The Sacrificing Animal

In which a Southern bride has second thoughts, John D. Rockefeller discovers his God, National Geographic sparks a sexual awakening, Carl Sagan presides over a solemn rite, and you finally figure out why the blog is called The Sacrificing Animal

It is possible that we are alone in the universe. Nevertheless, atheism is absurd. This is a consequence of three laws of humanity and three laws of divinity. These laws structure the world in which we live, and move, and have our being. 

1. Humanity is finite

2. The human being is a sacrificial animal—a sacrificing animal and a sacrificed animal.

3. Human communities are founded on this sacrificial act.

4. Divinity reveals itself within us and without us. 

5. Divinity is infinite.

6. Divinity cannot be demonstrated or destroyed—it can only be feared or loved.

I will explain these laws in sequence.

Humanity is finite. This is the essential feature of mundane existence and the elementary fact of daily life. That doesn’t make it an easy truth to live with. Every day, you are allotted twenty-four hours of time and a limited number of calories. The number of places you can go, the number of people you can see, and the number of things you can learn is finite. You must decide how you will spend your allowance of hours and calories.

It is a crushing responsibility; because for every place that you visit, for every person that you see, and for every thing that you learn, there are innumerable places not visited, people not seen, and things left unlearned. Every chosen actuality involves the sacrifice of infinite potentialities. The first law of humanity thus produces the second: The human being is a sacrificial animal—a sacrificing animal and a sacrificed animal. It is crucial for our sanity that we rarely remember this. People who cannot forget are paralysed. The scent of the altar is always in their nostrils. Every hour of every day, they smell the smoke of their own sacrificed possibilities rising up toward heaven. 

Let’s observe a common contemporary sacrifice: the wedding. In this wedding, the bride panics fifteen minutes before the ceremony, because she can smell the altar waiting for her. She remembers that she wants to be a lawyer. She wants to be a lawyer, and she would be good at it. But she knows in a deep and secret place—a place barred tightly shut until just this very minute—that this man will make no sacrifices for that possibility in her life. She knows exactly what will happen at that altar. But her mother has cooed the ambition back into its hole so many times that the dream is no longer solid. Weakened by years of undermining, it is finally swept away by a creamy tide of smiles, stockings, and social inevitability. And she really does love him.

So down the aisle she walks, leading herself behind her—a self with professional lips and wire-rimmed glasses and expensive heels. As the priest recites the liturgy, the groom lights the altar, scatters it with barley grains, and pours out the first libation. Once the altar is crackling with hunger, the bride cuts a few hairs from the coiffed head of the sacrifice and singes them in the flames—bringing the god to his offering. Then she sprinkles some water on the victim's forehead. The sacrifice twitches as the drops splash down through well-plucked eyebrows, and the bride chooses to take this as a nod of consent. When the moment comes to say: “I do” the bride reveals the knife, hidden in the basket of barley grains. In a twisting movement that is both firm and final, she slits the throat of the sacrifice, and lets the blood splash out on the altar. The women of the congregation take up a ululating cry as she kisses the groom. The priest examines the liver, slips the entrails on the spit, and places the stair-mastered thighs on the altar for roasting. 

We are sacrificing animals, and we sacrifice ourselves.

This brings us to the third law of humanity: Human communities are founded on the sacrificial act. In the ancient Mediterranean world, this was quite explicit. Every political, professional, and voluntary association was sealed and cemented in communal sacrifice. When the Greek aristocrat Cleisthenes launched Athenian democracy by reforming the citizens of Attica into ten voting “tribes,” each tribe was named after an Attic hero. Tribal solidarity was ensured by regular communal sacrifice at the shrine of the eponymous hero.

Modern communities are no different. We are all members of many overlapping sacrificial communities. Some we chose, some were forced upon us, and most we couldn’t tell you either way. We gather in these communities to affirm our choice of life. We gather to reassure ourselves that this way of life is worth the sacrifice of other possible selves. And we gather to replenish the community through the sacrifice of fresh possibilities in the form of new initiates. Sacrifices are performed by a single person, but they are consumed by the whole community. The concluding moment in a Greek or Vedic sacrifice is the communal meal, where the sacrificial community feasts on the parts of the animal that have not been burned for the gods.

