We're not going to agree on what 'the gods' are, though it would certainly be interesting to talk about. Still, I am still fascinated by this claim, which maybe gets near to why that is:
'what’s the real difference between slaughtering people on a battlefield or capturing them and later slaughtering them on a zigguarat?'
Can you really not see a difference? (And by the way, as a rule I am opposed to both!)
You probably already know this, but Aztec warriors were trained specifically *not* to kill on the battlefield, but rather to capture the enemy warrior alive. A warrior who’d killed instead of taking a captive was thought to be a bad warrior.
It was then the state priests who did the killing, which is a bit like the liberal democratic idea of displacing death onto another agent. Similar to remote drone warfare, or fighting Russia through arming Ukraine as proxy, etc.
What i mean is they’re all equivalent in the end (material) result, and we should resist attempts to create hierarchies of human atrocity or “evil.” Comparing modern human sacrifice to earlier forms only lets us excuse what happens now.
It was dark times indeed and I was very distressed to see how many of my peers were coerced into taking something that we have no idea about. In the states we have a website https://howbadismybatch.com/ which correlates batch numbers and VAERs reporting for the regretful. I also sympathize, as someone who choose to brave it out during mandates it did make me crazy for a while. I broke me in certain kinds of ways.
I’m getting ready to write about agreements - it’s been gestating for a while and must be in the cosmic space weather, a demand that we look closer at the agreements that we are meshed in. Just the other day I received a comment that included the epic “some people have no choice” a convenient lie that stripes away the essence of our god human relationships- even though I will concur that some choices have unbearable consequences.
ah, that "no choice" bit is a fascinating problem with modern political thought, especially in social justice iterations.
Interestingly, one of the primary target enemies of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom was Sartre, specifically because of his insistence about the impossibility of truly ever losing one's agency. Why they saw it as a threat then wasn't as clear as it seems now: the last thing the capitalist order ever wants are its lowest classes believing they have agency in the world...
Re CPVOD. My homeopath advised against the vaccines in general, with J&J if I had to, but then informed me I couldn't be seen in the office if I hadn't been vaccinated. So I got the J&J, had absolutely no side effects, not even a sore arm other than the pain of the needle going in. Also, knock wood, no infection despite at least two exposures. Also know people who have been ill one or more times despite doing all the boosters. Those interested may want to follow John Michael Greer's COVID posts on his Dreamwidth account. Weekly arena for discussion has been going on over a year now.
I had no pain from the J&J either, nor any "flu-like" effects after. My husband and his secretary both, on the other hand, got quite ill immediately after the mRNA injections.
“”Recently in a podcast Martin Shaw said ... “new Christians shouldn’t be expected to explain the past crimes of Christianity.” I would generally agree with this if were applied to all religious ideas,””
Im going to have to slightly disagree with you and Martin here. Maybe you shouldn’t have to explain past crimes but certainly you should be expected to show awareness of them and offer a position that integrates the dark history of your tradition to show you offer a different perspective.
While I like and get your Aztec example Buddhism seems more akin here. I live 15 miles from Boulder, Colorado which has Naropa University and The Boulder Shambala center. Both are Buddhist and both were founded by problematic individuals who were later found to have extensively abused or sexually abused students / followers. Both institutions extensively covered up these abuses. This doesn’t begin to discuss other issues such as the inherent elitism that these institutions exist in Boulder which has an average home price of $1million USD and historically has been racially homogeneous and was intentionally was built as an exclusive community.
Spiritual bypassing is so common in nearly every tradition that at this point in history it’s fairly imperative to acknowledge it and to expect someone who publicly claims a faith position, enlightenment, or genuine religious experience to show awareness of their tradition’s dark history and offer a better position. This seems like necessary differentiation if you want to have a public religious position and one that is needed to help evolve/reorient nearly all spiritual traditions.
I consider myself Christian or at least Christian adjacent. I quite appreciate reading and listening to Richard Rohr these days and I’ve yet to encounter anything by him (book, podcast, sermon, or men’s work talk) where he doesn’t acknowledge and spend a fair amount of time separating the historical wheat from the chaff of his tradition.
So, I was being a little extra kind about Martin’s statement because I like him personally.
I actually think that to accept any faith requires a full understanding of its implications, otherwise you’re not actually accepting it. The new convert moment is just like the new relationship moment. Once the sweeping emotions aren’t there to carry you, the full reality of a thing can be quite jarring.
And I should say I feel the same way about religious denialism as I do about political denialism. There’s nothing more exhausting than an anarchist who denies the atrocities committed by anarchists in Catalonia, or Marxists who deny the gulags, or pro-western civilization sorts who deny colonial abuses, as I do about religious faithful who deny the the darkness of their faith.
It’s a form of immature belief sustained not by faith but by fantasy.
I do not know Martin personally but I do fantasize about tackling him into a snowbank. I like him a lot.
I suppose this is a touchy subject for me. This phenomenon exists across many fields (like politics as you mentioned) and includes my own as an Artist. Art and the idea of enlightenment tend go hand and hand yet abuse, narcissism, entitlement, elitism etc is rampant within it. Looking at the shadow of spiritual traditions has been really helpful for me to try and sort out the situation, especially the one here in the US.
Here university professors have near permanent jobs with tenure (unheard of in nearly any other field including founding your own company,) summers off, partial work weeks, access to equipment paid for by students, galleries, and access to visiting artists funded by student tuition, etc.
Meanwhile students are being saddled with crippling debt at often high interest rates which is inescapable even through bankruptcy. This has put multiple generations now in a form of debt slavery where they can’t start families, buy houses, start businesses, and often prevents them from even realistically continuing to make art at all let alone succeed at it.
I value the education I received and think fondly of many university professors yet I refuse to not speak about the scale of the debt problem. It is at times hard to wonder how anyone can still participate in this system. The harm seems to vastly outweigh the benefits.
Currently the US has a collective 1.5trillion in student debt, which has never decreased. The never decreased part = this is real, real bad. On top of leaving people’s lives in ruins we are now at civilization collapsing levels of debt. Yet we keep doing the same thing where the winners win and the losers lose ……..just like those Buddhist institutions it’s best we don’t talk about or do anything about that last part.
Yeah, totally: one should totally tackle him into a snowbank!
Universities in general are a difficult subject for me to be nice about. I never had the money to finish, and it was always quite clear that the PMC sorts in the US think poor hicks without uni degrees are quite brutish.
Also, though, I think the elitist abusive religious hierarchy you see in Buddhism is generally a feature of all organized religions. I attended a megachurch (Southern Baptist) in Florida for many years, and I remember this weird cult of success around the pastor that was really difficult to square with anything from the gospels. But that's the same thing one sees around the Pope, and also certain imams, and the heads of highly-endowed synagogues, temples, and monasteries...
uh thank-you. as a long time supporter and admirer of Martin I am struggling to be as interested now that he's a new christian. for all these reasons but especially because christian civilisation and its deep shadow is still effecting my everyday agreements in ways that I find akin if not downright evil. at least with the romans and Aztecs etc there's a bit of distance for digestion.....
it's interesting to use the Aztec religion as a contrast with Christianity, when they both seem to suffer from the same core problem. (maybe this is the point you're trying to make.) just as "a language is a dialect with an army"—a religion seems to be the result of yoking human contact with the ineffable to the expediencies of maintaing a nation, or an empire. the problem isn't religion as such, or gods, or theism: it's the animal part of us, whispering that we always need more power in order to be safe. we've been building ziggarats in one form or another ever since the development of agriculture, when the carrying capacity of the landscape could be artificially expanded beyond hunter-gatherer levels, when land had to be taken and held in order to maintain the surplus population. that's the source of the instabilty that the Aztecs sought to manage, and the source of the sin that the Christians tried to supress. once humans reached that level of instability, the requisite gods were only happy to throw their weight behind the most ruthless. we had a much healthier relationship with the gods for most of our history, before we started asking them for sustained military domination.
there is no way to maintain civilization without blood sacrifice.
