I changed the title to Dance on your Funeral Pyre. We’re inquiring into sacrifice and the avoidance of sacrifice through symbolism, like sacrificing an animal instead of a human, sacrificing a human instead of…ME. The avoidance is like Russian Nesting Dolls, one layer of avoidance after another, all avoiding the real sacrifice of myself into the funeral pyre of life, the Living Fire of Now. So we throw in symbols hoping the gods will accept that. The biggest symbolic ritual is in church when you drink some grape juice and eat a wafer that is the symbol of Jesus dying and resurrection on the funeral pyre (cross) but even that is a symbol. Jesus is a symbol for your dying on the funeral pyre. So we nest symbols within symbols and never get to the living end of it.

Life IS death. Life lives on life. Period. No way to get around it. If you are a vegetarian you are sill eating life, and life (the worms) will get you in the end, unless you think cremation will cheat the worms. So this is the horrible truth, the Horror, the Horror of Life. We are all food. But we resist. We pull back. We don’t want to go. we don’t want to leap full throated onto the funeral pyre of life. So we send someone else. We get as scape goat and kill that. We have ritual of artificial sacrifice, and we know it. But we don’t confess it.

We are getting down to the nitty-gritty here. We avoid sacrifice and death because we are attached to the body, and we think that is the ultimate sacrifice. We give medals to people who die helping others. But that is not what we’re talking about here. All that fine. But even here these heroes are symbolic sacrifices for me, for my not having to do it. That’s the whole point of Christianity, it seems. You don’t have to sacrifice because Jesus did it for you. Sit back, drink your beer on the sofa and have some grape juice on Sunday.

Our volunteer military has become our substitute sacrificial substitutes. . They die for Freedom so we don’t have to. Jesus dies so we don’t have to. Everywhere, the cop out. Everywhere the symbolic substitute. I don’t want to die. Who can I get to go for me? I’ll pay good money.

Our Goddess Freedom is a demanding Goddess who want constant sacrifices.

We’re talking about the watering down of sacrifice unitl the soup is just flavored water. We don’t like sacrifice because it means the giving up off our comforts. And the biggest comfort of all is our persona, our personal image.