Blood Rites by
Jimmy Lee Shreeve
pbk out August 06
(Arrow)
at £7.99
Here's everything that you ever wanted to know about voodoo, sorcery
and satanism but were afraid to ask. You can also brush up on the dark
side of Tantric or on chaos magick.
The book, which explores the ritual of human sacrifice, opens with the
story of Adam, the little African boy whose torso was found floating in
the Thames in 2001. Was this a religious or a domestic murder? Author
Jimmy Lee Shreeve interviews both witchcraft and police authorities to
find out. He uncovers ancient belief systems which encourage
contemporary tribes and individuals to kill in order to please their
bloodthirsty deities.
Blood Rites also has a chapter about the teenage boys who killed and had
necrophiliac sex with Elyse Pahler. The author interviews me in this
chapter. Later there's an interview with an expert in ritualistic crime.
Jimmy is a fan of the gonzo school of journalism which focuses on
personal experience and has a free-form format. As such, he conducts a
ritual on Hampstead Heath with his shaman friend Crazywolf to
ostensibly free Adam's soul. He also slips into an altered state in a
London pub to glean advice on ritual murder from the long-dead authors
William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg and has a brief chat with Satan at
a later date.
But elsewhere, Shreeve is more matter of fact, and the book is filled with
detail about genuine human sacrifice. This makes for fascinating, if gory,
reading - for example, some Third World shopkeepers bury a human hand
outside their shop door in the belief that this will point customers towards
their premises and increase business. And a few Nigerians make human
sacrifices before local elections, believing that this will bring their
preferred candidate more votes. There's also an intriguing look at split-
brain research, which explains why some people think that they see or
hear non-human entities.
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Blood Rites by
Jimmy Lee Shreeve
