Law and Life

Fortune Telling, Witchcraft, Law, and the Future

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Law

Lesson: 28 of 39

Genre: Speech

Track: 139

Dictation Name: RR156P28

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

[Rushdoony] Our scripture this morning is from the book of Leviticus, the nineteenth chapter, the twenty-sixth verse. Leviticus 19:26, and our subject is Fortune Telling, Witchcraft, Law, and the Future. Fortune Telling, Witchcraft, Law, and the Future. Leviticus 19:26. “Ye shall not eat any thing with the blood: neither shall ye use enchantments, nor observe times.” Or, as the Berkeley version gives it, “Eat nothing that contains the blood. Make use of neither fortune telling or witchcraft practice.”

The ban which, first of all, appears in this verse on the eating of blood is very closely and essentially related to what follows. Blood in scripture is equated with life. Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Eating of blood throughout history has often been used as a means of gaining life and power from other creatures. Moreover, among the ancient Zabei {?}, the blood of sacrifices was offered to demons in order to please them with the gift of life and to fraternize with them. To this day, the eating of blood is an essential part of many occultist groups.

Our concern, however, is with the aspect with this law which prohibits fortune telling and witchcraft. Let us look at fortune telling first of all. Fortune telling, in recent years, has been very closely associated with Gypsies. As a matter of fact, we think of Gypsy women as essentially being fortune tellers. It is interesting, however, that Gypsies themselves will have nothing to do with having their fortune told. It is a sure way of anyone who is a Gypsy being abolished from the ranks. They regard it as something for outsiders only for the marks, for the fools, as something totally to be avoided by anyone with any intelligence.

Moreover, it is done only by the women, and its basic purpose in its adoption and its continued use is to obtain information concerning any community in which they happen to be. As Jan Yoors in his book, The Gypsy, writes his account of years of life as a Gypsy, describing the account of one Gypsy woman to him. “In essence, Cata{?} said that the avidity for fortune telling came from an inability to cope with one’s anxieties. Instead of satisfying, it created a self-perpetuating greed for prophesy, akin to compulsive gambling. Only more harmful since one lost not money but insight. It blinded one to the causes of one’s problems and this was madness. It was a vain and self-defeating search for expedient solutions to problems of moral integrity and was caused by an unwillingness to face life as it was. Most people consulted fortune tellers primarily to seek the confirmation of their fears more often than of their hopes. Fears could become bother to a witch. For many subconsciously wanted to have happen that which they said they fear most. Cata {?} said that fear impoverished while the acceptance of sorrow could enrich. The Lowara {?} said without wood, the fire would die, disclaiming guilt. Seen from a practice point of view the tangible substance of fortune telling was the ability to listen with endless patience to every human folly. To this they added some vague generalities into which specific and personal meanings could be read. Cata {?} talked for a long time and with great openness. She told me about a country squire in Serbia long ago who imagined that he had a dreaded, incurable disease. He consulted a physician in Sarajevo who reassured him and emphatically denied his fears. The squire rushed to see other physicians, all of whom agreed with the first doctor. He went to Nish and to Belgrade and to Sophia {?} and Bulgaria. In despair, he went to see a soothsayer who immediately confirmed his fears, proving the medical authorities wrong in the eyes of the squire. After a protracted and costly treatment, he managed to save the squire from an imaginary illness.”

Now, it is interesting that scripture here puts in juxtaposition fortune telling and witchcraft. They both represent an ungodly desire to know the future, but they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Both are attempts to bypass God’s worth, God’s law, because the word of God declares that the means of predicting, of knowing the future, are very simple. You obey God. The wages of sin are death, but there is a reward for faithfulness, for law-keeping, for walking in the Lord. Now, God chooses the reward. We cannot pick our fate.

On the one hand, witchcraft attempts to force the future to conform to man’s will, and to do this by means not allowed by the word of God. It is interesting that the word for witch in the Bible is rendered by some as poisoner. It also has a long association with murder. Jeffrey Burton Russell in his History of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, began as a radical skeptic, feeling that these four witches were innocent people who had been persecuted amended his book in a state of shock, because he found that ritual murder, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and all kinds of other practices were clearly a part of medieval witchcraft and are of modern witchcraft, and he saw in the revival of these things today the destruction of civilization. Those who indulge in witchcraft seek to play God and to compel the future to comform to their will.

