Animal Sacrifice: Are They Doing It Wrong?

Possible animal sacrifice location
A possible animal sacrifice location in the Howard Beach area. J.C. Rice (New York Post)

The New York Post had two articles recently on apparent animal sacrifice in the Jamaica Bay area of Long Island (politically in both Brooklyn and Queens).

Animal Sacrifices on the Rise in Queens with Chickens, Pigs being Tortured in ‘Twisted’ Rituals” appeared on September 7, 2024.

Animal sacrifices are surging in Queens, with chickens, pigs and rats being tortured, mutilated or killed in “twisted” religious rituals in parkland surrounding Jamaica Bay, The Post has learned. 

In a little over a month, at least nine wounded animals or carcasses have been discovered in the federally-managed Spring Creek Park in Howard Beach and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Broad Channel — including five live pigs with partially severed ears.

Creatures recovered from the revolting scene also include a near-dead baby rat tied up in a bag with chicken bones; a freshly decapitated chicken head; a live hen in distress; and a dead dog with its neck snapped.

Ethnographically, the article adds, “Jamaica Bay has been a popular religious site among members of the Hindu Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean diaspora living in nearby neighborhoods, including Richmond Hill and Ozone Park..”

The Post was back on September 14th with “Feds, City to Crack Down on Animal Sacrifices in NYC’s Jamaica Bay after Dog-Carcass with Snapped Neck, Wounded Pigs Found. Mobile lights were to be installed to thwart the evil cultists operating under cover of darkness! I wonder how that worked out.

“Feds, City” should talk to their colleagues in South Florida about this problem. It was there, after all, that a legal case arose that led to the Supreme Court’s verdict in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. For a good backgrounder on the case, listen to Heather Freeman’s Magic in the United States podcast episode on the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye. (A print transcript is also available at that link.)

In essence, per the Court, animal sacrifice for religious purposes is not illegal in the United States under the First Amendment.

Animal sacrifice pops up repeatedly in the Bible. Many Muslims partake in qurban (animal sacrifice) at the feast of Eid al-Adha. Some Orthodox Jews have a practice of waving a live chicken overhead while praying on Yom Kippur Eve, then slaughtering it for a meal according to the kosher rules. And Christians describe Jesus as the Supreme Sacrifice, some descibing themselves as “washed in the blood of the [sacrificial] Lamb.

A. J. Jacobs, a non-religious Jewish writer in NYC, devotes a semi-humorous section of his book A Year of Living Bibically to attempting to join Hasidic Jews iin this ritual.1

Pagan studies scholars have tended to skirt sacrifice in the Afro-Diasporic religiions, which is why Heather Freeman’s podcast was an exception. There has been some writing on blót in Asatru, which may include sacrifice, starting with Michael Strmiska’s 2007 article “Putting the Blood back into Blót: The Revival of Animal Sacrifice in Modern Nordic Paganism.”

Animal sacrifice was a key religious practice of the pre-Christian peoples of Germanic Northern Europe. It is now being revived by some modern Pagans who reconstruct pre-Christian Germanic religious traditions, drawing on medieval Icelandic literature as well as Anglo-Saxon literature and other related sources (155).

Jefferson Calico’s 2018 book Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America devotes an entire chapter to the topic, examining its social, religious, and ethical contexts, noting that “Eating the sacrifice2 becomes a sacred as well as a dissenting act that calls into quesion and occasions a critique of secular, mainstream American eating practices” (314).

Sacrifice means to make something sacred by connecting it to the divine, yet when it comes to the Jamaica Bay incidents, I have so many questions. Were all these animal remain the product of sacrificial rituals?

The Asatru would have eaten the “blotted” pig — were the ones found abandoned by some urban homesteader? A dead dog? Killed in ritual or killed to cause pain to its owner? Baby rat? (Mom made him get rid of it?). Cops3 operate with simple categories. What happens when you make a collar and end up in court being grilled4 by a First Amendment lawyer? Is it easier just to put up some lights than sort out the perpetrators, when some are criminals and others part of a protected class?

  1. Subtitled “One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,” the book describes his attempt to follow all the Hebrew Bible’s rules while living in New York City — with a very patient wife. []
  2. As is normally done in most cultures. []
  3. Like vegans. []
  4. Pun intended. []

Of Animals —  Magical and Cryptic

A new issue of the Hellbore zine, No. 11, “The Animal Issue” has been published. Real life is trying to keep up. (See below.)

Hellebore is available from a few shops in the UK or by mail.

Hares that are witches in disguise, ravens with prophetic powers, sacrificial wrens representing the god-king. Animals are often included in folk horror narratives because of their symbolic traits, or because of the folk beliefs surrounding them. Historically, animals have been understood as objects of cult worship, deities or devils incarnate, witches’ companions, omen bringers. They’ve also been re-imagined as hybrids, chimeras, and cryptids.

