Goat Song

"A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation" (Calasso pg. 260).  In this lesson, we continued our talk on the Middle, this time focusing on the initiation aspect of it. We discussed the Fertility Rites: rituals performed in Spring, to help the harvest, a couple of examples of Calasso's rituals (such as the origin of tragedy-- dancing around in goat skins around a mangled corpse... doesn't get more tragic than that), and finished with a talk on ceremonies. The word comes from Ceres, which was the Roman name for Demeter, goddess of the harvest. As previously mentioned, there were many rituals performed to help the harvest grow with the assistance of the gods.