Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology

7. The Sensory Experience of Blood Sacrifice in the Roman Imperial Cult

137 7. The Sensory Experience of Blood Sacrifice in the Roman Imperial Cult Candace Weddle Abstract: The field of classical scholarship has been too often reliant on sterile approaches to analyzing the sensory aspects of ancient sacrificial rites. Mute mosaics of choirs and silent reliefs of flute players serve as evidence for the sounds of worship, and ancient descriptions of burning incense suggest the odors of divine rites. Certainly such archaeological and literary sources provide vital evidence, but it is nevertheless difficult for scholars to conceive of the sensory impact of the sacrificial spectacle. I suggest that we may achieve a more thorough understanding of the experience through an autoethnographic investigation of modern religious sacrifice. I analyze my experience of the slaughter of large numbers of bovines during the Islamic Kurban Bayram sacrifices in Istanbul to make suggestions concerning the sensory elements of Roman imperial cult sacrifices and, by extension, of ancient blood sacrifice in general. This is not a comparative religion project but rather an attempt to understand the sensory impact of ancient sacrifice in a way that exceeds the limitations of traditional research. Monte Albán, among the heights surrounding a valley, is a complex of ruins : temples, reliefs, grand stairways, platforms for human sacrifice. Horror, sacredness, and mystery are consolidated by tourism, which dictates preordained forms of behavior, the modest surrogates of those rites. Contemplating these stairs, we try to imagine the hot blood spurting from the breast split by the stone axe of the priest. —Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, edited by Jo Day. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 40. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois Univer­ sity. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3287-8. 138 C. Weddle Ancient Roman Sacrificial Practice When the ancient Romans sacrificed to their gods, the sights, sounds, and smells of the rites permeated the city. The smoke from altars filled the air with incense, the voices of choirs were raised in song to the accompaniment of flutes and drums, and prayers were intoned by priests. If the offering included live victims, the smells of slaughtering and butchering the beasts and roasting flesh and hides on wood fires were notable. Whether resulting from a small private offering of incense on a home altar or a large public rite in which one hundred or more bovines were sacrificed, the visual, auditory, and olfactory byproducts of sacrifice were a daily presence in the ancient city. The proper control of these sensory elements of sacrifice was vital to correct ritual practice. Roman sacrifices were understood as providing sustenance to the gods through the vehicle of smell; the “savor” of offerings was delivered to the gods on the smoke of sacrifices, and smells thus symbolized the connection of humans with the divine. Things that were heard during the course of sacrifice were also of immense importance . A misspoken word or an unexpected sound, such as the bellow of an animal in distress, could negate an entire ritual, necessitating that it be started again from the beginning. Asignificant body of scholarship has been produced on the ancient evidence for the ritual control and ritual meaning of various sensory elements of Roman sacrifice (for example, Fless 1995; Fless and Moede 2007; and Quasten 1983 on cult music and Harvey 2006 and Yerkes 1952 on incense and other scents in worship ). However, Roman sources are concerned primarily with the effect of ritual sensory elements within the context of correct accomplishment of specific rites. The sensory impact of cult ritual on the worshippers and on the urban environments in which the rites were often carried out—how far the sounds and smells carried, how they may have affected daily life, whether and how they might have played a role in reactions and responses to particular cults—received little attention in antiquity, nor have these issues been taken up extensively by modern scholars. It is my intention here to raise questions that are, perhaps, of a more mundane nature than those that scholars of religious anthropology and classical culture have often grappled with so eloquently but are, nevertheless, of importance for advancing our understanding of the sensory experience of sacrifice within the ancient city. Our ancient evidence for sensory elements of Roman sacrificial rites is extensive but limited in scope, and in the field of classical scholarship, we have been too often reliant on sterile approaches to analyzing the sensory aspects of cult worship...