Word: ritualized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...destroy the power of the Female"-i.e., of Jehovah's predecessor, rival and unacknowledged consort, the Great Mother Goddess or Triple Moon Goddess, known in the Eastern Mediterranean lands by various names, including Hecate and Astarte. She had ruled Canaan before the Israelites came; her worship included ritual prostitution, and Jesus' mother Miriam (Mary in the English Scriptures) had actually been born, so the High Priest said, "under the old dispensation," as a result of a dreamlike unmarital incident in a garden during the Feast of Tabernacles. Jesus' losing struggle with the Female was the drama...
...military commission on Guam last week read into the record a Japanese Army major's confession of cannibalism. Unlike rumored instances elsewhere, this was no story of starving Japanese eating their own or enemy dead in an effort to survive. It was ritual cannibalism practiced on the bodies of U.S. flyers who had been decapitated after being shot down in the Bonin Islands. The sole excuse: "war madness...
Africa was enjoying a rash of ritual murder. Three years ago jet-complexioned Sir Ofori Atta, Paramount Chief of Akim Abuakwa, died (of natural causes) in the Gold Coast Colony. Soon his friend and secretary, Mensah, Chief of Apedwa, disappeared from view. After long investigation by the British authorities, eight natives were convicted of murdering Mensah, and sentenced to hang (TIME, Dec.11,1944). Mensah, the Crown contended, had been sacrificed to provide blood to daub a ceremonial stool which represented the late Sir Ofori; or to provide Sir Ofori with a companion in the spirit world; or both...
...ceremonially used in the Gold Coast for a century, and pointed out that some of the accused were Christians who would not have been tolerated at a pious pagan ceremony. The Colonial Office icily retorted that human blood was still preferred and that nominal Christianity means nothing to African ritual phlebotomists...
Last week the Colonial Office's arguments were inferentially bolstered when a black Basuto named John Makume, convicted of ritual murder, was hanged at Maseru, Basutoland, 3,000 miles from the scene of the Gold Coast mystery. John Makume was a Sunday bell-ringer in the local church, and his little gang of 16 men were "all educated and professed Christians." John, 75, had dispatched to the spirit world a 60-year-old shoemaker, had made "medicine" from the head, heart, lungs. In Basutoland such a medicine is believed to increase a chief's prowess in battle, boudoir...