In this issue we tell tales of hares, moonlight, and madness, of half-glimpsed uncanny felines and the demon king of cats, of monstrous serpents with an appetite for destruction, of seemingly unassuming yet all-powerful toads. From the Isle of Man to the flatlands of Suffolk, the animals in these stories rise from the forest, from the field, from the waters, to re-enchant the landscape of these isles.

Elizabeth Dearnley’s article “Running with Hares” at least acknowledges North American jackrabbits (true hares). Nothing about Lepus americanus, the snowshoe hare — maybe we need to investigate its magical side.

TImothy Grieve-Carlson writes on the long British tradition of mysterious big cats on an island that is not supposed to have any wild cat larger than the Scottish wild cat, and there are not too many of those.

But wait! There is news about DNA samples from a sheep in Cumbria (NW England) that revealed the presence of something larger. “‘The Beast of Cumbria’ – Big cat DNA confirmed to be on sheep carcass” reads one recent headline.

Somehow I do not think that the old “escaped from a zoo” explanation is adequate anymore.

The Pagans, the Unicorns, and the Serial Killer

I have complained before about the relative lack of good American Pagan biography and autobiography. John Sulak’s biography of Oberon Zell (b. 1942) and his partner Morning Glory (1948–2014), The Wizard and the Witch was one of the exceptions.((Yes, Morning Glory either invented or co-invented the term “polyamory,” and she was aware of creating a Greek-Latin hybrid.)) While it was first published in 2014, Sulak and Oberon subsequently revised and enlarged it, splitting it into two volumes.  The link goes to volume 1.

It’s also a history of the American Pagan movement in the 1970s-1990s particularly, with a West Coast emphasis. In the early 1980s, the Zells lived at Greenfield Ranch, a ranch in the Coast Range near Ukiah, Calif., that had been divided into acreages for back-to-the-landers and, yes, cannabis-growers, which meant the level of paranoia was fairly high. The ranch was raided by drug agents at least once, as I recall.

My friend the Pagan songwriter Gwydion Pendderwen lived there, and M. and I visited several times between 1978 and his passing in 1982. I have not been back since. Obviously much has changed.

In the late 1970s the Zells got an opportunity to live at Greenfield Ranch as caretakers for an absenteee Pagan parcel-owner, and there they practiced a documented but neglected ancient technique for turning new-born Angora billy goats into true unicorns. These went on the Rennaissance Faire circuit—later under the big top.

As Oberon would say, they were hoping to influence “kids who saw the Unicorn and would recognize it for what it was—not a fantasy creature made of moonbeams, just a small white animal with its own kind of beauty and heart and horn . . . . Those kids would make the connections and see that Magkick was possible and then go on to create their own contribution to that unique world-view [and] make their live whatever they want it to be.”1

But something darker was afoot. Another Greenfield Ranch resident helped out with showing the unicorns at Renn Faires, etc., so much so that he was sometimes called “Unicorn Man.”

Morning Glory and Angora goat “unicorns.”

His name was Leonard Lake, and he was a serial killer, although he had not really started on his murderous path at that time but apparently was planning it. There is plenty about him online, but my introduction to his story came through Episode 1 of the Trace of the Devastation podcast, a true-crime series about serial killers of the 1980s-90s in the California Gold Rush country.

In that episode, “The Unicorn Man,” you will hear Oberon Zell give his own honest self-appraisal of how he and others were fooled by Lake, whom they took to be just another back-to-the-lander, albeit with a more ex-military outlook.

Anyone can be fooled some of the time. Consider this a footnote to Sulak and Zell’s books.

  1. John G. Sulak, The Wizard and the Witch: An Oral History of Oberon Zell and Morning Glory (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 2014) 180–81. []

A Little-Known Welsh Magical Practice

“Myths surrounded” the caiman, says the BBC.

Burying large reptiles under the floor. It must be a “Pagan survival,” right? Doubtlessly an apotropaic custom, like scorch marks on wooden beams as charm against fire, or leaving old shoes and such inside the walls during construction.

Siberian Shamans Hold Camel Sacrifice — It’s Traditional, They Say

Watch this powerful video, which is also embedded in this article in the Moscow Times online: “Siberian Shamans Revive Ancient Camel-Burning Rite ‘to Help Russia.’”  The location is given merely as “the Irkutsk region” but elsewhere there are references to Tuva, a Central Asian republic that is part of the Russian Federation.

The shaman quoted, Artur Tsybikov, says that the sacrifice is traditional but has not been performed for thee hundred years.  I am guessing that he means in a time before the area came under imperial Russian rule and before Orthodox Christian missionaries arrived with imperial backing.

