The best modern students of Greek religion have produced rather different interpretations of the origin, function, and significance of the central act of sacrifice, the kill. Having looked in detail at the ritual, its commentators, and its myths, we are now in a better position to evaluate these views. Appropriately, we will start with the Swiss scholar Karl Meuli (1891-1968), who did most to enhance our understanding of the origin of Greek sacrifice. Meuli was a brilliant folklorist and classicist, who combined profound erudition with bold speculation. In his analysis of Greek sacrifice, he stressed that the Olympic (normative) sacrifice was nothing but ritual slaughter, to which the gods were latecomers. Moreover, this ritual slaughter found its closest analogs in the slaughter and sacrificial ritual of Asian shepherds, who derived their customs straight from their hunting ancestors. Although there is some truth in these propositions, they can not be accepted in their totality.
Let us start with the positive side. Meuli’s investigation has shown that many details, such as the burning of small pieces of meat, the tasting of the innards, and the traditional way of cutting up the victim, are extremely old and must go back to pre-agricultural times. On the other hand, the ‘‘hunting connection’’ does not explain everything. The throwing of grains of corn on the victim evidently does not derive from hunting habits, nor can the burning of the thigh-bones be paralleled in the customs of early hunters; in fact, burnt offering in Greece clearly originated in Syro-Palestine and did not derive from a straightforward tradition that had been maintained by the proto-Greeks. Moreover, unlike real hunting tribes who sometimes returned all the bones to a Lady (or Lord) of the Animals, the Greeks offered only a few bones to the gods. And again unlike hunting tribes, they broke the bones to extract the marrow, as the excavations in Samos, Didyma, and Kalapodi have shown. In this respect they had moved away further from their hunting ancestors than the early Indians and the Jews: the Old Testament forbids the breaking of the bones.
Meuli also neglected some obvious differences between the hunt and sacrifice. Although hunters often follow certain ritual prescriptions, especially when preparing themselves, the hunt itself is a profane activity, unlike sacrifice. It is true that our literary accounts do not insist very much on the connection of sacrifice with specific gods, nor do sacrificial scenes on vases depict gods as often as we would expect, but there can be no doubt about the fact that sacrifice was considered a very holy affair by the Greeks.
Taking Meuli’s views on the continuity between hunt and sacrifice as his point of departure, Walter Burkert (1931- ) has refined and expanded this picture in various
Ways. From his many observations on sacrifice I would like to note here three aspects. First, Burkert stresses the role of ritual in the preservation of hunting rites during the enormous span of time that man (not woman) has been a hunter, and the prestige that hunting and the eating of meat has carried virtually until the present day; he also notes that the excavation of the Anatolian town of Catal Huyiik (6000 BC) enables us to observe the gradual transition from hunt to sacrifice. Secondly, Burkert argues that participation in aggression unites a community; sacrifice thus helps the continuation of society. Thirdly, following Meuli, who stressed that the hunters felt guilty for having killed their game and regularly tried to disclaim responsibility, Burkert has made this feeling of guilt the focus of his sacrificial theory. His star witness is the Dipolieia, an Athenian festival during which an ox was sacrificed because it had tasted from the sacrificial cakes. Subsequently the sacrificial knife was condemned and expelled from the city, but the ox was ritually re-erected, yoked to a plough. In the aetiological myth the killer of the ox eased his conscience by suggesting that everybody should partake in the killing of the sacrificial victim. This ‘‘comedy of innocence,’’ which disclaimed responsibility for the sacrificial killing by putting the blame on the ox itself and the knife, is taken by Burkert to be paradigmatic for every sacrifice: humans experience Angst when actually killing the animals and have feelings of guilt over the blood which they have shed.
Burkert’s observations focus our attention on important aspects of Greek sacrifice, and his views on the role of ritual in the tradition of hunting customs go a long way towards solving the problem of how various ritual details managed to survive the transition from hunting via shepherding into agriculture. We may perhaps add that practices and beliefs of hunters seem to be very persistent. Many of the parallels observed by Meuli derive from modern descriptions of Siberian and Arctic peoples, and clear traces of the belief in a Lady (or Lord) of the Animals, to whom the hunters dedicated the bones of their game, survived in western Europe even into the twentieth century. As the hunt takes place in the wild outside society and civilization, its practices are perhaps less susceptible to quick changes. Moreover, its high prestige, even among pastoralists and farmers, may explain the survival of some of its customs across profound changes in social structures.
On the other hand, Burkert’s observations on the role of bloodshed in the evocation of Angst and guilt cannot be accepted in their totality. The main problem here is the virtually total lack of testimonies of actual fear and guilt among the Greeks. On the contrary, Attic vases constantly connect sacrifice with ideas of festivity, celebrations, and blessings. The ritual of the Dipolieia can not make up for this absence, since it constitutes a very special case. The existence of a month named Bouphonion, ‘‘Ox-Killing,’’ on Euboea, its colonies, and adjacent islands suggests a ritual of great antiquity but limited circulation. In its attested form, however, the ritual is actually rather late, since it presupposes the developed Attic rules of justice. Moreover, as the ritual shows, the protagonist of the sacrificial happening was a plough-ox, which it was a crime to kill at Athens. Consequently, we should not generalize from this particular sacrificial ritual to a general view of killing in Greek sacrifice.
Finally, in explicit opposition to Meuli and Burkert, Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914- ) has argued two important points. First, Greek sacrificial rites should not be compared with hunting rituals but resituated within their proper religious, Greek system and, second, the killing of the victim is organized in such a way that it is unequivocally distinguished from murder and violence seems excluded. Regarding the first point,
Vernant and his pupils have indeed successfully analyzed the ideological presuppositions of Greek sacrifice, in particular its political significance as manifested by the Orphics’ and Pythagoreans’ refusal of sacrifice, that is to say, by groups which operated in clear opposition to the values of the polis. Vernant’s equipe has also succeeded in bringing out the importance of studying the representations of sacrifice on Greek vases for a more profound understanding of its significance.
Much less persuasive is Vernant’s attack on Burkert’s interpretation of the kill and its corresponding unease as the center of gravity of sacrifice. He notes himself that rituals, myths, and representations are all painfully careful in avoiding any reference to the actual killing of the sacrificial victim (cf. Chapter 26 in this volume). In this way the Greeks tried to exclude the elements of violence and sauvagerie from their sacrifice in order to differentiate it from murder. His main arguments for this thesis are twofold. First, if the Greeks really felt uneasy about animal sacrifice, they should have also objected to the representation of human sacrifice. But when in archaic Greek vase-painting Polyxena is killed over the altar, we see her blood spurting, although we never see that of cows or sheep. Second, Vernant states that he refuses to impose a meaning on sacrifice different from the one explicitly given by the Greeks. Both these arguments are hardly convincing. Where would social anthropology or sociology be if they accepted only meanings explicitly mentioned by societies? But Vernant’s first argument is hardly persuasive either. Representations of human sacrifice concern only mythological figures and are meant to suggest a monstrous offering, not a pleasing gift.
World History
