Escape and Offerings

Finger Sacrifice

A few years ago a colleague of mine was traveling in Africa by boat and ran into a storm that seemed to grow dangerous. Sud­denly a fellow passenger, a politician of some rank in that coun­try, began throwing dollar bills into the raging waters.¹ While we may share my colleague’s astonishment, the very metaphor of “raging waters” shows how easily we let ourselves slip into personifying the natural forces.

Similar astonishment, and plain ridicule of such behavior can be found in some ancient sources, at least among the philoso­phers. Seneca, in his Naturales Quaestiones, writes:

I do not hold myself back from revealing all the absurdities of our people. They say certain persons are experienced in ob­serving clouds and capable of foretelling when there will be hail.... It’s really impossible. At Kleonai there were official “hail-watchers” (chalazophylakes), watching for hail to come. If they said that hail was coming, what do you think the people did? Each person would sacrifice individually: one a lamb, the other a chicken; at once those clouds moved away to some other place, when they had savored some blood. You laugh? Listen to what will make you laugh even more. If a man had neither lamb nor chicken, he sacrificed what he could afford: he laid hands on himself—but don’t think clouds are gluttonous

».ir cruel. Tie punched hi'* tìnger with a very sharply pointed pen, and with this blotxl he performed his auspicious sacrifici'; and the had turned jvvav from his piece of land as well as from places where they had been implored with greater sacrifices/“

Seneca adds that the hail-guardians were sued and punished if thev faded to avert disaster from vineyards and cornfields.

The rationalist laughs at this response to panic because it shows no obvious link between means and ends, especially in rhe face of naturai forces.

Toward the middle of the second century a.d., at the delightful site of the Asclepius sanctuary at Pergamon, a rich hypochon­driac spent more than ten years of his life. His name was Aelius Aristeides? He had been trained in oratory and became a very successful orator in his later life; his works have survived. Aelius Aristeides apparently had suffered some sort of psychosomatic breakdown when he was about to start his career. He left his work and retired to Pergamon to take endless cures with Ascle­pius, the god of healing. He firmly believed that the god himself would tell him, in dreams, how to proceed in order to save his life and to regain his health. Anxiously watching for revelations, he kept a diary about his experiences, wavering between petty indigestions, deep depression, and megalomania—“you are the best professor in the world,” his dream once told him. W hen he felt better, he elaborated speeches in honor of Asclepius; these speeches are preserved.

One incident he recalls is of special interest. The god visited him in a dream and informed him he was to die within three days. This was determined» rhe god said, and signs and events of the following day indicated that the god did not speak in vain. Yet Asclcpiw was benign, so he showed Aristeides how it was

possible ro avoid necessity through ritual—a sacrificial ritual in which religion is seen to function as a defense against life-threat­ening catastrophe. This was the ritual prescribed: Aristeafes 36 would have to cross the river and to otter sacrifice on the other side in pits ibothroi to unnamed gods: coming back, while cross­ing that river, he would have to throw small coins all around, not caring where they fell or who picked them up: finally, back in the sanctuary, he had to perform a hill sacrifice at the Asclepius temple, which means slaughtering a sheep and inviting priests and friends for the feast: bur in addition, he would have “to car a piece of his body for the sake of saving the whole.” A painful choice, no doubt.

Aristeides’ account, preserved as a rhetorical text from the high point of Graeco-Roman culture, is at the same time a private and quite a primitive document of religious practice. It shows io an exemplary way how the performance of ritual growls out of anxiety and is designed to control it. We may assume that the personnel of the Asclepius sanctuary, priests and seers, were help­ful in interpreting Aristeides’ dreams and ensuring that the sac­rifices kept to the track of proper ritual; private ideas are im­mediately engulfed by the streams of tradition.

The sequence of such rituals is easy to follow. First, the par­ticipant deals with the powers of death and the netherworld; then he crosses the boundary while throwing away money—remem­ber the African example—and finally, he achieves integration with a group of celebrants at the god’s sanctuary. The dedication of a valuable object, a practice common in all the sanctuaries in the ancient as well as in the modern world, can be interpreted as a substitute for one’s own self, pars pro toto. Some part would have to be sacrificed to save the whole. We probably should not generalize and assume that the same idea was behind every finger

ring and votive object commonly found in sanctuaries, but we must be sensitive to the supposition that some story of anxiety and hope is expressed by each of these objects dedicated to a god.⁵ Aristeides expressly makes his dedication a substitute, a 3 kind of ransom from the threat of death. The coins strewn around at the river evidently serve a similar function: a ransom in cash, a manageable loss in order to gain salvation.

The part of the body for which the god accepted the ring as substitute clearly would have been the finger itself.

