The Gods Who Walk Among Us by Thomas Horn

Author:Thomas Horn
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Body, Cults, Eschatology, Paganism & Neo-Paganism, Religion, New Age Movement, Relations, Christianity, Comparative Religion, Spirituality, Christian Theology, Apologetics, Mind & Spirit, Paganism, General, Armageddon, Christianity and Other Religions
ISBN: 9781563841613
Publisher: Huntington House Pub
Published: 1999-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

bestiality, etc. Later versions of the ritual (Bacchanalia) expanded to include pedophilia and male revelers, and perversions of sexual behavior were often worse between men than they were between men and women. Any creature (sometimes a child) that dared to resist such perversion of Dionysus was subjected to sparagmos (“torn apart’) and omophagia (“consumed raw”). In B.C.. 410, Euripides wrote of the bloody rituals of the Bacchae in his famous play, The Bacchantes;6

The Bacchantes. . .. with hands that bore no weapon of steel, attack our cattle as they browsed. Then wouldst thou have seen Agave mastering some sleek lowing calf, while others rent the heifers limb from limb. Before thy eyes there would have been hurling of ribs and hoofs this way and that, and strips of flesh, all blood be-dabbled, dripped as they hung from the pine branches. Wild bulls, that glared but now with rage along their horns, found themselves tripped up, dragged down to earth by countless maidens hands.

Euripedes went on to describe how Pentheus, the King of Thebes, was torn apart and eaten alive by his own mother as, according to the play, she fell under the spell of Dionysus.

The tearing apart and eating alive of a sacrificial victim may refer to the earliest history of the cult of Dionysus. An ancient and violent cult ritual existing since the dawn of paganism stipulated that, by eating alive, or by drinking the blood, of an enemy or an animal, a person might somehow capture the essence or “soul-strength” of the victim. The earliest Norwegian huntsmen believed

this, and they drank the blood of bears in an effort to capture their physical strength. East African Masai warriors also practiced omophagia, and sought to gain the strength of the wild by drinking the blood of lions. Human victims were treated this way by Arabs before Mohammed, and head-hunters of the East Indies practiced omophagia in an effort to capture the essence of their enemies.

Today, omophagia is practiced by certain Voodoo sects as well as by cult Satanists. It should be pointed out that such modern omophagia illustrates a continuing effort on the part of Satan to distort the original revelations of God. Eating human flesh and drinking human blood as an attempt to “become one” with the devoured is, in many cases, a demonization of the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. But sparagmos and omophagia, as practiced by the followers of Dionysus, was not an attempt of transubstantiation (as in the Catholic Eucharist), nor of consubstantiation (as in the Lutheran communion), nor yet of a symbolic ordinance (as in the fundamentalist denomination), all of which have as a common goal—the elevating of the worshipper into a sacramental communion with God. The goal of the Bacchae was the opposite: the frenzied dance, the thunderous song, the licentious behavior, the tearing apart and eating alive, all were efforts on the part of the Bacchae to capture the essence of the god (Dionyus) and bring him down into an incarnated rage within man. The idea was not one of holy communion, but of possession by the spirit of Dionysus.

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