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A frail tabernacle of flesh
An older woman, obviously drunk, stumbles out of the bathroom of the Charles Village Pub, triumphantly announcing to noone in particular that, “We rocked that shit!” When no one responds, she approaches a table where three young black people are seated, “We rocked that shit!” she repeats. They stare at her blankly. “Whoo! Whoo!” she concedes, before wandering back up to her place at the bar.
Obama gives his big speech. He says something about all the things that are going to change. Someone at the bar mutters, “Nothing!” and is immediately hushed by others nearby. Nobody likes a buzzkill.
People wept on tv. Regular people and “important” people like Oprah and Jesse Jackson. We drove home, finally exhausted, honking and hooting at passersby.
I always have a hard time feeling what I’m supposed to feel during mass rituals, surrendering my soul to the crowd. I wish I could have wept. I wish I could have felt my heart leap, but government to the people has become an abusive relationship. Promises and new faces do not necessarily equal change. (I hit you because I love you…) But they very well may eventually. They very well may, as yesterday felt more like a solemn religious event than a purely political, civic or social one. How to relax into it. How to get swept up in the media message of hope. Hype. Never put all your trust all your dreams into one man, one party, one group of men. No matter who he is, no matter who they are. This is why we invented gods. The burden is too great for any human being to bear on its shoulders too long. The will of a people. The desire for something better. Or at least something different. Magic.
IF THE HIGH gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of this earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be expected that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh should escape the same fate, though we hear of African kings who have imagined themselves immortal by virtue of their sorceries. Now primitive peoples, as we have seen, sometimes believe that their safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one of these god-men or human incarnations of the divinity. Naturally, therefore, they take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard for their own. But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay. The advantages of thus putting the man-god to death instead of allowing him to die of old age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough. For if the man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means, according to the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed from his body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been extracted, or at least detained in its wanderings, by a demon or sorcerer. In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is lost to his worshippers, and with it their prosperity is gone and their very existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the soul of the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer it to a successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, dying of disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in the last stage of weakness and exhaustion, and so enfeebled it would continue to drag out a languid, inert existence in any body to which it might be transferred. Whereas by slaying him his worshippers could, in the first place, make sure of catching his soul as it escaped and transferring it to a suitable successor; and, in the second place, by putting him to death before his natural force was abated, they would secure that the world should not fall into decay with the decay of the man-god. Every purpose, therefore, was answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god and transferring his soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous successor.
Ancient traditions in new guises, washed of their primitive bloodlust. May Peace descend like a prayer upon the people. May Love renewed flow from where the rock was struck in the desert. Last night I dreamt I went off for some time to work on a farm and slaughter animals. Life ends and starts again at every moment, not just this one. That’s the true essence of Hope. Back to work.
- Prev: From my “Lost Month” in California
- Next: A short hiatus
November 5th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Great writing.
November 5th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Vote for yourself!
November 5th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I think there might be more to that than we moderns and post moderns think. The God-King idea that is. I think the divine right of Kings was legit originally. But when we entered the age of Kali Yuga it was no longer in effect.
What we have now might operate along some similar principles, only in a sinister way. Souls of rulers reinacarnating into the same genetic line over and over again. I think that actually happens.
The democracy thing is a ruse, though. I can see where you are going with it, the idea of the “peaceful revolution” every four years paralleling the idea of the God king being slain to renew the vitality of the office, But democracy in America is fake. Its been the same regime all along.
We have the rulers we deserve and in a sense its God’s will that we have the rulers we have.
Because what do corporations do? Prey on our greed and laziness. You can’t con an honest man and you can’t get rich selling the masses wasteful and useless products they are too virtuous to buy. You can’t fan xenophobic flames that aren’t already there.
My hope is in seeing people begin to change their values.
November 5th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
I fucking love this shit!
November 5th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Nice one quoting the Golden Bough. I’ve been thinking the same thing. As per usual, I’ve been beat to it, so now I’ll go and work on something else!
I didn’t feel the whoo-ha! thing, either, though I know many people did. I did not vote because I don’t believe in it. That being said, O. makes a better national totem than McCain, so I’m glad for it in my own way.
Nothing bad about being around a bunch of happy people that are happy for something rather than happy against.
