El Mano de Dios

I've already written directly about Gauchito Gil and San La Muerte, two of the more popular Argentine folk saints.  Both have widespread and fervent cults, with thousands of devotees, roadside shrines ranging in size from small altars to sculpture gardens and even centers of pilgrimage:  holy cities, so to speak; despite all this, despite the many attestations of miracles, the Catholic Church does not recognize these saints.

San La Muerte and Caspar, the dead baby.

This may be understandable, at least in the case of San La Muerte, aka Saint Death or Holy Death.  An imposing figure, a skeleton, often robed and wielding a scythe, sometimes leaning forward in his throne, he is basically a sainted Grim Reaper.  Although some pray to him as one would with any other saint, for matters of love (red), money (gold) or other worldly powers and concerns, he is suspected to be the patron of more sinister worshipers, and nefarious deeds have been discovered and ascribed to his influence.  His cult is strongest in northeast Argentina, especially in Corrientes.  Some speculate the cult is a product of the encounter between Guaraní ancestor worship, which included the veneration of bones, and the influence of Jesuit missionaries in the 1760's; but fact is, nobody know exactly when or how it started.

A similar figure is, unsurprisingly, also worshiped in Mexico.  I say unsurprisingly because death, skulls and skeletons are a common Mexican artistic motif and Todos Santos (All Saint's Day), or the Day of the Dead, is one of Mexico's most rambunctious and widely-celebrated religious traditions.  Death is mourned and celebrated with drink, fireworks and feasting at the local cemetery.   The image of the mother is also an important motif in Mexican culture and the national patroness is La Virgen de Guadalupe, an image ubiquitous in Mexico and wherever Mexicans live.  She is the heart and soul of Catholic Mexico.  Not surprising that death is, unlike in Argentina, a woman:  La Santisima Muerte.  This would be an interesting area of study; the respective gender of "Saint Death" in Mexico and Argentina and why such a similar figure appeared in both countries.  I wonder if it could be something as secular as the fact that both countries are the largest producers of cultural products in Latin America:  music, television, literature and especially cinema.  Not sure why this would be, but for some reason the possibility came to mind.

Anyway, pictured above is my red San La Muerte.  I had actually first purchased a flashier gold statuette, but my mother-in-law knocked it off a table while tidying up, and it broke into pieces.  She's a psychoanalyst and my wife is as well; my wife is always trying to tell me that many of my accidents are not that at all, but unconscious reflections of inner desires or aversions.  So it's ironic that her mother, who disapproves of these things, "accidentally" broke it.  The iconoclastic mother-in-law.

In writing this I learned that Guatemala also has a skeletal death saint, El Rey San Pascual, who seems to be pretty much the same as Argentina's San La Muerte.  The three death saints I've discussed are believed to have their origins in pre-Colombian religion; indeed, the syncretism between non-Christian religious beliefs and Catholicism is a Latin American-wide phenomenon.  African traditions have blended with Christianity to produce Candomblé (Brazil), Voudon (Haiti) and Santería (Cuba) to name but a few.  In countries with a fewer African Americans, such as Guatemala and Mexico, this process took place with Native American beliefs.  The Catholic Church has always been tolerant of the syncretism, up to a point.  Indeed, allowing the use of "pagan" traditions was first applied to European Christianization and even has a name:  Interpretatio Christiana.  This has become a point of contention in countries once dominated by Catholicism but now rife with various Protestant and Evangelical sects, which seek to eliminate pagan traditions from Christian belief and practice.  In Guatemala, this has led to riots on several occasions; one notorious brawl took place of the steps of the cathedral in Chichicastengo.  

"Chichi" has a very strong syncretic religious culture.  I witnessed a ritual in nearby Utatlán, at the end of a long, incense-filled, tunnel-like cave under a Mayan temple complex.  I also saw what was clearly a fertility ritual before a stone idol called Pascual Abaj; this sits atop a hill closer to Chichi than Utatlán.  I photographed this ritual at the friendly urging of the man performing it, and made extensive notes on the precise actions he performed.  One day I'll dig up this notebook and photos to share here on LoS.  I was also personally blessed by a curandero in Nebaj, a bit farther north, at a shrine hidden in a cornfield.  It involved lots of prayers and the burning of various materials we picked up at the local market.  What bound all three of these rituals was the free intermingling of the names of recognizable Catholic saints with Mayan gods.  Syncretism in action.  There was also a Day of the Dead in the Guatemalan town of Todos Santos; this was an emotional experience for me, having not long prior lost my father, and I danced and drank all night with a family who must have sensed my grief, as I was welcomed into the kitchen periodically throughout the night to warm up, rest and drink bowls of a delicious gruel that kept me going and helped absorb the copious amounts of alcohol I imbibed -- which in this town, is a big part of the ritual observance.  I feel privileged to have witnessed and participated in these rituals so I am eager to meet some practitioners of Afro-Catholic religions.  My only concern is to avoid becoming a gawking tourist; I need to participate, but I do not want to contribute to the "touristification" of these rituals.

I used to say that my only further use of psychedelics would be to try ayahuasca with a shaman to guide me, but ritual ingestion of ayahuasca, aka yagé, has unfortunately become a kind of drug tourism, the Quechua and Aymara-speaking regions treated like some kind of New Age Amsterdam, a New World Kathmandu.  William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg wrote an excellent book on their search for the drug, entitled The Yagé Letters.  A detailed and often hilarious account, it doesn't get into folk saints, but it does  describe a serious series of psychic and spiritual investigations.  It has also undoubtedly helped spawn the kind of zonked-out pilgrimage to the hinterlands I used to undertake without understanding the potential deleterious effects this can have on a spiritually rich but financially impoverished people.  Some will end up selling their religion to the highest bidder and others will become hucksters, with either no real knowledge of the shamanic role or just jiving the gullible and saving the real traditions for themselves.  This is, not in the specific context of spiritual tourism but tourism in general, why I turned a bit cold towards traveling in parts of Mexico and Guatemala, not for lack of "authentic" experience, but for contributing to the kind of human interactions that reduces everything to an exchange of goods and services for cash.  I realize tourism can be an important economic boost for a country, and if anyone needs a boost it's Mexico and Guatemala, but I'm kind of leery of the whole "Gringo Trail" these days.  I'd still like to experience the Afro-Latin-American traditions though.

 

But back to my collection of figurines, next pictured is Gauchito Gil.  I've discussed his story before, but it's worth repeating that before his murder, he'd enlisted in the war against Paraguay to escape the wrath of a local police chief, jealous of his affair with a wealthy widow.  After his return, he refused to fight in the Argentine Civil War and fled from the authorities into the pampa, more or less forced into the role of a bandit.  Gil was eventually captured and killed by the police, but not before he informed the gendarme who was about to cut his throat that his dying son would recover; he did, and the grateful policeman spread Gauchito's cult as thanks and penance.  Gil's roadside shrines are painted red and red banners hang from them or fly overhead.  His cult, like that of San La Muerte, is strongest in the north, in Corrientes, but it has spread throughout Argentina and into neighboring Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile.  He even has a Facebook page.  But who doesn't?  Even San La Muerte is social media savvy.

