And One Visitor Said, “I Can See the Broken Eggs. Where’s the Omelet?”

“Caiaphas was invoking a mechanism for preserving culture that is as old as culture itself. Whether it is the Assyro-Babylonian myth declaring that Marduk created the world by killing the monster Tiamat; or the Teutonic myth telling how Odin formed the world by raising the corpse of Ymir from the sea of Ymir’s own blood; or Pope Urban II declaring that God willed the first Crusade; or Thomas Jefferson saying that the tree of liberty must be periodically watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants; or Lenin saying you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs — cultures have forever commemorated some form of sacred violence at their origins and considered it a sacred duty to reenact it in times of crisis” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, pp. 6-7).