The Persistence of Memory: Ancestral Recall & Blood Mysticism
Though each organism represents a totality, it is at the same time part of a larger whole. Sometimes in nature the part carries with it a memory of the whole, an inner longing for a union with the whole. And so it can be with certain human beings. The journey to bridge the abyss that separates the past from the present is a quest to transform the present -- and thus the future. It is not political in nature, nor could it ever be. It is defined by eternal values & divine principles. Nothing about it is determined by the temporal. It is not a quest for everyone, but for the elect who feel it's calling in their very blood.
The self seeks union with the soul, & the soul yearns to regain it's lost/forgotten territories. The instinctual awareness that such things are possible has served as a fundamental driving force for certain men down the centuries -- nay, millenia. Poets, philosophers, & mystics have searched for the means to somehow achieve these goals, and awaken in man the ancestral memory that might serve as a nexus between man and the divine. The memory is there. The quest to awaken it follows a path that leads through fire & water, forests of symbols, & initiatory ordeals not written of in books.
That memory is possessed of a power, a hunger, a will; as can be witnessed in the realm of nature & certain of it's creatures. Take as a splendid example the simple starfish. At times, during the harsh struggle for existence far beneath the waves, the starfish will lose an appendage. Although adrift on its own, the lost limb retains a longing somehow to become a part of that which was once the whole. And then within the billion cells of the seemingly dead member, longing is translated into growth. Now, cell by cell, the limb remembers that of which it was once a part. And now -- cell by cell -- reconstructs itself into the shape & function & pattern of that to which it once belonged; until finally, memory becomes reality. A new starfish has been created.
This process can be achieved by a very common creature. Are we to imagine that human beings are exempt from this same longing -- the instinctual yearning to be reunited with the primordial whole? Do you imagine that we only inherit the color of our eyes & the shapes of our heads? Or is there a deeper memory that dwells within us, in every cell: a genetic memory? Of course there is. It is a memory that can be awakened, cell by cell & soul by soul. The word "religion" comes from religio, meaning "going back to the source". The quest for the Grail is a quest to return to the source. It is a quest to reunite the part with the whole, the descendant with the ancestor, the temporal with the primordial... and in so doing, recreating the missing nexus between our past & our future.
[ More of Boyd Rice's grail-related writings of can be found at The Vessel Of God. ]
© 2005 BoydRice.com
"Religion is based . . . mainly upon fear . . . fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand . . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race."
~Bertrand Russell
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
~Charles Darwin