Reason explores spirit with disbelief. This disbelief makes good fiction. Assumptions that can be uttered aren't. Why say what you don't believe?
It's not easy to investigate the spirit of wilderness. Spirit as super natural suggests the natural does not include it, but natural includes spiritual in every particular. The puritan wanted protection from the thing in itself called spirit of wilderness, inversely applied rituals of scapegoats to the wood. You cannot drive spirit from wood. Spirit is in the man. Things were upside down in his mind. He thought he was a tantamount Hebrew in the wilderness, as in Mather's, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), but he was a spiritual one, wanted to drive the Leviticus scapegoat out of the camp with their sins pronounced on its head. It was driven into the wilderness and delivered to the "spirit of the wilderness." He thought the sins outside him. There were inside.
Pharmakoi
Something similar occurred in ancient Greece with the pharmakoi, that annual Greek rite of propitiation. Actors, pharmakoi, a man and a woman taken from the village were ritually executed. They were given gifts of figs and cake in the village, then scourged and driven out. The people threw squill bulbs and stalks at them. These "victims" were volunteers chosen for their ugliness, meant to show the people's repugnance of their sins. The rite celebrated their emergence from barbarism, from when human sacrifice was a literal practice. Pharmakoi supposedly evince higher civilization.
Considering this expulsion of the man/woman some argue Adam and Eve are types of pharmakoi, driven out of the garden, except there was no society to be cleansed. The word for these celebrants translates literally, human medicine, which derives from the word for medicine, pharmakon. They were their own medicine, the means by which "people restore harmony to their world through scapegoat sacrifice, i.e. blame and retaliation."
In other times a victim of this rite might have been a captive warrior cannibalized to steal his power. The medicine then was a cure for weakness. Newcomb recounts a ritual where Central Texas Tonkawas consumed a Comanche captive's heart. We're talking 19th century. The objective was to take the "spirit power. If the enemy were courageous he would thus acquire his courage" (W. W. Newcomb. The Indians of Texas, 152.) This human medicine is different from the Greek rite. The pharmakoi were a substitute for the entire people. To restore health to the tribe they transferred societal guilt to the representative man/woman. Rohde says that
"the pharmakoi were the marginalized. That could include the king, but more commonly the pharmakoi were the unwanted, "polluted" people such as murderers (note their listing in 22:15), the deformed, or foreigners. They were scapegoated by a community in order to avert evils such as disease and other catastrophes. They were ritually led "outside" via a special gate of the city to purify that city; then they were either exiled or possibly put to death (Harrison: 96). Before they were hunted out of cities, they were "cleansed" by being beaten with branches of a fig tree and with squills, which were believed to have purifying capabilities (Rohde: 590)."
But Phamakoi weren't any such thing as the lower class, the poor of garbage dumps or murderers. They were the sin bearers of a sacrament, a purification. In discussion of the outside and the inside in the purging of the body politic, what was once inside, such as the pharmakoi in the town or the goat in the yard, is cast out as a scapegoat, to bear the sins of them all: "if the word pharmakos that Plato does not use still resonates within the text...if the outside is always-already part of the inside," a mystery of expiation is at work, but not "the status of the concepts 'present' and 'absent', 'body' and 'soul', 'center' and 'periphery', for of course all this is a play, not a reality, and the sins come back and again. Poison is also a cure embodied in Socrates expulsion as a scapegoat from the city to his death. But not only Socrates. Beware Sociology making all things into itself.
Mark R. Bredin says, "Girard sees in Greek myth the phenomenon of people blaming others for the violence in themselves. This "other" is the pharmakos. Girard calls the pharmakos "the victim" whom we kill believing that we are rooting out violence and creating peace (1996: 163). Alison expresses it well: "We are all, always and everywhere, immensely violent creatures, and the only way which we have to control this violence is the search for collective unanimity against a victim" (1998:21). This phenomenon in society Girard calls "single victim mechanism.... In sum, the pharmakos is one who is blamed and is then condemned in order to restore peace to the community."
