The Reciprocity of Giving

Le don in Perspective

Perhaps the earliest Greek votive inscription extant is incised on a bronze statuette of Apollo, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; it is dated about 700 b.c.

In the Odyssey Athena disguises herself as Mentes to visit Te­lemachus at Ithaca. She introduces herself as a “guest-friend (xe- nos) from father’s time.” Telemachus receives her with due re­spect and offers a gift, doron, which will be a “treasure stored in the house” (keimelion); the donation is put off, though, until the friend’s next visit. “Choose a very nice one,” Mentes says, “it will be worth a recompense for you.”² Just as Mantiklos asks for an amoiba, Telemachus is encouraged to expect a “return” when offering his gift. It will be worth a recompense: the word axion implies the image of the scales, of a balance that accompanies gift exchange.

The inscription of Mantiklos and the text of the Odyssey may 130 be nearly contemporary. It is through gift and countergift that relations of friendship are established and maintained, whether among men—aristocrats, at any rate—or between man and god. The same terminology and ideology regulate the two sets of re­lations, through the exchange (amoiba) of gifts (dora) with a standard of equivalence (axion).

The phenomenon of giving, the principle of reciprocity and its importance for social systems, has been brought to scholarly at­tention by a celebrated work of Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don, first published in 1924? It is the coincidence of moral, social, and economic interaction and the paradoxical link of freedom and obligation that constitute the special interest of this phenom­enon. Gift-giving regulates the standards of justice, the practice of partnership, and the circulation of goods. In modern perspec­tive the economic aspect may well have become preponderant, while gift exchange has been relegated to the basis of archaic and primitive economies. But at the same time it is the foremost ex­pression of rank and status and thus accompanies social inter­actions of all kinds. Its basis is an unexceptionable expectation or even obligation of return. Every gift demands a countergift.⁴

Gift exchange appears to be one of the universalia of human civilizations. “To give” is one of the basic verbs in most lan­guages; the dative is established in Indoeuropean noun declen­sion. Empirical studies have been devoted to the principle of gifts and its manifestation in so-called primitive societies.⁵ The prin­ciple of reciprocity is recognized in every case. There are of course forms of violent acquisition of goods which may be equally frequent or even more common, not to say honorable, in the same societies: robbery, piracy, cattle-stealing, wars waged for plunder, and trickery of all sorts. But the phenomena are

distinct. It is giving that controls a system of rank and honor and thus guarantees stability in the inner circle. Giving is neither dis­interestedness nor pure self-interest.⁶ It rather creates some pre­carious balance between the two.

The phenomenon of giving has long made its impact on studies of ancient civilizations, from the Bronze Age to archaic Greece. Moses Finley, in his book on the Odyssey, has an important chapter on the role of gifts in Homer; Nicholas Coldstream wrote an essay on the archaeological evidence for “Gift Exchange in the Eighth Century B.c.”⁷ Even in the Bronze Age, there is no treaty without exchange of gifts.⁸ In the midst of a Homeric bat­tle, when Glaukos and Diomedes recognize they are guest­friends, they have to exchange gifts, and they change armor.⁹ Gift-giving is much older and more widespread than any at­tempts to control bribery: “The Gift a man gives provides space for him and escorts him to the Great one.”¹⁰ It is interesting to read in the “Letter of a Princess to the Prefect of Ugarit” that the sender, in need of silver, tells the correspondent: “Send me much of it, and not little”—no quantity, no price; regulation will be through continued exchange.¹¹ “Give a very nice one—you will get your return,” Athena told Telemachus. Trade is still in the form of honorable gift exchange. The system pervades poetry as well as reality.

The invention of the free market, of money, and of putting a price on the merchandise brings changes to the system. Whereas giving creates a bond between the persons who give and those who receive, money exchange is impersonal. Still, “exchange” remains the basic process, goods for money, or money for goods, on the basis of choice, of partnership, and, ideally, of bilateral profit. Even if state-controlled contributions are paid by taxes, the expectation remains that the citizen will get a return for what he is giving, be it privileges, prestige, or just personal safety. Even the prestigious gift has remained, sometimes called “sponsoring” in a more modern vein; it is a form of ceremonial waste not without the expectation of the “pleasant returns.”

