Guilt and Causality

Religious Therapy and the Search for Guilt

Greek literature begins with Homer’s Iliad, and the Iliad begins with the story of a plague. Chryses, a priest, goes to the camp of the Achaeans to ransom his captive daughter, Chryseis.

If we leave aside the omniscient narrator and try to imagine how the events appeared to the common man in the camp of the Achaeans, the main and most notable event would be the plague. People dying, pyres burning—it was an experience of catastrophe all too common in life and all the more terrible because there was no recognized form of medical treatment. Still, one has to do something about it. Achilles, who takes the initiative, imme­diately decides (and expects the others to agree) that the calamity

must have a cause, and that the cause is the anger of one partic­ular god, Apollo; he is the god of healing as well as of pestilence. Apollo evidently is angry, very angry with the Achaeans. So Achilles proposes to “ask a seer or a priest or even an interpreter of dreams... Why has Phoibos Apollo become so angry?”¹ Kai- chas the seer rises to tell the assembly what the poet has already told his audience: the god is angry because Agamemnon has in­sulted his priest.

We are dealing here with a sequence of events which by far transcends Homeric poetry; it even transcends Greek civilization and may practically be called universal. Four characteristic steps mark the process. First comes the experience of evil, disaster, or catastrophe which is threatening and anxiety-arousing; this im­mediately provokes the questions why? why now? why to us?² This calls for the second step, the intervention of a special me­diator who claims superhuman knowledge: a seer, priest, or in­terpreter of dreams. Third is the diagnosis. The cause of evil must be defined and localized, normally through establishing guilt, identifying what wrong was committed and by whom, and whether recently or long ago. To know the cause is to find the way to salvation. Fourth are the appropriate acts of atonement, measures both ritual and practical to escape from evil and to find salvation. These usually include religious ceremonies but do not exclude rational proceedings. Therefore, give back the daugh­ter—and also sing the paian.³

A closely parallel story from the Bible is set in the time of the Philistines.⁴ This sort of literary genre, the saga or quasi­historiography, comes closer to reality than does the heroic

epic—which of course does not guarantee the details of the tale to be historical fact. The Philistines of Ashdod have defeated Israel and taken away the Holy Ark, which they bring, as booty and 104 dedication, into their Temple of Dagan.

I am not pursuing here suggestions of common heritage or literary borrowing.

pattern. An earlier example from Bronze Age Anatolia is the text called the Plague Prayers of Mursilis, king of the Hittites about 1340 b.c.^s A plague afflicts the land of Haiti. The text preserved mentions what we would call the natural cause, infection through contact with foreigners (“prisoners carried the plague into the Haiti land”). But such knowledge does not help. Instead, the king “made the anger of the gods the subject of an oracle.” Just as Achilles recognizes the wrath of Apollo, Mursilis ac­knowledges the anger of the gods, and both take the same mea­sure: they consult an oracle or seer. Mursilis, a king living in a literary civilization, had turned to the ancient records. The results were indecisive, and they needed to be confirmed by the oracle. He learns of two causes of guilt, two transgressions that have occurred. Sacrifices to the River Euphrates have been forgotten— in the Iliad too, Achilles suspects that Apollo is angry because of neglected votive offerings or hecatombs—and a treaty has been violated by Mursilis’ father, Suppiluliuma. So the king tries to make atonement: “the reasons for the plague that were estab­lished... these have I removed. I have made ample restitution... offerings for those oaths I have made to the Hattian storm­god.... The offerings to the River Euphrates I promise to make.”⁹ Here is the series of events: the catastrophe, the common supposition that this is due to the wrath of a god, the mediation by the oracle, the statement of religious and moral guilt, and the atonement through religious ceremonies. This pattern seems to be fully established in the Bronze Age.

But we need not keep to the past nor to literature. A few years ago, in a little village called Kirjat Malachi, close to Tel Aviv, six people had died within a few weeks.¹⁰ The inhabitants, appalled by this coincidence, turned to a famous rabbi in Jerusalem. He declared that the cause must be a sin committed in the place, whereupon the inhabitants remembered that recently a striptease show had been held in a communal building of the village.

disease, not a striptease show. But this event exhibits exactly the same sequence as in ancient times: disease and death, the divine mediator, declaration of guilt in breaking a religious-moral ta- 106 boo, and ritual performance to make amends.

In classical literature the most sublime instance is provided by the beginning of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Some global form of disease, nosos, is infesting Thebes. Plants are withering, women and animals are miscarrying, people are dying. Oedipus the wise ruler does what needs to be done: he sends his envoy to Delphi to ask what causes the evil.¹¹ The answer points to a crime com­mitted long ago, the slaying of King Laios. Oedipus takes the measures required, both on the ritual and the rational level. He pronounces his curse and starts the inquiry, which will lead to himself. It is true that the art of Sophocles nearly makes us forget the beginning at the end. We do not ask whether the plague has run its course, and Oedipus is not sent immediately into exile.¹² Sophocles may have invented the whole introductory sequence. The pattern was readily available, as it had been to Homer. It is a pattern of practice that easily develops into a story.

After Heracles killed Iphitos, he fell ill and asked the oracle at Delphi how to recover his health. He got involved in a quarrel with Apollo about the Delphic tripod, but finally had to give in to Apollo’s command that he be sold into slavery for three years.¹³ After undergoing this form of disgrace, Heracles re­gained his health and status.

