Since checking in on Santa Muerte the situation has just got worse:

To the dismay of the Catholic church and the disgust of the Mexican government, a bogus saint from popular folklore has become a crucial accessory for junkies, gang members and cartel kingpins alike.

The government has dubbed the skeleton a “narco-saint” and sent troops to destroy the garishly decorated roadside shrines erected in her honour. In drug-related trials or in raids on supposed cartel strongholds, Santa Muerte is repeatedly invoked as an indication of depravity and guilt.

At the trial of Gabriel Cardona, accused of kidnapping and murder on behalf of the Gulf cartel, investigators alleged that he collected his victims’ blood in a glass and drank a toast to Santa Muerte. When police smashed into a house allegedly occupied by a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, they found an entire room turned into a Santa Muerte chapel.

To residents of Ciudad Juarez, the fuss over a cartoon-like figurine who appears more of a grim tart than a grim reaper would be funny were it not so desperate. After two years of spiralling strife, a military surge financed in part by the US has not only failed to reduce the mayhem, but many here believe it has made it worse.

Source

The violence can be both shocking and macabre:

Mexico's drug war reached new levels of brutality at the weekend when a gang member was killed and cut into seven pieces as a warning to members of a cartel.

To drive home the point, the victim's face was sliced off and stitched on to a football.

...

His torso was found in a plastic container on the streets of Los Mochis; elsewhere another box contained his arms, legs and skull, said said Martin Robles, a spokesman for Sinaloa prosecutors.

Hernandez's face, sewn on to a football, was left in a plastic bag near city hall. A note read: 'Happy New Year, because this will be your last.'

It almost recalls the suggestion that human heads were used in Mesoamerican ballgames.

Source

Hat tip

Well witch hunting seems to be a topic that comes up here a lot but that doesn't mean it can't get odder, which is where the witch gun comes in:

The National President of Sierra Leone Indigenous Traditional Healers Union, Dr. Alhaji Suliaman Kabba, has stated that for one to operate witch gun, the person must know about witchcraft. He made the statement at his Calaba Town office in Freetown while explaining the dangers of witch gun and the number of witch gun confessions in late 2009. He said a person who operates witch gun would never be perceived by the ordinary eye adding that such people only carry out their evil acts when they are in an invisible state.

Dr. Kabba also said that formerly witch guns were used by members of secret societies to punish what he called law breakers. He opined that “today people have turned this gun into an instrument to make money. In fact some use as low as three or five thousand Leones to kill their brothers, friends and other family members.”

He further stated that “most witch gun killings are borne out of malicious jealousy, for positions in offices, for political reasons and a host of other related reasons.” The Traditional Healer President continued to categorize the different types of witch guns and their deadly effects. “The earliest and deadliest type of witch gun is made out of the husk from rice, but today's witch guns are made out of gun powder while others are made out of lead. In fact the type of witch gun bullet that is most frequently removed when people are shot is the lead.”

He maintained that it was impossible for a traditional healer to remove more than four witch gun bullets from someone's body. “A lot of healers use means to inject more witch gun bullets into people's body. This is normally done with the intention of making money.”

Is it like bone pointing, in that it is a means to direct a curse at an individual or is it weirder than that?

Source

Hat tip

Looking around I stumbled across another article on this:

There aren’t many medical mysteries in Sierra Leone.

If a medical doctor can’t diagnose an ailment or if a patient can’t afford to see a doctor, he or she usually comes to one conclusion about the cause of the pain and suffering: they must have been shot by a witch gun. The illness could be typhoid or schizophrenia, but the symptoms are often attributed to some form of black magic.

...

Strange behaviour or crippling illnesses, everyone tells me, usually means someone has been shot by a witch gun, which can’t be seen by the naked eye. Mental illness is most often attributed to witchcraft, because its symptoms are so difficult to understand. A traditional healer claims to be able cure people of their ailments and charges a hefty fee for his services. Patients pay with money, chickens or palm oil and are usually given herbs as treatment.

Source

Hat tip

Which puts it somewhere between a catch-all wastebin for everything they can't diagnose and also the key to a money making scheme for anyone claiming to be a witchdoctor. Still I can't imagine it'll be long before one appears in a video game, as it is a great name (as is Gun Witch, a name I pondered for a character before finding one already existed of that name, as well as it being the alias of a guy in the seduction community and his technique, which I won't link to - you'll have to Google it).

The songlines are fascinating part legend, part roadmap, part psychogeography and a whole lot more besides. This is perfectly demonstrated in the news that some of the events and locations mentioned in the Dreamiing stories might have lead scientists to make new discoveries of unknown impact craters:

An Australian Aboriginal 'Dreaming' story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory.

Duane Hamacher, an astrophysicist studying Aboriginal astronomy at Sydney's Macquarie University, used Google Maps to search for the signs of impact craters in areas related to Aboriginal stories of stars or stones falling from the sky.

One story, from the folklore of the Arrernte people, is about a star falling to Earth at a site called Puka. This led to a search on Google Maps of Palm Valley, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs. Here Hamacher discovered what looked like a crater, which he confirmed with surveys in the field in September 2009.

It gets interesting because the Aborigines couldn't possibly have seen this form:

Despite the link to the Dreaming story, weathering and the absence of meteorite fragments suggest that the crater is millions of years old and humans could not possibly have witnessed the event, Hamacher said.

Another crater at Gosse's Bluff, 170 km west of Alice Springs, is 140 million years old, and is also the subject of an Arrernte Dreaming story about a "cosmic baby" which fell to Earth.

