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     Catherine Bell:  "Among the many complex subsystems of cosmic exchange that are woven together in the potlatch, one of the most central is human-animal reciprocity.  The potlatch dancers perform the mythical events by which a lineage ancestor acquired special titles, powers, and favors, and from a supernatural animal donor, notably the ability to hunt that animal successfully. 

     “In return, the ancestor and the descendants who inherit the title and powers are obligated to perform the rituals in which the supernatural animal is continually reincarnated.  The animal flesh is eaten at the potlatch and the skins that are distributed testify to the death of the "form" of the animal and hence the release of its soul for reincarnation.  Thus the potlatch publicly witnesses to the fact that the sponsor has inherited key powers that have enabled him to acquire wealth but also to oblige him to sacrifice it. 

     “Likewise, the animal spirit who sacrifices its animal flesh and skin so that the human lineage may live and prosper counts on the sponsored potlatch as a ritual death and funeral that facilitate its reincarnation.  The ritual reinvokes the mythic human-divine interdependence, transmits it to new generations, and fulfills the obligations inherent in it."

       from:  Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions  1997   p:122

     ... Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Mahalo’s Dangerous Hunts together in one montage?  Why?  I do so in order to both rend and render how our digital representations (of animals, et al.) exclude one essential ingredient: instilled spirit, or put another way, distance and aura. 

     For the sin of our image making extends here, in vulgar reproducibility and disposability -- not in each image’s newness, ubiquity, profitability, interpretability, or even in their two and three dimensional fidelity and uniqueness.  Our images are created already dead -- already sucked of expectation.  This holds true for most every image created throughout our digital culture today. 

     Our technological visualizations are but graven images incapable of surviving physical death, non-reciprocal apparitions ascribing physicality to God yet unworthy to facilitate reincarnation.  Today, our disposable digital images are false idols: Golden Calves.  And as a consequence of our vulgar image tools and our sinful image making, we idolaters are likewise dead, our ancestors forsaken, and our descendants eternally doomed.

             ...where animism once spiritualized objects,
             industrialized technologies objectify all spirit.