Introduction
The Sacred and the Profane
'You will recognize sacred rites dug out of the annals of old […]'
Ovid, The Fasti
For Ovid, annals were 'old', and the sacred rites 'dug out', as if undertaking excavations was already needed to retrieve and understand them.
Man's relationship with the sacred through time and cultures keeps me on asking. As exotic it is for me, coming from a most profane kind of education, it is throught practicing I chose to perceive this way of belonging to the world.
By myths, rites and archaic symbols I am being brought into the field of beliefs. Whereas experimenting practices sometimes considered esoterical forces me to give up the commenter's mantle and take over that of the actor.
According to Mircea Eliade : « Modern man is incapable of experiencing the sacred in his dealings with matter; at most he can achieve an aesthetic experience. » (The forge and the crucible)
Tying myself down to feel this way of belonging to the world, I am specifically trying, perhaps in vain, to go beyond this esthetical experience.
Jérémy Bracone
From one way or another, the emergence of modernity and of all its lot of new features spells the end of these various, primal and animistic - or whatever you may call them - visions of the world. The interesting reflux of this central movement of history is that, just like those primal visions of the world fade away into the the new globalisation's hinterland, they re-establish within its center. For city-dwelling average classes, already flooded under modern gadgets and bored to death by the loss of sense which they apparently cause, chamanism, voodoo, witchcraft, all of these wild things brutally seem to be extremely attractive. Now that is one surprising historical interweaving. For whom we call primitive, who remain ostracized and generally powerless, what the modern world promises are things, ease and safeness. For the so-called modernists, what the primal world promises is precisely the thing they're lacking of – sense. The primal rush for modernity and the modern rush for primitiveness represent one of the incongruous yet recognised aspects of our world's cultural tapestry. And a lot of us spend their life crossing the two.
Graham Townsley, Kamaroa.
'You will recognize sacred rites dug out of the annals of old […]'
Ovid, The Fasti
For Ovid, annals were 'old', and the sacred rites 'dug out', as if undertaking excavations was already needed to retrieve and understand them.
Man's relationship with the sacred through time and cultures keeps me on asking. As exotic it is for me, coming from a most profane kind of education, it is throught practicing I chose to perceive this way of belonging to the world.
By myths, rites and archaic symbols I am being brought into the field of beliefs. Whereas experimenting practices sometimes considered esoterical forces me to give up the commenter's mantle and take over that of the actor.
According to Mircea Eliade : « Modern man is incapable of experiencing the sacred in his dealings with matter; at most he can achieve an aesthetic experience. » (The forge and the crucible)
Tying myself down to feel this way of belonging to the world, I am specifically trying, perhaps in vain, to go beyond this esthetical experience.
Jérémy Bracone
From one way or another, the emergence of modernity and of all its lot of new features spells the end of these various, primal and animistic - or whatever you may call them - visions of the world. The interesting reflux of this central movement of history is that, just like those primal visions of the world fade away into the the new globalisation's hinterland, they re-establish within its center. For city-dwelling average classes, already flooded under modern gadgets and bored to death by the loss of sense which they apparently cause, chamanism, voodoo, witchcraft, all of these wild things brutally seem to be extremely attractive. Now that is one surprising historical interweaving. For whom we call primitive, who remain ostracized and generally powerless, what the modern world promises are things, ease and safeness. For the so-called modernists, what the primal world promises is precisely the thing they're lacking of – sense. The primal rush for modernity and the modern rush for primitiveness represent one of the incongruous yet recognised aspects of our world's cultural tapestry. And a lot of us spend their life crossing the two.
Graham Townsley, Kamaroa.
