Witchcraft gone: New Zealand expelled the state’s last wizard

“It means that I am getting bored and getting old, but there is no one like me. People like me,” explained the therapist British Guardian. “It’s just boring bureaucrats and old people who don’t like me.”

The city council called the move in a statement a “difficult decision”, but the therapist “will forever be a part of Christchurch’s history”. The termination is the result of a new tourism concept that is supposed to make Christchurch a “more vibrant and modern city”.

Or, in the words of the magician: “You want to paint a cityscape where bureaucrats just sip a latte coffee roam the streets.”

“There is magic in every beginning”, or: Money for Viet Cong

He was born in Britain and has degrees in psychology and sociology. It only became a mystery when he immigrated to Australia in the 1960s and began teaching “Cosmology and Shamanic Arts” as an unpaid lecturer at the University of Melbourne. It was funded by donations. There, Brackenbury Channell launched several art initiatives and persuaded the director of the National Gallery of Victoria to allow his body to be displayed as a “living work of art”.

Eventually he lost his volunteer job at the university because study leaders learned that Brackenbury Channell had donated all the donations he had collected to Vietnam’s communist guerrilla army, the Viet Cong.

In 1974, the magician finally moved to New Zealand, where he began preaching on a ladder in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square. At first, the authorities tried to take action against his sermons – but his entertaining sermons soon became so popular with devotees that they were given to her.