Before Gil's throat was cut, he was hung upside down on a tree typical of the pampa.  This recollects Old World sources such as the crucifixion of Jesus (not to mention Mithras and Osiris) and also the self-sacrifice of Odin, who hung upside down on the Norse axis mundi named Yggdrasil, an ash tree to Gil's algarrobos.  Argentina has strong connection to Italy, so it's more likely that the upside down Gil was inspired by Italian pitture infamanti, portraits of criminals hung by their heels upon a tree, a way to humiliate condemned men, especially those deemed traitorous.  When the Roman populace rose up against them, Mussolini and mistress Clara Petacci were dragged from their home, hung by their heels by an angry mob and beaten to death.  The hanging by the heels part always intrigued me; perhaps I jump too quickly to conclusions in seeing a connection.  But this practice was almost surely based on the Roman predilection for crucifying the condemned upside down if an extra dose of humiliation was required.  The pitture infimati in turn became the model for the The Hanged Man, the 12th card of the Tarot's Major Arcana.  In the Tarot, the hanged man is usually hung from either a tree, or a leafy tree-like Tau, the man's body cross-like, his face serene, seemingly out of place in a less than serene predicament.  He also has a nimbus around his head, like a saint or a martyr.  This may be because the crucifixion is a prelude to illumination, as in Odin's case, or resurrection, as in the case of Jesus.  For that matter, in Gil's case as well, for while the man died on the tree, his cult was also born; the man became the saint, his power to intercede on behalf of the powerless announced.  Tarot-designer A.E. Waite doesn't see The Hanged Man as a martyr and it's not generally interpreted in this light, but the cardcould easily have formed the basis of Gil's iconography.  A position usually reserved for reviled criminals but who was, in Gil's case, a saint.

I mention the bit about Gil refusing to fight and the story about being drafted because this element also plays into the story of La Difunta Correa.  Legend is that circa 1840 a woman named Correa set off to rejoin her husband, who'd been drafted to fight in the Argentine Civil War.  (Other versions of the tale have her fleeing into the pampa because she had her child out of wedlock, while others yet have her fleeing the sexual advances of corrupt officials -- a common element in the "virgin martyr" category of saint; there are dozens of examples in the "official" canon).  She died of thirst on the way and, when some gauchos came across the body four days later, her baby was still able to suckle at her breast.  The gauchos buried her and saved the baby.  So both Saints' tales involve the gaucho, still a powerful symbol of freedom, men who live beyond the confines, and law, of the city, in the wide and wild pampa, with their own code of justice, symbolized by the gaucho's knife.  The tango, another symbol of Argentine society and a powerful erotic dance, is said to have been born in the brothels, evolving from the milongas which were first danced by pairs of men, imitating the movements and gestures of a knife fight.  Both stories also attest to the heavy weight these Civil Wars put on people's hearts, as brother fought brother and tore the people apart.  Some versions of Correa's story also involve unjust officials whose actions set in motion the Saint's martrydom.  So we have two massively popular cults, very death-centered, plus the worship of death itself, all three of which seem to have grown most rapidly in the years following the Falklands/Malvinas War.  This war is a big part of contemporary Argentine consciousness, the outline of the islands instantly recognizable on signs in countless cities reading "Las Malvinas son Argentinas!"  The Malvinas are Argentinian!  This war also brought down a brutaldictatorship and with its exit came countless revelations of a long reign of terror effectuated by the police and the military:  kidnappings, murder, horrifying detention centers, theft of children, the stuff of nightmares.  It's a scar on every family, and my own is no exception.

Below is the latest addition to my collection.  La Difunta Correa's cult is centered in Vallecito and was first spread by cattle drivers -- gauchos -- and now more by truckers.  Roadside shrines are apparent because devotees leave bottles of water to represent her "eternal" thirst.

There is a Catholic antecedent to this story, by the way.  There is a story in Jacobus da Vorigine's Golden Legend about a barren couple, a Roman Governor and his wife, who had their prayer for a child granted to them by Christ, via Mary Magdalene's intercession.  The governor and pregnant wife then set sail for Rome to meet St. Peter, but the wife died en route, during childbirth.  Making land, the governor found he could not bury the body, so he covered it with his cloak and left the doomed baby by her breast.  He returned two years later, shocked to find his child still alive, having suckled at his mother's breast the whole time, her body incorrupt.  Mary Magdalene, who'd accompanied him, then resurrected the wife!

La Difunta Correa

I don't have a figurine for this last saint, but my mother-in-law, the iconoclast, told me about him when she gave me La Difunta Correa:  Miguel Ángel Gaitán.  Miguel was a baby who died in 1967.  In 1973 a violent storm unearthed his coffin and his corpse was found to be incorrupt.  This is a pretty common first step towards sainthood.  A saint specific to the Toulouse region, Germaine of Pibrac, is such a saint.  And of course the incorrupt body of the Roman Governor's wife precedes the story of Gaitán and La Difunta Correa. The locals made four attempts to shelter the coffin but each time a tomb was erected, it was later found demolished.  This is actually quite a common motif in legends surrounding miraculous images of the Virgin.  It was then decided simply to place the coffin in a chapel, but even then, the lid was found to have been removed; after this went on for a while the boy's mother decided to put a glass lid on the coffin and today, the little mummy receives thousands of visitors yearly and answers prayers.  This too is not unheard of in "official" Catholic saints.  I've seen plenty of saints in glass coffins; in Cortona, Italy, where I stayed for 3 months back in 1990, the dried cadaver of an obscure local saint, Saint Margaret of Cortona, was placed upon the parish church's altar.

A bit out of place, but it just occurred to me that the story of Correa is also a strong symbol of a mother's love for her child, which recalls what I said about the role of the mother in Mexico, but also the role of the Virgin.  The incorruptibility of the body is an indication of spiritual purity, itself linked to sexual purity.  For the Virgin is free from original sin, an innocent not corrupted by the carnal pleasures responsible for the Fall and thus, the aging and infirmity-prone corporal bodies from which Adam and Eve were originally free.  Makes the Christian Science concept of sin as a kind of disease seem a bit less innovative; the incorrupt bodies of the pure are the other side of the doctrine that sin causes corporeal corruption....

So none of these miracles or stories, and even their specific details, are out of place among the enormous roster of Catholic saints, many so local that most people haven't even heard of them, even Catholics from the same country.  St. Fris, anyone?

People are hungry for religion, especially receptive to the idea that prayer and offerings can result in miracles; where poverty is endemic, sickness, education, money and success are concerns with more hopelessness attached to them than in much richer countries.  And in the last few decades, Argentina has slipped deeper and deeper into poverty and all its accompanying woes.  It is a country dominated by a profound sense of insecurity, for the future, for the hope of economic recovery and an end to corruption, the explosive growth of shanty towns and above all, crime.  This in a country already wounded by a recent war and a brutal dictatorship, many of whose criminal perpetrators are still alive.  I would only expect these cults and others like them to grow.  Everybody's looking for a miracle, to be touched by the Hand of God.  Or at least one of his deputies.