I kind of want to argue with the common habit of calling that part of human nature "the animal part". Animals do precisely not do that. Not because are all sweet and fluffy of course. Nature is "red in tooth and claw" often enough. But building and building, obsessed with vague wants and anxieties is 100% a human part of us, it is something that animals are not capable of doing.
interesting! i would have thought that anxiety is exactly the baseline state of almost every animal in the wild. if evolution is real at all, it's because the survivors had the strongest physiological impulse to fulfill unmet needs. it certainly wasn't the result of careful planning; i can't imagine that impulse being anything other than the body's constant, keening awareness of what it needs, and the physiological capability to do whatever was necessary to get it. that needn't apply to the soul or the spirit of the animal. but i think that's part and parcel of having a body in a constant state of deprivation.
(this is why we don't teach chimps how to use handguns.)
the "building and building" is what happens when that anxiety is de-coupled from a shared awareness of our co-dependence, given opposable thumbs, and blasted into cosmic (self-)awareness.
Well, biologically speaking, stress is a form of physical arousal evolved to make an animal react powerfully to physical danger in the moment - such as a fight with its conspecific, or a flight from predators. In their natural habitat, when they are not currently in danger, animals often return to a relaxed state fairly quickly if they survive the situation. Constant stress damages the bodies of animals as well as humans. Under the stress hormones, the immune system and digestion and in many animals the procreation cycle get suppressed to save energy for the fight or flight and under constant stress, bodies therefor eventually break down. Almost by definition stress cannot be a baseline state, because it is the thing that evolved to mobilise resources for acute danger. - Source for this: The book Why Zebras Don't get Ulcers
In addition, as far I we can tell, animals are not able of the abstract longterm thinking that enables humans to be haunted by fears of the imagination or build civilisations. They never build civilisations anyway, so it just seems fair to me to blame the attendant f*** ups of civilisation on the human parts of us...
how wonder how the researchers measured that "relaxed state"... if they didn't have them hooked up to brain scans, how would they identify heightened awareness of hunger, or sleep deprivation, or the possibility of future threats? i'm not sure people who suffer from PTSD always show external signs of it, and i imagine that's analagous.
and what would you say are the "human" parts of us? isn't "human" just an animal body with a cosmic mind?
Of course we can never read an animals mind, we can only read it's body language or do some (probably stressful) experiments on it. But they have pretty readable body language in my opinion. On the occasion that I've been able to watch animals in the wild, they don't read especially driven or anxious to me.
The human part is the thing that has abstract thoughts beyond the here and now. Well I guess 'human' is a sort of emergent phenomenon and not easily nail-downable. But yeah, compared to 'the animal', it is the thing that goes beyond the physical here and now. Basically, the mind, not the instincts or the body. And it sure is the mind that builds civilisation.
i think you might be making a value judgment about "anxiety" from an anthropocentric perspective. civilians perceive anxiety as maladaptive because they can imagine a world in which it's not necessary for survival. if you find yourself in a warzone, or a refugee shelter, or just lost in an unfamiliar place—let alone in the wild—that hyperawareness of threats and opportunities comes back quickly. we can call it something other than "anxiety," but whatever it is, it's not a state of relaxed enjoyment.
i don't know what your situation is. i'm a stay-at-home dad for two kids under 6 years old. i have been in a constant state of low-key anxiety—or hyperawareness, if you prefer—since my oldest was born. there is *always* something that needs my attention. 24/7, 365. and that's just everyday life, in a state of relative comfort, without my family being in imminent danger. am i giving myself ulcers? no. am i completely relaxed? never. is it healthy to be like this all the time? i have no idea. but it doesn't matter, because that's how i take care of my family.
I would suspect that one way to read an animal’s mind is to examine it physically. I’ve never read “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” but I work pretty hard to keep my horses from having ulcers so I can guess the content to some extent. Stress leaves marks on the body. Ulcers are a sign of stress in equines. If zebras do not have ulcers, it means their bodies are in a state of non-deprivation, since ulcers in equines are caused by inadequate access to food (s their stomach produce acid 24/7, so they must keep their stomach full 24/7 to avoid the acid eating their stomach). There are other markers of stress, including stereotypic behavior like pacing, weaving, and cribbing. All common ailments of stalled horses and unknown among wild equines. Rather than being in a constant state of deprivation, a wild equine is usually far healthier than an equine given free access to food and clean water, a beautiful bed cleaned daily, and the best veterinary care.
that's very interesting, and i think it reinforces my point... equines need to eat 24/7, so there must be some physiological impulse, which we would probably recognize as "anxiety," constantly prompting the animal to keep eating, keep eating, keep eating. it's not an "unhealthy" state because it's a baseline state: it's how the animal has evolved to survive. nevertheless, animals are constantly on the brink of running out of food and water (especially equines, it seems) or becoming prey, or dying from exposure if they don't find adequate shelter in the wild. it's impossible for me to imagine that isn't reflected in a constant state of hyperawareness. and when that gets translated into primates who, again, suddenly evolved into cosmic consciousness, that hyperawareness doesn't just disappear. instead, it expresses itself in amplified and convoluted ways, broadcast through the megaphone of human imagination. that's exactly what PTSD is in humans: an inability to switch off the constantly-pinging fight or flight response after exposure to a sustained threat. the whole story of civilization is a collection of individuals reacting (badly) to a poorly-evolved hyperawareness of real and perceived threats, because—again—that is what it means to be human: a cosmic consciousness decanted into an ill-fitting animal physiology.
to argue otherwise seems to veer into a kind of romanticized pastoralism. we want to imagine animals as being in some kind of peaceful repose. and i'm sure there are moments of transcendence: again, i don't think the spiritual experience of a horse or a hawk is reducible to its physiological responses. but it strains credulity to think that our worst human impulses just manifested spontaneously as soon as the ridgepole was lifted on the first permanent shelter, with no biological basis whatsoever.
You make an important point about the instability thing. In civilizations with any kind of animal or human sacrifice, the blood starts pouring more copiously the more threats to its internal stability arise. But also, it's the same with imprisonment, as well: the higher the instability, the more people get locked away.
One of the most interesting theories about human sacrifice vis à vis the Aztecs is the Marxist one, which generally sees such institutions as methods of societal control. Particularly strange is the fact that even the Spanish who freed warriors destined for sacrifice demanded that they be put back in their cages so they could do their duty. This suggests that the level of hegemonic social control that the Aztec state had over even their enemies was staggering.
