Creation Myth, Sacrifice, and Transformation

Apr 3

A few weeks ago, I went to a sermon by digital pastor and queer Christian Kevin Garcia at a local church. Kevin’s sermon came to me on a day when I was completely devastated by changes happening in my life. I was grieving for what I felt was a sacrifice I had made of myself, my time, my family, and my resources for the community where I live. I was feeling as if all the life-sustaining blood I had to give had been spent and I was left with a mess of grief and poignant failure.

Kevin has a gift for connecting with his audience through a combination of vulnerability, humor, and intellect. I was moved by the story he chose to tell on this particular late-winter Sunday in lent and inspired to share it with you all here. Contrary to what you’d expect in the build up to the resurrection, it didn’t involve Jesus’ sacrifice, but rather the larger notion of sacrifice and faith in the Near Eastern world. What follows below is a paraphrase of Kevin’s sermon with my own interpretation and it’s relevance to the astrological concept of the nodes of the moon.

I am grateful to Kevin for reminding me that sacrifice is a transaction based on faith. When caught in the real-world details and consequences of our sacrifices, we can forget or denigrate the higher vision and ideals that led us to make the sacrifice in the first place. But a sacrifice of ourselves and by extension something valuable to us, is a commitment to transformation, to change. And the promise of transformation leading to something bigger, better, more transcendent requires illogical faith.

I hope you enjoy my musings on Kevin’s sermon and the process of sacrifice, transformation, and faith.

Duality and Creation

In most creation myths (Genesis, Gilgamesh, the Greek myth of the splitting of Chaos), there is a unified whole that is rent into elemental entities (sky, water, earth) that make up our world. The act of separation from an absolute divine entity births our material earth.

Similarly, in Hinduism there is the concept of maya, or an illusive state of duality. Our material world is the product of a state of separation from the absolute divine, where a divine God is projecting consciousness outward into creation. To be living in a material world and not aware of our true oneness with absolute divine consciousness is to be living in maya.

Genesis 15- God’s Covenant with Abram

In Genesis 15, Abram is in dialogue with the Lord about whether he can trust the promises the Lord has made to him in vision. The Lord promises Abram myriad offspring and dominion over many lands at a time when Abram is an old man and living in exile. As Abram questions this improbable prophesy, the Lord says:

“Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” So Abram presented all these to him and killed them. Then he cut each animal down the middle and laid the halves side by side; he did not, however, cut the birds in half. Some vultures swooped down to eat the carcasses, but Abram chased them away.
As the sun was going down, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a terrifying darkness came down over him. Then the LORD said to Abram, “You can be sure that your descendants will be strangers in a foreign land, where they will be oppressed as slaves for 400 years. But I will punish the nation that enslaves them, and in the end they will come away with great wealth. (As for you, you will die in peace and be buried at a ripe old age.) After four generations your descendants will return here to this land, for the sins of the Amorites do not yet warrant their destruction.”
After the sun went down and darkness fell, Abram saw a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass between the halves of the carcasses. So the LORD made a covenant with Abram that day...

The Promise of Sacrifice

The specific sacrifice that Abram made is ancient Near Eastern practice of splitting animals in half to represent two parties coming together in an agreement or a treaty, each with a binding side. This bloody bisection represents the violent splitting of the cosmos in creating the world; at the moment of bisection, the sacrifice of both parties creates something new. In the case of Abram, it is a new dominion that emerges from his own self and seed.

The Nodes of the Moon in Astrology

As I contemplated Abram’s bisected goat and ram, I realized that there is a parallel with the concept of the nodes of the moon in astrology. The nodes of the moon are the two points where the moon’s orbit around the earth intersects the sun’s apparent path from the perspective of earth. It is from these points that eclipses occur. In the circular birth chart of Western astrology, the nodes of the moon make a straight line that bisects the circle. In the Indian tradition, the nodes of the moon are symbolized by a dragon cut in half, with one node as the head and the other as the tail. The north node, or head of the dragon, is a point that is furiously becoming, while the south node, or the tail of the dragon is a point where our past tendencies undo what we seek to become.

Traditional, evolutionary, and pop astrology generally share the view that the nodes of the moon are significators of both the greatest challenges and the greatest rewards in a person’s life. The nodes are our karma and the difficult choices we must face in becoming, embodying, and transcending our selves. The nodes are the paradox we feel most instinctively within; they are where we feel most acutely the pinch of duality, the rub of existing with an ego, the determination to overcome, and the conviction that something better will happen to us if we can just get beyond ourselves. They are a symbol of our ultimate sense of separation from the divine.

As astrologers, we frequently treat each node as a distinctive entity with its own set of characteristics and agenda. But I like to think of the nodes as creating the backbone of the chart: an essential support for the task at hand of living our unique life. There is tremendous energy flowing between the north and south nodes that pulls us into all kinds of internal and external conflicts and tendencies.

In my worldview which emphasizes free will over fate, I suggest that facing our nodes, our karma, requires faith in our own ability to choose, to be in partnership with divinity and with ourselves, and to make it through our own commitments. Just like Abram.

Sacrifice, Faith, and the Promise of Transformation

Returning now to Genesis 15, after Abram sacrifices his animals (a significant amount of his personal wealth), he falls into a deep sleep and a terrifying darkness. It is a moment of fear, stupor, and we can imagine, ultimate confusion about the reason he just gave up precious assets in response to a divine command. Yet in this darkness, Abram receives two confirmations from God that he did the right thing: first the Lord speaks directly to him in prophecy, and second, Abram sees a vision of a flaming torch passing between the halved animal carcasses. As Kevin emphasized in his sermon, this flaming torch is God ratifying the agreement with Abram and committing to actualize his promise.

I realize that most of us don’t get such instant gratification as divine voices and flaming chalices reassuring us that our sacrifices will bear fruit for ourselves and our world. But in the depths of my own grief and the aching pain of change, there is faith that by submitting myself to the process of change, I can reap the benefits of this change. Although transformative change occurs with or without my consent (karma), I can choose how I react. Moreover, Genesis 15 suggests that by submitting to the illogical process of sacrificing what is most precious to you, you gain both proof of your faith and a boon in return. In sum, God can’t come and make an agreement with you for blessings if you haven’t offered yourself first.

It is this promise of transformation in exchange for sacrifice that is the basis of most religious and ritual practice— a transactional language between us and the divine. It seems so fundamental, yet it is overwhelmingly difficult to execute. And yet, I must cling to this promise as I grieve my own sacrifices and hope for their benefits.