With folk saints, all the familiar elements of official Catholic saints are recycled and put into a more contemporary and familiar context -- not, for example, Roman Gaul, but contemporary Argentina.  And this will continue to happen, whether officially recognized or not.  In France, the current most popular "official" saints date largely from the 19th century; long enough ago that the historicity of the accounts is not an issue, but close enough in time and within familiar enough events to reassure the devoted that their saint knows exactly what they might going through.  As the times continue to change, we can expect periodic updates to the legends of existing folk saints, as well as the development of entirely new ones.  The age of miracles isn't over.  Evangelicals will speak in tongues and be slain in the Spirit like the apostles, the logical conclusion of the Protestant devaluation of the role of the priest as an intermediary, the belief that each man and woman can read the Bible for themselves and develop a special relationship with the Christ.  Catholics, still valuing the role of the priest, will continue to look towards even holier intermediaries, and if the old ones are found lacking -- because inevitably, poor people will remain poor, sick people will not recover and the sterile will remain childless -- new ones are just waiting to be found.

Tea for Tomb

Meissen obelisks

Terre Cabade Cemetery, Toulouse

I stumbled across these ceramic Rococo obelisks (c. 1750)  during an online search unrelated to ceramic Rococo obelisks. Like pyramids, I often associate obelisks with death, not so much for their Egyptian origins but because so many tombs and war memorials use them. A chapel overflowing with death-related iconography in Toulouse's Notre Dame de la Daurade (see the three images below) is flanked by two frescoes; the chapel's side walls are decorated on one side with images of the arts and spiritual might, the other side with images of the the sciences and worldly might, arranged in a fashion much like they are on these table settings. A kind of (perverse?) dissonance that these gaily-colored ornaments evoke (for me) a dark altar in a chapel of death. Roughly contemporary to boot. Construction on the current church was begun in 1761.

Addenda: St. Jean-Baptiste and Iron flowers.

1. RE: The Vandals of Toulouse

Last week I was at the Église St. Jean-Baptiste in Ondes.  This week it was the 14th-century Église St. Jean-Baptiste in Le Burgaud.  For a guy with no head, John the Baptist gets around.

I happened to be sipping a Trappist ale and looking at the church yesterday, the form of the clock-tower and it's roof coming together in my mind as an obelisk.

I turned to my friend P---- and mentioned the common LoS speculation that church architecture featuring two bell-towers flanking the facade has its roots nourished in the black soil of the Nile Valley.

For an idea of what the Egyptian precedent looked like, check out the image these model makers have, an Egyptian temple entrance on a page for a model called, oddly enough, Temple Entrance (made from mold #98, or so we're informed in sentence one).

The description of the model states, almost in a severe tone it seems to me:

"You will need to cast mold #98 eight times to build the entrance shown here."

Which sounds more like witchcraft ritual than model building.

This picture of the obelisks at Luxor isn't actually the best image with which to make my case, as only one obelisk is pictured.  But the base is still there and we can see where it was located.

This was in my mind as I walked to the church and reflected on what I knew about the history of the village.  Not much.  The Knights Templar had a commandery here and there was a leper colony of sorts, but that's about it.  Even that info was flawed; turns out it was the Hospitallers and I still have no idea where they penned up the lepers.

The obelisk of the bell-tower, alas, was not the ferpect mefathor, as there was only one, The tower is primarily a functional feature of the structure; to hold the clock, of course, but also to make space for the stairs.

If you're not too familiar with the architecture of the Midi, I'm sure that even from afar the thin wall rising up from the facade tickled yer elmo.  This is a clocher-mur ["bell-wall"], or bell gable.

The odd thing thing is that at either side of the base of the pointy isosceles triangle that forms a sort of pediment of the clocher-mur, there are two clear-as-day make-no-mistake-about-it obelisks.  Stumpy, but clearly defined.  A search of Google images France for "mur-clocher Toulousain" has a few other examples where these horn-like obelisks pop up.

French Wickerpodiologe has a section dedicated to the bell gables of the Midi.  No less a personage than Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), popular architect and General Inspector of Diocesan Buildings--churches in other words--noted the use of brick in their construction in his influential architectural dictionary.  Wicketsnoodle suggests that the use of brick accounts for the exceptional development of the bell gable in the Midi.  Makes sense.  Brick is lighter, cheaper, easier to work with, faster and more flexible than working with cut stone. 

The commander of the Hospitallers here lived in a house attached to the church, itself  a part of the town's ramparts.  This accounts for the presence of arrow slits in its walls.  It was the Hospitallers, in fact, who ordered the church built.  I assume their presence here was due to Le Burgaud being a stop on the road to Santiago de Compostela, but the surrounding forest, the Aubets spring and high places were sacred places before their Christianization.

The sheer face of the wall, the small rose window, the massive brick piers that buttress the facade do give the church a somewhat fortified appearance, but the ramparts and city walls that once encircled the village are long gone, dismantled in more peaceful times to be cannibalized for the stone and bricks

The church is undergoing renovations, but one can still see the traces of a graffito that had been tagged on the church:  the anarchist symbol and the phrase "Un pays sans dieu."  A country without God.

On a side note, this Hospitaller church was built to replace a chapel dedicated to Saint Leonard of Noblac, a patron of prisoners.  He was invoked to secure freedom and even during his lifetime, attracted a lot of ex-cons to his abbey, many of whom stayed to work the land he provided for them.  Leonard was strongly associated with the road to Compostela, which probably accounts for the presence of a chapel here.  I wonder if his association with Compostela was bound up with is role as patron of prisoners; presumably criminals would be tempted to go to Compostela for the plenary indulgence offered to those who made it.  Wiping the slate clean of sin would have special appeal for them.

Leonard often was also invoked for assistance in childbirth; this and a special role for prisoners is interesting for those interested in the cult of the Virgin.  Despite having no record of any veneration or church dedications to Leonard since his death in the 6th century, his cult took off in the 11th, just as the cult of the Virgin was in full flower after the influence of St. Bernard.  Obviously, people had the same worries everywhere and the Virgin couldn't handle the caseload alone.  We've seen male saints take on attributes of the Virgin before (e.g. St. Fris).  The cults of many saints exploded at this time, globalized as it were, beyond being obscure local cults (e.g. St. Fris or Stes. Liberata and Quiteria), due to the passage of so many people through the south of France on the way to Compostela.  Of course, the influence of the Troubadours as transmitters and relaters of popular culture cannot be overestimated.

Speaking of culture, in the late-sixties a café was created in Le Burgaud that still exists today, a small beacon of culture in the cornfields featuring theater and music, often very avant-garde stuff which would be not so common even in Paris, let alone a one-Solex town in a poor farming area.  The original idea was to take young people in difficulty, often ex-cons, who would come to the healthier environment of the country and work and live at the café, assisting and performing in its productions.  Today it's more of a cultural association, but on some nights groups of young people from the inner city will be working in the café.  A fascinating continuity with Saint Leonard's project and the musical diffusion of his legend--the café has been a stop for numerous poor musicians, who play in exchange for a meal, a carafe of wine, a place to crash and gas money for the next tavern or music hall.  It reminds me of when I learned Toulouse had a reputation as a tolerant and cosmopolitan city, known for its large number of students and vagabonds, since the early middle ages.  This, too, is still true today.

For more about Le Burgaud, see:  Notre Dame des Aubets.

2. RE:  Aucamville Project 11: Mary on the Cross (redux)

Basically, this is just another example of a cemetery marker in wrought-iron, also typical of the Midi, with a floral motif.  We would suppose this plant metaphor refers to the death and resurrection of Christ, reborn like the plant world in Spring.  Jesus as vegetal god!

The details on some of these crosses show that the cross isn't being overrun by flora, but is itself a tree, possibility the Tree of Life....

