The letter arrived at our offices a few months ago. "This spring," it began, "the Supreme Court will decide whether animal sacrifice as a religious rite is against the law. Believe it or not, the Presbyterian Church, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Baptist Joint Committee, Creation spiritualist Matthew Fox, and scores of mainstream religious officials are lobbying the court to uphold this primitive rite. Why? The case cuts to the very heart of freedom of religion--and the American way of life. It impacts on the use of peyote in Native American rites, which was ruled against last year and caused an uproar among religious activists.
"It also impacts on the use of prayer in Christian Science, the legality of kosher Jewish practices, even the practice of Holy Communion, where wine and wafers are fully believed to be the blood and body of Christ."
Few would be awaiting the Supreme Court's decision more eagerly than Philip John Neimark, the letter continued. "Dr. Neimark is a successful financial analyst who has become a babalawo, or high priest, in the Ifa religion, an ancient system of belief in which animal sacrifice is one of the most sacred rituals.
"He also happens to be my uncle. He's literally a shaman." Right there in the American heartland. And if we dared, the author would witness and write about the sacred ceremonies from which outsiders are usually banned.
Neimark may be an example of Americans' restless search for transcendence. Then again, as we asked him, maybe he's just depressed--or going through an unusual midlife crisis. Certainly, many people have strong feelings against blood sacrifice, yet much of our experience stems from films such as the cult thriller The Believers and the boy-scout adventure Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. There are few opportunities to hear firsthand from people who actually practice such rituals.
We know that almost every American who reads this account will struggle to understand what motivates belief like Neimark's, or whether to trust it. Some see in the sacrifice a sacrilege and hubris. Some suspect a sinister cult, not only imported but "primitive"--maybe one arbitrary cut above (or below) human sacrifice.
Few articles have divided our staff as this one. Nor did the debate end in June, when the Supreme Court ruled animal sacrifice protected under the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion.
But this much we did agree on: There is a spiritual hunger among Americans and the quest for meaning is taking many people in many unorthodox directions. Philip John Neimark's is one.
-The Editors
Reporting has often taken me to some strange, far places--from the slums of Puerto Rico (where a drug dealer threatened to cut my throat), to the home of a deposed Communist leader in Romania, to the bowels of a Mayan temple buried in Honduras. But the farthest, strangest place of all was my uncle's garage in Chicago, where I went last spring.
There, in a neighborhood of wellkept brownstones on quiet streets, I participated in an ancient religious ceremony, complete with prayers to a nature deity and the sacrifice of a baby goat--whose soft, fine face I held in my hands before my uncle slit its throat and let its blood spray on a bowl of stones. Later I was asked to pray over those stones in a dark shrine of a room, and the next day to help my uncle's lovely wife, Vassa, wash them clean.
I'll tell you now that I cried for two hours after watching that goat die (even though I grew up a meat eater); that while washing the stones I felt like a murderer cleaning up evidence (and in some bewildered, perilous corner of my soul, I still do); and that I keep circling round the memory, wondering why it was so unsettling, why one animal penetrated me more than the names on the Vietnam Memorial or the photos of Sarajevo.
"It's the absolute, existential kick in the ass," my uncle had warned me. "It changes your whole concept of life, death, and your position in the universe." Indeed, for those who practice the Ifa religion, as my uncle does, blood sacrifice is a necessary sacrament that leads to actual miracles.
At least it did for him. Philip John Neimark is a 53-year-old white, Jewish businessman who made his first million by age 30; he's a recipient of honorary doctorates, listed in Who's Who in the World--and a high priest, or babalawo, in a religion that first flourished in Africa millennia ago. His book about the religion, The Way of the Orisa, was published last May by HarperCollins.
For more than a decade he was one of Chicago's most successful commodities traders, and he still manages $40 million of other people's money, giving them about a 20 percent return every year. And, for a long time, my uncle was our family's most brilliant cynic, the guy cruising down the street in an antique Jaguar with a license plate bearing Aristotle's empirical dictum, A is A.
"I was totally committed to the Cartesian, Newtonian universe," he says, "and I lived my life absolutely on that basis. If you couldn't prove God, He didn't exist. In fact, I militantly attacked and dismissed any other paradigm." So how did he end up praying to nature deities and casting the answer to others' fates with a chain of cowrie shells? How did he become a man who saved his wife's life (doctors were afraid she was bleeding to death during her pregnancy) with ritual ceremonies and prayers?
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