Geoff's Blog

Enduring Wedding Traditions.

I said I was gonna try to do it this weekend, and I did it:

The Faith Instinct (Review).

Canaima:

Among many indigenous peoples of the Guyana Amazon, the term canaima refers both to a mode of ritual killing and to its practitioners, a form of dark shamanism involving the mutilation and lingering death of its victim, who becomes, after death, the shaman’s food….

In these fatal attacks, intended to produce ritual food, the victim is struck from behind with a special club and the tongue pierced with the fang of a venomous snake, so the victim cannot speak. An iguana or armadillo tail is inserted into the rectum and the anal muscles stripped out. The anal sphincter is forced out by pressing on the stomach and severed. A thin flexed twig is inserted into the rectum, so that it opens the anal tract, into which are inserted packets of herbs, beginning a process of autolysis by which the body begins to dissolve….

Three days after death, the shaman inserts a hollow stick into the rotting, buried body—decaying human remains smell sweet to a canaima—and sucks out the the putrid liquid, which makes the sorcerer invulnerable to revenge by the victim’s family.

Gimme that old-time aboriginal spirituality….

Sweet fucking Jesus. “Savages” doesn’t begin to describe these people.

There’s been an emphasis on the curing, beneficial aspects of shamanism. We want to set the ethnographic record straight by reminding people of the very important cosmological links between the power to kill and the power to cure. They represent complementary possibilities of the universe, and are fundamental to the way shamanic activity is conceived.”

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

—Friedrich Nietzsche