Everyday Canvas

Is Strong Persuasion Equivalent to Casting a Spell?

Prompt: Aphrodite, furious for not being honored properly, cast a spell on the women of Lemnos. These women smelled so horribly that their husbands left them.
Do you think a group of people can cast spells or, in other words, really persuade a second group of people into believing they are not quite right to such a degree that the second group's social lives are affected?

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On the flip side, someone on the net is providing her customers with “very powerful influence spells” to be used on just about any situation; however, this spell-caster can personalize the spell for fast results, only for 67.93 US dollars. This type of spell-casting, however, is not what I want to write about, as much as this lady's commercialism made me grin.

Coming back to Aphrodite or those like her, their first step has to do with control; that is, the control over themselves. When someone truly believes in something and has control over herself, controlling and persuading other people comes easy and often unnecessary; however, if some work of persuasion needs to be done, Aphrodite and the likes of her are usually willing to make their followers become more comfortable with their presence even if this is uncomfortable work. Building rapport is automatic for all Aphrodites for they have mastered the matching and mirroring of other people’s emotions and beliefs. Their modus operandi is a serious study for the psychologists, and one such book talks about how to do this: Power Persuasion: Using Hypnotic Influence in Life, Love and Business--By David R. Barron. In no way, I am promoting this book or this author, but only showing that such stuff exists.

Most of the time, persuasion happens through the use of values and negative persuasion through showing the other person his or her lack of values and convincing them of this fact. For example, I believe if those women didn’t ever go near or worship Aphrodite, no spell Aphrodite would have cast would touch them, but then, they probably had to leave Lemnos or maybe not be born or lived in Lemnos, at all. Those poor women were in a catch-22 situation. If you have a weak side, you either go along with friends or lovers stronger than you or feel damned under their spell.

Such an unfortunate thing always happens to those people who are not so sure of themselves and who try to find validation from someone else or from some group. This leads to mob behavior, carried to extremes by the influenced group led by their stronger maestros. We have seen it in our lives very often. In schools, this appears as peer pressure, and in real life as prejudice, racism, or reverse racism.

Playing with other people’s value systems and persuading them to act negatively or influencing them to feel bad about themselves surely is like casting a spell since the persuaded person gives his or her autonomy to the persuading party, and this results in some very unfortunate situations.