Station IV – The Sacrifice Unmasked That Laughs
After Babylon: disenchantment, silence, and the radical refusal of redemption
After the fall of Babylon, no new temple rises.
What remains is a desert.
Not a desert of trial or purification, but a post-theological desert: a place where the symbols of religious power no longer work. Here worship is not overthrown—it is simply abandoned. It no longer convinces.
Station IV marks the point of maximum disenchantment in the journey.
This is where the foundational myth of sacred power collapses:
suffer now to be saved later.
At the heart of this station stand two ancient Buddhist tales, Jātaka 18 and 19, which expose the sacrificial logic without polemic.
In the Matakabhatta-Jātaka, a goat destined for sacrifice laughs and
weeps.
It laughs because it knows the karmic cycle is ending.
It weeps because its death will be called “salvation.”
In the Āyācitabhatta-Jātaka, a sacrifice offered to escape a vow reveals its emptiness: offering something to “be released” is not liberation, but the continuation of debt.
No blood liberates.
No vow convinces the Absolute.
Negative theology passes through this station as radical silence:
God does not reject sacrifices because none are desired.
None are desired because nothing is wanted.
Cioran expressed this with ruthless clarity:
every promised redemption is cruelty postponed.
The image accompanying this station shows what remains once sacrifice is
disarmed:
ruins without triumph, a goat no longer a victim, a knife surviving only as a
reflection in water. The wanderer offers nothing, asks nothing, expects
nothing.
The threshold of Station IV is stark:
To renounce redemption.
Not out of despair.
Not out of nihilism.
But because the need to be saved collapses along with the myth that sustained
it.
No new faith is born here.
Only a posture:
to live without sacrificing anyone—
not even oneself.
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