Virgil, in his Georgies, tells how Aristaeus lost his bees to a sudden pest. Following his mother’s advice, he turned to the sea­demon Proteus to inquire about the cause of the bees’ sickness. It was revealed that Aristaeus had been guilty, through sexual assault, of the death of Eurydice.

The pattern is not confined to mythology alone. A decisive event in the history of the second century a.d. was the great plague that spread from the East during the war against Parthia in 167 a.d. As the doctors gave up—Galen left Rome—the cities

mined to oracles; various oracular responses from the period are extant, which rclcr to t he wrath of the gods and give instructions lor ( till rituals that should help.^{1 %}

A lint her example from contemporary Africa was witnessed by Vittorio Lanternari.¹" When a little child got sick, the mother mined to one of the prophetic healers. This wise woman did not even look at the sick child first but started to query the mother about the family situation and ha If-forgotten conflicts with rel­atives. She found out that t he mother had not performed a sacred lihation rite in honor of the guardian spirits which had been due the previous year, and for some years an uncle had neglected his duties toward his sister and her offspring, for whom he was re­sponsible. So the wise woman required the mother to go to that uncle, to reestablish good relations, and to perform the neglected ritual at once. Only then, at a second meeting, the prophet in­spected the sick child and administered a treatment which re­stored his health within a few days. Disease is not confined to a special state of physiology in one individual but is seen as a bad state of the whole social field encompassing mother and child, their relatives, and their rituals. We might protest that the one is taken as a pretext to interfere in the other, but on second thought we might admit that a child’s sickness can be related to a tense family situation. We should at any rate recognize that this is a way of establishing a world of sense in which evil can be pushed away and health can be found.

It would be easy to accumulate further parallels, from Eski­mos to Africa and from Oceania to America, for the treatment of disease according to this procedure. Let us add one story in Livy which seems like a parody of the pattern.¹⁷ When, in 331 B.c., a deadly disease spread in Rome, a slave girl said that cer­tain matrons were concocting poison, whereupon they were made to drink their own potions and all died. In consequence, 170 more women were executed—“the event was considered a prodigy.” Then, according to ancient custom, a “dictator for fix­ing a nail” was appointed, and he performed this strange and simple ritual. Even if the cause of evil seemed clear and patent

in this case—though doubts remained, as Livy indicates—things could be fixed only through ceremonial dealings with the super­natural.

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Present Sufferings

So far we have been dealing with cases of disease. Disease may be the most common occasion to trigger the mechanism. In fact disease is most intimately linked to religion in most civiliza­tions.¹⁸ If asked why they keep to their strange and sometimes bizarre religious ceremonies, so-called primitives will usually re­ply that they would fall sick if they didn’t. Sickness is known to follow transgression; it becomes all the more oppressive if divine warnings are not heeded.¹⁹

Still, disease is not the only thing that starts the sequence. Re­call the situation of the Greek fleet at Aulis, graphically described in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: day after day strong north winds blew, ships were damaged, people despaired—until the seer, Kal- chas, proposed “another means against the storm, a sharper one, declaring Artemis” as the cause.²⁰ The fault has been Agamem­non’s; he has to sacrifice Iphigeneia.

The disaster of adverse winds also appears in the Odyssey.²¹ Menelaos finds himself trapped with his crew at the island of Pharos and asks why this should be so. To get the appropriate mediator turns out to be tricky in this case, as Menelaos has to capture Proteus, the Master of the Seals, with the help of Proteus’ daughter, Eidothea. Proteus indeed knows what the fault has been—not surprisingly, it was a failure to make sacrifices. Men­elaos has to return to Egypt and to perform what he had for­gotten to do. The mechanism is used by Homer lightheartedly to introduce the delightful tale about Proteus and his seals—it was so natural to let his imagination follow the pattern.

More dramatic is the story of Jonah, the prophet who tries to flee from Jahweh and instead of going to Nineveh, sails west­wards from Jaffa. A terrible storm rises, and the sailors are in despair. Disaster must have a cause, some fault committed by

one person. Something has to be done by way of divine media­tion, but as seers are not available, “Let us draw lots to see on whose account this disaster is happening to us.”²²· The measure is effective, and the culpable man is identified. Jonah confesses his sin and agrees to be thrown into the sea as a willing sacrifice, and apparently the others arc saved.

In a less dramatic vein, an unpretentious lead tablet from the oracle of Dodona records the question: “Does god send the win­ter (or storm) on account of the pollution of a certain person?”²³ This documents an official consultation of the oracle in the fourth century b.c. We are free to speculate with some uneasiness whether a “yes” answer resulted in some form of scapegoating in the inquirer’s community. Winds and winter at any rate hold the threat of infertility and famine. When once a great famine came over the land of the Lydians, “they turned to the seers.” The holy men declared that the gods were demanding the king’s atonement for the death of Daskylos; thus the king went into exile and offered compensation to the son of the victim.²⁴

There are other experiences of catastrophe. Sargon II, king of Assyria and forceful conqueror, was finally slain in battle, and his corpse could not be found for burial. This made his son and successor, Sennacherib, who called himself the “circumspect,” ponder the ways of the gods.²⁵ “Pondering in my heart over the deeds of the gods, I thought about the death of Sargon my father, who was slain in enemy country and was not interred in his house, and I said to myself: let me investigate by means of ha- ruspicy the sin of Sargon.” It was clear to him that the catastro­phe must have had its cause in a sin, and he proceeded with the investigation. Sennacherib assembled the diviners in “three or four” separate groups, so that they could not communicate, and asked his question. He suspected that perhaps Sargon had put the gods of Assyria above the gods of Babylon. And behold, this is the very answer the seers unanimously produced. Hence Sen­nacherib prayed to the gods and felt relieved. To “straighten the rites and ordinances of Assyria and Babylonia,” he made a beau­tiful statue for Marduk in Babylon, as he had made one for Assur,

