These usually are not marginal rituals. When, at weekly Mass, lots of the world’s greater than 1.3 billion Catholics, a couple of sixth of the worldwide inhabitants, eat a wafer of bread that has turn out to be the physique of Christ — not in image however bodily reality, by the thriller of transubstantiation — they’re actually bringing God inside. (The Aztecs who got here to energy in 14th-century Mesoamerica consumed their deities, too, formed out of a dough of maize, amaranth and black maguey syrup, scandalizing friars newly arrived from Spain within the early sixteenth century, who noticed this as a subverted sacrament.) So pressing is the Eucharist to Catholics that in 2018, when Venezuela was in financial free fall and struggling extreme meals shortages, neighboring Colombia donated to the predominantly Catholic nation a quarter-million communion wafers so that folks may correctly rejoice Easter.
The British spiritual research scholar Graham Harvey has gone as far as to counsel that faith “must be outlined not as believing however as consuming.” Meals has at all times been central to the best way we articulate our sense of the cosmic order and, by it, our identities as people and peoples. We eat this, not that; we share a meal with you however not them; we feed on God or let God feed on us. Meals is a primary necessity, profane in perform, serving to maintain our instinctual, animal selves. It solely turns into sacred after we consider these selves are price sustaining.
WHAT DO YOU feed a god? A bull, thought the traditional Greeks, its horns gilded and its neck draped in wreaths, signaling its glorified standing. They led it gently to the altar and coaxed it to bow its head, as an indication of consent, earlier than the slaughter. Then they butchered it, swaddled the nice thighbones in fats and burned them, so the gods may feast on the smoke, the immaterial and thus eternal a part of the animal. It was the people who took succor from the flesh — who, because the French classicist and anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant has written, ate the half that had been merely cooked, “softened and weakened to allow the puny forces of the human physique to assimilate it.” This meal, virtually the one event on which the Greeks would eat meat, was without delay a second of connection between the gods, of their timelessness, and people, defenseless earlier than demise, and a reminder of all that divided them.
To supply an animal to the gods was to supply life itself, and a life approximate in dimension and energy to 1’s personal. Some peoples took this a step additional, just like the Aztecs, who smeared the mouths of their stone idols with the blood of people, lots of them enemies captured at struggle, but in addition figures chosen from their neighborhood who’re believed to have accepted the destiny as an honor. The victims have been relieved of their still-beating hearts with obsidian knives at a charge, historians estimate, of 1000’s (possibly tens of 1000’s) a yr. These left among the many residing sometimes provided their very own blood in tribute, drawn with thorns plunged into the ears or tongue.
