I want to draw a comparison between the consoomer meme and the many cannibalistic folk monsters around the world. It seems to me they share a common archetype in the man who's soul has been hijacked by the same spiritual sickness
See the consoomer, he is thin and weak, he pines after goods he already owns, but their iterations will continue until Judgement Day. See his eyes, not quite human, possessed of a light beyond this world.
The Kwakiutl believe babies are dangerous, for precisely the reason that all they know is consumption, born with a voracious and unstoppable appetite.
Not only babies, but for the Kwakiutl the whole world is full of mouths, all fully prepared to rip, tear and consume the bodies of people.
This is extended to the ultimate fear, of monsters, of cannibals, of that primal lust to consume another being. The Kwakiutl channel this horror through the Cannibal Dance, the hamatsa. See the Cannibal Bird, beak opened to devour
The cannibal is the ultimate consoomer. One whose spiritual architecture has been so rearranged to yield a monomaniacal drive, a will to consoom. He has transcended the ordinary and become of one purpose.
This drive is reflected in the midnight tales of cannibalistic horror told across North America. The famous Wendigo, the Atshen, the Owl Woman, the Skudakumooch.
One source of these tales are the dim memories of tribes which endured the ravages of starvation and hunger. Sunken eyes and crazed mouths, at a certain point famine drives a rational man to eat the inedible, the mineral, the forbidden and even his kin.
This soul sickness is seen as irrecoverable, the one who succumbs is a pariah, an outcast to the pure society. Our malaise is to place this abominable person in the centre of our social world, give him praise and esteem.
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The last person tried under a British Witchcraft Act was in 1944, but not for the reasons you might expect
Helen Duncan, a Scottish medium, spent much of her time doing battle with scientists and sceptics over her supposed abilities to vomit up 'ectoplasm' during seances, as well as her photography showing 'spirits' over her shoulder as she communed with the dead
Most of this stuff was amusingly ridiculous, she would regurgitate cheesecloth covered in egg and claim it to be ectoplasm. Her critics made her swallow methylene blue tablets or tried to use X-rays to show up her fraudulence to the public.
Afrocentrism is probably unique amongst ethnocentric ideologies for its claims that basically every nation and people everywhere on earth were originally black. A thread:
At this point most people are familiar with this line - that the first Europeans were black.
But this goes all the way. The Anglo-Saxons were black, as were many royals and important figures in English history.
Before there was a Small Boats Crisis in the English Channel there was a Small Boats Crisis in Australia, and before that crisis started there was the Tampa Affair - that time when a Norwegian freight ship carrying Hazara Afghan migrants was boarded by Australian special forces..
On August 24th 2001 the rickety fishing boat, the Palapa, was disintegrating somewhere around 150km north of Christmas Island. Over 400 souls were aboard, mostly Hazara Afghans, with some women and children. They had been battered by storms and now faced sinking into the sea.
The closest vessel was the container ship, the MV Tampa. Responding to an SOS, Australian authorities guided the Tampa to the Palapa using a plane. The migrants were dehydrated, some unconscious and some had dysentery. Captain Arne Rinnan set a course for Indonesia.
Skin whitening cosmetics are an $8 billion a year industry, and going up. Bought predominantly by women, as many as 75% of respondents to surveys admitted to trying to whiten their skin using commercial or DIY products.
Most major companies sell some version of these lotions and creams around the world, with huge customer bases in southeast Asia, Africa, India, and Latin America. Terms like 'glowing', 'brightness' and 'natural fairness' are used along with 'whitening' to market the products.
Adverts point out that fairer skinned women have more successes in life, in their careers, love lives and social mobility. Many are quite blatant about the connection between whiter skin and opportunity.
Some extracts from Edgerton's book Sick Societies concerning the status of women in certain forager and pastoralist cultures.
Edgerton's main point in this book is to question the idea that all traditions and customs are necessarily healthy or adaptive - for instance the widespread habit in many cultures of denying women, even pregnant women, equal access to high quality foods.
There are many rationalisations for making women carry the heavy stuff, but ultimately men don't want to do it.
One of the benefits of multiculturalism is that the NHS has finally woken up to the problem of jinns and the evil eye, a topic they have been neglecting for decades. Here we see an NHS workshop correcting this oversight, helpfully delivered only in Bengali.
Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and other 'Asian Muslims' actually suffer worse mental health outcomes compared to other ethnicities - exacerbated no doubt by our ethnocentric blind spot over black magic and jinn affliction.
Jinn do indeed have like their own children and stuff, which is why we need to break the stigma of visiting a wise man when your mental health is not ok.