Weird Canadian Laws: Pretending To Be A Witch Was A Punishable Offence Until 2018 - Narcity

Pretending To Be A Witch Was A Punishable Offence Until 2018

So? Pretending to be a police officer, or a medical doctor, is STILL a crime where i'm from.

Fraud is fraud and people should be punished for it.

This is where I go on a rant about historical illiteracy.

Okay, so once upon a time people used to believe witchcraft was real. This caused a lot of problems, so over time society moved on to "ha ha, that's dumb, magic doesn't exist".

Great, fine, everything is okay now, yeah?

Well, will you be surprised to learn that there are criminals, scammers, con artists, and untrustworthy people out there? And when Spiritualism became popular, a lot of these types sold their services as mediums. They totally could put you in touch with your dead Aunt Kate or Uncle Fred, and of course once all the "I'm happy in the afterlife, it's all great, nobody is in Heck" stuff was out of the way, they'd give you advice about things like "Aunt Kate says pay me, your medium, $$$$$ to avert the curse on you" or "Uncle Fred wants you to give me, your medium, all your life savings so I can invest them for you in this sure thing stock".

A lot of gullible people got suckered by this kind of carry-on, and lost their shirts. Okay, so you take the scammers to court, right?

Oh, but hold on! Fake medium swears blind they are real medium and it's not their fault those stocks were useless and you lost everything, Blame Uncle Fred, that naughty old guy, for giving bad advice, or maybe it wasn't Uncle Fred at all but an evil spirit pretending to be Uncle Fred. What's that, you say I'm a con artist? How dare you, you are attacking my religion! Magic is real, I believe it!

So you couldn't prosecute them for really being witches, since those laws had been done away with. But neither could you prosecute them for being fakes, because how do you prove ghosts don't exist, and if you set out to prove that, then you have to prosecute every single church in the land for fraud when they preach about God and Heaven and Heck every Sunday. Tricky!

The solution? Make it illegal to pretend to be a witch. That way, if Fake Medium Madame Rosa ends up in court, you are not claiming 'magic is real and I'm prosecuting you for consorting with the Devil' but neither are you going full-atheist God Not Real. If Madame Rosa says the ghost of Uncle Fred told her to take the money, then she's pretending to be a witch to deceive your client and she owes all that money back.

So all this "tee-hee, weren't they so dumb back then?" about the laws is out of ignorance. But yeah, what else should I expect from some clickbait rag?

I don't know what to make of any of this, waiting for the Contrapoints rebuttal video.

Snapshots:

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)