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Blasphemous Thoughts

Lucy.Tatman{at}anu.edu.au

The sacred, from the Latin sacer, originally meant both blessed and accursed. This article begins by remembering the intolerable qualities of the sacred as it is imagined, figured and mythed in Western culture. It is then argued that within Western culture there is a significant difference and unresolvable tension between ‘the sacred’ and ‘religion’—a tension/difference strangely akin to that between the semiotic and the symbolic as theorized by Julia Kristeva. It seems that one of the functions of religions-as-institutions is precisely to control, tame, and make more manageable the sacred. In practice this means controlling sexual, sensual bodies—especially those bodies most closely associated with messy physicality and bloody corporeality.

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