-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder Craig Lockwood�1993 CompCare Publishers 3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100 Minneapolis, MN 55441 612.559.4800/800.328.3330 ISBN 0-89638-363-6 255+pps � out-of-print/one edition. ----- A very interesting and excellent book. Om K --[16]-- Chapter 16 Where Are The Bodies? Cults, Evidence, And Denial "As ethology has shown, a sense of community arises from collective aggression." -Walter Burkett, 1983 "Cult" is a word appearing frequently in this text, but like ritual abuse, it is a word more difficult to define than to use. Individuals who molest, rape, and even kill in the name of one religious concept, or deity, or another are frequently apprehended. Groups who do the same thing, however, show up less frequently. While aberrant individuals are always a random threat, the organized aberrant group is perceived as the greatest threat. Survivors claim that organized groups, "cults," secretly perpetrate the mind-control conditioning that produces MPD, allowing them to remain hidden. In secret, individuals working together can perform ritual sacrifice, kidnap, produce pornographic materials, deal in drugs and weapons, and conduct tax-exempt criminal business. Groups involved in these activities are, almost without exception, defined as cults. "Cults)" in the broadest sense, usually form around an activity. Since activities are open to interpretation, more specific definition requires some effort. G. Olson-Raymer's Occult Crime: A Law Enforcement Primer, published in 1990 by the California Office of Criminal Justice Planning, offers what is, in spite of the slaughtered syntax, probably the best law-enforcement definition to date: Occult activity involves the use or knowledge of action and/or rituals connected to supernatural beliefs and/or supernatural powers. Satanic activity involves a belief that Satan will bring personal power over oneself, others and the external environment and, in turn, such power will permit the believer to live by whatever moral and ethical codes one wishes to adopt. Ritualistic activity involves repeated physical, sexual, psychological, and/or spiritual acts. But the operative noun is law enforcement. Sociologists and anthropologists tend to see the law-enforcement model as valuebound to mainstream Western social and religious concepts. Culling All Cults Disbelievers in the ritual-abuse phenomenon are quick to point out that law-enforcement officers and psychotherapists typically define almost anything that is religiously non-mainstream as "cult." This may happen because law-enforcement training models of occult crime are being presented at psychotherapeutic conferences. When these two professions discuss groups to which their subjects of investigation or patients claim to have belonged, the definite article preceding the noun is commonly inserted. Any group becomes "the cult." While this may be no more than a verbal convenience, it still gives the impression that somehow all cults are conspirationally linked. According to survivors, many cults are linked. In some cases they describe whole communities being involved or a single county having several large cults. Disbelievers scoff at this claim, saying it's preposterous. J. Gordon Melton, another scholarly skeptic, claims in his Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America to have undertaken the only comprehensive survey of all public religious groups. Melton, whose study was published in 1986, before much of the contemporary clinical evidence had surfaced, disbelieves in the reality of ritual-abuse cults. In his critical and thorough study of the phenomenon, In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult, Robert D. Hicks cites Melton's work as coming "closer to an accurate estimate of the number of cults than any cult cop's baseless generalization." Melton estimates that, "using the broad definition of the social scientists, one can find some 500-600 cults or alternative religions in the United States." Melton says that over 100 are ethnically based, and relegated to first and second generation immigrant communities., Melton obviously had no access to secret groups, which in any case don't answer questionnaires or show up as sociological statistics. To deny such groups exist, as Melton does, is to deny history. Secret groups have always existed. Only their ability to remain secret can be questioned. Kathy McCarrell, program director of the Los Angeles County Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Center, and a staff writer for Beyond Survival magazine, suggests that it's possible the reason these groups aren't ferreted out is that there has been neither the official inclination nor the allocation of personnel for the task. She says: "When the FBI's Ken Lanning says he's been examining claims of ritual child abuse for eleven years, it gives you a good idea of the level of priority the federal government places on