But then, how many Americans willingly go to war, or march to jobs they hate every morning, or vote for candidates they don't like, or buy things they don't really want and definitely cannot afford?
And I'll take issue with the "agriculture changed everyone" argument. Just now reading the Davids Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything that effectively challenges that old anthropological theory of civilization progress.
not familiar with Dawn of Everything, but I'm pretty sure that a food surplus is an inevitable outcome of agriculture, regardless of any narratives around "civilizational progress." that's why people deliberately cultivate crops: to create a reliable surplus over and above what could be found through foraging. once you have a surplus, you need to stake out land to cultivate in order to maintain it. thus territorial competition, thus warfare. that doesn't happen in a logic progression from one civilizational "stage" to another—but i can't imagine it's not an unavoidable consequence of growing crops that support additional population growth, regardless of how or when it happens.
Ah, actually -- it's probably worth reading it, or other similar works (Melinda Reidinger mentions a bit of this in The White Deer). Agriculture doesn't always lead to territorial stress or settlement. Europe was full of hazelnut and other regular cultivation (horticulture is usually how it's described) during the entire Mesolithic (resulting in constant caloric surplus) but didn't "evolve" to the civilization stress seen in Mesopotamia.
A good way of understanding what's happening is that the agriculture-leads-to-tyranny-and-suffering idea is a Mesopotamian (specifically Judeo-Christian) framing that most theorists don't try to see out of. One way of it being put that made a lot of sense to me was an atheist Israeli archeologist explaining how other archeologists go to Israel "to see how civilization started because the bible tells them that's where it started."
yep, that all makes sense. i certainly wouldn't argue that agriculture is a necessary precursor to whatever we call "civilization." i think it's a function of logistical complexity beyond a certain point: low levels of agriculture don't inevitably lead to high levels of agriculture, or to warfare. incrementalism is nonsense, obviously. but isn't there a tipping point around surplus food and population growth that tends to produce increased competition, and to veneration of the blood gods discussed in the article? maybe not as an ironclad law, but as a strong tendency?
'what’s the real difference between slaughtering people on a battlefield or capturing them and later slaughtering them on a zigguarat?
I never saw much of a difference either. I would say the distinction was for the Aztecs, the War was the Ritual. They fought wars of conquest, but Flower Wars were structured ritualistic affairs to gain captives, and allowed Aztec warriors to demonstrate prowess on the battlefield for intimidation, propaganda and other purposes. And warriors considered it more honorable to die in a sacrifice than on the battlefield.
For us, the Ritual is the War where the sacrifice happens there on the battlefield, or in the factory, or on the highway and so on. In the end the result is the same.
Jul 10, 2023·edited Jul 10, 2023Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
“new Christians shouldn’t be expected to explain the past crimes of Christianity.” I love Martin Shaw's work, but I can't help but see a similarity here with the recent trend in corporate acquisitions, wherein assets are claimed, but not obligations. The most prominent example being Disney's refusal to pay royalties due to Star Wars novelists, due to the theory that the company bought Lucasfilm, but not its existing contractual obligations. In other words, they now owned the novels, but not the obligation to continue to pay agreed upon royalties for their continued sale. #DisneyMustPay became an online rallying cry in response. It seems to me that if you are going to inherit a tradition and claim the good, you need to at least acknowledge the debts incurred alongside it, and make some attempt to discharge those debts, whether or not you personally incurred them.
I didn't know that about the acquisition. That's awful.
Maybe another aspect of this question is the difference between acknowledgment and responsibility.
Currently, there's a tendency (especially on the social justice identity politics side, but also all around) to try to make identity groups responsible for crimes or malfeasance from a few. "#YESALLMEN," for example, or the "all white people benefit from white supremacy," or on the other side, the attempts to treat all minorities according to the behavior of a few.
So, in light of that, I can definitely see a concern over the idea that all people of a religion should be responsible for actions they couldn't commit. But of course, in this case, we're talking about 2000 years of history, not just a few decades.
And anyway, religion is a chosen identity, not an enforced one, which makes this something different from the previous examples. Especially since Christianity is an initiatory faith (through first communion, being born again, etc), and purports that its members join a "universal communion" of believers, there's definitely an argument to be made that one really ought to at least reckon (if not more) with the atrocities enacted under the sign of the cross.
Obviously, no Christian could possibly hope to make amends for the slaughter of animist peoples who declined to convert in the past.
The old treaties the US Government made with some Native American tribes guaranteed the territories “as long as the grass grows and rivers run”. Of late, that phrase has been running through my mind in a bitter, ironic way. “Looks like the white man took care of that little loophole right quick, huh?”
I find it really interesting that the old conception of Hell was to be cut off from the presence of God. The old curse of the Norse was the Nidstang which was supposed to drive the land spirits away from their enemies. If we take God/ land spirits/ nature to be related concepts, it could be argued that the entire goal of our civilization is the darkest curse of our ancestors both Christian and Pagan. Bleach and antibiotic soap to drive away the natural cultures of bacteria and yeasts. Giant monocrops of corn and soybeans, silent with the insects killed by pesticides and the birds that once feasted on the insects and lived in the hedgerows between the fields.
Jul 11, 2023·edited Jul 11, 2023Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
The recently deceased Italian polymath Roberto Colasso left behind a massive ouvre that maps the development or decline of human consciousness, traversing as it goes, our stay on planet earth. He writes that when we gave up being middle of the food chain vegetarians to mimic animal predators, we underwent a profound initiation into stalking, hunting, and killing. This initiation brought with it the guilt of the kill, something our predatorial animal teachers still seem oblivious to. In his books describing the Aryan invasion of India, he goes into great detail about Vedic rituals and how their preferred ritual was the sacrifice (the horse being a favorite.) Colasso describes this obsession as the Vedic priesthood’s way to redress our guilt over having to hunt and kill. Could having to kill to live be our Original Sin, one we have redefined with so many words and now redress in largely unconscious ways: regional wars, genocides, terrorism, and mass shootings in malls, schools, places of worship, etc?
Chimps, bonobos and other primates are enthusiastic meat hunters. In this fun YouTube exploring the meaning of life with the Hadzas, one of the last hunter/gatherer groups on earth, well, let’s just say no guilt about the hunt and meat eating was seen, if anything you saw joy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGjuRwx_Y8
Jul 11, 2023·edited Jul 11, 2023Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
It does, as always, seems to be group by group, situation by situation. I worked for 11-years traveling to the Cree communities in Northern Quebec to teach writing and study skills to Cree students in McGill University's Education program. This was/is a continued effort to get more Cree teaching Cree, rather than white folks doing the job. The bear is still a highly venerated by the Cree, in spite of how alcoholism and evangelical Christianity have devastated traditional ways. One day only 2 people showed up to class, sent to tell me that one of my student's was the proud mom of a 13-year-old boy who had just killed his first bear. They were all attending his bear bar-mitzvah...which went on for a few days. The Cree are very polite and very understated and don't share much about their myths and ways to passerby, so when I returned down south I had to go research this a bit.. In one text, a traditional Cree bear hunt was described. Traditionally a medicine man went into his "shaking tent" and invited the Chief Bear Spirit of that region (a region in the James Bay area) to visit him there. When the spirit arrived, the tent began to shake. They conversed and the medicine man asked permission for the hunt. He also asked where to find the bear and how many his hunters were allowed to kill. He did this with other animal spirits too, particularly with the reindeer hunt where the how many question was more relevant. Now of course this account came from a white academic who was interviewing elderly Cree hunters.....Maybe they were pulling his leg, as they so enjoyed doing, considering they were overrun with academics who came for a month to do research, then left to go build a career down south with their findings. Not much given back to the Cree. But I do think the Cree that I met had a much greater respect and empathy for wild life than us urban folks do. Just my 2 cents.
