Holding (Per??n's) Hands in Argentina
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
POLITICAL NECROPHILIA Holding (Peron's) Hands in Argentina By Arthur M.Shapiro Magic is important in Argentina; the country is full of witches and magicians and thaumaturges and mediums....
...the work of psychopaths...
...Yet Christ rose from the dead, and 13 is the number of resurrection or regeneration...
...Of course, he knew nothing...
...His identity became merged in Hellenistic Egypt with the deity Thoth and eventually surfaced as the syncretic Hermes Trismegistos around the first century...
...Some 60,000 people attended this extravaganza on July 6, having been released from work by a 10-hour general strike in Perón's honor...
...Each contained a message from "Hermes lai, for the Group of 13" and a fragment of a poem...
...Thinking along very political lines, he noted that between the bombings and the grave robbery, "permanent guards now have to be assigned to hundreds of political offices and dozens of tombs and vaults...
...What else he might have done with them is open for speculation...
...It demanded $8 million in ransom for the hands and ceremonial sword of the Caudillo, and set a July 15 deadline...
...Macgregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, and Madame Blavatsky...
...Thirteen is an "unlucky" number because there were 13 at the Last Supper (and for several other reasons...
...Hermes was the Greek god of insight and dreams, and patron of magic...
...These folks," he said, "used a lot of equipment, tools to perforate thick masonry, maybe even a crane...
...Also attributed to Hermes Trismegistos is the Corpus Hermeticum, one of the fundamental works of the mystery religions, revived in the great 19th-century vogue for occultism that featured such characters as Eliphas Levi, S.L...
...Naepaul The Return of Eva Perón Last June 30, three prominent figures representing the leadership of the three most important factions of the Peronist movement —Saul Ubaldini of the General Confederation of Labor, Carlos Grosso, titular head of the reformist " Renovators, " and Vicente Leonidas Saadi, acting president of the Partido Justicialista—received identical envelopes in the mail...
...After extended negotiations among the factions as to who would sponsor the show and who would speak and in what order, the labor federation called a public outdoor mass for Perón's repose...
...The envelopes all bore a return address: 2086 La Pampa Street, Buenos Aires...
...Still, "Hermes lai" and "The Group of 13" have multiple resonances for the adept...
...The document was widely circulated in the Middle East and in Europe by 1200...
...And it reminded the public that just the week before, individuals unknown had bombed 16 Radical Party offices nationwide...
...The whereabouts of the missing parts will be discussed for years in the sidewalk cafes and bars of Buenos Aires...
...The press in general supported the view that it was a political act, albeit a strange one...
...The 13th Tarot Trump, Death, typically shows the Grim Reaper with a scythe...
...it ended, "Taken from our hands with a sweetness not forgotten...
...The Radicals' solicitude seemed real, but it was certainly in keeping with Alfonsin's very effective campaign to coopt the Peronists by such gestures as maintaining contact with Isabel, using Perón's hand gestures, and even adopting his word "companeros" for the masses...
...The numbering of this chapter is not random...
...Nicolas Hermes, chief consulting surgeon at Fernandez Hospital, professor of surgery at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School, and a man of unquestioned probity lives there...
...By this account, the break-in at the tomb was mere window-dressing, intended to "explain" possession of the hands and, incidentally, to get the scraps of poetry as bona fides for the ransom note...
...They found the bars on the skylight of the tomb had been cut...
...Specifically, someone had whacked it across the face with sufficient force to break the neck and the nose, had severed and removed a finger from the right hand, and had carefully slit open the head to remove the brain...
...Of the three, only Saadi took this strange missive seriously...
...In a loony way it all fits together...
...If all of this seems incredibly arcane to be of political interest, one should keep in mind that Argentina is a country where one's tobacconist may cast horoscopes...
...Thus to impute a coded mystical message to the ransom note for Perón's hands is anything but far-fetched...
...Perhaps Perón's feet were not accessible...
...Nevertheless, Saadi went to Municipal Court Judge Jaime Far Suau and got an exhumation order...
...The government would not help them...
...It does not appear in the Greek concordance to the Corpus Hermeticum, and its real significance may turn out to be numerological...
...Political necrophilia is nothing new in Argentina, where bodies have been used before to convey symbolic messages—as when the Montoneros, having killed former President Pedro Aramburu, absconded with his body, or when the burial place of Radical exPresident Arturo Olia became a source of tension between natives of his home province of Cordoba and the leadership of his party...
...All the damage was skillfully concealed at the time intimate closeups of the cadaver were released to the public through the respectable media the week of January 9, 1985—one more occasion when the evening news in Argentina was easy to confuse with Tales from the Crypt...
...No one seems to recall seeing the body since it was removed from the presidential residence by General Jorge Rafael Videla's men after Isabel was overthrown...
...Carlos Grosso, the Peronist reform leader, said that "no political force with any common sense or maturity could have done this, and it's not worth speculating along those lines...
...the lopped heads are the seeds that fall to the ground and sprout hands and feet, the new shoots...
...and] they provoke a general alarm...
...Meanwhile, theories began proliferating...
...But the visitor must ignore this side of Argentine life because, he is told, it isn't real...
...The occult angle comes naturally to the Argentine mind, and has fueled speculation that Peron has not been in possession of his hands for a decade...
...It is hard to separate wild rumor from wild truth about this man, who through the infamous "Triple A" (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) helped to coordinate death-squad terror in his own country and elsewhere in Latin America...
...The most famous of them, it happens, is Section 13 of the Corpus Hermeticum, where Hermes Trismegistos instructs his son Tat on how to achieve regeneration...
