Sun And Sacrifice Research Paper

Sun and Sacrifice

The sacrificial ceremony of North America's Great Plains Indians, which is performed in veneration of the sun, previously included secondary rites that differed significantly between tribes based on the varying visionary elements that entered into its composition, and even to the extent in certain cases as to make the sun's role practically fade from being the central consideration. However, these intricacies—common in a fractured and permutating world such as that of the American Indians—are not of a nature to nullify the fundamental content of the ritual cycle in consideration. This content has survived all the religiously and politically-driven persecution that the Natives have had to suffer for more than a century.

The Kshatriyas of ancient India were not barred from spiritual realization simply because they were the warrior class and often had to take up the sword. In fact, one of Vedic India's core texts on the realization of the self's connection to the Divine—the Bhagavad-gita—is set on a battlefield, and the conclusion of that text is that it is better to perform one's duties as a warrior all the while recognizing one's spiritual significance rather than renouncing those duties out of some misplaced sentiment based on one's bodily situation. One should understand that the Native American life, much like that of the Vedic Indians, entails a texture and context of items and events, external forms and intrinsic destinies, in which the inner man is radically and transcendentally free while the outer man performs and undergoes the destiny set forth according to the laws of material nature, both of whom comprise the ebb and flow represented in the Sun Dance and, specifically, the sacrifice of the external toward making the sacred internal realization; needless to say, there is within this a fruitful amalgamation of the exaltation for impersonal nature and the affirmation of the sacrificial and heroic

Healings sometimes takes place and protections are granted during the ritual. Extraordinary phenomena such as visions sometimes occur, but, more importantly, a refreshed sensation within proximation of the central tree, a portent of renewal and benign powers. Crucial is this concept of "power" for the Indian: The Universe is a layered structure of powers all flowing from and back into a singular Power that is both underlying and omnipresent, immanent and transcendent, personal and impersonal. For the Plains Indians, the spiritual man is yoked to the Great Spirit in its universal form by the cosmic powers which penetrate his being in purificatory fashion in order to transform his outward constitution so as to facilitate his inward spiritual welfare; he is simultaneously the heroic actor and that which is acted upon by the Great