Those who go to fortune telling are at the opposite spectrum, they want to say that the dice are loaded, all things are evil, that God or the gods are only evil, and they want their fears to be confirmed so they can justify themselves. What’s the use of being good? What’s the use of working? What’s the use of doing anything because this is the way things are? So, they say, in effect, God is evil and I am the poor, unfortunate victim.

But Deuteronomy 28, Leviticus 26, and all scripture say that God is righteous and man can know the future and predict and establish it only by obedience to the word of God. Ezekiel 20:11, in condemning, in judging the people of Judea for their departure from God and their indulgence in forbidden cults, declared, “And I gave them my statutes, and shewed them my judgments, which if a man do, he shall even live in them.” All else is wrong. Every legitimate attempt to know the future in terms of the word of God capitalizes society. When we say yes, we can know the future, we can determine it to an extent under God, by obeying him, by working, by doing all things lawful, and to that extent, we are able to determine the future by godly means. We are capitalizing society. We are capitalizing it with faith, with our character, and with the products, the material products of our character, so that society has a spiritual and a material capitalization wherever man obeys the word of God.

The future is determined by this. Go through history. Whenever you have a tremendous burst of prosperity, and growth, and success, it comes from faith, character, work, but when history sees a decline, it is a decapitalization created by a departure from the faith, and both fortune telling and witchcraft decapitalizes a society radically and drastically. They destroy faith and character. They destroy the material results, the product of the work of faith and character, and society begins to disintegrate and collapse whenever fortune telling and witchcraft begin to increase.

Now, the Jan Yoors account, which I just read, of the Gypsy opinion of fortune telling indicates the suicidal nature of fortune telling. To probe into the future this way is to separate it from man’s will, and it is to deny the benevolence and the grace of God. It is to say that man’s will is futile because God is evil, but it is precisely those who say that God is all-righteous and omnipotent who therefore, also stress the validity of man’s will as a secondary cause, as a secondary determinate in history.

Fortune telling leads to determinism, which is very different from pre-destination. Pre-destination declares that because God is sovereign, man is responsible. Determinism says man is helpless and nothing matters. Saul refused to repent or change. Had he repented, the future could have been different, but Saul refused to change. He went to the witch of Endor to have his fears confirmed because Saul, from the moment he began to disobey God, held in principle that God is unreasonable and I am a good-hearted man and what I did that God frowned upon was done with good and honest and noble intensions, and it is an evil in God, not in me, that has led to my plight, and so he heard the verdict of the witch of Endor from the witch of Endor’s apparition, with self-pity. He was, in effect, indicting God and justifying himself as an unfortunate man.

Fortune telling thus, involves masochistic impulses, environmentalistic philosophies. It is the abdication of the requirement to exercise dominion. It says, in effect, evil has dominion and all is futile because God is evil and therefore, I am justified in my self-pity. In witchcraft, on the other hand, godless dominion is sought. It is a manifestation of the desire to play God. It is lawless. It is antinomian.

I indicated that in Jeffrey Burton’s study, he found that the use of poison, of ritual murders and the like were basic to medieval witchcraft, essential to it, and that it was a myth that these groups were brutally and unjustly persecuted. They were out to destroy civilization, to destroy Christianity, to decapitalize the world, and it would have been radically and drastically decapitalized had it not been for the Reformation and then the Counter-Reformation taking steps against this by turning again to faith and character.

One champion of witchcraft, Buckland {?}, has said that, “Behind the magic of witchcraft is a belief that power comes from the human body.” From man himself. Man is ultimate for witchcraft, and in power. For fortune telling, man is ultimate but unfortunate and trapped by a hostile universe. A witch, says Buckland, is “By self-proclamation a witch. Essentially, a witch is a witch if he says he’s a witch.” Total autonomy. Do it yourself because it’s a do-it-yourself universe. This is the thesis, of course, of all unbelief.

Both fortune telling and witchcraft represent, in different fashions, quests for ungodly power. One by a peek in the future to have the masochistic satisfaction of saying, “I told you so. Life is stacked against us,” or on the other hand in witchcraft by lawless ungodly control. Both are self-defeating. Both are destructive of society and they make man the ruler, as it were, or captain of a sinking ship. That which they establish is that which is, therefore, doomed. Man separated from God. Man in rebellion from God. Man denying God. It is hardly an honor to be a captain of a sinking ship. This is all that witchcraft and fortune telling can offer. The witches can only command society by destroying it and trying to rule in the ruins.