Near Megalopolis in Arcadia, Pausanias records, there was a sanctuary of the Furies, Maniai, with a small mound nearby called the Finger Memorial (Daktylou Mnema) exhibiting a fin­ger made of stone; a place called Healings (Ake) was nearby. The story goes that Orestes, having killed his mother, was driven mad by the Furies just there, until he bit off one of his fingers. When he had done this, the black Furies turned white, Orestes regained his senses, and he performed two types of sacrifice at the spot to both the black Furies and the white ones. This ritual was prob­ably still performed at the sanctuary during Pausanias’ lifetime.⁶ Pursuing demons are pacified by the act of severing a finger from the body; the partial loss is to save the whole man. This was the aetiology of a cult of Maniai in Arcadia of which further details are not known; possibly it was a healing cult, as the place name Ake indicates. The fury that befell Orestes can be seen as a kind of illness, cured by this special form of sacrifice. This brings Ores­tes even closer to Aristeides.

Finger sacrifice is also a common motif in folktale and fairy­tale, with variations including the fantastic, the grotesque, and the humorous. Take for example some medieval versions of the Cyclops story, the tale about the one-eyed ogre blinded by the cunning hero. The oldest text is a collection of tales entitled Do-

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lopathus, by lohannes de Alba Silva, written about 1200 a.d.⁷ The final and most thrilling episode of the story is the escape from the blinded monster. In the Odyssey Polyphemus makes a weak attempt to lure Odysseus by offering gifts. In the medieval versions the ogre actually throws a finger ring, a golden ring in our text, which the hero eagerly grasps; but as soon as he has put the ring on his finger he is forced to scream—in other versions it is the ring itself that screams—“here I am, here I am,” ecce ego! ecce ego! And it proves impossible to strip the ring off the finger again.

What makes the motif of finger sacrifice more serious is that it is actually practiced. As James George Frazer observed:⁸ “In Tonga on the Friendly Islands it was common practice to cut off a finger or portion of one as a sacrifice to the gods for the re­covery of a superior relative who was sick”; earlier, Captain Cook reported the same thing: “They suppose that the Devil will accept the little finger as a sort of sacrifice efficacious enough to procure the recovery of their health.” Likewise, “Hottentot women and Bushwomen cut off a joint of a child’s finger, espe­cially if a previous child has died. The sacrifice of the finger joint is supposed to save the second child’s life.... Some South Afri­can tribes believe that to cut off the joint of a sick man’s finger is a cure.” “Among the Blackfeet, in times of great public or private necessity, a warrior cuts off a finger of his left hand and offers it to the Morning Star at its rising.” In India a woman who “has borne some children, terrified lest that the angry deity should deprive her of her infants,... goes to the temple, and as an offering to appease his wrath, cuts off one or two fingers of

the right hand.” Some would do so repeatedly, becoming more and more seriously handicapped; indeed, the colonial govern­ment of India tried to forbid the custom at the beginning of this century. An interesting variant is reported from the Fiji Islands: “a finger was sometimes cut off and presented to an offended superior to appease his wrath.”⁹

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Worldwide, it seems, in situations of distress and illness or even in anticipation of disaster, people would cut off a finger or part of a finger.

In all probability we are dealing with a custom that is as wide­spread as it is ancient. In some of the famous Paleolithic caves there are handprints of people apparently trying to come in con­tact with the sacred or to leave the mark of their presence. In one cave some of these hands clearly are mutilated, and it has been assumed that some form of finger offering occurred even at this epoch. In other words, finger sacrifice is a Paleolithic ritual that has survived into the twentieth century, over more than 20,000 years. Another finding is from a late Neolithic site, Arpachiya in Iraq, where “five stone fingers and one human finger bone” have been found in a sanctuary.¹⁰ This seems to attest the custom of self-mutilation in the fourth millennium B.c., while the clay ob­jects show that gods were kind enough to accept substitutes even

then, as Asclepius did with Aristeides. In India, after the prohi­bition of the rite by the British government, people would cere­monially cut off finger joints made of dough at the appropriate situations,¹¹ carrying on the ritual tradition by way of symbol­ism.

Biology, Fantasy, and Ritual

The “part for whole” sacrifice can be plainly rational in its cal­culation of loss and gain. Plenty of situations in human life re­quire that similar alternatives be pondered, and decisions made accordingly. To leave one’s purse to a hooligan rather than to run the risk of getting stabbed or shot is the regular advice in our civ­ilization;¹² throwing part of the cargo from the ship in a storm was common practice.¹³ Not too long ago men would cut off a finger to avoid getting drafted into the army, or try to get sent away from the battlefield through clandestine self-mutilation of nonvital parts. But the pattern also explodes beyond what is functional and rational as it moves into symbolism: instead of cargo, throwing dollar bills into the sea, presenting gifts to the tempest, or, as I have been told in one instance, throwing a hand­bag not to a robber, but to a barking dog.¹⁴ The pattern is dis­placed as it loses contact with reality and turns into “ritual” in its exaggerated and demonstrative character. In this form it will follow prescribed examples or use expert advice; thus it will ap­pear to be culturally learned behavior. But as it is generated afresh repeatedly, it evidently has a psychological impact, a ther­apeutic effect. Ritual of this kind may be called magical in the sense that it seeks to achieve a definite goal by some nonobvious chain of causality; but this merely introduces a convenient term instead of an explanation. At any rate, the nonobvious connec­tion of cause and effect is widely acceptable, and it makes sense to those who practice it.