I was raised in a rural hunting culture in Wisconsin, my farmer father was a splendid marksman, hunter, and a wonderfully kind strong man, animals had a special affinity towards him with cats and dogs showing respect and deference, sensitive to the weather, the alpha keystone predator in his domain, a type of Midwest agrarian animist, as was my mother who had a link with plants. In the spring she would take her children to a splendid blossoming of spring ephemerals in a local woods. Her teenage sons would walk in quiet entranced by the beauty. I would gather morel mushrooms to fry up in our home churned butter. Killing animals within the boundaries of need, keeping the balance, and doing it efficiently and quickly was a regular background part of my youth. Native song birds were off limit, and treasured as were the predatory birds, seasonal hunting restrictions were respected, non-native invasive bird species were always open season as appropriate.
What a beautiful childhood. There are less and less of us country folk....I spent mine in the backwoods and on coasts of Maine. My dad was an avid deer and duck hunter...the latter into his old age. He finally said he couldn't kill deer any more.....not sure if he meant he was too old to tramp about in the bush, or that his affection for them finally hit home. Anyway his basement workshop was filled with swords and guns!! After his stroke, Mom (secretly--sort of) got rid of his weaponry out of fear he might use them in some desperate way.. What a thing!
Yes also to the parents as animists. My dad never set foot in a church. His church was the back lot he would disappear into on Sunday to forever clean out the brush and commune with the trees. He also kept bees. Mom would take me on nature walks naming all the wild plants with both their local and Latin names. At night she would take me out to the sea wall and we'd stand there as she pointing out all the constellations, especially the circumpolar ones in case I ever got lost. Precious knowledge so few urban children have or understand anymore. In light-polluted Montreal, you can barely see the stars on a given evening.....Am still a bit traumatized from having to sell her Maine home after she died.
I've read a similar theory regarding cannibalism: since animist peoples generally thought of animals as kin, killing them amounted to cannibalism. Therefore, many rituals developed around making amends for this crime against kin.
I’m sorry to hear about your mother-in-law’s health crisis. It really sounds like the last thing you guys needed at the end of the Greece trip. I’ve found myself thinking a lot about this post and the conversation it has sparked.
A few times over the years, I’ve encountered a version of the experience you describe of having “Aztec human sacrifice” brought up as a conversation-stopper. In my case, it’s when I’ve written or spoken about how important Indigenous understandings have been in shaping my thinking about modernity and climate change and the rest of the trouble we’re in – and someone will go, “Ah, but, look what they were doing before we got to the Americas!” (The prehistoric extinction of the megafauna, apparently coinciding with the arrival of humans, is the other favourite example that people throw out.) All of which to say, while it maybe doesn’t get thrown at me with the same force and fierceness you experience in some of your encounters with Christians, I recognise what you’re describing.
It strikes me, too, that none of us who have been formed by the heritage of the Abrahamic religions – a category which I’d say includes you, me and Martin! – could justifiably view human sacrifice as an alien horror, something done by “those terrible people” and unimaginable to the followers of the One True God. Because, as Kierkegaard stresses in Fear and Trembling, the Bible says that Abraham spent three whole days intending to sacrifice his son. Yes, as he raises the knife, with the child bound on the altar, the angel stays his hand and tells him he’s passed the test – but the deal of human sacrifice is there, right at the heart of the story that unites the three Middle Eastern monotheisms, and the patriarch’s willingness to go along with this deal is the proof of his faith. It’s a devastating story.
Coming back to the interview Elizabeth Oldfield did with Martin and Felix, your post was the third mail I got yesterday that mentioned different aspects of their conversation, so it’s clearly stirring up a lot of things. I’d listened to the whole episode before reading the post, and I had to go back and re-listen to the relevant passage afterwards. For what it’s worth, then, Martin’s exact words were, “I don’t think it’s a young Christian’s job to have to defend the catastrophes of the last 2000 years.” I’m not really quarrelling with your paraphrase of it, I can see how it landed that way with you. To my ears, though, there’s a difference between refusing to “defend the catastrophes” of the faith tradition in which you stand and engaging in what you’ve described here as “religious denialism”.
Anyway, given how much energy we’ve all put into discussing one parenthetical comment out of a ninety-minute conversation, let me just share the link to the whole episode for anyone who wants to give it a listen:
And thanks for your willingness to stay with the trouble of all this, Rhyd. I do appreciate the space that's opened up by the dialogue across difference that happens in your comment threads.
I've also seen that argument regarding the mega-fauna, as well as deforestation in North America before colonial contact being used as a "gotcha" (since, after the plagues came, there was a massive carbon sink from regrown forests for about a century). Both (and also the human sacrifice) as used to create a strawman, as if any of us are arguing that "indigenous people were all pure, non-indigenous people are all evil," etc. Frustrating, but of course it's not really different from the "gotchas" one hears elsewhere ("gulag," "eco-fascist").
Thanks for retrieving the original quote from the podcast. Now that I read it again, I'm remembering there was an extra dimension to the comment that furthered the sense of denialism: the word "catastrophes." Catastrophes are usually things that suddenly occur without apparent sense (floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes), as if there's no one behind them. Or things that are unsuccessful or had unintended consequences. Even being extremely charitable, I'm not sure any of those meanings could apply to the things done by or on behalf of the Christian order ...
The one hypocrisy I like to point out is the inquisition, which killed and tortured thousands of people in horrible ways.
Somehow the idea of a sacrifice performed by Aztecs is deemed barbaric, and the inquisition is just a small hiccup in an otherwise enlightened western history.
"Anyway, what’s the real difference between slaughtering people on a battlefield or capturing them and later slaughtering them on a zigguarat? The difference seems mostly aesthetic."
Others were quite upset about the Covid stuff (some upset I'd refused to take the mRNA vaccine, others upset I'd gotten any vaccine at all).
And others (especially Christians) were less than pleased about:
"at some point one really does need to reckon with the really dark and violent side of things, whether that’s mass slaughter in the name of Christ or mass human sacrifice to keep Huitzilopochtli on the side of the empire."
you gonna write it? :p
We're not going to agree on what 'the gods' are, though it would certainly be interesting to talk about. Still, I am still fascinated by this claim, which maybe gets near to why that is:
'what’s the real difference between slaughtering people on a battlefield or capturing them and later slaughtering them on a zigguarat?'
Can you really not see a difference? (And by the way, as a rule I am opposed to both!)
I’m opposed to both too.
And I don’t see any substantial difference, no.
You probably already know this, but Aztec warriors were trained specifically *not* to kill on the battlefield, but rather to capture the enemy warrior alive. A warrior who’d killed instead of taking a captive was thought to be a bad warrior.
