By: Event Journalist. ((Photos by Charlie / Eva and likely others – Editing by Daiyu, nb. different Windlights were used by different photographers, please assume there was a consistent time!))
What began outside Vudu Spice as an Equinox ritual of renewal ended with a man burned inside a wicker effigy while a crowd watched and FDH put out the flames.
By the time I arrived outside Vudu Spice, the street had already been clad in fire and dressed for significance. As our images show fire bowls burned low and hot while food and liquor had been laid out for whomever was dragged towards the event by that smell of Hathian trouble brewing. Smoke curled up around an altar and ritual table. Above it all loomed the wicker figure itself, the main event… Tall enough to turn heads even before anyone understood how it might be used (or on whom). The event had been advertised as a Spring Equinox gathering, a ceremonial burning for renewal and balance, and at first glance it looked exactly like that. A public rite in Hathian likely equal parts theatre, belief and bravado, along with booze, hip bumping and probably a few bloody noses.
Priestess Eva stood at the centre of it all, a figure the Observer’s Editor had prepped me with in detail. Blood and Bone. Vudu and Magic. Chaos and Insanity and a heady mix of cult sex symbol. She had the sort of presence that makes a crowd lower its voice without being asked. I saw that she was crowned in horns and bone and from a distance appeared to have some form of instrument in her hand, perhaps a pendulum. Perhaps it represented balance? Perhaps it represented time. Perhaps it would mark or be marked by what was about to unfurl in Hathian? Eva welcomed those gathered to “the renewal” and to the Spring Equinox. The ‘priestess’ spoke of release, rebirth and I took away from it her view of the old need to let fire carry away what should not be kept.
“Ash and blood… to feed what must grow… Join the world with fresh new eyes… let the world feel our sacrifices… to cleanse us through fire… to let us go forth new…”
Eva
It was serious, not playful. In Hathian, where any event can tip sideways, the opening moments had enough darkness to make me heed Daiyu’s warning and draw a little closer to the light and any familiar face. It was enough to make this reporter hesitate before dismissing Daiyu’s ‘experience’ as street-pageantry with a darker wardrobe. Hathian, just maybe, was about to get one of it’s dark, dark events.
Then There was a Cage
At first, and I will admit this plainly… I thought the man inside it might still be part of the ‘props’, the staging… the general… uhh atmosphere. Other people seemed to think so too, so it wasn’t a dumb a thought as it might appear in hindsight. Look, not all of us have lived through the worst that Hathian has and sometimes we think spectacle doesn’t equal bloody murder…. Anyway, that uncertainty clung to the crowd for longer than it should have.
So Ivar, his name given out as part of the ceremony, did not behave like a prop or Eva’s set dressing. He cried out for help. He begged. He made all of us witness and accomplice to the ‘renewal’. He in effect was a crime we all committed, whether we wanted to or, as I hope most felt, didn’t.
He was visibly injured, bloodied and frantic and the people surrounding him appeared to mock him. one, looking possibly like Charlie kicked the cage and taunted him. Another, looking very unlike her cartoon portrayal of barely competent Hopper Chief trainer drowned out his cries with more backing music. Others gave threat to him. This cage was no prop. This was no actor. This was a victim and as I said… we were now all accomplices to what was to come.
[Editorial note from Daiyu Tang: For readers who still enjoy filing everything under ‘weird local flavour,’ this is the point where you stop, assess your fucking mental state and then get some therapy. The next step on ‘local flavour’ is a Hopper all-you-can-eat-BBQ and seriously; are you that disturbed? Christ.]
Then There was Dragging
What followed was, in its own way, almost more disturbing because of how unevenly people reacted to it. Some appeared to this (sober) journalist clearly intoxicated. Some were mesmerised by the pageantry and pagan(try). Some seemed to assume it must still be some kind of performance because the alternative was too ugly, yet for those, I say… when will our eyes be opened in Hathian? Perhaps a few drifted away… But most simply watched, which is its own kind of answer. That was the feeling in the street more than panic at first: hesitation. The sort of hesitation that lets a Hathian atrocity gather form in public because nobody wants to be the first to say out loud what they think they are seeing. It’s the same with the riots, or the bystander effect. We’ll watch the Molotov get thrown and then go ‘OH SHIT’ when the HPD fire back with assault rifles. We’ll watch the woman be beat in the alleyway and then go ‘OH SHIT’ when Ain advances on us. Never mind that we could have stopped any of it, together, we just go ‘OH SHIT’. And let me be clear, this was a ten bell ‘oh shit’ fire moment.
Eva ended that hesitation herself.