Partial mutilation has its analogues in the world of animals. Some spiders’ legs break off easily and continue to move for a while; this is to distract the attention of simple-minded predator pursuers and give the spider a chance to retire to safety. Lizards’ tails too easily break off and thus may remain in the grip of the pursuer, while the lizard itself escapes. Here mutilation is en­coded in a special biological program, genetically fixed and fol- 4 lowed in the construction of the skeleton, a program that works in this particular habitat with clear survival value. It can be re­phrased precisely in the words of Aristeides: “to cut a piece of the body for the sake of saving the whole.” Birds may experience “terror molt,” which means that an individual, attacked by a predator, suddenly sheds its feathers and thus leaves the attacker with a mouthful of plumage while escaping in a “naked” state.¹⁵ In the class of mammals, a fox caught with a paw in a trap will bite off its paw to escape. The smaller loss is outweighed by the very fact of survival.

Thus an age-old ritual pattern, spread over the world and ex­pressed in tales, dreams, and religious cults of ancient civiliza­tions, has its analogy in a biological program that is seen to work at various stages of evolution and with various animal species. The program is directly functional in the animal world, as it enhances the chance for survival by distracting the attention of predators. In human culture, it is a ubiquitous and persistent pattern both of behavior and of fantasy. The programs of be­havior of man and animal are so close that they can be described with the same words, “partial sacrifice for the sake of survival in a situation of pursuit, of threat and anxiety,”—in short, the pars pro toto, “part for whole” principle. Religion and zoology are seen to join hands.

This is not to postulate a definite inherited program of behav­ior, encoded genetically and passed on in continuous evolution from more primitive to higher living beings and culminating in man. The examples from different species are not connected by a continuous chain of evolution; nothing like it has been reported about chimpanzee behavior or, more generally, about monkeys. We are dealing with analogies, not homologies. In fact, the pro­grams that come into play are also different. The active self­mutilation of the fox is not the same as leaving a part that breaks

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off to the predator, as with spiders and lizards. Another much simpler and more general behavior of “abandoning” is to give up a source of food when disturbed by a stronger rival or a pred­ator. And there is a formidable step from the biological program to the conscious and verbalized principle, the explicit calculus pars pro toto and the decision to be made about it, even if sug­gested by ritual and narrative tradition.

From the opposite side of the argument, it would be equally difficult to hold that these human rituals and fantasies owe their whole existence to some form of intracultural learning, to ob­servation or empathy, or to sheer creative fantasy. The pattern’s recurrence in time and space, our readiness for the response, and common understanding point to a biological “landscape” un­derlying experience. The human makeup includes biological pro­grams dealing with anxiety and flight that are older than the human species, and these comprise or engender at least the ru­diments of the ritual pattern, correlating threat, alarm, pursuit, flight, and the trick of abandoning what can be spared. Lumsden and Wilson made it a criterion for the “coevolution of genes and culture” to find “memoirs most easily recalled, emotions they are most likely to evoke”;¹⁶ this seems to be a model case of their findings.

It is well known and easy to recall, and even to rehearse in fantasy, how haunting and deeply disturbing the image of the pursuing predator still is, notwithstanding millennia of civilized life. Victims of psychosis often develop the anxiety of being pur­sued; for the healthy, a movie thriller will not do without scenes of pursuit and narrow escape. Demons, in myth and in art, usu­ally take the form of predators.¹⁷ To depict the terror of hell Christians pictured it as a huge devouring animal with yawning jaws, and Jaws still projects vicarious terror even today. Few contemporary people will have any terrifying experiences of that kind, but even the attack of a barking dog will normally produce a sudden physical shock far beyond the real danger: we “know” about the danger of a predator’s attack even before any actual experience, as the chicken “knows” about the hawk.¹⁸ Humans

are more adaptable and less fixed in their repertoire than chick ens, but primates and hominids, too, had predators for danger­ous neighbors, and the appropriate reactions have been fixed in our biological makeup. The snake, the leopard, the wolf—the image of the pursuing predator is easily evoked by any kind of threatening danger, whether real or imaginary. No wonder it ap­pears in religious ritual too.