Pierre Bourdieu has elaborated a “theory of practice” in which

social interactions in general are transfers of assets, so that giving gifts becomes an investment, an accumulation of symbolic cap­ital which will be used again at a later time.¹² Taking a study of 32 Cabyl society in Morocco as his starting point, he shows that capitalism operates even in primitive systems of interaction.

If reciprocity of giving is one of the universalia of anthropol­ogy, it is worth examining the anthropological characteristics im­plied. Giving presupposes evolution of the hand that makes it free for “manipulation,” something that distinguishes man from apes; it presupposes the intellectual achievement of constituting an object which is detachable from the personal sphere, to be given away at ease and without pain; it also recognizes not just an adversary but a partner of equal status, whose thoughts and interests can be represented through empathy. And it implies awareness of the time dimension: credit projects into the future the return of past obligations, with an invariant standard of value. In these processes more distinctly intellectual activities are seen to develop, namely counting, calculating, measuring, and weighing. Some concept of equality and of measure, the axion in Homer’s expression, must underlie the process of exchange. No wonder the principle of reciprocity has been found highly satisfactory in the construction of mental worlds.

It is common to find extensions of the principle of reciprocity which are not logically necessary, indeed are irrational in certain aspects, and which still remain highly satisfactory to the human mind. The principle is applicable to quite different spheres and works to make them manageable, foreseeable, and acceptable.

The gift aspect dominates sex and marriage. Sexuality is one of the oldest programs of biology, certainly not invented just for humans but indispensable for them and highly valued in individ­ual experience. It has often been termed irrational because it re­fuses to conform to conscious planning; gift exchange is one means to impose rationality on sexuality. From the patriarchal point of view, the female becomes the “object” for exchange. A

bride is “given” to her suitor by her father—this is called ekdi- donai in Greek, in matrimonium dare in Latin.

Another application of the principle of reciprocity pervades the sphere of punitive justice.¹⁷ Punishment is accepted as just if it is subsumed under the concept of reciprocal giving, of retri­bution. Retribution can be seen as a simple inversion of action: the culprit is to suffer what he has done.¹⁸ Even this understand­ing of correspondence presupposes a distant, “objective” view. But there are limits to the lex talionis.¹⁹ The ideology of recip­rocal exchange, of giving, is much more widely applicable. In Greek, to be punished is termed “to give justice” (diken didonai); but it can also be said that the culprit gets or receives his due after having “given” offense; these are still current expressions in English as in German.²⁰ The twofold possibility of metaphor points to the artificiality of this verbalization when it is applied to overt aggression and brutality. The epitome of rationality is easily at hand: “measure for measure” and counting numbers— blows, for instance, or days of imprisonment.²¹ In Homer’s Od­yssey, when Odysseus’ comrades have eaten the cows of Helios at the island of Thrinakia, the god asks for a “fitting return,” by which he does not mean remuneration for the slain cattle—in

fact Odysseus’ comrades promise to provide it—but that the cul­prits must be put to death.²²

Yet universal and aboriginal as the principle of reciprocity may 134 be, it is not innate; it has to be learned afresh by every individual, it has not changed our genes through cultural evolution.

There are just faint analogies to giving among animals. The most obvious example, parents feeding their young, ought to be set aside. This is instinctive behavior mostly bound to the dyad of mother and child, sometimes taking the father in company. Animal young beg for food, relying on the propensity of their elders to feed them. This may be the ultimate origin of charis, the mutual smile of closeness and understanding. But the per­missive attitude toward children usually contrasts with the ex­pected behavior of adults who are “taken seriously.” There may be cooperation in hunting. The dog fetches what it has helped to hunt, but will give it up yielding to superior authority. Some practice of “offering gifts” is found in the context of courting and mating at different levels of zoology, especially with insects or birds. This is a means to an end, to arouse interest and to diminish anxiety. No principle of reciprocity derives from it. There is some food sharing among hunting chimpanzees,²⁴ as well as incipient forms of intentional revenge among them.²⁵ Sys­tems of gift exchange go far beyond these and can be said to constitute a universal human achievement.

