In some cultures winter is owned by the Goddess of Death, the Crone. Things that sink down into the earth are thought to have died and will be resurected in the spring when the Goddess Eostre comes to the surface. Oddly enough, the male God, the consort, has a very small role in all this. When you consider how good males are at killing and burying you'd think the myths would be all over the role of the male God. But, back in the day when She was well thought of, I suppose death was looked at in a different light.
People often say that things would be different if we had to kill the food we eat, actually take it down, skin it, deal with the parts we can't eat.... the whole native thing. But we don't kill our food. We kill one another and then we just waste the meat. But the plants and cows and chickens that we do eat we buy ready to cook from a merchant. The merchant is considered to be under the domain of the Trickster. (oh no, here he goes again with the Trickster) but if you think about it, it does make sense. In our culture, here in Amerika, we take chickens for instance. We grow them in warehouses, never seeing the sun, never feeling the earth. We kill them in an assembly line and gut them and throw the parts into land fills where it can attract rats and disease. We wash them in chemical baths and huge vats of feces, water and for all we know, chlorine. The end result is sometimes dyed yellow to look somehow fresher. People like yellow food, they don't like skin colored food. Well, skin colored if you are a caucasion. That all costs x pennies. Then, we exchange the carcasses for more pennies than it cost to prepare them. The guy who buys them exchanges them to a store owner for even more pennies over the cost. He sells them to us for a couple of bucks, many pennies over the original cost.
This series of exchanges involve the use of coins, which are bits of metal which represent labor. But since we are trading more symbolic labor than actually went into the dead bodies, we are creating an imbalence of energy. Anytime money is involved you can see the work of Hermes, the Greek Trickster. Most people know Hermes as the messenger of the Gods, but in fact he was more than that. He was also the God of Magic and the God of the marketplace. Crossroads, where you sold your soul to play the guitar really really well, was sacred to Hermes. His temples were built there and offerings made at a crossroads went to him. He was also a bit of a cross dresser, sometimes known as a hermaphrodite because he was a God that like to live on both sides of the coin. Nothing trickier than thinking you got a babe on the make and then find that your partner has one too!
So this food thing today is an obvious sign of the rise of the fortunes of said Trickster. What about human death? Well, look at what happens when someone dies now. Instead of laying the body out in the dining room and having a feast to celebrate their going to live with the gods, we pay someone to take the corpse away, clean it up, fill it full of dead chemicals and then paint it to look un-natural. The clothes are phony, split in the back and tucked in. The box is often hermetically sealed. All designed to make Death seem somehow clean and safe and removed from everyday life. In other words, Trickster has stolen authority from the Crone. STealing is also a common trait with Trickster. Now since e pay someone to do all this to our dead loved ones, we see commerce is now a huge part of Death and commerce is a Trickster domain.
One of the things about Trickster, though, is that he lies. He tells you something is going to happen a certain way and then it doesn't. Sort of like how Yaweh told Eve she would die if she ate from the Tree of Knowlege. She didn't, he lied and that lie is the first of many in the Bible.
So everything in the funeral is made to look as if it is going to last forever. The stainless steel, hermetically sealed coffin, the chemicals poured into the veins of the deceased, the granite monument we place on the gravesite and the fact that no one will ever build a house or a highway over that grave. Except of course that the commerce god can easily arrange for the graves to be moved if the mall needs to expand. Or, like in one mall I know, you build the mall around the grave!
What the Crone says is that Life is a circle. Everybody lives for a time, then dies, and they return that borrowed body to the earth from whence it came. you know it came from the earth becasue you are what you eat and we eat plants from the earth and animals that eat those plants. Everything from the Goddess is returned to the Goddess and in exchange for that relationship we come to realize that we never die as in stop, but we return to life almost instantly... in a changed and new form. She brings us into this life as Isis, loves us as Aphrodite, feeds us as Gaia, and lays us down inside her as Crone. Trickster just gets us to waste our life playing stupid games and then robs us of our dignity by forcing us to pay huge sums of money (representing our labor) to have some stranger do those last few things to honor our loved one.
Trickster is not evil, mind you. He runs this show right now, but as a God, he knows that the Great Mother... his mother, too, is all-powerful and will come back again at some point to run the show the way she always does. She's letting Trickster have some fun at our expense, and because it's just a game she know we will not be seriously hurt. But I think if we play too rough, if we kill off too many critters, plow too many furrows, steal too many babies, kill too many loving children, Crone will appear and bury us. Not all of us, but enough to make Her point.
Picture this. China and Japan call in their loans, all 10 trillion of them. We don't have enough laborers to create enough things of value to pay back those loans, so we default. Now everyone knows our money is not worth the paper it's printed on, so they stop dealing with us. China has more than enough consumers to take up the slack. India has lots of scientists and programmers and such, and so on and so on. Amerika is bankrupted and the government collapses. It's a form of death, the domain of the Crone. Now, the country splinters as various factions accuse one another of being the cause of our collapse. Infighting is something Trickster loves to promote. Regions split off and keep their resources within their needs. People begin to have more gardens, because so much of the marketplace is trashed. We have farmer's markets... another Trickster arena, so He's happy. We barter more, home school more, fight a hell of a lot less, especially with no money to buy bombs. So a rebirth occurs. Several healthy states from one screwed up facist nation. Like the way Neanderthal would bury gramps in the back of the cave, we bury the nation in the back of our minds.... because a nation is a mental object, a phony creation. There are no nations when you look for them from space. We made them up. But these new toys will grow and go through all those stages of growth new living things do, until they screw up and collapse too. Rome did, Britain did, USSR did. They may try to come back under a new name, like a man who left his children might move to another city and call himself John Smith. New Amerika might involve part of the Northeast, part of the Deep South.... maybe even Cuba. But it will be a new nation, under the Goddess with liberties and rituals for all.
So I figure that even with Adolf Bush in the Grey House, killing as many people as he can by proxy, and his insane group of psychotics taking down the nation from the inside out, eventually the Crone has her way, the Goddess shows her strength, and we all sleep better in our beds at night without fear of a terrorist attack.... because who would attack a two-bit, down on it's luck country with nothing to threaten anyone and only a huge supply of natural resources? Why would any sane person invade and occupy a country so messed up it can't defend itself? How many Adolf Bushes could there be in the world?