this phenomenon. Only one agent? For the whole country? "With all the FBI and DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] personnel assigned to investigate drugs, isn't it possible that if we assigned just half as many agents to investigate ritualistic child abuse that a significant increase in the number of documentable cases would unfold? Until we make child abuse more of a national priority, we will never really know the depth of the phenomenon." McCarrell contends that we have always had drug abuse, as well as child abuse, in the United States. "It wasn't until this [last] decade, however, that we realized the epidemic proportions of the child-abuse problem in the United States, which may well be responsible for this nation's proliferation of drugs and violence." If there were few cults in the past, today, in a society where the foundational structures of family, morality, and ethics are undergoing rapid transformation, it is understandable why people might want to create them. Hicks has invited his audience to consider and debate his arguments about the existence of such groups. Debating a knowledgeable anthropologist on his own ground is more properly conducted by another anthropologist. Perhaps some additional insights can be offered to achieve a better understanding. "Cult Cops," Christians, and Confusion Hicks contrasts Melton's estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 total cult members to Dale Griffis' figures of 3,000 cults with 500,000 members. Griffis, a former Tiffin, Ohio, police captain, is a leading figure in the law-enforcement training movement Hicks calls "cult cops." Composed of officers and former officers, these people lecture and conduct training seminars on occult groups and "satanically motivated" crime. Hicks, a former naval cryptology officer, with an academic background in anthropology, served as an officer in the Tucson police department and later as a civilian manager for the Pima County Sheriff's Department in Arizona. When his In Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult was published in 1991, he was a criminal justice analyst for the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. After attending several law-enforcement training seminars dealing with cults, Hicks says he became "progressively more skeptical, then even more alarmed by the cult experts' antiintellectual and anti-rationalist stance." Hicks saw the law-enforcement cult-crime model as "shoddy, ill-considered, and rife with errors of logic ... and ignoran[t] of anthropological, psychological, and historical contexts." When our blue knights start tackling black magicians, Hicks feels they overstep the bounds of their mission. Another problem Hicks perceived was an overt Christian bias on the part of many of the trainers. Lacking nothing but a law-enforcement concept of behavior, they viewed all deviation from mainstream religious practices as potentially dangerousespecially the widely practiced Afro-Caribbean religions with their array of sometimes gruesome occult objects and symbols. Citing Columbia University scholar George Eaton Simpson, who studied Santeria and approximately thirty other related Afro-Caribbean beliefs, Hicks offers a cultural context for their appraisal. According to Hicks, Simpson defines cults somewhat broadly as "religious protest against a system." In Simpson's view the social collusion between the rigid, impersonal, Roman Catholic cosmology and the equally rigid Latin American secular society creates a clearing for alternate religious activity. Hicks quotes from Simpson's book Black Religions in the New World, which says: "Religious ceremonies take believers away from the mundane affairs of life and are often exhilarating experiences. A well-performed religious cult ceremony in the Caribbean or in South America provides dramatic entertainment for participants." Anyone attending a Vodoun or Santeria ceremony for the first time would probably call "dramatic" an understatement. Simpson's is a sophisticated, rational, academic view, but it is not a view commensurate with the way most law-enforcement officers learn to perceive an often threatening environment. Imagine a twenty- three -year-old white police officer responding to a disturbance call. Opening a door she finds a group of non-whites in a candlelit room filled with statuettes of bizarre entities. Splattered with fresh blood, a powerful- looking man dressed in white, with a cluster of beads and bones around his neck, leaps to his feet, a knife in one hand and a severed goat's head in the other. It's easy to understand the officer's gun-drawn "Everybody face-down on the floor!" response. If these activities and nontraditional religions aren't a threat-is there any "threat" at all? And if so, where are the bodies? Bodies of Evidence Disbelievers maintain that without more well-documented physical evidence of murder committed during rituals, survivors' claims about homicidal cults can't