The French often have a family tomb with a plaque for each member therein interred.  The grieving, instead of laying a new stone after each death, merely add the plaque and then leave small votive plaques, porcelain flowers, religious icons:  "Dearest Mother and Wife", "Our beloved Uncle", etc.  Thus the cemetery is a cluttered place.  France being France, the religious usually honor Toussaint by going to a special mass.  Everybody goes to the cemetery to lay flowers, but only chrysanthemums.  More restrained than Todos Santos, or Dia de los Muertos, and without the macabre joys of Halloween aka All Hallows Even.

OK, sorry for the beleaguered tone of this post; it's my second go-round after the fist version, longer than this, got sucked away into a Blogger bug black hole and I ended up working on this version until long after the midnight oil burned itself out.  Anyway, there are scores of bell gables in the region, I'll try to snap photos of the surrounding villages, almost all of which have a parish church like that at Le Burgaud.  I'll leave you with a photo of Aucamville's church for a comparison.

Photo by Didier Descouens: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aucamville_%28Tarn-et-Garonne%29_Eglise.jpg

Aucamville Project 11: Mary on the Cross (redux)

3/3:  I'd forgotten I'd already done a (quite different) little riff on this theme:  The Virgin and the Cross.

Toulouse is known as "la Ville Rose" (the Pink City) because of the brick with which its buildings have been constructed since at least the Middle Ages.  These bricks are not the smallish rectangular jobbies you might think of in American or English construction.  In Toulouse and the surrounding areas the principle brick is called a "foraine" and is about 45 x 25 cm and 5 cm thick.  They're quite heavy and make for a solid wall.  45 centimeters is no small shakes.

 

The gatehouse to the Aucamville cemetery gives a sense of the ingenuity with which these foraines can be put to use.  The walls are made with them, as are the decorative elements of the cornice and the pediment, even the frame of the arched entry.  I've always liked this gatehouse, which is simple  but elegant.  The size and shape of the cross in the pediment is determined by the material:  four foraines make up each arm, and to me, it has always looked something like a flower.  If you look at our other posts about architecture in Toulouse (example), you'll see that everything from walls to bridges to obelisks to chateaux are made with these foraines.  I suppose that's due to the fact that the soil around here is pretty much pure clay.  If I dig in my garden, I will find this clay with some river stones mixed in, but very little dirt or vegetal matter.

In Toulouse, the Terre Cabade cemetery (see the previous example I mentioned), whose entrance features two brick obelisks, takes it's name from this clay-like earth--"cavade" in Occitan.  (Like Spanish, the v and b sound is pretty much interchangeable in some Occitan dialects).

For stately buildings, this clay is put into a more or less standard mould and fired in a kiln to produce bricks of terra cotta, or terre cuite.  But humbler buildings, barns and even homes will be made of unfired brick.  The clay is mixed with some straw and dried in the sun.  The uncooked bricks have the same dimensions as a foraine.  They are not usually used on the north face of a structure, and even the humblest of buildings will use cooked brick at their foundation, as well as to frame windows, doors and reinforce the corners of a structure; sometimes a row or two will be thrown in to solidify the wall, along with smooth flat river stones, or galets.  This architecture is much like that of the American Southwest, with wooden beams and adobe walls.  The principal difference is that in France, one almost never finds a flat roof.

Anyway, this is less about architecture than it is to present a few images for The Gid, something that astonished him:  the Virgin Mary at the center of the cross.

The two examples presented here are typical of the region, in material and imagery:  they are made out of wrought iron as opposed to cut stone, and the crosses use a vegetal motif.  Get your Joseph Campbell out, as Yggdrasil definitely comes to mind.  In the first example below, I find a deft piece of work; the vines curl about Mary's head and the leaves are clearly star-shaped, thus evoking Mary's halo of stars.  Whether intentional or not, the leaves as a crown of stars symbolically connect Heaven and Earth, referring (I believe) to the Tree of Life as a kind of axis mundi (see Aucamville Project 4).  It would also connect the very terrestrial act of burying the dead with the post-mortem voyage of the soul to heaven.

Example 1.  Note how the vine forms a halo of star-shaped leaves around Mary's head.

In the second example, we find a form more common in this area, where the Cross itself is like a tree.  The flowers are lilies, symbols of the Virgin, almost exploding from behind her in a luscious bouquet of vegetal grace, iron-clad to boot.  The spring-like form to the right of Mary's head (from the viewer's perspective) adds an especially dynamic touch.  Recall also that the fleur-de-lis, a stylized lily, is a long-standing symbol of French royalty; the lily as a symbol of both French royalty and the Virgin Mary would also link Mary with France.  As an aside, a cock is also commonly used on these wrought-iron crosses and it, too, is a symbol of France.  Current notions of laïcité aside, France is a decidedly Catholic country, or at least a Marial one:  no village is complete without a statue of the Virgin.

Example 2:  The Queen is dead, long live the Queen.

These use of these crosses is not confined to grave markers; for a detailed discussion of the many ways they are used, please see "Too late, baby. Slay a few animals. At the crossroads."

I'm also looking forward to an upcoming guest post by LoS pal Tim Wilson, who will write about these crosses, especially in the funerary context, and traditions derived from the pre-Christian worship of Hecate.  I don't know what he'll write, but I'd like to mention that Hecate is a tripartite goddess who was often portrayed facing three directions; this is linked to her function as a goddess of crossroads, of which death is a sort, I suppose!  Hecate, unsurprisingly, is sometimes viewed as an influence on Marial attributes; the latter's symbol, the lily, in it's stylized fleur-de-lis version, is often used to symbolize the trinity.  Hecate was also seen as a Savior, the Mother of Angels, which definitely fits in with Mary's role in Catholicism.  She is also associated with the underworld, which is especially resonant in the context we're looking at here.  I predict Tim will go into these ideas pretty thoroughly and, if I know Tim, not without a great deal of erudition and a dash of humor.

Finally, the third example below is less typical of the region, but the mandala-like, vaguely floral motif at the center really grabbed my attention.  It may merely be a pretty abstract design, or it may be intended to represent a flower or even the sun; a floral motif is clearly present at the base of the cross, with leaves growing up the sides and some kind of flower on the middle, a lily perhaps, or a lotus.  The flower strikes me as vaguely Egyptian.  The extremities on the arms and top of the cross also seem like stylized flowers.  If the "mandala" is a solar symbol, this could allude to the Occitan cross used in these parts, which some theorize may derive from a Gaulish solar disc.

This stone cross also has a weird androgynous quality, evoking at once both a curvaceous feminine form and a phallus.

So in these iron trees and this stone representations of flowers, as well as in the flower-like design of the gatehouse pediment, we have an interesting visual metaphor for the ephemeral being immortalized.  The flower is ephemeral but, like the Christian hope for the faithful at the end of the world, returns to life.

One final thought.  As the Aucamvillois bury their dead in the clay, one can't help but wonder that if on some level they are reminded of the origin of all life in Adam, who the Bible tells us, was formed by God from a lump of clay and then fired in His kiln, so to speak.

Human life grown from the soil, like a brick....or a flower.

North of the Border

Old friend Dr. Jensen (see Sausages in suitcases) sends us this interesting article about the growth of the Mexican La Santa Muerte cult in the U.S., and not just among Mexican immigrants (two devotees quoted are named Bragg and Beasley....)  Not to be confused with Argentina's San La Muerte. 

