Recognition Rites Quotes

I can't pretend this isn't important. I can't act like it doesn't exist. It's ironic, but true. There are a lot of things I'm really good at keeping secret. But I've learned I'm not too good at that with you. I can't pull it off. I don't want to just hook up. I don't want a secret relationship." "Well, that's a relief," I said, grabbing for both of his hands and holding on for dear life. Doubt started giving way to recognition, but he needed to hear it. "Why's that?" "Because I'm really sick of secrets.

This is the whole meaning of polarity, of life implying death, of subject implying object, of man implying world, and Yes implying No. [...] Just as liberation involves the recognition of oneself in what is most other, it involves the recognition of life in death - and this is why so many rites of initiation take the neophyte through a symbolic death. He accepts the certainty of death so completely that, in effect, he is dead already - and thus beyond anxiety.

Books are admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses their greatness in consideration of abrogating their meaning; so that the reverend rector can agree with the prophet Micah as to his inspired style without being committed to any complicity in Micah's furiously Radical opinions. Why, even I, as I force myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility, find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this brilliant and thoughtful writer." And the ordinary citizen, knowing that an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from his own point of view. It is narrated that in the eighteen-seventies an old lady, a very devout Methodist, moved from Colchester to a house in the neighborhood of the City Road, in London, where, mistaking the Hall of Science for a chapel, she sat at the feet of Charles Bradlaugh for many years, entranced by his eloquence, without questioning his orthodoxy or moulting a feather of her faith. I fear I small be defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.

The rituals of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis were practiced for some 2000 years, from the fifteenth century B.C.E. to the end of the fourth century C.E. Demeter and Persephone are Goddesses of the agricultural cycle, Goddesses of the death and rebirth of the seed crops, Goddesses whose rites were later spiritualized to symbolize the death and rebirth of the soul. The rites of Demeter and Persephone are said to derive from agricultural rituals for women only known as the Thesmophoria. In classical times the rituals of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis were among the most important in all Greece. We go to Eleusis because we too want to celebrate the mysteries of mother and daughter. For those of us who are reared on myths and stories of fathers and sons, it is healing to know that once the deepest mysteries of the universe were symbolized in a story about the relationship of mother and daughter. The story of Demeter and Persephone resonates with echoes of the powerful but little-celebrated relationship we have had with our mothers and daughters. Our rituals at Eleusis in the summers of 1981 to 1986, are among the first to have been celebrated there in conscious recognition of the Goddesses since the forced closing of the ancient temples about 400 C.E. These rituals have been among the most powerful experiences of my life. It seems as if there is an enormous energy dammed up on the site waiting to be released. Whether that power is the natural energy of the place (all the Greek temple sites are at naturally powerful spots, as Vincent Scully has shown) or the cumulative energy of worshippers, or the power of the Goddess, I do not know. From "Eleusinian Mysteries" featured in The Goddess Celebrates: an Anthology of Women's Rituals, Edited by Diane Stein, published in 1991.

I’ve always yearned to be a black man, to have a black man’s soul, a black man's laughter. You know why? Because I thought you were diflFerent from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something difiFerent on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. encouragement and signs of gratitude or recognition have been very few, if any, along my road. If humanity can be compared to a tribe, then you may say I’m completely de-tribalized. You love Negroes out of sheer misanthropy, because you think they aren’t really men. in the end all human faces look alike with nothing bright or hopeful around me, except those distant stars— and even there, let’s be frank: it’s only their distance that gives them that purity and beauty ideals don't die— obliged to live on shit sometimes, but don’t die! the company a great cause always keeps: men of good will and those who exploit them your skin, you know, is worth no more than the elephants’ hide. In Gennany, at Belsen, during the war, it seems we used to make lampshades out of human skin— for your information. And don’t forget, Monsieur Saint- Denis, that we Germans have always been forerunners in everything ‘Women,’ I concluded rather bitterly, ‘have at their command certain means of persuasion which the best- organized police forces do not possess.’ The number of animals who lived in cruel suffering, sometimes for years, with bullets in their bodies, wounds growing deeper and deeper, gangrenous and swarming with ticks and flies, could not be estimated to change species, to come over to the elephants and live in the wilds among honest animals Always cheerful, with the cheerfulness of a man who has gone deep down into things and come back reassured. No one knew the desert better than Scholscher, who had spent so many nights alone there on the starlit dunes, and no one understood better than he did that need for protection which sometimes grips men’s hearts and drives them to give a dog the affection they dream so desperately of receiving themselves. by ‘defending the splendors of nature . . .’ He meant liberty.” Islam calls that ’the roots of heaven.’ and to the Mexican Indians it is of life’— the thing that makes both of them fall on their knees and raise their eyes and beat their tormented breasts. A need for protection and company, from which obstinate people like Morel try to escape by means of petitions, fighting committees, by trying to take the protection of species in their own hands. Our needs- for justice, for freedom and dignity— are roots of heaven that are deeply imbedded in our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing but the gripping roots ...” . . . And that girl sitting there in front of him with her legs crossed, with her nylon stockings and cigarette and that silent gaze, in which could be read that stubborn need, not so different from what Morel had seen in the eyes of the stray dogs at the pound. but not even all that was comic and childish about him could deprive him of the dignity conferred upon him by his love for his Maker. that human mass whose physical strength was nothing compared to the faith and spirit that dwelt in him. Three quarters of the Oul6 traditions and magic rites had to do with war or hunting while it's easy to suppress a magic tradition it's difficult to fill up the strange voids which it leaves in what you call the primitive psychology and what I call the human soul The roots of heaven are forever planted in their hearts, yet of heaven itself they seem to know nothing but the gripping roots It must be very consoling to take refuge in cynicism and to try and drown your own remorse in a consoling vision of universal swinishness, and you can always

In fact religion or what was understood by that word at the time, was incorporated indissolubly in the body of social institutions, in which recognition of the "gods of the city" and observance of the lawfully established forms of worship played a fundamental part, providing them with a guarantee of stability; and it was this that conferred on these institutions a genuinely traditional character. Since those times however, at any rate during the classical period, men ceased to be fully aware of the principle on which their tradition should have been based intellectually; in this may be seen one of the earliest manifestations of the metaphysical incapacity common amount Westerners, a deficiency that brings a strange confusion of thought as its fatal and unquestionable consequence. Among the Greeks especially, rites and symbols inherited from more ancient and already forgotten traditions rapidly lost their original and exact meaning; the imagination of that predominantly artistic people, freely expressing itself through the individual fancies of its poets, covered those symbols with an almost impenetrable veil, and that is the reason why philosophers like Plato openly declared that they did not know how to interpret the most ancient writings they possessed concerning the nature of the gods. Symbols thus degenerated into mere allegories, and through the workings of an invincible tendency towards anthropomorphic personification they turned into "myths," that is to say fables about which every could believe what he pleased, provided he continued in practice to maintain the conventional attitude prescribed by the legal ordinances.

The Sioux sacred rites have undergone change since the Sioux were forced from their plains freedom to the bleak reservations of despair. The seven Mother Earth ceremonies that have evolved are offered to bridge across to the sacred In the natural world and to foster a regard for our planet as a living relative who must be sustained. Such ceremonies were followed down through time by the successful caretakers, who served well at their stewardship of Mother Earth. Reviving these ceremonies in this time of crisis will, it is hoped, bring forth a new-found perception and respect for the natural elements. I hope that the reader will attempt to do some ceremony in order to carry on that position of stewardship, even if it is a simple holding up of a stone to the rising dawn in recognition of the earth wisdom that comes with each new day.