WITCH BULLETS

[ArtinNC]

105 BERGER TARGET or 105 Berger VLD Target for shooting 100yd with 1:8 twist barrel ?

 

[paperpuncher]

I’ve shot them both in midrange competition, shot good scores with both. I think the hybrids are the easy button

 

[CJ6]

100yds??

 

[Fast14riot]

The VLD target is a bit pickier in seating depth, but they shoot well. For 100y, you might not notice a difference between them.

 

[Gary in MD]

WITCH bullets does your rifle shoot better?

 

[M-61]

What’s a ‘witch’ bullet?
New design?

 

[chuckshooter]

good witch or bad witch?

 

[Bill Norris]

good witch or bad witch?

Which one ?

 

[Clancy]

For 100 yards, I’d go with the 105 hybrid or the 108 boattail. If you do shoot a VLD, I’d shoot the hunting version, but I’d avoid the VLD.

 

[M-61]

Which witch is better?

 

[Clancy]

Which witch is better?

Pretty sure you sleep with one in college and marry the other. Some of us get this mixed up.

 

[jpjulian]

Which witch is better?

The one which casts the better spell?

 

[whatsupdoc]

The Witch's Bullet: Hairball and Hexing Tradition​

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• Tuesday, January 8, 2019​

Witch Balls & Witch Bullets


"They kill cattle by shooting them with balls of hair, stunt the growth of children, make cows go dry, prevent the formation of butter and soap, and inflict a variety of personal injuries and domestic misfortunes."- Journal of American Folklore

I'm not normally one to espouse the use of harmful charms, but I do respect their history and their value. Nothing is more witchy than a good hex, and the New World has a particular tradition of cursing and hex charms that are ever so interesting to reclaim in our modern practices. Our baleful charms are those involving dolls, knots, needles, powders, potions, and yes, even hairballs.

"Witches are supposed to shoot animals with little hairballs, which pass through the hide and lodge, without leaving any hole."- Cora L. Daniels, Encyclopedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World

There are two kinds of “witch balls”: those of Western European origin, made of glass, designed to negate or redirect the influence of an evil spirit or a witch, and, those of New World make which are balls of cattle or horsehair rolled with an adhesive substance into a small ball which is then used in cursing spells. One is to avert witchcraft, the other is an expression of malicious witchcraft, or, counter-magic, or, an apotropaic charm.

"A small bunch of hair from a horse or cow is rolled between the two hands into a small round ball, and this ball is used as a bullet. In whatever part the ball hits the picture, in the corresponding part of the victim, a wound is inflicted." -Journal of American Folklore

Actual accounts of witch-bullets being used to harm people and livestock have been recorded throughout the last few hundred years, with reports detailing physical evidence of injury and even naming some of those witches, conjurers, and sorcerers accused of practicing this magic. Conversely, the average non-witch folk charmer often resorted to hairballs as an anti-witch charm. "In some of the states, a spell may be put upon a man by burying a "hair-ball" (one of the compact balls of hair often found by butchers in the stomachs of cows or oxen) under his doorstep. This object (powerful, because peculiar) may also be carried about as an amulet to protect one from spells."- Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1926)

Effingham County Illinois folklore regards witch balls as a charm that can be shot against a witch. And just as silver bullets (another traditional charm with European parallels whose real-life applications seem to appear mostly in American gun magic folklore) were used to both create and destroy witches the simple hairball could have this power.

"Among their evil acts, they would transform unwitting sleepers into horses and ride them, bewitch cattle to stop them from giving milk, and kill or injure victims by throwing witch balls, made of hair from cows or horses, at pictures of their victims." -Jeffrey E. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society

Where the hair-balls are concerned, witches in Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana folklore, were said to roll these little hairballs into bullets to be used in a form of sympathetic magic in which the balls were shot at pictures or depictions of one’s enemy. It was believed that if one were to die from this magic, a ball of hair would be found within the victim. These differ greatly from the famed bezoars, which were said to have valuable, beneficial qualities."Randolph notes witch balls described as being the size of a marble made of black horsehair, and another one made of black hair and beeswax that was rolled up into a hard pellet. The belief is that a hairball (or witch bullet) could be thrown or shot at a person by a witch. This hairball (or bullet) would be found on the body of anyone killed by this method."-Gerald Milnes, Signs, Cures, & Witchery: German Appalachian Folklore (p. 168)

Mentions in both story-telling and in recorded reports stretch throughout the South and Midwest, cited most frequently in the Carolinas, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Delaware, Tennessee, Iowa, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and even Michigan.

“The concept of supernatural shooting was common to all, but the notion that witches fired balls or bullets seems to have developed from Native American conceptualization of European technology within a supernatural framework of disease, which then was passed back to the European colonizers.”-Owen Davies, America Bewitched (p.41-42)


Cattle-Killer

 

[SD guy]

Thought this was going to be about RDF's.

 

[Clancy]

Thought this was going to be about RDF's.

Random Damn Flyers? That’s what we call them around here.

 

[ArtinNC]

WITCH bullets does your rifle shoot better?

105gr Berger Target is the only 105 I have ever shot. And you would be a "witch" if you had been out in the heat all day today

 

[JFrank]

I shoot the 105 VLD in my Dasher but there are better bullets available than either one of them.

 

[muleystalker]

The 108 Berger is the easy button.

 

[NZ_Fclass]

Spanner in the works.....107 Sierra's. Quite happy...and we get them at a good price through the NZNRA.

 

[muleystalker]

Spanner in the works.....107 Sierra's. Quite happy...and we get them at a good price through the NZNRA.

Great bullets also.