Muddled thoughts about Cathedrals

I'm still reading "Second Nature " by Michael Pollan. And in it, Pollan suggests that cathedrals are an attempts to replicate the feeling of being a sacred grove. The idea being that the tall pillars replicate tree trunks and the hushed sound and subdued lighting replicates the dabbled light through leaves and quiet of the grove.

I don't dispute the similarity. But by contrast the modern civilized ideas of religion are deliberately non-participatory, non-interactive. You sit in the pews and listen to the minister speak to you of God. The idea that the congregation would have something to say about the understanding of the sacred, is itself a blasphemy. Because the worshipper is a sheep and priest is a shepherd.

And the morality of civilization contains a madonna/whore complex regarding wilderness. Note the term: virgin woodland. Again, don't touch. Don't interact. The idea of the witch with her garden of herbs in every village. The idea of personal vision quests. Participation in a living religion is very dangerous to an established power structure.

Hierarchy is a pyramid. And we use pyramids to house dead things. Which tells you everything you need to know. Everything important goes in the pyramid, in the tomb, in the mausoleum. Embalm Lenin. Mummify Pharoah. Build a rendition of Lincoln, carve his visage in stone to stop time.

And we do the same thing with ideas. The idea that new ages might require new ideas is sacrilege. The priest and pharoah  hand down the correct ideas to masses, the flock of obedient sheep. And inevitably these ideological concepts are anthropomorphic, because we assume humans are the top of the pyramid, the Pharoah in the tomb. One step below god in the cathedral. We assume top-down order, a chain of command in a hierarchy, almost without fail.

And because we assume order is hierarchical we also assume that natural laws must be prohibitions and restrictions laid down by some divine creator. If we are forced to live under a king, clearly God must also be a king. And if kings rule by decree, then so must God. And with these incorrect ideas we caused ecological disasters that killed Empire upon Empire. Because the laws are actually laws of cause and effect like the laws of motion described centuries ago. And we don't care that these ideas don't work when applied to the real world, because we have faith in the idea. We are loyal to the doctrine. Heaven gains precedence over earth, scripture overrules skill.

The tyranny of ideological purity, assuming that ideas are more important than the messy physical world, originates from an underlying assumption that ideas predate the physical world rather than the spring from it. And what does this gain the Pharoah at the top of the pyramid?

Control. Control of the medium. Control of the message. This is why the Pope feared Martin Luther, and why the German Princes sought to control and exploit his efforts. Under civilization, power rises up the pyramid, driven by an abstracting of knowledge from nature and an encouraging of a sterility and helplessness masquerading as purity.

And this is why kings prefer cathedrals to sacred groves and why shepherds like sheep.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.
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