Instead, Hamacher thinks Arrernte Aborigines may have learned to recognise craters from more recent impacts and then deduced the origin of the Palm Valley and Gosse's Bluff craters. One more recent example of craters created by an impact are the Henbury craters, 70 km from Palm Valley and just 4,000 years old.

Here it is:

Could it all be coincidence?

Hamacher's comparison of known craters and Aboriginal stories about cosmic impacts have not yet uncovered conclusive evidence that meteorite impacts have been witnessed and incorporated into oral tradition.<br /><br />But he has found documented evidence of the Henbury craters being referred to as &quot;chindu china waru chingi yabu&quot; by Aboriginal elders, which he said roughly translates as &quot;Sun walk fire devil rock&quot;.</p></blockquote>
<p>There are some great comments, worth nosing through including:</p>
<blockquote><p>Hamacher's comment that the Arrernte people &quot;may have learned to recognise craters .... and then deduce the origin&quot; is another example of patronising whitefeller thinking. Why would Elders do that when they have an unbroken oral connection back through deep time to the Dawn of Creation? The Githabul Ngarakbul people - formerly and fraudulently known as Bandjalung - trace their lineage back &quot;to the intelligent water which fell from the tail of the great Serpent&quot; (a comet). Evidence that life was spawned from cometary debris is now verified by NASA and forms the basis of the Githabul claim of suveranty over their lands, reluctantly acknowledged now by government.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Let's keep alive our sense of wonder and excitement as science and mythology combine to unravel the great mysteries of who we are and whence we came.<br />An Adnyamthanha Elder, who adopted me as his niece, told me stories from his Grandfathers of &quot;walking with the flesh-eating lizards&quot;. The Adnymathanha have a name for that crittur, who is as alive now in their stories as he was in their lands.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course, that may raise more questions than it answers too.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3225/aboriginal-dreaming-story-leads-meteorite-crater" target="_blank" title="Open in new window">Source</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.anomalist.com/" target="_blank" title="Open in new window">Hat tip</a></p>
<p>It might only be the start of this type of investigation:</p>
<blockquote><p>Mr Hamacher said the discovery of a connection between dreamtime stories and reality was an exciting one.<br /><br />&quot;Lots of Aboriginal dreamtime stories are associated with craters, meteorites and cosmic impacts and although some craters are millions of years old and people would not have been able to witness the impact, it seems as if traditional dreaming stories know about the crater's origin.&quot;<br /><br />One of the stories - the one that local Arrernte people tell about a star that fell into a waterhole called Puka in the valley, where Kulaia, the serpent, lived - had led to the discovery of the ancient crater, which the team proposed to name Puka, but there were &quot;many, many more&quot;, Mr Hamacher said.<br /><br />&quot;We found stories with descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls related to places in Arnhem Land - we assume there are more meteorite craters out there and science doesn't even know about their existence yet.&quot;</p></blockquote>
<p>So this isn't the end of the story and we'll track further developments as they happen.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/google-earth-confirms-dreamtime-meteor-legend/story-e6frf7jx-1225814665715" target="_blank" title="Open in new window">Source</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.dailygrail.com/News-Briefs/2010/1/News-Briefs-03-01-2010" target="_blank" title="Open in new window">Hat tip</a></p></body>
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A letter in the current Fortean Times highlights an intriguing tale, suggesting suppression of a documentary linking Rennes-le-Chateau (which must be bordering on a cliché these days) with Girona and the swirl of connections in the city linking Kabbalah and Jean Cocteau. David V. Barrett (the writer of the letter) wrote and article in the Fortean Times 226 (pages 46-52) named after the book it was based on: City of Secrets an autobiography by Patrice Chaplin (yes Chaplin, she married Michael Charlie's son). The article got the attention of a filmmaker who produced a half hour documentary on the topic. It debuted in November 2008 was shown once on Controversy TV on October 2009 and then the producer Carrie Kirkpatrick got this email (worth noting that this might a conspiratorial first - the use of kisses to seal an email from "the people at the top," clearly a direct link to Judas himself!!):

Hi Carrie,

Hope you are well? Unfortunately after a few meetings with the people at the top we have been asked to pull your shows of the channel, and unfortunately are hands are tied Carrie. I know you have gone to alot of trouble to get these shows ready for us, and also promoting it to your friends and even going to the extent of paying for the music. But we have been told that Due to circumstances out of control we cannot show them anymore. I understand that you will not be happy with this decision, but i also hope you understand that we have to abide by the people above us and their decisions. I ‘m sorry to have to be the one to deliver the news, and i hope you understand the situation we are in.

Best wishes

------- xx

This could get the conspiratorially-minded excited and Barrett does wonder "whose sensitive esoteric toes has Carrie Kirkpatrick trodden on in her documentary? Has she inadvertently revealed secrets or connections beyond those in Patrice Chaplin's book and my article?" This does raise the problem that such people would be trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle and are only drawing attention to the film. When it could have been allowed to quietly die on a British TV channel I've never heard of (despite it sounding right up my alley) the film remained in the hands of the producer (no mysterious "break-ins" or "accidents" to hush it all up) and now they have put it online for everyone to watch, now with an extra shiny frisson as "the film they tried to ban." In fact you can watch it here:

At the next AGM of the Secret Rulers of the World (plus the Internet), I expect a lot of serious questions to be asked of whoever dropped the ball on letting this out into the wild.

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