Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One 1.2. Book 1: A Thermodynamic Genealogy of Primitive Religions Chapter 7: Greek religion ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence C. Chin. All rights reserved.

Introduction: problems in the contemporary study of Greek religion

To begin with, any study of Greek religion today can no longer contain references to the Doric invasion or some "Wanderungen der hellenischen Staemme." See, for this, Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and Language (1987). Consequently, we will no longer accept some such opinion as that of Nilson who "sees in Greek religion a successful union between the pre-Hellenic religion of the indigenous population and the cults and beliefs brought in by the Greeks when they arrive in Greece during the second millennium B.C.E." (Zaidman and Pantel, La religion grecque, Paris, Armand Colin, 1989, p. 6) The Greek religion of the classical and the archaic period is an indigenous development in Greece. With regard to its origin and evolution see for example B. C. Dietrich's The Origins of Greek Religion (1974; Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter) where he finds in the Minoan religion borrowings from Anatolia, discovers continuity between it and the Mycenaean religion, and finally claims the local survival of cults from the Mycenaean substratum during the "Dark Ages" is what lays the basis for the Greek religion of the archaic period (p. 5).

While it is probably no longer difficult today to convince someone of the invalidity of the "Aryan invasion" scenario, which was certainly produced more by the ideology accompanying European imperialism during the nineteenth century than by any scientific discoveries, the different cultural framework of the contemporary West leads us to some new pre-conceptions which again prevent a proper understanding of Greek religion in its own terms without the imposition of our own contemporary concerns. In the preceding we have spoken of the erroneous understanding of (intraworld) religion by the Anglophonic "sociologists of religion" (religion as a symbolic system of worldview integrating society) and of Girard with the ensuing generative anthropological approach. The French may be destroying the understanding of religion in a fancier way than the Americans, but they are destroying it nonetheless. Hence here in the case of Greek religion we will wrestle with the problems of the French school.

Some confusions can be spared if we simply take into account the structure of the evolution of religions. In the beginning of their study of Greek religion, Zaidman and Pantel ask us to throw away our familiar "intellectual categories." (Ibid., p. 5)¹ This purge will then allow us to understand Greek religion as "a symbolic system with its own coherence" (p. 6), i.e. as a system closed in upon itself which could never be understood as just one more manifestation of whatever universal structure of human religiousness. The denial of any such universal structure and the consequent attempt to close Hellenic religiosity upon itself have become standard operation since the beginning of the twentieth century, e.g. already seen expressed in Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's classic Der Glaube der Hellenen.² The French "advancement" from this is getting increasingly symbolic with Greek religion, treating it as a closed system of significations. The dépassement of modernity and the transition to postmodernity (consumerism and the information age) have produced different ideological concerns in the Francophonic world than in the Anglophonic world: the French obsession with the reduction of culture to a closed system of signs results from the application of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand Saussure and Roman Jakobson to the study of culture, and is manifested alike in structural anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), in psychoanalysis (Lacan), then in the semiotics of culture; it has penetrated as well the French study of religions and now their classical studies. This is the case with the sociologico-symbolic approach of the earlier Hubert and Mauss with regard to sacrifice, then with the structural approach of Lévi-Strauss in the same matter, and now with Jean-Pierre Vernant or the French school of Greek religion in general. As Vernant answers the question, "What is a religion?"

In this way Vernant's view does not differ in substance, but only in surface schema (e.g. structural linguistics), from Robert Bellah's "cybernetic model" or Peter Berger's nomos model or Berger-Luckmann's socio-symbolic model (The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)... The only "reasonable" approach a bunch of atheists can come up with when studying religion. Modern "religious studies" thus degenerates into a dispostif reflecting and reinforcing the modern, social contract-based, democratic organization: not the study of past religions for its own sake. To return to Zaidman and Pantel, they justify the "purge of prejudices" they demand by emphasizing on the "radical difference" between the faith of the West (i.e. Christianity) and the belief of Hellas:

First of all this comparison only shows that the Greek religion is intraworld, pre-salvational, or "cosmological", in contrast to Christianity, which is salvational, "transcendental," and of the historical (i.e. first) mode. Second of all the authors compare a traditional religion with a modern one subsisting in the context of a secular society. Such improper comparison, born out of a non-comprehension of the nature and purpose of religion, does not invite us to consider Greek religion as an isolated system of significations incomprehensible except in terms of itself, but, on the contrary, to compare it with other typical intraworld religions. As said, the purpose of these is to maintain worldly orders (the order of society and of the cosmos) by regularly engaging with the sacred source, drawing from it as from a pool of energy (power) the energy the human order needs to maintain itself, and replenishing it afterwards. Furthermore, our approach in this first part of our study is phenomenological, and so, in the words of Jean Rudhardt:

The first step is then the identification of the experience, vécu, of the sacred, order, and disorder, or energy, i.e. power, which can maintain order against its otherwise necessary tendency to fall into disorder. Consider Rudhardt's identification of the several words in Greek that are specifically related to "energy" (which he calls puissance) and "order":

Here we see the Greek equivalents of mana. We must, as always, interpret the cultic aspect of the Greek intraworld religiosity which departs from this primordial experience of the sacred as first and foremost an ergonic system of gestures which aim to maintain worldly order through the release of, and the harmonization with, the sacred energy, and not as some sort of system of significations (along the line of semiotics) or of communication. This latter symbolic approach in fact only works roughly with certain definite portions of the intraworld religiosity, such as initiation rites and divination, etc. While everyone says that the best and only way to understand the religiosity of the ancients is to try to get into their perspective and see the world as they see it -- the foundation of our cognitive-phenomenological approach, but with the additional explicit requirement to understand why they see the world as they see it -- each always ends up distorting it into a reflection of modern ideology and mentality.⁶

The representation of divinity in Greek religion

Of the three principal modes of religious expression (récits/ représentations, règles, rites) we are only going to mention briefly the peculiarity of Greek religion in regard to the first two, but devote the major rest of our analysis to the ergonic rituals of the Greeks especially in their sacrificial form. This is because we have nothing particular to contest the established understanding with regard to the Greek representation of divinity and their use of taboos.

The Greeks are probably the most advanced among all the intraworld religious cultures in the matter of the representation of the divine. The highly realistic statues which represent their gods in human form do not so much signify an anthropomorphism as demonstrate the theoretical (in its original sense: “seeing”) nature of Greek consciousness, i.e. their “ability [‘gift’] to see plastically; it suffices for us to simply look at these sculptures and figures in marble and in stone, in order to experience through these the presence of the infinite and of the divine proceeding toward us.” (Marcel Detienne, “Au commencement était le corps du dieu”, Préface to his translation, Les dieux de la Grèce, p. 16; “… don de voir plastiquement, et les figures qu’il sculpte dans la pierre et le marbre, il nous suffit encore de les regarder pour éprouver à travers elles la présence de l’infini et du divin cheminant au devant des hommes.”) We must however note that this gift of the Greeks did not completely flourish until the Hellenistic period (i.e. Alexander and onwards); during the archaic period the Greeks were merely starting to develop a representational technique of the divine that was to be proper to them. Moreover, we must remind ourselves that the temples (naos) among the archaic and classical Greeks do not serve ritual functions. “Rituals take place most often outside the temple and not in its interior” (Zaidman and Pantel, p. 38). The function of the Greek temple is rather “to store inside the statue or statues of cult, and eventually all the goods belonging to the divinity, given in offering.” (Ibid.)