It was then the state priests who did the killing, which is a bit like the liberal democratic idea of displacing death onto another agent. Similar to remote drone warfare, or fighting Russia through arming Ukraine as proxy, etc.
What i mean is they’re all equivalent in the end (material) result, and we should resist attempts to create hierarchies of human atrocity or “evil.” Comparing modern human sacrifice to earlier forms only lets us excuse what happens now.
It was dark times indeed and I was very distressed to see how many of my peers were coerced into taking something that we have no idea about. In the states we have a website https://howbadismybatch.com/ which correlates batch numbers and VAERs reporting for the regretful. I also sympathize, as someone who choose to brave it out during mandates it did make me crazy for a while. I broke me in certain kinds of ways.
I’m getting ready to write about agreements - it’s been gestating for a while and must be in the cosmic space weather, a demand that we look closer at the agreements that we are meshed in. Just the other day I received a comment that included the epic “some people have no choice” a convenient lie that stripes away the essence of our god human relationships- even though I will concur that some choices have unbearable consequences.
ah, that "no choice" bit is a fascinating problem with modern political thought, especially in social justice iterations.
Interestingly, one of the primary target enemies of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom was Sartre, specifically because of his insistence about the impossibility of truly ever losing one's agency. Why they saw it as a threat then wasn't as clear as it seems now: the last thing the capitalist order ever wants are its lowest classes believing they have agency in the world...
Re CPVOD. My homeopath advised against the vaccines in general, with J&J if I had to, but then informed me I couldn't be seen in the office if I hadn't been vaccinated. So I got the J&J, had absolutely no side effects, not even a sore arm other than the pain of the needle going in. Also, knock wood, no infection despite at least two exposures. Also know people who have been ill one or more times despite doing all the boosters. Those interested may want to follow John Michael Greer's COVID posts on his Dreamwidth account. Weekly arena for discussion has been going on over a year now.
I had no pain from the J&J either, nor any "flu-like" effects after. My husband and his secretary both, on the other hand, got quite ill immediately after the mRNA injections.
Oh and prayers to your insanely gorgeous husband and his mum. May they receive healing and rest!
Everytime you write "insanely gorgeous husband" he smiles. :)
"they’re all offerings, too."
Ugh, Rhyd, sometimes you make my hair stand on end.
Haha sorry. :)
Yep, there is a diverse ecosystem of spiritual beings out there with various behind the scenes effects and responses.
And there are diverse interpretative models used by people to understand and navigate this ecosystem.
“”Recently in a podcast Martin Shaw said ... “new Christians shouldn’t be expected to explain the past crimes of Christianity.” I would generally agree with this if were applied to all religious ideas,””
Im going to have to slightly disagree with you and Martin here. Maybe you shouldn’t have to explain past crimes but certainly you should be expected to show awareness of them and offer a position that integrates the dark history of your tradition to show you offer a different perspective.
While I like and get your Aztec example Buddhism seems more akin here. I live 15 miles from Boulder, Colorado which has Naropa University and The Boulder Shambala center. Both are Buddhist and both were founded by problematic individuals who were later found to have extensively abused or sexually abused students / followers. Both institutions extensively covered up these abuses. This doesn’t begin to discuss other issues such as the inherent elitism that these institutions exist in Boulder which has an average home price of $1million USD and historically has been racially homogeneous and was intentionally was built as an exclusive community.
Spiritual bypassing is so common in nearly every tradition that at this point in history it’s fairly imperative to acknowledge it and to expect someone who publicly claims a faith position, enlightenment, or genuine religious experience to show awareness of their tradition’s dark history and offer a better position. This seems like necessary differentiation if you want to have a public religious position and one that is needed to help evolve/reorient nearly all spiritual traditions.
I consider myself Christian or at least Christian adjacent. I quite appreciate reading and listening to Richard Rohr these days and I’ve yet to encounter anything by him (book, podcast, sermon, or men’s work talk) where he doesn’t acknowledge and spend a fair amount of time separating the historical wheat from the chaff of his tradition.
All that and still love the post.
So, I was being a little extra kind about Martin’s statement because I like him personally.
I actually think that to accept any faith requires a full understanding of its implications, otherwise you’re not actually accepting it. The new convert moment is just like the new relationship moment. Once the sweeping emotions aren’t there to carry you, the full reality of a thing can be quite jarring.
And I should say I feel the same way about religious denialism as I do about political denialism. There’s nothing more exhausting than an anarchist who denies the atrocities committed by anarchists in Catalonia, or Marxists who deny the gulags, or pro-western civilization sorts who deny colonial abuses, as I do about religious faithful who deny the the darkness of their faith.
It’s a form of immature belief sustained not by faith but by fantasy.
I do not know Martin personally but I do fantasize about tackling him into a snowbank. I like him a lot.
I suppose this is a touchy subject for me. This phenomenon exists across many fields (like politics as you mentioned) and includes my own as an Artist. Art and the idea of enlightenment tend go hand and hand yet abuse, narcissism, entitlement, elitism etc is rampant within it. Looking at the shadow of spiritual traditions has been really helpful for me to try and sort out the situation, especially the one here in the US.
Here university professors have near permanent jobs with tenure (unheard of in nearly any other field including founding your own company,) summers off, partial work weeks, access to equipment paid for by students, galleries, and access to visiting artists funded by student tuition, etc.
Meanwhile students are being saddled with crippling debt at often high interest rates which is inescapable even through bankruptcy. This has put multiple generations now in a form of debt slavery where they can’t start families, buy houses, start businesses, and often prevents them from even realistically continuing to make art at all let alone succeed at it.
I value the education I received and think fondly of many university professors yet I refuse to not speak about the scale of the debt problem. It is at times hard to wonder how anyone can still participate in this system. The harm seems to vastly outweigh the benefits.
Currently the US has a collective 1.5trillion in student debt, which has never decreased. The never decreased part = this is real, real bad. On top of leaving people’s lives in ruins we are now at civilization collapsing levels of debt. Yet we keep doing the same thing where the winners win and the losers lose ……..just like those Buddhist institutions it’s best we don’t talk about or do anything about that last part.
Yeah, totally: one should totally tackle him into a snowbank!
Universities in general are a difficult subject for me to be nice about. I never had the money to finish, and it was always quite clear that the PMC sorts in the US think poor hicks without uni degrees are quite brutish.
Also, though, I think the elitist abusive religious hierarchy you see in Buddhism is generally a feature of all organized religions. I attended a megachurch (Southern Baptist) in Florida for many years, and I remember this weird cult of success around the pastor that was really difficult to square with anything from the gospels. But that's the same thing one sees around the Pope, and also certain imams, and the heads of highly-endowed synagogues, temples, and monasteries...