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and he bequeathed this advice to his son: never make any deci­sion without the diviners. He also stated that it was the scribes of Assur who had prevented him from giving Marduk the honors due. Some politics is involved here: the relations between Baby­lon, the old center, and Assur/Nineveh, the center of Assyria, had always been strained. Sennacherib’s solution recognized equal rights, at least at the theological level. There was also rivalry between the “scribes” of Nineveh and the “diviners” unani­mously siding with Babylon. The balance was achieved by rein­forcing the religious party as against the administration. The king exercised rational control by separating the seers into three or four groups to test their veracity.

The worst disaster is defeat in war. When Carthage was under siege by Agathocles, the Carthaginians, feeling the wrath of the gods, explored various forms of supplication; they recalled for­gotten sacrifices due at Tyre in former times and started again to perform the horrible child sacrifices they had formerly offered to Kronos. This is the report of Diodorus. Priests or seers are not mentioned, but they cannot have been absent in the search and decision-making.²⁶

Two more examples come from Greek history. When the di­sastrous earthquake destroyed Sparta in 464 b.c., an explanation was at hand: “At one time the Lacedaemonians had removed certain helots who had sought asylum at the sanctuary of Posei­don (at Tainaron), leading them away and killing them. For this reason, they believe, the great earthquake has happened at Sparta.” These are the words of Thucydides.²⁷ We may assume that seers pointed out the transgression and urged sacrifices to Poseidon, the “Savior from Downfall” (asphaleios).

When the whole city of Helike slipped into the Corinthian Gulf in 373 b.c., a parallel exegesis was given. lonians from Mykale had wanted some items from Poseidon’s sanctuary at Helike, aphidrysis, for their own cult of Poseidon Helikonios, but the Achaeans had denied them their pious petition. And behold, in the following winter the catastrophe occurred: Poseidon revealed his wrath. A contemporary author tells this story, apparently

from the point of view of the priests and seers of the Panionion sanctuary at Mykale.²⁸

Pausanias has an older story about failure and success at the Olympian games. The Achaeans wondered why for a long time none of their athletes had won a victory at the Olympian games. Turning to the Delphic oracle, they learned that long ago a cer­tain Oibotas, Olympic victor in 688 B.c., had not been honored properly by his compatriots, so he laid on a curse that none of the Achaeans should win in the future. Henceforth the Achaeans installed special honors for Oibotas at his tomb and set up a statue of him at Olympia, and immediately afterwards, in 496, they enjoyed a victory; “and there remains until my day the cus­tom that those of the Achaeans who are to compete at Olympia do sacrifice to Oibotas; and if they win, they put a wreath on the statue of Oibotas at Olympia.”²⁹

At once more general and more private is the story about a certain Paraibios in Apollonius Rhodius. The man felt that he was living a luckless life (akerdes bios), and he turned to the seer Phineus to ask if there was a special reason for that. Phineus found an offense committed one generation back: Paraibios’ fa­ther had felled a tree in the mountains and harmed the hama­dryad living in that tree. So Paraibios was told to erect an altar to the nymph and to offer the kind of sacrifices that bring relief, lopbeia biera. “Thus he finally escaped from the evil sent from the gods.’^{,?discovery of old guilt and wrath, and the remedy.}

The pattern easily develops into a tale. The very question “why?” calls for a tale. When people are faced with strange be­havior, they say, “tell me, why are you doing this?”³⁶ Sense is created by finding a way to speak coherently about events. One result may be the typical cautionary tale. The tale, however, is likely to invert the sequence experienced in practical life: it starts with the original fault or mistake, whether an infraction of ta­boo, a violation of law, order, or morality, or just some rash and imprudent action; it explains how, in consequence, evil mani-

tested itself; it goes on to describe how it was finally overcome by the appropriate means? Tales allow variations that include catastrophe in the end, but in practical life we cling optimistically to the possibility of overcoming disaster. 113

The Foundation of Cults

Two aspects of the pattern will especially attract the attention of historians of religion: the foundation of cults, resulting from this Active but powerful “causality,” and the role of mediators in the proceedings.

“Disaster brought religion back to mind”—adversae res ad­monuerunt religionum.³³ As the pattern in focus here is practi­cally universal, it can be seen to work as one of the foundations of religious practice and institutions. A Jewish legend tells how the last king of Babylon, Nabonid, came to acknowledge the true god. Having suffered from an ulcer for seven years, he received an explanation for his ailment from a Jewish seer: he had wor­shiped false gods. He confessed his error, turned in prayer to the highest god, and was healed.³⁹ In this way Judaism was con­firmed.

