They're Creepy and They're Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky

I think we'll continue the macabre theme with a discussion on the occult and the paranormal. Since I am so late in posting this topic, I'm going to try to leave it wide open for any interpretation. This is partly inspired by our book club discussion with the author of Florida's Ghostly Legends And Haunted Folklore: North Florida And St. Augustine. (Who incidentally, my coworker, her daughter, and I are meeting up with to explore a graveyard in Ybor City. Am I psyched? Totally). But since we've covered ghosts (multiple times even), then I thought I would leave it open. Want to talk about your intense dislike for Sylvia Brown? Go for it - I'll probably have my own stuff to add. Or if you'd rather discuss crop circles, do it.

My personal interest lately has been in sin eaters, the spear of destiny, and exorcism. Ok - so it's more on the Catholic religious side, but it's still the occult in my opinion. Most of this has spawned from watching Constantine again. (Which we watched with my youth group - cuss words and all -- we had been talking about angels having free will). But the central plot scheme in the movie is centered around 2 things:

1. Suicides (according to Catholic belief) go straight to hell. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

2. The power of the Spear of Destiny (the spear that pierced Christ's side and finished him off)

According to legend (in the movie, and somewhat in real life), whoever controls the spear of destiny, controls the power of the world. Hitler is rumored to have had it during WWII (and actually started the war in order to capture it), but whether that was the real deal, or one of several replicas is debatable. In the movie, Gabriel tries to use it to unleash Satan's son, Mammon, onto the world. There's a heck of a lot more to it than that, but read it for yourself.

The other is the notion of the sin eater. This was (maybe is) a person who agrees to take on the sins of the person who is deceased or dying. There would be a ritual where the family of the dead would pass bread and wine over the body, which the sin eater would consume, and thereby take on that person's sin. Here is an entry on it. The idea of it is absolutely hellish if you believe in a heaven and hell. What if they died before they could pass on all the sins to someone else? Usually the person was poor, and an outcast of society. The movie, The Order, though in general probably pretty terrible was what got me started on it.

Another movie that inspired me to do some research into the macabre was The Others. In it, Nicole Kidman finds a "book of the dead", which was a book full of photos of dead people. A search for that on google will only bring up site on ancient Egypt. However, Victorian post mortem photography should get you a number of hits, including these. Creepy, no? But I also find them rather touching, that they would care so much to go through all the trouble of doing the pictures, or that they were so desperate to remember their loved ones in a peaceful state.

Well, that's the topic. My apologies to our faithful readers for my complete laziness.