regarding the woman on the right...the following is from the London Telegraph:
Satanic killers tell of blood drinking
rites
By Hannah Cleaver in Berlin
(Filed: 18/01/2002)
A WOMAN who says she and her husband killed
a German friend with 66 knife wounds
on orders from the devil has claimed that
she became a satanist in Britain.
German police say any
evidence pointing to possible crimes or an illegal satanic
ring in Britain will be sent to the relevant
authorities.
Manuela Ruda and her
husband, Daniel, have admitted killing their friend, Frank
Haagen, "for Satan". She said she got
a taste for vampirism and the occult while
in London and Scotland.
She appeared at the
regional court in Bochum in full gothic garb, her head
partly shaved to reveal an upside down
crucifix and a target tattooed on her
skull.
Mrs Ruda, 23, gave
a chilling account of drinking blood from volunteers
contacted on the internet. She said: "I
was in England and Scotland, met people
and vampires in London. We went out at
night, to cemeteries, in ruins and in the
woods.
"We drank blood together,
from willing donors. You can't drink from the
arteries, no-one is allowed that. I had
implanted pegs put in the teeth which
were pulled out and were replaced with
fangs.
"I also slept on graves
and even allowed myself to be buried in a grave to test
the feeling. I signed over my soul to
Satan two and a half years ago."
The couple have denied
responsibility for killing Mr Haagen, 33, although both
have admitted committing the crime.
Mrs Ruda told the court:
"It was not murder. We are not murderers. It was the
execution of an order. Satan ordered us
to. We had to comply. It was not
something bad. It simply had to be. We
wanted to make sure that the victim
suffered well."
Her husband compared
himself and his wife to a vehicle involved in a fatal
accident. "The car would not be charged,"
he said. "The driver is the bad guy. I
have nothing to regret because I haven't
done anything."
Mrs Ruda said she and
her 26-year-old husband lured their victim to their flat.
When they arrived a "strange force" and
"other beings" were present.
"We were sitting on
the couch the whole time, then my husband stood up," she
said. "He had terrible, glowing eyes and
hit out with the hammer.
"Frank stood up and
said something, or wanted to say something. The knife was
glowing and a voice told me: 'Stab him
in the heart.'
"He then sank down.
I saw a light flickering around him. That was the sign that
his soul was going down. We said a satanic
prayer.
"We were then exhausted,
and alone, wanted to die ourselves. But the visitation
was too short. We could no longer kill
ourselves."
After killing Mr Haagen
the couple cut an occult star on his stomach, drank his
blood from a bowl and had sex in an oak
coffin in which Mrs Ruda usually slept.
The couple were arrested
in their flat, the walls of which were covered in
satanic slogans and hung with an array
of knives, axes and machetes.
Mr Haagen's mutilated
and partially-decomposed body was found next to the coffin
in the living room.
Dieter Justinsky, the
public prosecutor, said: "I have never, ever seen such a
picture of cruelty and depravity before.
They simply had a lust for murder.
"Both believed in Satan,
they worshipped him. A death list found in the flat
contained the names of future victims.
They drank his blood, slept in coffins
and believed they would achieve immortality
as vampires."
Several witnesses have
testified that the couple suffered from personality
disorders. They could both face long terms
at secure psychiatric institutions.
The Rudas told police
that they went to Britain twice, spending five months in
Scotland in 1996 and visiting London in
February 1997. The gothic phenomenon, an
off-shoot of the punk scene, emerged in
the late 1970s.
A spokesman for Bochum
police said last night that any information relating to
crimes in Britain would be passed to the
relevant authorities.
John Giddings of 2002 Isle of Wight Festival organisers the Solo Agency:
"I don't want any dance music. I don't want any of that crap. We want real songs played by real people. Anyone with a cassette machine can go away."
Poe's birthday celebrated with cognac and roses
BALTIMORE, Maryland (AP) -- A small crowd
gathered at the old church where Edgar
Allan Poe lies buried, waiting, as they
do every year, for the arrival of a
stranger.
