My latest at the Belmont Club. The Western world thinks of itself as secular and rational. But is it?
Belmont Club: Monsters We Have Known
One of the controversies surrounding the coverage of the chaos in Haiti has been the reluctance of mainstream outlets to mention such matters as voodoo and cannibalism in connection with gang violence, as if the influence of the occult and barbaric were somehow anti-black or racist. But it is universal. Ironically, the idea of the “zombie,” derived from African word “zonbi,” was popularized by William Seabrook, an ex-reporter at the NYT who was a friend of English occultist Aleister Crowley. “Seabrook had a lifelong fascination with the occult, which he witnessed and described firsthand both in Third World countries, as documented in The Magic Island (1929) and Jungle Ways (1930).”