Sacred Cannibalism - Musings

Noctua · Fri Oct 11, 2013 1:45 am

Just in time for Halloween..

If you asked me to make an argument for the divinity of brutality..
the dual nature of death, bestial instinct..

I could easily tell you the reverence of such by multiple, ancient civilizations.

While this remains relevant today, it could never be considered as it once was..when so much has become senseless throughout humanity..
and evolution has largely failed us, our understanding lost to mainstream or conversely, egotistically driven conditioning..

However, there was an understanding by the ancients, of sacred symbolism in bloodshed.. it's very simply alluded to,
but few may grasp..
and all, everyone who holds an interest or has an opinion, should be delving into whatever available, original sources for themselves.. so as not to be impacted by a biased viewpoint spread as truth.

Duality is the key aspect here.. and the reality of our dual nature is often suppressed, rather than explored..
demonized, for silly reasons..
leading to negative manifestations, by those who will not embrace, not allow themselves to comprehend what they are capable of, or what the essence means.. the unreachable..

The Cult of Bacchus..
wild women in trance were cursed or blessed in ritual of their primal form, driven to frenzy.
As an initiative act, to be closer to their god.. and to enter themselves, their shadow.. they would become possessed, ravenously, tear at bull's flesh,
so consuming the avatar of Dionysos. Casualties were a tragic result of chaos incarnate, this bringing respect among the spiritual..
and an element of fear attached to the coming of the god.. a fear that became linked to the alien, exotic, unseen.. that which we can only know through experience..

Rather likened to what abrahamic followers know as 'the body of Christ'. The body, the blood..
here of the liberator, symbolism come full circle.

This is in essence a shamanistic ritual, as was the whole of the Dionysian Mysteries.. where female participants are believed to have, in stages, taken on the part of the devotee.. the maenad.
Reenacting savagery, as sexual release and a passage into the great beyond..

The Egyptian Pyramid Texts include a little gem of cannibalism, known as 'the cannibal Hymn'
whereby the King, too, eats of the sacrificial bull.. the flesh of the gods.

The physical archetype, the life essence was crucial in establishing spiritual union and afterlife mastery..
this is clearly evidenced in funeral preparation, the countless texts of death rite, and yes, holy spells associated with the bodies, tombs, ancestors and among others, vampiric deities.

Just as in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, which were as well those of death and included Dionysos as a sacred figure, alongside Persephone and Demeter..
the child - the sacrifice - bringer of ecstasy and of butchery. Duality was held more sacred than all else, encompassing the total cycle of creation and destruction, sun and moon, death and rebirth.

An importance of immortality could be said to be represented through the careful preservation of egyptian corpses,
organs, blood, amputation held as divine pillars.

These, here, are not recognized as atrocities but the significance of our mortality and physical portal to divine transcendence.

The Aztecs took this to a whole 'nother level' in that the holiest of attributes were inherently vampiric, child sacrifice and blood cults abound, gore stains temple steps..
and we look back as a society and most of us see barbarians, but the aztecs truly were a spiritually advanced civilization and we could obviously say so in many other ways..
what did they comprehend that we, as a culture, do not?

The Aghori tribe of India is today, consuming corpses, the dead flesh..
and certainly, have pulled away from traditional fare, but in doing so are cleansing themselves of the stigma attached to death..
the taboo of impurity; instead regarding 'God' to be all things.. all states of being.. and seeking to understand organic matter.
Their civilized mentality finds spiritual merit and practical benefit in this; are they wrong? are they crazy?

Rather than wrong or right, we must see it's about the standards we've accrued, and the way we've been governed into today..
we are taught to ignore our mortality..to fear our death.. to shy from or faint at the sight of blood..
to condemn the violence purveyed in media rather than the confusing systems of society that push and pull us, most often rather than educate us or encourage quality of being.

But without going off on a tangent, which I really don't want to, I end this off here..

We tend to be either oversensitized or desensitized.. to find balance poses quite a unique challenge with the moral constraints grinding against nature.

Food for thought..

NyctophiliaRaven · Fri Oct 11, 2013 1:52 am

Beautiful, and en pointe.

Noctua · Fri Oct 11, 2013 7:55 pm

Why thank you..

no one else wants to bite? nearly 100 views say otherwise, lol.
Took one look and ran the other way? :devil: arawrawr..nom nom.. nom.. but for serious.

(Never fear, gentle Noc is a selective cannibal, I chose my meal and am forever bound to it.)

What does it stir inside of you? To think of consuming your god.. and to be consumed? What do these feelings mean? I believe them to be the very essence of our nature..

while some want to say the prevailing attribute of humanity is conscience.. but I think that's more of a pipe-dream, myself.. more often than not fear stricken, and so a result of repressed 'cannibalistic' urges..
perhaps, as expressed in my original article, in fact the purest and most evolved state of being..

kenpodragon · Fri Oct 11, 2013 8:33 pm

Excellent article Noc.

As to add, one thing that alchemical systems teach is that death, and decay become the prima materia - thus death leads to creation and not the other way around.

jasbro07 · Fri Oct 11, 2013 9:31 pm

Noctifera wrote:Why thank you..

no one else wants to bite? nearly 100 views say otherwise, lol.
Took one look and ran the other way? :devil: arawrawr..nom nom.. nom.. but for serious.

