On Human Sacrifice
It is always difficult to review a friend's
book, especially when it is a signed gift - a bad review might offend
and a good review be distrusted. Fortunately, Jimmy Lee Shreeve is one
of the least 'precious' of litterateurs, a man who consciously models
his style on American 'gonzo' journalism, a man for whom criticism is
like water off a duck's back. So it is with some pleasure that I
can say that this book really is worth reading, assuming that you have a
strong stomach and that you take it for what it is and not for what you
might like to be. The book is published by Barricade whose list
includes quite a large number of more conventional true crime books that
concentrate on one of America's greatest gifts to the world - the
'romance' of organised crime. From this perspective, 'Human Sacrifice'
is definitely a bit offbeat because it is looking at murder not as
business or art or compulsion but as religious tool.
Shreeve's
own perspective is basically Ayn Rand with balls. But with a twist. He
has a finely tuned sense of the use of Magick, of the shamanic, of
voodoo, of imagination and of the 'irrational'. The ambiguity of human
sacrifice fascinates him. First, it was possibly what our own ancestors
did. Second, it can be surprisingly sophisticated in its reasoning.
Third, its religious component is often sincere - people really do
believe in the amoral spirit world that underpins the 'crime'. Human
sacrifice for 'spiritual' reasons certainly raises disturbing questions
about cultural relativism and 'savagery' that are extremely inconvenient
in our politically correct age.
There are two aspects of this
book worth mentioning - style and content. The style is very engaging if
you are prepared to accept it as tabloid journalism. In-depth research (Shreeve wears his learning lightly but he
ticks all the right boxes here) is combined with direct interviews with
key figures, personal experience (when perhaps he gets most lyrical to
the point of his reader not quite suppressing a smile at his
booze-fuelled adventures and meetings with Mr. D), some hearsay and
transcripts of his radio show. With some writers this melange
could have descended into a mess - he is disarming about how he had
problems with finishing a chapter or understanding an issue - but
somehow he makes it all hang together. But the book must rise or
fall as 'true crime' on its content. The style is not in the Truman
Capote league but it does serves its purpose of keeping the reader going
and stimulated.
Over 300 or so pages, he takes a look at the
disturbing 'torso in the Thames' case where the victim (a young boy)
seems likely to have been murdered for black magic purposes, the 'muti'
culture of Africa (a key element in the recent 'District 9' film from
South Africa), 'Satanic' killings in Germany and the US (often linked to
disaffected youth in the heavy metal culture), survivals of Andean
human sacrifice and grave robbing for the Palo Moyembe cult in the
hispanic communities of North America. There are also passing
references to the possible role of human sacrifice amongst the drug
lords of Mexico and the well-attested survival of human sacrifice in
some Indian Tantric cults. Apart from the murders linked to disturbed
Western kids (which, it has to be said, are rare), nearly all these
killings are linked to extremely deprived third world cultures which are
being disrupted by modernisation.
Shreeve is a liberal sort of
guy with respect for other cultures, though less respect for religion as
a whole, but it is hard not to draw the conclusion that some serious
savagery (if we include honour killings, female circumcision and so forth alongside magickal murder) is on the very edge of normal in some parts of the so-called
South. Worse, this nightmare of cruelty that might have come from an HP
Lovecraft tale as something 'other' appeared at one time to be leaching into the West
through mass economic migration. Killing for criminal magical
benefit is probably very rare in the West and not common in the South
but the good folk of New Jersey and other East Coast cities are not
inclined to feel very progressive when grannies' bones turn up in a
cauldron in a nearby shaman's lair and the local migrants cannot see
that they have done anything wrong in making use of them.
Similarly,
the leaching of 'bad' religion is not just about the wrong end of
'Juju' or Muti but is also embedded in primitive Christianity.
