On our ancestors and meat-eating
09:13
In debates about the use of animals as food, carnivores will resort to the seemingly serious argument about the availability of meat in the diet of our ancestors. Like "our ancestors ate it" and therefore so should we. In pagan cultures, this appeal to the experience of our ancestors is quite an important point, but is this matter really as simple as it seems? We will not discuss what has already been written a million times before - the fact that you cannot directly compare the era we were living in even a hundred years ago and the present time, given that the planet has become hugely overpopulated, or the hypocritical methods used to kill animals in the cruel factory farms now vs the killing by hand of animals raised with their own sweat and blood, or the respect that hunters in traditional cultures had for the animals they hunted, or the fact that our ancestors ate very little meat actually, because meat was a "treat", being expensive to obtain and so cattle were slaughtered mainly on holidays. What I would like to do is to examine the issue from this perpsective. When you talk about our ancestors, who are you referring to? In retrospective chronological order (in Russia), these were: the Soviet people, peasants/workers, serfs – we cannot peer further back into pagan antiquity. Ancestors of this human group, due to certain social circumstances, were dependent, in a slave state, uneducated and low-browed. Given the inherent inequality of human beings, and using common sense, we have to admit that the people comprising most of any nation are ignorant sheeple. Therefore, when we use the word “ancestors”, we must understand exactly which people we are talking about. We do not want to denigrate rural workers. Quite the contrary, as a largely rural population is a bearer of the pagan spirit («paganus» - rural) and purity of the blood, whereas the city represents the centers of official Christianity and multiculturalism, a Petri dish where bourgeois mold proliferates. True, it should be clarified that paganism, the remnants of which were passed on to us through the village, is rustic, peasant paganism, closely tied to agricultural rituals. It would be logical to assume tha
both sorts of paganism existed – the more militant and also the sort espoused by Dmitriy Volkhov, certainly very different in nature. But unfortunately, for obvious reasons, we cannot know anything about this. Back to the subject at hand: given all the above, can we even consider the ‘appeal to meat-eating ancestors’ to be a serious argument? What if our descendants were to hold us up with our contemporaries as examples in a hundred years? We’d better hope not. At the same time, the best representatives of the human species, of all eras, considered vegetarianism and nature worship to be among the most important components of personal evolution. Ancient philosophies, which we have already discussed a number of times, including even Orthodox saints such as Seraphim of Sarov, for whom Christianity is the “only calling”, the greatest thinkers, writers and scientists - the human elite - have unanimously declared a need to abandon animal food and return to a natural approach. So why are those who adhere to the principle of hierarchy and inequality basing themselves on the experiences of the majority, rather than listening to the spiritual aristocracy? Shouldn’t the opinion of Pythagoras or Wagner be more authoritative than a million average people’s opinions? We don’t mean that, in principle, invoking the collective experience of previous generations is be a dead-end road. Of course, they have much to teach us and there are many practices we should return to, rejecting the chimeras of the modern world, but we need to pick and choose, to rethink and complement the experience of our ancestors, in accordance with current needs. We believe that we must take the best of our people as our new benchmark, and thereupon build new concepts of a pagan environmental worldview.
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