The blushing bride of our example lives in a white, conservative, evangelical community of the American South. At the moment of slaughter, an ululating cry of celebration erupts from a hundred prim and powdered female throats. A hundred throats welcome our bride to the life of the weekly social circuit, and all the arcana of a clean and timely household. A hundred throats affirm their own sacrifice of so many years before as righteous and proper. A hundred throats celebrate the persistence of the sacrificial community in a new bearer for its way of life. And the young unmarried men of the community—future lawyers, future dentists, future regional managers—who can one day expect to return to a well-cooked meal after a long day of work—devour great cuts of those firm and professional thighs. The sacrificial animal cannot survive alone, or endure the smoke of its own altar without company.

Nor can it survive without the divine. Communal sacrifice is not a random or arbitrary event—it is the natural response to an epiphany. The original Greek word, epiphaneia, means a striking manifestation of the divine. An epiphany reveals a god, and the proper response is to institute a sacrificial cult.  Every act of sacrifice is dedicated to a god. To understand the sacrificial animal, you must understand the laws of divinity, beginning with the first: The gods reveal themselves within us and without us.

Aphrodite makes a good example. Aphrodite is inside of us. The jackhammer in your 9-year-old chest when you saw your first crush, or the band saw in your 12-year-old skull when you discovered a National Geographic with pictures of bare-chested Khoisan women in it? That was Aphrodite. Those jackhammers and band saws were internal epiphanies of Aphrodite. But Aphrodite is not just inside of us, she is also outside of us. Aphrodite does not just preside over love and sex, she incarnates love and sex at their Mostest. This Mostest is forever beyond us. It is the point over the horizon that we are constantly pursuing. Happily married couples are always finding new ways to make each other happy, Casanova is always refining his techniques of seduction, and connoisseurs of hardcore pornography are always escalating into weirder and weirder stuff. These are products of Aphrodite’s horizonal epiphany.

But what about these strange new gods, who grant us strange new epiphanies in these latter days? Can we understand them as gods at all? Yes. Strange though they may be, they are identically bound by the first law of divinity. Take the stern smokestack god of Capitalism—the god of productivity, efficiency, and a reasonable rate of return. When a teenaged John D. Rockefeller tallied up his debits and credits at the end of every day, a little gnome of satisfaction pranced a jig in his belly as he saw his net worth grow. This was an internal epiphany of Capitalism. When an aging John D. Rockefeller, long since the richest man the world had ever seen, continued to absorb other firms, beat back the trust-busters, and hone his profit margin to an ever keener edge, he was sacrificing to an horizonal epiphany of Capitalism, a Mostest Money situated in an eternally receding horizon.

There is no “big enough” or “rich enough” when dealing with divinity. The Mostest is unattainable by its nature. St. Anselm said it best: the divine is aliquid quo maius nihil cogitari potest, “that-than-which-no-greater-can-be-thought.” Whatever spectacular plateau of fortune Rockefeller might reach, there were always greater gains in productivity to be envisioned, greater market shares to be imagined, greater fortunes to be contemplated. The process had no end. In confirming the first law of divinity, we have stumbled on the second: Divinity is infinite.

Which means we must be careful. Finite beings that we are, in dealing with infinite divinity, we are always in danger of flying too close to the sun. A dark epiphany can swallow you whole, and even a bright epiphany may be consuming. This is the origin of the politics of epiphany—the elaborate system of attractive and apotropaic rituals that structures our relations with the ones we love. The politics of epiphany are most obvious in the process of parenting. Good parenting demands constant attention to the byzantine complexity of the divine realm, and a musical sense for how to construct attractive and apotropaic rituals.

An attractive ritual is designed to elicit a bright and desirable epiphany. An attractive ritual summons a god capable of giving your child a secure, profitable, and fulfilling future life. Good parents understand that happiness come from a life in service to a god—the life of a devotee. Happy people do not sit on their ass. Happy people are devotees of a particular deity—Music, Art, Computer Programming—whatever. These are gods willing to share their infinite divine life. They hook their followers with an internal epiphany: the challenge of joy. Then they reel them into an infinite future with a horizonal epiphany: the joy of challenge. So we celebrate when our children discover a god willing to share its divine life—to infuse their veins with purpose and vigor—with the challenge of joy and the joy of challenge.