be taken seriously. Non-fatal ritual abuse involving sexual crimes committed against children is less problematic. Since this activity falls within the more commonly understood framework of pedophilia, it's considered more "provable." Mechanisms exist in law enforcement to deal with it. Alfonso Valdez, an investigator for the Orange County, California, District Attorney's Office, observes that since substantive documentation about pedophile rings has accumulated at local, state, and federal levels, nobody questions their existence. Pedophiles, however, are rarely homicidal. Since the public, for whatever reasons, tends to accept the existence of things like satanic cults, Bigfoot, and UFOs, they are not necessarily the ones who need convincing. This leaves the machinery of justice, which, according to Kathy McCarrell, would just as soon not be burdened with such things. If, as some survivors claim, members of these groups occupy positions of power within local, state, and federal government, anyone who believes the claims has a moral responsibility to do everything within his or her power to bring them to light-an awesome, and potentially dangerous, burden. And just what, and how much, "proof" is enough? How many bodies are required to create bureaucratic or official certitude? Which gender, ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic class offers the most convincing forensic reinforcement? Are children more apt to be victims than adults? Are white victims more important as evidence than victims of color? To elicit concern, does a per capita body count based on current U.S. census figures need to exceed so many per thousand(s) of population? Is there a line? Is one body per 1,000,000 acceptable as being below the "line of official concern"? When is action appropriate? What agency makes the decision? And finally, just what defines a "cult victim"? When the FBI's Kenneth Lanning dismisses the well-documented 1988 ritual-murder trial of the State of California vs. Clifford St. Joseph as a "sadomasochistic," homosexually motivated sex crime, as opposed to "satanic crime," how should this be interpreted? Despite the fact that the never- identified victim's corpse was found sodomized with a pentagram carved in his chest, his wrists, ankles, back, and buttocks slashed, testicles mutilated, hot wax dripped into his right eye socket, and his blood drained, is Lanning saying that his murderer(s) went to all this trouble just to make it look like ritual sacrifice? Why? If this wasn't a ritual murder, as Lanning wants us to believe, then what was it? What constitutes "enough ritual" to make a crime "satanic" or even "ritual?" And even if it is "ritual," does it legally matter? Official concern about terminology may hold the key. In the United States, the Church of Satan is recognized as a religion; as such it's protected under the Constitution. People calling themselves Satanists, however, need not be card-carrying members to enjoy the rights of religious freedom guaranteed under the First Amendment. This is true for nondenominational Christians, Moslems, Jews, Santerians, Wiccans, or anyone else. Religious freedom is an absolute guarantee. Individuals can be Satanists without breaking the law. Criminals can be Satanists and conduct legal satanic rites without breaking laws. In the event a crime is committed during a satanic ritual, the law treats it no differently than a crime committed while performing a Baptist rite. Murder is a capital crime, punishable under statutes and authority derived from the Constitution. To bring a case to trial, a district attorney needs a body, substantiating corroborative forensic evidence, a suspect or suspects, witnesses, or documentation. Belonging to a religion that demands periodic human sacrifice, or some other form of illegal activity as a matter of doctrine, may make an individual suspect. Without a conspiracy centered on making that sacrifice, however, there is no crime. In obtaining a conviction, the nature of the religious beliefs of the perpetrators is of no importance This may help explain Lanning's "official" attitudes, and to some extent those of Donald Hicks, whose law-enforcement/ academic perspective is augmented by sociological and anthropological interpretations. So how does a disbeliever like Hicks interpret a case such as the ritual sacrifice of Mark Kilroy in Matamoros, Mexico? Here was clear evidence of many human sacrifices�thirteen corpses in one site alone. Here was an internationally operating cult led by a charismatic leader who manipulated his members through sex, used mind-control techniques, engaged in criminal enterprise, and randomly abducted, tortured, and sacrificed humans to create supernatural power. All the things the disbelievers said didn't happen. And there were, it turned out, many more than the thirteen original bodies. While the religious format wasn't precisely "satanic," similarities outweigh dissimilarities. Hicks spends a number of pages in several chapters dealing with this case. His comprehensive analysis of the most dramatic North American ritual sacrifice case of the century, however, overlooks several important facts. Kilroy was There Mark Kilroy, a Texas college student out on a spring break barhop with his buddies, was a randomly abducted victim of human sacrifice. Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, an American citizen, was a charismatic sorcerer who led a group of middle-class Mexican and American followers on a ritual crime spree. Constanzo's group was collectively responsible for killing at least twenty-one people in a fourteen-month to two-year period. Additional body parts were found bearing Constanzo's trademark mutilations but were only linked circumstantially, as opposed to the others that were corroborated by confessions. Findings of children's bloody clothing in one location in Mexico City and two in Matamoros suggested the possibility of child sacrifice. Only one child's body was ever found, however. Constanzo's true body count will never be known. Matamoros has been proclaimed by "cult cops" and survivors as proof that ritual sacrifice groups exist. Disbelievers paint the affair as the result of psychopathic aberration. Since there was no "proof of Satanism," the event is considered unclassifiable, and therefore of suspect authenticity. Constanzo was ambiguous. Depending on the interpretation, he was either "living proof of Satanism" or just another "self-styled," diabolical psychopath with "a hodgepodge of occult beliefs," like Richard Ramirez, the "Nightstalker," only with a following. Morbid fascination and negative celebrity surround notorious murderers. The darker and more evil the crime, the greater the interest. In the case of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, who and what he really was ties scattered among the few existing shards of his personal history. Journalist Jim Schutze supplies the details of Constanzo's life in his well-researched and xell-written book Cauldron of Blood. Born in Miami in 1961, Constanzo was the grandson of a reputed Cuban Mayombera priestess. His teenage mother, Delia Gonzalez, was "a looker" whose husband disappeared suddenly after a year. He had run away, claimed Delia. The Los Angeles Times reported, on May 16, 1989, that she was "once arrested when police found her living in a tiny apartment with several children and twenty-seven animals. The floor was covered with blood, urine, and feces." That was not her only brush with the law. After her husband disappeared, she and her small son departed quickly for San Juan, Puerto Rico. People in the neighborhood whispered that she possessed "powers." Whatever she possessed, it is certain that little Adolfo grew up in a climate that at the very least included initiation into Santeria Baby Adolfo was a perfect child. Everybody in the community knew it. By the age of two, because of his regal bearing, he was marked as a "chosen one." By four, he was obsessively neat and concerned with his appearance. It was an indulgence little Adolfo could afford. His mother had married a well-to-do businessman, whose businesses soon substantially prospered. Young Adolfo proved an outstanding pupil at school. At church he was immediately noticed for his devotion and was made an acolyte. His proud stepfather couldn't resist pushing him in his religious duties. There was resentment, and then suddenly the man started to "sicken and waste away before the very eyes of his associates." He was persuaded to go to Miami and died there in 1973, presumably of cancer. Delia, now a rich widow, soon remarried. Her new husband resented the boy's superior airs. Delia warned him to leave the boy alone. Instead, he began whipping him during drunken rages. A fatal mistake. He also "disappeared." By fourteen, the sexually precocious movie-star-handsome adolescent had fathered a child by a thirteen-year-old girl. But he was becoming known for his other powers. He could see the future and predict things. This caught the eye of several older bisexual men in positions of power. Sometime during this period he underwent more training. By 1983 the youth was a shadowy fixture in Mexico City's rich and notorious La Zona Rosa cafe society. He could read the future. People whispered that he had accurately predicted the attempt on President Ronald Reagan's life. Models, entertainers, and movie stars began requesting his services. Since nobody needs the uncertain future explained as much as a narcotraficante, a dope smuggler, the five-figure charge was little enough. just when the $10,000 dope-dealer fortune-tellings and the $40,000 limpios (ritual cleansings) stopped and the human sacrifices began is not known. His followers spoke of Delia "sending him away" to an apprenticeship under a "Great One." "Constanzo made three trips to Haiti in one year," journalist Phil Carlo says. What he learned there is uncertain. Somewhere, under an unknown sorcerer's tutelage he learned techniques of ancient Mexico�such as the distinctive Aztec and Mayan method for removing a human heart while the victim was still alive. He also learned "flaying," the act of skinning a human being while keeping him or her alive during the process and then wearing the victim's still-warm skin before finally opening up the chest cavity, removing the person's still-beating heart, and drinking his or her blood. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a foot-soldier who had accompanied Hernan Cortez on his epic march to Mexico City and back, documented Mexico's long tradition of human sacrifice and cannibalism. Castillo observed Aztec priests performing the "flaying" and other rituals dozens of times and wrote of it in his True History of the Conquest of Mexico. In each town and village the scene was the same. Indian priests sacrificed daily, ripped open chests, tore out hearts, drank blood, offered the hearts to their gods, painted blood on the temple walls, cut off arms and legs, and, finally, cooked, then ate certain body parts. About Xocotlan, a medium-sized town, Bernal Diaz writes: "I remember that in the plaza where some of their oratories stood, there were piles of human skulls so regularly arranged that one could count them, and I estimated them at more than 100,000." Piles of thigh bones and additional skulls were strung on beams ... and "three priests who had charge were guarding them." Fr. Juan Zumdrraga, a Franciscan humanist scholar who was later made Bishop of Mexico, estimated that in any year 20,000 children were sacrificed. His estimate, according to R. C. Padden in his book The Hummingbird and the Hawk, is considered conservative. During the consecration of one temple in 1487, eighty thousand human beings were sacrificed by tag-teams of priests in a ninety-six-hour holocaust. By the end of the month-long ceremonial they had butchered more than 100,000 people. Constanzo's syncratic approach to his religious practices has proven problematic for Donald Hicks because Constanzo, like many sorcerers, used techniques borrowed from several magical sources. Hicks's thesis-that there is no such thing as organized satanic crime�denies the existence of any widespread "satanic conspiracy" or Satanism's influence on crime. Hicks acknowledges that cults which practice human sacrifice can, and sometimes do, exist individually. And this is how he classifies Constanzo, as an anomaly, an occult opportunist who took advantage of the ethnic/religious beliefs of middleclass Latinos involved in the flourishing cross-border drug trade. While this is one opinion of the case, the other side deserves serious consideration. Whatever consensus is eventually settled on Constanzo, significant elements of mind control, random abduction, sexual torture, and criminal conspiracy-all the claims made by satanic cult survivors-are present. Only Satanism seems to be missing. Satanism aside, what the existence of Constanzo and his followers suggests is the ease in which an international conspiracy, predicated on committing human sacrifice to ensure personal gain through crime, can flourish undetected. Constanzo was known to officials in the federal judicial police, to state police, and even municipal police in Mexico City. Many high-ranking police officials were his clients. The others feared his connections, great wealth, and supernatural power. Constanzo would probably still be at large had it not been for Mark Kilroy's father and mother, who possessed the determination to literally create an international incident. Mark's uncle, a U.S. Customs special agent, provided the political skills and contacts to push the case. But always, always about these things that live in the dark, an even darker shadow ties underneath. Ambiguity is the most consistent factor arising in all claims of underground "cultic" activity. Here Constanzo is guilty of the sorcerer's favorite trick, confusing the issue. While he was trained early in Santeria, he learned from a mayombero the elements of Palo, a sect based on the magical practices of the Kongo, an African tribe. Constanzo, according to Schutze, conducted mayombe rituals�called mambos in Kongo�and wrote spells in Bantu, an African language. He added the most hideous elements of Mayan/Aztec sacrificial sexual torture to his repertoire of black magic. According to journalist Phil Carlo, who witnessed the events unfolding in Mexico, "Constanzo's patron deity, to whom he was dedicated, was called Kadiempembe, the patron saint of criminals and criminal activity. It was from this deity that the Hernandez crime family was able to gain power over their drug-dealing competitors and keep from being seen by the police." Rafael Martinez, an anthropologist who specializes in Palo Mayombe, claimed at the time that the murders "shocked practitioners of a religion that uses human bones to gain magical power." Martinez, as quoted in the El Paso Herald-Post