But what purpose do these statues of gods in the temples serve? "Leur rôle n’était pas de servir au cours de rituels mais de rappeler les attributs de la divinité, son histoire ainsi que celle des divinités qui lui étaient associées. L’espace des frontons permettait de larges compositions reprenant souvent des éléments du panthéon, les métopes et les frises offraient tous les épisodes de la vie des dieux aussi bien leurs luttes contre les Titans que leurs banquets et leurs querelles intestines." That is to say, the representation of gods among the Greeks is first of all for the sake of the transmission of myths. "Partout où se portaient les yeux, les images des dieux rappelaient aux hommes, sous des formes en apparence familière, l’extraordinaire distance entre la statut divin et la condition humaine." (Ibid., p. 46.) All these realistic, "humanistic" representations of gods serve therefore to teach us about the very structure of the cosmos stratified as divine and human. In order to prosper within the cosmos, human beings must comport themselves correctly in relation with the cosmos, i.e. in view of this structure.

"Rules" (règles)

Having a correct relationship with the cosmos in view of its structure means performing cults at the right, determined time (sacred time: positive aspect) and not violating taboos during the time outside rituals (profane time: negative aspect). An example of Greek taboo may be given in relation to the sanctuaries:

Actions which violate taboos perturb the very structure of the cosmos which then degenerates into disorder.

The structure of Greek sacrificial cult

As for the blood sacrifice of the Greeks, it is generally known, as we have seen, to be composed of two formulas, thusia and enagizein (or sphattein). These two different types of sacrifice, as said, are associated with the different species of "spirits" which require sacrifice and which Jean-Pierre Vernant (in "Greek religion," Encycl. of Rel., p. 106 - 7) has identified as three in number:

• The ordinary dead: to whom corresponds enagizein/ sphattein.
• The dead heroes ("ancestors"): also enagizein/ sphattein (hence enagizein is considered "chthonic").
• The Olympians (gods properly speaking): thusia.

Following the "logic of sacrifice" that we've adopted from Nancy Jay, thusia would be a communion sacrifice mixed with expiatory elements, i.e. the undifferentiated type, whereas enagizein/ sphattein would be purely expiatory. The peculiarity of the Greeks would then consist in this that they differentiate very consciously within the expiatory function the positive and the negative aspect: the positive aspect is the feeding of the spirits or gods in order to maintain or renew their order, i.e. the order of the cosmos; it is this positive aspect of expiation (endergony) which is mixed up in thusia with the communion function (exergony) and which is also found more or less in hero cults. The negative aspect is the aforementioned "membrane building," the offering of food to the spirits of the ordinary dead which have turned dangerous in order that they "stay in their place," a bit like throwing a chunk of meat to a menacing guard dog to calm it, to fix it in place so that it wouldn't come bite oneself. The third type of (perhaps erroneously so-called) expiation, the defecatory type ("scapegoating"), is also found among the Greeks, as we shall see. It is to be remembered that although we concentrate here on blood sacrifices, it is irrelevant to the meaning of endergony whether the offering (the energy deposited) consists in meat (hence involving death), vegetation, or even objects. People go to the temple and offer to the Olympians all kinds of valuables that fill up the place, "from the most modest vases to booty collected during the course of an expedition conducted by the city. A winning athlete gives his crown, the sick a representation of the part of his body which has been cured, the city its monument," so much so that often these over-abundant offerings have to be buried and later on discovered by archaeologists.⁷

We'll later go into the relationship, in the Greek case, between the primordial human experience of the sacred as the energetic substratum of being and the primordial meaning of sacrifice as alimentary (ergonic). For now simply guard against confusing the alimentary sense with the communicative sense such as for instance found in divinatory sacrifice, but more importantly with the sense of alliance which an alimentary ritual may acquire. The case of libation among the Greeks may offer a contrast between the two senses of alimentation and alliance. Libation "inaugurates a meal, a propitiatory gesture which has the same meaning as the offering of the first fruit."⁸ As a first-fruit offering, libation is performed in its alimentary sense of replenishing the god/ cosmos lest it run out (c.f. the rites of Anthesteria below). But consider the scene of the departure of the "hoplites":

Compare Abraham's use of karat berith (later). Always implicit in communion sacrifice's ergonic function of unification of the social group (renewal of its order) is this alliance-forming.

Let's now return to thusia. As said, the Greeks do not enter into temples to make offering to gods, but they do it on an altar outside (bomos). "Around it and upon it was performed the central rite of the Greek religion, the burnt offering called (thusia)…" which is thus the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew holocaust. Vernant continues his description:

Thusia is thus not only the undifferentiated type (one gives back to the gods such specific parts of the animals as fat and bones as holocaust [expiation as positive] and then consumes the rest [communion]). Note also that the non-ergonic, divinatory aspect is also present in it (the examination of the entrails before the ergonic offering). In enagizein, however, one gives the entire animal away to the spirits (of the dead) in holocaust:

Rudhardt cites (ibid., p. 250) many classical and Hellenistic authors' testimony concerning this fundamental division in Greek sacrifice between thusia and enagizein:

Even after citing all these attesting to the distinction between positive expiation (in thusia) and negative expiation (in enagizein), Rudhardt however concludes that "[c]tte tendance ne conduit pas à distinguer un rituel apotropaïque [enagizein] et un rituel propitiatoire [thusia]." (Ibid., p. 252.) Such blatant attempt on his part to ignore the interpretations of the natives and to impose his own preconceived schema is due to his subscription beforehand to the interpretation of sacrifice as "communicative" only (as already indicated), by which he can no longer understand the original ergonic meaning in the act of offering.

The meaning of Greek sacrifice

While everyone agrees that the sociological function of sacrifice is to unify the participants in a community -- and this is why the function of "alliance" is always present in a communion or undifferentiated type next to the alimentary function, and why thusia may be regarded as the central component of the Greek civic religion -- we here specifically disagree with the Paris school by denying their interpretation of sacrifice as "communicative": sacrifice expresses "at once the thread which welds together the citizens and their communication with the divine."⁹ Such interpretation, after all, seems only applicable to thusia, although Rudhardt for the sake of consistency attempts to extend it to enagizein as well by interpreting offerings for the ordinary dead as also communicative,¹⁰ and in the process he has to even deny that the common Greeks actually fear "ghosts." Quite untenable.

