I have the great honour and pleasure to share with you this article by my friend and guest blogger, the writer Alienora Taylor.

Sacrifice by Alienora Taylor

In the mournful wake of Armistice Day, I have turned the creaking mechanism of my mind to that oft-used, little-understood word‘sacrifice’ – and a well-spring of sombre images, of contradictory thoughts,bubbles up.

It all goes back, as so much does, to the blood on snow greenness of ‘Sir Gawain and The Green Knight’ – and meanders, along the way, into symbolism, chivalry and Ritual Magic.

Gather round, people; gather round the bright fire in our communal Cave of Humanity. Look at the flame shadows on the rough walls; look at the shapes they make: creatures running, fleet of foot and wild of heart,from early man’s spears; lovers through the ages twining bodies and minds in passion; people slaughtered like pigs for the good of the land, the propitiation of some stern god or other…

Look! Weep if you will – and then think. Think. Think…

I dive into the Dictionary, and this is what I find:

SACRIFICE: an act of slaughtering an animal or person or surrendering a possession as an offering to God or a divine or supernatural figure.

I scrabble into the earth, with eager fingers, and pull out the twisted root:

Middle English: from Old French, from Latin ‘sacrificium’ –related to ‘sacrificus’ – from ‘sacer’ ‘holy’…

And something strikes me with the imagined subtle testing force of The Green Knight’s axe: true, the strike just nicks my metaphorical neck, but a trail of bright blood still stitches the snow’s purity.

The word comes from the same source as ‘sacred’ – of course it does! I am astonished that this has never occurred to me before!

But we live, do we not, with this undercurrent of myth and religious thought, this idea that there is something inherently holy,righteous, in an act of sacrifice. We speak, blithely, about the Ultimate Sacrifice offered by the millions killed in the War to End all Wars.

But I do question this assumption – in part, at least. And the kernel of my discomfort lies deep in the nut of holiness. For, it seems tome, if sacrifice is needed, it should be for a Higher Purpose, and pertaining to the Creator (however you conceive this being) – and, above all, it should be done willingly, with a conscious choice behind its often violent and agonising severing of body from soul.

In the Mystery Traditions, the King makes the Sacred Marriage with, and to protect, the land. In the trial of stag strength which follows, he runs the risk of dying, of shedding his blood for the kingdom, for Logres, for landscape both literal and inner.

In ‘Sir Gawain and The Green Knight’, Sir Gawain (known to be Arthur’s strongest, and most gallant, knight) offers his neck to the shape-shifting Green Knight both as penance for his girdle-taking dalliance with Sir Bertilak’s lady (Morgan le Fay in another guise) – and as his part of the original bargain. And he accepts, with true humility, the initial two feinting blows and the pain of broken skin, blood loss and pain.

In the story, the whole thing has been set up, masterminded– or should that be mistress-minded? – by Morgan Le Fay, as a Yuletide test of King Arthur and his Court at Camelot. Why? Good question. I think there may have been an element of complacency creeping into the high Summer perfection of life at Court. I think that the shading into Autumn, the corruption and withering of symbolic leaves was already clear to those with eyes to see.

Bringing this back to our own times, let us, once more,think about the two Great Wars (and countless lesser ones) which have so crippled the psyche of Humanity.

And let me be bold here: going to the heart of the matter,in what sense was either war – with its countless dead and wounded – an offering to any kind of divine or supernatural figure? How can the sacrifices –whose sad bones  still litter Flanders’Fields – be seen, in any real sense, as holy?

How? When, it seems to me, the motivation behind most wars is greed: coveting of other people’s lands, women, oil supplies…

I do not think we, as a species, go to war for anything I would recognise as a Higher Purpose.

Given the specious nature of most national and international land boundaries, I am not sure that the millions of gallons of our young men and women’s blood seeping into the soil is a fair or just exchange.

The act of sacrificing yourself, either literally or metaphorically, is holy – as long as the reason is bathed in Light.

Dark sacrifices are drawing on a far more sinister power, propitiating the god forms who/which allow us to delude ourselves that a World War fought for annexation purposes can ever be just.