{"id":1883,"date":"2010-10-19T16:49:14","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T22:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1883"},"modified":"2010-10-19T16:52:09","modified_gmt":"2010-10-19T22:52:09","slug":"giving-animal-sacrifice-a-bad-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1883","title":{"rendered":"Giving Animal Sacrifice a Bad Name"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know that I am all for polytheism, and I say “All honor to Durga,” but isn’t this a bit much?<\/a><\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Times <\/em>reports that more than 40,000 people, many of whom were inebriated, took their sacrificial goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to pray to the goddess Durga on the last day of the Navratri festival.<\/p>\n

“People were vying with each other to get their goats sacrificed first, and they had a verbal duel with the butcher,” Banka district spokesman Gupdeshwar Kumar told the paper.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the ancient Greco-Roman world, people\u2014at least urban people\u2014often ate red meat only in the context of a religious ritual. James Davidson discussed this matter<\/a> in Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

What is important is that the omission of fish [from the Iliad<\/em>] helped to construct an opposition between the meat of pigs, sheep and cattle, all of which had to be sacrificed before it could be eaten, and fish, which was quite free of such structures, an item for private, secular consumption, as and when desired. In an important sense, fish-consumption was simply not taken as seriously as other kinds of carnivorousness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wikipedia’s entry on hecatomb<\/a> (sacrifice of one hundred animals) quotes the Homeric passage about what sounds like one big cookout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know that I am all for polytheism, and I say “All honor to Durga,” but isn’t this a bit much? The Los Angeles Times reports that more than 40,000 people, many of whom were inebriated, took their sacrificial goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to pray to the goddess Durga on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[128,40,52],"class_list":["post-1883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hinduism","tag-polytheism","tag-sacrifice"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-un","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6893,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6893","url_meta":{"origin":1883,"position":0},"title":"Animal Sacrifice and ‘Hard’ Polytheism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 2, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"There was some discussion last week at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting as to whether the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group should sponsor or co-sponsor a session devoted to issues surrounding animal sacrifice. Some voices in the Pagan world suggest that you are not really a \"hard\" polytheist (truly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Hinduism\"","block_context":{"text":"Hinduism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=hinduism"},"img":{"alt_text":"imrs.php","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/imrs.php_-300x204.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10248,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10248","url_meta":{"origin":1883,"position":1},"title":"Siberian Shamans Hold Camel Sacrifice \u2014\u00a0It’s Traditional, They Say","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 22, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Watch this powerful video, which is also embedded in this article in the Moscow Times online: \"Siberian Shamans Revive Ancient Camel-Burning Rite \u2018to Help Russia.\u2019\"\u00a0 The location is given merely as \"the Irkutsk region\" but elsewhere there are references to Tuva, a Central Asian republic that is part of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"animals\"","block_context":{"text":"animals","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=animals"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":472,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=472","url_meta":{"origin":1883,"position":2},"title":"Historic preservation leads to .\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 22, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Historic preservation leads to . . . polytheism?Those fun-loving Wahabi Muslim clerics in Saudi Arabia fear that preserving historic buildings in their holy city of Mecca--even sites associated with the prophet Muhammed himself--might lead to polytheism.Their reasoning is so convoluted that I cannot easily summarize it. But an Arab architectural\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10181,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10181","url_meta":{"origin":1883,"position":3},"title":"Pentagram Pizza with Milky Devotion and Unlikely Polytheism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 24, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"\u2022 Is this a case of misplaced devotional offerings? The Tamil Nadu Milk Dealers Association says yes. \u2022 The Live Science news site is not the place where you expect tor read about Norse (or any other) polytheism, but this article strikes a reasonable note. \u2022 Icelandic elves again, this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"elves\"","block_context":{"text":"elves","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=elves"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/pentagrampizza.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":841,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=841","url_meta":{"origin":1883,"position":4},"title":"Polytheism, not Tradition","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 24, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Keep an eye on the International Year of Polytheism Web project.This is really more of a conceptual art piece than any sort of reconstructionism (definitely not reconstructionism or capital-T Tradition), although it has been mentioned earlier in the Pagan blogosphere.Still, if anyone wants to \"wants to overcome the epoch of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"polytheism\"","block_context":{"text":"polytheism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=polytheism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1235,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1235","url_meta":{"origin":1883,"position":5},"title":"Downsizing Polytheism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 23, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"A 2003 panel from Partially Clips\u2014A Webcomic for Grownups. Click to embiggen if necessary.","rel":"","context":"In \"polytheism\"","block_context":{"text":"polytheism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=polytheism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.chasclifton.com\/uploaded_images\/canoe_sm-753434.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1883"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1885,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883\/revisions\/1885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}