Last month I paid a visit to the local
genocide museum which really knocked me for six (that and the subsequent
nightmare, which I feel extremely privileged to have had).
This all led me to
discuss on another forum whether genocide itself was a god (and I know you can ask 'what's a god?' but just playing along here for a while...) and the darker side of wo/man as a species.
My argument crudely boiled down to:
In Rwanda, within the space of a few weeks it commanded more devout, blinded followers and blood sacrifice than any other god has known in our lifetime. One million dead in a frenzy of absolute willing carnage....There's that funny little saying Zora Neal Hurston came up with: 'Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers, Real gods require blood'. I wonder if she truly knew what she meant.
When we talk about healing and healing powers and energy, the healer often says they are the channel through which this divine light shines, the power of healing is an entity in its own right that is summoned and given life through the human flesh. In that respect the mechanism of genocide must be similar. So where does the human end and the god begin? If there was no man, there could be no genocide. Are education, kindness, reason and personal morality tools by which one can protect one’s self against possession from such an awesome, powerful force? Do they make the difference between the victim and the killer?
I suppose on the pantheistic angle we call far lesser things a god. Things that we have to close our eyes and imagine hard as being real. This power, this malevolence, is so very real in the world that it can't be denied existence in the realms of spirit on the grounds that it is just evil, or that it is an invention of man. The very thing that made Satan so famous - or the power some might attribute to the carnage of other gods, whatever name they choose to give. Rhavana perhaps, of the unthinking waste of metta Kali, the war-ravaged destruction of the Morigan (was she responsible for the bloodlust that cause Cuchlaine to slaughtering women and children when they came to welcome him?), of the blood lust of the women's cults of ancient Greece, driven to infanticide. This seems to best the lot in its quality, ferocity and sheer scale. The actions of man, our emotions, our inventions - all these things have a spirit counterpart so the same must be said of genocide.
So where did all of that suddenly go I wonder? That energy, that animosity. Where does something like that go?Okay, so that wasn't such a tightly edited re-cap :p
So, got a few answer to that and, finding this forum, something else struck me.
Upstairs in the walk-through of genocides around the globe, it points out with a parting plaque that there are certain signals leading up to genocide that always happen - I forget what they are now but it's along similar lines to the signals that indicate an emerging dictator: closing outside contact, shutting up freedom of speech and press, spurts of military training - that sort of thing.
Now, thinking from a magical perspective - the educated elite who plan these acts have real intent behind them: the magi. The 'signals' can be likened to the invoking ritual? I do this, this and this, power and energy surges, intent manifests, genocide appears.
This is an invocation performed all over the world: Germany, Balkans, Cambodia and more recently Burma and Darfur (Kenya is a possible).
So knowing the mechanisms of invocation, would it be possible to quell them? How many people does it take to deal with a monster the size of genocide? If you tried to quash it would its struggling throws be more devastating still? Could you throw a spanner in the invocation process?
I'm curious.
