Many will remember Euripides’s play The Bacchae in which the Maenads rend, tear apart, and mangle the body of King Pentheus, and then perform ritual omophagia upon those remains. The staging of such a ritualized murder and cannibalistic act as part of Greek religious entertainment must have been in its first showing akin to those perverse and horrific snuff films of the twentieth century. For us it seems almost far-fetched that such communal rituals were part of the daily and yearly life of the ancient Greeks, and, yet, one wonders what such ritual acts absolved and released in their daemonic power that we in our age are missing? Have we with our supposed overcoming of such ritual murder through its Christian mimesis, with the ritual murder of Christ with a hoard of witnesses, and whose remembrance many churches still celebrate not in itself just another such violent and senseless communal act; or, is there something innate within the human that needs such communal acts of violence to rid itself of some inhuman element at the core of the human?
In our age of disenchantment in which these communal rituals have all but been lost in the irreligious ideologies of our post-liberal economies of neoliberalism, exactly what is building up in the hinterlands of our collective inhumanity that in its daemonic power is no longer expulsed through structured rituals of sparagmos and omophagia? In our very denial of such ancient practices are we not letting ourselves open to some darker potential release of the daemonic on a planetary scale? Will we see the day when this ancient cycle of ritual murder and cannibalism returns with a vengeance as the truth of our own inhumanity? Our thirst for such ritual murder and cannibalism comes in our festival of bloody horror films, but because they are not part of some ritual enactment done with the body of communal praxis, but are instead screened second hand elaborations shown in the cold dark interiors of projected desire this need for the raw truth is lost. One wonders what dark returns to the brutal sacrifice and cannibalistic acts might be literalized in our society as we fall into political madness in the coming years and decades at the disastrous hands of our denials?
––Absolute evil: a being thirsty for ruining our nature would uproot all the trees in spring, it would eat up all the buds, it would poison the springs to kill all the living beings in them, it would stop up all the wells to hear the hoarse voices of the birds, it would cover all the flowers so that it would see them dry and fade, and bent sadly over the ground. It would kick the pregnant women in their bellies to kill the beginning of life, the fruit, all that is fruit, and the virgins’ smiles, it would freeze them into a grimace. To the lovers, in their sexual spasm, it would throw a cadaver, and to the newborns, even before they opened their eyes, it would fix black glasses into their orbs. On a black board the size of the world, it would leap towards the sun to stop its rays, make it laugh into an eternal night, without stars, a sun in mourning, forever dressed up in black.
—E.M. Cioran, The Book of Delusions
The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts 
If not, perhaps you should be acquainted with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Eliade
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I read Mircea way back in the sixties, my friend…. at almost 70 years of age I’ve plowed that world and more.
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Interpreting phenomena of the antiquity should be brought into a hermeneutic perspective. We are not able to grasp their true meaning, for we are not conceptually equipped to do so. Mircae was the closest. I could be ur daughter, Mr Hickman, wish u good health and thanks for answering to my comment 🙂 My essays have not been translated, but there’s always Google translate
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Yea, I’m not much into worrying over correct readings anymore… closer to the notions of misprision… we each tell stories to ourselves one way or the other. There is no correct reading of one’s self or another… only more enjoyable readings that keep our interest. Even science is a narrative that changes over time… the sciences of the past few centuries wouldn’t even recognize each other much less the supposed facts everything is based on. We each enter the diversions that help us get on with our lives. In the end that’s all that really counts. All the rest is pure bullshit! 🙂
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There are a transcendental perspective and argumentation, which really doesn’t rely on sense data, but onto innate principles of eternity. That’s why you draw the correct conclusion about the bullshit.
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That too is illusion and deception! This notion of having some “transcendental perspective” situated outside our senses, a reliance on some beyonding of higher powers or authorities etc. is for me the final lie. As if what your affirming were some higher truth beyond human judgement and reckoning. I want be the one to pop your bubble, and don’t take me wrong… just to let you know that for me such illusions have no valency. I’m not seeking some rock or Word beyond the human vale of tears… we are already condemned enough by human frailty and corruption to go seeking for higher transcendental purposes behind this cosmic horror…. I will have none of it.
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the very human ability of reasoning and the fundamental laws of logic are trascendental, so if they were nonexistent, you and I wouldn’t be speaking now. There would be no sense in any sense. Even the empirists knew that. Jay Dayer has my point and we are both Eastern Christian Orthodox. Dig a bit deeper into Jay’s analysis since Im not an English native speaker. Hed explain much better
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At the age of 70 I’ve long given up the need for explanations or answers… As a member of that party of one, a Solitaire, who shares not the faith you so need and cherish I’m not here to dissuade you from your diversions and comforts. In fact I once was a priest… so let the dog lie! I’ve long ago turned toward the dark… why now at this late stage should I renounce my turning? Be happy with your choices, seek an abundant life and grace. No need to argue with an old curmudgeon; it’s a waste of your good heart.
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its never too late, just listen to Jay Dyer, he was calvinist and Roman Catholic too, but then the miracle happened. I know West as a whole would never get the Orthodox minds
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Nothing is too late for nothing… but that path is closed to me for good. Happy days for you… and yours.
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