the unlikely story of how America slipped the surly bonds of earth & came to
believe in signs & portents that would make the middle ages blush
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An African politician recalled that in 1952, a man returned to his home area in central Kenya, much to the surprise of his neighbors: "He had been missing since 1927. We thought he had been slaughtered by the Nairobi Fire Brigade between 1930–1940 for his blood, which we believed was taken for use by the Medical Department for the treatment of Europeans with anaemic diseases." In 1986, however, a man in western Kenya told my assistant and I that it was the police, not the firemen, who captured Africans ("ordinary people" just "associated firemen with bloodsucking because of the color of their equipment") and kept their victims in pits beneath the police station.
Bachicabo, a hamlet in Alava, was one of the first places to reproduce the visions. Located in the valley of Valdegovia on the border with Burgos, it was beyond the zone from which buses took people to Ezkioga. The first to see the Virgin there was the fourteen-year-old son of an emigrant to Sestao, a Bilbao industrial suburb; the boy was back in the village for the summer. On about 2 August 1931 he was tending oxen a kilometer from the village near a spring called Petrás, where the villagers often stopped on their annual pilgrimage to the shrine of Nuestra Señora de Angosto. In a cavity of a large boulder he saw a flower, and when he went to touch it, the Virgin Mary appeared in its place.
Group trance might take violent forms, as when maskers impersonating Rangda the Witch or Barong the Dragon "would go wild, rush out of the accustomed performance place into the crowd... then fall unconscious and have to be revived." In Gianjar district, the temple court would at times be filled with wild figures brandishing krisses, leaping, and shouting, as they enacted the giant Pig, Lion, or Witch that possessed them, and the rapt followers of Barong, men and women alike, would stab themselves with their krisses and frenziedly "hurl themselves forward to suck the gushing blood" from a fellow trancer's wounds.
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