Animals, Gods and Humans - Intro docx

Ingvild Sælid Gilhus explores the transition from traditional Greek andRoman religion to Christianity in the Roman Empire and the effect of thischange on how animals were regarded, illus

Ingvild Sælid Gilhus explores the transition from traditional Greek andRoman religion to Christianity in the Roman Empire and the effect of thischange on how animals were regarded, illustrating the main factors in thecreation of a Christian conception of animals One of the underlying assump-tions of the book is that changes in the way animal motifs are used and theway human–animal relations are conceptualized serve as indicators of moregeneral cultural shifts Gilhus attests that in late antiquity, animals were used

as symbols in a general redefinition of cultural values and assumptions

A wide range of key texts are consulted, ranging from philosophical tises to novels and poems on metamorphoses; from biographies of holy mensuch as Apollonius of Tyana and Antony, the Christian desert ascetic, tonatural history; from the New Testament via Gnostic texts to the Churchfathers; from pagan and Christian criticism of animal sacrifice to the acts ofthe martyrs Both the pagan and the Christian conception of animalsremained rich and multi-layered through the centuries, and this bookpresents the dominant themes and developments in the conception ofanimals without losing that complexity

trea-Ingvild S æ lid Gilhus is professor of the History of Religions at the

University of Bergen Her publications include Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins

(Routledge 1997)

A N I M A L S , G O D S A N D H U M A N S

Ingvild Sælid Gilhus

A N I M A L S , G O D S A N D

H U M A N S

Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman

and Early Christian Ideas

by Routledge

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© 2006 Ingvild Sælid Gilhus

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Acknowledgements vii

3 Vegetarianism, natural history and physiognomics 64

6 Animal sacrifice: traditions and new inventions 114

7 “God is a man-eater”: the animal sacrifice and its critics 138

11 The crucified donkey-man, the leontocephalus and the

vCONTENTS

This study of animals in ancient religion started as part of a plinary research project, “The construction of Christian identity inantiquity,” funded by the Norwegian Research Council By means of thisproject our research group established Christian antiquity as a distinct andinterdisciplinary field of study in Norway The stimulating environmentcreated in this group has been a great inspiration for this study of animals I

cross-disci-am deeply indebted to those involved, especially to Halvor Moxness whowas instrumental in getting the idea of a joint project on Christian antiquity

to materialize

I will like to thank all my colleagues of the interdisciplinary milieu of theInstitute of Classic Philology, Russian and the History of Religions at theUniversity of Bergen for inspiring seminaries, interesting discussions andconstructiv criticism

During the last three years the study of animals has been continued in asmall research group focusing on life-processes and body in antiquity,funded by the Norwegian Research Council I want to thank Dag ØisteinEndsjø, Hugo Lundhaug, Turid Karlsen Seim and Gunhild Vidén for criticalreading, fruitful discussions and inspiration

My thanks are also due to Siv Ellen Kraft and Richard H Pierce forhelpful comments on parts of the manuscript My friend and colleagueLisbeth Mikaelsson has been a great support during all the ups and downs ofthe project Troels Engberg-Pedersen generously offered to read the wholemanuscript, I am grateful for his careful reading

I extend my thanks to the anonymous reviewers of Routledge whoprovided many valuable suggestions I further want to thank the librarians

at the University Library, Bergen, especially Kari Nordmo, who have alwaysprovided me with the books I needed I offer my sincere thanks to MariteSapiets for improving my English

I would like to thank Walter de Gruyter and the Swedish Institute inRome for permission to reprint revised versions of previously publishedpapers Chapter 11 contains part of my article “ you have dreamt that ourGod is an ass’s head”: Animals and Christians in Antiquity”, published in

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A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

Michael Stausberg (ed), Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Religionsgeschichte,

Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2001, pp 210–221 Chapter 7contains revised portions of my article ”The animal sacrifice and its critics”,

published in Barbro Santillo Frizell (ed), PECUS Man and Animal in

Antiquity, Rome 2004, pp 116–120

As for institutional support, I am grateful to the University of Bergen forexcellent working conditions and to the Norwegian Research Council for grants.Finally, with all my heart I thank my husband Nils Erik Gilhus for hisunfaltering encouragement and never failing support

