Human Sacrifice & Other Forms of Impeachment

History never repeats but it does often rhyme. This is largely because human nature doesn't change, while the circumstances do; therefore, man qua man can't help saying and doing the same old things, only garbed in new clothing. As Eve was the first progressive, college educated white women (of both genders) may be the last.

Let's take "impeachment," for example. What is it, really? And with what does it rhyme? It seems that it's been with us since before the beginning, only in different guises, from regicide to patricide to deicide. In a superficial sense, today's trial is but a farce. Even so, different motives abound, making it a farce multiplier. 

Even among a tribe not known for self-awareness, there are surely some Dems who pretend to support the farce for wholly cynical, tactical, or strategic reasons, e.g., to throw red meat (or fresh organic vegetables, rather) to the base, or to distract from the Biden administration's deeply unpopular policies, or to provide a Totem of Hate to temporarily unify their disparate mob of losers, misfits, and crazies 

By the way, you may have noticed from the sidebar that we're on a Garrigou binge, and likely will be for the remainder of the year. However, before gorging ourselves on that feast, I'd like to finish our dialogue with Transcendence and History before it sinks beneath the subjective horizon. 

Speaking of the unbloody sacrifice of impeachment, I wonder if today's ritual killing somehow rhymes with communion? Is this but another satanic mass and President Trump the unwitting host in a parallel looniverse?

First, some resonant passages from T & H to set the stage:

the popular concept of the historical past as having receded irretrievably into a distance of time is a misconception based on a failure to appreciate human participation in timeless realities, and to appreciate that all who grasp and enact those realities are brought together in immediate and true contemporaneity (Hughes).

For example, to participate in the Mass is to stand cheek-to-jowl with all co-participants past and future, above (with the saints in heaven) and below.  Indeed, it is to em-body the one participant in the one eternal sacrifice that transcends time.  It explicitly does not repeat the sacrifice, rather, eternally rhymes with it in an unbloody manner.  

(Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin: some bow-tied clown of a chaplain has taken a mask from the ancient gallery and pleaded with his strange god to take control of this impeachment trial. Don't worry, the gods of the left have been summoned and are indeed in control of the proceedings. Carry on.)

Elsewhere in the book Hughes quotes Voegelin to the effect that our modern progressive revolt would be unintelligible if it weren't understood as a deformation of the very Christianity against which it is in revolt. 

Let's pull a golden oldie from the shelf, In the Shadow of Moloch, by Martin Bergmann. In a chapter called The Psychology of Sacrifice, he notes that

The rite of sacrifice must meet a deep and universal human need, otherwise we would be at a loss to explain its presence in all known cultures.

I wonder what this need could be? I'm a psychologist. Perhaps it's that familiar

feeling of dread that many men and women, burdened with a sense of guilt, experience when they are particularly successful or when good fortune beyond their expectations befalls them.

Let's say, for example, a group successfully rigs and steals an election. Naturally, this will provoke guilt. The guilt is repressed, but then what? I know! Let's project it into someone else and sacrifice the victim. All in favor say Aye. 

The ayes have it. In other words, human sacrifice is always unanimity minus one. 

This is truly one of the universal motifs of human history. Every primitive culture practiced human sacrifice, and the left is nothing if not primitive.  

One of the explicit purposes of the impeachment is to drive a stake through the heart of the Orange Man so that he can never again haunt the fragile psyches of the left. This too rhymes with the past:

Many students of the subject believe that sacrifices originated in fear of the dead. The Greeks burned their dead so as to banish them to Hades, while certain primitive people dismembered corpses to prevent their returning to life.

Or returning to the White House. In any event, so long as President Trump has secret service protection, dismemberment is probably off the menu. So, impeachment it is.

"Primitive cultures" fear that "One who does not sacrifice will be persecuted, punished." In Mesoamerica, for example, "The continuation of the world, the rising of the sun, depended on sacrifices.... not even the continuation of time could be taken for granted." The gods want blood, and they want it now.

It would be logical at this point to segue to Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled, but unpacking it would take all day. Just read the book, which will be like reading today's news, only forever. The bottom line, as Bergmann says, is that the Crucifixion "was the central sacrifice in the history of the world and made all subsequent sacrifices superfluous."