Central to public ritual was some kind of sacrifice or offering, which a priest or official, rigorously purified for the act, might present on an altar as a way of communicating with a god. Many studies of sacrifice - from the nineteenth-century sources for Freud’s Totem and Taboo to twentieth-century authors like Rene Girard - have focused on the blood and violence intrinsic to animal sacrifice, but this emphasis has tended to distort the meaning of sacrificial rituals in their cultural and performative contexts. Indeed, such violence-oriented interpretations have often served explicitly to frame the Christian myth of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice (cf. discussion in Hammer-ton-Kelly 1987). More recent examinations of the place of sacrifice in public ritual have stressed the meal elements in sacrifice, which appear not only in the choice of offering (edible animals) and the mode of‘‘rendering sacred’’ (through cooking and burning), but also the use of the remains: shared and eaten or, for gods, sprinkled as ashes or blood at a sacred location. Even in their largest scales (such as the continual offering cycle in the Jewish temple of pre-70 Jerusalem: Schurer 1973-87: 2: 295308), sacrifices essentially constituted meals that the human community shared with gods. Divine and human ‘‘portions’’ were strictly designated according to tradition, and those portions meant for humans were subsequently eaten among an authorized group, priesthood, or cult society, often in a state of marked purity. This feast represented not a sharing of the god or his essence but rather with the god, as the blessed remnant of a lord’s meal (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 36-7; Scheid 2003: 79-110).
The omnipresence of sacrifice in religions of the Roman Empire obscures the fact that in most Mediterranean cultures ‘‘sacrifice’’ involved grain, oil, and bread offerings far more than meat. Conversely, ritual slaughters of animals were not necessarily ‘‘sacrifice’’: Plutarch describes annual slaughters of crocodiles in one part of Egypt, conducted in order to expel disorder from the cosmos (de Is. et Os. 50); and evidence from Egyptian animal necropolises suggests that ibises, cats, and other animals were killed simply to produce mummies for pilgrims’ devotions (Charron 1990). The exceedingly rare evidence for human sacrifice in the Roman world points to communities attempting ritual mediation under extraordinary stress (as in a siege). The imagery of human sacrifice, however, which was often coupled with allegations of cannibalism, commonly served to designate the anti-human or subversive; and all manner of subcultures - from the pacifist (Christians) to the foreign (Jews, Egyptian herders) to the weird (Bacchantics, Gnostics) - fell under such accusations over the course oflate antiquity (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 80-2; Scheid 2003: 95; Rives 1995).
Public sacrificial ritual and domestic offerings alike were performed to mark critical events in civic life, to maintain the fortune of city and home, and to celebrate in common at festival occasions. In such cases, the actual killing and eating of an animal would be part of a much more elaborate ritual process. Whereas in Rome sacrificial rites intrinsically involved divination, as haruspices examined the entrails of the offering, and came in imperial times to signify the emperor’s cosmic authority (Gordon 1990b), in Egypt blood sacrifices were far less central in the total theater of festival than, for example, the procession of the divine image beyond the temple doors. Furthermore, the importance of public sacrifices notwithstanding, much of the ‘‘life’’ and meaning of these occasions was borne in music, song, particular festival foods, and pantomimes (MacMullen 1981: 16-42; Lane Fox 1986: 91-2; Frankfurter 1998a: 52-65).
Under the anxious third-century edicts of the emperors Decius and Valerian, sacrifice - in the simple form of pouring libations and sharing in ritually killed and dedicated meat - became the symbol of the orthopraxy without which the empire would descend into chaos and invasion. It is now certain that these edicts were not meant to persecute Christians - who might or might not participate in these rites (Wipszycka 1987) - but rather to establish a common ritual for the sake of social order and cosmic harmony; even priests and priestesses of traditional religions were sometimes called in to perform the required gestures (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 239-43; Knipfing 1923: 364-5; Fredriksen, this volume).
World History
