Quotes

Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.

I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies. The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, David; the idea that I’ve aided and abetted him in any way. If you want to embrace that theory it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information is a criminal. And it’s precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States.

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking soundbites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, ‘that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘The Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machinegun?”

The obscure 1995 Leonardo DiCaprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. Kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, “The NBC Nightly News” and other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them.

The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

If we are to have peace on earth… we must develop a world perspective…. Yes, as nations and individuals, we are interdependent…. It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality…. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality

Capitalism gives to the worker the right to choose his master, but insists that the fact of mastership shall remain unquestioned

On my 40th birthday rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might actually be more interesting to terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself a magician.

In Voodoo, food is one of the many offerings ceremoniously given to the Lwa (Spirits) and is usually shared afterward as a communal meal. In a meat-eating society, animals are food. In small-scale cultures, people slaughter animals at home rather than buying meat at the grocery store. Animal sacrifice is not about a morbid fascination with death of an animal; it is the offering of life-giving energy in the preparation of sacred food.

Here in the USA, most of us are ambivalent about animals. In our minds, the act of killing an animal is morally charged, but the act of eating one is morally neutral. The absence of death in our lives makes death compelling and mysterious. But in other cultures and in our rural areas, it is an unremarkable aspect of existence; slaughtering an animal is as neutral and necessary as putting a can of soup in a grocery cart.

Some Voodooists in the U.S., including my community in New Orleans, don’t consider animal sacrifice culturally appropriate and do not practice it, preferring to offer store-bought food to Lwa and community. (For the record, I am vegetarian.) My mentor and friend Sallie Ann Glassman once suggested that if someone wishes to perform animal sacrifice, they should slaughter and butcher their own food for a year before considering offering it in ceremony. But to other Voodoo communities, animal sacrifice is natural and integral to their tradition. They take animal life with reverence, cook the meat and eat it.

As long as hunting and the slaughter of animals for meat is accepted in our country, less familiar cultural practices that take animal life must also be respected.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.