The sacrifices' ugliness represents its sin, whether less human or more. The inevitable anthropomorphism of the scapegoat in the imagination is more than just a likeness from mammals. It projects outwards from the mind into the world. There is an inside and outside, understood poetically and they do not exclude each other. Spiritual scapegoats come in the form of a man, the malformation of a man, so called a monster. This monster has human likenesses even if it is a man lobster with jaws and legs. This imagination opposes a spirit that comes in the beatified form as an angel.
Puritans
II.
Puritan preoccupations that Indians were devils and the pawns of devils resulted in cultural deconstructions proving them guilty of racism and genocide. These trace psychologies of extermination to similar episodes of the Hebrews in Canaan. There is however one huge exception. The New Testament had no extermination policy. Puritan exterminations were not perpetuated with New Testament approval, so the Puritans had to make them up from the Old. The New Testament church concluded gentiles could not even be made to be circumcised let alone decapitated. So puritans sought Old Testament justification of their fear and prejudice. However the Old Testament was not the cause of the Puritan practice either. The cause was the English. This is obvious whenever the English colonists are contrasted with the Germans of Philadelphia who shared their biblical beliefs but shunned the English doctrines of extermination and assimilation.
English Only's progeny was slavery (called freedom), extinction of species (called prosperity) and destruction of the ocean and atmosphere (called dominion). De-constructionalists think the masculine caused extinction, but it was a national, ethnic, appalling cruelty: the "theological rigor [that] entered into what now seems an appalling cruelty toward Indians," (Garry Wills. Under God. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1990, 142) Draw a line from the behavior of the puritan against Indians in America to the behavior of the British empire in India. There are endless permutations of the negative effects of English nation hood in the world. The English transferred it en masse to the Americas, the Americans presumably will transfer it to the Chinese who swallow up all smaller groups in between. Each act of digestion is an acquisition. The domination is justified like this, assimilate or die.
There is a huge effort to defeat the recognition that this pattern has occurred among assimilated peoples. The substituted paradigm is that the puritans were afraid of the dark wood and their defensiveness was so extreme they exterminated the wood and the native from religious causes and doctrines. But fear made the doctrine, not doctrine the fear. The British were hardwired as a nation to domination and destruction and propagandized the west with such notions even while they colonized the east. Fear and doctrine hand over the appalling modern notion to America that it is England's racist/chauvinist twin of not only national but gender masculine sins.
How can we conduct an inquiry into the spirit of wilderness in this context, when the Azazel itself, to which the Leviticus scapegoat was released, is seen as a manufactured justification, a function of racism of Hebrew justification of genocide? It is in our interest to note that the ice caps are now the Indians, fresh water society is dissolving in saline and wilderness is falling off the side of the world.
Emendation note:
There is no end to discovery. Lately surfaced is the etymology of Azazel by Skeat:
The most famous example in English (and many other languages whose translations of the bible are based on the same sources) is "scapegoat" which is a mistranslation of the word Azazel (In Hebrew: עזאזל) originated by William Tyndale in his 1530 Bible, and appropriated in the King James Version of the Bible (Leviticus chapter 16) in 1611. Confounded by the word, Tyndale had interpreted Azazel as ez ozel - literally, "the goat that departs"; hence "(e)scape goat." According to the Talmud, Yoma 67b, Azazel is a contraction of az (harsh) and eil (strong) and refers to the most rugged of mountains. This identification is supported by Rashi, the great Medieval grammarian, who interpreted Azazel to be the name of a specific mountain or cliff over which the goat was driven[3]. According to R.H. Charles, it was called so for its reputation as the holding place of the fallen angel of the same name[4]. Modern scholars generally reject Tyndale's interpretation and favor one related to a fallen angel/evil demon interpretation. Today in modern Hebrew Azazel is used derogatorily, as in lekh la-Azazel ("go to Azazel"), as in "go to hell".
