Brazilian Spiritist pipe
Brazil holds this strange world record: to have the biggest amount of declared spiritists among its population. And for spiritists I mean common people that can communicate with the spirits of the dead through specific rituals or certain spiritual “techniques”. In fact, in Brazil, Spiritism is considered as a whole religion, with more than two million mortals following its principles and practices. No wonder, then, that was there, in Brazil, where this spiritist pipe’s uncanny story happened…
It began on October the 5th, of the year 1949. That day occurred the most important gathering in the World’s History of Spiritism. The summit was called “Pacto Aureo” (an enigmatic Portuguese name, which can be translated as “Golden Covenant”), and there were set the rules and prescriptions upon the actual Spiritism’s social structure was built. That very same day Fernando Das Neves was born. And since his birth coincided with such a fundamental reunion, his family augured to the baby a bright future within the Spiritist movement. Fernando’s uncle, going far beyond the rest of the family, prognosticated that the new-born was called to be the most powerful medium of the XXth century.
Time passed and Fernando grew up. But his “natural abilities” didn’t show up. So, at the age of 21, Fernando was sent to Uberaba, a district in Minas Gerais state. There lived the legendary Chico Xavier, whose list of extraordinary attributes and deeds is boundless: a superlative prophet, an outstanding prolific writer (with more than 400 books which were dictated by different entities, written thanks to his psychographic skills), a bullet-proof humbleness, an unmatchable sense of charity… were all characteristics of the one who was later considered the Pope of Spiritism.
Fernando entered Chico Xavier’s institution and, thanks to his influential family intervention, he soon became one of his disciples. The idea was to let Chico help him develop his psychic powers. And the lessons started almost instantly.
It took ten years for Fernando Das Neves to recognize that his training was going nowhere. And even more, he started to think that he was a fraud: in his lifetime he did not experience any communication with the dead, not even once. So, exhausted and depressed, he packed his possessions and returned to Rio de Janeiro
Back in Rio, he announced to his family his retirement from the spiritual path. But his uncle convinced him that the failure wasn’t his responsibility at all, but instead, a wrong selection of a spiritist environment. He explained to Fernando that a medium has two very different groundings to choose from. One is the Kardecist movement: based on Allan Kardec’s philosophy, this tradition promote a clean body as a condition to contact the spirits. On the opposite site, or almost, you can find the Umbanda Spiritism: grounded in several African cults, this faction believes in inducing the medium in a trance (through substance experimentation or any other ritual practices, for example). Chico Xavier was the ultimate Kardecist. Now Fernando needed to experiment the other option, inspired by the previous experiences of Aleister Crowley’s Golden Dawn. And his uncle was so eloquent that made him change his mind.
A couple of weeks later, Fernando’s uncle introduced him to the members of one extremely closed esoteric group, whose ritual’s line was unmistakeably umbandistic. They were going to held a spiritist session that same Sunday night and invited Fernando to join them, something he accepted without knowing that this decision will put him in great danger…
Sunday arrived and Fernando ended up in a minuscule apartment with half a dozen other people. His uncle, who was not present, had praised his nephew’s talents in such an emphatic way that the group agreed unanimously to let Fernando be the one to carry away the ceremony as the mediumnic channel. That accorded, someone brought a little wooden pipe, filled it with cannabis and passed it to Fernando saying “We are ready”. That became his first contact with a “toxic” substance…
Fernando smoked with fruition. But nothing happened. I mean, nothing “supernatural” happened. And although he felt quite easy about this, the others don’t. So one of the attendees, an extremely tall man, grabbed the pipe in disgust and refilled it, but this time with Madak (a powerful mix of Opium and Tobacco). That made a drastic difference. Really.
