Published in a) Grand Deluxe edition printed by the Officina Bodoni on Japanese vellum, bound by James Brockman after the design of Joan Tebbutt and Sydney Cockerell; b) Deluxe Edition printed and bound by Stamperia Valdonega, Verona; and c) Trade edition printed and bound by Stamperia Valdonega.  Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, a book (or manual) of sacrifice-formulae showing sacrifice as the primary operational necessity for human beings.  Human beings, to live life to its potential, must engage in sacrifice.  Man’s most ancient sacred text, the Rgveda, stresses sacrifice for the preservation of all creation.  Indeed, it shows that sacrifice constitutes creation.  Men and Gods, the Rgveda teaches, are in a perpetual dance to sustain the world.  Strength for the Gods comes from humans’ sacrifices and, in turn, by sacrificing man is enabled to gain the help of the Gods to advance to his ultimate potential.  Whether one accepts the existence of the Gods at all, or as being inside or outside of one’s own individuality, makes no difference.  Power centers exist.  Humans alone are puny; humans alone have small strength.  To hold and increase strength man must make contact with power centers named Gods by the ancients.  Within the human body (a cosmos structurally and sympollically equivalent to the cosmos), as Yoga demonstrates, contact with power centers provides increasing strength, strength to breakthrough limiting positions and consolidate an arising new energy at higher levels of synthesis and control.  Perfect sacrifice demands the most precious.  And what, to man, is more precious than bone?  Inscriptions, the inscribing on bone, the burning into mind the sacrificial process.  In short, there is no real life for man, no internal advance without such sacrifice as leads to an external tie-in which flows back to the internal providing strength and stability for an increasingly higher-order movement.  Sacrifice begins in birth with blood and pain and death.  Sacrifice is the fire that feeds each heartbeat’s music, the fire that lights the mind’s glory.  Sacrifice so understood and entered into becomes essentially the first step that must be taken by the human being to escape from the mundane, the time-bound ordinariness leading to final death.  To gain the next step, the fully entering into transcendent Memory^T  itself must come about.  Then life/death dominate no longer: only the Transcendent without any limitation holds, but not first without sacrifice by which to reach unbound Memory^T.

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The Origin of De Testimonio Animae

After years of trying to find the vision-voice for a major poem, in the middle 1950s reading C.G. Jung, Answer to Job (CW11) Haven O’More found the Tertullian quoted below.  Explosion!  The poem De Testimonio Animae directly began to come into being after seeing and working with the text of Tertulliani De Testimonio Animae:

“Haec testimonia animae quanto vera, tanto simplicia; quanto simplicia, tanto vulgaria; quanto vulgaria, tanto communia; quanto communia, tanto naturalia; quanto naturalia, tanto divina.”

O’More disagreed completely with Tertullian and Jung that the authority of the soul derived from “the majesty of Nature” (Tertullian) and “that the statements of the soul point to realities that transcend consciousness” (Jung).  Quite the contrary.  Understanding the poem De Testimonio Animae as On the Witness Consciousness, the soul creates all realities including nature in so far as it can be said to be a reality.  Understanding Mere Consciousness-Only as the darshana of it all applies the universal correction.  See, for example,  all of Homer (Greek text and Chapman’s marvelous translation); Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato; Commentary on the Parmenides of Plato; Hsüan Tang, Ch’eng Wei-Shih Lun (Doctrine of Mere-Consciousness); Yoga-Sutra; Rgveda; Plato entire and Aristotle entire (Greek and Thomas Taylor’s superb translations); Plotinus, Enneads; Theos Bernard, Hindu Philosophy; Hans Jacobs, Western Psychotherapy and Hindu-Sadhana; and, essentially, G.H. Mees, The Revelation in the Wilderness; Evolution, Paradise, and the Fall; The Key to Genesis; and Dharma and Society.  Many more traditional essential and vital texts, including the Bible and other scriptures, could be named to support the darshana of the poem De Testimonio Animae.  But the principal thing to know remains: the texts of Jung and Tertullian activated the vision, contributed to finding the voice, and set up conditions  generally leading to the making of the poem De Testimonio Animae.  In other words these texts generally set off the vast explosion leading to the making of the poem DTA — especially, it should be emphasized,  this small Tertullian text.

December 25, 1994