The cuisine of sacrifice among the Greeks

282 Pages·1989·8.32 MB·English

by  Marcel Detienne

The Cuisine ofS acrifice
among the Greeks
MARCEL DETIENNE
and
JEAN-PIERRE VERNANT
With Essays by
JEAN-LOUIS DURAND, STELLA GEORGOUDI,
FRANQOIS HARTOG, AND JESPER SVENBRO
Translated by
PAULA WISSING
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHicAGO PRESS
Chicago and Lom:um
ODTU KUTUPHANESi
METU LIBRA.RY
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Marcel Detienne is clirecteur d'etudes at the Ecole pratique d:r Etudes, Paris.
Among his earlier books, The Creation ofM ythology was published in English translation by
the University of Chicago Press in 1986.
Jean-Pierre Vemant is professor at the College de France. His previous books include Myth
and Thought among the Greeks and The Origins of Greek Thought, both in English translation.
(J.)
METU LIBRARY
~II
IIIII II 11111111 IIIII
255070201061005156
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1989 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1989
Printed in the United States of America
98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 54 3 2 1
First published in Paris as La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec, © Eclitions Gallimard, 1979.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Detienne, Marcel.
[Cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec. English]
The cuisine of sacrifice among the Greeks I Marcel Detienne and
Jean-Pierre Vemant; with essays by Jean-Louis Durand ... [et al.];
translated by Paula Wissing.
p. em.
Translation of: La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-226-14351-1 (alk. paper);--ISBN 0-226-14353-8 (pbk.:
alk. paper)
l. Sacred meals-Greece. 2. Sacrifice-Greece. 3. Cults-Greece.
I. Vemant, Jean-Pierre. II. Title.
BL795.S23D4713 1989
292'.38-dcl9 88-39143
CIP
ooThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Inforination Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
-----------------
Contents
Translator's Note vii
1 Culinary Practices and the Spirit of Sacrifice 1
Marcel Detienne
2 At Man's Table: Hesiod's Foundation Myth of Sacrifice 21
Jean-Pierre ~rnant
3 Greek Animals: Toward a Topology of Edible Bodies 87
TtnYNJ_T n41,;,. n ... ,nNJrl
.)~-'""'" .A.JVWN ~""'""'"""
4 Ritual as Instrumentality 119
Jean-Louis Durand
5 The Violence ofWellborn Ladies:
Women in the Thesmophoria 129
Marcel Detienne
6 The Feast of the Wolves, or the Impossible City 148
Marcel Detienne and ]esper Svenbro_
7 Food in the Countries of the Sun 164
Jean-Pierre ~rnant
8 Self-cooking Beef and the Drinks of Ares 170
FranfOis Hartog
9 Sanctified Slaughter in Modern Greece:
The "Kourbinia" of the Saints 183
Stella Georgourdi
v
.· ' '
vi Contents
10 A Bibliography of Greek Sacrifice 204
Jesper Svenbro
Abbrevations 219
Notes 221
Index 269
Illustrations 106-18
Translator)s Note
A few words are necessary concerning the citations in the text. Transla
tions of the Greek texts are my own, based on the French, since often the
French wording better accorded with the spirit of the discussion than
available English versions. I have also translated French secondary sources.
For biblical passages, I have utilized the English edition of the Jerusalem
Bible throughout.
I would like to express my gratitude to Arthur Adkins and Virginia
Seidman for their attention to matters Greek that lay beyond my compe
tence and to Priscilla Murphy for her eye for detail. Any errors or misread
ings of the French are, of course, my responsibility.
vii

ONE
Culinary Practices and the
Spirit ofS acrifice
Marcel Detienne
THERE are two reasons for our choice of examining the Greeks on
the problems of blood sacrifice. First of all, we see in the Greeks a
society in which the basic ritual acts in daily practice are of a sacrificial
type. For nearly ten centuries, guided by immutable cultic statutes, the
Greeks never failed to maintain relations with the divine ,powers through
the highly ritualized killing of animal victims, whose flesh was consumed
collectively according to precise strictures. This factual con~ideration is
joined by another, which illuminates the Greek presence within us from
the time of the Church Fathers to the sociologists who, with Durkheim
and Mauss, study the relationships between religion and society through
inquiry focused on the phenomenon of sacrifice.
