received an order of a new deck of tarot cards. She explained to me (as described on page 219) how the common practice was to draw 3 cards, which represented past, present, and future (from left to right). In addition, she explained how if a card is drawn upside down, then the cards meaning / implication is reversed. However, I was especially intrigued by the open-endedness of the interpretation. I practiced reading someone’s fortune and my friend’s sister encouraged me to simply speak anything that came to mind in relation to the cards. So, it was cool how with absolutely zero knowledge, there is an element of human connection that allows anyone to...