William Harman, reprint from Soundings An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 119-35…. Note year of presentation, viz. 2000….. so that, clearly, this essay is not informed by any writings on the topic after 1999. See Addendum at end.
I begin with two vignettes:
ONE. In April, 1989 in the Texas-Mexico border town of Matamoros, Mexico, the remains of thirteen human bodies – mostly bones, boiled entrails, and chunks of flesh -were discovered in a large cooking cauldron inside a shed on property occupied by a group of drug smugglers who practiced a brand of religion and sympathetic magic called Palo Mayombe. The tradition, with roots we can trace to Africa, proposes that the vital forces of sacrificial victims offered to appropriate spirits will provide ritual practitioners with unusual powers. Members of the group were strict abstainers from alcohol and drugs. The “highs” they experienced, they said, came from the spirits they worshiped. The leader of this group, Adolfo Constanzo, had convinced members that their efforts to evade law enforcement authorities were guaranteed success if they could sacrifice to the spirits carefully selected humans resembling the people the group sought to evade. The thirteen victims included five American college students on Spring Break in southern Texas. The others were Mexican. The sacrifices apparently involved ritual murders, usually stabbings, dismemberment of the bodies, cooking and ceremonial eating of portions of the remains. Authorities were able to apprehend the group partly because of the overconfidence the rituals instilled. Many believed that they had truly become invisible and invincible (Gallerne 1993).
Goat sacrifice in Tamilnadu–Pic by Harman Continue reading →
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