The logistics of sacrifice (1)

The Temple of Minerva SulisLooking at an artist’s rendition of the Roman temple of Minerva Sulis at Bath, UK, you will see a thin plume of smoke arising from the altar outside the temple. There appears to be no fuel, just smoke.

I got to thinking about animal sacrifice, not the whys and wherefores but the logistics.

My frame of reference here is the ancient Mediterranean, thus ruling out contemporary Santeristas, etc., contemporary extreme Kali worshippers, or even the 16th-century Aztecs, known for their (dis)assembly-line approach to human sacrifice.

For all that, go read René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred.

First of all, the altar. One you have graduated from a pile of unhewn stones to a nice block of marble, are you going to build a fire on it? The heat will lead to cracking, spalling, etc. Even if you have just a small fire into which you sprinkle wine, tufts of hair clipped from the victim, handfuls of barley, or whatever, it would be destructive. So do you line the top of the altar with disposable bricks or set a brazier on it? What do the archaeologists say? Has anyone looked at altar stones for signs of fire damage?

One friend suggests looking at Book 23 of the Iliad for suggestions: the sacrifices at the funeral games of Patroklos. I tend not to trust Homer on these matters, though: he was telling An Amazing Tale of Long Ago, with larger-than-life characters who did things in a larger-than-life way.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, some chthonic deities got their sacrifices burned in pits. That makes sense.

As a hunter, I have cut up animals ranging in size from squirrels to elk. I know about blood and guts. After the haruspex has looked at the liver, what then? Is it burned? It won’t burn fast! (Lots of fuel needed–who supplies it?) Intestines if fatty would burn better than an ox’s stomach, for example. Or all those parts disposed of elsewhere? You don’t just burn blood, unless you have a monster bonfire going.

In most cases, the worshippers ate the muscle meat. Fat was often burned: the smell was pleasing the gods and definitely increased the worshipers’ appetites. In Fishcakes and Courtesans James Davidson discusses how to the classical Athenians, red meat-eating was all mixed up with religious taboos and sacred violence, whereas fish was “secular,” and they could eat all they wanted, when they wanted.

Who gets the hide? The priests (for sale to the tanners, presumably)? If bones are burned, what about horns? The smell! The flies! The ashes!

If you wanted a constant fire going, olive oil would be a better fuel than wood. I suppose you would not want to be downwind either way.

Lots of questions. More later.

Pagan studies, nature religion at AAR-SBL

For anyone attending the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and Society for Biblical Literature in Philadelphia in November, here is a quick–and not necessarily definitive–list of the Pagan-studies sessions.

First, the all-day Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies, which has been happening since 1998 in some form but is not an official program unit.

The following program units have at least one Pagan-studies presenter, if not the entire panel:

1. New Religious Movements Group and Contemporary Pagan Studies Consultation, Saturday – 1:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m, Michael York, London, UK, presiding. Theme: Neo-Pagan Religions in Central and Eastern Europe: Identity, Community, and Challenge.

2. Platonism and Neoplatonism Group, Sunday – 9:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m., Gregory Shaw, Stonehill College, presiding. Theme: Neoplatonism, Dead or Alive: Is Neoplatonism a Living Tradition?

3. Death, Dying, and Beyond Consultation, Sunday – 9:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m., Christopher M. Moreman, St. Francis Xavier University, presiding. Theme: Continuities and Discontinuities: Contemporary Cross-Cultural Approaches to the Study of Death.

4. New Religious Movements Group, Sunday – 4:00 p.m.-6:30 p.m., Holly Folk, Indiana University, Bloomington, presiding. Theme: Theoretical Issues in the Study of NRMs and NRMs and Their Sacred Texts.

5. Contemporary Pagan Studies Consultation, Monday – 9:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m., Wendy Griffin, California State University, Long Beach, presiding. Theme: Boundaries and Paths to Authenticity.

6. New Religious Movements Group, Monday – 1:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m. Greg Johnson, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder, presiding. Theme: Devoted to the Outdoors: Nature Recreation as Religious Practice.

Appeals court upholds Wiccan parents

An Indiana appeals court has upheld the right of divorced Wiccan parents to expose their children to their religious practices, something that both parents wished to do.

The Indiana Civil Liberties Union argued the case on constitutional grounds — that the decree trampled on parents’ rights to expose their children to the religion of their choice.

But the appeals court didn’t rule on the constitutional question. Instead, the appeals court relied on state law, which prohibits courts from limiting parents’ authority unless a child is at risk of physical danger, or significant emotional impairment.

More links and details at The Wildhunt blog.

What you will find in The Pomegranate

I have posted a complete table of contents for volume 7 of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.

Issue no. 2 is now in press, and I hope it will be available at the Equinox Publishing booth at the American Academy of Religion-Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in Philadelphia in November. It will be a lively and provocative issue.

Now to further update the “old” web site.