Good parents fill the lives of their children with attractive rituals for bright gods. They create landing pads for epiphany: piano lessons, cartooning class, computer club. They live in the hope of a keyboard epiphany that will transform piano lessons from a source of irritation into a source of growing joy. Anyone who watches television interviews understands the process. When people who are very good at things— tennis players, linguists, particle physicists—are interviewed about what they do, they recite the cosmogony of their own career. The cosmogony always begins with a bright epiphany: “Well when I was eight, my dad forced me to take tennis lessons. For the first six months, I hated it, but I remember there was this moment when…”

An apotropaic ritual is designed to ward off a harmful god—to avert a dark epiphany. There is nothing fixed or objective about the distinction between a bright and dark epiphany. The judgment varies between cultures and individuals. Many fathers have fiercely desired an epiphany of Mars for their son, but many mothers have feared the same epiphany all the fiercer. No starker contrast could exist between Republican Rome and our own culture, where parents conscientiously forbid their children to play with toy guns or watch violent movies. They know how many devotees of Mars eventually spill their entrails on foreign soil, even as the immortality bestowed by glorious death has lost its appeal. The decline of martial and civic gods and the ascent of Capitalism and Science—which value peace for the free exchange of commodities, individuals, and ideas even as they barbarize war with nerve gas and nuclear weapons—has pulled the curtain off The Old Lie: dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

But the ancient god of Respect (who in earlier epochs bore the name of Honor) is still dangerously alive in the rougher neighbourhoods of every American city, where his devotees respond to disrespect with libations of 9mm slugs. Legions of after-school programs and neighborhood basketball leagues attempt to ward off Respect, and all the other dark street side epiphanies. A central deity of the urban post-industrial pantheon has now departed her original stomping grounds and is gaining devotees at an alarming rate. From affluent California suburbs to the hill country of Appalachia, every parent now fears the epiphany of the first syringe. In addiction, we recognize the consuming power of divine infinity in its purest form. For an addict, nothing will match the glory of the first syringe, the internal epiphany that rendered him a devotee. He will chase its memory—a horizonal epiphany—into the consuming sun of a final overdose.

This danger is not restricted to the socially stigmatized deities of the urban-industrial pantheon. “Addiction” may be a word of universal censure, but “obsession” refers to a far more ambiguous reality. The dividing line between the labor of dedication and the monomania of obsession is by no means clear. Many parents attract an epiphany by forcing their daughter into computer programming club—only to resort to apotropaic rituals of limited computer time and enforced outside play when she starts spending nine-hour stretches in front of the screen. American culture is divided on the figure of the Wall Street financier pulling fifteen-hour days. We slap him on the back for stimulating the economy and providing his children with an Ivy League education. But we are uncomfortable with the consequences of his bottomless drive to accumulate. How many meaningful conversations will he have with his son this year? What effect are his activities having on the earth’s biosphere? We rightly wring our hands over the coming collapse of gasoline civilization and the dangers of nuclear power. But divine infinity—and the invisible human organ that responds to it—remains our most volatile source of energy.

We live at the mercy of the gods. For all the rhetoric of modernity, the gods cannot be overthrown. Infinity extends into intangibility and invincibility, and these corollary qualities produce the final law of divinity: Divinity cannot be demonstrated or destroyed—it can only be feared or loved. Reason, argumentation and demonstration are purely instrumental: they are tools in the hands of a predetermined end or goal. In matters-of-fact—the scientific world of material and efficient causality—these tools rightly take center stage. But they play a subordinate role in the realm of matters-of-conviction—the human world of formal and final causality where ends or goals compete for devotees. The politicians of epiphany, the devotees who search out new initiates for their cult, understand that demonstration is useless in the absence of a shared god. They cannot demonstrate their own god or destroy their enemy’s god through a rigorous logical progression. They can only inspire fear or love—casting shadows on an enemy deity or granting a bright epiphany of their own.

The politician of epiphany is thus a Hierophant. This is a Greek word constructed from the words ta hiera “the holy” and phainein “to show.” In order to understand how a Hierophant actually operates, let’s examine one of the most successful Heirophants of the 20^th century—Carl Sagan.

“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'you know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”

The final sentence is of course absurd. Not only do people revise their positions all the time in both politics and religion, but Sagan is blaming the dog for not being the cat in refusing to acknowledge any distinction between matters-of-fact and matters-of-conviction. We will bracket this absurdity and restrict ourselves to the first four sentences. This is where Sagan reveals how well he understands the politics of epiphany and demonstrates the techniques of a successful Hierophant.

