 |
|
|
"Only in the throes of death is the spark of eternal life ignited." - Friedrich Von Schlegel There's something missing from bloodless offerings, and even from animal offerings that we do not ourselves kill. And, in a word, it's awe. The word eusebia, piety, religion comes from the word seba, meaning awe. Awe is the proper relationship that we have before the Gods. To be in awe is to be in a fundamentally different state of mind. There's an element of separation, of fear. The knowledge that you've just witnessed something shocking, that you stand before something that is fundamentally different, Other. You may also be filled with serenity, beauty, joyfulness, but in your heart, there's the same feeling you get when you look out over the grand canyon, when you've come close to touching an electrical current: Holy shit! I could have died! You can intellectualize sacrifice. You can make it purely about thankfulness, and indeed, that's a very good form of sacrifice. But unless there's the shedding of blood, unless there's the stink of fear, of adrenaline, of contact with death and the triumph of life, the beautiful terribleness of the moment, it's difficult to have that feeling of seba. I suspect that this is why horror movies are so popular. We still crave, deep in the lizard part of our brain, to see the victim torn apart, to watch its beautiful, tragic suffering on our behalf, to find that intersection between the divine and mortal, life and death. Our society has no way to feed this urge within us, to perform katharsis and let it out, except through the cinema. Socrates would have most enthusiastically argued for a
more spiritualized view of sacrifice: yet in his last, he
too, offered bloody sacrifice, for it was proper to do
so. |
