The Rainmaker’s Sacrifice

My last sacrifice post ended with Hesse killing his fictional character Knectht rather than himself (as, years before he had unwisely tried to do to himself). My sacrifice posts began with my lhasa apso Chauncey expressing anger by shaking his toy sheep, but not even destroying it let alone attacking us. The commonality between all the sacrifices was substitution of a symbol for the desired event but too many of the sacrificers I mentioned got caught up in that symbol–thought, for instance, that the gods really did need human blood or that the Jewish people really were the cause of all the Fatherland’s sufferings.

In Mysterium Conjuntionis (419-20), C. G. Jung relates a story told to him by his good friend, the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm, who had just returned from China. In the province where he was staying, a drought was turning into a famine. The missionaries prayed, the Chinese performed rituals, but to no avail. So a rainmaker was called. Three days later the rains came. At Wilhelm’s question, the rainmaker answered that the area had lost its attunement to the Dao (the way of the universe) and so there was drought. Even entering the area deranged him from attunement. For three days, he waited until he synchronized with the Dao; then, the province had as well: the rains came.

Particularly, on Martin Luther King’s day, waiting sounds like a mistake. African Americans waited over a hundred years for the promise of freedom to be fulfilled and in the 1960s it did not seem any closer. What King did was change the kind of waiting. It had been a making do and trying to ignore or adapt to the oppression. King waited like the rainmaker with the dream clearly in mind. Others resorted to violence or dissociation but standing in protests, walking in marches, he was waiting as a purposeful act. He did not get caught up in the symbols employed in protest and see any one of them as the final goal, but watched the horizon knowing that the rain clouds would come. Whether a sufficiency of them have come yet is another matter. But some did. And above all, he taught the right kind of sacrifice, the right kind of waiting.

Atheists Don’t Have No Sacrifices

The paradoxical double negative of the title I owe to Steve Martin’s “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs,” about atheists both having and not having music (in that his song itself contradicts their lack). In a previous post, I said that atheists deny anything so “openly religious” as a sacrifice, but that lack of openness opens the door for covertly religious imitations of sacrifice. Breaking something to make it sacred (the meaning of sacrifice) could only be credited by a materialist science (L5), if sacredness were an attribute that could be measured physically such as weight or height. Yet an idea as flattering as being made sacred (or as appealing as breaking other people for the public good) is not renounced just for lack of credibility.

The inspiration for the above picture of Madame Curie glowing in the dark, I owe to The Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon tries to encourage young women to become scientists so that they can die of radiation poisoning like her. His notion that such a fate would be desirable is obviously modeled on martyrdom, considered at one time the crown of a true Christian life.

As I had to split sacrifice at L4 (moralism) into two posts to do it justice–and moralism certainly deserves justice–so here I am following suit for equally deserving L5. Consequently, this post is a general introduction to ways sacrifice is sneaked in.

Ayn Rand was particularly adept at this, as in The Fountainhead, where an architect invites public condemnation and possible imprisonment for dynamiting a building he designed but which strayed from his plan. Despite this evocation of martyrdom, the book’s best known quote is about saints being “dangerous” because she believes virtue is selfishness.

Although agnosticism and atheism fit most neatly with scientific materialism, they are not the only expression of that level. Another expression, not necessarily atheistic and today largely associated with libertarianism, esteems the freedom from traditional restraints that L5 brings and makes it into the core value for which one should be willing to kill or die. The Cold-War version of this was “Better Dead than Red” and the Vietnam War’s “We must destroy the village in order to save it.”

In addition, there are various versions of sacrifice, really from lower Levels, but adopting L5 masks, most famously the German medical experiments. Even though there was a veneer of science to these, their motivation and methodology was an extreme form of L3 bullying. One group of experiments tortured Jewish and Roma subjects to show their inferiority, a standard practice in bullying. The other experiments served the war effort (a traditional L3 enterprise) by assessing how much harm a human body could survive under various circumstances. The latter might have yielded actual knowledge of value, but instead of hearing of that happening, all I have run across are reports of methodological errors and of Nazi scientists destroying their records for fear of prosecution. They were only willing to sacrifice other people’s lives for science, not their own. So those sacrificed were wasted. But then, what good have all the millions of other human sacrifices done throughout world history?

