Vestry Sermon

Bonjington Prometheans!

Welcome to your Tuesday sermon from The Vestry.

The equinox and solstice gatherings on Hackney Marshes - called ‘We Don’t Know What This Is’ - are a beautiful event and you should go when you get the chance. The next one is at 6.03am this coming Thursday, 20th of March.

Above are some images and a soundscape from summer solstice 2024.

On Sunday morning just gone David, one of the organisers, posed a question in their Whatsapp group. Playing on the event’s name he asked ‘What do you think? Why are we coming together like this?’

Responses were rightly full of glowing praise for the event, describing what it means to the people who attend. Answers revolved around ideas of connecting with the natural cycles of life, of calm and togetherness and a sense of healing.

A huge part of the magic of the event is that it takes place on Hackney Marshes - a large open space surrounded by the East London cityscape. A liminal place, where two worlds press up against each other.

In the discussions I had with David, Tom and Adrian last year, prior to Church of Burn making ritual at their event, I explained that I liked the idea that it’s the enactment of ritual sacrifice that ‘causes’ the Sun to rise.

It’s a pretty silly notion. I guess you could say it’s hubris. Deluded even. That us burning a few quid in ritual materially influences the celestial bodies.

But humour me. Hold onto the thought for just a minute or two.

It's impossible to get into the heads of our ancient ancestors. That’s 300,000 years of history for Homo Sapiens alone.

Certainly they’d not have thought about ritual sacrifice as a detached observer. It wouldn’t have been an ‘object of study’ like it is for most people today. Rather, because ritual sacrifice is a powerful thing to be a part of, they’d believe what they were doing was necessary. It kept the natural cycles of their world turning. Maybe for them - just as for me with our Solstice Money Burning - it was their sacrifice of a goat, pig or even a child that caused the Sun to rise.

For our ancestors sacrifice was intimately, immediately and materially connected to the world around them. For our ancestors there was no ‘nature’. There was no separation. They were as one with Gaia. The notion of ‘nature’ is a modern invention.

Our ancestors didn’t need Joni Mitchell to remind them that ‘We are a cog in something turning’. They knew they were stardust long before science came along to prove it.

So then, I reckon for a good 99% of humanity’s history making ritual sacrifice to keep the celestial clock turning - to make the sun rise - was just what we did. It is us moderns that are the anomaly.

How are we to make sense of this? Do we just reject the beliefs of our ancestors? Do we just accept our current astronomical story as fact, and reject everything else as fiction?

Or is there an echo of some ancient truth resonating through sacrificial ritual?

When you perform a ritual sacrifice, what is apparent is that the act comes first and the rationalisation follows. As far as we know this is historically true, too. We’ve been engaging in ritual sacrifice since the start. It is the founding act of civilization.

In time, different stories have been told to make sense of the power of ritual. And to direct it. New Gods have been birthed, eclipsing the celestial order, eclipsing The Sun, The Moon and The Stars.

For the last couple of millennia, the story that’s enraptured a significant and especially powerful proportion of the human tribe is that there is just one God. And that His sacrifice - the death and rebirth of Himself through the body of His only begotten Son - alleviated us of the need to participate in ritual sacrifice.

Henceforth, communion - oneness with the divine - was to be enacted by consuming the body and blood of Christ. The turning of the celestial clock was strictly God’s work. Our ritual sacrifices were no longer required.

And so for a hundred generations or so, the ancient truth once known to us - that ritual sacrifice creates our world - has gradually faded. The echo of it is now barely audible.

In that time humankind has detached itself from the world to such an extent that we have become witnesses to its destruction. At our own hands. And seemingly without being able to stop ourselves.

In other words, against all reason we are sacrificing that which is most precious to life on our beautiful planet. Not for the Sun, but for Gods of economic growth, for Gods of capital, for the God of money.

So then, when we burned 105 pounds at dawn on the Summer Solstice and the Sun rose, we were at the very least engaged in a celestial re-ordering. We burned our God to honour a greater one. And unless humanity does this en masse, unless we reject our secular stand-ins for the originating Sun God, unless we find a new story to allow our ancient wisdom to be heard once more - humanity will not live to see the Sun rise.

If the tragic logics of the metacrisis play out in the way most scientists expect then it is the generations born within our lifetimes who will be witness to that final sacrifice: the burning of the world itself.

And in that last dawn, the story of the sunrise will no longer matter. Because there will be no one left to tell it.