A black-clad man arrived
just before 3 a.m. Saturday, marking the poet's
birthday with the traditional graveside
tribute: three red roses and a half
bottle of cognac. Only this and nothing
more.
It is a rite that has
been carried out by a mysterious stranger every January 19
since 1949, a century after Poe drank
himself to death in Baltimore at age 40.
This year's birthday
tribute was normal and subdued compared with last year,
when the stranger left a note that enraged
Baltimore Ravens fans.
Borrowing from Poe's
"The Masque of the Red Death," the note read: "The New York
Giants. Darkness and decay and the big
blue hold dominion over all."
Red and blue are the
Giants' colors and "the big blue" is a team nickname. The
Ravens, who take their name from Poe's
most famous poem, were to meet the Giants
later that month in Super Bowl XXXV. The
Baltimore team ended up winning the
game handily.
"My own theory is that
after the near riot that occurred last year when he
insulted the Ravens, this guy thought,
'I'll just stick to the tradition and not
cause the trouble,' " said Jeff Jerome,
curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and
Museum. Jerome and 15 invited guests watched
from inside the church.
Jerome said the man,
wearing the traditional black hat and coat, with a white
scarf concealing his face, appeared to
be different from last year's so-called
Poe Toaster.
"He appeared to be
a younger man," said Jerome, who has witnessed the ritual for
20 years. "He stood erect and walked quickly."
The man made no gestures,
other than the secret signal he sends Jerome to show
he is the genuine Poe Toaster, as he laid
the tribute.
The three roses represent
Poe, his wife and his Aunt Maria Clemm, who are buried
beneath the newer monument. The cognac
is a mystery, Jerome has said, because
there are no prominent references to it
in Poe's works.
Poe was born in Boston
and raised in Richmond, Virginia. But Baltimore, where he
lived for several years during the 1830s,
has adopted him as one of its own.
A prolific poet and
critic, Poe wrote comedies, detective stories and tales of
the macabre, including "The Fall of the
House of Usher," "The Pit and the
Pendulum" and "The Tell-Tale Heart."
TERENCE MCKENNA: "I assume that we're all peasants, really. When was the last time you spent time with someone who formulates American foreign or social policy? I don't spend time with those people. We're rich peasants, of course. Don't confuse poverty and peasantry. We're rich peasants, but we're totally in the dark, and the great ones come and go on their sleighs to and from the castle, and we mark their comings and going, but we have no idea what's brewing up there. Every once in a while, they stumble, and we get LSD, or the Internet, or something else that slips through the cracks. It's impossible to control history, and it's wonderful that so many people are trying, because it makes for such an interesting game."
(from a Jan 1998 interview with Charles Hayes, printed in Shaman's Drum, Number 60)
17 JAN 02
Corpse-eating lizard!
Spectres
of the Spectrum
by Craig Baldwin
(16mm color and b/w sound
film approx. 93 mins.)
Spectres of the Spectrum
is a feature-length 16mm film utilizing old 'kinescopes' (filmed records
of early TV broadcasts before the advent of videotape, mostly from the
late Fifties' educational show called 'Science in Action') to create an
eerie, haunted "media-archaeology" zone for a sci-fi time-travel tale,
wherein live-action actors search for a hidden electromagnetic secret to
save the planet from a futuristic war-machine, inspired by HAARP the High-Frequency
Active Auroral Research Program. (Though fictionalized for Baldwin's film,
HAARP is, in fact, a very real phenomenon. On the surface, it is a data-gathering
tool to explore the Aurora Borealis in detail. But in fact, HAARP doubles
as one of the most sophisticated components of the Star Wars weapons arsenal,
a particle beam device that can be accurately targeted on specific sites
in the ionosphere.
Set in the year 2007 in the blighted desert outpost of Las Vegas, a young
telepathic woman ("BooBoo") scavenges for survival on an old bombing range
with her father ("Yogi") who is holed up in a cinder-block pirate-TV station,
broadcasting rambling diatribes on the impending global electromagnetic
'Pulse'. A solar eclipse gives BooBoo a cosmic opportunity to save the
world, through a superluminal voyage back into time to retrieve a secret
message left on the airwaves by her scientist grandmother.