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A special sign arousing anxiety is the staring eye. This fearful reaction is most clearly based on a very old and general biological program. As nature invented the eye to search for food, pro­spective “food,” alive and selfish, learned to beware of the eye. The fear of the eye is present in many animals, as a functional reaction to being hunted by sharp-eyed predators. In another variation, certain butterflies, among other species, display the staring eye on their wings to avert unpleasant pursuers, while the peacock uses the eyes of his tail just to catch attention. In human civilizations the fear of the evil eye is widespread; the concept is documented from the ancient Near East through classical an­tiquity and into contemporary practice.¹⁹ The innate fear calls for countersymbolism: the power of the evil eye is broken by another eye, by a certain color, or by male aggressiveness, espe­cially by phallic display, or finally by blinding. The Polyphemus tale introduces the ogre as the anthropomorphous predator. To blind him is to achieve the most brilliant success in overcoming anxiety.

The biological reality of pursuit by predators is easy to incor­porate into religious tradition. A general Greek prayer is “that the foot of the pursuer be turned away.”²⁰ Brahmanic myth in India tells about the origin of the normal and most common form of sacrifice, the libation of butter: when Agni, fire, had been cre­ated, he turned out to be an eater, roaming through the land and devouring whatever he met. Then Prajapati, the Lord of First Creation, produced butter to feed Agni; Agni thus was assuaged. Since then, pouring butter into the flames at the altar has been made into a sacred ritual.²¹ Cult, by this understanding, means to avert danger by consenting to a tolerable loss, in this way

manipulating the “eater.” “To pour sacrifice makes life return,” as Babylonian wisdom holds.²² Greek ritual had a class of sac­rifices called rites of aversion; apotropaia. Jane Harrison found 44 apotropaic ritual an especially old and basic stratum of Greek religion.²³ The way of doing it is to throw or pour out to uncanny pursuers what is due to them; often a person is cautioned not to look back when leaving the scene of the sacrifice.²⁴ Evil demons are said to require these rituals, for which the corresponding Latin term is averruncare.^ls The Romans resorted to human sac­rifice allegedly by order of the Sibylline oracles, when the scan­dalous unchastity of some vestal virgins offended the gods and presaged disaster. As Plutarch tells it, the oracles ordained “to send forth (proesthai) to certain strange and alien demons, in order to avert what was about to happen, two Greeks and two Celts, who were buried alive on the spot.”²⁶ To avert evil by sending forth or rather throwing off (proesthai) or leaving the victims to these demons—it makes a pattern that could not be more explicit.

In a counterpart to ritual, there is a well-known story pattern, common in saga, folktale, and myth, of magical flight or magical escape.²⁷ It forms the thrilling conclusion of many a fairytale, including the Cyclops story. The magical flight usually takes this form: as the heroine or hero or both flee from the dominion of a witch, a sorcerer, an ogre, a dragon, or other unpleasant com­pany, the powerful and swift adversary realizes they have escaped and takes up pursuit. There is just one way to stop him: the fleeing person must throw things behind that will grow into bar­riers to halt the pursuer at least for a while, until a decisive point is passed and safety is regained. Throw a comb, and it will grow into a forest or into a mountain range. This tale pattern can be found in the Indian Veda and in the Finnish Kalevala as well as in the Grimm collection of fairytales; nor is it absent from Greek mythology. In the Kalevala, Canto 43, Vainamdinen has got hold of a precious magical object and is escaping in his ship, pursued by the North Folk and their queen; as he sees them appear at the horizon, he throws a piece of flint over his left shoulder into the sea. This grows into a cliff where the pursuing ship is stranded, but the obstacle is only temporary. The pursuing queen t urns into an eagle, and the fight goes on. Karl Meuli took the motif of the magical flight to be typical of shaman poetry/⁸ fantastic stories 4 > surrounding the ecstatic performances of the Siberian charis­matics who penetrate into the realm of spirits, meet all kinds of helpers and dangerous adversaries, and come hack again tin harmed, as magic is countered by magic. But the pattern has more general foundations.

The story pattern wanders off into pseudo-zoology in this yarn about catching tigers, told in antiquity. The Indians steal young tigers from the lair and rapidly retreat on horseback. But as soon as the adult tigers realize their loss, they take up the pursuit, and they are much faster than any horse. So the rider, as the tigers come near, abandons one of the stolen cubs, which the tigers carefully bring back to the den. Then they resume the pursuit, and as they reach the rider, again running with enormous speed, a second and then possibly a third cub has to be abandoned; if successful, the rider will keep one or two when he finally reaches the civilized region which tigers do not approach.²⁹ This pictur­esque zoological nonsense³⁰ exactly matches the pattern of the magical flight; there too the pursuer is stopped more than once, and there is a decisive frontier where the pursuer has to give up. Instead of demons or sorcerers, the tiger story has reinstalled the classical pursuer, the most formidable carnivore. An interesting detail is the precise point where the pursuer stops. In its territorial behavior each animal feels safest at the home base, and less and less secure with increasing distance; this results in a precarious balance of anxiety and aggression in the marginal region. In the world of the tale this turns into a clearly defined point, parallel to ritual behavior which establishes marks of territory, even on a prehuman level.³¹

