The Patron Saint of the Badly Behaved

or Hadean Press Chapbook Review #1

Saint Cyprian - Saint of Necromancers (HADEAN PRESS)

As a wandering hoodoo I am long familiar with the iconic figure of St. Cyprian, a stalwart ally of the mercenary practitioners in both the North and South America’s as well as Europe.  The trouble with this figure, as Conjureman Ali suggests in his brief text regarding this paradoxical Saint, is that for some entirely inexplicable reason almost none of his lore has ever been translated into English out of the original Spanish and Portuguese.  Ali does us the great service of not dwelling over long on the fascinating permutations of St. Cyprians legend (couple of quick pages in case you live under a rock and have never heard of the patron Saint of necromancers, pagans and witches,) and gets straight to the business of translation.

Ali lays out the proper preparation of the three ritual oils, the first is remarkable similar in composition to Three Kings incense and I have no doubt would make an excellent general anointing oil (the use suggested within the text), a second which reminded me a lot of the old southern Cleo May recipes (and put to a similar use again according to the text,) the third though is unlike any of the compositions that I am familiar with and I shall have to give a shot.  This third oil is used in the consecration of St. Cyprians Amparo (along with a few of the more standard rituals) which out of all the workings in the brief text is in my opinion the true golden nugget.

The use of this amparo among Los Muertos to moderate the intensity of Santa Muerta’s presence was news to me but I can attest to its necessity.  When she is worked in an intimate sense she owns your ass.  She comes when she wants, she takes what she wants and she rides you when she feels like it.  I was entirely unaware that los Muertos utilized Cyprians amparo to mitigate the intensity of those exchanges and shall enthusiastically give that one a whirl. 

As an aside, I would pick on the scholarly lot considerably less if they took the time to provide resources like this more often.  I mean seriously, hundreds of years waiting translation!  It is my sincere hope that we will see more of those texts popularized in Latin America translated into English in the upcoming years.  Anyhow, I tip my hat to you Ali, a cat could never have anything but your Cyprian in 20 pages and I suspect they would do just fine.  

Saint Death, the Knights Templar and Corporate Colonialism

by Sylvia Ji

First some background because what’s happening in Mexico isn’t a drug war which is what mainstream western media is calling it, it’s a civil war.  It would be generally bad for North America if we admitted we had a civil war on our hands but that’s what we have. We have to go all the way back to the early 1990’s (long, long ago in a faraway magical place) and NAFTA.  The North American Free Trade Agreement or what is now in 2011 the world’s largest trade bloc.  The Zapatista’s declared war on the Mexican state on January 1^st, 1994, the day NAFTA came into force eliminating Article 27 of Mexico’s constitution.  If you’re not entirely clear on what a free trade agreement is, it’s basically when a collection of political leaders from different countries get together and make it a law that the private sector banking and commodities interests have more power than their respective country’s political leaders.  It is exactly as bad of an idea as it sounds like.

The immediate effects in Mexico were catastrophic; by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers NAFTA almost instantaneously drove some 2 million Mexicans out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the crushing of union organizing drives as government policy, has resulted in sweatshops along the border where wages typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.  The city of Juarez on the Mexican-American border where American corporate manufacturing is the employment mainstay has become a warren of shanty towns and a battleground between the Cartels and the Mexican and American drug enforcement agencies. 

The one highly profitable undertaking left in Mexico was smuggling.  Smuggling drugs north out of South America into the U.S. and guns south out of the U.S. into South America.  The cartels became regional super-powers, controlling cities and vast rural areas.  In 2000 President Vincente Fox began a concerted effort to take control of the illicit trade over the US/Mexican border in Tamaulipas.  He failed, turns out that the millions of impoverished Mexicans had something of a bolstering effect on the Cartels.  Previous to 1994 the criminal underground in Mexico was subject to the archetypal ‘dirty cop’, an ideologue deeply entrenched throughout secular culture.  The ‘dirty cop’ presupposes that the civil authority given the police is greater than that of the criminal class and so therefore the persistence of crime is a testimony to the moral decay of those in positions authority.  So in civilian terms what really happened back in 2000 was that the cartels took the international drug trade away from the military.  The civil authority was no longer greater than that of the Cartels.

