It seems there’s a mystery in Georgia.
Call it, as one magazine did, recently, “The Mystery of the Headless Goats in the Chattahoochee River,”
A year before, a local television station, WSBTC, reported that there were “headless goats found floating in the Chattahoochee River. Someone has dumped hundreds of decapitated goats over the past few years.”
A few sacrificed animals — perhaps several sheep near Miami, or chickens in New York — are one thing. Reports come periodically about isolated events. But hundreds?
When a reporter for the station accompanied Jason Ulseth, who works for the environmental group the Chattahoochee Riverkeepers, Ulseth had told him, “Lately it’s become a lot more frequent, and on Friday we were out here and saw thirty of them floating down the river.”
A witness, it seems, recorded cell-phone video of goats being tossed into the river from the I-20 bridge.
According to the report, the video shows the goat hitting the water. “He actually hears the body splashing down, not only in the middle of the night, but he told me he hears them in the middle of the day,” Ulseth said. [For Full Story]
It wasn’t even Halloween, at the time of that report.
Even the staid New Yorker Magazine picked up on the story, featuring it more recently, on September 29, 2022, the feast of the Archangel Michael, of course, though one doubts the magazine planned it that way (or even is familiar with that feast day).
“The case of the headless goats is a mystery,” says the magazine. “It’s also a public-health hazard, and a nightmare for a stretch of river that’s newly safe for recreation.
Noted the writer, “one theory about the headless goats of the Chattahoochee focuses on the Afro-Caribbean religious tradition Santería, also known as Lukumí and La Regla de Ocha. The practice sometimes involves animal sacrifice. A similar theory was floated several years ago, when numerous goat heads turned up in and around Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. In both cases, no one has established a definitive connection, at least not publicly.”
When he was directed by Georgia authorities to Robert Almonte, a retired deputy chief of the El Paso Police Department who worked a number of narcotics investigations and has since founded a consulting company that specializes in the activities of Mexican drug cartels, Almonte explained that the perpetrators were probably drug traffickers who “involve the spiritual world in their activities.”
“I told Almonte about what was turning up in the Chattahoochee,” says the writer. “He didn’t sound surprised. ‘I’m seeing more and more of the drug traffickers using Santería for protection over the last couple of years,’ he said. ‘But that’s a lot of goats. That would mean they’re moving a lot of drugs along that highway.’”
Santeria is an exquisitely improbable mix of African voodoo-like occultism — very dark stuff — with elements of Catholicism.
Almonte reportedly figures that Mexican cartel operators could be sacrificing goats for safe passage to or from Atlanta, and dumping them in the river. [For Full Story]
One professor who studied arcane cults said that if it is Santería, the fact that it was by a river means that it was an offering to “Oshun, the goddess of love.”
It sounded to him more like copycatting, or a group unfamiliar with the actual details of Santería, using the goats as a lucky charm. “It’s like not knowing anything about Catholicism and bathing in Holy Water because you think it’s gonna help you,” he was quoted as saying. [For Full Story; beware profanities]
During a recent conference in Miami, we were approached by a devout Catholic professor who was in distress and begging prayers. She said her next-door neighbor was a witch who practiced Santería among other things and was constantly cursing her and her house — even putting a skull on a post and pointing it in her direction. The besieged woman tried to grow hedges to blot out the neighbor, but the neighbor reported her to the community board, which made her trim the hedges in accordance with code, exposing her to the occultist and the occultist’s friends.
Prayer need. Pray for her. Let us all pray for each other.
Rosary in hand, let us take turf back from the enemy.
Oh, October: the Month of the Rosary.
But according to a former Satanist, occultists perform rituals for the entire month. It’s the Month of the Rosary versus the Month of Satanism. (More on this next week, at our on-line retreat).
[resources: Michael Brown, on-line retreat, 10/29]