Heck I threw a little cow blood around myself back in the day, though mine was purchased by the pint from a Spanish/Asian market in Jersey. Remember that Afro-carib magical practices were just as influenced by European occultism as anything else, and magical traditions develop in urban centers in interesting ways.

However the ASPCA though is just parroting New York’s animal rights movement’s racist attacks on Santeria. When I lived there I had a vegan tell me we should deport all the Cubans because they “tortured animals” for their religion. Meh.

In your last post on this you question whether the old “cult experts” are out stirring the pot. About a month and a half ago a reader of mine passed on a request from some European blog that linked to me to have me contact a reader of theirs who was interested in “occultists” and paganism. That person turned out to be Linda Blood who authored the book The New Satanists back in the early 90s. After a terse (yet polite) exchange of emails where I implied her life’s work amounted to being a laughing stock and she strongly suggested that I was ignorant of “them” we bid each other farewell. I was left with the impression that Blood, Ted Gunderson and the rest of the SRA ilk had congealed around the whole Prison Planet culture and were peddling the 9/11truth/NAU/NWO stuff for a good deal of the last decade. They seem to have quite the little following on both sides of the political spectrum; Blood on the right, Gunderson ran an anti-Bush site for awhile.

It’s been largely ignored but I think the “ritual experts” have wormed their way into the fringes of a bunch of sub-cultures. I have even met a pagan who believed in S.R.A. My impression from my conversation with Blood was that they were preparing for another push. Maybe one of them got hired to do a workshop?

The authorities need to quit hectoring alternative religions and look for some mentally unstable individual, because serial murderers often abuse animals first, then move on to human victims.