“Bring him… This one has stained what was meant to be sacred… He is judged… Convicted in the eyes of Haven.”
Eva
She ordered this and those around her made it so. So when Ivar was hauled out before the altar she did not speak softly. She did not let that comfortable wool fall over our eyes. No, I stood there as she declared the above and that ‘the earth demanded its due’. The ritual language borrowed the structure of law; law that Hathian often lacks. Judgment. Conviction. Sentence. But this was not a courtroom. There was no Judge Jack. No actual judge either. Just the natural justice of Eva and her pagan beliefs. This was a public street wreathed in smoke and firelight while a crowd listened to a woman in ceremonial dress claim the right to condemn a bound man to death. Let that sink in. To fucking death.
Crossing Over
From there, the event crossed fully into horror. Ivar was dragged, restrained and I think was cut and stabbed while people around him in the hard language of Eva’s ritual completion. “More blood! More!” Eva cried. “Get him up there, family! The time has come!” Ivar was forced toward the wicker man, up the structure, and into it. The words being used all the while were cleansing words, renewal words, old words about ash and spring and the earth taking what it is owed. But there was nothing symbolic about the body being handled in front of us. Nothing abstract about his cries. Nothing mystical enough to erase the fact of a living man being made part of the fire. What was his exact crime? I tell you I was too scared to approach and ask. I was, as I said, a witness and in a way an accomplice. The journalist turned recording device, rather than human. I should’ve intervened, but what… would have been another burning? I was scared.
When the torches were put to the wicker, whatever remained of the event’s spiritual nature burned with it. Maybe Eva and her ‘family’ would call it differently. Maybe to them the burning was the most spiritual part. Eva called for the flames to clear the air, cleanse the ground, and burn.
The structure caught. Smoke thickened. Heat rolled across us. People sweated but most of them did naught but watch. It really was the case that the crowd did what Hathian crowds so often do when confronted with something unforgivable… Freezing, staring, talking, joking, fondling… Only a few now saw that this wasn’t them watching folklore, or immersive theatre, or one more eccentric neighbourhood rite… It was a man burning in public while the city made room for it. You made room for it. We all made room for it. Fuck.
You Can’t Quench the Fire (it Burns the Immortal Soul)
Reality struck. The sirens and machines of FDH arrived to break the spell of the ritual. They weren’t hereto adjudicate belief but to put out a fire, and in doing so dragged the whole spectacle back into the language of consequence. You set a giant wicker man (and a real man) alight, you get the FDH. No job to big.
Water hit the structure. Smoke and ash spread over the street and the event that had begun in ritual tones and invocations ended under FDH’s emergency response, with wet wreckage, shouted coordination, and one firefighter audibly calling for “a bus for a corpse.” That was the full stop, the punctuation for Hathian. The corpse that the event had been whispering for all along. We knew it, didn’t we? Thank you to the FDH for doing their job, but, they didn’t need to have one in the first place. When we abdicate our responsibilities to do collective good, others have to step in and in this case, it was too late for Ivar…
The Editor Writes
By: Daiyu Tang
What unsettles me, reading back through my reporter’s notes, is not only the killing itself. It is the ease with which normal city life appears to press back in around it. People discussed where they were going next. Whether the fire department had ruined the ceremony… (ruined? ffs – someone died). Whether there was food left… banal things. Life things that Ivar wouldn’t get again. This is what makes Hathian so difficult to look at directly for any length of time right? Atrocity draped in a single moral colour? No. In a rainbow genocide of colours? Yes. It comes mixed in with chatter, appetite, inconvenience, lust, theatre, faith, boredom and the practical business of deciding what comes after. ‘Hey babe, that guy screamed nicely didn’t he – let’s go watch a film’… What can I possibly say when hearing that?
A man was not merely symbolised as a wicker man, a real man was judged in public, terrorised in public, burned in public, and eventually spoken of in the flat, ugly language the city reserves for its dead.. ‘corpse bus for one’, like ‘dinner reservation for one’… Just another day in hell. You can dress that in ritual language if you like. You can surround it with candles, blood, flowers and prayer. Fires can burn down the street like Flamin’ Cajun has got out of control. You can call it balance. You can call it cleansing. The body at the end does not care what name was given to the fire. It’s just a fucking body.
Hathian has always had a weakness for making cruelty sound older, wiser and more inevitable than it is and if this city is now so hungry for meaning that it must build effigies, pronounce sentence and feed living flesh to the flames in order to feel renewed, then perhaps what needs burning away is not winter, not sin, not spiritual stain, but the city? What do you think dear reader?
