Then I generalized: I suspect most men would benefit from this. Most of us have never really made our peace with the feminine, with our own feminine sides, and of course with those of the women around us. There is of course a role–an important role–for the masculine to play, but the feminine is larger. It expands more. There is more space in it. It is intrinsically more spiritual. It goes farther.
Then I started thinking about hierarchies of belonging. If we follow the Polyvagal Theory, then we really have three levels of nervous system functioning which can take over, depending on the circumstances and our reactions to them. The lowest is the immobilization/trauma response. Above this is the fight or flight response. Above this is the social response, which would include reasoning, chosen self restraint, as well as higher emotions which are facilitated by existing at this level, which would include love and a sense of connection.
One can in fact rationally desire and pursue love, as the most rewarding pathway for human action to follow. You can reason your way to it. This is, I think, an important point.
But I got to thinking that you can coalesce groups of people around lower focal points too. The bonding of men at war? Persisting group experiences of shared fight or flight. This bond exists at a primal level, because that is where it happened. In other circumstances you may have nothing in common with–or even like–these men (and I am of course generalizing, since most people in combat are men, although the same would apply to shared stresses among woman or mixed gender groups), but when you face death together, you take something away.
And sacrificial rites would exist at the gut level, at the trauma level, at the unmyelinated vagus nerve level. The bonding would exist at that level, that of fascination with death, that sense that compels you to look at a car wreck, wondering if you will see a dead body.
They are ritual horror, ritual death, done slowly and with great attention. As I think I’ve mentioned, I wanted to do a paper in graduate school comparing the phases of a serial murder–there is an arc of psycho-physiological states–with those of a traditional ritual, particularly a sacrifice, using particularly Turner’s ideas. I was turned down, but given that some of the first texts we were required to read–Durkheim and Freud–were written by atheists, I still no reason I could not have applied social psychology to the thing.
Be that as it may, in this regard I think we could see some parallelism between the Jewish practice of ceremonially slitting the throats of sheep and goats and other animals and calling it the praise of God; and those of Satanists, who use cruelty to build bonds among themselves. These people do exist. I’ve known therapists who worked with their victims. They seem particularly to enjoy hurting children.
There is obviously a continuum. But I would recall to your memory–if it ever lived there–the story of God telling Abraham to “Take your son , your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you. ”
God tells Abraham to make a holocaust–a burnt offering–of his son. He winds up not doing it, but the story is there, and that in itself is telling. How can we know what actual practices were excised from the Bible, which I would insist must be viewed as a human and cultural document?
Thus we would see here a human cultural evolution from one nervous system focal point to another. From horror, to fighting, to reasoning, at least in principle. We have departed from reasoning in our allegedly highest cultural centers, because they have tied themselves up in knots intellectually, because they lack the capacity to process life emotionally. This state need not endure, although it remains to be seen if they will burn down–or allow to be burnt down–all the highest accomplishments to date of the human species; if, in fact, they will facilitate another and larger holocaust.