I grew up in Tennessee and am very familiar with the mega church cult of personality. ::Sending you a hick yeehaw!::
uh thank-you. as a long time supporter and admirer of Martin I am struggling to be as interested now that he's a new christian. for all these reasons but especially because christian civilisation and its deep shadow is still effecting my everyday agreements in ways that I find akin if not downright evil. at least with the romans and Aztecs etc there's a bit of distance for digestion.....
it's interesting to use the Aztec religion as a contrast with Christianity, when they both seem to suffer from the same core problem. (maybe this is the point you're trying to make.) just as "a language is a dialect with an army"—a religion seems to be the result of yoking human contact with the ineffable to the expediencies of maintaing a nation, or an empire. the problem isn't religion as such, or gods, or theism: it's the animal part of us, whispering that we always need more power in order to be safe. we've been building ziggarats in one form or another ever since the development of agriculture, when the carrying capacity of the landscape could be artificially expanded beyond hunter-gatherer levels, when land had to be taken and held in order to maintain the surplus population. that's the source of the instabilty that the Aztecs sought to manage, and the source of the sin that the Christians tried to supress. once humans reached that level of instability, the requisite gods were only happy to throw their weight behind the most ruthless. we had a much healthier relationship with the gods for most of our history, before we started asking them for sustained military domination.
there is no way to maintain civilization without blood sacrifice.
I kind of want to argue with the common habit of calling that part of human nature "the animal part". Animals do precisely not do that. Not because are all sweet and fluffy of course. Nature is "red in tooth and claw" often enough. But building and building, obsessed with vague wants and anxieties is 100% a human part of us, it is something that animals are not capable of doing.
interesting! i would have thought that anxiety is exactly the baseline state of almost every animal in the wild. if evolution is real at all, it's because the survivors had the strongest physiological impulse to fulfill unmet needs. it certainly wasn't the result of careful planning; i can't imagine that impulse being anything other than the body's constant, keening awareness of what it needs, and the physiological capability to do whatever was necessary to get it. that needn't apply to the soul or the spirit of the animal. but i think that's part and parcel of having a body in a constant state of deprivation.
(this is why we don't teach chimps how to use handguns.)
the "building and building" is what happens when that anxiety is de-coupled from a shared awareness of our co-dependence, given opposable thumbs, and blasted into cosmic (self-)awareness.
Well, biologically speaking, stress is a form of physical arousal evolved to make an animal react powerfully to physical danger in the moment - such as a fight with its conspecific, or a flight from predators. In their natural habitat, when they are not currently in danger, animals often return to a relaxed state fairly quickly if they survive the situation. Constant stress damages the bodies of animals as well as humans. Under the stress hormones, the immune system and digestion and in many animals the procreation cycle get suppressed to save energy for the fight or flight and under constant stress, bodies therefor eventually break down. Almost by definition stress cannot be a baseline state, because it is the thing that evolved to mobilise resources for acute danger. - Source for this: The book Why Zebras Don't get Ulcers
In addition, as far I we can tell, animals are not able of the abstract longterm thinking that enables humans to be haunted by fears of the imagination or build civilisations. They never build civilisations anyway, so it just seems fair to me to blame the attendant f*** ups of civilisation on the human parts of us...
how wonder how the researchers measured that "relaxed state"... if they didn't have them hooked up to brain scans, how would they identify heightened awareness of hunger, or sleep deprivation, or the possibility of future threats? i'm not sure people who suffer from PTSD always show external signs of it, and i imagine that's analagous.
and what would you say are the "human" parts of us? isn't "human" just an animal body with a cosmic mind?
Of course we can never read an animals mind, we can only read it's body language or do some (probably stressful) experiments on it. But they have pretty readable body language in my opinion. On the occasion that I've been able to watch animals in the wild, they don't read especially driven or anxious to me.
The human part is the thing that has abstract thoughts beyond the here and now. Well I guess 'human' is a sort of emergent phenomenon and not easily nail-downable. But yeah, compared to 'the animal', it is the thing that goes beyond the physical here and now. Basically, the mind, not the instincts or the body. And it sure is the mind that builds civilisation.
i think you might be making a value judgment about "anxiety" from an anthropocentric perspective. civilians perceive anxiety as maladaptive because they can imagine a world in which it's not necessary for survival. if you find yourself in a warzone, or a refugee shelter, or just lost in an unfamiliar place—let alone in the wild—that hyperawareness of threats and opportunities comes back quickly. we can call it something other than "anxiety," but whatever it is, it's not a state of relaxed enjoyment.
i don't know what your situation is. i'm a stay-at-home dad for two kids under 6 years old. i have been in a constant state of low-key anxiety—or hyperawareness, if you prefer—since my oldest was born. there is *always* something that needs my attention. 24/7, 365. and that's just everyday life, in a state of relative comfort, without my family being in imminent danger. am i giving myself ulcers? no. am i completely relaxed? never. is it healthy to be like this all the time? i have no idea. but it doesn't matter, because that's how i take care of my family.
I would suspect that one way to read an animal’s mind is to examine it physically. I’ve never read “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” but I work pretty hard to keep my horses from having ulcers so I can guess the content to some extent. Stress leaves marks on the body. Ulcers are a sign of stress in equines. If zebras do not have ulcers, it means their bodies are in a state of non-deprivation, since ulcers in equines are caused by inadequate access to food (s their stomach produce acid 24/7, so they must keep their stomach full 24/7 to avoid the acid eating their stomach). There are other markers of stress, including stereotypic behavior like pacing, weaving, and cribbing. All common ailments of stalled horses and unknown among wild equines. Rather than being in a constant state of deprivation, a wild equine is usually far healthier than an equine given free access to food and clean water, a beautiful bed cleaned daily, and the best veterinary care.
that's very interesting, and i think it reinforces my point... equines need to eat 24/7, so there must be some physiological impulse, which we would probably recognize as "anxiety," constantly prompting the animal to keep eating, keep eating, keep eating. it's not an "unhealthy" state because it's a baseline state: it's how the animal has evolved to survive. nevertheless, animals are constantly on the brink of running out of food and water (especially equines, it seems) or becoming prey, or dying from exposure if they don't find adequate shelter in the wild. it's impossible for me to imagine that isn't reflected in a constant state of hyperawareness. and when that gets translated into primates who, again, suddenly evolved into cosmic consciousness, that hyperawareness doesn't just disappear. instead, it expresses itself in amplified and convoluted ways, broadcast through the megaphone of human imagination. that's exactly what PTSD is in humans: an inability to switch off the constantly-pinging fight or flight response after exposure to a sustained threat. the whole story of civilization is a collection of individuals reacting (badly) to a poorly-evolved hyperawareness of real and perceived threats, because—again—that is what it means to be human: a cosmic consciousness decanted into an ill-fitting animal physiology.
to argue otherwise seems to veer into a kind of romanticized pastoralism. we want to imagine animals as being in some kind of peaceful repose. and i'm sure there are moments of transcendence: again, i don't think the spiritual experience of a horse or a hawk is reducible to its physiological responses. but it strains credulity to think that our worst human impulses just manifested spontaneously as soon as the ridgepole was lifted on the first permanent shelter, with no biological basis whatsoever.
You make an important point about the instability thing. In civilizations with any kind of animal or human sacrifice, the blood starts pouring more copiously the more threats to its internal stability arise. But also, it's the same with imprisonment, as well: the higher the instability, the more people get locked away.
One of the most interesting theories about human sacrifice vis à vis the Aztecs is the Marxist one, which generally sees such institutions as methods of societal control. Particularly strange is the fact that even the Spanish who freed warriors destined for sacrifice demanded that they be put back in their cages so they could do their duty. This suggests that the level of hegemonic social control that the Aztec state had over even their enemies was staggering.
