Getting What You Ask For

A New York City principal has been effectively fired for spending the school's money for a Santería ceremony to remove negative energy from the school. (Via The Wild Hunt.

What an example of the "be careful what you ask for" principle. Something in the universe decided that Maritza Tamayo herself embodied the negative energy that she was trying to remove.

Tamayo later forced her assistant principal to pay the Santeria priestess $900, then improperly paid [the santera] $350 more to drive children to school for Regents exams.

And the custodial staff was stuck with cleaning up the chicken blood, apparently.

I am reminded of a ritual invoking the god Mercury that some friends and I performed when I was in my early twenties. We followed our source as best we good, even rising early in the morning to utilize the calculated "hour of Mercury" and speaking the lines in Latin.

We all got what we petitioned the god for. One friend, who clerked in a struggling used bookstore, asked that the bookstore's business would improve. And then the owners fired him, moved to a new location, and the store's business did indeed improve.