So think about that and Google some stuff or whatever.  The western media has also focused its attention on the cult figure of Santa Muerta or Saint Death.  The sensational possibilities of a real life death cult in the secular north are just to delectable to pass on.  Or at least, it is a lot easier to pitch than the Christian zealots of the Knights Templar.  That’s right; the Cartel which controls Michoacán is the Knights Templar who have risen to dominance out of the wreckage of La Familia.  The Knights Templar were most likely the strong arm of La Familia, who collectively revered El Mas Loco as their spiritual leader.  El Mas Loco constructed an evangelical Christian belief system out of the writings of John Eldredge and the tenets of Swedenborgianism. 

The Templar Knights, like their namesakes before them are responsible for many of the most gruesome spectacles the civil war has produced thus far; hanging the bodies of rivals from bridges, tossing the decapitated heads of police enforcers onto nightclub dance-floors and in one instance sewing the face of a corrupt politician onto a soccer-ball. 

Los Zeta’s, La Familia’s great rival for control of the Mexican underground kills in a more traditionally ritual manner.  The bodies of victims of Los Zeta’s are often marked with iconography associated with the gang and have the head, genitals and heart removed.  Governmental raids have also identified the use of nganga among Los Muertos, showing distinctive influences from Palo and Kimbanda.  Santa Muerta is most likely analogous to Centella of the Palo or if not there is a curious amount of synchronous eschatological overlap between the two.  The original 31 Zeta’s were Guatemalan para-military recruited by the Gulf Cartel as bodyguards in the late 80’s.

Santa Muerta is understood as the Good Death which came for the Son of God and spared mankind the sufferings of their sin.  To the animist that good death is in fact the merciful figure of the story who acts on behalf of the desperate.  A good death was also a Catholic foundation point, absolution at the moment of death was paramount so that the soul did not stand before God burdened with its lifetime of sins.  Prayers and offerings were then made to preserve the individual for the Good Death.  This is eschatologically sound Christianity; Jesus admonishes the faithful to pray for their salvation by right of his Good Death (most likely because God didn’t listen to him).  In this regard Good Death becomes a point of spiritual liberation and security for those beyond the social and Christian moral scope and so Santa Muerta is equated with criminals and prostitutes because she is shelter and salvation for the desperate and sinful.

Santa Muerta’s devotee’s in Mexico are at war, a real civil war which has arisen out of unimaginable poverty and desperation and not the laughable crusades of suburban cashiers to dress like Green Day fan club presidents.  The obvious logic of taking the vital organs and the powers of the soul of one’s enemy will obviously escape those who are so crippled by their Protestant morals that they cannot even take the life of their own dinner but it makes perfect sense to a soldier and anyone else without the luxury of double standards.  In fact, we are seeing the very same sorcerous warfare utilized by the Vodoun during the Haitian revolution in action.  I suppose it is easy for the effete N. American intellectual to pontificate regarding the violent sorceries of the Petro, Danto and Zombi in driving the Aristocracy from Haiti, lost as they are to history.  Not so easy when those same sorceries now drive chaos and death across the border into secular suburban America where most of you still live with your parents.

The 20 million illegal Mexican immigrants that have flooded into America in the last decade are socio-political refugees from a civil war started by American and Canadian corporate interests so that they could extend record profits into the new millennium through the vehicle of cheap labor, a civil war with an unofficial death toll approaching 50,000 and that’s a conservative estimate.  That is an omnipresent specter of death right there.  Regardless of whether the individual is a criminal, a prostitute or a fortune-teller it’s all death all the time for an enormous portion of the population.  Santa Muerta is traditionally given offerings which mark her as a figure of the oppressed classes, weed and tequila and blood. All attempts to gentrify this figure will fail miserably.  Death waits for us all, whether you nod off old and decrepit or meet your end with a drug dealer’s bullet your final sacrifice to Santa Muerta will be your life. Los Muertos make sacrifice to Santa Muerta for a Good Death, to die without fear with their face towards the sun.  There is no room for a goddess like that in the American suburbs and the Protestant ethics they have dressed up in pagan iconography.  Hecate, Astarte, Kali... this was how they were worshipped, with the fearless violence of Los Muertos. 

