The Cosmological Space of Sacrifice

By John K. Lundwall

In Kay Read’s essay “The Cosmic Meal” we are informed that the Mexica ritual of the New Fire was a cosmogonic event. The ritual itself was the renewal of time and the creation of a new world and a new cosmos. She writes, “In preparation for the rite, all fires were extinguished, all wood and stone statues of the gods kept in people’s homes cast into the water, and all cooking utensils and fire implements thrown away. Everything was swept clean and all rubbish disposed of” (Read 125). The ritual itself was deeply connected to the cosmological view of the Mexica. Every fifty two years the ceremony was repeated because every fifty two years was the beginning of a new cosmological age; many such ages formed a great age or World Sun which was symbolized at the center of the Aztec Calendar. To keep the cosmos in harmony sacrifice had to be made. Here we understand that ritual sacrifice was the product of a cosmological understanding, and not the other way around.

In the Yuwipi tribe tradition, the shamanistic journey must take place in the sacred hut or lodge which has been made sacred by the marking of space. Like the Mexica fire ritual, the space of the lodge is filled with cosmological meaning as four flags are placed in the four corners of the lodge, each representing a cardinal point, with a fifth flag placed to represent the zenith sun making its passage across the sacred sky. In other words, to arrive in the land of the spirits one must be oriented, one must mark the way, and one must understand the rhythms of the heavens. The journey is not for just anyone, but for the initiated, for the ones who have brought cosmic harmony in both the land of the living and the dead.

In Henry Pernet’s study of the Dogon ritual masks we learn that common interpretations of the ritual masks were erroneous, or at least profane interpretations, and that as one became initiated deeper into the liturgy of the tribe one gained deeper and more complex understandings of what the mask, dance, and space were about. The common understanding that a mask represented a spirit slowly gave way to an understanding of “capital significance since they recall cosmogonic events of the greatest magnitude” (Pernet 53). “Cosmogonic events of the greatest magnitude” constitute the creation of a new cosmos, the creation of a new world, and the creation of a new being who has passed from one sphere and is resurrected into a new sphere, oft times as deity.

It is a curious connection that so much of ancient ritual is cosmology, and I suggest that the fountain head of ritual and myth was a deeply religious-philosophic view of the patterns of nature, especially as revealed in the sky. After all, cosmological events of the greatest magnitude reveal themselves through patterns of the sun, moon, and stars. Every vernal equinox a new world is created as the earth rises out of the grave of winter and into the light of spring. Every new moon a new cycle is regenerated and the tides, animals, and plants reverberate such cycles. Every cycling of stars and constellations not only foretell the seasons, but also mark the cardinal points on earth and in heaven, and this is very important if we are to understand the cosmological significance of ritual and of ritual sacrifice.

Ritual cannot be separated from the sacred space in which it is performed. The sacred space is the point from which true transformation takes place, and according to Eliade, it is the point of orientation which founds the sacred world (Eliade 22). Thus Eliade writes:

“The world (that is our world) is a universe within which the sacred has already manifested itself, in which, consequently, the break-through from plane to plane has become possible and repeatable. It is not difficult to see why the religious moment implies the cosmogonic moment. The sacred reveals absolute reality at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world. (Eliade 30)

The order of the world for the Mexica was the fire altar, for the Yuwipi it is the proper orientation of space only in which the journey into another sphere may be gained, and for the Dogon it is the ritual mask symbolizing cosmogonic events of the greatest magnitude. All of these rites reflect a new passage from one world, age, time, or cosmos, into another.

Sacred space, anciently, was the temple, and so often the temple was the center of ancient. civilization. When I speak of temple I am not speaking of a massive stone edifice, though there are numerous such examples to provide, but the sacred space in which sacred ritual was performed. Thus, the temple could also be a grove, a tree, a cave, a hut, a teepee, a sacred lane or circle, etc. Indeed, the world outside this sacred space was profane space. Our word profane comes from the Latin pro fanus literally meaning outside the temple.

The etymology of temple is also very important. It comes from the Greek root tem, meaning to cut, and refers to the cutting of two perpendicular lines. The temple therefore was the cross, a cosmological symbol existing millennia before Christianity, for the cross was the cardinal points of orientation which defined sacred space. More importantly, the cross was an astronomical symbol, marking the four points in the year in which the sun rose in its equinox and solstice houses, that is, the constellations of the zodiac which opposed each other at right angles and formed a cross in the sky. The temple therefore is the template, a synonymous word, or map of the heavens in which ritual was the measure and gesture that mortals could make to transform themselves through the planes of heaven and earth. The Yuwipi recall this understanding in their rituals.

Sacrifice was central to temple ritual, and blood sacrifice was always performed upon the altar, itself a temple in miniature. There were many forms of blood sacrifice throughout the ages and cross cultures. Leaving human sacrifice aside as its own sub-category, and I would contest a perverted form of sacrifice resulting from the long loss of original esoteric mystery, we find throughout the ancient record an overwhelming preference for two forms of animals to be sacrificed: the bull or cow, and the ram or goat.

In Hebrew ritual, Josephus explains to us, “On the tenth day of the same lunar month, they fast till the evening; and this day they sacrifice a bull, and two rams, and seven lambs, and a kid of the goats, for sins. And, besides these, they bring two kids of the goats; the one of which is sent alive out of the limits of the camp into the wilderness for the scapegoat, and to be an expiation for the sins of the whole multitude” (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews). In a Babylonian ritual text we read that the priest is to sacrifice “my man, my ox, my sheep, either a man or an ox or a sheep” (Bu 88-5-12, 51). In the mysteries of Mithras and the Great Mother there took place the taurobolium (bath in bull's blood), and its variant, the criobolium (bath in ram's blood). In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey blood sacrifice was always with a bull or ram. Even when Achilles plucks twelve Trojans from the waters to use for human sacrifice, he did so on behalf of Menoetius, whose son Patroclus had been slain. Menoetius name derives from the root menos, meaning bull, and here too we are to understand that these sacrifices were in effigy of the great bull.

While birds, pigs, and even crops were also placed on the altars of sacrifice, in Near Eastern tradition they almost were always in conjunction with a sacrifice of a bull or ram. This is important, because the bull and the ram were representations of the sun rising in Taurus, the bull, and Aires, the ram, specifically during the days of Spring Equinox in which these constellations housed the vernal sun. In Mesoamerica, where the bull and the ram were not animals in supply, the New Fire sacrifice, according to Read, was in conjunction with the Pleiades (Read 124), a star cluster above the shoulder of the cosmic bull, and so this sacrificial ritual paralleled cosmic alignments with the same portion of the sky. The sacrifice of such animals or objects in the temples or templates of cosmos was an initiatory into solar theology. The sacrificial bull or ram was a substitute for the world, the community, and the individual through which transformation and grace took place through the symbol of the fecundating sun housed in these animal-stellar forms. In stellar terms, life, death, sacrifice, and resurrection were ritually performed throughout the year in the sky, and replicated throughout the year in temples on the earth, bringing heaven down to earth, so that the initiate could become part of heaven.

Ritual in general, and sacrificial ritual in specific, therefore, is a reflection on many levels of cosmogonic events of the greatest magnitude, each with an exoteric and esoteric meaning to be given only to initiates of the clan or group, and always within the sacred and cosmologically marked space of the temple, in whatever form that may take. Sacrificial ritual was symbolic of cosmogonic events which usher in a new cosmos, a new world, and a new being. This process is revealed in the sky as well as on the ground, and was replicated in ritual measure and sacrificial gesture in sacred space.

Posted by john at May 6, 2005 02:17 PM