I recently traveled to Ireland to the site of an ancient megalithic cursing site to lay a curse on the billionaire oligarch and techno fascist Peter Thiel. Before you turn the page to another story in your feed, I would like to disabuse you of the notion that this was an idle vacation side quest - a silly stunt perfected for the Halloween season.
Because curses are real.
And I know that with a little help from my friends here on the Internet that we can absolutely cause Peter Thiel to develop an itch that will never go away.
Let’s talk about the science of my little incantation. Curses are one of the most studied cultural practices in anthropology since the founding of the discipline with cases of lethal curses going back at least to the 1500s.
The most famous scholarly article on the subject was written by Walter Cannon in 1942 titled “Voodoo” Death.
In it Cannon discussed dozens of accounts of lethal black magic that resulted in people actually dying from curses. He referred to autopsies of the victims and posited the likely mechanism of action was a over-stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system leading to a cascade of physiological changes leading to organ failure. Notably, Cannon wrote that the cases of “Voodoo Death” he documented were nearly identical to soldiers in World War I who died of a condition that was then known as “shell shock.”
Cannon was hardly the only anthropologist to write about it. Notable works on cursing and the mechanisms of magic were penned by Claude Levi-Strauss, Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard as well as more contemporary accounts by Wade Davis and my former professor Neil Whitehead. In Whitehead’s case, some people have suggested that a curse he picked up in Guyana from Kanaima Shaman may have contributed to his own early death by colorectal cancer in 2012.
To boil it down to its most basic components: curses work because people believe in them in the same way that they believe in the placebo effect to help them heal from illness (this is called the “nocebo effect” in medical literature). And, just like with the placebo effect, curses work even if you know that what you are getting is “just a nocebo”.
All of that to say, when I traveled to Ireland to visit the site of the Killinagh Bullaun Stone my plan was not to kill Peter Thiel, but to cause him to develop an uncontrollable itch that would never go away. And I have reason to think that if somehow this video actually reaches him, there is chance that it actually works.
This isn’t because of whatever magical powers exist in the stone (if such powers exist on earth at all) but because the collective power of the people invested in the idea that Thiel is curse-able will seep into his superstitious mind.
I’m posting this video for free on Substack a few days before I launch it officially on YouTube. I hope it prompts you to get into the fine spirit of the season. Perhaps you can help spread the word so we can worm our way onto Thiel’s skin.