In Greek mythology, the most elaborate and gruesome version of the magical flight is the story of the Argonauts. As Jason and Medea steal away from Kolchis with the Golden Fleece, King Aietes follows with his fleet. It is not possible to ward him off by force, but Medea knows how to stop him. She kills her brother Apsyrtos (aps syrton, meaning “to be swept off backward”), “cuts him to pieces, and throws these into the depths of the sea;

46 while Aietes collected the limbs of his son, he was late for the pursuit; thus he turned back.”¹² The story surely is very old. Such a tearing apart of a human body (sparagmos) is a magical cere­mony, no doubt, and Medea is a sorceress. But the term “magic” does not explain much. Remembering the spider and the lizard, along with the tiger snatching of India, we find that fantasy and ritual follow the old and beaten tracks of the pars pro toto sac­rifice, that biological trick for survival to distract the attention of the pursuer by abandoning, by throwing. The “part,” in the Argonaut myth, is the small, the feeble, the replaceable member of the community, the younger brother. Any predator has his best chances with young and feeble quarry.

There is another variant with a strongly biological background which takes the step from the sublime to the ridiculous. One biological reflex which makes the individual leave something be­hind in a situation of alarm is involuntary defecation. The acci­dent is commonly alluded to in coarse speech as the ultimate sign of cowardice; it did not escape Aristophanes.³³ In normal life we have built up enough precautions to avoid situations of extreme and uncontrolled panic—yet it happens with children, it may still happen in traffic accidents, it happened in war; already the As­syrian annals use the motif to defile the beaten enemy,³⁴ and the Greeks were not immune to it.³⁵ It is also a well-known chim­panzee behavior.³⁶ Language retains the primitive far beyond ac­tual experience, adapted of course to the cultural context. It is the contrast to normal decency that creates this particular op­portunity for verbal abuse.

Probably less known nowadays is a curious ritual from the nineteenth century. Thieves in Germany and Austria, perhaps generally in Europe, believed that they would be safe from pur­suit and detection if they left their feces at the crime scene, and so they did.³⁷ The biological reaction of panic in a terrifying sit­uation was turned into apotropaic magic; what may happen in­stinctively was done on purpose. The practice remains notable for the interplay of a biological program, superstitious yet con­scious magic ritual, and rational control. Superstition arose as the act was reinterpreted to assume magical efficacy through 47 nonobvious causality. In Greek religion, the goddess Hekate, who might be called the very impersonation of panic in the dark, is an “eater of excrements,” borborophorba.™

Castration and Circumcision

Self-castration, a special form of self-mutilation, is a strange and repulsive chapter of ancient religions. The very term “castration” is connected in antiquity with another tale of pseudo-zoology. Beavers—castor in Latin—produce in special glands a fragrant secretion which was highly valued as a medicine. It was wrongly believed that the substance was produced in the testicles of the male beaver. Thus when the beaver is hunted and finds himself trapped beyond escape, “he bends down, and biting off his own testicles throws them to his hunters.” In this, the ancient writer telling the story explains, he is “like a clever man who has fallen among robbers, he puts down whatever he carried with him for the sake of his own salvation, giving this as ransom.”³⁹ The par­allel to the human situation and behavior is explicit; partial sac­rifice is again seen as ransom.

The story about the beaver was doubtless told in Latin, in which castor is reminiscent of castus, “pure and abstinent,” hence castrare. In terms of animal behavior the story makes no sense. As biological beings, individuals, being survival machines for their selfish genes,⁴⁰ could not do worse than to sacrifice their potentially immortal procreative cells. In its distortion of biolog­ical fact the story gives itself away as a projection of typical hu­man preoccupations and anxieties. Perhaps because in wars ag­gression is linked to masculinity, the asexual could count on better chances for survival. More important, in our conscious world self-preservation appears to be the conditio sine qua non of existence and hence the ultimate goal that can be envisaged

rationally; the biological program of procreation, which makes the individual replaceable and hence superfluous, remains dis­turbing in this respect. This may be ultimately why sex is re- 48 garded with the strongest suspicion in many traditions of wis­dom, of yoga and other forms of asceticism. The illusion is that by renouncing procreation men may stay clear of the maelstrom of life and death. A small loss seems possible, even advisable, to guarantee the salvation of the individual whole. This is one of those reversals by which the mental world tries to get off the tracks of biology, with short-lived results for the individual, but with persisting appeal to the species. Conscious and unconscious imagination remains fixed to the theme with all of its strong shock of ambivalence.