It has been too often for contemporary researchers of religion to ignore the explanations the sacrificial natives themselves give of their rituals, as has just been seen with Rudhardt, but we certainly no longer subscribe to such bad habits. Plato, for example, defines thusia (expiation or endergony in the positive sense) in the most common sense way as "gifts for the gods" (To quein dwreisqai esti toiV qeoiV; cited by Rudhardt, ibid., p. 250). Now we have seen that universally humans have taken this "gift to the gods" to be "food for them". The Greeks thus consider their sacrificial cult (thusia) as qerapeia qewn, "the care of the gods." This is no different than the care of the dead ancestors, and, again, all early humans, the Greeks not excluded, believe that there is a soul which survives death (and needs to be nourished) because of their conception of life as a function of the animation of the body by a soul which is just breath. We have already mentioned some examples from classical Greek for this instance, but Rudhardt offers some more:

That is to say the assimilation of the breath-soul of the dead to the atmosphere, to the very structure of the cosmos in order to govern it. The memory of the primordial experience of the soul as breath-air which returns to the atmosphere upon the death of the body is still present in these writers of otherwise late date, already under the influence of the Presocratic (especially Ionian) pantheists. In the beginning of the Greek (religious) experience these souls must have similarly been thought to need periodic replenishment by the energy or power released from food in order that the order of the cosmos may not "run down." This is the positive sense of expiation that is found mixed up with the communion function in thusia. That the Greeks also originally experience food (whether as animals or as plants) as produced by the atmosphere, as the materialization of this invisible "sacred" or energetic substratum of being, and as thus sacred in this sense, can be attested to, as said, in the original meaning of the word nomos (as "food"), whose derivative ta nomizomena, as Rudhardt himself notes, "applies to sacrifice [thuein], to prayers, to chants and to dances, and to purification just as to the whole of what are due to the gods. It is the closest Greek expression to our word 'rite.'"¹¹ Recall, again, the various examples from diverse cultures of the word "sacred" meaning "energy" or "food" and of the word "sacrifice" meaning "god." The use of food during sacrifice -- whether to renew the order of society or of the cosmos -- risks exhausting (the order of) the atmosphere which is supposedly renewed by the very food that it itself has produced. Order of the cosmos being exhausted, the spirits of the dead (or of ancestors) which embody it thus become dangerous, the forces of disorder, against which the human group thinks it possible to defend itself -- avoiding reaching equilibrium with them -- by, still, throwing energy-food at them. This is the negative sense of expiation found in enagizein for the chthonic spirits. Within the positive sense there can be then found the seeds for an ordinary cult of the ancestors, who may furthermore be hypostatized as gods¹², and within the negative, the constitution of an ordinary (apotropaic) rite of aversion vis-à-vis the demonic phantoms. For the Greeks even the funeral rites have the function of "opening up for the dead the access to the underworld in order to free the living of their presence" (ibid., p. 114), that is, of apotropaisis (aversion). When the two senses are still undifferentiated therein probably lies the original meaning of the Greek word daimon, although it tends to veer toward the negative side. That what has just been described, especially negative expiation, lies also at the foundation of Greek religiosity, i.e. that the same feeling as among the Chinese -- that the dead ancestor, if unfed, will "eat you" or otherwise descend and work vengeance among his children -- constitutes also the core of Greek religiosity at its bottommost layer is attested to by another of their words for religion, deisidaimonia, literally "fear of ghosts". Continuing evolving in meaning, "[b]y the time of Theophrastos o deisidaimwn is frankly in our sense 'the superstitious man'" (J. Harrison, Prolegomena to the studies of Greek Religion, 1922, Cambridge, 3rd ed., p. 4). Plutarch's critique of the unseemly character of the by-now superstition of the common people concerning gods -- "he wants to treat the gods and regard them as he himself would be treated and regarded, as kindly civilized men" (p. 5) -- confirms again the Greek sharing of the universal structure of primitive religiosity we have isolated: "if you invite friends to dinner and leave out Plutarch [i.e. forget to feed the gods], or if you are busy and omit to call on him... he will fasten on you and bite you, or he will catch your child and beat him, or turn his beast loose into your crops and spoil your harvest." (Cited by Harrison, p. 5.)

Expiation in the negative sense is thus do ut abeas, as Harrison common-sensely points out. Expiation in the positive sense but reversed in temporal causal sequence, depositing energy first in the cosmos (with gods) and withdrawing the fruits later on, such as Agamemnon's sacrifice to Zeus to ensure the success of the upcoming battle, is do ut des (or rather, do ut possis dare) (p. 11). Outside its regular, i.e. periodic, calendrical application (below) thusia, or expiation in the positive sense, is more frequently performed after some enterprise to celebrate its success (Rudhardt, ibid., p. 255 - 6); the ergonic meaning of this thanksgiving function of positive expiation (caristhrion), as said, lies in the understanding that the god-cosmos has quite exhausted itself in producing the fruits desired and must thus be replenished.

Communion sacrifice, the other side of thusia, is "eating god" (the sacred manifesting itself as food) and expiation in the positive or rather undifferentiated sense, "god eating god." (Recall the Egyptian portrayal of gods eating maat and the frequent identity between "god" and "sacrifice", or between "ancestor," "sacrifice," and "sacrificing to ancestors" in the Chinese ideogram Di, and we'll see how the forgetfulness of this primordial experience in favour of some "modern" meaning causes the French school -- such as Vernant -- to deny that Greeks "eat god.") The primitive mind of course is only implicitly aware of the thermodynamic impossibility of the circularity of expiation (which rather works like a perpetual motion machine). The Greeks, by isolating expiation of the positive sense within thusia and that of the negative sense within enagizein, and associating the former with heaven and the latter with earth,¹³ have done no more than explicitly distinguish between the two perspectives on the replenishment of the cosmos, or the two ways of looking at it, and also between the two moods respectively associated with the two perspectives. Hence, as Nancy Jay heeds us, we would do better by shifting our attention from the objects of the cult to the subjects doing the cult.

On the other hand, the Greeks never seem to have separated the communion from the positive expiatory function. The Homeric sacrifice is a simple undifferentiated form and seems to serve as the direct precursor of thusia, i.e. the latter is just the more expanded form of the former. "The verb thuein, not that frequently employed in Homer, does not designate complete sacrifices [i.e. the expanded sacrifices of the city]; it means [simply] a little piece of offering which accompanies any meals and which one takes out of, it seems, the dishes and throws into the fire."¹⁴ The most typical firstlings offering. The Homeric sacrificial rite on the community level, as Rudhardt has described it (p. 254), is more or less the same as the later developed form of thusia: the rather lowly part of the flesh of the sacrificial animal is burnt back to the ouranian gods, and the rest, especially the entrails (splagcna), eaten by the community as a unit (together) in order to renew the order -- i.e. unity -- of the group. Noteworthy is that women are present here to utter ritual shouts when the animal, its throat cut, falls. The example Rudhardt offers of the Pylians¹⁵ demonstrates the same power of unification mentioned earlier that the participation in a common substance (the eating of the sacrificial animal) can effect. The consumption of splagcna is communion, and before this one must first give some back to the gods -- accompanied by a libation -- as expiation to replenish them. (C.f. the example Rudhardt [p. 255] gives of Eumaeus' sacrifice of a pig to restore Ulysse.)

