Full text of “The Magic island / by W. B. Seabrook ; illustrated with drawings by I am told that when some years ago “Bank” Williams, the saturnine, cynical. The Magic Island [William Seabrook, Alexander King, George A. Romero, Joe Ollmann] on *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The best and. He was William Buehler Seabrook, a reporter and Lost Generation writer Though The Magic Island did not represent the first usage in English print of the word.
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And now the bull, before whom, deified, this blood of other beasts had been poured out as an offering, must also die. It was the only occasion among them when I was in bodily danger, and it came about as a sort of accident, through my own stupidity.
It depicted a Gothic interior with mitered mediaeval bishops communing little kneeling blonde girls in hoopskirts and early Victorian pantalettes, little white boys william seabrook the magic island like Frenchified Etonians. Eat and drink, Ogoun Badagris. We had both felt it almost from our first contact.
Big wooden bowls, and heavy, common china cups were also brought, and a machete. There was a table piled with more gingerbread, a basket of dried herring, bonbons, brown-sugar candy, a five-gallon jug of clairin already half emptied. Papa Legba, guardian of the gates, god of the crossroads, was represented as a venerable old black farmer with a pipe between his teeth; Ogoun Badagris, the bloody warrior, appeared as an old-time Haitian revolutionary william seabrook the magic island in uniform with a sword; 1 See Appendix, page The needles are then left side by side, parallel but reversed, so that the point of each william seabrook the magic island against the eye of the other.
The cross itself was a sacred symbol before Qirist ever died upon it. The Catholic priests, all save a few of the oldest and wisest rural ones, deplore this, but I suspect that Jesus himself might understand and be well content.
It is not necessary to look backward to the Dionysian orgies, the bac- chanalia, the rites of William seabrook the magic island, or frenzied David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. The immediate result was that we three went to another caille about a quarter of a mile distant, to lay the matter before a man named Dieron, who was a hougan, a sort of Voodoo high priest in the district.
United States Senator Shipstead is just a name to me, which I may not be even spelling correctly. Spread in the center of the candle pentagram, on the cow- hide, was a square red cloth, like a napkin, which was to be the covering of my ouanga packet.
Though far from I feeble, possessed of great vitality, she was a slender woman, j slightly formed, whose nervous strength lay not in muscular weight. It seemed mildly humorous, rather.
Full text of “The Magic island / by W. B. Seabrook ; illustrated with drawings by Alexander King.”
It was during a lull in a hard week-end. They also sang an invocation to Ybo, another of the ancient gods. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
It justified something in my soul. I should like to get at some idea of how it originated.
For as the priest wove his ceaseless incantations, the girl began a low, piteous bleating in which there was nothing, absolutely nothing, human; and soon a thing infinitely more unnatural occurred; the goat was moaning and crying like a human child.
And now the literary-traditional white stranger who spied from hiding in the forest, william seabrook the magic island such a one lurked near by, would have seen all the wildest tales of Voodoo fiction justified: Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: The habitation would fall in ruin.
William Seabrook – Wikipedia
So far as the world of urban Port-au-Prince and Ameri- canized Haiti was concerned, I might have been on another planet.
Family, cousins, friends, were seated around, eating, drinking, wading, william seabrook the magic island, and hav- ing, all in islamd, a grand good time. Papa Legba, ouvri harriere pour moins! He was Voodoo of the Voodoo, but as he laid his hand upon my head it was neither in creole that islxnd spoke, nor French, nor even the al- most forgotten language of old Guinea.
It ii a god who comes. All the home-made chairs in the neighbor- hood had seabrooo borrowed, also old boxes and stools. The necromantic uses which they make of various parts of the corpse are thoroughly authenticated in many veri- fiable cases. It was to be used also, she told me, in the special magjc that would occur when William seabrook the magic island was finally led into the liout7ifort to face certain of the ultimate Voodoo mysteries.
He leaned over and put his hand in protest on my knee.
What difference does it make if we say that the girl was drugged — as I suspect she was — or that both were hypnotized? While the papaloi still wove his spells, his hands moving ceaselessly like an old woman earding wool in a dream, the priestess william seabrook the magic island a twig green with tender leaves between isoand young girl and the animal.
William Seabrook
And it was for william seabrook the magic island reason, I realized, that Rafael would surely have attacked me had I not leapt from the table at his last command. This supplication was followed immediately by a pe- culiar dance done by the mamaloi alone, to the islanf ment of a powerfully nagic drum rhythm which went thus: But I believe that the thing itself — their thing, I mean sebrook is ration- ally defensible. After taking leave of the company and of the old man, whose cold hand I clasped in saying adieu, which seemed to please them, I gave the widow a couple of small bills to help defray expenses of the baniboche, and rode away re- flecting that Haitian peasants are difficult for the civilized mind to understand.
Yet now the two who were william seabrook the magic island to william seabrook the magic island mysteriously merged, the girl sym- bolically and the beast with a knife in its throat, were docile and entranced, were like automatons. Instinctively she knew that what- ever might grow tree-like from my interest, its roots were buried in soil common to us willism.
There was an old-fashioned en- graved certificate of first communion from the parish church at Croix de Bouquet, which Louis handed me as his own.