The Hierophant’s job is to elicit an epiphany—to bring the initiate into the presence of the holy. In the Eleusinan Mysteries of ancient Athens, the Hierophant guided the initiates through rites of purification that lasted several days. The Heirophant then performed an ecstatic ceremony that climaxed with the presentation of the sacred objects. We still have no idea what these objects were, but in the cleansed perception of a purified initiate, they clearly had a transformative effect. The evidence is their continuing obscurity: the Eleusinian Mysteries were conducted for over a millennium, and no initiate ever divulged their secrets. Sagan is a Heirophant, bringing his readers into the presence of the holy; he is granting them an epiphany. But rather than present sacred objects, he re-presents a sacred scenario. The moment Sagan describes is a composite one, formed from a lifetime of his own personal epiphanies. This exquisite moment—in which public evidence triumphs over private prejudice—crystallizes the beauty that Sagan discovered in the practice of science.

The moment Sagan describes contains a twofold epiphany. On the surface, it grants us an internal epiphany. The moment throbs with moral beauty. The peculiar truth of moral beauty is that the more a decision hurts when it is experienced from the inside, the more pleasure it communicates when it is viewed from the outside. This moment of personal sacrifice for the sake of Truth entrances and inspires us. It discloses divinity by giving us joy. But this joy arrives with a challenge. The challenge is to maintain that same level of commitment to the Truth. The challenge is to always have the courage to say: “you know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken” in the face of clearly demonstrable evidence. This takes us beneath the surface of the moment, to the horizonal epiphany enfolded within. The purely rational, objective, and impersonal behavior of the scenario’s scientist sets a bull’s-eye in the heavens. It establishes a transcendent standard to which we can aspire. Our efforts will always be failing (finite humans that we are) but this horizonal epiphany carries us ever upward. This is the challenge in which the scientist finds his joy.

Science is a god.  It is a higher possibility within us, to which we are responsible. It is a transformative horizon beyond us, by which we orient ourselves. Consider the only qualifying statement in the Heirophant’s utterance: “[this moment] doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful.” Sagan’s use of that idiom is revealing. He is acknowledging that humanity is finite and flawed by nature. But he is also affirming that this finitude conceals a divine capacity. We have the ability to shed the snakeskin of our personal prejudices and ascend to a truly impersonal perspective on reality—the objective standpoint—the Martian standpoint—the standpoint of Truth. In doing so we transcend ourselves. We become divine. This is the holy mystery of Science, and Sagan was inspiring in his dedication to bringing new initiates to that sacred plateau. Legions of bright young men and women, who might have been literary critics or diplomats, chose to be scientists on the strength of Sagan’s beatific vision. The quote we are examining is currently making the rounds as a Facebook meme, but Sagan’s crucial platform was his television show: “Cosmos.” The cosmogony of many scientific careers can be found in childhood viewings of “Cosmos,” in which the hypnotic voice of the Heirophant conducted them to an internal epiphany of the beauty of Science, sparking a lifelong ascent towards its corresponding horizonal epiphany. Sagan conducted them to their own sacrifice, and they should be forever grateful.

Science will always need Heirophants of the Sagan caliber. Gods can be neglected and scorned, abused or starved. Only the patience, tradition, and sacrifice of human cult keeps a deity healthy. Sagan spoke of Late Antiquity in funereal tones, as a time when bright young men and women abandoned the philosophical schools for monastic life and priestly office, and a Christian mob murdered the female philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Hypatia. Much popular interest in Hypatia dates to Sagan’s paean to her in his book Cosmos, where he paints her as the last steward of the great Library of Alexandria, condemned as a witch by the rising tide of Christian superstition and barbarism. He’s full of crap on most of the historical details, but that’s not the point. The point is that gods flourish on sacrifice, and Sagan understood that the god he loved would wither and wane in the absence of a continuing cult. 

And yet, even if Sagan’s darkest nightmares were realized, even if Science was drowned in a tide of religious zeal or nuclear conflict, so long as humans are alive, Science will never be destroyed. A new epiphany could revive the cult, and a new epiphany will always be possible. Gods cannot be killed—they can only be starved into silence. Gods are gods because they respond to something eternal, something that will always be with us. Every one of us bears the complete pantheon within ourselves. We are all saints and scientists, rabbis and rapists in potential.

These are the questions to which every historical life and culture is an answer:

Who will you fear and who will you love?

Who will you starve and who will you feed?

This blog will chart the contours of humanity’s deathless pantheon, and use the laws of Divine-Humanity to understand our history and imagine our future.