...An anonymous source in military intelligence predictably attributed the dastardly deed to "some group on the Left, not the same as the bombers of the Radical offices...
...Privately, many Peronists concurred...
...The grave robbery, he declared, was "simply macabre...
...His address had been chosen to match the pseudonym "Hermes...
...Some remembered that the British command post in the Falklands-Malvinas War was the carrier Hermes...
...The thieves and bombers, he said, "seek to instill fear and commotion and maintain us on edge...
...it would take hours and hours of work to violate it...
...The bizarre Odyssey of Eva Perón's embalmed remains is the stuff legends are made of, but a side effect of the theft of her husband's hands was the belated revelation that when Lopez Rega had her cadaver spruced up in 1974, the undertaker found some very odd things had happened to it...
...The crypt was only 80 feet from the cemetery headquarters, and there was a round-the-clock watchman...
...It is interpreted to mean that man is the earthly counterpart of God, and that both are expressions of the same universal force...
...The movement, torn by vicious infighting, staged a demonstration of grief that barely disguised the clashing agendas and personal ambitions of the mourners...
...Along with the Peronist leaders, Labor Minister Carlos Alderete eulogized the Caudillo as a man committed to social justice...
...Nobody, though, was raising $8 million...
...There can be no salvation without regeneration," Hermes says to Tat, and the Partido Justkialista should be listening...
...The body had sat there for a year and a half with Evita's, and the man on the street firmly believes that Lopez Rega communicated with both of them...
...The message spoke of hands too...
...Peronist spokesman Antonio Cafiero disagreed...
...An examination of several hours confirmed that the sword was gone— and so were Perón's hands, neatly removed above the wrist...
...Currently in prison for crimes committed during the 1970s when he was the most powerful man in the government, Lopez Rega had headed a secret society called Anael that supposedly practiced necromancy, divination, and other black arts in the Presidential Palace itself...
...This was an attack on democracy, not just on Peronism, the letter said...
...Interior Minister Antonio Tróccoli stated firmly that there would be no declaration of a state of siege nor any postponement of the scheduled balloting...
...Inside the crypt, sealed with 12 triple-combination locks whose number sequences were a top party secret, there was a 10-inch hole in the 375-pound plate-glass cover of the coffin...
...I once had my lucky number calculated by a lottery-ticket dealer while I sipped a Coca-Cola (the fellow claimed to be using a procedure from the Zohar...
...V.S...
...Incredibly, neither did the cemetery officials or watchmen, who claimed they had not noticed anything out of the ordinary...
...That leaves the odd word "lai," so far unexplained in the Argentine press...
...The Greek iai appears in plays by Aristophanes (e.g., at the end of Lysistratd) and in a fragment from Sophocles as a generic whoop: "Yippee...
...Although as usual in such matters the message to be read into the message is ambiguous, "Hermes" directs us at once to the basic Hermetic documents...
...Instead of being politically inspired, it seems to be an expression of insanity...
...The suggestion was clear: a sinister conspiracy to destabilize the political situation in anticipation of the September 6 legislative elections...
...Its most famous aphorism, often given as "That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that above, to achieve the wonders of the One," is the fundamental theorem of astrology...
...The message, whatever its precise mystical interpretation, is clearly about resurrection...
...Abraham's wife Sarah found clutched in his mummified hands the Emerald Table of Wisdom, written in Phoenician characters and said to be the basic text of all magic...
...Davis, who frequently visits Argentina...
...The poem, written by Juan Perón's widow Isabel, had been on the front of the Caudillo's coffin...
...Deputy Chief Nicolas Musto of the 29th Prefecture told Congressman Miguel Angel Toma to relax: "There's no chance Perón's body has been profaned...
...This is the renewed and reformed tradition that informed Lopez Rega's secret society and others like it all over Argentina...
...President Raul Alfonsin's Radical Party reacted immediately, publishing on July 2 an open letter to all Peronists that affirmed solidarity with them in their pain and humiliation...
...But if the hands were removed while he still had access to the body, it would account for the seemingly impossible logistics of their removal through a 10-inch hole in a very cramped space...
...There was much speculation that it would work to the advantage of the Radicals by making the Peronists look like ridiculous political necrophiliacs, more involved with the past than with formulating a coherent program for today...
...Arthur M. Shapiro, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of zoologv al the University of California...
...He is mowing a field of human heads, but hands and feet are growing in their place...
...In magical tradition Hermes Trismegistos ("Thrice-Greatest") was the grandson of Adam, a sage of surpassing wisdom, as well as builder of the Pyramids...
...Much speculation, however, centered around the murkiest figure in the modern history of Argentina, José Lopez Rega—"The Wizard," Peronist court astrologer, black magician, Isabel's reputed lover, universally compared to Rasputin...
...Colonel Jaime Cesio, security chief for the State petroleum enterprise YPF, speculated that "at least six people with walkie-talkies were involved...
...Yet the grave robbers had gone to extraordinary lengths for mere psychopaths...
...The police also thought it was a bizarre joke...
...The sum, it said, was due for services rendered in 1972...
...Some whispered of secret deals involving Montonero terrorists and/or Libya's Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi...
...Retired Colonel Horacio Ballester, a member of the Alfonsin support group Military Men for Democracy, confirmed that it was no amateur operation...
...The next day— the 13 th anniversary of Perón's death— a procession made its way to the Chacarita Cemetery in western Buenos Aires...
Vol. 70 • August 1987 • No. 11