But then, how many Americans willingly go to war, or march to jobs they hate every morning, or vote for candidates they don't like, or buy things they don't really want and definitely cannot afford?
Not much has changed.
Also PS you sent me an email when I was just back from Greece that I completely lost. Could you send it again?
And I'll take issue with the "agriculture changed everyone" argument. Just now reading the Davids Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything that effectively challenges that old anthropological theory of civilization progress.
Is that in reference to my writing (hard to tell with the way comment threads are placed)? I'm pretty sure I've never suggested that.
not familiar with Dawn of Everything, but I'm pretty sure that a food surplus is an inevitable outcome of agriculture, regardless of any narratives around "civilizational progress." that's why people deliberately cultivate crops: to create a reliable surplus over and above what could be found through foraging. once you have a surplus, you need to stake out land to cultivate in order to maintain it. thus territorial competition, thus warfare. that doesn't happen in a logic progression from one civilizational "stage" to another—but i can't imagine it's not an unavoidable consequence of growing crops that support additional population growth, regardless of how or when it happens.
Ah, actually -- it's probably worth reading it, or other similar works (Melinda Reidinger mentions a bit of this in The White Deer). Agriculture doesn't always lead to territorial stress or settlement. Europe was full of hazelnut and other regular cultivation (horticulture is usually how it's described) during the entire Mesolithic (resulting in constant caloric surplus) but didn't "evolve" to the civilization stress seen in Mesopotamia.
A good way of understanding what's happening is that the agriculture-leads-to-tyranny-and-suffering idea is a Mesopotamian (specifically Judeo-Christian) framing that most theorists don't try to see out of. One way of it being put that made a lot of sense to me was an atheist Israeli archeologist explaining how other archeologists go to Israel "to see how civilization started because the bible tells them that's where it started."
yep, that all makes sense. i certainly wouldn't argue that agriculture is a necessary precursor to whatever we call "civilization." i think it's a function of logistical complexity beyond a certain point: low levels of agriculture don't inevitably lead to high levels of agriculture, or to warfare. incrementalism is nonsense, obviously. but isn't there a tipping point around surplus food and population growth that tends to produce increased competition, and to veneration of the blood gods discussed in the article? maybe not as an ironclad law, but as a strong tendency?
'what’s the real difference between slaughtering people on a battlefield or capturing them and later slaughtering them on a zigguarat?
I never saw much of a difference either. I would say the distinction was for the Aztecs, the War was the Ritual. They fought wars of conquest, but Flower Wars were structured ritualistic affairs to gain captives, and allowed Aztec warriors to demonstrate prowess on the battlefield for intimidation, propaganda and other purposes. And warriors considered it more honorable to die in a sacrifice than on the battlefield.
For us, the Ritual is the War where the sacrifice happens there on the battlefield, or in the factory, or on the highway and so on. In the end the result is the same.
Yeah, huh? Maybe one of the few real differences is really that we don't notice our rituals, while they most likely did...
“new Christians shouldn’t be expected to explain the past crimes of Christianity.” I love Martin Shaw's work, but I can't help but see a similarity here with the recent trend in corporate acquisitions, wherein assets are claimed, but not obligations. The most prominent example being Disney's refusal to pay royalties due to Star Wars novelists, due to the theory that the company bought Lucasfilm, but not its existing contractual obligations. In other words, they now owned the novels, but not the obligation to continue to pay agreed upon royalties for their continued sale. #DisneyMustPay became an online rallying cry in response. It seems to me that if you are going to inherit a tradition and claim the good, you need to at least acknowledge the debts incurred alongside it, and make some attempt to discharge those debts, whether or not you personally incurred them.
I didn't know that about the acquisition. That's awful.
Maybe another aspect of this question is the difference between acknowledgment and responsibility.
Currently, there's a tendency (especially on the social justice identity politics side, but also all around) to try to make identity groups responsible for crimes or malfeasance from a few. "#YESALLMEN," for example, or the "all white people benefit from white supremacy," or on the other side, the attempts to treat all minorities according to the behavior of a few.
So, in light of that, I can definitely see a concern over the idea that all people of a religion should be responsible for actions they couldn't commit. But of course, in this case, we're talking about 2000 years of history, not just a few decades.
And anyway, religion is a chosen identity, not an enforced one, which makes this something different from the previous examples. Especially since Christianity is an initiatory faith (through first communion, being born again, etc), and purports that its members join a "universal communion" of believers, there's definitely an argument to be made that one really ought to at least reckon (if not more) with the atrocities enacted under the sign of the cross.
Obviously, no Christian could possibly hope to make amends for the slaughter of animist peoples who declined to convert in the past.
The old treaties the US Government made with some Native American tribes guaranteed the territories “as long as the grass grows and rivers run”. Of late, that phrase has been running through my mind in a bitter, ironic way. “Looks like the white man took care of that little loophole right quick, huh?”
I find it really interesting that the old conception of Hell was to be cut off from the presence of God. The old curse of the Norse was the Nidstang which was supposed to drive the land spirits away from their enemies. If we take God/ land spirits/ nature to be related concepts, it could be argued that the entire goal of our civilization is the darkest curse of our ancestors both Christian and Pagan. Bleach and antibiotic soap to drive away the natural cultures of bacteria and yeasts. Giant monocrops of corn and soybeans, silent with the insects killed by pesticides and the birds that once feasted on the insects and lived in the hedgerows between the fields.
The recently deceased Italian polymath Roberto Colasso left behind a massive ouvre that maps the development or decline of human consciousness, traversing as it goes, our stay on planet earth. He writes that when we gave up being middle of the food chain vegetarians to mimic animal predators, we underwent a profound initiation into stalking, hunting, and killing. This initiation brought with it the guilt of the kill, something our predatorial animal teachers still seem oblivious to. In his books describing the Aryan invasion of India, he goes into great detail about Vedic rituals and how their preferred ritual was the sacrifice (the horse being a favorite.) Colasso describes this obsession as the Vedic priesthood’s way to redress our guilt over having to hunt and kill. Could having to kill to live be our Original Sin, one we have redefined with so many words and now redress in largely unconscious ways: regional wars, genocides, terrorism, and mass shootings in malls, schools, places of worship, etc?
