*SACRIFICE*... a bug-a-boo of a word in our culture. I think that in relation to witches it tends to conjure up all kindsa negative thoughts in most folks of other belief systems... you know... stuff like sacrificin' babies & dogs & cats and weird crap like that.
To me, personally, I relate to "sacrifice" in this life from the aspect of being a woman and a mother... Joseph Campbell said: "Motherhood is a sacrifice. On our veranda in Hawaii, the birds come to feed. Each year there have been one or two mother birds. When you see a mother bird plagued by her progeny for food, with five baby birds, some of them bigger than she is, flopping all over her -'Well', you think, 'this is the symbol of motherhood, this giving of your substance and every damn thing to your progeny.' That is why the mother becomes the symbol of mother earth. She is the one who has given birth to us and on whom we live and on whose body we find our food." Motherhood has, for the most part, been a pleasant and joyful sacrificial experience for me, one from which I have gained a wonderful new womanfriend in the process (my daughter), but that is not always the case... in fact, the act of "mothering" my step-son was a sacrifice of an entirely different sort... a painful and frustrating one without any tangible rewards to it so far...
Actually isn't the birthing process itself a blood sacrifice from wimmen so that human life continues? In the past moreso than now, girls were brought up to be sacrificial virgins to the institutions of marriage and ensuing motherhood... our very lives were often sacrificed toward this goal (during childbirth), before the advent of easily available birth control methods.
I have often thought that in this modern hustle-bustle world, we, men and wimmen both, are making many "sacrifices", but of the wrong sort... we are sacrificing ourselves to the gods of the almighty dollar... How many people spend their entire lives doing work that is totally wrong for them, makes them unhappy, ruins their bodies...? (And yes... this borders on another topic [Right Livlihood] ) We sacrifice our selves, our very spirits to perpetuate the modern way of life...
Well, at one point in my life, I turned that around for myself... I gave up the worship of the almighty dollar... lived *without* alla those luxuries we work so hard to provide for ourselves... I suppose you could say I "sacrificed" alla those *things* for a glimpse of a simpler life. I'm not gonna ramble on with this thread, tho... I'll save it for when we do the Right Livlihood topic.
BUT... some of what I'm gettin' at flows along the same lines of what both Saga and Ariadne have said in that what I did at that time in my life was to take back the power to *control* my life in a more intimate way... >> I'm back in the fear/powerover structure these days... one of the sacrifies I made for motherhood, I suppose (so that she could have choices... she's seen both ways...). But I *know* there'll come a time in my life when I'll want to sacrifice, "let go" of these *things* again... only next time, I'll do it in a
more knowledgable way, knowing which *things* make the best sacrifices... ...ahhhh... to once again, get away from this powerover culture we live in.
And Ariadne said >> To that I echo a resounding YES! And...>> I agree... it is *very* important to renew these ancient bonds, these acts of honoring the sacred through offerings... it is important to our feelings of *connectnedness* with all the earth... with the divine.
And... another Campbell quote here: "The god of death is at the same time the lord of sex. ... It's amazing: one after another, you discover these gods who are at once of death and of generation. The death god, Ghede, of the Hatiian voodoo traition, is also the sex god. The Egyptian god, Osiris, was the judge and lord of the dead, and the lord of the regeneration of life. It is a basic theme - that which dies is born. You have to have death in order to have life. ... Unless there is death, there cannot be birth. The significance of that is that every generation has to die in order that the next generation can come. As soon as you beget or give birth to a child, you are the dead one. The child is the new life, and you are simply the protector of that new life."
Which brings me back around to the birth/motherhood theme I started out with... spiraling on...
Myst TFP
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