Animals, Gods and Humans by Saelid Gilhus Ingvild;

Author:Saelid Gilhus, Ingvild;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

Sacrifice and the human body

In the transition from a pagan to a Christian culture, Christian conceptions of sacrifice were sometimes combined with traditional conceptions. From the Nolan countryside, the Christian monk Paulinus wrote in 406 CE about a pig and a heifer that offered themselves for slaughter at the tomb of Saint Felix (Carmen, 20). As Denis Trout has recently shown, when animals were slaughtered at the tomb of Saint Felix, the needs of rural life were thus taken care of, and Christian and pre-Christian religious practices were combined (Trout 1995; cf. Trout 1999: 179–86). It is worth noting that in this Christian amalgamation of traditional sacrificial ritual and Christian piety, the animals were not merely cooperating as they had been expected to do in the traditional sacrificial cults. The pig and the heifer were eagerly and happily hurrying towards their destiny as the Christian martyrs were thought to do. This must be seen as a typical Christian development, even if there are also examples from the pagan tradition of animals that gave themselves up voluntarily for sacrifice and made considerable efforts to be killed for that purpose (Porphyry, On Abstinence, 1.25.9).

When the traditional Graeco-Roman sacrificial culture was exchanged for that of the Christians, a symbolic and ritual burden was lifted from sacrificial animals and loaded onto Christian bodies. Traditional religion had been located in the animal body as the most cherished product of agriculture and animal husbandry, and the religious techniques had been aimed at transforming that body from living flesh to tasty meat, to give the gods their due share and to interpret what was inscribed in the intestines of the animal. Christians declined to participate in ritual butchery of animals and on a symbolic level replaced the animal body with the human body: Christians worshipped a god who was himself the sacrifice.

In Christianity, the sacrificial terminology was transferred from animals to humans and used to describe personal salvation. According to Everett Ferguson, sacrifice was the universal language of worship in the ancient world, and therefore “it was natural that the significance of Jesus’ death should be interpreted in those terms” (Ferguson 1980: 116). That sacrifice was a sort of religious lingua franca is an acute observation. It is also clear that sacrificial language permeated Christian thought. It was applied to the death of Christ and to martyrdom, as well as to different types of worship, including the Eucharist, which was described as a “bloodless sacrifice”. At pagan altars, the meat of the sacrificed animal was transformed into food for the gods, while in Christian churches the Eucharist was transformed at the altars, and the relics of the martyrs were in later times placed under or close to these altars.

The high point of sacrificial language in the New Testament is Romans 12.1. Here the Christians are urged to present “your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God”. The source of this symbolic language was the sacrificial death of Christ. The description of the death of Christ was often based on a ritual slaughter.

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