Desperate times call for desperate measures. If your team keeps losing, it players struggling with injuries and yellow cards, and chances of a quarterfinal are slipping away, some basic witchcraft may just be the way to go.
Walking around the fan zone you may have been handed a flyer with a somewhat obscure message.
“Do you know who you, where you are and why does you live on the earth?” the leaflet asks, mysteriously. “Are you created in the image and likeness of God, or a sheep?”
Follows a more sombre tone: “Do you often have an aversion to life?”
“But let’s start with the Euro 2012.
A simple spell to win your team,” the perplexing message ends.
But each ending is also a beginning, as those who look up the website on the flyer will be quick to find out.
From the cosmos of the World Wide Web, self-trained wizard and author of “Witchcraft without witchcraft” Sergey Kovalenko teaches about meditation, esoteric and “real” witchery.
In an hour-long conversation with the Kyiv Post in a downtown restaurant,
Kovalenko said his craft comprises such activities as channeling one’s vital energy, healing with the hands, and magnetism – the art of focusing one’s mental acumen to influence the thinking of others.
Like with Cleopatra. Everybody knows she wasn’t particularly attractive yet she was able to focus her sensual energy so strongly that men would be ready to give their lives for a single night, he said.
Learning to do it is quite difficult though. On average at least six months of practice are needed to control start controlling minds. Influencing the course of a football game is much easier.
Kovalenko is convinced fans can make a difference if only they believe in victory hard enough and put all their energy into cheering for their team.
But this innovative approach is not quite as easy as it sounds. As with most things in life, the key is proper preparation.
First, you have to visualize the match, see yourself shooting the goals, winning on the penalties. Then you have to send this energy of victory to your team. The best moment to do this is during the anthem, when all the players are close together.
“You don’t want the energy going to the wrong team by accident,” Kovalenko advises.
But you don’t want to stop after that, as the teams need support throughout the game.
“Don’t relax, otherwise you lose,” he warns, referring to a common problem for football players and wizard apprentices alike.
“Personally, I have a problem, just like most people – once I achieve something, I stop trying,” the autodidact sorcerer explained.
This happens often to couples, when one partner stops working on creating the energy of love, and the relationship begins to fall apart.
Or with Hitler – once he had entranced the population, he stopped trying and things turned ugly, Kovalenko adds.
He first became interested in the esoteric arts after practicing karate. This interest then moved to eastern philosophies, and he picked up as much literature as he could lay his hands on.
Help came in the form of a resourceful friend who would break into a storage place for thrown-out books meant for recycling, hunting for gems of wisdom.
Kovalenko later got involved with darker arts, too, but prefers not to go in depth about it.
The warlock also bears a grudge against the Orthodox Church, which he says is too restrictive.
Everything about the religion is about bans, he says: don’t take that apple, don’t covet that woman, don’t climb that tree.
“From childhood you keep being told what not to do,” he deplores.
Moreover, the church bans communication with the spirits of dead people or using magic and curses, but then they do it themselves, Kovalenko bemoans.
But for now, the key is spreading the wisdom: “I want people to learn to use energy to become happy. And they can practice for the Euro.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Jakub Parusinski can be reached at [email protected]