Underworld saint La Santa Muerte, symbol of vengeance prayed to by cartels, becoming popular in U.S. 

Folk saints are fascinating and evidently reflect a popular need.  That said, the growth of the crudest forms of superstition and irrational religious devotion is not really a good sign of a healthy society.

I could be wrong.

Previously:http://lawsofsilence.blogspot.fr/2007/08/folk-heroes-and-cults-of-death.html

Leave a good-looking corpse

Looks like Ke$ha, or at least the director of the video for "Die Young", has taken the bull by the horns and placed a whammy on the "pop-occulture", "Illuminati-in-pop-music" crowd by making a video so over the top it borders on parody. Yet it will still guarantee to offend.  In one scene she and her dancers burst into a what appears to me to be a church and start smashing things up, standing on the dais in front of a pentacle, engaging in sexual debauchery etc.  Triangles fade in, a flashing inverted cross appears as it fades out; Ke$ha herself flashes a ring with an eye in it.  She looks through her fingers splayed in a "V", making an eye in a triangle.  A skull and bones flashes in and out.  Etc.  **Video at the tend of this post**

Actually, this Illuminati-in-the-music business is an old (and obvious) meme and it's obvious why the media would be an obvious player in any well-constructed conspiracy theory.  Especially one involving indoctrinating the masses.  I've long read such theories regarding the music industry, media in general, really.  One actually good but disingenuous writer I refuse to link to is obsessed with the Illuminati symbolism in Lady Gaga videos.  Another (not so good a writer) sees the all-seeing eye in improbable hand configurations, including looking through the "ok" sign.  Hate to learn what he thinks of "got yer nose".  Hip-Hop is suspect (maybe for all the gesticulation) especially Jay-Z and Kanye West.  This other guy seems to have a lot of answers:

The general opinion regarding musicians and their “induction” into the Illuminati is tragically incorrect. These artists themselves aren’t actually IN the Illuminati, they are merely pawns FOR them. The deal is that they sign over particular creative rights in exchange for the publicity and access required to become a sensational star. They sign up with the Illuminati to become famous quickly, because Illuminati members have infiltrated and remain a ubiquitous force in the entertainment industry.

The author seems to think this is all a by-product of Saturn worship.  In his explanation he also manages to implicate the north and south poles, as well as the cube, in this infiltration of Saturn-worshipping Illuminists into all the higher echelons of society.  It reads as though he's grabbed a few half-digested internet conspiracy memes and sort of (barely) lashed them together in a tour de force of syllogism and unsupported statement.  Which is sadly effective, judging from the sheer number of similar websites. 

Personally, I think this video is taking a poke at these theories, all the while going for the easy and obvious provocation.  The dollar sign in Ke$ha's name seems especially apt in this context.  People are still going to take the bait, though.  It's very blatancy will be taken as an even more arrogant ratcheting up of that nebulous "revelation of the method."  She's certainly made the symbology crowd of Illuminati-watchers' work easy for 'em.  Just take the Saturn-worship guy, whose blog, erm, "Illuminati Watcher" makes that very point.    Ke$ha's going to town with the Illuminati thing; the photo stills from a performance of the song on Australia's X Factor are pretty eye-popping:  Weishaupt at Las Vegas.  More like backdrops to a Muppet Show number than ritual props in an alchymical mind-fuck.

She may even take Lady Gaga's place as Illuminati Marionette N° 1 at this rate.

Anyway, echoing Beyoncé's police state chic, this video of Ke$ha and her band of dancing Illuminists, who adore Ke$ha as if she were a saint, are all gunned down in the end by the police.  Shades of Waco.  As all those Davidians might have figgered out between the time the real police machinery launched a gas canister at their home and the fiery death that canister would lead to, we all "die young."

So here's the video.

Alpha -- Zeta

The Narco Bible

In a gunfight on Sunday, Oct. 6, Mexican marines killed Heriberto Lazcano, aka “El Verdugo,” described as the leader of the Zetas cartel.  (Perhaps "a" leader is more accurate, as other reports have it that Miguel Treviño Morales took control of the group in August....which could explain how Lazcano was located).  The day after, masked gunmen raided the funeral home holding his body and spirited it away. 

The Zetas are an especially brutal cartel, one faction in a drug war that has left over 50,000 dead in the last six years.  War is truly an apt description, but does little to evoke the almost surreal scale of violence in parts of Mexico, routinely involving beheadings, dismemberment and the public display of body parts.  In one case we've mentioned on LoS, 6 victims had their hearts cut out; in another, 5 human heads were found in ice chests.  This is only the tip of the iceberg; mass killings have involved victims numbering into the dozens....70+ in a mass grave here, 49 headless bodies by the roadside there.....

This graphic helps visualize the numbers.

LoS readers will have recognized that "death and dismemberment" is one of the blog's long-standing interests.  Beheading, de-handing, lost arms, floating Canadian feet....we've covered it.  It's a macabre field of inquiry and perhaps we sometimes laugh a little too easily, but rather than take this as a sign of cruelty, try to see it as a kind of psychic defense against the steady bombardment of our conscious and subconscious minds with violent images and information.  It's enough to make one want to stay home all day with the doors locked; a little laughter is a good dose of anti-paranoia medicine.

Dismemberment is a powerful and distressing tactic, hitting us almost physically; in all other respects being equal, I think it affects us more than a "mere" killing does.  A severed limb or head is somehow humiliating, adding insult to injury, as it were.  It's also a lot more creepy to think of either the perverse commitment it takes to actually dismember a corpse...or the killer whose flare of passion has erupted and now, back to reason, must find a way to dispose of his victim.  On some primal level, even the least superstitious among us might feel that desecration of the corpse makes it harder somehow for the dead soul to rest in peace, to pass on to the other side.  Desecration is rich in symbolic import, poetic resonance and archetypal gut-punchery.

I went over this quite a bit in a post about the theft of St. Laurence O'Toole's heart and the power of relics.  I would reiterate that in the cult of the saints, a piece of the saint's body is often regarded as the most vital sort of relic, that in this case dismemberment allows for the spiritual wealth to be shared; the part is as powerful as the whole, and a small fragment of bone is enough to get the job done.  The power of the body part is deftly illustrated.

At the time I wrote that post I was reading an anthology entitled Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics in Latin America.  I had a brief correspondence with contributor Dr. Donna Guy from OSU about her article on popular saints and the Pérons in Argentina.  The whole book is highly recommended, but her essay is a very enlightening stand-out.  Rebels, outlaws, usurpers and the usurped, the ways in which the remains of the dead are used by the living form a rich and variegated historical canopy, an interesting point of entry into wider historical issues.

Without re-hashing every detail, suffice it to say that the power of the corpse should not be underestimated and in this anthology is illustrated by the post-mortem fate of several famous political figures from various Latin American countries.

The Obama administration realized this power when they made the decision to quickly dispose of the body of Osama Bin Laden after he was clubbed to death by SEALs (LoS post), ostensibly to avoid allowing his buried remains to become the focus of a pilgrimage site.  The practical benefits of this denial are inexorably bound with its symbolic and spiritual aspects.  (I'd found it odd that Lazcano was described as having been killed by the Mexican navy, but a navy team killed Bin Laden, so why not).

