Sack Man: NYC Specimen

"El Señor del Saco," Clo Blanco

Clo posted this amazing photograph onto her instagram over the weekend and then sent me a copy so I could post it here as evidence of an NYC, street performer, gold-painted Sack Man specimen. Do note the small, gold victim's foot sticking out of his Sack Man sack as he snoozes on the subway platform in the Times Square station. Nefarious!

Noche de San Juan

I've been looking at photographs from last night's celebrations in Spain on "El Huffington Post" (crazy that The Huffington Post is taking over the world... do check out the photos, though) and it sure looked like fun. I celebrated quietly here at home, lit a couple of candles and washed my face after midnight with ritualistic deliberation. Small stuff. 

     

Apart from the fire and water rituals, I did some "gathering of midsummer herbs". And rather than go tromping around in the surrounding hills and hollows up here in the mountains in the middle of the night, risking poison oak, mountain lion attack*, and wolf spider terrors**, just so I could come home with a handful of California sagebrush that, now that I think of it, grows in my own yard, I decided to plant my own batch of cooking herbs. I didn't get a chance to start up the veggie patch this spring, so this little herb collection will have to do for now. The symbolism isn't quite right, but we tend to have long Indian summers and annuals generally thrive with occasional bud pinching through the New Year, no need to start drying herbs now. 

Damn, I forgot to buy the sage!!!

I'm a lazy person, so I haven't transplanted them to the pots next to the kitchen door yet. Tomorrow. I've never grown/eaten/cooked with Cuban basil before; it's supposed to be similar to any sweet basil, but with a spicy flavor. Intriguing! Even better, it's a perennial.

And just in case you thought that I didn't end up having any St. John's magic come my way (or just a stroke of ordinary good luck), I stopped by my next door neighbors' yard sale on the way back from the farm & feed, and ended up leaving with a little treasure:

FANCYYY

Howard gave me a ridiculously good deal. As I gave him the cash for the typewriter, I blurted out, "Up in the Mission District in San Francisco, you wouldn't be able to find one of these for under $100!" SUCH A DUMB THING TO SAY. It needs a new ribbon, but all the keys and doodads seem to work, and it's really just beautiful. I'll post some proper photos once I'm finally able to test it out.

Addendum: I mixed up the two thymes in the photo identifying the midsummer herbs. The Orange Thyme is top center, and the French Thyme is bottom left. OOPSIES.

* There have been sightings of a lone adolescent mountain lion roaming around the neighborhood in the past week -- at dusk and at night, but sometimes during the day. We're hoping s/he's just passing through on the way to discovering new territories.
** Don't even dare do a Google image search -- DON'T YOU DO IT IT'S TOO TERRIBLE. 

Midsummer Love Letter

The summer solstice came and went yesterday without me even stopping to acknowledge it. The day was filled with meetings on campus and long Skype dates with far-flung friends under the oak tree, and after having dinner later on in the evening, I immediately went to bed to snooze it all off.

I've been living here in Ben Lomond for over two years -- how is it that I'm only now taking advantage of the
electrical output under the oak tree? All I need out there now is a small table and I'm all set with a new summer office.

Though last night was officially Midsummer's Eve -- and today the first day of summer -- I'm holding off until Saturday night to celebrate the solstice. I'm celebrating the Spanish way, the witchy way, on St. John's Eve, what I've always known as la noche de San Juan. 

The Spanish version of the original Old Christian/Pagan tradition would call for a bonfire on a beach -- either on the ocean or river bank or lake -- and midnight bathing and bonfire jumping, as well as late night herb collecting, but I think I'll try a more quiet and cozy adaptation of the fire and water rituals from here at home. All my friends are away, and though my trusty Spaghetti Western side-kick Mr. Coe would love nothing more than a midnight adventure for two, lighting bonfires on the dog beach, I think we'll be better off at the house. BECAUSE IT'S GOING TO BE SPOOKY OUT THERE. This noche de San Juan is supposed to be extra special due to the fact that we're currently in a new moon -- the magic is said to be extra strong,  ooh la la! So, those of you looking to avoid witchy influences in your life, stay out of the dark and light a candle or three! And for those of you wanting to embrace the witchiness, take advantage of this most important Witches' Sabbath, your spells and incantations should be exponentially more powerful. I'll report back on my own shenanigans Saturday night.

Speaking of witchy, spooky things, check out my afternoon reading:  

Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria (2006) is of special interest these days.

More on those later. 