Tysbikov is also involved with political efforts to boost the prestige of traditional shamanism and animism, including this shamanic congress.

Let’s face it, all traditional (that word again) polytheisms involved sacrifice, usually of animals. You give to the gods, they give to you, right? There was even carryover into the Middle Eastern monotheisms — Kapparot for some Jews,  sacrifices of sheep or cattle at Eid al-Adha, and of course Jesus as the “lamb of God” who is the supreme sacrifice. Some people sacrifice their sanity—less blood that way.

“The Importance of Rituals to the Hunt”

One of my camera traps captured this bull elk in late August 2016, four years after that hillside burned. Now look at the thick grass!

I have written a little about the intersection of hunting and ritual, but today I would ask you to read Jeremy Climer’s blog post “The Importance of Rituals to the Hunt.”

Before we go any further, we should define both “tradition” and “ritual” because people often use them interchangeably.  Although traditions can be religious in nature, ritual is more specific to spiritual matters.  So, for the sake of clarity in this article, we will use “ritual” to describe spiritual matters and “tradition” to describe non-spiritual matters.

Most rituals, even for Christian hunters like myself, originate from our pagan ancestors.  Some of these rituals are pre-hunt and some of them are post-kill.  As humans, we have always asked for blessings before the hunt and given thanks for our success after it.  This is not so different than the pre-planting rituals and the post-harvest rituals in our agrarian history.  We need food to survive, so we ask for assistance and when we’re full, we express our gratitude in hopes that our appreciation will be looked upon kindly when it comes time to ask for assistance again.

And then he quotes me saying something fairly blunt about ritual and taking life.

Climer lives in northern Colorado, but he was kind enough to rendezvous in Florence, a southern Colorado town that I visit weekly. (Try the Pour House coffeehouse if you are there.)

My first writing on Craft hunting ritual was published in 1992, in the chapter “Witches and the Earth” in Witchcraft Today, Book One: The Modern Craft Movement, that being a four-book series that I edited for Llewellyn in the 1990s. It included a description of pre-hunt ritual performed by my hunting partner and myself.

The essay Climer cites, “The Hunter’s Eucharist,” is something that I am still proud of. It made some money too, winning an outdoor writers’ essay contest sponsored by Winchester, as well as being printed three times. Its first publication was in Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, while a shorter version, differently titled, appeared in Colorado Central, a regional magazine, and then was reprinted in David Petersen’s excellent anthology, A Hunter’s Heart.((David Petersen was also a founder of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a rapidly growing and effective conservation group.))

Climer’s “three popular rituals” are a pretty good argument for “Pagan survivals” on their own, even given that one is Cherokee, at least in his heritage.

Around the Blogosphere: A Pagan Cat, Multiple Souls, and Idolatry

¶ “I don’t want to be rude, but what religion are you?” A Pagan pet’s name produces confusion at the veterinary clinic.

¶   “The Three/Four Souls and Their Afterlives.” Heather at Eaarth Animist looks at different traditional accounts to learn what might explain her own experiences: “It has baffled many Western anthropologists how a studied people can talk about a dead person being reincarnated in a child and also being an ancestor. The problem comes from the anthropologist’s own Christian idea of one soul.”

¶ Added to the blogroll under “Classics”:  Roman Times: An online magazine about current archaeology and classical research into the lives of inhabitants of the Roman Empire and Byzantium.

¶ Scholar of esotericism Wouter Hanegraaf from the University of Amstersdam discovers a solid book on idolatry as a category within monotheistic religions: “One searches practically in vain for authoritative monographs about the notion of idolatry and its significance in monotheist religions generally.” There are some contemporary scholars of Paganism working on that area too, but maybe not enough.

Wicker Man, Wicker Masks

One of the Armagh Rhymers’ masks, via The Bosky Man.

At The Bosky Man, Andy Letcher tells how playing a gig at the Ludlow Medieval Fair let him to meet an Irish band whose members perform wearing wicker masks, made by a 90-something-year-old Irish mask-maker who is the last of his kind.

That’s a pity because both invoke an odd, almost indescribable atavistic feeling. It seems to me extremely important that we all should know that feeling first hand, that we should experience it at key moments in our lives and in the yearly round of winter, spring, summer, fall. For whatever else the feeling is, it’s the sense of being brought up sharply against something Other, and you never know, that might just save us from ourselves.

I agree; in fact, I helped to write a book about that subject.

Survey: Your Spiritual Relationship with Animals

Sabina Magliocco, anthropologist and folklorist and author of Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America, among other books, has a new research project underway on people’s spiritual relationships with animals.

The purpose of this study is to understand how we imagine our relationship to animals, how we incorporate animals into our spiritual or religious beliefs, and how this may motivate our actions in the everyday world.

She invites you to take her survey.