Pagan religious rituals and institutions are even more likely to emerge out of disaster and be decisively reinforced by it as the disastrous event is interpreted and cured by reference to religious guilt, with the help of mediators who subsequently become active on behalf of the cults. Guilt is commonly attributed to the break­ing of religious taboos, neglect of sacrifices,⁴⁰ or violation of sa­cred rules, which are dramatically inculcated in this way.⁴¹

In Greek mythology, the standard etiology of a cult or festival is the following: a plague or famine (loimos or limos) spreads in the land because murder has been committed or a taboo has been broken; the oracle is then consulted, and it gives an order to perform rituals that are repeated ever since. The Karneia, for example, the characteristic festival of the Dorians, was founded when the Heraclids, returning to the Peloponnese, accidentally killed a diviner named Karnos. Although details of the story dif-

fer, the pattern remains fixed.⁴² More circumstantial is the story told by Theophrastus about the Buphonia, a festival at Athens. A farmer had “murdered” his plow ox, and a plague ensued in 114 consequence. Hence the oracle commanded that the “crime” be repeated every year in a strange and complicated ceremony.⁴³ Homer introduces the paian in connection with pestilence; a his­torical account claims that Thaletas brought the paian to Sparta because of an epidemic, of course.⁴⁴ In Rome the temple of Ceres Liber Libera and the temple of Apollo were founded on the oc­casion of an epidemic.⁴⁵ We have already looked at Virgil’s com­plicated story about guilt and propitiatory sacrifice that accounts for the magical ritual of bugonia*⁶ The cult of Asclepius was introduced to Athens in 420, in consequence of the great plague. The cause of the plague was generally found in the violation of the taboo of the Pelargian Wall, although Thucydides has his own ideas as to this chain of causality.⁴⁷

Ritual remedies can include temple building. Herodotus tells that Lydian King Alyattes, during his siege of Miletus, inadver­tently caused a temple of Athena Assesia to burn. He fell ill, and when the illness would not disappear, he asked Delphi about the cause. The oracle recalled the burning of that temple, which he had to rebuild. Indeed, he constructed two of them at Miletus, monuments of divine wrath and grace, with the warning at­tached to them by the story of Alyattes.⁴⁸ Livy records similar stories about the origins of Roman cults and festivals. Already the companions of Odysseus, when breaking the taboo of Helios’ cattle on the island, thought they would undo that offense by building a rich temple to the Sun God after their return; in this case, they failed.⁴⁹

Taking account of the foreknowledge of gods, the narrative sequence may change and put the god’s initiative at the begin­ning. Queen Stratonike, for instance, had a dream commanding her to build the Temple of the Syrian Goddess at Hierapolis. She neglected to do this and—predictably—fell seriously ill. She then made up her mind to tell her husband, and the two of them secured the construction of the temple.⁵⁰

Experience of the kind is not limited to kings and queens. A touching epigram from a Cretan cave tells us that Salvrus Alenas, together with his wife, used to honor Hermes there regularly by sacrifice. When she died he gave up the practice, but after much suffering he has learned finally that one must honor divinity. So he brings back offerings and intends to care for that sanctuary permanently.⁴ In a similar vein, many of the so-called penitential inscriptions from certain sanctuaries in Asia Minor have such stories to tell.'² They usually record that the dedicator had fallen ill, that he recognized his offense, which may have been moral (some form of cheating or an illicit sex act) or ritual (cutting sacred wood), and that he repented, acknowledging the greatness of the god who cured him by his grace. The stele is a testimony of his gratitude.

The same sequence was operative at other fringes of the Greek world. Herodotus has a story like that about the Etruscans. After the battle of Alalia, about 540 b.c., the Phocaeans who had fled from the Phoenicians were stoned to death by Etruscans close to Caere. Afterwards, “everyone or everything that passed the place where the murdered Phocaeans were lying became twisted and crippled and lame as if by stroke, men, sheep and donkeys.” Then, by order of the Delphic oracle, a festival was inaugu­rated—a heroic cult with athletic contests and horse races, ex­hibiting by contrast the perfect bodies of animals and men.⁵³ Most probably the festival took place on the spot, at Caere. The etiology attached was typical for Greeks, but not for Greeks alone. The “female illness” of certain Scythians was traced, ac­cording to Herodotus, to guilt incurred by plundering the sanc­tuary of Aphrodite at Askalon; the modern view would consider this a form of shamanism.⁵⁴ In a more recent example, at Ob­erammergau in Bavaria the Passion Play is still performed today because of a vow made during a pestilence in 1634. The festival has become a tourist attraction—but in this case we know the aition to be true.

A more remote example is known from direct observation.⁵⁵ The Nzima of Ghana have a polytheistic system, and each god

has a special group of worshipers directed by a priest who per­forms ecstatic dances. Each god can “select” a new worshiper, and this is how it happens. When a person has a serious illness, 16 suffers the death of some relatives, or gets enigmatic dreams and visions, he turns for help to some old diviner. The mediator then says, in a menacing tone: “If you do not comply with the will of the god who calls you, you will experience still worse misfortune, or even die.” The diviner finds out the name and identity of the god or spirit who has “called” the new initiand. He becomes integrated into that group and in this way seeks to recover and to find relief in a comprehensive way.

The Mediators: Risks and Opportunities

The role of the mediators deserves special attention: the seers, the oracles, the shamans, the medicine men, the rabbis—in short, persons who “know more” and hence may help against all kinds of present evil, make good whatever has gone wrong.⁵⁶ They are greatly needed because in practical experience the evil cause is hidden, evident as it may appear in the cautionary tale composed afterward. Even if a sin is the cause of the difficulty, it may be unknown to the perpetrator.⁵⁷

This is the great opportunity for those who mediate with the unseen; the moment of decisive influence and even power. It is at the same time not without risk, as the mediator may meet with aggression due to unpleasant revelations. “Seer of evil,” Aga­memnon bursts out against Kalchas, and Oedipus is even harsher against Teiresias. But their greatest risk is that they may fail. There may be a rivalry of competing mediators with fatal con­sequences; the Book of Daniel toys with the execution of all the inferior seers, the Chaldaeans outdone by Daniel.⁵⁸ Sennacherib split the diviners into groups, and only their unanimous decla­ration was considered valid; what would have happened if they had disagreed?⁵⁹ Herodotus has an account of how the Scythians proceed if the king gets sick.⁶⁰ They call three diviners, who in­evitably declare that somebody has committed perjury “by the

hearth of the king” and thus has caused the king’s disease. If an accused man claims his innocence, six more diviners are sum­moned, and this multiplication may be repeated until a majority vote has identified the real culprit, whereupon the minority di­viners are burned to death.