Heaven is a hammock and stack of spooky reading on a summer afternoon, indeed. And gazpacho. I still have so, so, so much gazpacho. 

Procrastination Investigation: The unfortunate historical basis of the Sack Man.

"Que biene el Coco"
Goya, Caprichos plate 3

Last summer, tooling around on the internet and generally procrastinating my time away, I fell down the wikipedia rabbit hole and, much to my delight, came across an entry in which some of my favorite things met: serial killers, monsters, old wives tales, and historical fact.

I'm a sucker for weirdo historical tidbits. I love spooky superstitions, fabrications, fairy tales, and "widely distributed untruths". I get particularly excited when I come across historical traces to urban myths and folk tales, and am particularly interested in investigating the grey spaces where fact and fiction converge.

El hombre del saco, or, Sack Man (also known as El Señor Sacamantecas, or, Mr. Lard Remover)* is the Spanish equivalent of the Boogie Man, and may be the most popular monster used by parents to scare their children into submission in the Spanish speaking world.**

This is how the story goes. There is a man, with a sack, who wanders through the city streets, village alleys, or country lanes (all depending on where you live, of course) at dusk. He abducts children loitering outside the home, sneaking them away in his sack. Those children are never seen again. Mr. Lard Remover, specifically, takes those children, kills them, reduces their body fat to lard, and then sells that lard back to the unsuspecting parents of the abducted children. Really, what could be more terrifying then the image of your own family sitting down to a dinner cooked with your own reduced body fat? Telling this story to kids is the perfect way to make sure they come home before sundown.

I always thought that there was some kind of hidden truth to this urban(/rural?) legend, but assumed that whatever historical fact there was to the story had been buried under centuries (if not millennia!) of intergenerational memory, slowly erased by Oblivion.

Not so! The accounts are out there, and fresh! There are a handful of documented cases of Sack Men (and women!) operating in both rural and urban areas all over Spain throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Most famous examples of such, sometimes serial, infanticidal killer boogie (wo)men are: Manuel Blanco Romasanta, killing women and children and making human lard in early 19th century Galicia (he was also a werewolf!); Enriqueta Martí, the 'Vampiress of the Carrer Ponent', pimping out children and then extracting their bodily fluids and grinding their bones to dust to make home-made medicinal remedies in early 20th century Barcelona; and Francisco Ortega, Francisco Leona, and El tonto Rodríguez (vampire, witch doctor, and village idiot, respectively!), abducting, exsanguinating (is this a verb?), and removing the bodily fat from a young boy in early 20th century Almería.

Why the exsanguination? Why the extraction of bodily fat? Sadly (horrifically), the consumption of children's blood and application of hot poultices made of the body fat of children to the chest were considered by many in 19th and 20th century Spain to be effective "home remedies" for tuberculosis. The remedies were incredibly pricey (and, of course, difficult to come by), really only available to the white collar class and the wealthy. Is it ironic that such folk medicine should only be economically accessible to the bourgeoisie and social elite? The rate of child abduction skyrocketed throughout the country during this time.

What is so disturbing? tragic? just sad? to me is that this happened so recently (historically, relatively). I can negotiate and reconcile these occurances if they were to have happened in the middle ages, even the relatively dark days of the 16th and 17th centuries.*** But these atrocities were, in some cases, being committed less than 100 years ago. Worse yet, they were being FORGOTTEN in less time than that. These killers, who started out as werewolves and vampires, have very quickly become mere bedtime boogies and meanies.

It's remarkable how quickly Oblivion can work to transform some thing(s) too horrible to live with into much more benign apparitions.

Is Spain the only country with such a ghastly folk mythology pertaining to the tuberculosis epidemic of yesteryear? Is it possible that the Sack Men of other Spanish-speaking countries were also hack folk doctors, werewolves, vampires, and village idiots? And what of those boogie monsters in the rest of the world?

Quickly running through my mental pop culture backlog, the Boogie Woogie Man from Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas is particularly compelling, what with his burlap construction, ripped at the seams, spilling maggots and worms...

We never truly believe in the Boogie Man. But maybe we should (and believe in much more).

***

Read the first installment of my Enriqueta Martí: Sack Lady series here.

Read my follow-up post on medicinal cannibalism/corpse medicine and the Sack Man here.

*Excuse my ridiculous, spur-of-the-moment translation.
**Other names include El Coco, El Tío Saín, El Silbón. Translate them yourselves!!!
***There are, certainly, accounts of Sack Men operating throughout Spain during these centuries as well, travelers who adopted? abducted? enslaved? war orphans and street urchins by the handful.