With their Airstream trailer converted into a spaceship, the amazed BooBoo
is able to catch up with outwardly propagating Fifties' educational-TV
broadcasts, affording an accelerated review of mid-century science and
science-fiction cinema; and narrating a loose and collage-happy history
of heroes and martyrs of the electromagnetic revolution. Commentary on
Mesmer, Morse, Bell, Tesla, Farnsworth, and others comes from Yogi and
his 'TV Tesla' correspondents, in a playfully speculative effort to trace
the growth of corporate hegemony over the electromagnetic spectrum. Through
an increasingly abstract montage of live-action, archival film, broadcast
video, and 'exploded' interviews, the fantasy narrative warps into disjointed,
abstracted, audio-visual phrases, suggesting the breakdown of personal
ego/memory, historical representation, and, yes, of spacetime itself.
This science-fiction allegory about 'electromagnetic autonomy' in opposition
to the hegemony of the culture-management industry, tracing a history of
media technology from its early days to a 21st century "New Electromagnetic
Order" that threatens to take total control of our lives.
Jewish Renewal Makes It to Film
by Rami Shapiro
Raising the Sparks: A
Personal Search for a Spiritual Home in Judaism. Chuck
Davis. Throughline Productions
and Delphi Productions, 2001.
With its very first scene,
Raising the Sparks, a delightful and disturbing
documentary of producer/director
Chuck Davis' year-long sojourn into Jewish
Renewal, draws us into the
central dilemma of postmodern Judaism: the tribe. The
film opens with his youngest
son's brit milah. Amid the boy's screams of terror
and the practiced nonchalance
of Jewish friends and relatives, Chuck verbalizes
his angst at circumcising
his son to appease a God he does not believe in and to
make his son a member of
a tribe he is not sure is worth joining. In a sense,
Raising the Sparks is Chuck's
attempt to justify tribalism in what for him and
most secular Jews is fast
becoming a post-tribal world.
Each
of the world's religions responds to a specific question. As long as the
question is compelling and
the answer relevant, the religion thrives. When the
question is moot, the religion
dies. This is why centuries of effort to convert
Jews to Christianity have
been so unsuccessful: Jesus is the answer to a
question Jews don't ask.
And it's also why, without even attempting to convert
Jews, Buddhism is making
such inroads among us.
Christianity
answers the question: "How can we overcome Original Sin and avoid
eternal damnation?" Most
Jews don't ask this question, so Christianity is
irrelevant to them. Buddhism
answers the question: "What is suffering, and how
can we end it?" This is
a question Jews do ask, and the concise, practical
advice of the Buddha is
quite compelling. The question Judaism answers is this:
"How do I adhere to the
tribal standards set by God Who chose us from among all
peoples to be His holy nation?"
This is a question fewer and fewer Jews even
think to ask. If Judaism
is to survive it must answer a different question.
Different,
not necessarily new. Judaism must shift its focus from tribal
survival to planetary survival;
it must move from halachic conformity to aggadic
creativity. God did not
command us to be Jewish; God commanded us to be holy.
The old question: "How to
be a Jew?" has to be replaced with the older and
timeless question: "How
to be holy?" And it is here that Chuck's journey into
Jewish Renewal is most welcoming
and helpful, for he shares with us a Judaism
that dares to ask the right
question.
What
Jewish Renewal does, and does so well, is shift emphasis from peshat, the
literal meaning of Torah
and tradition, to drash, psycho-spiritual
interpretations that transform
tribal teachings and custom into a dialect of
universal truth. Judaism
in the hands and hearts of the wonderful Renewal rabbis
interviewed in Raising the
Sparks is no longer the parochial culture of tribal
Israel, but the highly sophisticated
spiritual lifeway of yisra-el, of the god
wrestlers and spiritual
warriors from many backgrounds seeking to infuse and
repair the world with holiness.
