On Sacrifice

“Robertson Smith {in The Religion of the Semites, 1907} shows that sacrifice at the altar was the essential part of the rite of the old religions. It plays the same role in all religions, so that its origin must be traced back to very general causes whose effects were everywhere the same.

“But the sacrifice -- the holy action ... originally meant something different from what later times understood by it, the offering to the deity in order to reconcile him or to incline him to be favorable. The profane use of the word was afterwards derived from the secondary sense of self-denial. As is demonstrated, the first sacrifice was nothing but ‘an act of social fellowship between the deity and his worshippers.’”

-- Sigmund Freud, “The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism” (Totem and Taboo)

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“The woman penetrated is a labyrinth. You emerge into another world inside the woman. The penis is the bridge; the passage to another world is coitus; the other world is a womb-cave. Cave man still drags cave woman into his cave; al coitus is fornication (fornix, an underground arched vault). And the cave in which coitus takes place is the grave; a chthonic fertility rite; Antigone buried alive, together with her ancestors, her bridal chamber the tomb. Death is coitus and coitus is death. Death is genitalized as a return to the womb, incestuous coitus.

“..The head, the husband, and the soul of the body. The classic psychoanalytical equation, head=genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The was up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital...

“... In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head.”

-- Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body


Sacrifice has an older meaning than guilty
surrender. The sacred flesh torn wide open
poured out His wine for all to share that we
may enter one heart and feast forever there
inside the ritual moment. Later we added
the shame and remorse, turning the sacrifice
into something more nuanced, distanced from
its former sweet surf. Maybe we erred less
back then, thinking from lower centers
which were eclipsed then lost. Is not
guilt altared in memory? Before such sins
there was Eden. We offer our bodies to each
other in remembrance of our first joy,
entering it riven, sustained by its rapture.
The itch reminds us that we’ve been far
too long from our lord’s round table in
that chapel by the sea. We hurry back,
tearing off each other’s clothes in pent
abandon, knowing with our dark deeper brains
that we’re close. Greed mauls us off into the
errant realms, incessantly pounding on the door
which has grown ever heavier with unsayable
need. No wonder we grow nuts and strike out,
forgetting the crops in the field, scything down
our neighbors to furrow their wives. Sacrifice
grew guiltier, robbing all pleasure from the meal,
a communion for lost souls with a flesh
and blood idealized into an arid, comfortless
toast to eternally lost beds. Thank God
for the dark genius who rides on the brain
with his long balls hanging over each cortex,
his long straining neck and dark-capped
head hollering for the blue drain of the matter,
thos dewy folds where sacrifice awakens
back to its former upturned glory. The thought
of the heart forgets the art of the ritual,
opting instead to the sweet cheeks of the matter
and have at her again, painting a womb’s deepest
walls with bison and mastodons, sabre-tooth
tigers and prone dreaming shamans whose
song echoes faintly here. She’s behind that altar,
you know; I flip its guilty weight over to find
a smiling god holding wide the door by which
I enter through him back to her, into
the paradise of waking on ecstasty’s bright
shore which begins here. I’m writing words
today in long phallic lines, each a stair
descending as far down as they go
into what’s oldest and first. Here’s to Eros in
the saddle of my dolphin brain, riding
the waves of sursurrant desire, diving
the main into a mouth which rules from
down under where true north is most South,
a devouring congregational devout.