The alleged behavior of the beaver recurs in tales and rituals of castration. In sanctuaries from Babylonia to Asia Minor and Syria a Great Goddess was worshiped by eunuch priests; they were called galloi at Pessinus, the most influential center of this cult. This is not the place to investigate this phenomenon in all its aspects, nor to discuss the various theories which have been brought forward by modern interpreters to explain its origin.⁴¹ The one cuneiform text that clearly refers to it explains that Ish­tar, the Great Goddess, installed it “to spread awe among men.”⁴² It is difficult to decide which came first, the Great Goddess with her eunuch devotees or the institution of the royal harem with eunuch guards, purportedly invented by Queen Semiramis or Atossa⁴³ and in existence down to the beginning of this century at Istanbul and Beijing. Let us just have a glimpse at the religious side, for which Lucian, in his book on the Syrian Goddess, is the main source.

Lucian tells a foundation myth in a novelistic and satirical fashion.⁴⁴ Queen Stratonike of Syria was told in a dream to found a new temple of the goddess at Bambyke-Hierapolis. She went off accompanied by a young and handsome man, Kombabos, whom the king chose as his delegate. Kombabos foresaw the risk of serving as companion to a young and passionate queen. Sus­picion would be unavoidable and could cost him his life. He

therefore castrated himself and left his genitals, embalmed with honey and unguents, in a sealed box with the king. As he had expected, the lonely queen fell in love with him, and when he refused, the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife was re-enacted in a new variant: slander that Kombabos had violated the queen, trial, and death sentence. In the end Kombabos asked the king to open the box and proved his innocence by his impotence.

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The Kombabos story clearly is etiological in its details, espe­cially with that sealed box—eunuchs really kept such boxes even in China.⁴⁵ The story may be quite old, since the name Kombabos seems to recall the old name of the Great Goddess Kubaba- Kybebe.⁴⁶ What is especially interesting is the psychological ex­planation it offers for the ritual of castration. It is the fear of the more potent sexual rival, the king with his power to kill, that drives the inferior partner to renounce his sex. In some monkey societies the younger low-ranking males suffer a sort of psycho­logical castration as long as they remain in the family; in the course of time they grow bigger and stronger and finally get their chance.⁴⁷ The tale makes Kombabos act like the clever beaver, giving up what is of mortal danger for him in order to survive. According to Lucian, at Bambyke-Hierapolis castration would actually be done at the major festival, and the future galloi would “throw” the severed parts into the house from which they would receive their female clothing and adornment,⁴⁸ as the beaver threw his testicles toward his hunters.

No less strange is the story in an isolated passage from the Hebrew Bible which must be regarded as one of the foundation myths for circumcision. The text is usually attributed to the old­est layer of the Pentateuch, the Jah wist.⁴⁹ When Moses returns from Midian to Egypt together with his wife Zippora and their little son, they rest at night in the desert. “And Jahweh met him and wanted to kill him. Then Zippora took a flint and circum­cised her son, touching Moses’ private parts with the foreskin and said: A bridegroom of bloods you are for me. Then Jahweh let him go.” The writer of the text already wondered at the story; he added an explanatory note, stating that this refers to circum-

cision.⁵⁰ The passage has remained enigmatic. How can the Lord appear in the guise of a killing monster of the nocturnal desert? But that is exactly how it happens. Suddenly, at night in the 50 desert, one is struck by an irresistible fear of god, more powerful than a king and ready to kill. For ransom, man has to renounce his masculinity—in this case, the mother steps in to make the decision. At the same time, a double substitution takes place, child for man, and foreskin for penis. Sanguinary mutilation, both real and symbolic, is necessary to ward off the pursuer. Only a “bridegroom of bloods”—Moses in relation to Zippora—will survive. This is dealing with a super-father in the ways of Kom- babos, mitigated by ritual substitution. It is the mother who wields the flint knife—as castration in the cult of the Mother Goddess was done with a flint knife. Doubts may remain whether this is the precise origin of circumcision, but apparently it is the oldest interpretation of circumcision we have.⁵¹

It is tempting to connect finger sacrifice with castration; the Freudian approach has become popular. Even before Freud, the finger monument of Orestes in Arcadia had been suspected of being actually a phallus.⁵² And what will become, with a bit of Freudian and anatomical fantasy, of that finger with its eloquent ring in the medieval ogre story? Telesphoros, the child in the hood to whom Aristeides dedicated his finger ring, does in fact turn into a phallus in the hood in some ancient statuettes.⁵³ In a curious version of the Attis myth, Attis, dying from castration, will not be revived but neither will he decay, and as he lies dead, his small finger keeps moving.⁵⁴ Many myths also insist on the figure of the threatening female, Ishtar or Kybele, Zippora or the furies allied to Klytaimestra. It may be left to psychologists to establish to what extent the human psyche is apt to produce images and symbolism of this kind. The perspective adopted here suggests that there is a background even beyond the Freudian psyche, that there are pragmatic and not just Oedipal anxieties rooted in our biological makeup. There are real predators; awe wrought by ritual, meeting with the ambivalence of sexuality in

the individual’s experience, finds fertile ground to thrive in some appalling forms of religion.