The more immediate problem of the diviner is profane disbe­lief. Even so-called primitives are not ignorant of cunning, of tricks and deception. With reference to Greece, Herodotus is pos­itive that the Pythia of Delphi could be bribed, and he offers case histories to document it.⁶¹ King Oedipus, identified as the mur­derer of Laios by Teiresias, immediately suspects a conspiracy of high treason by Kreon, who may have manipulated the seer.⁶² Aristophanes in his comedies constantly ridicules the seers with their oracle books; they are clearly seeking their own profit. And isn’t it typical that Kalchas, in the Iliad, determines that the of­fense committed was the maltreatment of a priest?

The most impudent manipulation is perpetrated in the tale of Ino and Phrixos, staged in a lost tragedy of Euripides. The crops fail, and the oracle commands that Phrixos must be sacrificed, but it was his stepmother, Ino, who had made the women roast the grain before sowing so that nothing could grow, and it was she who had bribed the oracle to bring about the death of her stepson.⁶³ The whole development, from catastrophe to sacrifice, is manipulated. Euripides may have invented this version of the Phrixos myth; it presupposes the inveterate machinery of scape­goating, of searching for the culprit, and turns it to cynical mis­use.

In another part of the world Eskimo shamans are sent to con­sult Sedna, the Mistress of Animals, if the men do not catch enough seals. The shaman usually finds out that Sedna is angry and has become polluted because “the women” have broken their taboos, so these women must immediately step forward to con­fess their sins; only then will Sedna become clean and kindly again and provide success in hunting.⁶⁴ Isn’t it a good trick, to stabilize the patriarchal system through special taboos made for women?

That religion is mainly Priestertrug, manipulations by priests for their own benefit, has been repeatedly voiced since the En­lightenment. Yet in spite of suspicions both ancient and modern, 118 in spite of the unimpeachable existence of cunning and trickery among humans, the hypothesis of pure deception does not ex­plain anything. The “present sufferings” are obvious, and often the salvation attained is no less impressive. It is not only the case that charismatics of one or another kind are needed and that many of them are successful in the eyes of their clients, even in the twentieth century. They do provide a frame of interpretation for women and men confronted with evil, usually by conforming to a chain of tradition, ritual, knowledge, and belief, which are widely shared and accepted beyond individual mistrust and de­ception. The mediators create sense to counteract what seems unacceptable: sheer coincidence.

The mediators generally use signs to establish their findings. Many kinds of signs are employed by seers; apart from intuition, dreams, and shamanistic trance, signs may be offered by chance or produced by certain manipulations.⁶⁵ It is important that not even the mediator be able to manipulate or predict the result. Thus a message must be conveyed in some sort of special lan­guage or, in the metaphor of more advanced civilizations, a “writing” that can be read. The mediator’s achievement is to make sense of it, to integrate the details into a comprehensive view of the situation and the persons, the past and the future; this may have the force of compelling truth, and it is often called the will of the god. This is in fact what we are constantly doing in our mental constructs, integrating innumerable confused sig­nals into one mental whole. This mental world breaks down in situations of crisis. It is for the charismatic to restore it.

Explanatory Models: Fetters, Wrath, Pollution

Various interpretations and corresponding strategies are opera­tive in reactions to disaster. One of the simplest ways of describ­ing the experience of distress is the impression of being bound,

fettered, caught in a trap. “My life has escaped like a bird from a fowler’s trap: the fetter is broken, and so we escaped,” the psalm says, giving thanks to Jahweh.⁶⁶ The corresponding (»reck term is lysis, “release.” Pelasgians ask Delphi for lysis of the pres - 119

ent evils.⁶⁷ Klytaimestra, alarmed by a threatening drcam, sends her daughter to Agamemnon’s tomb “to offer means of her re­lease (lyteria) from the murder.”⁶⁸ One might even “release killing by killing.”⁶⁹ Greek purification priests offer lysioi teletai, rituals to release individuals from the bonds of evil, especially in the name of Dionysus who himself assumes the epithet Lysios. “Tell Persephone that Bakchios himself has released you” is the text of a gold plate from Thessaly, addressing the initiate who has just died.⁷⁰ Here lysis is claimed to be effective in the beyond; but the same teletai were also good for the living, freeing them from “manifest sufferings,” as Plato has it in his Phaedrus.⁷' In the situation of being fettered by adverse winds, lysis may be found through sacrifice. Note that one of the oldest documents of German literature is a spell about “fettering” and “unfetter­ing.”⁷²

The experience of being fettered by evil can be attributed to supernatural agents. This is the hypothesis of aggression out of the dark, of “black magic.” Any kind of disturbance could be surmised to have been caused by an outside agent, by somebody knotting bonds of evil. This is especially common in Mesopo­tamia, where extensive books of incantations and rituals were compiled to “set free” the victim of such machinations.⁷³ “Ev­erything evil, which has no name, which has taken hold of me, which has pursued me, which is bound to my body, to my flesh, to my sinews, which does not get loose”—this must be released by countermagic, clearly corresponding to lysioi teletai in Greek.⁷⁴ In Greece, however, there is plenty of evidence that evil machinations of the kind were not just surmised but intentionally and circumstantially performed; that people, with the help of appropriate specialists, strove to fetter and thus to disable their adversaries, or even prospective partners for sexual encounter. This is called “binding,” or katadesis in Greek, defixio in Latin.⁷⁵

