I'm quoting from Joseph Campbell's "Myths to Live By."
Quote:
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"Man," wrote Oswald Spengler, "is a beast of prey." That is simply a fact of nature. And another such fact is this: that throughout the animal kingdom beasts of prey, when compared with their vegetarian victims, are in general not only the more powerful but also the more intelligent. Heraclitus declared war to be the creator of all great things; and in the words again of Spengler, "The one who lacks courage to be a hammer comes off in the role of the anvil." Many a sensitive mind, reacting to this unwelcome truth, has found nature intolerable, and has cried down all those best fit to live as "wicked," "evil," or "monstrous," setting up instead, as a counter-ideal, the model of him who turns the other cheek and whose kingdom is not of this world. And so it is that finally two radically opposed basic mythologies can be identified in the broad panorama of history: one in which the monstrous precondition of all temporal life is affirmed with a will, and the other, in which it is denied.
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I thought that was a cool insight. The wild truth of life that is generally not addressed in the "civilized" world is that life feeds off of other life. It's a horrific truth that all life consumes other life to exist. And this realization in the face of self preservation leads to the growth of religions such as christianity.
So, the pantheon of christianity (amongst other beliefs) is created in response to this realization and certain people rejecting it. It's not created to describe reality but more to provide an out to a concept that seems conflicting with our desire to survive.
I think this concept of the world as a flame is very cool. Life is constantly reaching out tendrils and consuming itself and then being snuffed out.. Sometimes it sparks and creates more of itself (offspring) and propagates and the fire spreads. But all life is burning... The stomach extracting energy from other life, the womb which creates more life as some sort of spark igniting new fuel (or reclaimed fuel).
It's a wild image and I think its very cool. Quite a different paradigm than we're used to. I think the christian culture does a good job at just relegating all of creation (except humans) to the realm of satan. When the reality is that all life, as it was created, amongst all instances of life (self aware or otherwise) behave in this horrific manner of consumption of other life.
Pretty cool stuff.
The Hammer or the Anvil? 
Linear Mode
