Somewhere in between the Handmaids Tale and the Grim Reaper, there were the unnerving ladies of the Azores Islands. “Enveloped in their large hooded cloaks, the Azorian women seems to flit about like phantoms,” wrote Elisée Reclus in a 19th century encylopedic series on the earth’s inhabitants. With radical doomsday preppers making headlines with their…