Jewish
Renewal asks not "How can we maintain our uniqueness as a people?," but
"How can we use 3,500 years
of Jewish experience to repair the world and
ourselves with holiness?"
Here is a question worthy of our utmost attention. And
answering it will insure
Judaism's survival as a vital spiritual force in the
world for generations. But
before Judaism can be the answer to this question,
Jews must begin to ask it.
And this is where Raising the Sparks is disturbing.
Chuck
encounters in Renewal Judaism a practice that is devoted to holiness, to
universal questions. God
is the Nameless Source of Reality that manifests all
life. Torah is a spiritual
map written in symbols open to endless
interpretation. Mitzvot
are spiritual practices for chipping away at ego and
freeing the soul from the
enslaving self. Prayer is a technology for stepping
outside boundaries and experiencing
the unity of all things in God. Halachah is
a toolbox for repairing
both person and planet. Yet at the end of his journey,
Chuck is still struggling
with the old question of tribalism. He cannot get over
the fact that Judaism is
for the Jews. He hears and even appreciates the Jewish
Renewal answer, but he cannot
yet bring himself to ask the new question. For
Chuck Judaism is still a
matter of tribe.
He is
not alone. Most Jews still think of Judaism as something parochial. They
see themselves as members
of a beleaguered tribe. While few are willing to
adhere to the customs of
that tribe, even fewer are willing to let the notion of
tribe go altogether. Why?
I suspect
the answer lies in an unarticulated fear of the hyphenated identities
demanded by postmodernity.
The emerging global village will not see an end to
human diversity, but an
expansion of it. As barriers fall between seekers of
different faiths, hybrids
will develop. This is not new. Moses Maimonides
created Aristotelian Judaism.
Abraham Abulafia created Jewish Sufism. What is
new is the self-conscious
nature of postmodern hybrids. Maimonides and Abulafia
did not admit, let alone
celebrate, their creativity. But our age is different.
What earlier Jews saw as
peshat, postmodern Jews see as drash.
In the
postmodern world everything is drash. We borrow openly and liberally from
other faith traditions and
begin to speak of ourselves as JuBus, Jufis, and
Hinjews. Ironically, we
draw the tribal line at Jesus, the one world-teacher who
was Jewish and who addressed
the world through the medium of Torah. I suspect
this barrier, too, will
fall, and when it does it will be a sign of the final
fading of tribalist thinking.
Jewish
Renewal offers an alternative to both tribalism and hybridization.
Choosing the way of interspirituality,
Jewish Renewal uses the insights and
sensibilities of other faiths
to search out, reveal, and revive similar insights
and sensibilities in our
own faith. Jewish Renewal takes advantage of postmodern
openness without falling
into the blather of spiritual Esperanto, abstract talk
about God, and holiness
stripped of all cultural richness and nuance. Where much
of New Age talk pits religion
against spirituality and offers a pristine
spirituality devoid of religion,
Jewish Renewal allows spirituality to do what
it was meant to do: uplift
religion.
Spirituality
without religion is like the sap of a tree without the tree itself.
The sap has nowhere to flow,
nothing to enliven, no way of manifesting life in
the world. Jewish Renewal,
in all its forms—from the most ecstatic to the most
silent and contemplative—resurrects
the tree of Jewish life by freeing the
spirit of holiness it was
meant to embody.
Raising
the Sparks is an excellent and honest portrayal of a contemporary Jew's
search for Judaism. It offers
a compassionate and clear-eyed view of Jewish
Renewal and her teachers.
It is a film worth seeing. More importantly, it is a
film worth talking about.
Rami Shapiro is senior
rabbi and president of Metiva,
a center for contemplative
Judaism in Los Angeles,
CA. His most recent book is Proverbs (Bell Tower 2001).
Raising the Sparks can
be purchased from Delphi Productions, 888-443-2400.
15 JAN 02
THIS PLACE ACTUALLY EXISTS--IN GLENDORA!:
