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February 16, 2007
I guess it really is Miami
While I was on the phone outside Saint Anne's hospital, these two ladies nonchalantly performed what I am assuming was a santeria ritual, this between chatting with various passers-by and yelling at a gangly grandson/nephew. (Young dude was both sulky and fascinated by their magicks.) The steps of the ritual as I saw them included (in order):
pulling a cigar out of a materials pouch and giving it to the kid to light (is this like letting him lick the batter bowl when making a cake?), pulling out an egg (hard boiled?), blowing smoke on said egg and absently saying a few words, pulling out a bottle of clear liquid and sucking some of that liquid into your mouth (holy water?), blowing a big spray-y raspberry onto the egg using said clear liquid, putting the egg into egg-sized burlap sack, saying a few absent words over the sack and putting the whole in your purse.
The ladies struck me as generally under-enthused about their ritual and largely unconcerned about their privacy, maybe becuase they were just preparing mats (that's enchanting materials for those of you who don't play WoW) for later use. The kid was completely kid-like: his antennae waving curiously even as he was annoyed at being stuck with the old ladies.
I paused for a few moments while taking and uploading the above image to consider whether I was violating these women's privacy and decided, yes, maybe and "oh well." On the one had they were just chilling out in the open and could have easily found a more secluded spot, so I don't think they cared who saw what. On the other hand, I doubt the possibility of being recorded and mass-distributed on the internet tubes factored into their thinking
(The worst possibility, of course, is that photography nullifies the magic, which means I might have - gulp! - just kilt somebody!)
Someone suggested to me that I was courting a certain kind of wrath with these ladies but I will take my chances. When I would get my hair cut as a kid Saint Anne would grow mysteriously vibrational with concern, something that I have always attributed to her fear that all that discarded hair could be put to nefarious use against me. She grew up in the hills overlooking Port-au-Prince during the 1940s; I figure (or is that "I like to imagine"?) she knows a few defensive tricks and buffs of her own.
Posted by ebogjonson in places, on February 16, 2007 9:52 AM
Comments
something about what you wrote struck me... the idea that these people were so non-chalant about the ritual they were performing.
years ago, when i was in seoul attending my family's ancestral worship ceremony for the first time i noticed the same sort of non-chalance. for me, i had presupposed that they were conducting some sort of solemn & sacred ceremony: lighting incense, serving the ritual wine, moving the chopsticks around in the food as if my dead grandparents were actually there visiting. but everyone was a bit ambivalent about the whole thing. my uncle would yell into the kitchen for something. and you could hear my cousins gossiping and cracking up in the kitchen. an overall loosey goosey attitude about the whole thing. maybe the preciousness is just an outsider's perspective of someone else's ritual? does ritual feel less holy the more often a person does it?
i'm not catholic but i had always been impressed by the wafers that catholics get to eat. whenever i caught a mass on t.v. i felt a great desire to be able to line up in front of the priest just to feel that kind of belonging & solemn unity. until i went to a real mass and saw quite a few people throwing the "body of christ" into their mouths like they were eating doritos...
Posted by: minsuh at February 19, 2007 2:16 AM
Doritos are Messiah-licious....
Posted by: the izza at February 19, 2007 11:54 AM
"i figure" & "i (like to) imagine" = same thing?
Posted by: w&w at February 20, 2007 4:02 PM
for me "I figure" always assumed that I came to my particular feeling after doing some vaguely scientific-seeming (to me) thinking/deducing, whereas, "I like to imagine" is more aligned with the leap of faith or intuition or random assumption, or self-serving/self-protective assumption.
But yer right: same diff!
Posted by: ebog/gary at February 26, 2007 12:32 PM
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