Fire walking and the intensity of apocalyptic arousal
For people who have entered apocalyptic time, everything quickens, enlivens, coheres. They become semiotically aroused — everything has meaning, patterns. The smallest incident can have immense importance and open the way to an entirely new vision of the world, one in which forces unseen by other mortals operate. If the warrior lives with death at his shoulder, then apocalyptic warriors live with cosmic salvation before them, just beyond their grasp.
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Image source:
http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/08/27/firewalking-festival-hot-japanese-ritual/
Thanks again to Steve Engel for prompting these reflections.
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Steve Engel:
April 22nd, 2013 at 9:33 pm
And thank you, Charles, for a persuasively clarifying response: “certain ideologies have structural features equivalent to high ceilings in an architectural space, so that ‘intensifying to fill the ideology available’ can have a certain fierce purity when the ideology is a religious one and pious self-dedication a possibility — even more so when ‘martyrdom’ can be aspired to — and yet more so again where one perceives oneself under divine sanction in the culminating battle of all time, immediately prior to judgment.”
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The prospect of impending death seems to confer a kind of ecstasy in most people who contemplate it . . . at almost any distance. To die both meaningfully and spectacularly no doubt attracts a certain personality type–perhaps one that has been activated by specific cultural experiences . . . including a distinctively flavored despair. I’m not inclined to attribute these circumstances to Islamic teachings and cultures–which vary, and many of which transmit strong motivations and methods for fulfillment through living. But groups large and small throughout the world promote Death-Loving Teachings, and these diseased groups always seem to attract a few suitable students.