Lessons Learned from Le Sacre du Printemps

I found out the hard way that modern Pagans don't especially like it when you bring up the documented history of human sacrifice by various Pagan cultures.  Especially touchy is the mention of the documentation, eye witness accounts, legends and archaeological evidence that human sacrifice was endemic to those religions today grouped together as Pagan.  I'd rather doubt that the people in those groups would have done that, themselves, especially accepting being grouped with what were likely to be their nearest rivals.

In that particular discussion, some of the things that got a hostile reaction were the Yule practice of the Norse to murder nine of each kind, including human beings.   The eye-witness account by Ibn Fadlan of the murder of a young slave woman so she could be burned with the corpse of one of the chief thugs in late Pagan Central Europe is chillingly horrific, and though it is bitterly rejected by some scholars and many modern Pagans, there is certainly no disputing that human sacrifice of that kind is documented in excavations.

Human sacrifice is documented even within the surviving literature of a number of those societies.  To deny that is as foolish as it would be for Christians to deny the Crusades or the anti-Semitic pogroms that blight the reputation of the religion that succeeded those cultures, in those places.  That is despite the explicit rejection of human sacrifice in the scriptures of Christianity and Judaism.  With the exception of the oddly out of place story of Jeptha's daughter - which reminds me of nothing so much as the murder of Iphigenia by Agamemnon with much the same motive, victory in war.

The acceptance of murder, its normalization, actualization, its mandatory practice, is the most meaningful and important measure of a culture's depravity of lack of it.  So it is necessary to be as brutally honest about that as necessary.  We don't get to hold any one group to a double standard, either for or against.  No one is intellectually or morally required to accept a double standard.  Insisting on one is to hand your adversaries an absolute basis for rejecting what you've said.

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For obvious reasons,  I always think of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring  in tandem with Shirley Jackson's most famous story, The Lottery.   The stories of both are of a spring fertility rite centered around human sacrifice in two agrarian societies.  One in ancient Russia, one in near contemporary New England.  Jackson's story is especially disturbing for someone who grew up under the town meeting system of government, as I did.  The features of that most visible and recognizable winter-spring rite are evident in Jackson's lottery.  Part traditional, old-family based direct democracy, part petty bureaucratic determination to be seen as doing it the right way as passed down through inbred generations, most of the participants, presumably, blood relations.  All knowing that they are most likely not going to be the loser of the lottery but aware that they could be.  I didn't have the experience of not knowing what was going to happen at the end of the story,  having had a plot spoiler tell me before I read it, but, then, the people in the story, save the very youngest, did too.  Jackson's story is famous for her control of dramatic tension and horror, showing how the most banal and, officially deemed, fair act can become a program of horror, of betrayal of even husband and child against the wife and mother, the perversely asserted instrumental justice on the basis of everyone supposedly having a fair chance of being the one murdered that year a perfect model of how a program can overrule real justice, decency, the direct experience of a human life, even the love of a husband and child.   If anything, the scenario for Stravinsky's dance in which a young girl is chosen to dance herself to death is less horrific.  Say what you will, Shirley Jackson knew how to tell that  story.

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I've been listening to various performances of Stravinsky's music for all of my adult life both in recordings and live, twice.   I have never seen a live performance of it danced and the first time I saw anything of choreography put to it, it was Paul Taylor's striking but definitely not Stravinskian crime mystery made to the two-piano version I posted last week.  That, if rapidly receding memory serves, was on the great series Dance in America way back a' when PBS was something like an important educational force.   I liked it and would certainly go see it live.  It was far less an abuse of Stravinsky than Disney's, and, unlike Uncle Walt, I'd imagine Taylor would have made good on paying the royalties.

I'd never seen anything like the original story with the orchestral version until I saw a bootlegged video of the Joffrey Ballet's reconstruction of the original dance by Vaslav Nijinsky.

According to the legend of the first performance, a lot of the motivation for the all-out riot was the choreography.  Stravinsky is responsible for some of that with his disdainful account of the audience reaction to seeing a bunch of bizarrely costumed "knock-kneed Lolitas" performing what was asserted were Nijinsky's outrageous movements.  Nijinsky, as told by several of my university teachers and a number of authors was a mentally disturbed and erratic dancer who should never have been given the job.  That he ended his days in an asylum only added to the attractive insanity that the legend of the riot has become.  Though it was hardly Nijinsky's first controversy, if not riot.  His choreography of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, with it simulated masturbation, was a warning to Stravinsky and the producers what was likely to happen.  I wouldn't be surprised if they knew they were ordering up a scandal.

I don't know anything about dance notation except that I know there is such a thing, at least a couple of systems of it.  I have no idea how much of Nijinsky's intentions are preserved but expect that the people working on the reconstruction were competent and honest.  That some of it had to be imagined, filling in gaps in the record is certainly not something unknown to other artistic reconstructions, in some cases, Mozart, Bartok, the composers or their survivors assigned people to finish what they knew they couldn't.

The Stravinsky-Nijinsky-Joffrey Rite of Spring is extremely compelling, though a lot of that is intrinsic to the score.  I'm not a judge of dance but I can say when something is moving and disturbing and provokes a confrontation with the most important issues.  After watching the quite imperfect video copy it made me think about the reality, the horror, the depravity of human, especially child,  sacrifice in a way that I'd never really considered before.   You can see it here:

One 

Two 

Three 

Shortly after seeing that, I saw a documentary about the recovery of the mummified victims of child sacrifice in ancient South America.  It  restarted the internal controversy over human sacrifice in a far more extreme form.