Thus, when our scripture tells us, “Ye shall not eat anything with the blood,” and then goes on to condemn fortune telling and witchcraft, there is, as I’ve said at the beginning, an essential tie between the two. Not only in that the eating of blood is a magical practice, but also symbolically, because both fortune telling and witchcraft involve a symbolic eating of blood, one’s own and society’s. They are forms of social cannibalism.

Our subject, as I said at the beginning, is Fortune Telling, Witchcraft, Law, and the Future. As against fortune telling and witchcraft, the word of God us, “This is the way, walk ye in it.’ The law word of God gives us the means whereby we can move into the future and, under God, exercise dominion.

Today’s society is being decapitalized. We see the extremes of fortune telling and witchcraft attracting vast numbers of peoples. However, although it would be possible to say very clearly the vast majority of people are still not involved in it, we must say in spirit they are when they depart from God and his word. It’s not without accident that books, magazines, literature dealing with witchcraft and fortune telling and astrology, occultism generally, have had their largest sales and first began to be popular in bookstores around a campus community, near a university. When this was first noted some few years before the whole witchcraft and occultist craze began to attract newspaper attention, it was regarded with amazement. Why was it there? News distributors I’ve talked to on a couple of occasions shrugged their shoulders and said they didn’t know, but if there was anything on the subject, that was the place to put it. Of course, it’s obvious. If a man departs from God, he will seek to play God, to be his own God, and this is the appeal of occultism, and this is why first became prominent in the academic communities, where men, having forsaken God, soon had to seek lawless means of power. They have been decapitalizinig society. We can see what our educators, with their godless lust of power, have done to education in this country and to politics, to family life, to every area of our society. It is a radical decapitalization, destruction, disintegration, but only obedience to the word of God can capitalize the future, and to the extent that we have obedience again to the word of God, we shall see by that faith and obedience, the recapitalization of society, and a godly future in the years ahead. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee for thy word, thy word is truth. Thy word speaks to our every condition and to our every need, to our every problem. Teach us so to walk that by faith and character, by faith and obedience, we may exercise dominion in every area, recapitalize our world to thy glory and to the praise of thy name. We thank thee, our Father, for thy faithful people who delight in hearing and obeying thy word. Bless those of our number who are absent. Heal them of their infirmities and strengthen and bless them in thy service. In Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now on our lesson? Yes?

(Audience member) {?}

(Rushdoony) I can’t quite hear.

(Audience member) Mardi Gras in New Orleans?

(Rushdoony) Yes.

(Audience) There is going to be one coming up in a few weeks. {?} do you have that {?} witchcraft {?} during Mardi Gras?

(Rushdoony) Yes.

(Audience member) {?}

(Rushdoony) Yes. Yes, but the most essential connection of the Mardi Gras is to the chaos cults, to the religion of revolution. Do you recall what I have said on the religions of revolution? Now, the Mardi Gras and the question, if you didn’t hear it, was about the Mardi Gras and what it meant. The Mardi Gras is a lineal descendant of the old pagan chaos cults whereby a religious revival meant not turning to God as it does in the Christian faith, but turning to chaos, because for the cults of chaos, the source of all things was not God. They did not believe in God, but primeval chaos, and so you sought a revival periodically, annually, you had to revive society by ritual acts of chaos. Now, in Rome, it was a Saturnalia whereby a condemned convict became the king in the early days of Rome and possessed the queen, whereby everything went. Incest, cannibalism in some societies, but not in Rome. Everything that was normally forbidden was practiced. Now, the Mardi Gras is precisely a modern form of the old chaos cults, the Saturnalia and therefore, almost anything that is occultist will be associated with it, but it’s even more anti-Christian, you might say, although fortune telling and witchcraft, and that sort of thing, magic, are all totally anti-Christian, but it is a more intensive form than these in that it basically requires acts of chaos. You throw all law aside.

For example, in some parts of Europe where they still have Mardi Gras under various other names. No act of adultery can be grounds for a divorce if it’s committed during that time. Any time else in the year, an act of adultery is grounds for divorce, but it’s taken for granted that it will take place during that festival of chaos. So, this is the ancestry of the Mardi Gras. Yes?

