An Italian charity, Partito EcoAnimalista, called Gadhimai "unparalleled religious madness", saying the buffaloes are not given food or water for several days before the slaughter to make them docile and weak.
Yet, strangely, "The Devil Inside" is not that bad — it offers a few memorable moments of religious madness arising from unwise exorcisms, and it sticks with an admirable thoroughness to its premise: a faux-documentary about a young woman's effort to free her murderous mother from demonic possession.
Smart's own testimony that he "blessed God in St. James's Park till I routed all the company" (Jubilate Agno B 90 91) as representing his religious madness is equally dismissed as resulting from drinking, as he was known for pulling pranks and the Board of Green Cloth, the government body that controlled St James's Park, would treat most disturbances in the park as resulting from madness.
Hebron's current state of madness, however, has less to do with religious craziness and more to do with ethnic segregation.
I challenge you, though, to find me any one saint who can claim to have metaphorical ownership over vine, grape harvest, winemaking, wine, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre in the way that the Greek Keith Floyd can.
In Bioshock, enemies are driven by the madness of religious fervour, in The Last of Us, it is a parasitic contagion – both rob humanity of sense and perspective; both supply fodder to our questing hero.
There are structural and narrative reasons why this isn't so strong, but it has plenty going for it: it's gripping, atmospheric and quite superbly acted, and it charts the madness of religious fundamentalism and the terrible cost of that madness.
Even in this lighthearted set-up, where one moment I am calling for the tearing down of decadent western civilisation and the next dancing in the style of Madness, a religious zealot preaching violence is a weird skin for an atheist, pacifist softie to wear all day.
There are other possibilities beyond madness or religious fervor that may have led to Smart's confinement: Newbery may have used the imprisonment of his son-in-law as leverage to control the publication of Smart's work and as a warning to others who worked for him not to cross him.
The story was of a contented clergyman without faith who falls in love with a free-living, nomadic girl and comes to accept a strange, new religious faith, leading him to madness and death.
I follow basketball with casual interest during the winter, with fleeting bouts of religious zeal in March (the madness, you know), a healthy reserve of curiosity in May (N.B.A. playoffs) and a level of interest in June that ranges from "mild" to "serious," depending on who's in the finals.