Ingvild Sælid Gilhus

July 2005

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

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Animals, gods and humans

Animals are beings with which we may have social relations We feelsympathy and affection for them, but we also exploit them for our ownbenefit, for company, sport or nourishment They are persons and things,friends and food We communicate with animals, but we also kill, cook andeat them Animals are similar to us as well as different from us, whichencourages us to imagine ourselves as them to conceptualize our own beingand to use them as symbols to make sense of our world

Our thinking about animals is not simple, any more than our feelings forthem are straightforward There is a conflict between our friendliness forsome animals and our fear of others, also between our economic interest inthem and a natural empathy for living beings when we have the imagination

to think of ourselves in their place By arousing contradictory thoughts and

a multitude of emotions, animals become natural symbols and such stuff asmyths are made of

The relationship between animals and humans is a relationship betweenone species and a tremendous variety of others Even if we feel that there is anunbridgeable gap between our species and all others, this gap is viewed differ-ently with regard to different species, which contributes to making therelationship between humans and animals extremely complex (Midgley 1988).How kinship and otherness, closeness and distance between humans andanimals are experienced and expressed varies in different types of discourse,and different cultural interpretations may be made of the same animal

In religions, animals appear as the third party in the interaction betweengods and human beings, often as mediators In this trinity, animals andhumans share a flesh-and-blood reality, while gods are creatures of humanimagination and tradition This does not necessarily mean that gods are seen

as less real than humans and animals – usually they are thought of as morereal Rituals function above all to establish and confirm the reality of thegods Killing animals in honour of them and offering them part of the meatfrom the sacrifice was one way in which their reality was established

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Historical changes and outdated answers

At some points in history, major changes occur in the religious meaning andfunctions of animals This was so in India nearly three thousand years ago,when the sacrificing of animals was replaced by bloodless offerings, eatingmeat was deemed less pure than a vegetarian diet, and doing no injury toany living being became a universal ethical command in Brahmanicallawbooks (Jacobsen 1994) In England, attitudes to the natural worldchanged in the early modern period Animals were viewed with increasingsympathy, and even writers in the Christian tradition no longer saw animals

as made solely for human sustenance (Thomas 1984: 166) In late antiquity,

a major change appeared, when the main religious institution, the animalsacrifice, was replaced by Christian rituals, which no longer included anyoffering of animal flesh At the same time, Christians continued to employ asacrificial terminology They regarded the death of Christ as fulfilling thesacrificial rites of the Old Testament and used the sacrificial lamb as asymbol for Christ (Snyder 1991: 14–15) With Christianity, the humanbody became the key symbol in a religion that focused on the death andresurrection of Christ, and the ultimate hope of believers was their ownbodily resurrection

This change from a sacrificial cult, where the animal body had been a keysymbol, to the Christian cult, where the human body became the new keysymbol, is one of the dramatic changes in the history of religions What thischange implied for the way human beings, through symbols, myths andrituals, imagined their relationship with the rest of the living world hasbeen remarkably little investigated

Few have found it strange that the bloodless cults of Christianity replacedthe sacrificial cults of the Roman Empire The reason why the worship ofgods by means of animal sacrifices gave way to the cult of Christ has notbeen discussed very much This curious lack of research may be due to acombination of assumptions based on evolutionism and implicit Christianbeliefs.1

That the religious significance of animals was discussed for so long in thecontext of cultural evolutionism has associated the problem with anoutdated way of thinking The religious significance of animals is stillmainly associated with earlier stages of cultural development, even if theevolutionistic paradigm on which these ideas were originally based has beenrejected Therefore, one reason why few have seriously asked why the blood-less cults of Christianity replaced the sacrificial cults of the Roman Empire

is simply that this problem was regarded as solved The solution wasenlightenment and civilization The slaughter of sacrificial victims is moreprimitive than bloodless cults, the worship of gods in animal form is a lessadvanced type of religion than the worship of gods in human forms, andpolytheism is more primitive than monotheism Seen from this perspective,

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Christianity stands for cultural progress In the case of animal sacrifice,furthermore, there has been a tendency to give universal answers tophenomena that in reality are extremely varied and perhaps have only asuperficial resemblance (Bloch 1992).2