Scapegoats

The pars pro toto principle, accepting the small loss in order to save the whole, is even more efficacious in group dynamics. “It is better that one man die than that the whole people should be destroyed,” the high priest Kaiphas declares in the Gospel of John;⁵⁵ the evangelist is anxious to add that Kaiphas spoke “not on his own but acted as a prophet.” This strange balance, sal­vation of all by the death of one, became one of the fundamental tenets of Christian theology. Yet Kaiphas’ prophecy was in fact restating a much older principle, widely understood, accepted, and practiced.⁵⁶ It is presupposed already in the Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma elish, when sentence is pronounced on a guilty god: “He alone shall perish that mankind shall be fash­ioned.”⁵⁷

In some unfortunate situations it seems perfectly reasonable that one person or a few individuals should be given up in order to save the others. In wars generals make decisions to sacrifice a number of their own troops for superior strategic goals. A more picturesque instance is that of the sleigh pursued by wolves. As the horses grow tired, one person must be thrown to the wolves closing in on the sleigh—we are back to the world of carnivores pursuing their quarry. Comparable situations arise in times of catastrophe, fires, floods, or sinking boats, when helpers may lose their lives while saving others. Gratefully we honor their memory, and make sure to remain attached to the tales recalling those thrilling events. Ritual language prevails in this context: there are victims, there is sacrifice.

The pars pro toto calculus is highly rational and highly emo­tional at the same time. It repeats at the intellectual level what biology has long taught before. Yet it retains a mysterious ring and carries religious ramifications in its wake. The sacrifice of one for the sake of all, enduring a small, tolerable loss to confirm

all life, is a motif dominating both fantastic talcs and strange rituals. The pattern transcends what seems reasonable and func­tional and leaves a purely symbolic message; it can be termed 52 magical or superstitious. The sequence of events feels right, makes sense to the participants, this triumph of the inherited pattern proves its autonomy.

Take the story of Jonah. The ship in the storm is a model situation of anxiety and despair. As the sailors begin to lose hope, they all agree with sudden unanimity that one man in the ship is culpable and has to be thrown into the sea. It is on the whole rational to throw part of the cargo into the sea to save the ship.⁵⁸ But it is the personalized Jonah version that made its way into the Bible and remains unforgettable. In addition, the tale intro­duces the huge swallowing monster, the fish to engulf Jonah; this was the character missing from the natural terror scene, and, with a fantastic reversal, it is to become Jonah’s savior. Folklor­ists have collected many parallels to this obsessive tale.⁵⁹ In a special form the motif recurs in Virgil’s Aeneid in which, to en­sure a smooth voyage, one man must die in the sea at night; “one head will be given for many.” Falling asleep through divine in­tervention, Palinurus the steersman is drowned.⁶⁰

Among the stories about the Lacus Curtius at the Forum Ro­manum, one is especially memorable. At this spot, it was said, a yawning gap opened (dehisse terram), and the soothsayers an­nounced that “the god exacted the bravest citizen.” Then Cur­tius, by his own decision, rode on horseback into the abyss, and the gap was closed.⁶¹ The yawning gap is a memorable projection of anxiety, linked to the image of devouring jaws. One person must be swallowed to save the rest. Later the deed is recorded in ritual, with gifts brought to the spot or coins thrown into the shallow pit that remained—something like those dollar bills thrown into the water in modern Africa. Anxiety is removed and normalcy secured by way of a specific payment.

Other rituals match other tales. A black lamb is slaughtered to stop a typhoon; storms are halted by drawing blood;⁶² at Cy­rene, “if a plague is coming against the country or the city, or famine, or dying... they sacrifice a red he-goat before the gates.”⁶³ Legend has it that a child was buried to avert a plague in Austria in 1715, and in Swabia a bull was actually buried alive to stop a plague affecting cattle in 1796.⁶⁴ To ensure the effec- 53 tiveness of a dam that checks the flood, a living being must be buried on the spot.⁶⁵

The tolerable loss may nevertheless leave the survivors with a bad conscience. This can be countered by an alternative projec­tion: the being chosen to perish was guilty, polluted, and detest­able; the positive effect is enhanced by the negative criteria of selection. This is the famous and much discussed scapegoat pat­tern.⁶⁶ Alternatively, the victim may be marked by a touching ambivalence, despised and worshiped at the same time. This has been elaborated, most of all, in the Christian tradition.⁶⁷

