Nachash

Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female “vampire” in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

“This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire,” Borrini told Reuters by telephone. “This helps … authenticate how the myth of vampires was born.”

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 — in which the artist Titian died — on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three km (2 miles) northeast of Venice and was used as a sanitorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse’s teeth, and vampires became known as “shroud-eaters.”

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the “undead” were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

“To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there,” said Borrini. “It’s possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized.”

While legends about blood-drinking ghouls date back thousands of years, the modern figure of the vampire was encapsulated in the Irish author Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula,” based on 18th century eastern European folktales.

Source:  Reuters

Source: The Independent

It is a sanctuary on the vast waters of Lake Victoria, a safe haven amid a gathering storm of killings. White-skinned albinos, known here as “ghosts”, are being hunted down by their own people, harvested for body parts by those who believe they will add potency to black magic rituals.

The remote island of Ukerewe, several hours across Lake Victoria and two days overland from the capital of Tanzania, is the one remaining shelter, a place where albinos can live in relative safety.

“Life is better here on the island,” says Alphonce Kajanja. Standing in Ukerewe’s main market he is just like any other fishmonger, only his hat shades a white face with swollen liquid eyes and cracked lips. He says there have been no albino murders on the island. “People here don’t believe in this satanic campaign.”

Elsewhere, the killing continues. In the past week, two more Tanzanian albinos were murdered. Elizabeth Hussein was hacked to pieces by men with machetes in Shinyanga province last Tuesday. She was just 13. Then Ezekiel John, 47, was shot and had his arms and legs cut off near the city of Kigoma on Thursday. Their deaths bring the toll to 35 murders in just more than a year.

There is similar violence throughout east and central Africa. And even in west and southern Africa, albinos face persecution and discrimination. The campaign is being orchestrated by witch doctors who claim they can make people rich using limbs and blood from their white-skinned neighbours. In some areas, albino children go to school with bodyguards, others hide at home, and distraught relatives pile rocks on their dead loved ones to deter grave-robbers.

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I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring [1] and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Genesis 3:15

Genesis clearly indicates that both the woman and the Nachash have a seedline, and that there will be hostility between them. The offspring of the woman produced, in the end, Jesus Christ, and quite obviously had in mind a literal “seed.” However, we do not seem to have much information about what would also be the physical line or seed of the Nachash. Why? Who are the physical descendants of the Serpent, and where are they now?

“Two beings [Adam and Nachash] had intercourse with Eve, and she conceived from both and bore two children. Each followed one of the male parents, and their spirits parted, one to this side and one to the other, and similarly their characters. On the side of Cain are all the haunts of the evil species; from the side of Abel comes a more merciful class, yet not wholly beneficial — good wine mixed with bad.”(Zohar 136)

“Nachash injected his impure semen into Eve and she absorbed it; therefore, when Adam had intercourse with her she bore two sons — one from the impure side [Nachash] and one from the side of Adam; and Abel [the second] bore a resemblance to the higher form, and Cain [the first] to the lower.” (Zohar 154a)