Twenty minutes later, Fernando entered in an irrevocable trance-like state. Or worse. While lying on the floor, unconscious, shaking and sweating and mumbling incoherent things, his colleagues panicked. The last thing they wanted was a dead overdosed body in the room. And in the middle of this mess someone knocked at the door. Sharp looks were shot between each one in the room. Two young guys pulled Fernando through the floor and left him alone in the bathroom. Then silence. And again three knocks. Instinctively, the only woman in there approached the entrance and said “Yes?”, using a childish voice, very common among Brazilian females. From the other side someone answered: “Let me in”.
It was strange, but everybody in that apartment felt compelled to open the door. And so did the woman. Precisely. What they saw was quite peculiar: an elder man in a black tunic, his face almost all covered up with a thick hood.
The elder man got in and went directly to the bathroom, where Fernando was. And entering there, he slammed the door in rage. Everyone seemed horrified, specially after hearing Fernando’s maniacal scream.
The tall guy quickly opened the door and, to his surprise, the elder man wasn’t there anymore. Fernando was awake, seated in the floor beside the toilet, crying in silence. Upon the general consternation someone suggested that he recognized the apparition: it was Aleister Crowley, one of the most notable “initiated” of the XXth century. The lady in the room commented that Crowley’s death occurred in 1947, more than 30 years before. Then, Fernando interrupted the general amazement: “I’ve just saw things that were not meant for the human eye”. But he never explained what was that monstrous thing he saw. Not even years after the shocking event. When all quieted down in the apartment, the tall attendee snatched the pipe and took it to his home. Then wrote down the chronicle of events, and send both (the pipe and the letter) to my grandfather.
This is a wooden handcrafted pipe, carved with some very stylized Indonesian patterns. The polished design is somewhat abstract, but in a way it resembles a botanical layout, with leafs and branches, divided with ring separators. The inner part of the bowl is made of ceramic so that the pipe itself doesn’t get impregnated by the herb’s strong perfumes: something ideal for those who want to keep their smoking ritual in secret.
Devil’s Parker 51 Pen stolen from Satan’s pocket
This is the first item of Samuel Goldstein’s private collection up for auction. It’s a luxury Parker 51 pen that belonged to the Devil himself and was stolen from Satan’s pocket right after signing a deal with him.
If you want to know the full story of this luciferian item, please read further. I’ll try to reproduce its tale as it was told to me by my grandfather.
The following events took place in a small town lost in Argentina’s vast and forgotten North, about half a century ago. Our main character was a common burglar, a chicken thief that one unlucky night got caught by the local police. Thrown to a filthy prison for a couple of days, he shared there a cell with a very strange and obscure man, a person convicted for killing at least three nuns. This silent individual was a devotee of “San la Muerte” (a powerful entity sometimes associated with the Devil) whose cult grew massive among Argentinian criminals. Both of them mutually confided all their difficulties and ambitions, and in almost no time at all, they became fond of each other. When our robber got finally kicked out of jail, his cell mate scribbled some weird symbols in the floor, lightened a red candle and said: “He will appear to you anytime soon. Take advantage of the deal”. After that, the assassin spitted cheap whiskey over the flame, snuffing it.
That night, while sleeping in a barn, the burglar felt a pestilent sulfur odor, so strong, that woke him up. Then someone entered the place… An average human figure came out of the shadows and stared at him with a pair of sinister eyes. Half drunk as he was after celebrating the end of his short stance in prison, he overlooked the terrible nature of that manifestation. Much to his disgrace, may I add.
He surely was confused. At first, the thief thought that that man was the owner of the land and feared to end up again behind bars just for trespassing private property. But eventually, while hearing the persuasive voice of the stranger, he remembered his confined friend’s uncanny ritual and the premonitory goodbye words. And finally understood the true identity of that “man” he had in front of him.