(Audience member): {?}

(Rushdoony) Yes, what it meant was that they both paid lip service to Christianity and yet, continued their practice of paganism. So that they said, “Well, we’re going to do these acts, but we’re going to also go through a form of being outwardly repentant. Yes?

(Audience member) {?} Christian, they wouldn’t dream of drinking blood.

(Rushdoony) Wouldn’t dream of what?

(Audience member) Dream of drinking blood.

(Rushdoony) Yes.

(Audience member) And yet {?} and yet they are {?}

(Rushdoony) Exactly.

(Audience member) {?}

(Rushdoony) Yes. You’re very right. We don’t dream of drinking blood, but any time we indulge in these practices, it is a symbolic eating of the blood of society, destroying its lifeblood. Scripture is very literal in what it says here, but it also does have its symbolic significance. The three things are not accidentally tied together in a single sentence. Yes?

(Audience member) How do you view handwriting analysis?

(Rushdoony) Handwriting analysis, that’s the question. I don’t know too much about it. I think that there are competent experts in this area whose analyses are basically to determine whether a person, as in a court trial, actually wrote this or whether it was in his handwriting, disguised and so on. Where you have that type of competent, I believe they call it graphologists, they do recognize that there is a common characteristic to whatever we do. Now, such competent persons can distinguish certain little characteristics and quirks in our handwriting that, to a certain extent, are indicative of a person. There are a great many, however, who go on and read all kinds of things into curves and slants and the like and that, I think, is just nonsense rather than occultism. Yes?

(Audience member) {?} witchcraft {?} presuppose a belief in God even though you’re a man of – a man of God? In other words, {?} atheist {?} do they believe {?}

(Rushdoony) The question is does witchcraft presuppose a belief in God. No, it does not. It presupposed a belief in man. Now, some witches illogically will say they believe in God, but it’s not in the God of scripture. The logic of witchcraft is that man is his own God and it’s a do-it-yourself universe. Remember the statement from Buckland that I read? All power comes from the human body. Man is the ultimate source of power. Now, I didn’t take time to go into it, because we’ve covered this on other occasions. One of the reasons why we’ve had this occultist movement today is because the reigning philosophy of our time is Existentialism. Now, Existentialism says there is no purpose, no meaning, no pattern in the universe, that man determines all things by the biology of his being. That the true Existentialist cannot allow anything external to himself, such as church and state, his parents, his schooling, society, to influence him. He must only be influenced by the biology of his being because he is ultimate. Well that, of course, is essentially the same thing, approached from a philosophical perspective as witchcraft says. And Existentialism is the logic of atheism taken to its conclusion. Yes?

(Audience member) Referring to the period of time in which the Salem witchcraft trials occurred, {?} phenomenon was quite {?} Germany, England, Scotland, and many other countries. Is it not true that there were {?} men that arose, went to communities and offered themselves as having an ability to ferret out the witches and many people were accused and tried {?} persecuted as witches who were not, in fact, witches at all?

(Rushdoony) Well, Burton, in his study, deals with this fact and he concludes that in the overwhelming majority of cases, those who were convicted were actually witches. Now, in some instances, those who claimed to name the witches were themselves witches. This may have been the case in Salem. What happened in Salem apparently was that some young girls who were experimenting and they had been taught by a slave brought from the West Indies, they were experimenting in all kinds of occultist phenomena; table levitation and so on, and then they began to go into very peculiar behavior. A doctor was called in. The doctor said there was nothing normal about this. There was something in the way of possession here. Well, instead then of dealing with the girls as themselves the source of the problem, because of what they had been involved in, they were deeply involved in it, they then listened to the girls as they began to accuse people in the community. Now, a few, one or two of those accused may have been guilty, but what the girls did was to give vent to their spite against various people. So there was witchcraft there in Salem, very clearly and it was involved among these girls of some prominent families who had time on their hands and were dabbling in this and wound up with very serious repercussions in their own mentality and life.

(Audience member) There was an English psychiatrist named William {?} who wrote a book {?} he cites cases where elderly women perhaps {?} to sit cross-legged for hours on a stool until they confessed to be witches.

