“God . . . wants to become man, and for that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy [Spirit], the creaturely man filled with darkness — the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts from the fallen angels. The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds himself aloof from the world and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark [side of] God would find no room.” ~Carl Jung, Answer to Job, paragraph 746

 

Sacrifice is a key theme in the Watchers and Nephilim mythos. The narrative of the fall of the Watchers is itself a sacrifice, divine angels rebelling against God, sharing forbidden knowledge and taking human wives, was  both a rebellion and a form of self-sacrifice. Surely the Watchers knew when they transgressed against the laws of a supreme deity that there would be a reckoning. They weren’t cast out, so their act of descent, or katabasis, was willful self-sacrifice in order to experience a new realm, and to empower humanity with knowledge they would not otherwise have access to.

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Philosopher George Bataille said that “sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice”. In other words, it liberates the victim from bondage, it represents freedom. In that freedom lies creativity, as sacrifice is a needed step in the creative process.

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Eroticisim is closely tied to the sacred, in that an experience of the sacred is simultaneously “divine ecstasy and extreme horror”. The rapture of a divine experience can be as violent and uncontrollable as it can be intensely ecstatic. So the concept of a sacred sacrifice contains elements of violence and eroticism, it brings one closer to divinity, and in the end, liberates the chains that bind one to a particular place or state of mind.

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Historically, divine sacrifice has left much to be desired. The sins of myself, my family, my people, heaped upon one or more “chosen animals”, offering a false sense of atonement so we can carry on with our sinful lives. Human sacrifice, which may include your own children, to appease gods in times of turmoil, or to just ensure that the sun keeps moving across the sky, seems absurd to us now. The ancient Greek ritual of pharmakós, where someone who was diseased or disabled would be made a scapegoat and thrown off a cliff, burned or exiled to ward off disaster or restore a community, would be seen today as cruel and morally wrong. There was ritual in those sacrifices, and sometimes there was an effort to make the mundane offering into something sacred. But there was little rapture and divinity, it is highly unlikely they brought anyone closer to any god.

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There is a term that comes from Germanic and Norse paganism called Blót, which is in essence taking something mundane and elevating it to be sacred, worthy of sacrifice to a god. In fact the word sacrifice comes from the Latin word sacrificium, a combination of sacer (sacred) and facere (to make), the act of sacrifice makes something profane into something sacred. This very excellent video by the band Faun illustrates the concept rather well.