A little CosmosBird whispered in my ear about what transpired last evening. The Ritual will be televised - as it was last evening. What was witnessed was Ritual. The gates were opened, the goat was sent outside the walls into the political wilderness and was shoved into the abyss. Immediately following there was shaming and blaming. The goat will now be punished, ignored and neglected until the inevitable.
"As we see, the akitu festival comprises a series of dramatic elements the intention of which is the abolition of past time, the restoration of primordial chaos, and the repetition of the cosmogonic act:
1 . The first act of the ceremony represents the domination of Tiamat and thus marks a regression into the mythical period before the Creation; all forms are supposed to be confounded in the marine abyss of the beginning, the apsu. Enthronement of a “carnival” king, “humiliation” of the real sovereign, overturning of the entire social order (according to Berossus, the slaves became the masters, and so on) every feature suggests universal confusion, the abolition of order and hierarchy, “orgy,” chaos. We witness, one might say, a “deluge” that annihilates all humanity in order to prepare the way for a new and regenerated human species." - from Mircea Eliade’s Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return., pp. 57.
So let’s step back and consider this possible set of interpretatnts, perhaps this isn’t merely anymore, maybe, just maybe its another harmonic instance of a specific ritual … the invocation of a particular template… or for those of you who prefer a more magical frame … “a working”.
This translation of Le Mythe de Veternel retour: archetypes et repetition (Paris, Librairie Gallimard, 1949) was originally published in 1954 by Pantheon Books under the title The Myth of the Eternal Return and is reprinted by arrangement with the Bollingen Foundation.