It's not easy to investigate the spirit of wilderness. Spirit as super natural suggests the natural does not include it, but natural includes spiritual in every particular. The puritan wanted protection from the thing in itself called spirit of wilderness, inversely applied rituals of scapegoats to the wood. You cannot drive spirit from wood. Spirit is in the man. Things were upside down in his mind. He thought he was a tantamount Hebrew in the wilderness, as in Mather's, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), but he was a spiritual one, wanted to drive the Leviticus scapegoat out of the camp with their sins pronounced on its head. It was driven into the wilderness and delivered to the "spirit of the wilderness." He thought the sins outside him. There were inside.
Pharmakoi
Something similar occurred in ancient Greece with the pharmakoi, that annual Greek rite of propitiation. Actors, pharmakoi, a man and a woman taken from the village were ritually executed. They were given gifts of figs and cake in the village, then scourged and driven out. The people threw squill bulbs and stalks at them. These "victims" were volunteers chosen for their ugliness, meant to show the people's repugnance of their sins. The rite celebrated their emergence from barbarism, from when human sacrifice was a literal practice. Pharmakoi supposedly evince higher civilization.Considering this expulsion of the man/woman some argue Adam and Eve are types of pharmakoi, driven out of the garden, except there was no society to be cleansed. The word for these celebrants translates literally, human medicine, which derives from the word for medicine, pharmakon. They were their own medicine, the means by which "people restore harmony to their world through scapegoat sacrifice, i.e. blame and retaliation."
In other times a victim of this rite might have been a captive warrior cannibalized to steal his power. The medicine then was a cure for weakness. Newcomb recounts a ritual where Central Texas Tonkawas consumed a Comanche captive's heart. We're talking 19th century. The objective was to take the "spirit power. If the enemy were courageous he would thus acquire his courage" (W. W. Newcomb. The Indians of Texas, 152.) This human medicine is different from the Greek rite. The pharmakoi were a substitute for the entire people. To restore health to the tribe they transferred societal guilt to the representative man/woman. Rohde says that
"the pharmakoi were the marginalized. That could include the king, but more commonly the pharmakoi were the unwanted, "polluted" people such as murderers (note their listing in 22:15), the deformed, or foreigners. They were scapegoated by a community in order to avert evils such as disease and other catastrophes. They were ritually led "outside" via a special gate of the city to purify that city; then they were either exiled or possibly put to death (Harrison: 96). Before they were hunted out of cities, they were "cleansed" by being beaten with branches of a fig tree and with squills, which were believed to have purifying capabilities (Rohde: 590)."
But Phamakoi weren't any such thing as the lower class, the poor of garbage dumps or murderers. They were the sin bearers of a sacrament, a purification. In discussion of the outside and the inside in the purging of the body politic, what was once inside, such as the pharmakoi in the town or the goat in the yard, is cast out as a scapegoat, to bear the sins of them all: "if the word pharmakos that Plato does not use still resonates within the text...if the outside is always-already part of the inside," a mystery of expiation is at work, but not "the status of the concepts 'present' and 'absent', 'body' and 'soul', 'center' and 'periphery', for of course all this is a play, not a reality, and the sins come back and again. Poison is also a cure embodied in Socrates expulsion as a scapegoat from the city to his death. But not only Socrates. Beware Sociology making all things into itself.
Mark R. Bredin says, "Girard sees in Greek myth the phenomenon of people blaming others for the violence in themselves. This "other" is the pharmakos. Girard calls the pharmakos "the victim" whom we kill believing that we are rooting out violence and creating peace (1996: 163). Alison expresses it well: "We are all, always and everywhere, immensely violent creatures, and the only way which we have to control this violence is the search for collective unanimity against a victim" (1998:21). This phenomenon in society Girard calls "single victim mechanism.... In sum, the pharmakos is one who is blamed and is then condemned in order to restore peace to the community."
