Challenge 905 Response

The Wishing Ceremony

with Danko Antolovic and Miriam E. Neiberg

“The Wishing Ceremony” appears in issue 905.

Excerpts from Challenge 905:

The membership of the cult is described in some detail. To what effect? What does the reader learn about these people?

Monotheism and equal justice are among the civilization advances made by Judaism. What civilization advance is made in the parable of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22:1-18)?

[Danko Antolovic] Miriam Neiberg’s latest story, "The Wishing Ceremony" describes very insightfully that core of Unheimlichkeit which I always suspect lies hidden in closely-knit, exclusive religious communities, regardless of the image of wholesome friendliness they often project.

(Sorry, I could never decide on an English word that conveys quite the same meaning.)

And that may also be my reply to Challenge 905: the human sacrifice does not have to be taken literally here; it is a stand-in for the guilty conscience of cults and for the insidious harm they cause to their members' psyche.

[Miriam E. Neiberg] You got it! You understood what I was trying to convey.

The child sacrifice was actually not the main point of the story. It was an end result of so much more, and you got to the heart of the message of the story.

There is a time in a person’s life (I’m having a birthday next week so I might be a little over dramatic, please forgive me) when one stops and reviews their actions to see if they are on the right track.

Evidently, these people are so blinded that they are willing to give up their most precious gift to stand by their beliefs. What might we be doing in the name of something we hold evident and true that might be construed as wrong.

[Don Webb] The adjective unheimlich does cover a lot of semantic territory; its meaning can range from “odd” to “spooky.”

Aside from its peculiar rite, the messenger-child cult looks quite normal. That’s why many of its members are described in some detail; readers are likely to find themselves reflected somewhere among them.

This cult’s core belief is unheimlich: infant sacrifice can convey the members’ wishes to their deity in the expectation that the wishes will be heard and fulfilled. Basically, these people have a kind of cargo cult, and its deity is an inverse Santa Claus who eats babies.

In the Biblical story, Abraham does everything he’s told to do, and that includes heeding the angel’s message to substitute animals for humans in sacrificial rituals. “The Wishing Ceremony” depicts an alternate modern world in which civilization has not advanced beyond human sacrifice.

Miriam and Danko are right: what other beliefs might we have that we think are logical but are actually no more than superstitions? And which are not merely “odd” but downright harmful?

But meanwhile, happy birthday, Miriam!