It's in the Blood: Ritual and Sacralization
"There's this
to say for blood and breath:
They give a man a taste for death"
"And he shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt offering. And Aaron shall offer his bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, and make an atonement for himself, and for his house. And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the LORD'S lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering ...Then shall he kill the goat of the sin offering, that is for the people, and bring his blood within the vail, and do with that blood as he did with the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy seat, and before the mercy seat:" (Leviticus 16:5-9, 15)
The stained glass of St. Paul's Cathedral in London's hectic financial district alters the light. Paralleling the River Thames, the cathedral is built on an east-west axis, so that as the sun rises, its light spreads color across the nave's flagstones until at sunset they stream across the choir. The effect is intentional. As medieval Christian writers borrowed a page from pagan mythology, they speculated that light was the radiance of God Himself, and the increasingly sophisticated architecture of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries enabled raised cathedral ceilings to let in more light. European guilds grew similarly more knowledgeable about construction, and elaborate stained glass designs encouraged the mixing of images and color. The altered light, wrote one writer, symbolized the way God's presence transformed us from material simplicity to resplendent beauty.
European cathedrals were constructed as sacred places. Their high arching vaults encouraged visitors to gaze upward toward the heavens, and their acoustics changed a handful of castratos into a heavenly choir. Criminals could find sanctuary in a cathedral (witness the hunchback of Notre Dame) because they enabled the mercy and presence of God Himself. Like a conduit, cathedrals wed the earthly and the divine, became crossroads, a nexus, a threshold between the material and the eternal. In echoes of the Tabernacle of the Old Testament Hebrews, the Holy of Holies, cathedrals were rare places where God and man could commune.
Sacred space is that area untrammeled by the corruptions of the material. It is where the divine is most fully felt on earth, where the encumbrances of time and space fall away. It is where the most holy of God's agents commune with the Divine to receive His laws and commandments. Mythology abounds with images of the mountain, the highest point on earth that lies midway between man and God. Here Moses received the Ten Commandments, Mohammed received his vision, Greek gods directed the affairs of men, and where Noah's ark settled, birthing a new people. Mesopotamians built ziggurats in an attempt to reach skyward, and Nimrod constructed the Tower of Babel to reach heaven. Jacob's ladder, Jack's beanstalk, the thread of Anansi the spider--all these connected man with the stars.
It is man's fall from paradise that occasioned the need for sacred spaces, as man, corrupted by the material plane, would need to renew his contact with god. But sacred places were only one way man could re-connect with the divine. Prescribed behaviors--rituals--could invoke the power, and sometimes the presence, of Providence. The hope was that in repeating the original behavior of the gods--the creation, the last supper, the sacrifice of the hero, the baptism, the war in heaven--the initiate would recreate the powers that attended the original ceremony. Magic and the rites of the Christian church thus stemmed from the same source: the proper recreation of an action could bring power to he who conducted the ceremony. Specialists trained in such rites--priests, shamans, sages, guides, prophets--alone could tap such power on behalf of the community. As Mickey demonstrated in the cartoon accompaniment to The Sorcerer's Apprentice, such power in the hands of a novitiate was uncontrollable. In matriarchal societies, the specialist was likely to be an earth goddess figure, someone identified with the material plane yet able to understand how to manipulate it to release its powers of healing. By the medieval era, European counterparts of the earth goddesses were most likely wiccans (a word loosely meaning knowledge of "the way"), from which came the designation of women as witches and the subsequent slaughter of thousands of innocent women by the Catholic church in Europe and, subsequently, Protestant churches there and in the Americas. Patriarchs have rarely shared their esoteric knowledge with women willingly.
