From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Jan 02 2005 - 22:18:39 GMT
Marsha and all campers:
Marsha asked dmb:
Have you ever participated in a Nature celebration? Have you ever visually
experienced the moon's cycle? Have you ever danced gratitude for an
abundant harvest? Maybe you've been at a Civil War re-enactment, but have
you ever experienced a ritual descent of Innanna? Can you appreciate the
returning Sun at Yule that marks the point in the year where the days again
start to lengthen? Have you ever sung chants to Mother Earth? Have you
ever been in a forest grove dancing in communion with others to the dynamic
energy of fire. Have you experienced you heart beating through drums with
the Earth's heartbeat? No? Pity.
dmb answers:
Yea, actually, I've done most of that stuff. In certain bohemian circles
people know me as the most loyal member of an annual summer solstice
gathering in the mountains of Colorado. There I am known as the honorary
co-host, master of ceremonies and the self-appointed shaman of the tribe.
This summer will be the 13th or 14th such gathering and I haven't missed one
yet.
The winter solstice celebration that my wife and I attended this year was
the 29th gathering, although we've only been to a few of those.
Once, a fireside chorus of drummers made me disappear at a Rainbow
gathering. These guys could drum, that's for sure. But in the light of day,
the vast majority of these so-called hippies were downright scary. I've
never seen such a concentration of dysfunctional, dirty, addicted people in
my life. But maybe that because I've never been to a civil war reenactment
or a ufology convention. ;-)
Once, I found a blood-red stone hand axe in the woods, just before dawn,
while I was tripping. I stood in the rain and marveled at it for hours. It
may have been many thousands of years old, but I swear I could smell the
meat it cut within my own body. I felt bad about the death of the animal. I
was the gut that abnsorbed its meat and was the sacrificed animal too. So,
I'm gland that Dionysis is a friend of mine, but I think being buddies with
the Buddha and the Christ is even better, so to speak.
I've been meaning to raise and explore the issue of patriarchal religion and
culture with you, and I'd still like to do that. Maybe start a new thread
here. Until then, let me just point out the solstice is meaningful to
neo-lithic pagans and Christians alike. And we can even talk about that same
thing in terms of philsophical mysticism. The Sol Stice is also symbolic of
timelessness and eternity as I explained to Chin earlier today in this
thread. The sol-stice is the time when the sun appears to stop moving. It
seems to rise and set at the same point on the horizon for two or three days
around the solstice and so it becomes, in religions and mythologies, a
metaphor for timelessness and eternity.
And if I can guess about the ritual descent of Innanna, which I never heard
of, this too would have counterparts in more developed religions like
Christianity. Even if that ritual is unrelated, I can tell you that there is
a part of the Christian myth and ritual involving increasing levels of
darkness as candles are blown out that has appeared in some form or another
in various religions that go all the way back to the caves. When exploring
this line a few years back I read in an encyclopedia that "some elements of
this myth may even pre-date the human species itself". I realize that such a
statement only raises questions, but the point is simply that some religions
are more highly developed than others and that we shouldn't throw the baby
out with the bathwater there either. And it seems that the baby is those
things that persist through time and and appear in the various stages of
cultural development while the bathwater is the stuff that comes and goes as
a particular local expression or otherwise demonstates its obsolesence.
The kind of ritual cannibalism we see in the Catholic church, for example,
might not evoke the unitive experience it symbolizes, but it sure beats the
heck out of actual human sacrifice or animal sacrifice, which was fairly
widely practiced in pre-historic times. Campbell spent some time talking
about the kind of relationship primitive peoples have with the animals they
hunt and on a very basic level it is sort of an undeniable fact that living
means killing. Meat is murder and so is salad. If one wishes to go on
living, one must eat and that means something else has to be eaten. And so
life is a very bloody affair. We grocery shoppers can hide from this to a
certain extent, but hunter/gatherers could not. And so the animals
themselves become the objects of religious practice and this is why we see
those painting on the cave walls. That's why we see such a proliferation of
mythological figures that are part human and part animal. And then when we
think of the Christ as a sacrificial lamb and the act of symbolically
ingesting the body and the blood, we see that we are dealing with something
very old and constant in the human experience.
And that's probably why I tripped so hard on that pre-historic hand axe made
of blood-red stone. I had eaten lamb the night before and so the find struck
me as a deliberately placed omen, as if the gods were trying to make me see
the truth by making me literally trip over it.
That was about ten years ago, but it seems like this morning.
I fed my boy his first lamb chop this christmas eve. He's only four years
old so we did not thank god for the meal. We thanked the lamb.
Now I forget what my point was and I need some lunch to break my fast.
OK, now (20 minutes later) that I've eaten the sacrifical macaroni and
cheese I can nearly think straight. Nearly. Anyway, I wanted to point out
that the same theme is expressed in terms of a female deity. Campbell has
lots to say on the topic, as you probably know already. As he tells it, the
distinction between creator and creature, between god and man if you will,
does not quite appear so sharply drawn in the goddess mythologies. If we
think of God as a mother instead of a father, then creation unfolds within
her womb. God pictured as the father, by contrast, sets up an ontological
distinction where the creator's generative power is cast out into creation
by a remote figure. In the East, the myths about the sacrifice that makes
life possible is contained within the creation myth because it concieved in
female terms. Here the idea is that the mother Goddess is dismembered,
chopped up into bits in order to make the universe, not to redeem it. She
sacrifices her self and becomes the world by dividing herself up into
"things". And here we see a much better metaphor for the position taken by
philosophical mysticism. She is undivided. She is DQ. In allowing herself to
be divided, she creates the world of static patterns, of time and space and
things. Here, the sacrifice and the creation are not two different things.
We can read this in Christian mythology too, but it requires us to imagine
that the tree that grew the death-bringing forbidden fruit in the garden of
Eden and the crucifix where the Christ gave up his life are made of the same
wood. But macaroni and cheese has only so much magic in it and this is too
long already.
But if you're interested,...
dmb
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