My answer these days is always, “We’ll see!” So when co-workers came in this morning to say, “We won!” that was my answer. Now comes the hard part. Once the euphoria wears off, we’ll see what we all do or don’t do; and what the man from Hope can do also.
The lone Republican at work was very quiet, only mentioning once that she couldn’t sleep last night and then changing the subject. Can’t help but say it reminded me of when the Red Sox lost the playoffs to the Yankees in the early aughts and a relative was very distraught about it…
Back to work indeed.
November 7th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
“DNA is composed of crystals whose primary function is not protein synthesis, but the reception and transmission of energy. As Sol Luckman explains, the DNA of any species resonates together and creates a morphic field that unites said species outside space-time. Thus the human species is morphogenetically linked through our DNA. This is additionally true within specific human bloodlines, which also create morphogenetic fields that unite family lines on the astral plane.”
-Beth Goodie
Tim, you know I think we misunderstand each other. This quote to me relates, but I think you mean it in a totally different way.
Let me ask you, do you look at occult type things as kind of fodder for a type of romantic collage, like an artistic creation? I think you look romantically and artistically at things I look at analytically.
But in some reverse way, you look at some indigenous type stuff like an academic would with a materialistic worldview. Whereas I pretty much look at it literally.
Well anyway, Dude, My morpogenetic feild resonates with the so called illuminati. Because I share some ancestors and thus their ancestral memory.
So this kind of thing you quoted is not a quaint and primitive way of looking at the world, but actually very similar to the way in which the dominant tribe still views the World. The dominant tribe of the World has superimposed over this a ruse of democracy.
So anyway, its no accident that “the first black president” is of caucasian and East African descent and shares no genetic memory at all with American blacks that are of West African descent and have gone through 300+ years of slavery.
November 7th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I’m not really sure I know how to respond to what you’re saying. But I definitely have a romantic and artistic slant at how I look at the world… However, that doesn’t preclude other modalities of interpretation for me.
November 7th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Wait, maybe I have an appropriate question: what religion were you raised? I was raised Catholic by parents heavily into the Charismatic Renewal movement. I think I can safely say that had a fair impact on my worldview and approach to life, even I don’t specifically follow the path they do. We live our lives in the wakes of other people and their passing through ours. I’m curious to understand what you mean about the Academic Materialist slant, though. That I still don’t quite get what you’re saying.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Well, its almost like we think in a similar dualistic way but our dualisms are reversed.
Its like I have an artistic romantic way of looking at things and an analytical way and so do you, but you look at things artistically/romantically that I look at analytically and I look at things romantically/artistically that you look at analytically.
All I mean about the academic view is just a part of the “mythos” of society. Its easy to pick up. Its a naturalist i.e. materialist worldview. Its known as looking at things “scientifically”
So lets take anthropology. Some Shaman says something. So the anthropologist can’t take it at face value, he has to translate it into a materialist worldview. The really cool kind of “pop culture” type writers also have an artistic slant and then they kind of spice up this materialist worldview with kind of an artistic flavor. “spell of the Sensuous” is like that.
I would have a tendency to take the Shaman literally. I look at what a shaman would do as mechanical. Nuts an bolts. Pretty straightforward.
So anyway I can’t relate to any kind of artistic metaphor that hearkens to ancient rituals to describe our democracy.
Because the people in power still this type of stuff for real. The people in Power are magicians. There are ruling families indwelt by ancestral spirits that pass through the same bloodline from generation to generation.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
So like, an ancestral spirit, passing through generations of rulers is not a mataphor for anything. It really happens.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
The elite are still primitive, just as primitive as a rainforest tribe. They work with really nasty entities though. I would hope the people in the rainforest work with more benevolent spirits, but probably not totally true. But anyway, the elite think just like they did in the Middle ages and before that all the way to ancoient times.
The rest of us are domesticated animals. We live in an enclosure. A mental enclosure.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I think a person being raised Roman Catholic and involved in the Charismatic renewal would expliain it. Assuming your parents were middle class and well educated. They would see things “scientifically” but also have a need for ritual, being practicing Roman Catholics.
The Charismatic renewel originated from Catholics rubbing elbows with Pentecostals at some point. The Pentecostals would tend to think more literally, be creationists etc. See this stuff in terms of nuts and bolts. No “magesterium.”
As for me, I really don’t think very much about my upbringing explains how I think.