These bizarre discoveries have popped up with shocking frequency this year, making Big Apple parks look like makeshift sacrificial altars and grazing grounds for livestock left over from religious rituals.
In the last few months, four goats have been found in public places in The Bronx. And a total of six were found in the city in the last year, according to Animal Care and Control. That's on top of 19 reported incidents of animal remains found in parkland, according to the Parks Department.
SECT-UAL HEALING: Santeria priestess Sandra Fachini prepares some blessed candles at her Bronx store before performing a cleansing ritual on a client. The back room featured figurines surrounded by a candle and offerings, including $20 bills and a Coors Light bottle.
While authorities and animal-care experts can't say for sure who's behind the menagerie of abandoned beasts and body parts, many people who practice Santeria told The Post it is likely they the remains of Santeria ceremonies.
The Afro-Caribbean religion has kept a low profile in New York for most of its history. Members rarely discuss their beliefs in public, and nonbelievers are forbidden from observing certain rituals. The secrecy, members say, is due to the negative perception some outsiders have.
"I've been called a witch," said Sandra Fachini, a Santeria priestess who owns the St. Lazarus Botanica, a Bronx store that sells religious items. "One time when I left my shop, a little boy came up to me and asked me why I'm a witch."
She learned Santeria from her parents in her native country, Brazil, where the religion is practiced openly. Here, she said, it has remained underground because of its association with voodoo and blood sacrifices.
"I'm not a voodoo person," Fachini, 60, insisted, as eight believers sat in her cramped store waiting to see her. "I'm like a psychiatrist; I'm here to help people."
Fachini has had a store on East Kingsbridge Street for 35 years. Flowers and colorful figurines of saints -- some with exposed hearts, others with somber faces, leaning on crutches -- line her front room.
In a back room stand figurines of nattily dressed black men surrounded by offerings: a candle, a dozen $20 bills and a Coors Light bottle.
Fachini sells votive candles and bath oils that promise prosperity, health or love. The white-haired priestess also counsels and prays with customers.
Her clients, she said, are from all walks of life, including businessmen, nurses and a well-known NFL player she declined to name. They come to her to mend broken hearts, find work or cleanse themselves of bad energy.
"Most people who we deal with now come for job situations," Fachini said.
Occasionally, someone will enter the store with evil intentions. Fachini said a man once asked her to cast a spell to kill his enemy. "I told him to get out," she said.
Santeria is on the rise, Fachini added, but many imposters now practice the religion without having seriously studied it.
"There's a voodoo man on each block," she said. "It's a lot of fakes -- a lot of people abusing other people."
Santeria dates back to the 1500s, developed by African slaves taken to Cuba and other Caribbean countries. It mixes polytheism practiced by the Yoruba tribe of West Africa and Catholicism, the main religion of the slave masters.
Photos: Angel Chevrestt
SECT-UAL HEALING: Santeria priestess Sandra Fachini prepares some blessed candles at her Bronx store before performing a cleansing ritual on a client. The back room featured figurines surrounded by a candle and offerings, including $20 bills and a Coors Light bottle.
One occasion for animal sacrifice is the baptism of a new member. According to Fachini, during a daylong ceremony, initiates are dressed in white and have their hair shaved. They are also given a saint to whom they will be devoted. To determine one's saint, a priest will cast broken-up coconut shells and divine a reading from how they fall.
One Santeria priestess who would not give her name said animals for sacrifices are generally purchased at farms outside the city because Big Apple livestock and poultry retailers are required to kill an animal before letting a customer leave with it.
The telltale signs of a Santeria sacrifice have been found around the city in the last year.
Aaron Brashear, head of the Brooklyn neighborhood group Concerned Citizens of Green-Wood Heights, said a resident came across a cow or pig's head on a street next to Green-Wood Cemetery in the spring. It was on a tray with rice, beans and a bottle of rum.
"You want to be respectful of someone's religious practices, but in this case, when you're leaving animal carcasses and food and it's on a public street, then you worry about health issues," Brashear said.
Rituals do not always end in slaughtering an animal, according to the priestess who did not want to be identified. A religious leader will cast coconuts or shells to determine whether the deity wants the animal's life spared. That's why, the priestess speculated, the six goats were found alive.
While a 1993 Supreme Court decision upheld the right to kill an animal for religious purposes, it is illegal to house livestock in most parts of the city, said Joe Pentangelo, assistant director of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It's also illegal to kill or harm animals in public parks.
Until 1995, Pentangelo said, the ASPCA was contracted with the city for animal care and occasionally raided homes suspected of housing animals for sacrifices.
In 1991, the ASPCA raided the home of a Bronx woman named Georgina Paris, confiscating 32 animals -- including sheep and ducks -- that were to be sacrificed. Georgina's daughter, Virginia, told The Post last week that her mother was from Cuba and used her basement as a temple to make the sacrifices.
Virginia Paris, 65, said her mother died a few years ago. She said Santeria priests today don't have the same knowledge and reverence for the religion.
"They are not authentic," she said. "And it's for money most of the times."
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