“Hi. I’m looking for something with a phoenix feather core.”
“GTFO!”
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But what if the Ark of the Covenant gets into the wrong hands? What then? Bet you didn’t think about that!
I can’t even buy instructional material for the sport I coach without proving my certification, so I’m not really all that put out about a wiccan who wants to be selective who he sells wands to.
However, you tangentially bring up an issue I hadn’t considered. In the US would this be legal? And I think the answer is “no,” because it would be illegal religious discrimination. A church run store might be able to refuse service based on religion, but I don’t know what the limits are.
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That would be like selling tickets to the new Noah’s Ark museum to people who just want to go in and goof on it.
Which I totally want to do.
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Then that person won’t have hands (or a face) for very long.
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A couple of friends of mine used to work in a San Francisco psychic bookstore. The kind of place where you can get your novelty Tarot decks.
Every 15 minutes, some teenage tourist would wander in and say “Where is the ‘Charmed’ house?” You’d think they’d just “scry” for Shannon Doherty or something. If you’ve ever seen the “Charmed” house on TV, you’ll note that it’s like all televisual habitats: It would cost eleventy gazillion dollars in real life. It’s a big rambling Victorian on an actual plot of land containing grass and flowers.
When those young folks would learn that the “Charmed” house was just as fake as the “Full House” house (which was located on the fringe of a housing project while the show was airing), their magical dreams were forever crushed and they didn’t even purchase a Gurdjieff action figure.
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“Marion, don’t look at it.
Shut your eyes, Marion.
Don’t look at it,
no matter what happens!”
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If they are duds. Defective wands might produce interesting results.
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It’s in the hands of top men.
Who?
TOP. MEN.
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Any sufficiently advanced Fitbit is indistinguishable from a wand.
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Any sufficiently ergonomic wand is indistinguishable from a Fitbit.
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Same for cosplayers. Anyone buying a stick for a costume is doing it wrong.
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Yeah, what’s the problem with costume sticks for sale? That way he makes sure to keep the loaded wands out of the hands of Muggles, he can pretend to be keeping people safe and preserve his faith at the same time. A responsible magic wand guy!
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Yay for techno sorcery!
…don’t know about y’all, but I’d rather have some HP flunkies in my shop than Klarion… and you know Teekl is just going to tear up the litter box…
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I expect Hogwarts sends it’s letters to muggles online these days:
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US laws about religious discrimination don’t go very far. They are based upon affiliation with established organized religion rather than whatever you happen to believe or practice. As a result these laws are always skewed against indigenous religions - including indigenous European religion (witchcraft, druidism, etc) - because of their informal nature. For instance, a person who was brought up Mormon probably has a sort of paper trail, whereas a German witch or Peruvian shaman probably does not. It is mainly an institutional thing.
Another problem is what wands are and how they are used in this context. A wand is an instrument which symbolically focuses the will of the user. As @Ray_Jones noted, anybody can buy or sell a wand, but you can’t buy or sell magic(k). This refers to the degree of personal connection one has with the tool, which usually results from having made it oneself. Just like how a Christian supply shop can sell bready hosts, but they cannot sell actual transubstantiation of the body of Christ, because the latter is not the artefact but is rather a ritual which they either perform or cannot. This shopkeeper is already something of a sellout for offering wands to neo-pagans instead of directing them to make their own.
IMO most people completely misunderstand what sorcery is - and isn’t. And pop-culture representations such as the Harry Potter media don’t do anything to remedy this.
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What about a Star Wars light sabre? Is that a magic wand or not? Presumably, it channels “The Force” which was sort of supernatural before that “midiclorian” (no, I don’t know how to spell it) business turned it into an application of nanotechnology.
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Well, at least in the U.S. you can show up at the wand show and pick one up with no trouble at all.
'Murican Magic!
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Anyone can use a light sabre. Only someone using the Force can use it to do stuff like deflect blaster fire.
Basically it is what Lucas called it early on - a laser sword.
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Like anything else, it would depend who you ask. Unlike HP media, light sabers were an original ficctional creation rather than adapting something from traditional use. IIRC in the movies the Jedi referred to them as being a weapon rather than a ritual implement.
Supernatural seems to be one of those loaded terms where many claim to know what they mean by it, yet there is little apparent consensus. Most people I talk with use it as a semantic McGuffin for explaining things away with a category change. The problem is that “natural” is largely a human value judgement, and not an equivocation of existence. People often remark that phenomenon which demonstrably occur are not “natural” by some arbitrary criteria. I find the term “metaphysical” to be more precise, and can be used to describe forces.
As for European-style sorcery, traditionally swords/daggers/athame are a kind of tool distinct from a wand. These ritual blades often symbolize reason, by virtue of splitting and analysis. Other ritual tools are cups, disks, lamps, etc. These have worked their way into European sorcery over the past thousand years through the hermetic philosophy of the Mediterranean.
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Yes. It takes no particular skill to swing a lightsaber.
Unless, of course, you value your limbs.
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