Many want the violence of Los Muertos and the Palo to be incidental, an unfortunate extension of poverty and not the nature of the spirit itself.  Many want this to be so because the dark magic’s of the western establishment, the covens and orders seem laughable and impotent in comparison to the warrior modalities of the Palo and Los Muertos.  When the criminal smugglers operating in the lawless west of Haiti out of the pirate port of Tortuga began the rebellion the scholars and western ceremonialists said all the same things about them as they currently are saying about Los Muertos.  It isn’t a ‘revolution’; it’s a bunch of barbarous heathens killing the righteous.  Well, the ‘barbarous heathens’ of Haiti kicked the asses of the western ceremonialists because they knew death and they knew magic and moral rationalizations don’t count for much in the face of thing like that.

In war one uses what weapons are at hand.  We Valentines got family in Mexico going back a couple of generations and on the ground in Mexico we worry about the police and the military not the cartels.  On the ground no one thinks the mass graves full of dead women on the American border were the work of the cartels, anyone who knows anything about Santa Muerta knows you don’t fuck with her women.  It isn’t that far from the civil disobedience and legal protests of farmers in Chiapas to the warrior cults of Los Muertos, it is exactly one generation of pandemic poverty and oppression beneath a corrupt government.  Which when you think about it, isn’t really that far at all.

If they murdered your women and buried them in a hole, what would you do?   

Obscene Promises

or The Palo of Jersey

Spider Circus,
Gros Bon Ange of the witch-doctor Ryan Valentine,
detail from 'the White Devils'

Don’t cry too hard for the Paleros in Jersey.  This is how it is after the tower falls and they are better equipped to deal with the subtleties of the Passaic’s currents than the fuzz.  Really that’s what this is all about.  Back around the turn of the millennium the carcasses of chickens starting showing up on the shores of the Passaic in Jersey, all of them murdered in a cold and calculated fashion.  It goes that way sometimes, I am no expert in Palo but sometimes you don’t want to keep the meat of a sacrificial offering (especially in the case of bad sickness, most of the old hoodoo also recommend that the remains are disposed of at the banks of a river if possible). 

Despite what some may regard as a great denigration unto chickens, that’s not really the reason the cops have it in for the Paleros.  The cops have it in for them because they are working sorcerers and these days a working sorcerer is probably not working with the cops.  For the most part, peddling anything other than show tricks can be twisted up into a criminal offence if the Prosecution is really determined.  Sorcery by its very nature cannot really be protected under the aegis of religious freedom, nor should any sorcerer worth their salt desire it to be.  Yet because much of the work of sorcery in general is devotional and fetishistic (traditionally, religious modes of thought) these aspects don’t make good fuel for a prosecution.  Prosecution requires demonstrable criminal intent.

That’s where it gets tricky for the Palero, bokor and hoodoo alike.  Though the western establishment might erroneously equate religious and sorcerous devotion, the sorcerer does not.  There is no formal religious hierarchy to sustain these men and women, this is true of all of the ‘Creole’ spiritualities.  Even the pious and devoted houngans and mambos of Haitian Vodou must first gather to themselves a congregation before they might tend it and I am willing to wager once again that that’s the way it should be.  Therein lay the risk however, for when the Palero offers legitimate sorcerous influence in exchange for money they are taking their first step out from beneath the protection of religious law.  Most often the nature of the work itself carries the sorcerer away from the watchful eye of the establishment.

Occasionally (sometimes frequently, depending on the specialties of the individual) however, the sorcerer is brought into direct contact with the secular powers.  Being contracted for assistance in legal proceedings or to protect an individual from conventional law enforcement are both common examples of work that will carry the sorcerer that much farther away from the protection of religious law.  The Paleros scattered about Jersey have inflamed the obvious conflicts between the sorcerer and the legal establishment by being outrageously good at what they do, a degree of consternation on the part of the authorities can be forgiven.  I for one, am not terribly worried over this latest brew-haw (its like the 5th time in ten years), the Palo are notoriously effective when it comes to influencing legal proceedings.  If they choose to deal with this latest challenge through some conventional secular means I’ll obviously support them but I’m not exactly holding my breath.  That’s not how I would deal with it and I very much doubt it’s how they will either.       

I will address a few things though, for my fellow mercenaries.  The playing field has changed a bit in the last decade or so.  Based on the most recent base psychological profile (2006) from the FBI for a ‘ritual criminal’, only ritual fetish demonstrably used as a sympathetic conduit for violence or degradation (mangled dolls for instance) can be reliably used to demonstrate mental imbalance in a N. American court.  If the sorcerer has used any sort of physical link in the crafting of such a fetish (hair, nails, etc.) especially if they have done so without the express permission of the individual in whose likeness the simulacrum was made then the prosecution can demonstrate that the sorcerer is imbalanced with possibly violent tendencies.  If any of the ritual fetish are killing tools and have been used (blood or hair left on the fetish) then the sorcerer will almost definitely be treated as a possibly violent offender.  

