As if once isn’t enough, everyone wants to be ‘born again.’ At first glance you might think this desire belongs to conservatives in America who take a phrase from the Bible quite literally. They conveniently forget that those words, as they appear in the Gospels, were directed at people who were already ‘born’ and did not believe in Christ when he preached. As they saw and heard him preach, they decided to believe. That makes the metaphoric phrase ‘born again’ rather poetically apt.

Today, however, the phrase is rather daft. They shun the old order and follow a new one. What does that mean? Simply put, priests are no longer enough: they need priest/prophet to guide them to the New Jerusalem on an expressway to Heaven.

On this side of the divide, we have our own ‘born agains.’ The principle is the same: My new way is the only way and if you disagree you are an enemy for life. It is amazing how quaint we become when we think we have discovered the ‘Truth’!

 Maybe I am old fashioned, but I wonder why people are so adamant about being born again when we haven’t died yet. I understand the metaphor but the cloth does not seem to fit the pattern –at least linguistically. The big question is why do we do this? My answer is that we are simply bored. Our boredom is more intense at a primitive and psychologically unhinged level. On the other hand, those who exploit this operate on the more mundane level wanting nothing more than money and power.

How do we fall for it and why? To answer this question (or at least attempt to do so) I went delving into books. I found this lovely story from the books that record our madness and come under the discipline called History. Luckily enough, it comes from pagan Rome and therefore should not offend any modern ‘born again’ in any ‘modern’ religion.

During the reign of the Emperor Claudius, the Romans were bored. Obviously there was a shortage of gladiatorial blood being spilled for plebian pleasure. Between jugs of wine, Claudius decided to introduce a new religion and ask his citizens to be ‘born again’ into it. He introduced what came to be known as the worship of the sacred tree.

Presentation is everything and the Romans understood that. Quality on the other hand, or even veracity, did not mean much then and does not mean much today. So Claudius, with the skills of a Hollywood special effects technician, sent his minions to begin the gestation of this new religion.

On March 22^nd (significant date) a pine tree was cut from a wood nearby. They chopped a huge trunk and swathed it like a corpse with woolen bands and decorated it with wreaths of violets and treated it as an important divinity. On March 23^rd the ceremonies began with the deafening blows of trumpets and the internment of the ‘sacred tree’ in the sanctuary of goddess Cybele. On March 24^th, the high priest initiated what was to be known as the ‘day of blood.’ He slashed his arms and offered the gushing blood to this ‘sacred’ tree. Not known for discerning judgment, the crowd began to follow his example egged on by frenzied music and raucous crowd behavior.

Since crowds are known to go their own way after being ‘initiated’ by mad priests into something, some began to castrate themselves and wrap the severed parts in cloth and offer it to the tree trunk. The priest helped make sense of it all by declaring that the severed trunk would come to life (literally resurrected) if all the rituals were followed accurately.  Now we have the cause long after the effect –a rather silly and redundant technique known to humans from the year dot.

No resurrection would be worth its salt without a feast. So on 25^th March the celebrations began. It was more like a carnival and became know as the feast of joy –Hilaria in Latin. The end of the festival came on the day of sacrifice when a bull was slaughtered over a pit covered with wooden grating. People walked into the pit and got drenched by the bull’s blood and as one historian put it, the man ‘emerged from the pit drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows as one who had been born again to eternal life.’

Claudius was so successful in his scheme that the cult persisted till the official adoption of Christianity as the state religion by Constantine some three hundred years later. You might want to know that the goddess (usually Cybele or Attis) who accompanied this new tree trunk god had a black stone face that was washed in the river before the festivities began.

I leave the reader to enjoy and conjure what he or she might like from this story. To me, however, the writing is on the wall. Or shall we say carved in wood!