Murder and Moonlight (10)

A Will to Be and A Will to Live.

 Copyright Eso A. B.

Yet there remains the night, and the night may be identified with the darkness of earth below the ground, the Earth as a womb. [Writes historian of religions David Carrasco: “All [food] that comes from the Earth Mother comes from the death that produces life.”
 
And since below the ground is where the dead tend to be placed, it became identified with the dead. Thus, at night, in the womb of Mother Earth, there drifted down a few feathers, the stems of the feathers perhaps imagined as the ribs of a skeletons of the dead. The feathers or ribs then fertilized Mother Earth, and inside Earth there began to grow a babe. The child was not a physical creature, but remembering that feathers were his seed, he was a mental image of a male from before the great learning about the toll and cost of violence.

The child was not a female, but a male, a male having no predestined role in life only in a limited sense. Whereas a woman is predestined to bear children, and becomes preoccupied with bringing the children up, the male child, may roam in the darkness at will, even perform violent acts, and build in the deep of the night make-believe castles. No one threatened  by violence will question the reality of the male make-believe or confirm that it has no more lasting value than the skin of a snake or the passing of a phase of the moon.

If we may enter this world of the male-dark, we are unlikely to be sure that we have created anything that will see sunlight. To make sure that we do not lose faith in our violent creation or the result of it, we must maintain the illusion (see the link above) that what we have created is real and will last.

However, for a creation to last, it becomes necessary to be willing to sacrifice our lives (“die as Gods die”), lest the illusion proves unreal and a consequence of murder.

Instead, rather than sacrifice our lives to ourselves (as the Sun and her daughters, the stars, do, when they set below the horizon in the evening  to rise again in the morning), we demand that not we, but others sacrifice themselves in place of ourselves. When they fail to do so (because there is no reason to be persuaded by our delusional make-believe), we declare them our enemies, sneak up on them during the night, and kill them.
It is then, after the murder, that the act of killing another forces itself on us as a nightmarish reality. Moreover, we (if male) become especially concerned that our victims are women, because women have no need of and do not partake in our male make-believe. Writes historian of religions David Carrasco:

“The startling practice of the sacrifice of women is one of the major religious patterns of central Mesoamerica that anthropologist and historians of religions have often avoided in their construction of theory and approaches to ritual life. It is remarkable….” (p.192)

The sacrifice of children by the Aztecs follows the same logic: there is no sin in sacrificing children, because we believe (through violent insistence) that what we create by violence has everlasting value.

I should not forget to also mention the “blood moon”, red colored in the evening sky. In folklore, it is usually believed to be an ill omen, a sign of danger, and bloodshed. The moon in the above link is rising from out of the Atlantic; the view is from the northwest of Washington, D.C., looking over the Senate building toward Alexandria and Arlington.Using the night and moonlight, choosing especially a night when the moon is full, to attack an enemy one fears to attack in daylight, suggests that when the Earth was ruled by the Sun and her Daughters, violence was learned from and abstained from.