The Greek sacrificial cult is effected within their year-long, seasonally regulated cult calendar (below) as elsewhere. Jane Harrison would like to see within these seasonal festivals a lowest stratum, and since this lowest stratum is characterized by negative expiation of the enagizein type she considers this the most primitive basis of Hellenic religion. Although it is probably incorrect to consider any temporal or even logical priority of negative expiation over the positive (such as the firstlings offering in the Homeric thuein) insofar as we have shown that both are co-primordial, just different perspectives on the same need to replenish the external environment, her thinking seems to us to contain some grain of truth in that the lower stratum of the festivals all involves the placation (negative expiation) of ghosts of the dead (or the underworld deities ruling over them) and -- since according to our framework the most primordial experience of the sacred (as "energy") around which religious rites are constituted relates to the experience of the souls of the dead -- therefore constitutes what is universal across humanity but specifically manifested among the Greeks, i.e. what the Greeks most conspicuously have in common with other peoples at their stage of development (pre-salvational, intraworld). The congruence between the Greek and the Chinese superstition already noted, consider now as she does, for example, the three-day festival of Anthesteria (supposedly a wine festival for Dionysos) where all are drunken (an orgy fair, so to speak) and which begins on the 11th day of the month Anthesterion. On the first day, the Pithoigia (jar-opening), the time when the wine in the buried jar (pithoi) has fermented and is ready for drinking, occurs the offering of the first fruit, i.e. of libation before people can drink the new wine. This follows our formula of the replenishment of the cosmos after its exhaustion in the production of fruits (in this case, the fermentation of wine). Note that in this case the underworld ghosts of the dead, governing the earth, are thought to be responsible for (i.e. performing) the fermentation. But among the Boeotians, for example, "the day was called the day of the Good [Ghost], the Agathos Daimon, and to him they made offerings. The month itself was known as Prostaterios." (Plutarch, Q. Symp. VIII. 3, cited by Harrison, p. 33) It is still the ghosts of the dead, having yet been hypostatized into gods, who govern the atmospheric cosmos (or rather the underworld) and produce the fruits: the first fruits given back to the underworld (thanksgiving) before accepting its gifts therefore is in fact replenishment. The offering is in fact positive expiation. On the second day, the Choes (Pitchers), the wife of the king gets wedded to Dionysos, whose temple is opened on that day alone of the whole year. Note the gloomy signs of the supposed orgy which betray its ghost-placation origin, such as the demand that everyone drink in silence and in isolation. On the third day, the Chytroi (Pots), when, the Pot Contest held (Cutrinoi: "in which the Comoi [Comic Revelers] compete for the honor of performing at the City Dionysia next month", The Anthesteria of Apollonius Sophistes), the ghosts who have been roaming among the living and participating in the fun as well are, having been so honored, asked to return to the underworld, as Suidas has preserved for us:

When the orgy, i.e. the chaos, disordered, or equilibrium state, is over, the social organism and the cosmos need to re-establish their respective order and society in particular has to re-assert its sharp boundary against the external disordered state (low-entropy reestablished in the midst of high-entropy). Recall Chris Knight's primordial cycle of work and joy (orgy). The social organism declines periodically back to the disordered, equilibrium state, where the division of labour blurs and work stops, and the cosmos similarly degenerates to distinction-less equilibrium after exhaustion in producing the fruits so that the distinction between the dead and the living disappears together with the cessation of the work of the spirits in running the cosmos to so produce ("At this time of year the world... lies open (Patet Mundus, as they say in Latin), and Varro wrote, 'When the world lies open, it is as though the gates of the sad underworld gods are open.'") -- this downhill-running not only happens as a matter of the arrow of time in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, but also as desired. Just as a person who works hard all this time to produce -- and the hunter who hunts hard in Chris Knight's scenario -- has been "concentrating" too long, is now tired, and needs to "relax" and "rewind," i.e. to loosen the concentration of order, so the cosmos and society are relaxing during the equilibrium state of festivals. But from this equilibrium state differentiated order is to re-emerge and be re-established again, people going back to their respective stations in the whole scheme of the division of labour of society, and ghosts, too, being sent back to the underworld to exercise the next round of the production of fruits. ("The Dead descend into the Earth, from which new Life is born." Apollonious, ibid.) It is just like what Mircea Eliade has noted, the return of the mythic beginning of chaos and then cosmogony. It is because the cosmos is experienced during these festivals of the dead as reaching its highest entropy and losing thereby its differentiated order, that on the second day of Choes (called miara hmera, "day of pollution") people chew buckthorn (Rhamnus catharticus, regarded, because of its purity, as a defense or aversion drug: alexipharmakon) all day since dawn and anoint their doors with pitch to keep off the ghosts of the dead (Photius: ramnoV. futon o en toiV Cousin wV alexifarmakon emaswnto ewqen, kai pitthi ecrionto ta dwmata, amiantoV gar auth. dio kai en taiV genesesi twn paidiwn criousi taV oikiaV eiV apelasin twn daimonwn; "... hence at the birth of a child they anoint their house with it to drive away daimons"; cited by Harrison, p. 40): a ritual of membrane-formation; and that at the end of Chytroi, a sacrifice of the enagizein type (cutra: a pot of grain and seeds), which no man may eat, is offered to them -- and to the underworld god Hermes Chthonios -- as not only the energy to keep them away (membrane-formation) but also the energy they will need for the "next round."¹⁶

That equilibrium between the living and the dead should be reached around February or so seems determined by the agricultural cycle. Harrison likes to trace the etymology of Anthesteria itself, not to "flower" (anthos) but to anaqessasqai, "to raise [the dead] by prayer", or otherwise emphasize the meaning of "rising" in the word (anqein ek thV ghV) rather than that of "flower." The hypothesis has much merit when the equivalent thinking of the Romans is considered: whereas the Romans consecrate the first month of the year to the Olympian gods, they devote the second (February) to purifications and sacrifice to the dead.¹⁷ The name February itself is derived from the instrument for purgation of the ghosts, februum, which could be "a wool, a branch from a pine tree, grain roasted with salt" (Harrison, p. 51), etc., and Februarius mensis, the month of February, is the month of expiation because on the 15th of this month the great feast of expiation or purification (i.e. for appeasing and then averting ghosts), Februa, was held.

