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41 CHAPTER 2 Plato’s Victimary Culture The worshipper experiences the god most powerfully not just in pious conduct or in prayer, song, and dance, but in the deadly blow of the axe, the gush of blood and the burning of thigh-pieces. —Walter Burkert, Homo Necans R eligious activities were embedded in every aspect of a Greek’s life. Children across Hellas had watched and participated in sacrificial processions as long as they could remember. Processions that led a victim to the god’s altar happened every day. Few thought particularly about them. They were the way of things. Processions consisted of two or three people and an animal victim, a goat, sheep, or cow, or the whole population of the community and a herd of victims. Their purpose was always the same: to escort the animal calmly to the altar. Sacrificers kill the victim. In this, they are homines necantes, men killing, but not homines necantes, men murdering, the distinction fundamental to their ideology of sacrifice.1 The demeanor of the animal, therefore, caused much anxiety, for, were it to balk or resist, the pretense of its cooperation and willing participation would be undone. Once at the altar, the sacrificers sprinkled the altar, themselves, and the animal with water, a sign of unanimity but also the first act in a 42 Chapter 2 crescendo of violence toward it. They waited until it shook its head, indicating its consent, and would not proceed until it had done so. The animal wants to rid itself of the water, but homines necantes deceive themselves into believing that the victim consents to what is to come, a pretense Karl Meuli calls “a comedy of innocence.”2 Aggression mounts: they pelt the animal with barley grains and clip hairs from its head and throw them into the fire on the altar. Then the mageiros (butcher) or sphageus (slaughterer), the man among the sacrificers most skilled with the knife, plunges it into the victim’s throat. Women scream out, shrilling, wailing, “ololu, ololu, ololu.” Their shrieks punctuate the violence and salute the spontaneous release of mingled joy and terror at the god’s advent. This instant when the life is taken is never depicted in art or discussed. Homer, for example, in narrating Nestor’s sacrifice to Athena, says: The men lifted the cow from the broad-wayed earth and held it. Peisistratos, leader of men, gored her throat veins. After the black blood flowed out and the spirit left her bones instantly they carved her. (Ody. 3.453–456) These rituals of thusia, ubiquitous in Greek culture, comprise a sacrificial mode through which mortals communicate with their gods and, more so, among themselves through the viscera of a slaughtered domesticated animal.3 Greeks commonly considered it a kind of commerce. Euthyphro, one of Plato’s average Athenians, believes that “sacrificing is giving gifts to the gods, and praying is asking the gods for something” (Euthphr. 14c). Mortals send the gods the savor of the viscera roasted in the fire on the altar that ascends to the gods in the smoke (thuein, “to make smoke”). The rituals of thusia consist of two sets of activities separated by a moment charged with numen, met with eerie keening, and otherwise shrouded in silence. Those of the first act prepare the victim and ensure its placidity and the participants’ freedom from the pollution of murder. Those of the third act, performed over the carcass, extract the internal organs, beginning with the heart, in an order that imitates the movement of political power in the polis from its center in the agora to individual citizens in its territory.4 The viscera are roasted without salt, a memorialization of the transition from the raw of bestiality to the stew of boiled meat and vegetables that culminates the celebration.5 But Plato’s Victimary Culture 43 it is the marginal zone of the second act that holds the mysterium of thusia. At this moment differences and hierarchies that erect the human condition are obliterated by the advent of what mortals deem god. With the sudden thrust of the goring knife and the release of blood, the animal “passes without transition from the state of a live quadruped to that of a mass of meat to be shaped.”6 “From the procession, pompê,” Jean-Louis Durand continues, “the moment that takes one to the sacrifice, thusia, the moment the blood gushes, belongs...

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