Giving in Religion

In religious dealings, gift exchange is simply ubiquitous.²⁶ This seems to be another true universal of religious history as of an­thropology. The formula of Mantiklos, the gift accompanied by the demand of “pleasing return,” is found repeatedly in archaic Greek inscriptions, such as votive tablets from Corinth and a stone basis from Smyrna.²⁷ It also appears in Horner: “give pleas- 135 ing return to all Pylians for the grand hecatomb,” Mentor- Athena prays to Poseidon. Equally, the singer-poet prays to his god: “give graciously delightful life in exchange for my song.”²⁸

No wonder the first and apparently most obvious definition of “piety,” in Plato’s Euthyphro, is “sacrifice and prayer,” which in turn means “to ask and to give,” so that religion becomes a “craft of trade” (emporike techne). In his criticism Plato asks: how can we really give to the gods?²⁹ But in his Symposium Plato has Diotima explain that the “traffic” between men and gods, executed by “demons,” consists in prayers and sacrifices from one side and commands and returns for sacrifices (amoibe thu- sion) from the other.³⁰ Since commands of the gods normally concern sacrifice, amoibe thusion could well serve as a general way of describing religious interaction as a “sacrificial exchange system.” Even before Plato, the Hippocratic author of Peri aeron agrees with Euripides that gods enjoy being honored by men and hence “give back their favors for this.”³¹

The idea of mutual gifts exchanged between gods and men has quite an old pedigree. One of the clearest examples of Indoeu­ropean poetry that can be reconstructed from Greek and Sanskrit says that the gods are “givers of good things,” doteres eaon in Homeric Greek.³² With this wording Homer is accepting and passing on an idea that has come to him through a tradition of, say, 2000 years. In Mycenaean, the proper name Theodora means “gift of god.”³³ The Persian King Darius proclaims that Ahuramazda, creator of heaven and earth, “gives everything good to people”—and “kingship to Darius.”³⁴ Democritus con­curs that “the gods give to humans all good things, in olden days as well as now,” while the bad things that happen are due to men’s “blindness and want of sense.”³⁵ This is not to say that the idea of divine gifts is an Indoeuropean-Greek creation or pre­rogative. The Hebrew Bible stresses again and again that Jahweh

is the giver of all good things, giving food to all living beings, and giving progeny in particular. A similar formula of the New Testament has formed its own tradition of another 2000 years 136 to the present day. “Every perfect endowment and every good gift comes from above,” James writes in his letter, “coming down from the father of lights,” from god.³⁶

Of course the gifts from above, the good gifts from a god or gods, are just one side of the trade. They are to be answered by the gifts of men to gods in turn. This is our form of thanks or “grace,” charites, as the Greeks said.³⁷ In the formulation of the pagan Sallustios, “since we have everything from the gods, and it is just to return firstlings of things given to the givers, we give firstlings of goods through monuments, of the body by hair, of life by sacrifice.”³⁸ “Thou shalt not come to me with empty hands,” Jahweh commands; all peoples are obliged to bring gifts to Jahweh.³⁹ In a West Semitic text, the god Hadad “gives pas­tures and waterings for men of all cities, gives a share of sacrifice to the gods his brothers” (the cycle of gifts goes on even among the gods themselves).⁴⁰ Mantiklos has brought his tithe to the god. Socrates takes sacrifices to be the gifts of men to gods, ac­companied by prayers asking for exchange.⁴¹ Return is obliga­tory from both sides. In the Iliad, Zeus feels he should help Hec­tor, because “he has burned many thighs of cattle, on Ida and in the city of Troy.” Similarly Athena, in the Odyssey, urges the gods to help Odysseus, because “he has given sacred things to the gods more than other men.”⁴² A more poignant formulation is put forth in the Old Babylonian epic Atrahasis. During the famine, people turn to the god of rain with exclusive veneration. They build a temple for him and make great sacrifices, in order that “the god shall be ashamed at the gifts”—and they succeed: the god is ashamed at the gifts, and he gives his help.⁴³

The religious attitude so openly expressed over and over again has been characterized, even before the Mantiklos statuette was found, as the principle of do ut des: “I give in order that you shall give.”⁴⁴ The most unabashed formulation comes from Vedic India: “Give to me, I give to you.”⁴⁵ But also in Tanzania, at the