Consider another. The Hellenic defecatory sacrifice figures in the expulsion of the pharmakos during Thargelia. The month of Thargelion (May - June) is the time of grain harvest. As Anthesteria is the offering of the "first fruits" of the fermented wine, so Thargelia is the offering of the first fruits of bread stuff (thargelos = the first loaf made or the pot of seeds). The replenishing part of Thargelia is the offering to the underworld ghosts of the dead and the earth god of pelanos, a sort of porridge, the same as alphita, the barley-meal. (Harrison, p. 88 - 9) The libation that accompanies it is, originally, not wine, but milk and honey: the nephalia. This is the situation before its incorporation into the Olympian cult. Note that much like the Chinese ancestor-cult, this offering to the dead is non-blood; the ghost's metabolism demands glucose as the basic energy unit just as much as does that of the living. Hence the offering of honey, "sweets to the spirits to be sweetened, the Meilichioi, ghosts and heroes to be appeased" (p. 93). As for the pharmakos, the defecatory part, "Helladius the Byzantine, quoted by Photius, says that 'it was the custom at Athens to lead in procession two pharmakoi with a view to purification; one for the men, one for the women. The pharmakos of the men had black figs round his neck, the other had white ones, and he says they were called subakcoi" (p. 99). Tzetzes' (A.D. 1150) statement of the purpose of the non-seasonal performance of this ritual illustrates most clearly its defecatory meaning: "The pharmakos was a purification of this sort of old. If a calamity overtook the city by the wrath of god, either famine or pestilence or any other disaster, they led forth as if to thusia the most deformed of them all as a purification and remedy for the sick city." (o farmakoV to kaqarma toioutwn hn to palai. an sumfora katelabe polin qeomhniai, eit'oun limoV eite loimoV eite kai blaboV allo, twn pantwn amorfoteron hgon wV proV qusian eiV kaqarmon kai farmakon polewV thV nosoushV.) This immediately reminds of the ancient Chinese practice of burning the hunchback during drought: the disorder (as represented by the deformity of the creature) within us which correlatively causes disorder outside in the cosmos in the manner of microcosmo-macrocosmic concentricism and which thus has to be expelled or destroyed to cure the disorder of the cosmos. Tzetzes continues with the ritualized manner of expulsion and destruction:

Compare Plutarch's description of the similar defecatory rite in Egypt (de Is. et Os. LXXIII): "As Manethos recounts they used to burn men alive whom they call Typhonians, and the ashes they made away with by winnowing and scattering them" (zwntaV anqrwpouV katepimprasan wV ManeqwV istorhke TufwniouV kalouteV kai thn tefran autwn likmwnteV hfanizon kai diespeiron; cited by Harrison, p. 104).

Better than the later generations of religious scholars Harrison understands the defecatory meaning of the rite of pharmakos: "The pharmakos was not a sacrifice in the sense of an offering made to appease an angry god." That is, it is not endergonic, or consumptive in any way. "It came to be associated with Apollo when he took over the Thargelia, but primarily it was not intended to please or to appease any spirit or god... The essence of the ritual was... riddance, the artificial making of an agos [disorderly anima], a pollution, to get rid of all pollution. The notion, so foreign to our scientific habit of thought, so familiar to the ancients, was that evil of all kinds was a physical infection that could be caught and transferred; it was highly catching... [For example, o]n occasion of a recent outbreak of influenza in Pithuria 'a man had a small carriage made, after a plan of his own, for a pair of scapegoats which were harnessed to it and driven to a wood at some distance where they were let loose. From that hour the disease completely ceased in the town. The goats never returned; had they done so the disease must have come back with them'" (p. 103). Just like the stomach ill of a person can be "cured" by his or her defecating away or vomiting out the disordered or poison food remains within the body. Hence the annual defecatory ritual of Chaeronea which Plutarch describes in his own day is called exelasiV, riddance, expulsion (p. 106). A contemporary Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), in much the same manner as the French school though from a different starting point, errs when she tries to reduce the pollution by physical disordered anima down to the symbolic -- that the "impure" (spiritual filth) is just what doesn't fit into the existing classificatory symbolic system, disrupts its order, arouses thus the disgust of the mind, and so is avoided. She says this because, transposed within the modern scientific perspective, these spiritual filth have lost all physical reality and so make no sense to her; by reducing them to anomalies in a given symbolic representation system she makes sense out of these non-sensical entities for a modern like herself. She of course completely misses the possibility that perhaps there used to be a perspective in which spiritual filth could appear to have physical reality, just as a contemporary nervous woman who avoids sitting on a toilet used by men for fear of getting pregnant by the sperm thereon is not showing disgust over an anomaly unclassifiable by her mind but rather genuinely believes in the physical reality of the far-swimming sperms, which, that is, appear real, believable, within her perspective given the current state and limitation of her knowledge of the world. We moderns as well as the ancients waste a lot of time performing irrational acts that we believe are ergonic, not merely symbolic, when we don't know better.

The cult of the ancestors so frequently found among primitive tribes and the rural areas of great civilizations appears in ancient Greece in the form of the cult of the heroes. It thus serves the same function of unifying the community and assuring its continuity in time as does the cult of the Olympians. But the cult of the heroes differs from the cult of the Olympians not only in that it employs the formula of enagizein instead, but also in that it is more local. The heroes are originally averted just as the ordinary dead (Harrison, p. 9), and so the cult of heroes is probably a posterior development. The "heroes" are those that have founded, and thus serve as the arché of, a community at whatever level.

The cult of the heroes thus renders the founder of a community into some sort of patron god who ensures its continuity through time. In this way it is something of an intermediary between the cult of the Olympians and that of the ordinary dead, the negative sense of expiation associated with it being transformed in the process into a positive sense while remaining within the form of enagizein. The patron hero can then be replaced by a "god" (Milamowitz, ibid., p. 36) and sometimes incorporate real, historical persons.¹⁹ During the eighth century, cults are rendered to these legendary heroes claimed as ancestors of whatever noble families or groups of phratries by re-using abandoned Mycenaean funerary buildings. (Vernant, p. 106) Within the context of the emergence of the polis, "the cult of heroes... was associated with a specific place, a tomb with the subterranean presence of the dead person... the location of the tombs was sometimes kept secret because the welfare of the state depended on their safety. Installed in the heart of the city in the middle of the agora [see Postscript below for the sacred spatiality of the polis], they gave substance to the memory of the legendary founder of the city... or they patronize the various components of the civic body (tribes, phratries, and demes)." (Ibid.) By the classical period, the patronic function of the divine at the level of the polis (though not at the level below) has been completely taken up by the Olympian gods: "Each city is placed under the protection of a divinity: Hera at Corinth and Agros, Artemis at Sparta, Zeus at Cos, Athena at Tege and Athen, for example." (Zaidman and Pantel, ibid., p. 64) Within the framwork of divine patronage, sacrifice to patron gods or to legendary ancestors has the purpose of making them strong, "energetic," so that they have "enough energy" to protect the community. (Thusia would here be hosios: the regularly periodic restoration of the order of gods and of society.) A variant of do ut possis dare: the primordial meaning of sacrifice completely forgotten today.

Returning to the French school: Jean-Pierre Vernant presents thusly his interpretation of the meaning of Greek sacrifice (thusia) as communicative.