The sacrifices' ugliness represents its sin, whether less human or more. The inevitable anthropomorphism of the scapegoat in the imagination is more than just a likeness from mammals. It projects outwards from the mind into the world. There is an inside and outside, understood poetically and they do not exclude each other. Spiritual scapegoats come in the form of a man, the malformation of a man, so called a monster. This monster has human likenesses even if it is a man lobster with jaws and legs. This imagination opposes a spirit that comes in the beatified form as an angel.
Puritans
II.English Only's progeny was slavery (called freedom), extinction of species (called prosperity) and destruction of the ocean and atmosphere (called dominion). De-constructionalists think the masculine caused extinction, but it was a national, ethnic, appalling cruelty: the "theological rigor [that] entered into what now seems an appalling cruelty toward Indians," (Garry Wills. Under God. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1990, 142) Draw a line from the behavior of the puritan against Indians in America to the behavior of the British empire in India. There are endless permutations of the negative effects of English nation hood in the world. The English transferred it en masse to the Americas, the Americans presumably will transfer it to the Chinese who swallow up all smaller groups in between. Each act of digestion is an acquisition. The domination is justified like this, assimilate or die.
There is a huge effort to defeat the recognition that this pattern has occurred among assimilated peoples. The substituted paradigm is that the puritans were afraid of the dark wood and their defensiveness was so extreme they exterminated the wood and the native from religious causes and doctrines. But fear made the doctrine, not doctrine the fear. The British were hardwired as a nation to domination and destruction and propagandized the west with such notions even while they colonized the east. Fear and doctrine hand over the appalling modern notion to America that it is England's racist/chauvinist twin of not only national but gender masculine sins.
How can we conduct an inquiry into the spirit of wilderness in this context, when the Azazel itself, to which the Leviticus scapegoat was released, is seen as a manufactured justification, a function of racism of Hebrew justification of genocide? It is in our interest to note that the ice caps are now the Indians, fresh water society is dissolving in saline and wilderness is falling off the side of the world.
Emendation note:
There is no end to discovery. Lately surfaced is the etymology of Azazel by Skeat:
The most famous example in English (and many other languages whose translations of the bible are based on the same sources) is "scapegoat" which is a mistranslation of the word Azazel (In Hebrew: עזאזל) originated by William Tyndale in his 1530 Bible, and appropriated in the King James Version of the Bible (Leviticus chapter 16) in 1611. Confounded by the word, Tyndale had interpreted Azazel as ez ozel - literally, "the goat that departs"; hence "(e)scape goat." According to the Talmud, Yoma 67b, Azazel is a contraction of az (harsh) and eil (strong) and refers to the most rugged of mountains. This identification is supported by Rashi, the great Medieval grammarian, who interpreted Azazel to be the name of a specific mountain or cliff over which the goat was driven[3]. According to R.H. Charles, it was called so for its reputation as the holding place of the fallen angel of the same name[4]. Modern scholars generally reject Tyndale's interpretation and favor one related to a fallen angel/evil demon interpretation. Today in modern Hebrew Azazel is used derogatorily, as in lekh la-Azazel ("go to Azazel"), as in "go to hell".
Leviticus
Elaborations of this spirit of wilderness fictionalize the original text in Leviticus 16 where the bare facts express a desire for the clean over the unclean, something that hardly exists outside the orthodox. The point is not that there is a spirit of wilderness, but that there is sin of every kind causing infection and skin disease, that society is made unclean by exposure, so "keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean" (15.31), an early FEMA.