The same rationale was applied to the corpse of Che Guevara, whose dismembered body was scattered for the same reason Bin Laden's was dumped into the sea.  Che's remains were eventually re-patriated to Cuba and are located in an elaborate memorial there.  But in the interim before Che's re-interment, a more humble and organic shrine had developed.  At the site of his death, there is no corpse, but there is a folk cult of a saint--no longer "in the making"--but pretty much already canonized.  Locals venerate Che as a saint alongside established Catholic models, complete with relics, candles and prayer.  All the trappings of your typical saint.  Here we can juxtapose the power of the corpse both as Cuban state propaganda, like Lenin in Red Square, as well as something more spontaneous and "natural":  a saint created from popular devotion, outside the canonization process of the Church, and often at odds with it (see Héléna, the cemetery saint).

Then there is the case of Juan Perón.  The grave robbery which led to the amputation and subsequent ransom of Perón's hands (with their own Wikipedia page) was ostensibly about an 8-million dollar ransom, but it also had the potential to lead to other tangible political results.  Symbolically, it was an extremely powerful act.  More striking perhaps than a castration; both render the once mighty man in his splendid tomb somewhat ridiculous, pathetic and impotent, but the removal of hands seems much more mysterious.  The public never saw his penis, so if it disappeared....?  The public knew his hands, and the imagination can work much more easily when it can envision what once was, gone.  As Wikipedia points out, Lyman, editor of Death, Dismemberment, etc. argues that the theft was "a catalyst to destroy the symbolic cult of Perón".

Eva Perón's body also suffered indignity in death; her corpse was ignobly shuffled about before returning to Buenos Aires.  After the military coup of 1955 her body disappeared.  It was secretly put into a crypt in Milan under the name María Maggi (Mary Magdalen?).  "Evita" was exhumed and repatriated in 1971, placed in an elaborate and highly secure tomb, which has become a popular shrine, and she, revered like a saint.   What is important is that her body has remained intact.  In his essay on "Latin America" in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, John McManners "claims that Eva Perón consciously incorporated aspects of the mythology of the Virgin and of Mary Magdalene into her public persona."  In this case, the theft of the body demonstrates its importance; but at least it remained whole and undefiled. 

Talk about laws of silence:  at the time when Evita's body was being hidden, the military had outlawed even speaking the name of the Peróns in public.  The missing body was part of a wider effort to wipe them out of public memory.

This "body politics" dealy is what caught our eye upon seeing the titles of articles about the killing of Heriberto Lazcano.  The titles of the articles I've seen are telling.  The Washington Post article:  Zetas cartel founder killed, Mexican navy says; masked gunmen steal body.  The New York Times:  Mexico Kills a Drug Kingpin, but the Body Gets Away.  The fact that the body was taken is as important as the death itself.

The tangible results of his death will depend on the follow-though by the Mexican authorities and the inner organizational strength of the cartel itself.  Perhaps he was an irreplaceable strategist whose absence will seriously undermine the power of the cartel, or perhaps a capable lieutenant will step in and assume the duties.

Maybe in the resulting power struggle, violence will flare up; hopefully, the contenders will stick to killing each other as opposed to the hapless police, prosecutors, journalists and assorted bystanders gunned down and carved up in alarming numbers.

The propaganda value of Lazcano's death should have been enormous.  The Mexican government would have been able to hold it up as a success, as way to show the public that the police have scored a victory in its ongoing fight against the narco-traffickers.  But the brazen "theft" of the body mitigates the symbolic value of the victory, if not rendering it completely void.

As the cliché might have it, this cartel boss wields the power to confound the state from beyond the grave.

Mixed up with this propaganda and symbolic value is a spiritual mytheme that is all the more potent for its deep and long presence in Western thought, found among some of the earliest known mythology.  The myth of Set and Osiris seems relevant here.  Egyptian religion was a dominant Mediterranean cultural influence over a period of centuries, even millennia, and it is still today relatively well-known among the educated public, especially among students of esotericism, the occult and ritual "magick".

Plutarch tells of a conspiracy wherein Set conspired to assassinate Osiris.  Set tricked Osiris and trapped him in a box he then tossed in the Nile.  Osiris' wife Isis searched for his remains and found them embedded in a tree trunk supporting the roof of a Phoenician palace.  In some versions of the story Osiris is resurrected and impregnates Isis, dying afterwards.  Sometime later, Set discovers his body and becomes enraged, tearing the body in fourteen pieces which he scatters across Egypt in an attempt to deny him a proper passage into the afterlife and to erase him from memory.  Isis then reassembles the pieces (except his penis) to be buried anew.  The Gods then resurrect Osiris again, making him god of the underworld, often associated with the flood and retreat of the Nile.  The underworld and the Nile.  Need one say more?  The importance of these aspects of Egyptian civilization cannot be overstated, and Osiris, dismembered, becomes associated with these aspects after being re-membered, so to speak.

In another version Osiris is murdered by his brother Typhon, identified as Set.  Typhon divided the body into 26 pieces and distributed them among his co-conspirators.  After Typhon was killed by Isis and Hercules/Horus in revenge, these parts were recovered (excepting again the phallus) and buried in secret locations.  She did, however, make replicas of the parts and distributed them throughout the land, where they became shrines to Osiris.

History doesn't lack for examples of how final resting places and death sites become places of worship.  The graves of famous men and women become shrines, this is a fact.  Hence the Soviets' diligence in ensuring that the remains of Hitler were never given a grave.  Indeed, what exactly happened to them is a mystery, but they were buried and exhumed no less than 8 times, burnt, mixed with ash and thrown into the Biederetz River, if Pravda is to be believed.  It would also explain why some Egyptian Pharoahs destroyed rivals' monuments or effaced their inscriptions.

Closer to home perhaps, is the story of Jesus.  While not dismembered, the fate of his body had a decisive effect on the history of Western Civilization.  After his crucifixion, the three Marys went to his tomb to anoint the body and discovered that it had disappeared.  Unlike the disappeared body of Che and Bin Laden, the lack of a body here was proof of the resurrection and turned what had been a less-than-desirable end into the founding myth of Christianity.  For over a thousand years history was driven by the story that a body wasn't where it should have been!

In one of the earliest post on LoS, we translated a Mafia initiation ritual which involved vaguely occult practices.  One Mexican cartel based in Michoacon refer to themselves as Templars.  And another early LoS post speaks of Jesus Malverde, a kind of saint among the drug traffickers, so prevalent that shrines erected in his honor are regularly bulldozed by the Mexican authorities as part of its fight against them.

Thus a criminal battle extends into the spiritual realm.  Malverde is the patron of narco-traffickers, especially their hitmen.  Given the extreme level of brutal violence in the ongoing drug war, it's tempting to frame the cartels as a kind of death cult, with killings performed if not exactly for Jesus Malverde, than at least with Malverde being thanked and honored.  There's a fine line between thanking a saint for services rendered and performing actions in that saint's honor.


Malverde, however, was a Robin Hood kind of figure, and it's hard to see the Zetas, who regularly brutalize the poorest and most disenfranchised of Mexicans, honoring that legacy.  Yet, at times the cartels do in fact serve as a kind of local benefactor, spreading their largesse among those they deem worthy.  The price of disloyalty and collaborating with the forces of order are high, but there are rewards for helping the cartels, if only by remaining silent.  Malverde is referred to as the "angel of the poor" and a "generous bandit".  Clearly, the traffickers play upon this mythology; a whole sub-genre of  music, the narcoicorrido, celebrates their exploits and continue to thrive despite sporadically being banned from the radio.

