ABSTRACT
The precipitous increase in officially sanctioned mass death since the fourteenth century is, on some level, no more than circumstantial evidence of the isolation of abstract value from its material body. Still, the unanticipated spike in state sanctioned mass death, which first appeared in Western Europe and from there spread throughout the rest of the colonized world, has turned out to be statistically significant. The sadly familiar pattern it has left on the face of the globe calls into question our inclination to feel that contemporary attitudes towards the body along with the contemporary religious dispositions upon which these attitudes are often based are more healthy, wholesome and lifeaffirming than their traditional and ancient counterparts. Our inclination to view the pre-modern world as more violent, war-like and dangerous, on the one hand, or more spiritual, otherworldly and sheltered on the other is not borne out by the historical record. Rather, it would appear that traditional societies have by and large tended to be less violent and much more this-worldly than our own. Of course, in the absence of modern science, social actors in traditional societies interpreted their physical environments differently than we now do, searching and finding in them not only ample means for physical sustenance, but also evidence of divine guidance and comfort. Yet, in so far as they viewed the bodies that occupied their worlds, including their own bodies, as vessels filled with spiritual content and vehicles bearing divine gifts and information, traditional social actors were slow to view these bodies as mere instrumentalities whose consumption or destruction were worth the sacrifice.