NOTE: My apologies to anyone who tried the table of contents link earlier and got nowhere. Some changes had been made to the FTP access on the host server, and I did not learn about them in time. Now, with the latest version of Transmit, an elegant Mac FTP application, I able to upload files again.

Local Knowledge

Three cheers for Vera Stucky Evenson, author of The Mushrooms of Colorado. Those white mushrooms were indeed Agaricus campestris. M. and I ate them on last night’s pizza, and we’re still here 24 hours later. (Yes, I made spore prints too.)

The cat ate some too–he must have liked the oiliness of sauteed mushrooms–but he later left his on the bathroom floor. Cats and fungi: not a good combination.

Local knowledge can be hard to come by. When I taught an environmental-issues section of freshman composition, my student typically knew (or thought that they knew) more about the Brazilian rain forest than about the Wet Mountains, which they could see from the classroom windows, not 30 miles away.

Th Pueblo Mountain Park Environmental Center has taken a good step with the publication of Plants of Pueblo Mountain Park, which fits our ecological niche over here too.

This evening after supper I strapped on my authentic Lithuanian mushroom basket, and M. and I walked the ridge behind the house, picking boletes. “Probably the surest mushrooms to recognize beyond the Foolproof Four [morels, puffballs, shaggy mane, sulfur polymore] are the boletes,” writes Lorentz Pearson in The Mushroom Manual.

My eccentric sister in Kaunas provided the basket. She bought it from a street vendor–it looks like an angler’s creel, but it lacks the slot in the lid into which to deposit the spotted trout. Maybe it was supposed to be a creel anyway, but since the few Lithuanians I have met were mycophiles, it’s a mushroom basket.

It was Germans who started us gathering boletes. Years ago, we were hiking the Horsethief Park trail on the west side of Pike’s Peak when we encountered a group of elderly German women with shopping bags–typical Army brides from Colorado Springs–and they were doing some serious mushroom-picking.

They taught us those mushrooms, and then they pointed us one way while they went another way.

One member of that particular demographic established an unfortunate reputation with the local Search and Rescue group. She was so busy one summer afternoon a couple of years ago looking down for edible fungi that she got lost and spent a chilly night in the Wets. And now the S&R people are convinced that all mushroom-hunters are distracted and easily lost.

Local knowledge–what good is “nature religion” without it?

Writers and blogs

Steven Krause, who teaches English at Eastern Michigan University, weighs in on why writers should (not) blog.

Resistance is futile

“We are Zogg.” Go here if you dare–and have a fast connection. (Link from Non Fluffy Wicca.)

In memorium Monica Sjoo

Monica Sjoo, artist, writer, and a key figure in Goddess spirituality, died Monday.

With Barbara Mor, she coauthored The Great Cosmic Mother: Discovering the Religion of the Earth (Harper San Francisco: 1987). She also wrote Return of the Dark/Light Mother and other works.

In an email circulated this week, Starhawk writes of her,

The last time I saw Monica, she came for a night to the Earth Activist Training I was coteaching in England. She presided over the ritual we were having that night in her wheelchair, sitting by the fire like an embodiment of the Crone herself. We told stories, of the walk and the Stonehenge ritual, of Greenham and the antinuclear actions of the eighties, of the early years of the feminist spirituality movement. The younger women activists—and the men—listened with rapt attention to a history most of them had never heard. Monica seemed strong, at peace, complete. That is how I will remember her, her silver hair shining in the firelight, her eyes alight. One of the mothers of the women’s spirituality movement is gone. May the Goddess embrace her, take her into her loving arms, and bring her strong, creative spirit around the circle to rebirth.

A poem she wrote as her son Sean was dying of cancer is here.

Mutilating Pagan art

Via The Cranky Professor, I discovered Towards an Archaeology of Iconoclasm, a blog devoted to early Christian campaign to destroy or at least any earlier art that suggested connection to Pagan thought. The writer is a Danish graduate student in archaeology, Troels Myrup Kristensen. The thesis will attempt to answer questions such as who were the image-breakers? In what contexts does iconoclasm occur? What role did religious violence play in late Roman/early Christian society? What is the larger picture?

The Abrahamic religions’ hostility to art continues–witness the Taliban’s destruction of the giant Buddhist statues in Afghanistan a few years ago.

Discusing a damaged sculptural group of the Three Graces, Kristensen notes,

There were many different motives for Christians to smash pagan sculpture, and one of them was an aversion to nudity. This is clear from a series of sculptures, whose genitalia have been mutilated.

Genital mutilation. What more is there to say?

Church, state, and sacred sites

No insightful comment here, just a link to a Christian Science Monitor piece on the difficulties of applying law to sacred sites. Kennewick Man gets a mention too. (Remember, boys and girls, “Caucasian” is not the same as “Caucasoid.” Even the CSM fumbles that term.)