Image description: A southern Vermont woods in late summer with cut outs of Pamela Colman Smith’s images from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are Eight of Pentacles and The World.
Content warning: mental illness, anorexia
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
I’m about a week away from telling the Irish legend of Tuan Mac Cairill for the first time to a group, at an Equinox gathering here in Eastern Pennsylvania. The sets of notes I’ve made with the visuals I want to be sure to remember are worn and edging on tattered. When I tell the story, I never remember them all.
I’m curious right now about the component of sacrifice in storytelling and how in naming certain things—due to the limitations of memory, or as an active choosing—there are always others that are left out. Overall, I’ve been interested in the negative spaces in storytelling and meaning-making work. A story is neglectful by nature. Each one has something alive on the outskirts that doesn’t stop breathing just because the teller didn’t name it.
I know I’m far from the first to make this connection, but I do wonder sometimes if our meager human conceptions of “the wild” are a projection of this; we imagine the forest, ocean or desert to be this disordered, thick, fanged-and-winged tangle full of all the details and relations that our thin, human tales will never fully accommodate.
I’m interested in where the details go that get left out. And this has led me to consider words like sacrifice and discard. I’ve been working with the image of The World, which is the culmination of the major arcana sequence that depicts a dancer inside of a closed wreath.
Every story is a dance of inclusion and omission. This is worth saying, that's not, and what goes in each group changes over space and time. The world places its ten thousand gifts before us and we are in the privileged position of getting to choose: what to receive, and what to reject.
As I was drafting this Offering, I reached out to my friend Rabbi Zach Fredman at the Temenos Center in New York to see if he had some language to offer on sacrifice. I was interested specifically in whether there was a distinction between a sacrifice and an offering. If there was, I had ideas about what that had to do with the processes of inclusion and omission and receipt and rejection that we do when we tell stories.
He sent me a thirty-one-page passage from the book On Sacrifice by Moshe Halbertal, which I’d actually been looking for in vain after an encounter a few weeks ago during a rabbit-hole plunge on the story of Cain and Abel. I was grateful, but initially let down to find that Halbertal does not distinguish between a sacrifice and an offering in the passage.
For him, a sacrifice is an offering. A sacrifice is distinct from a gift in that it’s put forth by the giver to a greater power—God, in Halbertal’s case—and then it’s up to the recipient, who’s assumed superior, whether or not to accept it. Sacrifice by this definition is dangerous because it leaves the giver open to rejection.
I needed this exact thing actually. A lot more than I needed whatever it was that I thought I was looking for when I reached out to Zach. I thought I needed language to bolster an idea that I hoped was going to take me somewhere. Somewhere other than here, where I’ve been. I've been down, man. I’ve been feeling insecure.