Though the FBI and other secular enforcement agencies internationally will not violate religious law by attempting to prosecute animal sacrifice, they do still consider its practice by solo individuals a key marker for pathological violence. Any ritual work involving the public display of animal remains (among the Creole traditions most fetish are left somewhere they can be seen, or placed where their influence is desired) will be perceived as a physical threat and you will be promptly declared a violent criminal.  The instance of a goat’s tongue nailed to a tree outside a Jersey courthouse is an excellent example, no one could explain how it got there and no one took credit for it but it was nonetheless immediately construed as a death threat (and not the sorcerous attempt to silence a legal rival which it obviously was). Things to think about.  Sometimes the renegade nature of the act itself will assure its success and I wholeheartedly enjoy the renegade nature of contemporary sorcery but only a fool does not familiarize themselves with their rivals weapons.

Currently, it is not against the law to own human remains in the States (since the proliferation of the cults of Los Muertos and Palo a movement has begun to press for a rewrite of these laws in America) even if those remains are stolen, as long as the conditions they are kept under are sanitary and the items are not used as a means of psychological abuse or intimidation. (Your not allowed to just have human remains because you like them in Canada so technically its not legal, but for the purposes of art, spirituality or medicine donated remains can be used but not bought and sold).  The Palo, los Muertos and the Red and Black Schools of Vodou all greatly value human remains for their talismanic properties.  It is not impossible to procure human remains legally (as it is so often held) but it is difficult and tremendously expensive and so the proliferation of los Muertos and the Palo in N. America has led to a brisk and illegal black market trade in human remains.  Possession of remains of any sort will raise the eyebrow of the establishment and you will most definitely be treated as a dangerous suspect should they be found in your possession (this is obviously compounded if they are shown to be stolen) though you cannot be charged for this alone.

Don’t charge your clients up front when it can be avoided.  If you only accept full payment for services rendered it is a lot harder for you to be prosecuted for extortion, fraud or confidence scams.  An individual who provides payment upon the successful completion of a service cannot easily claim to have been extorted, taking money upfront for magical services can make an individual much more vulnerable to prosecution.  One of the very best reasons the cops in Jersey haven’t been able to make anything stick to the Paleros in the last ten years is that they don’t have any unsatisfied customers and that remains the best defense to this day.  Know your region, if you’re going to charge upfront for some services then educate yourself as to the point at which the cash value of a perceived fraud has moved you from petty to major criminal charges.

If you own a shop or botanica of any sort then learn the difference between a criminal raid and an inspection by your local municipal enforcement agencies.  In most places in N. America any storefront selling herbs, incense or holistic medicines can come under the investigation of local food and drug agencies.  You are legally obligated to co-operate with a municipal inspection of any kind unless you are requested to give up confidential information.  My advice to shop owners is to get a digital camera and keep it around.  When inspected, film everything.

If cops or vans have arrived with the enforcement agents, then you are about to be subjected to a criminal raid and seizure.  In this case, you are not obligated to help in any way or to answer any questions and unless you are personally under arrest your movements cannot legally be restricted.  Once again, if this occurs say nothing (you will save your lawyer the trouble of having all of that testimony struck as inadmissible and yourself a tidy sum in legal fees) and film everything.  Enforcement agents will not like the camera but as I mentioned above your movements cannot be legally restricted unless you are personally under arrest.  Any criminal raid also requires a warrant, read it carefully and if the enforcement agents violate its conditions at any point, film it.  Any representative of any agency not mentioned in the warrant can be forced from private property and should be immediately asked to leave.  Did I mention film it?

There are always local vagaries when it comes to the application of secular law and a sorcerer with a successful private practice would do well to familiarize themselves with them.  The FBI methods for profiling repeat criminals hold in Canada as well as the States and they represent a good model for how to attract the wrong kind of attention.  In some cases though, like the law in the States and the cults of the Palo and Los Muertos some degree of rivalry should really just be expected.

As for the latest installment in the ongoing drama of the Paleros vs. the Jersey PD, I suspect the Paleros will once again make good on their obscene promises because they are working sorcerers and making good on obscene promises is what we do for a living.