A second aspect of ritual involved its act of purification. When the earth and the flesh became stained by sin, a sacrifice was needed. As its denotation suggests, sacrifice is literally the making of something whole again, restoring it from a fragmented state to a unified one, a process requiring the removal of impurities. On a communal level, a village could be purified if an animal, freighted with the sins of the community, was destroyed. Though the act might require blood sacrifice, it could also involve simply dismissing the animal, most often a goat, from the village. Hence, the term scapegoat. In Athens around the sixth century b.c.e., villagers carried out a form of this practice in annually drawing lots to expel from their midst one of their own, never to return. When Sophocles later composed Oedipus Rex, he drew from both a mythological and cultural tradition as the protagonist, who bloodies his own face and hands, is dismissed from the corrupted village of Thebes and wanders without sanctuary until his death at Colonus. Nor was Athens alone in practicing such riturals as James Frazer pointed out in his late-Victorian publication, The Golden Bough. Folk communities often engaged in the sacrificeof an individual, both literally and metaphorically, to purify the village and restore it. The practice of regicide--the killing of the king--was practiced by a number of cultures well into the time of Classical Greece, and the notion of a Savior--he who gives up his life for the restoration of others--is the basis for most world religions, including Christianity.
Which brings us to the blood. For reasons not always certain, blood in paleolithic and neolithic cultures was associated with the life force; hence, its contamination required its spilling, an act much like the pruning of the gardener that would allow life to properly restore itself. (Such reasoning is behind the myriad flood myths wherein gods of various stripes sought to purify the earth and begin again.) The Old Testament speaks of blood as a life force, and the Jewish practice of kosher preparation involves the proper draining of blood from the animal, condemning animals that are not bled. Anthropologists have also speculated that the shedding of blood was a patriarchal response to menstruation. Having noted the parallel between the monthly "bleeding" of women and the cycles of the moon, men perceived women as inherently attuned to the life-giving nature of the universe, particularly as a menstruating female was subsequently able to give birth, literally creating life from within. Through the act of circumcision, thus, males were able to bleed themselves, the penis similarly involved in the creation of life.
The spilling of blood as an element of sacrifice continued into the Christian era because of The Last Supper, wherein Jesus instituted the ritual of symbolically drinking His blood as a uniting of savior and sinner. The weekly partaking of communion, or the sacrament, is the ritualistic renewal of creator and creation, the sins of the week purged in the act of restoration. In this, Christ became the scapegoat, the sacrifice, the blood atonement by which His followers could be redeemed if they partook of His blood in recognition of Him. The pagan roots of such symbolism pervaded the Mediterranean era. Again in Oedipus Rex, images of impurity abound in the play, Thebes defiled by the presence of a murderer. As the Delphic Oracle instructs Creon, the town must be purged, an act that can be accomplished only by the blood sacrifice of the killer (Oedipus) and his family, including Jocasta and their sons and daughters, whose very creation was a defilement.
Understanding the nature of blood sacrifice enables us to comprehend Oedipus in a different light. As Juliette du Boulay writes in "The Greek Vampire: A Study of Cyclic Symbolism in Marriage and Death," Greek culture saw incest as an abomination, but not because of its sexual nature. In a culture that viewed blood as a sacred life force, the Greeks believed blood must flow outward to new partners in marriage. In a prefiguring of modern genetics, they believed marrying too close to one's line ultimately stifled and adulterated the blood line; hence, conception through incest would be the ultimate inhibition of growth, a metaphorical flowing of the blood backward into the family rather than forward into the community. As de Boulay notes, this belief underscores an earlier interpretation of why vampires were not just feared but reviled, viewed as containers of impure blood. The vampire, holding on to life past its termination, did not allow the proper spilling of the life force, but instead maintained its corrupted blood and fed it back into the living. Such an interpretation sheds interesting light on the presence of incest in subsequent vampire tales, as in Edgar Allan Poe's creation of Roderick Usher and his sister, or William Faulkner's Quentin Compson, who is fascinated by the blood artery that pulses on his sister's neck.
As urbanized environments increased and science replaced mythology, blood forms of renewal gave way to lighter customs. The renewal of lives at birthdays, weddings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, seasonal celebrations and new years illustrates the way we follow the spirit, if not the letter, of the original laws. And as Virginia Woolf wrote, we each need a room of our own, a place where the earthly does not intrude, where it is possible, like sleep, to re-energize and bring balance to a life that seems to spin away from us. And in the simplest acts of husbandry--spring cleaning, gardening, weekend rituals about the house--we recreate the behavior of our ancestors, creating space in our lives wherein the divine might speak to us in the simplest of ways. Rituals are our life blood.