From Apes To Plato

Abstract

The thesis of Dudley Young’s Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War is foreshadowed in the connection between the title and the sub-title. The primitive revelations of the sacred came, he says, through the ecstasies of love and war, and these, in turn, derived from the mutilating frenzy of the hunt. At the heart of religious experience is the blood sacrifice: the ecstasy of the tearing and eating of flesh is the fundamental act of making sacred (‘sacro-ficere’), and the means by which man gains access to the divine, making the pneuma, the breath of god, come into his presence and the means perhaps by which he himself becomes divine.