Manoah
Member
“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
I came across this quote in my new Tarot of Vampyres deck, which has a guidebook that surprised me with its spirituality.
First let me say that I think probably we need both water and blood in our religion, but blood (metaphorically as well as literally) gets a bad rap in a lot of modern, liberal, systematic theology.
Let me also note there is a rich history of thick, physical, even bloody worship. For example, Confucius wrote that (sorry, this is just from memory) whoever discovered the secret of the blood sacrifice at the Temple of Heaven would rule China with an iron hand. Visual images of Durga drip with blood as she wears demon heads as a necklace. Even though Judaism rejected pictures and statues of G-d, the temple in Israel must have looked like a slaughter house, and there are other examples of a visceral, substantial worship. For Christians, whether transubstantiation or simply symbolic elements, communion suggests in a powerful sense physically eating the body and drinking the blood of the incarnation.
As for myself, to maintain coherence, I have to kind of compartmentalize my beliefs or put them on different levels. I find myself drawn to images, incense, yoga poses, and other very physical expressions of worship. The extreme forms of many of these could contradict my religious and philosophical beliefs--for example, that there is only one God or that there is no such thing as ESP.
I have to water these "bloody" or thick, physical expressions down at a higher level of philosophy. So I use Perennialism to tell myself that God has many faces. The masks of mythology have an underlying truth. Cultural relativism allows all peoples to be treated with dignity, taken seriously, and considered sacred.
C.S. Lewis found ways to honor the bloody physicality of myth and ritual, finding incarnation to be more than a ghost in the machine.
“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
In the Christian context (the only one I know well enough to dive into the necessary depth), spiritual truth can be experienced in something as bloody and crassly physical as the Tarot of Vampyres. According to the Christian story, we have all become undead, disconnected from our divine Source. We have an eternal soul that perishes apart from the blood of Another.
I do know the concept of Atonement and even eating meat is offensive to some--as is tarot and vampire lore to others. My apologies. What is a Perennialist Christian Mystic to do?