(Never fear, gentle Noc is a selective cannibal, I chose my meal and am forever bound to it.)

What does it stir inside of you? To think of consuming your god.. and to be consumed? What do these feelings mean? I believe them to be the very essence of our nature..

while some want to say the prevailing attribute of humanity is conscience.. but I think that's more of a pipe-dream, myself.. more often than not fear stricken, and so a result of repressed 'cannibalistic' urges..
perhaps, as expressed in my original article, in fact the purest and most evolved state of being..

you know Noc, i hardly ever speak with my mouth full...
for me to consume my God and be consumed
involves challenging the so-called conscience
the monkey-mind
going past the fear....surrender chaos nature the little death and rebirth in knowing
it reminds me of being a child and all that was within and the onslaught of all that is without - being told I didn't know anything because, basically at least to my mind, i hadn't memorized anything yet. the inner knowings vrs. a life memorized.., and the violence of the society as it strangles/regulates it.
without that dive into chaos, and the gods, we run the risk of being just a talking head with a bunch of learnings painted over our natural selves...

and yet i also understand that for us modern's, nothing is more threatening then this inner union with our duality....we just do not understand it and the fear SO dominates, in my view, that it remains a secret practice, a knowing glimpse into another's eyes but never spoken of...though here we are and thanks due to the internet!!
And also, death, the sexual energies and the power of the Self are so intimately tied together. I remember a quote from the Dune books that i obsessively loved way back when.
"You can drag humankind almost anywhere by manipulating the enormous energies of (sexuality) procreation. This energy must have an outlet. Bottle it up and it becomes monstrously dangerous. Redirect it and it will sweep over anything in its path. THIS is an ultimate secret of ALL religions." (Ben Gisserit Archives, Dune.)

To me, part of the path we have taken to reach our "civilized" state is a severe pruning of our inner connections to these uncontrollable forces. Once tapped into that.... how will you be controlled?

? How will I? It doesn't happen. Once you go there ... you know. the wildness won't be shoved back into the box.

i think we've become so generationally out of touch with that aspect of ourselves ( we don't have a map; we don't know the territory exists even) and thus not enough personal control to be willing to lose it. it's like the first thing you get taught in English class: to break the rules you need to know them. And yet, to live, to truly exist, it must be done.

quote(...The Egyptian Pyramid Texts include a little gem of cannibalism, known as 'the cannibal Hymn'
whereby the King, too, eats of the sacrificial bull.. the flesh of the gods....)quote

so funny, the above quote. i remember a stint in a ministerial training school and studying this very rite and how it related to the Christ and (this was a slightly more advanced Christian priest) how our traditional Christian rites tied in. He wanted us to understand how truly savage parts of traditional Christianity were. I remember going into a strange state and i couldn't pull myself out of it. I got what they were teaching intellectually. I understood the 'barbaricness' of the ritual but i just couldn't get past the symbolism and the inner sense of mysticism, ritual, the inner being, and I felt this huge rush of energy reach in and i had no idea what to do with it but luckily for me, being a wild child, literally, i didn't resist and went with it. I had enough training that i ran into major challenges later on the path. but part of me felt pulled into it even as my mind was supposed to be going..."oh, yeah, ick...bunch of barbarians."

just my 2cents
ps
an after thought...a lot of what you're speaking on reflects back to the literalism of the modern mind - we just can't hook into the symbolic .... you see it daily in the battle between imagination vrs. intuition and so forth. difficult to tell the difference in one's self and so intuition gets condemned and left undeveloped and then denied. and then feared. similar process i think.

love your to-the-point-posts / so for being-so-long-winded

Noctua · Sat Oct 12, 2013 5:39 am

What awesome contributions..
Alchemy is something I am passionate about so am glad the death state was brought up, as an essential factor.. working into the proposed viewpoint.

I am pleased to know people get this, and think about it as rational, but also emotionally cognizant beings..
And it is a synthesis our culture is largely missing.. There's a disconnect that makes one incapable of 'going there', as jasbro has alluded to.. consciously recognizing duality.
While our very mortality so clearly, eternally, stands as a symbol of what the ancients exhibited.. what now can rarely be accessed without some level of psychosis or disorder in the contemporary view; both because there are those who've grown disturbed and cannot comprehend what we're discussing without losing themselves, and so - contributing to the fear culture that condemns those who do have a sense of self and are truly, remarkably evolved. Strong individuals that can succumb when needed and rise at will, to apply this wisdom to existence.

I feel a little sad about it.. what is today, an alternative view.. an obscurity..
In many ways, as civilization became more formalized, conditioned upon conditioning, we've devolved.. My mind wanders to the ancients not only in the embrace of blood, and flesh, but by extension sexuality as an example.. an openness that was regulated by literally, prevailing religious territory (tainting mysticism and subjugating pagan belief) and as they say.. the victors write history, and so it is that influence which dominates and has shaped society through the years.
But things were not always this way, and there was never a 'right' or 'wrong' way of living, or perceiving.. only the pressures of popularity, persuasively shifting values.

/ramblings

Lionox · Mon Nov 28, 2016 11:31 am

Noctifera wrote:
What does it stir inside of you? To think of consuming your god.. and to be consumed? What do these feelings mean? I believe them to be the very essence of our nature..

To think of consuming my god? Merging comes to mind...

To be consumed? Transformation...

Sacred Cannibalism - Musings

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