Vernant is treading in the path of Hubert and Mauss in seeing the essence of sacrifice as the procedure to "établir une communication entre le sacré et le profane." ("Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice", Année sociologique, 1899) To so distort he has to dismiss the obvious alimentary connotation of osmh euwdiaV, "sweet-smelling savour" (the atmosphere swallowing up the nutritious smoke!), tied up with the very meaning of thusia itself, and twist it to mean something else, no longer common-sense. He justifies his interpretation by reference to (Hesiodian) myth:

But Hesiodian myth, on the basis of which only can Vernant's interpretation stand, and which re-organizes the pantheon in a linear system as well as reflects on the flaws of the human condition (later), is a development posterior to Greek religion proper, because it is speculative, already pre-philosophical. The Hesiodian type of myth cannot be taken to reflect the primordial religious consciousness proper to a pre-salvational, intraworld religion, because, as we shall see, it is already laying down the path toward salvational religions, such as Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and the philosophical schools to come after that, which all aim to escape from the sad human condition. The reflection on the flaws of human existence is expressed through the symbolism of the Fall, so that in the Hesiodian myth sacrifice is re-cast, its components re-explicated, to reflect the Fall and the consequent human dis-tance from gods; in this way sacrifice looks, and only looks, like a communicative act. Now that the modern researchers can no longer understand the ergonic (alimentary) function of sacrifice ("how in the world can people ever have believed that the invisible beings up there need to be fed?") because the perspective in which it is rooted and just common-sense has been entirely forgotten, they proceed to extend the other functions of ritual that they can still understand -- in this case, the communicative such as found in divination, but elsewhere the representational such as found in initiation rites -- to the ergonic functions no longer sensible to them. Hence Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss come up with the communicative function of sacrifice based on Durkheim's illusory distinction between the sacred and the profane as the universal constant of human social life, and they cast it furthermore in a fancy symbolic language ("sacralization-desacralization") to make it appear attractive.²⁰ The "communicative approach" then penetrates the French circle, and human religiosity becomes defined, in the successive hands of the masters of the French school such as Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille, as the administration (gestion) of the dialectical process of the sacred and the profane. As the French become increasingly incapable of thinking of religious comportment except in terms of the human effort to establish a linkage between the sacred and the profane, Vernant's and Rudhardt's views on Greek sacrificial cult similarly cannot escape from the communicative approach, which then gets even adopted by the American Robert Bellah ("Religious Evolution" in Beyond Belief, p. 30)! (We'll see later another devastating effect of this "communicative prejudice" among the French in regard to the subject of the meaning of Jesus' sacrifice.) Then the obsession with religiosity as a symbolic system comes in from both the French heritage of structural linguistics and British social anthropology. It is precisely because the perspective in which spirits constitute "real beings" has been lost that the moderns try to understand the interaction with these beings as something "symbolic." Hence Lévi-Strauss' view of totemism and sacrifice (and also Mary Douglas' approach to religious pollution).²¹ As these moderns twist and distort the ergonic meanings the natives themselves have given of their sacrificial praxes (e.g. do ut des) but which they can no longer comprehend into a fabricated meaning in the modern framework they are familiar with -- those of the modern age of linguistics and system-machines and then of the postmodern "information and communication age" can see everything only as "symbolic," "communicative," "systemic" --, they consider their distortion "advancement" or "progress" and consider such older work as J. Harrison's Prolegomena "out-of-date," even though it is precisely the latter, or others of the older generations whose works are not fancy anymore to attract, which actually still preserve some of the primordial religious experience of humanity. "Progress" in religious study is thus really degeneration, derailment, just as in philosophy. In this field of religious study the derailment seems to have started with Durkheim. (Remember that both the French school and the American sociology of religion trace their origin to Durkheim.)

The ergonic or alimentary understanding of Greek sacrificial cult is grounded in the primordial, undifferentiated form of myth, "wherein the gods of Greece are assembled as they have always been, forming a natural society, living in the world in the midst of men," that is, "completely apart from a history which believes itself to be capable of recounting the genesis of gods in a chronological tale by borrowing from traverses uniting different sanctuaries and multiple tales of mythology," as Marcel Detienne has described in relation to Walter Otto's classic (ibid., p. 10; "... là où les dieux de la Grèce sont rassemblés comme depuis toujours, formant une société naturelle, vivant dans le monde au milieu des hommes"... " à l’écart d’une histoire qui croit pouvoir raconter la genèse des dieux dans un récit chronologique en empruntant les traverses reliant des sanctuaires dispersés et les multiples récits de la mythologie"). This experience of gods and spirits as forming a synchronic and confused organization is proper to an intraworld religion where the sacred of which gods are manifestations is still entirely immanent within this cosmos.

The second of the two faults of the contemporary researchers, their over-reliance on classical works already speculative, hence derivative, in passing judgment on Greek religiousness "of the lower stratum," should be more avoidable. It should be easily understood that Hellenic consciousness since Homer has already been in the process of stratification. First, "[t]he Greek preoccupation with the relation of the gods to the events of the Trojan War gave rise to a continuous deepening of religious thought from Homer to Euripides." (Bellah, ibid., p. 31) Following Homer came Hesiod's pre-philosophical reflection on the limitations of human temporal existence paving the way for the salvational movements. The beginning salvational movements themselves were followed by the immense advancement in the differentiation of consciousness in the classical Greek world which, in accordance with our framework of the evolution of consciousness -- that such differentiation always comprises a upward and a downward movement --, produced both the ascendant Plato and the degenerating atheism, relativism, nihilism, and positivism of the sophists (including even Herodotus and Thucycides) which expressed disbelief in regard to the traditional belief in the survival of the soul after death and in all the metempsychosis and the judgment of the dead. These signs of degeneration, nihilism and atheism, etc., which Plato devoted his life to combating, were much the same as the manifestations of the downward movement of the atheistic rationalism of eighteenth century Europe which was similarly going through a great age of differentiation of consciousness ("Enlightenment"). They therefore must be excluded from all considerations of Greek religion, which belongs to the bottommost layer of the increasingly stratified Greek collective consciousness. Failure to do so has caused Rudhardt to even doubt whether the Greeks after all believed in the survival of the soul after death in Hades and in its efficacy upon the living (ibid., p. 114 -7), in blatant contradiction, again, to the very native testimonies he has cited.

Postscript As an example of the Greek sacrificial (lunar) calendar we use the Athenian. "The calendar of Athenian festivals dates... from the epoch of Solon (the beginning of sixth century B.C.)... At the end of the fifth century B. C., the city commissions a certain Nikomachos to put the calendar of sacrifices in order and a text was engraved and exhibited at the Agora in the Stoa Basileios..." (Zaidman, p. 73.)

A festival consists of three principal moments: (a) procession (pompè), (b) sacrifice and the communion meal afterwards, and (c) game, race, or whatever related activities (p. 75). The Panhellenic once-every-four-year game of rhapsodes and sports takes place, for example, during the Panathenaia, and theatrical competitions (in drama, comedy, tragedy, dithyramb, satire) happen under the gaze of Dionysos, hence during the Great Dionysia of Elaphebolion, the rustic Dionysia of Poseidon, and the Lenians of Gamelion (p. 78 - 9). These together accomplish very well the function of a civic religion in uniting the polis. Zaidman and Pantel particularly note that procession has the function of "inscribing the cultic practice within the city's space" (p. 77; "La procession est une manière d'inscrire la pratique cultuelle dans l'espace de la cité"). Thus festival procession finds its origin in the restructuration of the popular religion by the rise of the city-state (polis). The territoriality of the polis establishes "a kind of symbiosis between the people and their land, as if the citizens were the children of an earth from which they had sprung forth in the beginning" (Vernant, ibid., p. 106) and simultaneously produces "the temple as a construction independent of the human habitat" (ibid., p. 105).