The familiar pattern works in a Christian as well as in a pagan milieu. When a boy was afflicted by unbearable pain in his hands and feet, Saint Kyros and Saint Joannes intervened with the strange advice that he should make fishermen go fishing at the seashore. They retrieved a box with a puppet resembling the boy which had nails through his hands and feet; as soon as the nails of the voodoo doll were torn out, the boy’s ailments stopped.⁷⁶ Libanius, the eminent fourth-century rhetorician, was suddenly handicapped in mind and body until the carcass of a mutilated chameleon was discovered in his classroom, proof that magic had been worked against him; he felt better after that.⁷⁷ We note the progression from present evil through diagnosis to the dis­covery of the cause and final release. Here the magical interpre­tation avoids the realization of self-incurred guilt and projects the cause to malign aggression coming from without, even if the cure the innocent victim has to undergo may be circumstantial, unpleasant, and costly.

The model of binding and release, by contrast, adopts a matter-of-fact view without much concern about ultimate cau­sation. The fetters are felt, and one must get rid of them. In fact, the experience of being bound or trapped and striving to get free again is basically a biological experience, the need to escape a really dangerous situation, with corresponding anxiety but also various programs to counteract it; this is much older than hu­manity. Struggling to get free if ensnared by holds or fetters of any kind, making frantic moves to get away or to find out where the binding and the pain come from—efforts which may finally prove successful—is a situation familiar to most animals. Apes can try to pull out a thorn that has pierced the flesh, recognizing the tiny object that causes pain. Humans in panic are also still likely to make frantic and disoriented moves to get out of the traps of disaster. But their mental resources give them more chances to gain cognition and try to localize the cause of present evil. They dispose of a mental world with an immense choice of possibilities and a host of configurations that can be fitted to make sense. Anxiety, excitement, and fear of aggression persist,

however, and time is running short. This will make individuals eager for nonobvious as well as for evident solutions, hopefully accepting any lysis from the impasse. Mediators in their tradi­tional roles present themselves to help; and they will teach the psalm of gratitude.

A third model for dealing with the cause of evil is even more personalized: it is that of the wrath of a superior being who is punishing his subjects. We may call it the hypothesis of justified aggression. The concept of gods behaving in this way must have been established long before our documentation begins, but all kinds of spirits, ancestors, and demons may be credited with similar activities. Remember the graphic scene at the beginning of the Iliad: down comes Apollo, “angry in his heart.” “Why has he become so angry?” Achilles asks. The seer will establish the cause and the means to deal with it, and in the end Apollo will rejoice in his paian. The Philistines feel the hand of the Lord. Mursilis inquires about “the anger of the gods” and turns to them in prayer. “Toward which god did we commit transgression, that we are suffering this?” Greeks will ask in distress.⁷⁸ Even while angry, the superior may still wish to communicate; a just pun­ishment does not break communication, on the contrary, it rees­tablishes communication. There must be a reason for wrath that can be expressed and understood in common language, and the extent of the consequences may be negotiable. Even in the face of infinitely more powerful beings, enraged and threatening, one may use speech, say a prayer, together with all the well-known rituals of submission and debasement.⁷⁹ These follow upon the recognition of evil and include supplication, wallowing in the mud, self-castigation, self-inflicted wounds.⁸⁰ The victim may be tempted by vicarious sacrifice: “Through the killing of the sac­rificial victims, the feelings of wrath and offense of the gods are mitigated.”⁸¹ But it is also possible that the gods may smile upon us, especially when music gladdens their hearts. In Greek belief, rituals are constantly claimed to restore good humor to gods, hilaskesthai; in Akkadian, the expression is “bringing to rest the heart” of the angry god.⁸² Alternatively, the concept of universal

and unchangeable divine justice may be invoked. In this per­spective, all the sufferings of humans are explained as divine pun­ishment. The Hebrew prophets found the hand of Jahweh in all the catastrophes of history. Other religions would introduce transmigration of souls to substantiate the thesis of relentless retribution at the individual level.⁸³

Within the realm of language, an effective demonstration of submission is the confession of sins; it means that the punisher and the punished agree on a common formula. Mursilis is quite explicit in his plague prayers: “If a servant has incurred a guilt, but confesses his guilt to his lord... his lord’s soul is pacified, and his lord will not punish that servant.”⁸⁴ The confession of sins is required in many healing cults, especially in Asia Minor, but also in Egypt, with the cult of Isis.⁸⁵ There are penitential psalms in the Hebrew Bible, as with the Babylonians. Confession of sins is also reported, among others, of Native Americans in case of illness.⁸⁶ Mursilis and modern aborigines join hands. These culture patterns prescribe appropriate behavior toward those in rank and prominence, helping to express superiority and inferiority and to uphold status even through crisis.

The practice of confession is, however, conspicuously absent from classical Greece, at least at the official level; only Aristoph­anes has some passing references to it, such as: “We have done wrong. Please forgive us.”⁸⁷ Apparently the style of Greek society was averse to the form of humiliation expressed by confession. In the context of a political system run by self-responsible citizens without king or overlord, the belief system led to a certain pride of endurance (“the unwise cannot bear this, but the nobles (aga- thoi) can”⁸⁸) or to tragic insight beyond all hope, as exemplified by the end of King Oedipus in Sophocles. Not surprisingly, the very general, intercultural program of behavior we have been discussing so far does have specific differentiations, with alter­native options in single civilizations.