Of Bullies, Heroes, and Sacrifice

In the wild, predators occasionally kill their own children. Some people do the same, The founder of the Zulu nation, Shaka, reputedly killed his infant son, because the boy might grow up to be his rival. The Kara of Ethiopia did so if the child had any abnormality that made the  Kara think the infant “accursed” (minga). The gods will punish us if we do not kill the minga, they said. The Aztecs killed people of all ages to feed the gods, but archaeology has confirmed that many victims were infants. In the ancient Middle East, the gods were thought of as demanding sacrificed babies any time a blessing was needed as on a newly constructed building. My guess, though, is that whatever theological or other reasons were given, an underlying cause for human sacrifice was the predator’s inclination to prey on the weak.

L3, the Level when egotistical competition dominates, has heroes but also bullies: human predators. If an L3 is courageous, the competitive instinct may make him or her a hero, but especially in ancient times, society was not predominantly courageous, even though L3s want to be thought so; therefore rationalizations were found to put the weak to death. The bullies usually ran things. Indeed, as I mention in “Graves’s and Jung’s Developmental Psychology,” the Greek word for “hero” long meant powerful bully, and only very slowly acquired its pleasant modern meaning as if it were emerging from the Unconscious against the conscious desire to sacrifice other for oneself rather than the other way around as the hero does. Probably, the ancients didn’t need a word for a kind of person seldom if ever around. You may ask, what about Hercules (Heracles)? In Greek myth,he killed his own kids, though admittedly he felt sorry about it afterward. The goddess (Hera) made me do it, he said. And blaming sacrifics on the gods was a common excuse.

In contrast, the hero was ready to sacrifice him or herself–when there was a hero..

Tribal Trickster Sacrifice

Many Levels have been built into the myth of Prometheus over the centuries (at least up to Frankenstein: or the New Prometheus). It is the most famous example of the two basic sacrifices of L2: pan-community food sharing and the punished trickster.

According to Greek myth, Prometheus tricked the gods into agreeing to accept the least edible part of sacrificed animals, while humans consumed the rest. For this and other transgressions against the gods (notably stealing fire, which apparently was the last straw), Prometheus was condemned to be chained to the Caucasus Mountains, where a vulture (or eagle, or both) devour his entrails. So he is originator of sacrifice and a trickster, but in the exaggerated, heirarchical mode of L3 (competitor/hero) rather than the calmer, more-egalitarian L2.

For the latter, think of Coyote, the trickster among Southwest Amerindian tribes. When he stole fire, he did not do so alone but as the leader of a group including Squirrel and Chipmunk. His punishment was not centuries of having his entrails extracted but having the tip of his tail turned white. Coyote is an L2 trickster, but for that very reason not as exciting as the L3 ones such as Prometheus–who perhaps began at L2 with a different story, revised during the L3 period. (Since L2 flourished in the ancient world long before literacy, we can only guess at what its European L2 myths were. When literacy arrived with L4, scribes wrote down the L3 versions of the myths, the ones available then.)

At L2, one’s tribe, the neighboring plants and animals, spirits of nature, and ghosts of ancestors tend to form a community, where they are to some extent interchangeable, a shaman able to turn into an animal, the animals perhaps reincarnations of people, nature spirits sometimes manifest as animals, etc. Coyote may assume the form of a human, animal, or invisible spirit. Consequently, just as each tribal has a responsibility to share food with the whole human tribe, there is a worldwide custom of sharing as well with some others (e.g., spirits), albeit usually the less desired portion.

The majority of an L2 tribe tend to do what has always been done and treat each other according to custom. There is therefore need for tricksters who innovate and are not restrained by politeness from criticizing or punishing those whose misbehavior strains social harmony. The trickster can do so less upsettingly because he (or less often she) does so humorously. Trickster is a role one or more tribal may adopt, particularly in a religious ceremony, the time when the ordinary order is set aside and a mood is created for the unusual.