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Of course, both Stravinsky's and Jackson's stories were made up, they didn't actually deal with an account of a real human being communally murdered or, "dancing herself to death" in a real spring fertility rite.  They are entirely imaginary.

The same can't be said of those victims of human sacrifice, who were clearly murdered in some kind of rite or act of a ceremonial, presumably religio-political act.   Murdered in obviously ritual, traditional practices that were customary and, so, done more than once.  The seeming conventionality of it, makes it seem like the same people had practice in doing it.

Just why these victims were murdered can only be imagined, there is no real evidence of that. The only  exact information of those murders can only be known from the physical evidence that isn't either opaque or ambiguous tells us.  With such clearly complex acts, the thoughts behind them, both the official explanation and beliefs and the individual motives and thoughts are unknowable because we don't have the articulations of those by the people involved.  All of that is the product of interpretation, filtered through  many more layers of distorting filters of the kind I mentioned below, last week.  If you want to believe the explanations of those given by modern scholars,  I can't stop you but I can't see how any of it could be considered as even far less reliable a record of some reality than those of Stravinsky or Jackson.  It, as well, is made up.   As the great author of anthropological fiction, Ursula Le Guin said, she was very familiar with the environs and people she created for her stories.  Facing that the product of your imagination is fiction instead of a purported recreation of once real, unknowable lives seems to me to increase the amount of truth possible in the effort.   Denying that  your attempt to recreate the entirely undocumented thoughts and motives behind them is fiction diminishes its honesty.

As important as the unknown aspects of this are, the impossibility of recovering those doesn't mean that what can be definitely known about them is unimportant and without definite information.

For me, confronting the images of the real, preserved corpses of the victims of sacrificial murders, having the methods used to murder them, especially young children, forensically described, of the presumed poverty of some of the children due to their obvious dietary deficiencies, etc. elicited a far stronger feeling of horror and anger than watching the reconstructed dance did.  Real anger.  It still does as I'm writing this .

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The goal of a work of art is generally to provoke an emotional, physical and intellectual response, one that the creator of that art wants to provoke.   And it was always my goal to be able to do that as a performing musician, in service to the intentions of the composer and in my own ... well, enough said about that.

But in this case, on this subject, the artists chose to deal with issues that are unusually important and which transcend the bounds of art into the most real of real of real life.   And history and archeology are transcended as well by the reality of time and our position in it.  There is nothing to be done today  for those children murdered in, presumably, priestly rites.  There is nothing to be done for the slave girl murdered in Ibn Fadlan’s horrific account, murdered by two rope wielding thugs and a sort of homicidal priestess so she could accompany the thug chieftain into the next world, no doubt to be his slave there as well.

The really important, the really dangerous and really compelling fact is that human sacrifice is as common as war, slavery, industrial and recreational objectification and exploitation, prostitution, marketing, rape, risking infecting sex partners, cutting of food aid, medical aid, and a million different ways of using up real human beings, men, more women, and even more children, many of them sacrificed to idols of cash and other money, many of them to, mostly, male sexual and psychological domination turning other people into commodities, never forgetting that commodities are intended to be consumed, always based on a differential in power, strength, physical, intellectual, and that which can be had by corrupting politics and the official organs of justice.

Quite often the mechanism and systematization that allows that unimpeded use has no more of a basis than tradition and the social coercion of what will be thought if you resist what people expect.  That tradition is so strong that it can lead people to volunteer to be sacrificed.   R.O.T.C.,  Football, boxing, being a jockey, a beauty queen, a sex machine, a porn actor.... the list of venues of human sacrifice in the United States, Europe, every single place in the world, today, is extensive.   Admitting that those, especially the most respected of them asserted to be for the greater good of society are essentially the same as the most horrific of human sacrifice in past societies, read about, the subject of documentaries of the kind that used to be seen on PBS, is rare.  I can easily imagine that pushing that reality, especially about those most respected forms of it, will get you labeled as a crack pot.

Perhaps confronting that terrible reality leads to insanity.  Stravinsky's ballet premiered the year before the massive human sacrifice of the First World War, something that shattered Stravinsky's world view to the extent that he dramatically changed his language to what would later be called neo-classicism.  Some critics say he was seeking to recover the order that the rioting audience, and maybe he believed he had been departing from in Le Sacre.

But Stravinsky's music was a more abstract thing than Nijinsky's choreography - at least if the reconstruction is accurate.  The horror of the communal murder of one of its members, the leering men, women, girls, witness to their own depravity, and the victim a willing participant, trained in the habit of this annual rite from infancy, participating in her own murder by tradition, by sacred custom and for the greater good was all made as real as could be possible in Europe in the next five years.  Nijinsky's direct premonition of that would have been enough to drive anyone mad.

Maybe that's why people don't face what is all around them all of the time, restricting that to a ghetto in the distant past, or some other place or to acts of pure imagination.  Our species is drenched in blood.  It's a lot better to voluntarily sacrifice yourself in resisting that than it is to sacrifice your humanity in voluntarily ignoring or  following those customs. Refusing to participate in murder is, of course, the place to start.  Making the decision that murder really matters and insisting that it is always called murder is as important.   Doing that is keeping witness, to serve the victims of all of the murders, all of the sacrificial murders done on whatever excuse.   That is all we can do for them now, that is what is most important.