Dance/Hunt/History & Christ (as savages?)

[Terrance]

Savages? silvaticus, of the woods, wild, from silva, forest.

What savages? Are these American savages or what? Where did RC learn of
these savages and their dances? In America? Or in his books? One could
read this view of history as a dance commemorating the hunt for Christ
as heretical, as one could read RC Mango/Eucharist as heretical or
blasphemous, but I think this a misreading of RC's fractured Catholicism
and Catholicism generally. Inside the Mango, the RC tells us, is the
bone. 

Also, I'm not as enthusiastic about Ethelmer's view of History because
I'm not as pessimistic about RC view of predestination (it seems to be
more Catholic than Calvinistic, right?). Ethelmer gets to the
core--Death or the Bone, where resides despair and hope. 

Brian Branston
Marcia Elaide
Robert Graves
Sir James Frazer
Louis Charbonneau-Lassay 

Eastman explains that the buffalo skull that is dragged after the dancer
represents "the grave from which he had escaped" (1970, p. 60). It is
relevant to the understanding of this practice that "among hunting
peoples bones represent the final source of life, both human and animal,
the source from which the species is reconstituted at will.... The
'soul, is presumed to reside in the bones and hence the resurrection of
the individual from its bones can be expected." For hunters, "bone
represents the very
source of life. ... To reduce a living being to a skeleton is equivalent
to re-entering the womb of this primordial life, that is, to a complete
renewal, a mystical rebirth." 



The idea that "the inexhaustible matrix of life of the species" is found
in the animal's bones is characteristic of the "mystical relations
between man and his prey" that are "fundamental for hunting societies."
Plains tribes such as the Dakota "believe
that the bones of those bisons which they have slain and divested of
flesh rise again clothed with renewed flesh, and quickened with life,
and become fat, and fit for slaughter the succeeding June" (Eliade,
1974, pp. 63, 159, 160-61). Thus the theme of rebirth is expressed
through the role of the buffalo skull in the sun dance and this concept
of universal regeneration infuses with transcendent meaning the
participants' suffering of ritual pain in association with the skull of
the sacred animal.