The Sicilian Mafia itself began as a kind of political entity, a guerrilla force, which was probably from the get-go a kind of brigandry.  A number of political and revolutionary secret societies borrowed ritual elements from sources such as Freemasonry and over time mutated into criminal enterprise.  Tale for example, the FARC.  Are they really Marxist rebels these days, or are they drug traffickers, extortionists and kidnappers?  In method, they're not much different from a cartel, despite the vestiges of revolutionary ideology.

This brings us back to the Templar cartel, who have been described as "quasi-religious" and who apparently use initiation rituals described as "cult-like.  What these rituals consist of is anyone's guess, but police have reported finding plastic Roman centurion helmets they say were used in initiations.  Back in March,it was reported that 120 helmets had been found.  That's a lot of initiates!  Perhaps the initiations include passion plays?

Whatever the case the Templars do have a veneer of a spiritual and revolutionary mission, explicitly setting themselves up as contemporary Malverdes.

The Templars were so named in 2011 from the remains of La Familia Michoacana.  According to Wikipedia, Familia leaders Nazarion Moreno González and Méndez Vargas called their assassinations and beheadings "divine justice".  The cartel's spiritual teachings are influenced by Swedenborgian interpretations of the New Jerusalem.  Swedenborg's idea is that "the New Jerusalem described in the Bible is a symbol for a new dispensation that was to replace/restore Christianity."  Mormonism's founder Joseph Smith was heavily influenced by this interpretation, which which finds support in the writings of Karl Jung, as well as in New Thought.  La Familia's "boss and spiritual leader"  published a spiritual work mixing "evangelical-style self-help with insurgent peasant slogans" based on the work of John Eldredge, a contemporary American Christian author, lecturer and counselor.  Apparently his work is required reading for gang members and the cartel has provided funding to circulate Eldredge's writings.  The cartel promotes religion and family values, doesn't tolerate substance abuse or the ill-treatment of women and children and includes regular attendance at prayer meeting as an advancement criterium.  The cartel also distributes money to those in need and manipulates the local media into singing its praises.

"Social justice" is one of their aims and when the pope visited in 2012, they put up welcome banners and promised to refrain from violence during his visit.

Nazario Moreno was shot dead by police in December 2010 in a gunfight, but he lives on, reportedly worshipped as a saint himself!  MSNBC:

"Soldiers raiding criminal safe houses in the western state of Michoacan have recently found altars topped with three foot high statues in the image of Moreno, shown in golden medieval armor and carrying a sword. A local verse dedicated to the dead trafficker invokes him as a supernatural force.

"Give me holy protection, through Saint Nazario, Protector of the poorest, Knights of the people, Saint Nazario, give us life," goes the "Prayer to Saint Nazario".

Now calling themselves the Knights Templar, after the medieval military order that protected Christian pilgrims during the Crusades, members carry a code book decorated with pictures of cloaked knights with red crosses."

So the process of sanctifying outlaws is not merely an historical phenomenon, the process is ongoing; the "narco-saint" is a type of folk saint.

When I began this post, I set out to put the theft--or recovery--of Locanzo's body in the wider context of "death, dismemberment and memory" in Latin America.  In searching to widen to spiritual scope, I recalled the mafia initiation rituals, which bring the criminal organization closer to the secret society, of which a mafia undoubtedly is.  I went on to the idea that these mafias, or cartels, even have their own pantheon of saints; in the north, Jesus Malverde is lauded in song, and shown devotion by ruthless hitmen.  Death itself is also worshipped, making these cartels something like death cults.

In Michoacan, however, the "Templar cartel" has sanctified one of its original leaders and functions more clearly like a sect.  Recruiting among addicts, it exhorts its members to clean living and prayer.  All the while cutting heads off in the name of God and Saint Nazarion, author of their spiritual text.  Interestingly, the stated goals of the cartel include social justice, dignity and peace for the campesino.  The Robin Hood meme in full effect.

They are also ruthlessly dedicated to eradicating the Zetas, which adds an interesting element into the mix.

The Mexican drug war is certainly a war for power and narco-dollars, but could there also be an underlying spiritual battle being waged?  Is the idea of social justice a la Robin Hood and the "apotheosis" of former leaders a ploy, or a genuine belief?

And will Heriberto Lazcano become a saint?

Cannibal Spring

Eschatology by Dummies

I'm a bit late off the mark, sure, but I have a few observations about the so-called "Zombie Apocalypse" which occurred last month as the sun was moving from the house of the fish into that of the twins.  Is this the beginning of The End, marked by the transit of Venus, an event as rare as the earth passing through the tail of a comet?  Are the Mayans in on this?

The Cooked....

April 13.  The seeds of this post were planted after reading the strange and amusing tale of "asexual" Japanese chef Mao Sugiyama who, post-op, seasoned and served up his own "meat and two veg" for five diners at 250 bucks a pop.  Make that four diners, one balked at the last minute.  Sugiyama is a true Iron Chef!  This story appeared in Huff Po on May 24.

April 16.  I'd forgotten about the Brazilian cannibals I read about back when that story first broke and have only just now remembered.  There's not much amusement here, only strangeness.  Two ladies and a fellow lured at least two young women into their home with an ad for a babysitting gig.  They then killed the women and dismembered the bodies, making meat pastries which they sold to the neighbors.  This "cannibal cult" called themselves the "Cartel", perhaps an homage to the cartels to the north in Mexico, where dismemberment and beheadings have become par for the course in the drug-related violence which has claimed lives on the scale of a full-on war.

Calling a cult a cartel isn't so strange.  There's a cartel in Oaxaca called Caballeros Templarios, that is, Knights Templar.  A cult, a cartel, a chivalric order....without pushing things too far, one could say they all share quite a bit of characteristics, including laws of silence....

Concerned with reducing the population, the "Cartel" apparently intended to kill three women a year.  Symbolically significant, perhaps, but not quite enough to reverse exponential population growth.  Another motive was "to purify their souls" according to a police spokesman.  This would not be without precedent.  I've read somewhere that both the Aztecs and some Kali cults practiced cannibalism in order to please or approach their respective gods.  This is my body, this is my blood....

...and the Raw

May 26.  Whatever amusement I got from the Japanese cook tale was completely absent from the events which went down in Miami.  Unless you've been living under a rock, you've almost certainly read about the "Miami Zombie," which began all this Zombie Apocalypse talk.  A naked Rudy Eugene was shot dead after being ordered to stop eating the face of a naked hobo by the name of Ronald Poppo.  We're told this attack lasted 18 + minutes and cost victim 70% + of his face:  nose, lips, one eye, forehead eaten to the bone.  The attacker is described by friends and family as a nice guy who smoked too much pot and read the Bible.  Obviously that book is a bad influence!  He was suspected of being on drugs, the current theory being "bath salts" after the newspapers suggested cocaine psychosis, then mutant LSD.  Even this is far from certain and apparently, some humanity remained in Eugene, for you see, no flesh was found in his stomach (it pays to wait before blogging).  In other words he spat, not swallowed.