on April 25, 1989, said that Constanzo was guilty of "practicing a twisted form of Palo Mayombe." Martinez characterized Constanzo as a "psychopath." Psychological postmortems from anthropologists aside, from a nonacademic perspective even the best practices of Palo Mayombe would appear to an outside observer as the darkest kind of necrophilial sorcery. In her book Santeria, the Religion, anthropologist Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, an initiate into Santeria, describes Palo as witchcraft, or brujeria, consisting of two major types: Monte and Mayombe. Palo means stick, or branch, in Spanish. Regla de Palo, or sometimes Regla de Congo, is used to designate the sect, perhaps because it is a branch of Santeria, and perhaps because Palo's magic is worked with various pieces of wood and human bones. Palo initiates are known as paleros or mayomberos. Significant doctrinal differences separate Palo and Santeria. Most distinctive is the conception in Palo that through magic the palero controls the spirits of the dead, which are secured from the brains of corpses. In Santeria, the orishas act as intermediary aspects of the supreme deity Olofi. Orishas control the santero and the initiate alike through possession, and they "issue the orders." They may be propitiated through animal sacrifice, but Santeria ritual doesn't require any use of human body parts. Santeria tambors, or rituals, are conducted openly. Anyone may attend. According to Gonzalez-Wippler, there are two "branches" of Palo, a "good" or "Mayombe Christiana," and a "bad" or "Mayombe Judio," Spanish for "Jewish or 'unbaptized' Mayombe." This distinction is made because the so-called "Christian" nganga�or magic cauldron in which a human brain and body parts are mixed with blood, poisonous insects, bats, snakes, and a variety of other substances and objects-is sprinkled with holy water and the "Jewish" nganga, containing similar material, is not. Phil Carlo, who covered the exhumation of the bodies and smelled Constanzo's nganga, says he will never forget it. "It's an assaultive experience, a smell that causes a muscular reaction, a recoil as if from a blow. It takes weeks for the smell to leave your nostrils. It was a convention of all the worst odors I've ever known. It was a combination of the fruit and flowers going bad on the altar, body parts and organs in the nganga, and on the altar, sweat, urine, and feces that the people who were sacrificed had left behind." Carlo says that the sixteen- by twenty-two-foot shack was heated under the sun to oven temperatures. "The smell was so bad that in it you could actually hear the victim's pleas for death. When the police first opened the door they acted like they'd been hit with scalding water. These were tough, macho, Mexican cops who were hardened. They'd seen everything. They couldn't go back in without handkerchiefs over their noses." But mayomberos must learn to love it, to use it as a tool of dissociation, allowing the physical impact to create a psychophysiological wedge into another level of consciousness. Because of its overwhelming stench, the nganga must be carefully hidden. Though most mainstream Christians would blanch at the thought, the "Christian" palos consider that they work with God, or Sambia. Sambia is "a corruption of the Kongo name for the supreme deity Nsambi," according to Gonzalez-Wippler. "Christian" paleros use holy water, on the theory that the devil is about as comfortable in that medium as a bacillus in a petri dish full of penicillin. This "Christian" branch of the Palo sect is considered beneficent. Not so for Mayombe. Under careful scrutiny it appears that there is a syncratic welding of the major evil Mayombe deity, Kadiempembe, and the Christian Satan. Through Kadiempembe, "unbaptized" mayomberos work with the spirits of criminals, evil witches, and psychotics. These entities carry out the will of the mayombero. Hicks discounts several of the killings as strictly drugrelated executions. What Hicks overlooks is the fact that while the killings may not have been carried out in the spirit of strict ritual, in mayombe they need not be to have magical use. All extreme acts carried out by a mayombero are magical acts. Killing of any kind offers spirits to the control of the mayombero. Body parts are always useful in mayombe, especially if they are from an evil person. According to Hicks, Constanzo may have "applied elements of Palo Mayombe to his murderous drug business" since the belief system permits "personal interpretation" and "lacks a pronounced moral code." But this shouldn't indict all practitioners of Mayombe, nor "portend similar excursions into homicide by other believers." Constanzo himself did not use nor deal in drugs. His position was to conduct sorcery to protect the drug dealers. To do this, though, he most certainly dealt in death. "Constanzo walked with death, and lived and slept with it." says Carlo. "He was dedicated to death." Still, Hicks's