Chupacabra, Satan and genes:
When I first heard the legend of the chupacabra, my reaction was mild. The name means Goat Sucker. Really. I mean who could care? It’s an animal that apparently sucks the blood of goats. I suppose goats get their blood sucked by leaches, ticks, fleas, mosquitoes and in Mexico bats. What’s one more? The chupacabra will suck the goat dry and kill it, so that is something. And it is not only goats that suffer; chickens and other livestock are attacked. I initially put it down to some sort of Native American tradition. The monster apparently is most popular in Mexico and Puerto Rico, but it has been reported from Maine to Chile and from Russia to the Philippines.
But it really can’t be a Native American legend. It primarily sucks the blood of goats. And goats weren’t introduced until the arrival of Europeans; they are part of the Mesopotamian agricultural package along with things like wheat and barley. Besides it was never reported before 1995. So it can’t be anything ancient, can it? Really?
Hurm.
There are a lot of Christians in the world and more all the time. Christianity centers on Jesus and in particular his resurrection, which occurred some time after Passover. And to this day Easter is dated from Passover. So for a huge proportion of the world Passover marks a keystone moment of their faith.
In ancient times in the Holy Land people would go out for the summer with their flocks to graze them. Tellingly, goats featured importantly among the animals. There was a ritual done before going out. They would sprinkle blood on their doors in a bid to protect the flocks from The Destroyer. And the thing this Destroyer did, it sucked the blood of goats.
There are a number of religious traditions that contain a Creator and a Destroyer. The Eumenides of ancient Greek legend are a case in point. They are the three sisters, the fates, the furies. One spins the thread of life, one measures it and one cuts it. Spin and cut. Create and destroy. The word means “sweet spirited ones.” Nay not just sweet but sweet to the limits of the concept. Why such a nice name for such a scary notion? Go to Romania some time and say something bad about Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. You will be told he was no vampire and is a national hero. I suspect some of them are still afraid of him. I suspect the Greeks put a nice name to the furies because they were afraid of them.
I am no expert on the Hindu religion, but I have been told there are among many others two key gods. There is Vishnu the creator and Shiva the destroyer.
Come back to Christianity. There are the there faces of God: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The other day while out for a walk I passed two gardeners chatting. One was explaining the Trinity to the other. He said, “You pray, ‘Our Father who are in heaven,’ how many is “are”? Isaac Newton would have been impressed. He never believed in the Trinity.
Trinity, right, three faces of God. Wrong. God is Creator. But you won’t talk religion with a Christian very long before you turn up the Destroyer. Who rules in Hell? Who tempted Eve in the Garden? Why is not the creation of a perfect God itself perfect? The Destroyer is always there if only by implication. We call him Satan among other things.
Satan does not exist, of course. Satan worshipers exist but not actually Satan. If Satan existed then what would happen to Europe? They are overwhelmingly secular there. With no help from any Creator, they would be totally at the mercy of the Destroyer. Their birth rate would go through the floor. They would be doomed. OK. They are. So let’s not talk about that.
The chupacabra is the ancient Destroyer. He is the enemy of all that is good and wholesome. He is Satan. That is why he is so scary. To this day Christians keep holy a time that was in ancient days the occasion of the ritual to keep him at bay.
Now go back and look at the essay on Rh incompatibility. In the 1960’s Rh incompatibility was understood sufficiently to keep it at bay. Until then it was a killer of women and children which at least among those of European descent was right up there with famine, plague and war. So what did people do? Did they take the attitude, “We now understand how mixing genes can cause unspeakable suffering, horror and death. So common sense indicates that it can probably do more. It can harm us in ways now undreamed of. We need to avoid randomly mixing genes to protect ourselves from something even if we don’t know what it is.”? On the contrary, the spirit of the time was, “Free love. We know everything now. We can cure every sexually transmitted disease. We know all there is about genetics. Everybody can marry anybody and anybody who objects is a bad person. And anybody can have sex with anybody and anybody who objects is even worse.”
Obviously this was utter madness. There never was a time when all sexually transmitted diseases were cured. There never was a society that long endured without a tradition of marriage. There never was a society that lasted long without some sort of constraint on who married whom. Obviously there were rules the effect of which we did not understand. But we went there. We decided that we were different and that we were better than experience. We threw out the rule book.
How could we have been so stupid? The kindest thing I can think of is the Spanish flu. This was an epidemic that swept the world in 1918. It was so terrible that every country but Spain panicked and decided people would panic if they knew about it. So the contemporary news reports were from Spain.
The flu was probably the worst single event in history. In a few months it killed more people than all the wars of the 20th century. Most of the deaths were from pneumonia. But it also seems clear that the disease caused brain damage. So an enormous proportion of people alive in 1918 had been infected with the flu and potentially had unrecognized brain damage. In 1960 those people were 42 and older. By 1970 they were 52 and older. They were at the top of their careers. So all the authorities in the 1960’s were potentially brain damaged, even if to only a subtle degree. That may have been the cause of their obvious failure to look at evidence.
But that may be too kind. It can’t have affected everybody. Even if it caused brain damage, some people were not even infected in the first place. The brighter ones should have competed successfully for the most influential positions. So I do not know.
There is another thing other than brain damage that can make people ignore good sense. That is religious fervor. Don’t think about your own religion, whatever it is. Look at whatever religion your own has the most problems with. Don’t they look foolish? Don’t they make bad decisions? Don’t they ignore the most obvious facts and simple logic?
So what was this religious movement that so overwhelmed our good sense? It has to be Satanism. The God of scripture may be incomprehensible in many ways, but one thing is crystal clear. Genealogy is important. It matters whom you descend from. Have a go at rereading the Old Testament. The genealogies will drive you to distraction. Whatever else you may learn from them, you will learn THIS IS IMPORTANT. And what is the attitude of scripture on scrambling the gene pool? BAD IDEA. So this religious movement can not have been Christian or Jewish or Muslim. It had to be a revival of THE OTHER GUY. It was the rise of the Destroyer.
Anyway, destroy it did and destroy it does.
I don’t mean to say that every liberal of the 60’s and afterward was busy holding Black Masses and burning black candles and sacrificing a white chicken and a black chicken. Don’t tell me they were. Lie to me if you have to. But that was the effect.
Of course there is no Satan. The fact that large and varied gene pools die out is enough to produce the wars, the horrors, the extinctions, the prejudice and the hatred that we see in history. Simple arithmetic has no need of any supernatural help.
Still, when you are in a fight it can be helpful to have a name for the enemy. It is not necessary. Robert E. Lee was a very effective general, and all he ever called the troops that were trying to destroy his army was, “Those people over there.” That speaks well of his nobility of spirit, the humanity of his heart. By the way. He lost.
I am engaged in a bitter, soul devouring, inch by inch, cold, lonely, desperate fight to save the human race. Every now and then I look around for a name for the enemy. Sometimes he is the Pied Piper, leading the children to destruction. Sometimes he is the Pale Rider, death on a pale horse exterminating nations. Sometimes the Grail Curse. Sometimes he is just the plain cussedness of people.
He is the destroyer, lower case if not the Destroyer capitalized. Calling him the chupacabra would do, but the chupacabara is probably only a mangy coyote. So I have no name for the enemy.
If you care to join the battle and need a name, you could say Satan. You have my permission.
M. Linton Herbert MD
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