The Goat
Much repetition of the unclean required a ceremonial address called the Day of Atonement. In one aspect of this, a goat selected by lot from two, was "used for making atonement by sending it into the desert" (10). It was called "the live goat" because it wasn't killed but escorted out by a keeper and released, but before this a ceremonial transference occurred where the priest would "lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites-all their sins-and put them on the goat's head" (21). In this way it was released to the spirit of the wilderness. There was a kind of play on this ritual for people who had been sacrificing goats in"the open fields" (17.5) to "goat idols," meaning they were expiating their own sins. Whatever reality this speaks of is incomprehensible to the modern, as if we were to lay hands on the head of some scientist who cut the antennae off Monarch butterflies and send them into the desert.
Spirit of Wilderness
For Barry Lopez the wolverine enlivens the force of natural wilderness as the bear does for Momaday. We know we are less human by the loss of the wilderness contrast. One of four mammals will become extinct. Forests of the north, coyote and elk in storm, dead fall fires in yarrow meadows armed, dogs, men, tent, truck, prevent the hunger of the bear. But this is small stuff to the scapegoated puritan fear of the spirit. It has a name in Leviticus that Barry Lopez does not mention because the names of the gods are politicized depending on who uses them. Once above the outbuildings of a flour mill near ASU was the proud declaration "Ashtaroth" written high above. This was not a misspelling of Ashcroft. The ambiguity of the world of spirits to a people who have no gods is that power and money mix up an argument about consequence and cause and make a literature out of it. They are all gone out of the way, there is none that does good. There is a dominant group of new pietists, newscasters and reporters who proclaim this morality of disconnect from the comfort of their desks. They have the compassion of a war reporter living off amputees while pretending to be a conscience, just as the English puritan lived off the smallpox exterminador and the monetizers of home mortgages live off public consumption. When these fail they express the greatest compassion for the failed, but it is for themselves. Surely no one expects to end this discussion with a conclusion.
Elaborations of this spirit of wilderness fictionalize the original text in Leviticus 16 where the bare facts express a desire for the clean over the unclean, something that hardly exists outside the orthodox. The point is not that there is a spirit of wilderness, but that there is sin of every kind causing infection and skin disease, that society is made unclean by exposure, so "keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean" (15.31), an early FEMA.
The Goat
Much repetition of the unclean required a ceremonial address called the Day of Atonement. In one aspect of this, a goat selected by lot from two, was "used for making atonement by sending it into the desert" (10). It was called "the live goat" because it wasn't killed but escorted out by a keeper and released, but before this a ceremonial transference occurred where the priest would "lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites-all their sins-and put them on the goat's head" (21). In this way it was released to the spirit of the wilderness. There was a kind of play on this ritual for people who had been sacrificing goats in"the open fields" (17.5) to "goat idols," meaning they were expiating their own sins. Whatever reality this speaks of is incomprehensible to the modern, as if we were to lay hands on the head of some scientist who cut the antennae off Monarch butterflies and send them into the desert.
Spirit of Wilderness
For Barry Lopez the wolverine enlivens the force of natural wilderness as the bear does for Momaday. We know we are less human by the loss of the wilderness contrast. One of four mammals will become extinct. Forests of the north, coyote and elk in storm, dead fall fires in yarrow meadows armed, dogs, men, tent, truck, prevent the hunger of the bear. But this is small stuff to the scapegoated puritan fear of the spirit. It has a name in Leviticus that Barry Lopez does not mention because the names of the gods are politicized depending on who uses them. Once above the outbuildings of a flour mill near ASU was the proud declaration "Ashtaroth" written high above. This was not a misspelling of Ashcroft. The ambiguity of the world of spirits to a people who have no gods is that power and money mix up an argument about consequence and cause and make a literature out of it. They are all gone out of the way, there is none that does good. There is a dominant group of new pietists, newscasters and reporters who proclaim this morality of disconnect from the comfort of their desks. They have the compassion of a war reporter living off amputees while pretending to be a conscience, just as the English puritan lived off the smallpox exterminador and the monetizers of home mortgages live off public consumption. When these fail they express the greatest compassion for the failed, but it is for themselves. Surely no one expects to end this discussion with a conclusion.
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