point is well-taken. Just because santeros decapitate goats and mayomberos rob graves and boil the brains of criminals in cauldrons with snakes, centipedes, scorpions, poisonous toads, and chili peppers, singling out Santeria or Palo Mayombe or Vodoun as the religion of criminals "serves no lawenforcement purpose." Protestants and Catholics may be, and have been, just as violent and homicidal as paleros. Hicks's objective is to take cult-cops to task for believing that the spirituality is responsible for the evil. But his argument suffers when he falls back on cultural relativism, saying in essence that, sure, grave robbing for the express purpose of decapitating corpses is socially distasteful, but calling Mayombe a pathological religion is an ethnocentric cultural judgment. That may be, but plundering graves for body parts�even for the best of reasons in any culture�certainly generates a great deal of fear in those who do not do such things. People who choose as a lifestyle to inspire fear or dread in others tend to be sociopathic. Second-guessing anthropologists like Simpson and Hicks over matters of cultural context is not the objective of this inquiry. But in the interests of the discussion, there is something Hicks notes only in passing-in making reference to "the notorious Tom Wedge." Wedge, an Ohio probation officer, conducts occult training seminars. Along with journalist Robert Powers, he wrote a book called The Satan Hunter. Wedge, who has a distinct Christian orientation, disagreed with the academic "authorities" who seemed bent on pooh-poohing Constanzo for not fitting any of their preconceptions of Palo Mayombe. Wedge, according to Hicks, gave an interview published in the Austin American Statesman on April 13, 1989, and "pronounced [Constanzo's] rites Abakua, an association disputed by every other expert interviewed." Being a nonacademic and a Christian were two strikes against Wedge, but whatever Wedge's orientation, he, not the "experts," was right. Abukua, a term not used lightly by those Latinos to whom it is familiar, is the ultimate blood-libel, the worst possible thing a person can be accused of doing in societies that shrug at some very bad things. It is a word that frightens even the toughest Latino prison-gang members dedicated to La Vida Loca, the crazy life. When Mark Kilroy's body was dug up, police found a corpse whose lower legs had been hacked off above the knees, his chest torn open, and his heart ripped out. His brain had been chopped out of his skull. His spinal cord was yanked out. His fingers were severed, and his penis and testicles sliced off. Mexican law-enforcement officials murmured it was the work of the devil, or people who operate in his behalf. Mexican journalists ran stories about narcosatanistas, drug-Satanists. The American "experts," their own racist biases showing, quickly criticized this label as sloppy syncretism. Al Valdez, who has investigated these kinds of crimes for many years, says that Latinos shake their heads at such careful anthropological distinctions. Their societies understand such things. Even an illiterate understands what the gringo anthropologist can never quite seem to grasp�that all wickedness has a common source. In a world of competing evils and devastating horrors, precise nomenclatures and ethnographic descriptions are academic niceties. They serve as barriers of nonjudgment that sensitive people can place between themselves and certain uncomfortable truths. "Satanism is this. Palo Mayombe is that. Kadiempembe is not Satan. They have different names, and they are different things evolving from different cultural, social, and economic experiences. One is not the same as the other. You must be careful to avoid the taint of racist judgmentalism." So goes the litany. Name the thing, said the ancient magicians, and you control it. Word magic. But names and classifications aren't reality. Reality is the rotting headless corpse of the youngest Matamoros victim, little twelve-year-old Jose Garcia Luna, whose white rib bones jutted out of the blackened flesh where his heart had been hacked out so his blood could be drunk, and whose brain was tossed into the putrid broth of the sorcerer's nganga. This is the face of a human evil that has been called a thousand names, over thousands of years. Dismissing it, discounting the power of those who practice whatever form of it they learn, is a mistake. These are very dangerous people. They are invested in their beliefs. Whatever it is that people such as Constanzo learn to worship and serve is not a part of some culture. It is its own culture�has always been its own culture, and can be found in bits and pieces here and there in every human society. This kind of evil forms the darkest corner of the underground of rejected occult knowledge. And what all the disbelievers forget is that the rest of the world still believes. pps. 181-200 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