Chimps, bonobos and other primates are enthusiastic meat hunters. In this fun YouTube exploring the meaning of life with the Hadzas, one of the last hunter/gatherer groups on earth, well, let’s just say no guilt about the hunt and meat eating was seen, if anything you saw joy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGjuRwx_Y8
It does, as always, seems to be group by group, situation by situation. I worked for 11-years traveling to the Cree communities in Northern Quebec to teach writing and study skills to Cree students in McGill University's Education program. This was/is a continued effort to get more Cree teaching Cree, rather than white folks doing the job. The bear is still a highly venerated by the Cree, in spite of how alcoholism and evangelical Christianity have devastated traditional ways. One day only 2 people showed up to class, sent to tell me that one of my student's was the proud mom of a 13-year-old boy who had just killed his first bear. They were all attending his bear bar-mitzvah...which went on for a few days. The Cree are very polite and very understated and don't share much about their myths and ways to passerby, so when I returned down south I had to go research this a bit.. In one text, a traditional Cree bear hunt was described. Traditionally a medicine man went into his "shaking tent" and invited the Chief Bear Spirit of that region (a region in the James Bay area) to visit him there. When the spirit arrived, the tent began to shake. They conversed and the medicine man asked permission for the hunt. He also asked where to find the bear and how many his hunters were allowed to kill. He did this with other animal spirits too, particularly with the reindeer hunt where the how many question was more relevant. Now of course this account came from a white academic who was interviewing elderly Cree hunters.....Maybe they were pulling his leg, as they so enjoyed doing, considering they were overrun with academics who came for a month to do research, then left to go build a career down south with their findings. Not much given back to the Cree. But I do think the Cree that I met had a much greater respect and empathy for wild life than us urban folks do. Just my 2 cents.
I was raised in a rural hunting culture in Wisconsin, my farmer father was a splendid marksman, hunter, and a wonderfully kind strong man, animals had a special affinity towards him with cats and dogs showing respect and deference, sensitive to the weather, the alpha keystone predator in his domain, a type of Midwest agrarian animist, as was my mother who had a link with plants. In the spring she would take her children to a splendid blossoming of spring ephemerals in a local woods. Her teenage sons would walk in quiet entranced by the beauty. I would gather morel mushrooms to fry up in our home churned butter. Killing animals within the boundaries of need, keeping the balance, and doing it efficiently and quickly was a regular background part of my youth. Native song birds were off limit, and treasured as were the predatory birds, seasonal hunting restrictions were respected, non-native invasive bird species were always open season as appropriate.
What a beautiful childhood. There are less and less of us country folk....I spent mine in the backwoods and on coasts of Maine. My dad was an avid deer and duck hunter...the latter into his old age. He finally said he couldn't kill deer any more.....not sure if he meant he was too old to tramp about in the bush, or that his affection for them finally hit home. Anyway his basement workshop was filled with swords and guns!! After his stroke, Mom (secretly--sort of) got rid of his weaponry out of fear he might use them in some desperate way.. What a thing!
Yes also to the parents as animists. My dad never set foot in a church. His church was the back lot he would disappear into on Sunday to forever clean out the brush and commune with the trees. He also kept bees. Mom would take me on nature walks naming all the wild plants with both their local and Latin names. At night she would take me out to the sea wall and we'd stand there as she pointing out all the constellations, especially the circumpolar ones in case I ever got lost. Precious knowledge so few urban children have or understand anymore. In light-polluted Montreal, you can barely see the stars on a given evening.....Am still a bit traumatized from having to sell her Maine home after she died.
I've read a similar theory regarding cannibalism: since animist peoples generally thought of animals as kin, killing them amounted to cannibalism. Therefore, many rituals developed around making amends for this crime against kin.
Hey Rhyd!
I’m sorry to hear about your mother-in-law’s health crisis. It really sounds like the last thing you guys needed at the end of the Greece trip. I’ve found myself thinking a lot about this post and the conversation it has sparked.
A few times over the years, I’ve encountered a version of the experience you describe of having “Aztec human sacrifice” brought up as a conversation-stopper. In my case, it’s when I’ve written or spoken about how important Indigenous understandings have been in shaping my thinking about modernity and climate change and the rest of the trouble we’re in – and someone will go, “Ah, but, look what they were doing before we got to the Americas!” (The prehistoric extinction of the megafauna, apparently coinciding with the arrival of humans, is the other favourite example that people throw out.) All of which to say, while it maybe doesn’t get thrown at me with the same force and fierceness you experience in some of your encounters with Christians, I recognise what you’re describing.
It strikes me, too, that none of us who have been formed by the heritage of the Abrahamic religions – a category which I’d say includes you, me and Martin! – could justifiably view human sacrifice as an alien horror, something done by “those terrible people” and unimaginable to the followers of the One True God. Because, as Kierkegaard stresses in Fear and Trembling, the Bible says that Abraham spent three whole days intending to sacrifice his son. Yes, as he raises the knife, with the child bound on the altar, the angel stays his hand and tells him he’s passed the test – but the deal of human sacrifice is there, right at the heart of the story that unites the three Middle Eastern monotheisms, and the patriarch’s willingness to go along with this deal is the proof of his faith. It’s a devastating story.
Coming back to the interview Elizabeth Oldfield did with Martin and Felix, your post was the third mail I got yesterday that mentioned different aspects of their conversation, so it’s clearly stirring up a lot of things. I’d listened to the whole episode before reading the post, and I had to go back and re-listen to the relevant passage afterwards. For what it’s worth, then, Martin’s exact words were, “I don’t think it’s a young Christian’s job to have to defend the catastrophes of the last 2000 years.” I’m not really quarrelling with your paraphrase of it, I can see how it landed that way with you. To my ears, though, there’s a difference between refusing to “defend the catastrophes” of the faith tradition in which you stand and engaging in what you’ve described here as “religious denialism”.
Anyway, given how much energy we’ve all put into discussing one parenthetical comment out of a ninety-minute conversation, let me just share the link to the whole episode for anyone who wants to give it a listen:
https://thesacredpodcast.podigee.io/152-new-episode
And thanks for your willingness to stay with the trouble of all this, Rhyd. I do appreciate the space that's opened up by the dialogue across difference that happens in your comment threads.
Hey Dougald!
I've also seen that argument regarding the mega-fauna, as well as deforestation in North America before colonial contact being used as a "gotcha" (since, after the plagues came, there was a massive carbon sink from regrown forests for about a century). Both (and also the human sacrifice) as used to create a strawman, as if any of us are arguing that "indigenous people were all pure, non-indigenous people are all evil," etc. Frustrating, but of course it's not really different from the "gotchas" one hears elsewhere ("gulag," "eco-fascist").
Thanks for retrieving the original quote from the podcast. Now that I read it again, I'm remembering there was an extra dimension to the comment that furthered the sense of denialism: the word "catastrophes." Catastrophes are usually things that suddenly occur without apparent sense (floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes), as if there's no one behind them. Or things that are unsuccessful or had unintended consequences. Even being extremely charitable, I'm not sure any of those meanings could apply to the things done by or on behalf of the Christian order ...
The one hypocrisy I like to point out is the inquisition, which killed and tortured thousands of people in horrible ways.
Somehow the idea of a sacrifice performed by Aztecs is deemed barbaric, and the inquisition is just a small hiccup in an otherwise enlightened western history.
I don’t see a huge difference
Greetings from the future. I still don't understand what made everyone so apoplectic about this post.
some didn't like the:
"Anyway, what’s the real difference between slaughtering people on a battlefield or capturing them and later slaughtering them on a zigguarat? The difference seems mostly aesthetic."
Others were quite upset about the Covid stuff (some upset I'd refused to take the mRNA vaccine, others upset I'd gotten any vaccine at all).
And others (especially Christians) were less than pleased about:
"at some point one really does need to reckon with the really dark and violent side of things, whether that’s mass slaughter in the name of Christ or mass human sacrifice to keep Huitzilopochtli on the side of the empire."
If you accept that people are largely inconsistent monsters, this all goes down easier. :)