What Would You Sacrifice for Knowledge/Da'ath/Gnosis/Power/Mystery/Wisdom?

"The Tempation of Eve"
by William Blake

It's been said that G-d lied to Adam and Eve, that he said they would die if they ate the fruit, but that they didn't...   Oh, but they did die!  But that's part of the point.  First the "small deaths" of leaving the Garden, toiling in the field, and the pains of childbirth, then the "great death" at the end of their lives, Adam at 930 years old.

What would you give up to gain Knowledge?  What would you give up to become "like G-d", to become a god?  Is the immortality of your physical body a sacrifice worth giving?  They traded a posh (Port out, starboard home, around the Cape of Good Hope, for those who don't know) life of ease, caring for the trees but not working hard, but living in ignorance, for a life of toil and hard work and pain and eventual death, but gained Knowledge, Da'ath, Gnosis.

How many Americans living a comfortable, easy life would give that all up for Knowledge/Da'ath/Gnosis?

Essentially, it's Initiation, dying to gain Knowledge/Da'ath/Gnosis/Power/Mystery/Wisdom, then being reborn/remade.  It's like Odin said:

Down to the deepest depths I peered
I know I hung on that windy tree,
Swung there for nine long nights
Wounded by my own blade
Bloodied for Odin.
Myself an offering to myself
Bound to the tree
That no man knows
Wither the roots of it ran.

None gave me bread.
None gave me drink.
Down to the deepest depths I peered
Until I spied the Runes.
With a roaring cry I seized them up
Then dizzy and fainting I fell.

Well-being I won
And wisdom, too.
From a word to a word
I was led to a word.
From a deed to another deed.

It's essentially the same story, sacrificing yourself to yourself on the tree, and gaining  Knowledge/Da'ath/Gnosis/Power/Mystery/Wisdom.

G-d mislead them by creating a taboo that the plan ultimately required to be broken.  The serpent mislead them by making it sound like the promised death was immediate and absolute, rather than in the future and temporary.  But ultimately, Adam and Eve made their own decision, not based only on what G-d said, and not only on the serpent.  They gave up something to gain something else, and though they suffered the consequences, they changed EVERYTHING.  They took their Destiny into their own hands and overcome Fate by breaking the taboo, while G-d and the serpent stood back to see what they would do.

FFF,
~Muninn's Kiss

The Seething Cauldron

I just finished reading the article "Seidr and Modern Paganism" by Jan Fries in The Cauldron No. 139 (February 2011).  It raised some good points, about our understanding of ancient Seidr, about modern neopagan/neoheathen Seidr, and about magic, ritual, tradition, and religion in general.  The article is an edited extract of his book, Seidways: Shaking, Swaying and Serpent Mysteries, from Mandrake Press of Oxford.  The article makes me want to read the book in its entirety.

I guess there's a lot of controversy from the neopagan/neoheathen community about his association of Seidr with the shaking of other shamanistic cultures in Europe.  It doesn't match what the modern community has come to associate with the name Seidr, based on their reading of the lore and their experiences.  The article is basically his response to their objections, in summary form.

Enough with reviewing the article.  I want to discuss one specific paragraph here.  I'll leave out the last two sentences as they aren't related to what I want to discuss, but relates the rest of the paragraph to the flow of his argument.  I recommend reading the article in its entirety to get the context.

But seething was also part of sacrifice.  The Vikings never offered raw or burned meat to their deities.  To prepare a proper sacrifice, you suspended a cauldron on a chain from the temple roof and seethed the flesh until it was tender,  The scent arising from the sacrifice were an essential part of the sacrifice.  In Gothic the participants of the sacrifice were suthnautar, the 'seething companions'.  So whatever else the word may have implied, there was something sacred to seething.

I want to address several things here.  These are the Cauldron, the tenderness of the meat, the aroma, and the "seething companions".

Good Friday: Death and Darkness

According to the Western Church, today is Good Friday.  I doubt there's many people in Europe and the Americas who don't know that Good Friday is the observation of the anniversary of Jesus' crucifixion.

This evening went went to see the "Stations of the Cross" at Harvest Foursquare Church.  It not being a Catholic church, I wasn't surprised that it wasn't the traditional Stations of the Cross.  Instead of fourteen stations, there were nine (which made me think of Norse mythology, not Christianity).  I think they did a good job with it, even if I would have done some things differently and would have included some things left out, like Peter's denial.

At the devotional, I was thinking about the significance of Good Friday.  The central theme of Good Friday is the Crucifixion.  In modern times, this point tends to be downplayed, either seen as symbolic death or cleaned up.  Mel Gibson did show the messiness of it in his The Passion of the Christ (whether you like the things he said in it or not), and many people went to see it, but the shock of it wasn't what people wanted.  It was a temporary thing, then they moved on.

Death isn't something most people in Western civilization want to think about.  We do everything we can to distance ourselves from it.  We take our elderly and put them in rest homes and avoid visiting them because they remind us that one day we, too, will die.  Our obsession with health is an attempt to live longer, to put off death.  When people commit suicide, we won't talk about it and concentrate on calling them cowards and focusing on how they shouldn't have killed themselves, instead of accepting that they did.  When people die, we rush through the funeral and the other things that go along with a death, trying to make it go away as fast as possible.

In Jewish tradition, Shivah lasts seven days, starting with the funeral.  After Shivah, the parents grieve for thirty days from the time of the funeral.  Kaddish can be said for the deceased for as much as a year (though actually as much as eleven months and a day).  Yahrzeit is observed on the anniversary of the death (based on the Hebrew calendar, not the Gregorian that is normally used in the West) from then on.  Death isn't something that is dealt with quickly and forgotten quickly.

Many cultures and traditions have ancestor worship or ancestor veneration.  In these cultures, those that went before are very important.  Death isn't something to fear and avoid thinking about, because the connection to the dead is strong in these cultures.  To some, it is just a memory, but to some, they are guides and protectors of the family.

People shy away from the subject of sacrifice.  I have heard people who believe they are Christians say they don't believe in the Crucifixion because how could a loving god expect sacrifice of any type let alone a human, and definitely not his son.  I hear the same thing from neopagans, some of which worship gods like Odin who required human sacrifice under Norse, or whichever, belief.  In most societies in the world, blood sacrifices were the norm at one time.  Whether they are right or wrong, it's only more recently that it's become a taboo. It wasn't confined to just Judaism.

The only way to understand Christianity is to understand that in God there is both Mercy and Judgement.  You need to understand both sacrifice and death, and love and rebirth.

Good Friday is a day of Death and of Darkness.  It isn't a joyful or pleasant holiday, but the joy of Easter doesn't come without the death of Good Friday.

FFF,
~Muninn's Kiss