The idea that held sway within ancient Greek civilization, ar­chaic and classical, was the concept of pollution and purification, miasma, agos, katharmos. This again is not peculiar only to the

Greeks. The fear of pollution and rituals of purification play an enormous role in other forms of religion, too, especially in so- called primitive religion.⁸⁹ At the beginning of this century taboo became a fashionable word.

It is clear that the alertness concerning pollution and purifi­cation, universal as it appears to be, has biological roots. To keep oneself clean is a basic necessity for all higher animals, as dirt disturbs the normal functions of the body and has to be removed, though unfortunately it tends to come back and build up. What is functional even in humans—to wipe and to wash one’s body, to fumigate with sulphur to destroy pests—long ago became rit­ual, with all the characteristics of ritual in being demonstrative, exaggerated, and repetitious, as well as elaborated by specialists in an artificial way according to particular traditions.

The evidence from the Greek world has been assessed in Rob­ert Parker’s Miasma.⁹⁰ At the beginning of this century scholars used to express their astonishment at the primitive superstition inherent in the idea of a contagious pollution; today we are more inclined to examine the social and psychological processes and appreciate their subtleties. To find pollution is to give meaning to an uncomfortable status quo and to arrange for its elimina­tion. The contagious aspect of pollution is the necessary corol­lary of the effort to achieve the separation of what has been mixed up. As Martin West summarizes Parker: “To predicate pollution is formally to declare a state of abnormality so that it can be tackled by the appropriate ritual measures.”⁹¹

This formulation recalls the sequence with which we are now acquainted. A state of uneasiness or even disaster is made explicit and manageable by the diagnosis of guilt or pollution; to discover and pronounce this is the work of a special mediator—in Greek he is called purifier, kathartes, but he may well be identical with the seer, Melampus providing the mythical, Epimenides the his­torical example. Melampus, besides acting as Iphitos’ psycho­therapist, purified the daughters of Proitos who had become mad as a consequence of transgression; Epimenides purified the city of Athens, troubled by the killing of Kylon’s adherents who had

sought asylum with Athena.⁹’ The treatment was, of course, through ritual. This purification took place about 600 b.c., but the concept and practice of getting rid of filth, apolymainesthai, 124 appear already in the scene from the Iliad with which this chapter started. A parallel historical example is the case of Pausanias. When this member of the royal house of Sparta, victor in the Persian war but convicted of high treason, had died miserably of starvation in the precinct of Athena Chalkioikos, a state of un­easiness, nay anxiety, persisted at Sparta. Plutarch says that ghosts made an appearance there, and that the “conjurers of the dead” (psychagogoi) from Phigalia were called to provide help. Thucydides only mentions that the Delphic oracle was consulted. Speaking through it Apollo declared that there was pollution (agos), and that “two bodies” had to be given to Athena “instead of the one,” meaning Pausanias, forcibly dragged from the sanc­tuary as he was dying. Hence two statues were erected.⁹³ Once more we have present sufferings, transcendent diagnosis, and measures taken on the supernatural and on the public levels, namely, conjuring up the dead and setting up statues.

For the function and meaning of such proceedings, the expe­rience of a modern ethnologist, Maj a Nadig, is of considerable interest. In an Indian village in Mexico disease is commonly traced to mal aire, or bad air. This diagnosis is made by a wise woman who also knows about practical or ritual treatments which are in fact quite similar to ancient Greek katharseis. The ethnographer found that, in the context of village life, this was a strategy “to designate and to treat social tensions in a super­individual way, as recognized by that special culture... there is social consensus that disease is worked through aggressions, and there is a cultural pattern both to designate these connections and to make them less explosive as the originator of aggression is left in the dark.”⁹⁴ Disease is presumed to have a personal cause, but the concept of mal aire is used both to localize and to disguise the offender.

This analysis gives a good reason to rethink a certain assump­tion that has long dominated studies of Greek intellectual history,

namely, that the concepts of pollution and guilt represent two stages in the evolution of the human mind; of these, the fear of pollution is supposedly more primitive and hence should be earlier in the development of civilization, whereas the concept of guilt is more modern and reflects the awakening of self­consciousness. Guilt is related to personalized ethics, whereas pollution somehow harks back to the Stone Age. Kurt Latte pub­lished a rich and confused article in 1920, “Schuld und Sühne in der griechischen Religion,” in which he tried to describe how the Greeks arrived at a rational concept of personal guilt only at a ripe and late age, having started from impersonal and primitive “taboo.”⁹⁵ In a more general and suggestive way, an important chapter of E. R. Dodds’ book, The Greeks and the Irrational, is entitled “From Shame Culture to Guilt Culture,” an indication of the author’s belief in the development toward a more personal consciousness.⁹⁶ Dodds’ title has had a great impact on subse­quent scholarship; it has also met with profound criticism from students of anthropology and moral philosophy.⁹⁷

