Caul

Extrapolation

The phenomena of infant morphology has long fascinated persons whose intellectual pursuits lay at their most comfortable in untoward position, reflecting spiritual traditions to which the researcher has -- perhaps only casually -- sworn fealty. Nearly without exception, human religious experience autogyrates between the idea of being and non-being, living and death. The lives of men appear in our soul dramas as but limping children, somehow muscled and terse, mouthing dangerously invented languages of body, motion, of sword's edge and needle's point. To muddle with spyglass and pencil in the naked twilight of this experience is the duty of a lone nut, the errant scientician, the Gnomic up-ender, the Catholic.

It should come as no surprise then, that Europe's Mother Church enjoys a teaming wealth of scholarly information concerning those states of mankind which split asunder the divisory connections between man and animal, angel and monkey, chirping non-life and the waxy glow of gloamy non-existance. It takes a strange kind of man, in other words, to study strange kinds of men -- or as the case may be, very strange examples of newly-birthed children and in particular those examples which display superfluous body parts, glaring omissions of design or unnatural developments requiring immediate medical and priestly attention.

The so-called cowled child is just such a spectular birth-object.

Threading The Nut

Characterized by a flap of hanging skin, the cowled child is often born in what it must perceive as a state of woeful blindness.

Tersely sorting this cry from the collective wilderness are the distinctive characteristics which, despite the regular appearance of cowled children, mark each one as unique. In certain Inuit myths, the "reading" of a cowled child's particular "meaning" provided the calendar for everything from seal hunts to making love. In the Algonquin, the word for a cowled child is the same as "imperfect stone." In Europe, however...

....duly manipulated by qualified "seers" or representatives ....

See Also

Desiderata

A Brooklyn-based Puerto Rican Street Gang, the Kowled Kids, is so named in reference to their uncircumcised penises. The reference is thought to be a taunt to Jewish gangs which co-exist, not always peacefully, in certain neighborhoods near the Brooklyn Bridge.