There were no presentations whatsoever. The Devil said something like: “We both know what the other wants. Sign here and I’ll concede it”, and offered him a rolled paper along with the pen. When the burglar said “Ok”, the Devil took the thief’s left hand and made a fast cut with his sharp nail. Blood begun to flow and the Devil added: “Lets use this as ink”. After the contract was sealed with a human signature, Lucifer saved paper and pen into his pocket and was about to leave the barn when, suddenly, a white dove arrived flying directly towards Satan, and punched him in his chest. That was an odd situation indeed: a human-like demon with a bird flapping hysterically around him… And the thief, excited by the overall consternation, decided to keep a “souvenir” of such a bizarre encounter. So, in one of his usual kleptomaniacal raptures, he bravely slipped his hand into Satan’s pocket and grabbed the pen. The robbery went unnoticed (or at least that’s what the thief thought), because the Devil seemed only interested in breaking the dove’s neck, something that was attained with one skillful wrist movement. Then, Lucifer said in an impossible low pitch voice: “Another miscarried one”, and, offering the cleanest smile the burglar ever saw, he disappeared into the night.
From next day on, things started to change for the burglar. A local politician hired him to perform some dirty work, threatening his adversaries, keeping in order some illegal businesses. That was the kick-start of an unstoppable career that was crowned, a decade later, with a first son to be born from the womb of the gorgeous and wealthy landowner’s daughter, and foremost spectacular, when the thief became the elected Mayor of the town.
On his first week as a Mayor he signed several decrees, mostly giving his consent to corrupt deals with private firms. The hooking feeling of power, the arrogance and the impunity given by a rotten political structure, made him sign all those edicts with the Parker 51 pen. He did not use blood though, but regular blue ink instead. Surprisingly (or not really), included among one of those authorized decrees was an agreement to give a huge amount of public money to restore and expand the local catholic chapel. And he signed that also, without much hesitation. But the consequences of that cynical act were not so good…
A couple of days later, some terrible news interrupted the burglar’s peaceful afternoon at the Town Hall: his pregnant wife had died in a car accident. He left the building and hurried to where the crash took place. And upon his arrival, he recognized not only the devastated corpse, but also a shocking sulfur odor that he remembered instantly. He stayed there for less than two minutes. Then he returned to his office, buried every attempt to investigate what really happened under tons of bureaucracy paperwork, and resigned to his charge. That was the last time he used the Parker 51.
That night he traveled to a neighbor town to contact a well known priest (that happened to be a demonologist with several successful exorcisms in his resume). They talked for a couple of hours and the burglar confessed to the cleric the story of the pickpocketed pen. He also handed the pen to the priest for him to keep. The burglar received the priest’s blessing, jumped into his car and left the town. No one saw him again.
How come the pen was added to the Goldstein Collection you may wonder. Well, the priest was a friend of my grandfather, they met a couple of times and maintained written contact every now and then. In 1983 the cleric was diagnosed with a terminal disease so he gave the Parker 51 to my grandfather and told him its obscure origins.
Now, about the pen… The Parker 51 was regarded (and still is) as the best fountain pen ever made. It has a clever “vacumatic” system to fill its barrel with ink. A beautiful gold filled metal cap with parallel lines engraved all over it and a top pearlescent jewel.
The vacumatic system was sure a standout feature if you consider the sick use this pen had. As explained above, the Devil demanded to sign the contracts with blood. So I guess that, for that purpose, this was the usual procedure: to inflict a slight cut in the signatory’s skin, then, when blood arises, to recline swiftly the nib over the injury, and finally, to pull back the Parker’s diaphragm sucking blood with this movement, filling the container. In fact, if you look close enough, the nib still has some creepy stain marks, nor red neither blue (something between cyan and magenta), that I suppose were a product of mixing blood fluid and common ink.
The pen’s hood have some strange marks in its front. These scratches seem made by an extremely hard and sharp fingernail or some sort of tiny claw.
The outer part of the barrel shows also some inscriptions such as a mysterious number 7, a cabbalistic tiny digit which was profoundly engraved.
This is what I know so far about the devilish Parker 51 pen. But if you want to ask me something, I’ll try to answer all your questions. Just contact me or leave a comment and I’ll do my best to clarify the story of this bizarre item.