We are talking about the structuration of the sacred spatiality of the cosmos. Whereas in other cosmological empires (China, the Aztec, the Mesopotamian) the lived sacred spatiality is shaped around a massive imperial bureaucracy in the center, the peculiarity of the Greek city-states produces a different, rather diffused organization of sacred spatiality for which festival procession is a dispositif.

Sacrifice is performed during all the festivals of the Athenian calendar. "The number of animals sacrificed, known from the treasury account of Athena, allows a measure of the importance of the festival meals which follow the sacrifices: a sacrifice of a hundred animals (or hecatombe) was frequent and the number may climb to more than 250 animals sacrificed for the same festival. The city took on the cost of these sacrifices... During Panathenaias, the distribution of meat was done at Ceramic among the members of the demes who took part in the procession. If we follow the order of the Athenian calendar, each month witnesses the occasion of a great killing of animals..." (p. 77)

Footnotes:

1. "... accepter le dépaysement et la mise en cause de catégories intellectuelles qui nous sont aujourd’hui familières."

2. "Der Anstoss, den Glauben und die Gebräuche der auf tiefster Stufe beharrenden Völker heranzuziehen, ist von England gekommen; dass alle Menschen einmal auf derselben Stufe gestanden haben, ist als Axiom anerkannt, so grundfalsch dieses Axiom ist, und an seiner Anwendung auch auf die indogermanischen Völker wird besonders gearbeitet" (p. 8; "The attempt to bring to light the beliefs and usages of the people who have remained at the bottommost stage came from England; that all peoples have at one time stayed at the same stage is taken as an axiom. But so false is this axiom, and its application to the Indo-Germanic peoples as well has been especially worked out"); "Das Axiom, alle Menschen sind gleich, dürfte gerade von der Naturwissenschaft umgestossen oder doch berichtigt sein... Da sollte doch einleuchten, dass die Hypothese der immer noch gleichen religiöse oder vorreligiöse Vorstellungen auf etwas sehr raschen Schlüssen beruht" (p. 10; "The axiom, that all peoples are the same, should be knocked out of natural science or at least corrected... There it should be clear that the hypothesis of the same religious or pre-religious conceptions is based on very hasty conclusions"). In the words of Zaidman and Pantel: "Enfin, se débarrasser de l’idée qu’il puisse exister une essence de la religion permet d’étudier le phénomène religieux comme un objet de connaissance qui, comme les autres, a une histoire" (ibid., p. 5).

In the following, the "French school" is used in the rather restricted sense, sometimes referred to as just the "Paris school." The "école française" generally is taken to start from Durkheim and then includes Marcel Mauss, Roger Caillois (L'homme et le sacré), Georges Bataille (La théorie de la religion), and finally the recent figures.

3. "Pour 'nous', la divinité est extérieure au monde (Dieu est transcendant), elle a créé le monde et les hommes, elle est présente à l’intérieur de l’homme, enfin la sphère du religieux est limitée à un secteur très défini des activités quotidiennes [la vie collective est laïcisée]. Pour les Grecs, les dieux ne sont pas extérieurs au monde, ils n’ont pas créé l’univers ni les hommes, mais ont été eux-mêmes créés; ils n’ont pas toujours existé mais se sont emparés du pouvoir; ils ne sont pas éternels mais seulement immortels; ils n’ont pas tous les pouvoirs ni tous les savoirs, mais seulement certains d’entre eux; ils sont soumis au destin et ils interviennent constamment dans les affaires humaines."

4. Remember that we have following Benveniste interpreted his example wV osih egeneto in relation to the custom of Onchesto as meaning "in the beginning was the hosiē", i.e. the act which liberates the energy, the divine power, the hagios, so that order may be constituted (diakosmon). Hence Rudhardt says "the notion of order as a function of which the adjective hosios is defined..." ("la notion d’ordre en fonction de laquelle se définit l’adjectif hosios…", ibid., p. 308). Hosios, or the liberation of divine energy such as during sacrifice, must be regularly repeated in order that diakosmon may be perpetually maintained. Thus hosios has also the meaning of the regularity or periodicity of rituals. It is because hosios designates the liberation of energy for human use that it is opposed to hieros: the latter reserved for gods and the former not so reserved but permitted to man's use: iera kai osia meaning "the property of gods and men" and corresponding to the Latin sacra et profana; and osion cwrion meaning a place not set apart to the gods and so lawful for man to enter, and corresponding to the Latin profanus. (Liddel & Scott)

5. Remember again that Benveniste has interpreted the original meaning of hieros as "strong", then "filled with divine energy", then "sacred". These particularly sacred places or beings are considered to be filled with divine energy.

6. We consider it strange that the other authors always use this necessary approach as justification for isolating the religiosity in question. As early as Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: "Ich verstehe die Sprachen nicht, aus denen die zurzeit beliebten Woerter, Tabu und Totem, Mana und Orenda, entlehnt sind, halte es aber auch fuer einen zulaessigen Weg, mich an die Griechen zu halten und ueber Griechisches griechisch zu denken..." (Der Glaube, p. 10; "I don't understand the languages from which those favorite words of today like taboo and totem, mana and orenda, are borrowed, but it is rather a permissible way to hold myself 'in Greek' and think about the Greeks in the Greek manner...") When we get into the Greek perspective and see, think, and feel as the Greeks did, we however experience the approximately same sacred as denoted by the words mana and orenda.

7. Zaidman, ibid., p. 45; "Tout peut être objet d'offrande: depuis le plus modeste des vases jusqu'au butin rassemblé au cours d'une expédition guerrière par une cité. Un athlète vainqueur consacre sa couronne, un malade une représentation de la partie de son corps qui a été guérie, une cité un monument... Tout ceci nécessite des inventaires dressés par les trésoriers des sanctuaires, et de la place: il n'est pas rare que des bâtiments particuliers soient construits pour contenir les offrandes, ou que les offrandes anciennes soient enterrées dans des fosses dont la découverte fait la joie des archéologues."

8. Ibid., p. 27; Libations "ouvrent aussi le repas, geste propitiatoire qui a la même valeur que l’offrande de prémices alimentaires."

9. Zaidman and Pantel, ibid., p. 20; "... à la fois liens qui soudent entre eux les citoyens, et la communication avec le monde divin."

10. "... les offrandes s’adressent à des êtres qu’on souhaite accessibles, unis aux vivants par des liens qu’un culte renouvelle périodiquement..." Notions, p. 114.

11. Ibid., p. 142; "... ta nomizomena s’applique à des sacrifices, à des prières, à des chants et à des danses, à des purifications comme à l’ensemble de ce qui est dû aux dieux. C’est l’expression grecque la plus proche de notre mot ‘rite’."