The founder of modern hypnotherapy, Milton Erickson would wait to hypnotize until that point in the ultradian rhythm when a client was yawning or otherwise less alert and then Erickson might further enhance the dreamlike mood with humor or a myth-like story. He was looking for access to the Unconscious, so that he could bypass the clients’ habitual, limiting beliefs about themselves, and reprogram them for healthier behavior. That is much what the clownish tricksters did in L2 tribes. And the godlike Trickster figures such as Coyote innovated on a larger scale–or more precisely figured in stories told to entertain and thereby shape and or modify social behavior.

But among other things, these stories taught that breaking social rules had a price. The trickster was typically punished for tricks, though generally not severely. Human nature being what it is, I suspect that even though ceremonial tricksters were supposedly not subject to punishment for their clowning, whoever was the butt of the joke might resent it and find some way to repay it, so the trickster was risking becoming in some sense a self-sacrifice.

And with both  pan-community meal sharing and the idea of the trickster, L2 originated (albeit in rather nascent form) the notion of the sacred. According to Byrd Gibbens as quoted by George Carlin in Napalm and Silly Putty:

“Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth.”

In contrast to this, of course, L3 Prometheus was probably not having many yuks on the Caucasus Mountains,

Sacrifice: An Introduction

Last night I enjoyed a stimulating conversation about external souls with my wife and my friends Danielle DeLisle and Nathan Webb. Its focus eventually narrowed to stories of  “chosen ones,” sacrificed for society. Understandably. Sacrifice is a key paradox in religion: something made sacred by destroying it. Psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have tried to reduce it to one or another of its aspects, e.g., gift, bribe, substitution, communion, communication, murder of rivals, or nurturing of and/or by spirits. What makes such variety possible is our tendency to use the word “sacrifice” for a great diversity of phenomena, while missing others that might help to explain the former.

Back when he was breaking away from his discipleship to Freud, and had not yet fully evolved his own psychology, Jung thought a sacrifice was a way to break away from one’s beginning. I wonder how many of the other theories are as transparently autobiographical in their reduction to something personally significant to the theorist. I plead guilty, in that  I am applying as usual my own synthesis of  “Graves’ and Jung’s Developmental Psychology” based on my synthesizing together and updating their career-long deliberations (rather than any moment in their changing theories) .

Level 1: Consciously just surviving; unconsciously personifying the social instinct through an imaginary companion

Since Level 1–the simplest– is little (if at all) above being a mere animal, I begin looking for precursors of sacrifice from the non-human. Dogs we’ve had have expressed anger by shaking a ball or some stuffed animal. Our first dog would do this so vehemently as to destroy its own toy. I am reminded of stories about idolators who, when unhappy about something, punished their idols. Obviously, the dog neither renders the object sacred nor always destroys it. Our present Lhasa Apso Chauncey, never goes that far, and when he calms down returns to cuddling and nuzzling his stuffed toys as lovies. The psychologist William K Wimsatt called lovies “transitional objects,” in that infants transition to social relations with humans by playing with dolls and teddy bears. Wimsatt placed idols in that category.

The dogs substitute the object for us in their anger as substitution is one of the mechanisms found in actual sacrifice: bread and wine for Christ, scapegoat for the sinning congregation, play money burned for real money in Chinese funeral sacrifices, etc. Symbolic violence or destruction is another trait shared between actual sacrifice and the dogs’ venting anger.Perhaps comparable to the myths of external souls chronicled in Frazer’s Golden Bough (where what is done to a proxy is expected to happen to the original as if the original’s soul were projected into the proxy, the dogs are trying to effect us. Or since the dogs are criticizing our actions quite openly, are they trying to communicate their desires to us, as sacrificed people were used as communications with the gods?  But there are certainly other aspects of sacrifice not yet present such as the chosen serving society (since Level 1 precedes social relations). The complexity Levels are like Chinese boxes, smaller within larger. Level 1 contains just a couple of the components, whereas more emerge at every Level, each time totally changing the meaning.

I shall continue in the next post with Level 2: tribal trickster. Since i am myself in transit between Oregon and Texas (reason for me to be thinking about transitions?), that post is likely to be in several days rather than tomorrow.