In the present study, we are dealing with a limited period in humanhistory, the first to the fourth century CE, and a limited geographical area,the Mediterranean Animal sacrifice did not originate in this period; on thecontrary, it was brought to an end – at least in its traditional form After ithad been banned, people managed very well without killing their animals in

a sacrificial and religious setting The end of sacrifice did not mean thatpeople stopped killing animals or that they declined to eat meat, only thatthey no longer did these things in religious settings One difference betweenthe earlier and later periods was that the butchering of animals, which hadbeen a religious activity, was now secularized However, the end of animalsacrifice did not mean the end of sacrificial ideology, which was continued inChristianity

The transition from paganism to Christianity offers us an opportunity tolook at the much debated question of the origin of sacrifice in a differentway and ask other questions instead We will not ask why people started tosacrifice animals (about which, when all is said and done, we can know verylittle) but rather why they stopped doing so Why did the bloodlessChristian cults replace animal sacrifice? We are better equipped to suggestreasons why sacrifice came to an end in late antiquity than to give a reasonfor its origin in prehistory

If it is strange that the sacrificial cult came to an end, it is likewisestrange that the change from a sacrificial non-Christian cult to a Christiancult was not accompanied by essential changes in diet, for instance by a turn

to vegetarianism similar to the one we witness in India in the last nium BCE – even more strange since the question of purity of food was anissue among the different religious factions and sects in the empire.Representatives of various religious elites, for instance the Stoic Seneca(1–65 CE), the Neopythagorean Apollonius of Tyana (c 40–120 CE) and theNeoplatonist Porphyry (234–305 CE), abstained from eating flesh Whywas the sacrifice of animals discontinued apparently with no other dietaryconsequences for mainstream Christianity than that meat was desacralized?Sacrifice is only one element in Graeco-Roman human–animal relations

millen-As animal sacrifice lost its significance, the religious and moral value ofanimals was reduced in general The lowering of the status of animals isreflected in philosophical debates between Aristotelians, Epicureans,Platonists, Neopythagoreans and Stoics in which the Stoic position gradu-

ally became dominant According to the Stoics, logos is the categorical boundary marker between humans and animals, animals are aloga – creatures

without reason The degradation of animals is also to be seen when animalworship was used as an example of barbarism and regarded as a primitive

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form of religion The growing importance of the arena with its massacres ofanimals could also reflect a devaluation of animals.

Two complementary religious processes that concerned the relationshipbetween animals and humans were at work in the Graeco-Roman world.One was a sacralization of the human form, seen in several of the new cults,among them Christianity The other was a desacralization of animals, aprocess that can be observed when the traditional sacrificial cult came to anend The desacralization of animals is also to be seen in the criticism ofpeople who were suspected of animal worship It is as if animals and humanshad been placed on two scales, and the scales had started to move apart Thehumans were given greater religious value, the animals less But even if theprocess of sacralization of humans and desacralization of animals was notChristian in origin, Christianity developed these processes further Theywere given a final form and incorporated into the continuous cultural work

of building a new Christian identity

The study of animals

The present study owes much to several branches of cultural research Oneincludes the classic studies of animals in religions In the heyday of evolu-tionism, totemism and the religion of hunters and gatherers were the maincontexts for the discussion of the religious function of animals (Willis 1994:1–24) This discussion focused on totemism as a social system, but it some-times also stressed the nutritional value of the animals involved in this system.However, the debate about totemism took a new course in 1962, when ClaudeLévi-Strauss said that natural species are chosen, not because they are “good toeat” but because they are “good to think” (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 127–8) Fromthat point on, totemism has mainly been regarded as a system of symbolswhere animals appear as “chiffres” and as illustrations of human thoughtprocesses However, it must be pointed out that the structuralist turn initiated

by Lévi-Strauss, although it offered a fruitful new perspective, also implied areduction in the broader significance of animals One point was that economicfactors in the relations between animals and humans were downplayed;another was that emotional factors were overlooked Animals are not onlygood to think, they are also good to “feel”, and they give emotional value andimpetus to anything they are linked with That at least is one of the reasonswhy they are so effectively used as symbols and metaphors

Like totemism, sacrifice has been treated in recent research as a system ofsigns and as an institution that links and divides elements in the socialfabric (Detienne and Vernant 1989) Animal sacrifice has further beenlinked with economic factors and, above all, the distribution of power(Gordon 1990; Jay 1993; Stowers 1995)

Research on animals in antiquity is the second branch of research that hasbeen of value to this study This is a wide field that includes ancient debates

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