I hadn’t considered that hypothesis. I’d upvote for the novel theory, but now that you’ve told me you’ll never be able to trust further reactions that could confirm or deny it, which seems like it’s worth a downvote, so not voting your post up or down. That said, I think this fails to explain having a Bad reaction to this page and the entire site it’s on, despite thinking before reading it that Wicca was foofy nonsense and completely not expecting to find evil of that magnitude (a really, really strong feeling—none of the quotes you guys have asked me about have been even a quarter that bad). It wasn’t slow, either; unlike most other things, it was almost immediately obvious. (The fact that this has applied to everything else I’ve ever read about Wicca since—at least, everything written by Wiccans about their own religion—could have to do with expectation, so I can see where you wouldn’t regard subsequent reactions as evidence… but the first one, at least, caught me totally off-guard.)
I know who Crowley is. (It was his tarot deck that someone gave me as a gift—and I was almost happy about it, because I’d actually been intending to research tarot because it seemed cool and I meant to use the information for a story I was writing. But then I felt like, you know, Bad, so I didn’t end up using it.) That’s why I was surprised not to have a bad feeling about his writings.
I hadn’t considered that hypothesis. I’d upvote for the novel theory, but now that you’ve told me you’ll never be able to trust further reactions that could confirm or deny it, which seems like it’s worth a downvote, so not voting your post up or down. That said, I think this fails to explain having a Bad reaction to this page and the entire site it’s on, despite thinking before reading it that Wicca was foofy nonsense and completely not expecting to find evil of that magnitude (a really, really strong feeling—none of the quotes you guys have asked me about have been even a quarter that bad). It wasn’t slow, either; unlike most other things, it was almost immediately obvious. (The fact that this has applied to everything else I’ve ever read about Wicca since—at least, everything written by Wiccans about their own religion—could have to do with expectation, so I can see where you wouldn’t regard subsequent reactions as evidence… but the first one, at least, caught me totally off-guard.)
I know who Crowley is. (It was his tarot deck that someone gave me as a gift—and I was almost happy about it, because I’d actually been intending to research tarot because it seemed cool and I meant to use the information for a story I was writing. But then I felt like, you know, Bad, so I didn’t end up using it.) That’s why I was surprised not to have a bad feeling about his writings.