Here's a new short story (under 5,000 words).

Cal is a cunning man who reads cards and casts spells for money. He lives in present day South London. When a middle-aged woman asks him to get rid of her daughter's fiance Cal's task becomes urgent when Cal sees him buying a gun. However all is not as it seems...

Feel free to feed back and tell me what you think of this. Would you like to see more stories like this?

Many think that karma is all about what happened in the past, but what is really interesting about it is what happens to it now.
Karma ripens and we right now are the fruit. However there is something else too. What karma would be resurging now if conditions were different? The only reason that I am like this now is because all the other karmic possibilities lack the energy or conditions to bear their fruit right now. They will but not just now. So how do they appear?
They are the phantoms of imagination, the longings to be elsewhere, to be someone else; to have lived your life differently. These are are dream lives nostalgias of neverwas. Lacking power they cannot make real, so obsess instead with replay on-hold.
They can be real. It is possible to be a king, even though the seed is weak, even a genius although the ground be sterile. Those who know how to use sigils can strengthen those karmas in the depths of unconsciousness so that they resurge into the present. What form they will take may not be guessed, a dream, maybe? But Art is the best medium to capture these other selves from the primordial oceon of Nu.
Have you always wished you were a gangster but were to afraid to ask for it in case it became real? Well create the space in imagination and write it out, a whole life can be lived that way. What is more if there is some little skill then others can share your phantom life. Doesn't everyone want to share their life with someone? Humans are communal by and large, making it concrete takes these karmas out of their autism.
The only error is to get stuck on the belief that it is 'only imagination' and not really real. Where did every painting of Leonardo begin every play of Shakespeare, are these unreal, do people not pay to own them or see them. How valuable is our medicine, our science, where did these originate. Even Genesis had its First Day in the diaphanous coverings of the human imagination. Even if you believe it was God's idea first it was not until it entered the human imagination that the Word became flesh.

Little wonder then that Iamblicus in the 4th century stated that the Pleroma ranged from the highest heavens of the gods to the depths of the human imagination.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.....

Jamie

Came across this article by someone that I thought may be of interest. It ties in folklore motifs with psychology (nothing new there then!).

And now for Chapter Two of the second case for DCI Amanda Oliver and her team of Occult Crime Investigators.

Feel free to post your comments on this.

Regards,

Jamie