These two influences converge in the Orphic account of the death of
Dionysus and secure for it the honored position of a reference point
among sacrificial myths.1 The plot is simple. A god in the form of a child
is joindy slaughtered by all the Titans, the kings of ancient times. Covered
with gypsum and wearing masks of white earth, the murderers surround
their victim. With careful gestures they show the child fascinating toys: a
top, a rhombus, dolls with jointed limbs, knucklebones, and a mirror. And
while the child Dionysus contemplates his own image captured in the
circle. of pplished.metal, .. the. Titans strike, dismember. him,. and throw the
pieces iii ~{kettle. then they i~oast.them over a fire. dnce the victtm's flesh
has been prepared, they undertake to devour it all. They just have time to
gobble it down, all except the heart, which had been divided into equal
parts, before Zeus' lightning comes to punish their crime and reduce the
Titan party to smoke and ashes, out of which will be born the human
species.
Interpretation is an integral part of this mythological account, which
apparently dates from the time of the earliest Orphic writings at the end
of the sixth century B.c. On the one hand, this is a story conceived of and
invented by theologians devoted to the Orphic way of life, who meant to
l
2 Marcel Detienne
denounce blood sacrifices and turn men away from the cannibalistic prac
tices they unwittingly carry out (by extension) each time they offer an
animal victim to the gods. Elsewhere, beginning with the Aristotelian
school of the fourth century, 2 a different exegesis focuses on the figure of
the slain Dionysus, leading him toward the horiwn on which a general
theory of sacrifice will be built.
At this point we begin to see evidence of a ritualistic reading of the
myth, which will be developed from the beginning of the Christian era on
up to contemporary analyses with their anthropological perspective. For
example, in the fourth century A.D. pamphlet entitled On the Error of Pro
fane Religions3 Firmicus Matemus condemns the custom practiced by the
Cretans of tearing a live bull apart with their teeth. In doing so, he for
mulates a key interpretation connecting a ritual omophagic model, in
which Dionysus invites the faithful to eat raw animal flesh, with the rec
ognition of the god who appears sometimes in taurine, sometimes in hu
man form, and who is incorporated into the faithful who devour him, or
who offers himself in response to their communional desires. Only re
cently, working from a perspective that is deliberately open to anthropol
ogy but misled by the conviction that it is possible to exhaust the myth by
a faithful accounting of a Dionysiac ritual, E. R. Dodds, author of The
Greeks and the Irrational) 4 brings together the story of Pentheus, the
Orphic tale, and other traditions and finds in them a sacramental model
in which the god, present in the form of his animal or human ''vehicle;' is
tom apart and eaten by the assembled worshipers.
The slaughter of the child Dionysus is an exemplary tale, whose persist
ence throughout multiple retellings may lead one to wonder whether, as
Wittgenstein says, 5 in the final analysis it does not appeal to some incli
nation within ourselves; it permits us to connect a series of problems con
cerning Greek acts and practices of blood sacrifice and in a more general
fashion to inquire about the presuppositions governing the elaboration of
a theory of sacrifice as the central figure of religion and society combined.
*
Only supreme inattention to the details of the account of Dionysus' slay-
ing at the hands of the Titans would lead one to find in it traces of a ritual
connected with eating raw food. The narrative emphasizes the combina
tion of roasting and boiling, which is so odd in this instance (the tale
specifies that what has already been boiled is then roasted) that it provides
the subject and terms of one of the "problemata" in the Aristotelian col
lection. It is precisely these specifications for cooking which refer in the
myth to the familiar and ritual gestures of the blood sacrifice.6
Culinary Practices and the Spirit ofS acrifice 3
Along with the knife, the spit and kettle together and separately consti
tute the instruments of a way of eating that Herodotus in his accounts of
Egypt places at the heart of the difference, the otherness, that the Greeks
perceive in themselves with respect to the Egyptians. 7 By showing their
repugnance at using a knife, spit, or kettle belonging to a Greek because
he makes sacrifices and eats according to different rules, the Egyptians
described by Herodotus reveal to the listeners of the Histories an image of
themselves in which their sacrificial practice, seen in its instrumental as
pect, is circumscribed by its alimentary function. For here we find the first
characteristic that justifies the central place of the blood sacrifice in Greek
social and religious thought: the absolute coincidence of meat-eating and
sacrificial practice. 8 All consumable meat comes from ritually slaughtered
animals, and the butcher who sheds the animal's blood b~ars the same
functional name as the sacrificer posted next to the bloody altar.
