to avoid address abuse, please type it yourself

Was the moth drugged? One early morning, while watering our plants on Grabov Rat, I’ve spotted a motionless humming hawk moth inside a datura flower. This moth is a night creature, they were circulating our flowers late in the evenings. Was this one caught by the flower which closes at night? Anyhow, I forget about it for a while and on the next sight wasps were just finishing the moth body. OK, that’s natural recycling, but I wonder: was the moth dead or only drugged - datura is known intoxicant with alkaloid poisons (atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine).

I don't believe for a minute that all those terrifying "drug edu- cation" spots on TV will scare kids out of trying drugs. In fact, they may have the opposite effect. Everyone longs, sometimes secretly, to experience altered states of consci- ousness. Adolescents are intrigued by death and danger, not repulsed. How can people lure them into movies with the same symbols they somehow think will repel them from drugs? Our drug epidemic may or may not be a serious one. But I believe it is the symptom of a deeper cultural disease - the disappearance of legitimate occasions for ecstasy, trance, emotion and feeling, and the erosion of traditional rituals. When I was a kid, people got "high" at revivals and during other religious events. Everyone needs to experience that special kind of mental elation now and then. If we don't do it one way we will do it another. We won't outgrow drug abuse until those needs too, not just needs for bread and housing, are cared for. Man does not live by bread alone.

In recent years I've become much more interested in this issue of "ritual" (a word I usually define as "symbolic action", in contrast to myth, which is symbolic thought. The two go closely together and are seldom discovered in isolation from each other.) I forget just when the word "ritual" ceased having a negative, sticky-sanctimonius connotation for me and began serving as a pivot around which I could organize a lot of the loose ends not only in my thinking but in my life... I become convinced at that moment that although modern urban man was certainly not religious in most conventional senses of the word, neither was he secular in the way I had once thought. I could see that ritual and religion were not going to wither away, and that the real issue now was whether they would be used for man's liberation or to keep him in bondage.

Harvey Cox: The seduction of the spirit, The use and misuse of people's religion, A Touchstone Book, New York, 1973.

moth & datura

 2008-10-12 

2008-10-05
2008-09-28
2008-09-21
2008-09-14
2008-09-07
2008-08-31
2008-08-24
2008-08-17
2008-08-10
2008-08-03
2008-07-27
2008-07-20
2008-07-13
2008-07-06
2008-06-29
2008-06-22
2008-06-15
2008-06-08
2008-06-01
2008-05-25
2008-05-18
2008-05-11
2008-05-04

 

previous

 

WEBSITE  EDITOR:
Krešimir J. Adamić