Most probably, the “history of the mind” is neither linear nor clearcut in its progress. Alternatives may coexist or take turns in an irregular way. From what we have found so far, we must conclude that the pattern of causality, of guilt established by transcendent diagnosis in situations of disaster, is universal and aboriginal and typical of the human mind and human behavior in general; it has its avatar in the behavior of an animal pursued by a predator or caught in a trap. In this sense the predication and experience of guilt cannot be a special and late achievement. Another almost universal trait is the tendency to concentrate guilt on one individual, with the consequence of scapegoating.⁹⁸ Special juridical elaborations, with clear distinctions as to free will and responsibility, are of course products of advanced and enlightened civilizations. But in most of the examples discussed here the declaration of guilt was no more rational, the causality no more obvious, than a statement of indistinct pollution would be. No rational causality describes what happened to Agamem­non or to Jonah, to the Philistines or to the people of Kirj at

Malachi; these stories express rather the tendency to find con­nections at all cost, to concentrate on one person or action in order to have a fixed point from which to tackle a catastrophic situation. The procedure is nearly the same with the pronounce­ment of pollution. In both forms causality is stated, starting with an intervention in the midst of trouble and in the presence of evil, the cause of which has to be discovered. There is no time for leisurely reflection when something must be done. The two interpretations, pollution or guilt, are seen to guide similar prac­tices.

This leads to the conclusion that the two models of causation are parallel in their occasion and function, since they are mixed in “action”—recall the Iliad—if not in “origin.” Pollution tends to arouse feelings of uneasiness, as against the panic of feeling trapped. But one interpretation can well take the place of the other; to make them exchangeable can even be the first step of a cure. What matters is to establish a structure of cause and pos­sible relief. The appeal may be to the personalized sphere (to voice repentance and make it up to your superior will please him) or to the imagery of defilement (to hold still for a while and submit to unpleasant yet necessary treatment will help you regain your previous status in the world). A difference exists at the level of verbalization. If the concepts of guilt, wrath, and punishment demand a tale, the declaration of pollution calls for silence. There is no use discussing dirt; it simply must be removed in a practical way.

The choice between the alternative models of guilt or pollution or even a third, malign aggression, depends on recognized forms of interaction within the society or social group, which may range from quite aggressive to polite and refined. Here we come back to a typology of civilizations. If face-saving and shame are most important, the construct of pollution can be a means of saving important individuals from degradation and still making them responsible in an indirect way. It can happen to anybody that he steps in mud, and he will silently take appropriate mea­sures to restore cleanliness. If a murderer, in consequence of his

act. has to go into exile, this still constitutes a grievous sort of punishment: other forms of purification can be quite unpleasant too. A real bearing may be termed katharmos: “beat the hell out of him."'^co Though it may not be called punishment, it is still a tonn ot acknowledging consequences. Even a god may be de­clared unclean and made to go through a process of purification, as myth has it with regard to Apollo, the god of purifications.¹⁰⁰ But never could a Greek god “confess his sins.”¹⁰¹ If purification became important after Homer, in the archaic age, this was not due to growth of superstition but to the greater requirements of noble conduct and personal responsibility. The concept of pol­lution thus turns out to be a face-saving strategy, and anything bur primitive. Later, still along the same lines, the healing cult of Asclepius became widely popular. The characteristic of Asclepius was to be “mild and friendly,” epios. He never diagnosed either guilt or pollution and did not stir up causes. For him it was the result that mattered, the successful cure, which still resulted in Asclepius worship offered by the grateful.

It is striking how the rival interpretations coexist or clash even today. Confronted with an untractable evil such as AIDS, many tend to find the scientific explanation insufficient and resort to alternative hypotheses: aggression—some secret organization concocting viruses—or guilt, for which the disease is the punish­ment, with unlawful sex looming large under this aspect. The public ends up with polite and noncommittal recommendations of cleanliness.

In short, I postulate a dynamic program that operates in different civilizations and epochs, from so-called primitives to high cul­tures, a program dealing with the causality of evil. It appeals to unseen powers through what has been called transcendent di­agnosis, and it tends to establish and to reiterate religious ritual in order to restore the previous situation of normalcy. It turns out to be one of the main factors in enforcing religious practice.

This program, universal as it may be, is not primitive. It is rather an excessive elaboration of the principle of causality which Kant has termed the transcendental foundation of possible experience—and which most modern science is gradually leaving behind.¹⁰² By establishing connections of fault, consequence, and remedy, it creates a context of sense and premises a meaningful cosmos in which people can live in health and at ease; it is in fact the postulate and the acceptance of a surplus of meaning in the world, sharply contrasting with the reductions made by em­pirical science. It is not an achievement of pure reason nor of disinterested speculation, but it takes its initial impetus from the snares of disaster from which one struggles to get free, looking for the root of evil, or desiring at least to find some answer to the question “why?” The invention of guilt is one explanation in this context, as is the statement of nonobvious pollution. The rituals devised or reused at such occasions may appear inappro­priate and superstitious in our eyes. But even they “make sense.” A Greek paian or a Ghanaian dance group alike contribute the active elaboration, enhanced activity, and hence joy and satis­faction in an experience of necessity and sense. Danger is over­come by constructing or reconstructing a world of meaning. However fictitious, it often proves effective.

For Martin Nilsson, religion was “man’s protest against the meaninglessness of events.”¹⁰³ People are quite inclined to accept their own guilt, a readiness which makes the course of events understandable and offers a way to handle or refashion one’s own fate, in contrast to the oppressive burden of chance and necessity. Hence irrational associations and expectations, espe­cially in matters of health and disease, persist to the present time. Modern science, which is fascinated by chaos beyond causality while worlds of meaning are fractioned and pulverized within our multicultural mass society, will not easily prevail. People pre­fer to cling to the surplus of causality and sense, and there is no lack of mediators to explore the hidden connections.