Into the Woods

One of the courses I took with Gary lease involved, albeit as something wholly extracurricular, sacrifice of a ram.  I made a half-hearted effort to locate a description of the course - it would be in the transcripts but could not find them in the one place I looked - so I am stuck with what I recall of the class, and what the aims were.  The course focused on mystery religions; well, religions of the Eastern Mediterranean, at least in my memory.  Lots of texts, being university and a course for credit.  So we read and talked about various religious myths.  Dionysian stuff and some re Cybele.  Apuleius' Metamorphosis (The Golden Ass) was the other thing I remember clearly about the class.  I was taken by the translation (being solidly modern language only, an essentially monolingual, translation was it).  I still have my copy of the book, which I re-read about 12 years ago.  (I think I will dig it out and put it with the stacks of things to be read.)  That book was at the center of the course, which was (in my  mind I again go out of my way to note) about transformation through religious experience and religious experience.  

I thought of the course as focused on trying to make apparent what i was that these older religions gave or provided to the adherents, what experiences drove membership and adherence.  I think that is the right way to approach it.  The view of religious belief as science stories without the science struck and strikes me as wrong.  No one over the age of 10 or 12 could really believe there was some goofy fellow on a mountain throwing lightening bolts at things because he hasn't had a bath in a while.  There was an awful lot of sophisticated technology and construction.  A good many somebodies had to be paying close attention to the world as it was.  It is not matters get  better with the advent of the fish eaters.  Plainly ineffectual causal protections, so something else kept people involved in the religions.  That is the experiences induced.  And that was a part of the course: what was happening during the events?  Of course, can't be re-created with a bunch Christianized and intellectual youngsters at a modern university.  But it does not have to be to go some ways and be useful.  

So, after the close of the class, a bunch joined with Lease, bought a ram, killed it in a sacrifice and ate various bits roasted.  No blood on the face, etc., but it still had a significant emotional impact.  I had never seen an animal killed and butchered (or either) up to that point.  And that was part of the point, to create a  bit of the emotional impact of something there dying immediately.  I can admit to a sort of tourism about it, but not different than the excursions to Christian services of various kinds I had made. Those who select their church by doctrine are few, quite few I think.  (Once you swallow resurrection and an omnipotent omniscient loving God, the choice of whether the Trinity is one or three, and ordination, etc., is not worth bothering about.  Which makes explaining the long religious wars of Europe a bit of s mystery.  (It's my hole and I will dig it just as I like and just as deep.).)

Ah, yes, where.  In the woods.  We hiked out about 20 minutes to a very small clearing.  There were about 10 or 12, about half to three quarters of the class.  And it was spring, so lovely.