Alexander C. Chirila PhD, Assistant Professor of English at Turtle Mountain Community College Founder of The Center for Comparative Spiritual Studies. Dr. Chirila is the author of Manifest Individuation. For information on purchasing this book through Amazon, click here. His most recent book is the novel True Immortality. For information on purchasing this book through Amazon, click here.

In “Rites of Spring: Sacrifice, Incarnation, and War,” Michael Vlahos describes a mythic formulation—a matrix of symbolic elements—that have evolved as an integral part of human history. This narrative stems from a universal concept: transcendence through sacrifice. Transcendence is not individualistic.

Rather, Vlahos links transcendence with the collective—a journey undertaken by a “river of humanity” joined in common purpose or ideology.

Uncoiling from the prehistory of the earliest societies and blossoming into the atomic age of Modernity, the myth of transcendence through sacrifice, bloodshed, and battle is an enduring expression of a desire to bridge Nature and the Divine through Death. 

War and battle offer purgation through a medium stronger than water—blood. When human collectives began to vie with one another in open conflict, the horror of battle was mythologized--and transformed into the struggle between Self and Other (the barbaroi), or between combatants whose shared understanding of the value of war strengthen the ritual significance of their sacrifice.

Vlahos draws from one of the Western World’s most influential war epics—Homer’s Iliad. The glory of battle and deification of its participants present a network of symbols. On the one hand, the demigods of the battlefield represent ideals, the best of the nation made manifest. On the other hand, the participation of the gods provides divine sanction, without which the war becomes wanton death and slaughter…and for so petty a cause!

The mythic theatre of war perpetuates itself generationally by adapting to changes on two primary vectors: the sacred and the social. Vlahos points out that the sacred both validates and sanctions ritual enactments of desires operating on the collective level.

The social accommodates and appropriates the sacred, transforming doctrinal religiosity into religious nationalism, or, in an earlier model, transforming an entirely mortal sovereign into a god-king. The divine incarnation of a king or emperor sanctioned his authority and demonstrated the influence of the Divine in the affairs of the collective.

There are three parallel formations that Vlahos illustrates: the Neolithic tribal and communalistic, where the social and sacred were tightly integrated and where one bled freely into the other; the Mithraic and Christian offer of transcendence to the collective as opposed to the elite; and the modern rise of national bodies held together by a mortar of blood and rhetoric.

By the 19th century, humankind had seemingly conquered nature--only to find a new, untamed territory filled with beasts and shadows—itself. During the revolutions that swept across Europe, a new paradigm of the symbolic matrix appeared.

Transcendence became perfection of the collective through purgation. The eye turned inward and saw the promise of its own ascension overwhelmed by the failed promises of earlier regimes. Incarnation became the chrysalis of the old, monarchic model in its violent but necessary transformation into the glory of a new nation.

While the revolutions of the Western World (followed by those in Latin America and Africa) marked a definitive shift in the balance of power and mythologies that sustained it—embedded in the literature, paintings, rhetoric, and leadership of the period--Vlahos argues that this ultimately self-destructive quest for perfection through revolution could not be sustained.

The matrix shifts again, now to the assemblage of great armies holding aloft the white, bloodstained sword of a perfect and purified society. Arguably, the narrative here, at least from a Judeo-Christian-Muslim perspective, is rooted in the Paradise promised by God.

Christianity was mobilized by the Church Militant. The Old Testament provides ample evidence of divinely sanctioned war; and Islam—though distorted by radical jihadists—has never been a nonviolent expression of monotheism.

The narrative of paradise through war’s mass sacrifice was perpetuated through Europe, enmeshed with the imperial legacy of Rome, romanticized in the Arthurian Legends and hideously corrupted by Hitler during the 3rd Reich.

Vlahos underscores the hypocrisy of claiming a universal ideal of transcendence against an-Other that would do the same. Only by demonizing this Other can the collective, girded for ritual battle, mythologize the ensuing bloodshed.

While tactics have changed from the valorous skirmish lines of the preindustrial era to Improvised Explosive Devices and malware viruses, the symbolic matrix perpetuates itself, by assuming the shape of the surrounding narrative.

The barbarians of old, the tyrannical imperialists who bartered in flesh—the Nazis and Japanese—these already have been mythologized. They are iconic characters in a story that charts the course of our river of humanity.

Vlahos brings us into the narrative present, writing that “today the state lives off the residual brand loyalty of societies to the national war and sacrifice franchise.” Vlahos suggests that this brand name is devoid of substance—at least for the time being.

The world is war-weary and no closer to the transcendent incarnation of the collective claimed by the god-kings of old, later promised by rebel religions, and later still championed by secular societies touting a trajectory of unstoppable progress that would transform the world into a paradise of technology accessible to everyone.

Vlahos points out that we cannot entirely escape our collective desire for transcendence or the primitive belief that this can be achieved through sacrifice. The scale is grand because the world is small. The potential for utter destruction is correlated to technologies that encourage conflict.

The most warlike qualities of our nature, arguably unchanged since the first stone arrowheads, found their way into skeletons predating the oldest pyramid and have never entirely ebbed. While the symbols that express this narrative undergo evolutions of their own, the investment of belief that  empowered them shifts into the next formulation—but the river does not simply flow on.

It meanders and divides, becoming a network of interlaced matrices that tell the same story from different perspectives. Each “living river” claims validity; each one promises a different version of transcendence; each one is willing to fight and die for it.

This willingness—this collective will—now provides its own sanction, but in each case still depends on the ritual of sacrifice…and just as often opts to sacrifice its own “unblemished” lambs: its young men (and now women) in the flush of their vigor.

Life is still in the blood, and it is still believed that the shedding of blood will renew and rejuvenate the promise of transcendence--so crucial to nationalistic ideology.