On the one hand, Christian activists have been persecuting non-criminal
pagans with tales of sorcery involving suggestions of human sacrifice
while others of their type have been 'beating the devil' out of little
girls. Western social services are caught between the rock of
liberal respect for other cultures and the hard place of the demand that
the authorities police abuse amongst people of very low education with
beliefs that are, shall we say, challenging. Most nice middle class
people do not see the rising new edge of this culture clash in the inner
cities where village life is transported into a sophisticated welfare
society by the simple expedient of getting on a jumbo jet and walking
through some very weak border controls.
But let's be clear -
the abuses are exceptional in their worst form, the blood rites reported by Shreeve, although, no doubt, for each of
these few cases, there are tens of thousands of incidents of petty
viciousness born of poverty and habit that go on behind closed doors and
which are widely tolerated as customary. The worry is that the
requirements of social order may mean that abuses are allowed to
continue and be covered up rather than allow fear to drive these cultures
underground or their extreme examples fuel intercommunal conflict with the modern equivalent of the 'Jewish blood libel'. Yet poverty does breed crime and magical or shamanic practice
is used to buttress the power of local drug lords. Keeping things in the
open and informally monitored is good policy. One of the themes
of the book is how drug, crime and political interests in the third
world can resort to extreme magickal measures, including killing, in
order to gain power and advantage. Once this sort of thinking is
embedded in a society, it can become extremely difficult to eradicate.
The
authorities' approach to Palo Moyembe in the US, for example, is
increasingly to treat it as a legitimate religion and then to try and
contain and control its grave-robbing - but one suspects that African 'Muti'
may be a much more formidable problem with body parts having a value
that encourages a culture of killing where life is cheap. Unfortunately,
this is not a well documented world. Shreeve does his best but it is
clear that, at times (and a reason for the four rather than five stars
of the review), he takes a story, as a tabloid journalist might, that
could be true but turns it into something that is probably true only as far
as he is concerned. The most extreme story in the book (a truly gruesome
story of horrific African sacrifice by 'two hundred cuts') has the feel
of an urban legend from start to finish.
Most of the magical
influx into the West is an eclectic and intensified, perhaps neurotic,
version of tribal and cultural practices that were once suppressed with
more or less success by district administrators and priests. Fifty years
of failed decolonisation combined with the stresses and strains of
globalisation may have rebuilt a base for practices that are sometimes the
last hope of extremely frightened and poor people so that it is very
credible that extreme magickal solutions, involving a revival of human
sacrifice and murdering for body parts, should emerge. This is 'Ghost
Dance' stuff rather than a genuine community-based expression of
traditionalist religious practice.
It is certainly questionable
just how prevalent all this is. My guess is that the revival of radical
traditionalist religions is a very real phenomenon and that the use of
extreme solutions to problems still exists in pockets but that it is still only the most extreme personalities who are engaging in the worst excesses. And perhaps these are just people who would be a Jeffrey Dahmer in our world where there is no need to coat desire in spiritual mumbo-jumbo. Most
other people muddle along in their particular spiritual insanity in developed and developing world alike without causing much
harm to others. I am equally persuaded in reading this book
that the liberal-minded determination to deny that claims of extreme
practices are just a form of racism are also unfounded. These crimes are
not perpetrated by 'black' people, they are perpetrated by people who are extremely ignorant,
frightened and poor or are sociopaths you will find in any cultural community and who just happen to have darker skins. There is still no excuse for racism here but when the crime does exist (as in imported South Asian child abuse) it should be called out.
As Shreeve points out, when white people
were extremely ignorant, frightened and poor - and living in their
equivalent of the anarchic conditions of Africa, upper Peru or the
Mexican border - they were also engaged in similar 'magickal' and
shamanic projects that also resulted in attested cases of deliberate
killing for 'spiritual' purposes. The witch hunts of the Early Modern era were murderous and 'spiritual' and could be regarded as variants of human sacrifice. This raises a big policy issue
for the West. There are two different ways of dealing with the 'import'
of socially negative forms of magick since it cannot be fully suppressed - partly because the oppressive
act of suppression in itself binds the magickal more effectively to
their magick. The obvious way is to deal with the issues raised
is in the way that the US East Coast police authorities are handling Palo
Moyembe - through understanding, dialogue and education of both sides in
the community.
