/lit/ - Literature

>>9764267
preach it
also

>THE MADMAN----Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed.

>The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

>"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

>Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.

>It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

(cont'd)

>>9691878
>Ritual is the Being of civilization.
This *entirely.* A culture without rules or rituals is just a nomadic something. Religions make cultures what they are, hold them together, give them identities and foundations. Consumer Culture is really a form of para-culture, a kind of non-culture that exists only ironically. I don't want to call it essentially predatory, but it is semiologically vampiric in this sense. Cue the Sloterdijk:

>The undead—which walks among humans as the value of money and which, as a laughing communicator, strips the living of time and souls—rules today almost without any pretexts over the advanced societies. Work, communication, art, and love belong here entirely to the endgame of money. These form the substance of contemporary media and experiential time. And because money requires time for its utilization, so-called great history is also continuing in some eerie way; it is a game that is always played for extra time. Yet such history is no longer the conversation of the living with the dead about the goodness of the world, but the ever more thorough pervasion of the living by the economized specter. The money soul peers ever more undisguised out of the human subjectivity of our time: a society of bought buyers and of prostituted prostitutes is making a place for itself in globalized market conditions. Classic liberal laissez-faire is becoming explicit as the postmodern sucking and letting oneself be sucked. Telecommunication is increasingly difficult to distinguish from tele-vampirism. Tele-viewers and tele-suckers draw from a liquefied world which hardly still knows what a resistant or autonomous life might be. Is it not possible that a time is coming when those who do not wish to speak of vampirism should also be silent about philosophy?
Sorry, I just fucking that passage. Televampirism is exactly what Ritual is designed to combat. Sacrifice and ritual leave something for the gods that only the gods know how to deal with. Even if they're bloody Aztec sacrifices. Otherwise we get vampire memes. Vampirism is Capital with the only human face it knows, or needs to know.

>One can do them poorly or properly. Ritual is thus the mastery of man over his world, because world then becomes more than mere nature. This gives a different meaning of "mastery over nature" as opposed to techne and all its Heideggerian implications.
*Yes.* More on this to follow.

>Our draconologist also does not say that ritual is necessary because it is virtuous.
That's true! The spirit and the letter of the law are both required.

Continued, always continued.
>with not entirely appropriate but still endearingly grimdark 40k coolness fuck yeah