The scapegoat complex will not be discussed here at length.⁶⁸ Suffice it to recall the ritual for the Day of Atonement according to the Bible. A goat is selected “for Azazel,” the sins of the people are placed on its head, and it is led away into the desert. It will probably fall a victim to predators there. One later source says the goat was hurled down a cliff.⁶⁹ An ivory plaque from Late Bronze Age Megiddo has often been adduced for illustration of this ritual. It shows an aggressive sphinx, a demon with a lion’s body and a vulture’s wings, grasping a goat: a demon depicted in the guise of a carnivore of the desert.⁷⁰

Life for Life

Devouring demons who pursue men are prominent in the ancient oriental conceptions of disease, which can be countered by heal­ing magic.⁷¹ The normal practice is to offer an animal, with words such as: “Look, this goat is big and fat, take it and let the sick person go.” These ideas and practices were influential in the classical world too. Ovid, in Fasti,⁷² tells of demonic vampire birds flying around at night, called strides (witches are called by nearly the same name, strigae). The striges penetrate into the rooms where babies are asleep and suck their blood, leaving them

to sicken and die. One wise, charismatic woman found a ritual to help the sick babies: take the inward parts of a piglet and say, “birds of night, spare the inward parts of the child. For the little 54 one a little sacrifice is falling. Fake heart for heart, intestines for intestines; we give this life-sou I for the sake of a better life-soul.” The entrails, cut to pieces, are to be spread under the open sky, and nobody is allowed to look back as they leave the scene. In the imaginative world evoked by myth and ritual, the pursuing predators that suck the blood of their victims have to be pacified by a substitution sacrifice, by killing another small animal. An action that would have a pragmatic function in dealing with real animals, to stop pursuing predators by feeding them, becomes a purely symbolic, magical procedure. But it also entails another transformation: instead of passive abandonment of a chosen vic­tim, there is active killing. The victim-to-be saves himself by be­coming a killer in turn. In a way this doubles the protection to be achieved, both assuaging and threatening the putative ag­gressor, in a practice that is most strongly felt to be efficacious.

Ovid’s ominous words “soul for soul,” animam pro anima,⁷³ are well known from more serious religious contexts, especially from votive inscriptions to Saturnus from North Africa.⁷⁴ In this context it is necessary to recall that substitution in sacrifice can be turned around, from animal for human back to human for animal. Saturnus-Kronos is the god with whom ancient tradition connects the Phoenician and especially Carthaginian sacrifices of children, sometimes called Moloch sacrifices after Leviticus.⁷⁵ Diodorus says they had been replaced by animal holocausts of the more normal form, but in a situation of disaster, such as during the siege by Agathocles, the Carthaginians resorted to human sacrifice again as the more efficacious means to secure salvation.⁷⁶ These were “ransom for avenging demons,” Philo of Byblos said.⁷⁷ The Indian sacrifice of butter⁷⁸ and the Punic sac­rifice of children are two extremes of the pars pro toto principle. The conviction that a threat to human life can only be averted by offering another human being is a form of logic that can arise everywhere. Thus Admetus accepted the death of his wife Alces- tis in his stead; Aelius Aristeides dreamed about it;⁷⁹ Queen Amestris performed such killings; according to Herodotus, so did a king at Uppsala; and a seventeenth-century Hungarian duchess tried to prolong her life by slaughtering girls.⁸⁰ Caesar alleged 55 that it was general custom in Gaul to resort to human sacrifice in cases of sickness, of battles, of dangers in general, “because they believe that unless for the life of a man the life of a man is given, the will of the immortal gods cannot be placated.”⁸¹ Re­ports on child sacrifice in India, to avert sickness or other im­minent danger, still appear in our newspapers. In the Sumerian Inanna myth the “law of the netherworld” holds that a substitute must be given so that Inanna can rise from the dead; hence Du- muzi falls victim to the infernal galle who persecute him. These fatal demons “do not accept offerings of eating and drinking, flour sprinkled for sacrifice, water poured out for libation.” There is no offering to turn them away.⁸² Even in such a context the edifying reversal into voluntary sacrifice is possible. Some Romans made vows they would die if the sick emperor recov­ered—and Caligula really enforced the fulfillment of such vows.⁸³ Rumor had it that Antinous’ death was a magical sacrifice to prolong Hadrian’s life.⁸⁴

In the situation of the herd vis-à-vis the carnivore—the zebras attacked by lions—when one individual is killed, the others feel safe for a time. The instinctive program seems to command: take another one, not me. This ancient program is still at work in humans, still fleeing from devouring dangers and still making sacrifices to assuage and triumph over anxiety.⁸⁵ In this perspec­tive sacrifice is a construct of sense that has proved almost uni­versally effective throughout the history of civilization.