Ideally, the West would also be educating poor South
Americans and Africans but on their own terms although the scale of the task is so huge. There
are no jobs for all the educated and third worlders themselves bridle at
what they see as cultural imperialism by the back door. The progressive
impulse of the Western centre-left drove policy in the direction of
investment in the third world, especially in education, until recently
as a means of bringing peasant populations into something approaching a
cultural middle class. The truth is, however, that the money has run out
for this as a forward policy and the policy was never one adequate in scale or integrated with the material needs of populations. Governments are going to be
hard pressed even to maintain the programmes that they have in their
own inner cities.
It was only a matter of time before the pressure
on budgets and on social expectations (especially when the indigenous
populations of the West get spooked) are concentrated on very specific abuses
in which the authorities have to take action against the culture
and beiefs of migrants. In the UK, it took an inordinate amount of time
to deal with forced marriages and honour killings let alone female circumcision and child abuse because no one wanted
to be 'racist'. Courageous centre-left political figures had to shift
the agenda from one of racism to women's rights to get some of these matters dealt
with. Great progress has been made in the last decade but getting the authorities to act was initially like squeezing blood out of a stone, As to 'human sacrifice, although not currently an immediate problem, there are
clues that third world 'spiritual' practices that involve abuse (such as
Christian fundamentalist treatment of children), 'muti' and basic fraud could become an issue that permits extremity of another order. Mass migration and emerging world deprivation are powder kegs in
which different basic human rights and freedoms conflict with each other
and with lack of resources.
Shreeve's book (though he does not
go down this political route) is an important starting point in opening
up a debate ourselves before it is opened up in an infinitely nastier way
by some social services failure or scandal. It is also littered with
interesting insights into magical and shamanic thinking. Although none of
it will be new to people who have moved in those circles, it should be
educative for anyone fascinated by true crime and who is more used to
books on forensics or the doings of the Lucchese family. It has to be said that in the fifteen or so years since this book was published, matters have not got worse and possibly they have got much better as far as the West is concerned. Policing and public policy appeared to recognise the issues early and to have adjusted accordingly. Certainly, while murder for pleasure or profit still happens a fair amount, murder for 'spiritual' or magical reasons does not.
Shreeve,
for all his bragaddocio, gun-toting and gin (and, yes, he presents that
image in his real life despite being a Norfolk-based family man), is a
very humane individual. He could have followed tabloid instincts and
presented a paradigm of savagery based on Daily Mail editorialising that would have sucked in
every Aryan Brother or BNP member from miles around - but he does not do
so. He sees the desire for magical succour and the actuality of
shamanic experience as part of the human condition, one that,
eventually, we will grow out of as we mature. I am not at all
convinced by his attempt to explain the human condition in his final
chapter along left brain/right brain lines but he is on the right path. As I put to him in a private note,
reasoning or rationalism and magick or imagination are merely tools of a
sophisticated 'rational' self that makes judgements that are not fully
rational in the positivist sense but are rational from the existential perspective
of that person.
Human sacrifice can sometimes become a rational crime
based on deep belief under certain extreme conditions and in certain
types of culture. Having managed, with much labour, to push much of that
type of thinking to one side in the educated and prosperous West, it is
now vital to stop its re-entry by the back door of migration. There is no excuse for excessive tolerance of what we
should not be afraid to call imported savagery, whether Christian
fundamentalist or 'Muti'. There is a separate public debate,
still suppressed by the bien-pensants, to be had about mass migration
and national sustainability but this is not the same as a debate on a
social commitment to an investment in monitoring abusive social practices and
containing such abuse while showing respect for belief systems that have an
important role in allowing village people to adjust to modern urban
life. If we are to have mass migration, then let's not be irresponsible
about its social effects.