In an interview with his girlfriend after the attack, the girlfriend said that Eugene was either "drugged or cursed."  She hadn't believed in Voodoo before this incident but after she saw the victim's face, she was a believer.  Eugene, incidentally, was of Haitian descent and of course, the Zombie is associated with Haitian Voudon.

May 25.  Another cannibal murder. Kenya-born Alexander Kinyua eats a houseguest, 37-year old exchange student Bonsafo Agyeai-Kodie, a Ghanaian.  Police were alerted when the head and hands of the victim were found in a trash bin by Kinyua's brother.  The killer had disposed of the torso and legs near a local church after consuming the victim's brain and heart.

We've already looked into the significance of the severed head and severed hands, both symbols of power.  In a lighter post, we also discussed the Egyptian misunderstanding of the heart as the seat of intelligence.  Without this specifically Egyptian inspiration, I would propose the dismemberment was in fact a way to disempower the victim both literally and symbolically  (deep, huh?).  Eating the heart and brain might have been a way to ingest something of the victims intelligence and emotions, his character; in this the killing becomes the ritual accompaniment to an act of sympathetic magic.  As we will see, another recent cannibal killer took off the hands and head of his victim.

The Kinyua killing happened, by the way, in Joppa, Maryland.  Joppa is another name for Jaffa, a port city in current-day Israel with a rich Muslim history (a history the Israeli authorities have done their best to gloss over).  It was also the turf of the Tribe of Dan.  A fitting provenance during the talk of a zombie apocalypse, for it is from this tribe that some Millenialist groups have ascribed the origin of....the Antichrist.

Kinyua also ranted about death cults and mass human sacrifice and had been kicked out of the ROTC. His past violence and notoriety as a ticking bomb will do little to assuage people's suspicions that this kind of behavior was in fact programmed.

Waiting for the War

In some forums I've read, comments imply these cannibal attacks are somehow Barack Obama's fault!  Others don't beat around the bush.  According to one, these attacks are a sign America must cut all immigration (now!) according to a post I can no longer find.  [I swear it's true; I read these comments before I started the post and lost the articles I'd read them in among the welter that followed.  This makes what I've just written unreliable hearsay....]  Indeed the "race war" theme seemed to have gained steam in the wake of the Trevor Martin killing.  Drudge often has headlines about black on white crime, usually about gangs of black youths attacking a lone white or a couple, often with a quote "This is for Trevor".  Of course, these are real events, but it's also a none-too-subtle attempt to stir up fear; I propose Drudge is assembling these incidents on his perpetual front-page in order to create the impression of a pattern whose tempo is increasing, linking these events to the Obama presidency without directly saying it, so that swing voters might be persuaded that a black man in the White House is encouraging this kind of behavior.

The specter of black mobs and violent uprising is a potent and visceral image, which, as well will see, has already been evoked by at least one mainstream politician--a year ago Mike Huckabee made the connection between Obama and the Mau Mau, for instance.

Ooh Mau Mau

A few days after all this cannibal stuff broke I got a message on Facebook:  Happy Madaraka Day.  This was on June 1.  This Kenyan holiday commemorates the day Kenya achieved self-rule.  I thought here of the Mau Mau uprising which preceded independence, grokking at the same moment that Kinyua was himself a Kenyan.  Incidentally, the Mau Mau were primarily from Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu; the name Kinyua comes from their language and means "one who drinks".  Presumably, the reference is to water, but for our boy Alexander the thirst seems to have been for blood....

It is said that:

"The horrors they [the Mau Mau] practiced included the following: decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women."

The Mau Mau uprising is another event evoked whenever someone wants to drop hints about the "upcoming" race war, and the Mau Mau have been linked to our Antichrist/President by more than Mike Huckabee.  There is some basis for this, in fact:


Sarah Obama, President Barack Obama's grandfather's wife told him that her husband was imprisoned for six months and tortured before being tried in a British court.

Thing is, this uprising was primarily "black-on-black" crime.  Only 32 white civilians were killed, the rest of the vicitms blacks and soldiers.  Many of these deaths were spectacularly barbaric.  But the English killed about 10,000 Kenyans supressing the uprising, which adds a little perspective.  The Mau Mau didn't hold a momopoly on savagery; English atrocities are well-documented:

"[E]lectric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs were thrust up men's rectums and women's vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence."

Cannibals All

But let get back to the present.  A man, Chinese exchange student Lin Lun, 33, is reported missing on May 24.  In this case one Luka Magnotta, born Eric Clinton Newman (New Man) films himself murdering the poor fellow.  He masturbates with a severed arm and commits another sex act with the corpse.  He also eats some the victim with a knife and fork, so it's not entirely uncivilized.  Unlike another Clinton, our "new man" Magnotta inhaled.

He mailed a foot and hand to the HQ's of Canada's major political parties.  The other hand and foot ended up in Vancouver, the nearest city to the series of discoveries of dismembered feet floating in local waterways.  Is Magnotta making a citation here?  Is he trying to plant the idea that he may have been responsible for these killings as well? 

Earlier on, some papers were reporting that Magnotta claimed to have dated notorious killer Karla Homolka.  Her tale involves the abduction, rape and torture and ultimate murder of three female victims.  Now papers suggest this was just another lie by Magnotta, whose very name is false.  (He played a rich porn star online, posing with fast cars and good clothes, but in fact was a bankrupt waiter).  Mythomania and narcissism among his lesser character flaws!

This initial report of a liaison with Homolka is chilling.  Homolka, you see, did not act alone, but with her husband.  The Canadian feet mystery was first brought to our attention through the theory of the Smiley Face Killings.  This flawed theory suggests that a series of gruesome killing across the nation were carried out by an organized band.  Could the Magnotta/Homolka link be evidence that this is true?  Hey, even if its false, the seed is planted.  A kind of terrorism along the liminal.  Like Kinyua, seekers of signs that something fishy is going on are easy to find...an internet trail of animal cruelty and accusations of necrophilia already had people out for this guy even before he turned his attention to human victims.  An encounter with England's news media alarmed journalists there so much that they called Scotland Yard.

Magnotta wrote:  “Once you kill and taste blood it’s impossible to stop.”  Another line: “I’ll be back — and this time the victims won’t be animals.”


Apocalypse Whenever

Magnotta's story has some parallels with Kinyau's:  both seemed to be mythomaniacs with violent pasts, known to the police.  Their victims were both foreign students.  They both  left a "large online footprint".  Like the Miami cannibal, the attack was captured on film.  Terrorism in the digital age.  Brings all the horror onto your laptop.  (The Brazilian cannibals may have also filmed their crimes).

As it turns out, Magnotta also frequented white nationalist message boards and penned rather harsh anti-immigrant screeds....and some are questioning whether this was a racially-motivated killing or if the screeds were more of Magnotta's seemingly pathological need to create himself anew online.

So, these killings are more than rife with weird conspiratorial details which lead us down a variety of rabbit holes.  Anyone looking to construct a conspiracy theory is well-equipped with tantalizing links.  The internet cesspool is a swirling miasma, where the murky waters turn round and round, bits of flotsam floating back into view again and again before going down the memory hole.

2012 is the new Y2K and we here at LoS marvel at the continued strength of the apocalyptic mindset, how one incoherent book of the Bible continues to exert such force upon the American mind.  Then again, with footage of people killing, dismembering and eating each other so readily available, maybe it's not so difficult to believe that indeed, these are the last of days.