12. This Wilamowitz-Moellendorff has already explicitly denied in the case of the origins of the gods of the Greeks. Der Glaube der Hellenen, p. 36 - 7. But the problem of the origins of the Greek gods can only be solved by such a study as B. C. Dietrich's, ibid.

13. As Hippocrates says: "we ought to pray to the gods, for good things to Helios, to Zeus Ouranios, to Zeus Ktesia, to Hermes, to Apollo; but in the case of things that are the reverse we must pray to Earth and the heroes, that all hostile things may be averted. (epi de toisin enantiosin kai ghi kai hrwsin apotropaia genesqai ta calepa panta.)" Peri enupniwn 639, cited by Harrison, p. 10.

14. Ibid., p. 253; "Le verbe quein, d'un emploi peu fréquent chez Homère, ne désigne pas de sacrifices complets; il signifie une petite offrande qui accompagne les repas et qu'on prélève, semble-t-il, sur les principaux mets pour la jeter dans un feu."

15. "Les Pyliens sont en train de sacrifier, quand Télémaque et Athéna-Mentor arrivent auprès d'eux. Ils associent à leur sacrifice les nouveaux venus, bien que ceux-ci n'aient assisté ni à l'abatage ni à la combustion de la part divine. Les voyageur n'accomplissent aucun geste qui puisse remplacer pour eux les rites qu'ils ont ainsi manqués; ils doivent en revanche verser une libation, prononcer une prière et manger des splagcna, ce que leurs hôtes ont déjà fait." Ibid., p. 255.

16. Compare the Greek purgation of ghosts during Anthesteria with the Roman equivalent, the Lemuria: "According to Ovid each father of a family as the festival came round had to lay the ghosts of his house after a curious and complex fashion. When midnight was come and all was still, he arose and standing with bare feet he made a special sign with his fingers and thumb to keep off any ghost. Thrice he washes his hands in spring water, then he turns round and takes black beans into his mouth; with face averted he spits them away, and as he spits them says, 'These I send forth, with these beans I redeem myself and mine.' Nine times he speaks, and looks not back. The ghost, they believe, picks them up and follows behind if no one looks. [Compare this with the offering to the ancestors among the Duala in Africa: the descendants may not look back once he has deposited food at the sanctuary place dibala; later.] Again he touches the water and strikes the brass of Temesa and begs the ghost to leave his house. When nine times he has said, 'Shades of my fathers, depart' (Manes exite paterni!), he looks back and holds that the rite has been duly done." (Harrison, p. 35 - 6) Recall also the Chinese village custom where periodically a shaman-priest would, with his magic power, lead the dead corpses "hopping" (as Chinese say, "ghosts can't walk") out of the village. On this day everyone shuts the window for this leading-away of the dead must not be seen by ordinary people. Or else...

17. Plut. Q. R. xxv. twn mhnwn to men prwton OlumpioiV qeoiV ierwsan ton de deuteron cqonioiV en wi kai kaqarmouV tinaV telousi kai toiV katoicomenoiV enagizousin, cited by Harrison, p. 50. Also, "Februa Romani dixere piamina patres," Ov. F. 2. 19.

18. Rudhartd, ibid., p. 132. "L’enseignement de la mythologie et celui de la religion sur ce point concordent et se complètent. L’un et l’autre assignent aux héros, par rapport au groupe humain qui leur a succédé, le même rôle ou les mêmes fonctions. Ce sont les ancêtres d’une race ou d’une famille, les premiers occupants d’un territoire, les fondateurs d’une cité; ils ont institué un régime politique, inventé un art ou instauré une profession. Ils se trouvent à l’origine d’une tradition, d’une société qui se perpétue et leur survit. S’ils n’en sont pas les vrais initiateurs, ils l’ont du moins régénérée, tel Cadmos qui créa Thèbes une seconde fois, ou comme Thésée qui a fait l’unité d’Athènes et l’a sauvée des dangers qui menaçaient sa liberté."

19. Rudhardt gives some examples, ibid., p. 130 : "Les guerriers tombés à Marathon, ceux qui périrent à Platée furent, comme des héros, l’objet de rites périodiques." Also the example which Thucydide has preserved for us, that of Brasidas, the Spartan general to whom the Amphipolitains dedicate a cult: "Quand Thucydide écrit : Brasidas reçut un sacrifice en tant que héros (wV hrwi te entemnousi), ce n’est pas là simple figure de style ; le général vainqueur fut substitué au héros fondateur d’Amphipolis."

20. "Hubert et Mauss... [ibid.] proposent de rechercher la signification du sacrifice dans le mécanisme de la cérémonie: dans le rite d'entrée, le sacrifiant est dépouillé de son être et purifié; dans l'immolation, le corps détruit est mis en rapport avec les êtres (sacrés ou profanes) qui doivent profiter du sacrifice; les rites de sortie permettent au sacrifiant de revenir au monde profane, désormais métamorphosé; dans l'expiation, les rites de sortie sont les plus nombreux..." (René Bureau, in Mort pour nos péchés p. 95.) Note that the sacrificial rite is here isolated into a closed system of mechanism and also made into something like initiation -- which the "communication" is supposed to effect. It is now everything except ergonic, which (e.g. eating!) in fact is what effects the change of state or metamorphosis (restoration). Later Van Gennep would similarly isolate the initiation rite into a closed system of mechanism that basically looks like this distorted presentation of sacrificial rite of Hubert's and Mauss'.

21. Interpreting religious phenomena in the structural linguistic terms of metonymy and metaphor, Lévi-Strauss opposed sacrifice to totemism (La pensée sauvage, The Savage Mind). Totemism, being simply a system of classification, correlates two systems of differences metaphorically: differences between natural species are metaphors of differences between human groups. “Social groups are not like natural species, rather, they differ from other social groups in the same way that natural species differ from one another.” (Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, p. 138.) Sacrifice on the other hand links up in a continuity, in a relation of metonymy, two terms that are opposite and discontinuous with one another: the sacrificing human and god (the profane and the sacred). To make this work, Lévi-Strauss adopts the sacralization-desacralization scheme: choosing a sacrificial victim is taking what is natural (profane) and setting it apart, i.e. as sacred, as now something metonymically linked to god; in this way god is linked up with the otherwise totally different sacrificer. Then comes the desacralization: “Through the destruction of the victim, sacrifice breaks up the link which it has just effected and creates a gap which god then comes fill in.” Because of this “the animal becomes really the sign of divine gift when it is destroyed as a natural being. The symbol of sacrifice realizes in the act the relations of reciprocal constitution which linguists discover in metaphor and metonymy.” (Antoine Vergote, Mort pour nos péchés, p. 63 – 4; “Par la destruction de la victime, le sacrifice rompt le lien qu’il avait opéré et crée un vide que la divinité viendra remplir… l’animal devient réellement signe du don divin lorsqu’il est détruit en tant qu’être naturel. Le symbole du sacrifice réalise dans le geste les rapports de constitution réciproque que les linguistes découvrent dans la métaphore et la métonymie.”) Very fancy, but non-sense nonetheless.