But sacrifice derives its importance from another function, which rein
forces the first: the necessary relationship between the exercise of social
relatedness on all political levels within the system the Greeks call the city.
Political power cannot be exercised without sacrificial practice. Any mili
tary or political undertaking-a campaign, engagement with the enemy,
the conclusion of a treaty, works commissioned on a temporary basis, the
opening of the assembly, or the assumption of office by the magistrates
each must begin with a sacrifice followed by a meal. All citizens holding
civil posts regularly o:ffer sacrifices. And until a late date, a city such as
Athens maintained a king-archon,9 one of whose major functions was the
administration of all sacrifices instituted by the ancestors and of the body
of ritual acts that guarantee the harmonious functioning of society.
Two examples enable us to observe the solidarity between the domain
of the political and that of the sacrificial. The first can be seen in the incar
ceral space temporarily occupied by citizens awaiting the decision of the
share
court·or the" execi.itiori of a:sentence;·:AJ.lprisoners t:he-fife: and meals;
Sacrifice arid ·meal conjoin to confirm the ephemeral community of the
group jailed together. The only one excluded from these food sacrifices is
the typically asocial individual rejected by his fellow prisoners, who refuse
to light a fire with him and make a place for him in their reduced com-
munity.Io -
The second example, by contrast, is found in the act of extending polit
ical territory. To found a colony it is sufficient to bring a-spit from the
home city and a pot with fire in it.11 The sacrifice thus made possible is
not only the act of founding a new political community born of the first.
It will become the basis for the filial relations maintained by a colony with
4 Marcel Detienne
its mother city. Thucydides tells us that the Corinthians hate the people of
Corcyra, a colony of Corinth, because, during the religious ceremonies
when the victim's flesh was being distributed, the citizens of Corcyra ne
glected to give the first portion to a Corinthian, who should have received
12
the honored share. Elsewhere, when two cities are bound by an agree
ment, the distribution of power is made according to their respective par
ticipation in the sacrifices. Thus, for two cities of unequal importance,
such as Myania and Hypnia in western Locris, contributions of judges,
foreign ambassadors, soldiers, and local magistrates are levied according
to the number of victims that each must provide in shared cultic activi
ties.13 Inversely, whoever does not have the right to sacrifice, either as an
individual or in the name of a city, lacks the corresponding political rights,
whether to take part in prestigious contests, such as the Olympics, or to
participate in the assemblies that gather several cities around a ·temple.
One of the marks of a foreigner is that he is kept away from the altars and
is unable to make sacrifices without the official mediation of a citizen, who
14
will answer for him before the gods and the local cornrnunity.
*
To analyze the sacrificial system of a society that places sacrifice at the
center of its dietary practices and politico-religious thought, the Center
for Comparative Research on Ancient Societies has chosen to utilize four
major tactics:
1. The first aims to view the system from "outside;' by noting both
the sets of prohibitions and the transgressions that the system authorizes,
so as to define its boundaries. In particular, it is the forms of protest ex
plicit in the different orientations of Greek mysticism that permit us to
discover the implicit rules and major dynamics of the sacrificial system.
2. This external perspective is complemented by the internal analysis
of the sacrificial system: its architecture as seen from within, beginning
with the major mechanisms and their basic values on through the config
uration of each of the terms of the sacrificial process. The victim is also
considered: its status and place in the bestiary, the behavior required of it,
and its qualities and defects, as well as an examination-but this time from
within-of exclusionary procedures (animals that are not to be sacrificed,
flesh that is not to be eaten). The methods for dismembering the animal
and the division between the different internal parts and those in some
way constituting the animal's exterior are also examined. Types of cooking
are studied: the respective values of being raw, roasted, and boiled, as well
as the meanings of what rises with the smoke-bone, fat, and aromatics.
Last, the modalities of the distribution and division of the victim's flesh