(Rushdoony) Yes. I have Sargent’s book Battle for the Mind, and it is exceptionally good as it deals with the control of people by hypnotic personalities. In this area of witchcraft, his evidence is just one-sided. Now, I’m not denying what he said is true, but he hasn’t considered the total evidence of what was involved in some of those situations. Yes?

(Audience member) Two questions. One, what significance is there on the Gypsy culture {?} only women practice fortune telling?

(Rushdoony) Yes, I’ll answer the first one. In Gypsy culture, women alone practice fortune telling because the men have their assigned areas of work and it is used by the women to provide information to the men about the community, because in the course of the fortune telling, they allow the men or women to ramble on and they find out a great deal about the community. So, it’s information collecting and it’s regarded as the woman’s job to sit and listen to gossip, because that’s all they regard it as being, but essential gossip to know that, Is it safe in this community for Gypsies? Or what can we do? What can we get away with? What will the situation mean to us here? Yes, the second question?

(Audience member) {?} capitalizing and decapitalizing society {?} in what sense do you capitalize a society? I don’t understand the use of your term. [

(Rushdoony) Yes. How do you capitalize a society? Well, if tomorrow you had one million Americans who lived very strictly in terms of the word of God, divided by its rule, owe no man anything save to love one another, not going into long-term debt beyond six years. Who began to work in terms of what is called the Puritan work ethic, or any such thing if you will pardon the use of that phrase, the biblical standard of work, and every area began to apply very strictly the basic laws of scripture with regard to everyday living, they would begin to exercise such dominion that they would very rapidly begin to have an impact on society. There would be an area in which capital is accumulating through work, through thrift. Where dominion was being exercised in one area after another, and it would have a tremendous impact. They would then begin to rule, because out of necessity, society is going to be dominated by the people who are effective, who capitalize, who work.

For example, for a long time, the Puritan elements in this country dominated it. When Puritanism began to wane, and Unitarianism took its place, a new element began to come forward and to dominate this country. Jewish. Why? Because they were brought up in terms of the old biblical standards and every father felt that he had to teach his child the law and a trade with his hands or he taught him to be a thief. The result was they went to the top. Well, it’s interesting that Booker T. Washington, the negro leader of a generation ago, wanted through Tuskegee and other such institutes, to create a new type of Puritan, a black Puritan, because he could see the corruption of the white elements in the population by humanism, and so he felt, “Don’t worry about politics. Don’t get involved in activism. Get involved in building yourself up in terms of the faith, learning skills, working, and you will be the Puritan elite of the future who will rule the United States.” The new capital, the new source of capitalization.

Now, this is exactly so. It’s been demonstrated over and over again in history that this is so. For example, you read a great deal about the high Arab civilization that prevailed for awhile. It’s a myth. The Arabs never created any civilization. The ones who created it were the Christian and the Jewish captives, and the first generations of captive Christian and Jewish women who were taken into Arab harems. They brought up their sons in terms of their standards and the Arab science and the Arab crafts, the Arab trading ability that, for a time flourished, was entirely a product of either the Christian captives or the first generation children of captive Christian and Jewish women. They had the ability to capitalize society, but with their passing and when the Arabs no longer were taking in large numbers of Christian captives and Jewish captives, their civilization began to disintegrate.

(Audience member) So, you are using the word capital {?} in an economic sense. Capital as money {?}

(Rushdoony) Yes, exactly. Capital applies to both the intellectual, the spiritual, the material. Well, our time is up now. I have just two announcements. First of all, there is a clipboard on the lectern in the back and if you are planning to come with us next week after our morning meeting to Fox and Hounds – now, we’re going to try two or three different restaurants in turn and this next week, or this month, we will go to the Fox and Hounds, 2900 Wilshire Boulevard, between Yale and Stanford Avenues. We will have a buffet lunch there. It will be $3.85 plus, I think, about .40 or .50 in the tips and all, and we’ll have one check. So, we’ll figure it out when we get there, but if you would like to join us, we hope you will, please sign the clipboard. Put down your name, the number in your party, and your phone number so that if we need to contact you for any reason during the week, we can.

The other announcement, as you may have noticed, Gary North is not with us today. He is home practicing some home economics; diapering a baby, and learning, no doubt, with his baby daughter, that not only three cannot live as cheaply as two, but not as quietly as either. He will be with us next Sunday to speak.

Let us bow our heads now for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

[End of tape]