libation of the first beer after harvest, this formula is spoken: “Accept this drink—give us bliss... grant life, life, life!”⁴⁶ In Near Eastern wisdom literature we read: “Give to the god all day long, you will receive your returns.”⁴ ’ We even find the explicit term of “loan” or “investment”: “Who has mercy for the low man makes a loan to Jahwch, and he will requite him,” a Solo- monian proverb says. Even Jesus, according to the Gospel of Matthew, encourages people to give alms by the promise that “the father... will give it back to you.”⁴⁸ More cautious persons will prefer to invest their promise in the form of vows. “You will get back in exchange double and triple,” the chorus promises Zeus in Aeschylus’ Oresteia—a capitalist’s plea to an investor, as it were.⁴⁹ Often it is the sacrificer who thinks of making a prof­itable investment. Sacrifice to the gods will bring a hundred cat­tle—this is the original sense of hecatomb, “a hundred-cows- sacrifice.”⁵⁰ “Give more, and you will get more.”⁵¹ In the practice of votive religion, we often find the idea of a continuous circle of exchange, to give to the god because he has given and in order that he may give again. “Virgin Athena, Telesinos has dedicated a statue on the Acropolis. Be glad at this, and give him the chance to set up another one.” “Menander, fulfilling his vow, dedicates the tithe, returning his thanks; daughter of Zeus, save him, re­turning your thanks.”⁵² In Rome, at the Ara Maxima, the Ver- tulei give their tithe as a gift to Hercules and pray that he might “often condemn them to pay for a vote.”⁵³ For the farmer, the agricultural year is a cycle of giving. Grain is the gift of Demeter; it is collected at harvest, when first-fruit offerings to the gods are due immediately to guarantee continuation. It must have been difficult for the early farmers to throw eatable grain to the ground when winter is about to come⁵⁴—but equally, sowing must be done to guarantee riches in the next year.⁵⁵ Reality and ideology concur in the concept of cyclic exchange.

The do ut des principle, as has been seen, allows for variations: for Mantiklos, it is da quia dedi, for Athena in the Odyssey, date quia dedit, and it is do quia dedisti ut des in the votive circle.⁵⁶ This finally ensures stability: King Ptolemy and his queen, the

Euergetai. "continue to bestow many and great benefices on the sanctuaries in the country, and to enlarge the honors of the gods... In return for this the gods have given them their kingdom in a continuing good state, and they will give them all the other goods forever.'’⁵“

Protests against such blatant reciprocity are not lacking. The foremost one was by Jesus: “To give is more blessed than to receive?'⁵⁸ God gives without symmetry, and men should not ask for it.⁵* Yet the Christian tradition has more or less succeeded in restoring retributive justice and economy of exchange. A most sublime version of the principle is found in Islam: “Allah has bought from the faithful their lives and belongings, in order to give them paradise instead.”⁶⁰ The transaction has been fixed, men have paid through their faith and may expect the appropri­ate return.

From the perspective of anthropology and religious phenom­enology a double problem emerges: (1) How did the principle of reciprocal gift-giving arise and become one of the universals of human culture, alongside the famous “struggle for survival” among greedy and cunning individuals who are much more moved by the desire to get and not to give back? In a way, this is a question about the origin of collaboration and morality in general. (2) How could such a principle become dominant in religion, where one side of the deal must necessarily remain un­seen? This seems to imply a third question: Why are both phe­nomena, social giving and religious giving, so closely bound to­gether?

Genealogy of Morality?

Reciprocity is a form of morality. The question how morality could ever have evolved in a world dominated by the Darwinian struggle for survival has been refocused in the light of game the­ory and computer simulation. These studies have not only ex­ploded the older idea of group selection in what was called social Darwinism at the beginning of this century but also the approach

of Durkheim and Mauss, who, in explicit opposition to Darwin, wished to prove the priority of society as against the individual.*'¹ It is clear that justice and cooperation give an advantage to the ‘‘group'’ and thus should mark survival fitness and success; the greater advantage, however, will usually go to those who cheat and get emoluments without investments; it is the “selfish genes” that prosper?² One illustration of the alternative of cooperation versus cheating has become famous, the so-called Prisoner’s Di­lemma.⁶³ If you do not know what your partner is going to do, and if cheating pays more in a single case, which is the more promising decision? In one set of computer games based on these presuppositions the result has been that in the long run “nice” strategies turn out to be more successful than aggressive strate­gies based on cheating as soon and as often as possible. One should start with cooperation but react to cheating immediately by returning like for like. This has been called “a grudger’s strat­egy,” or “TIT for TAT”; it could equally be called the strategy of “pleasant return.”⁶⁴ Should we assume that in the long run co­operation, reciprocity, and retribution have been found to be more advantageous and have therefore been turned into values of cultural tradition? And going further, assume that strategies of this kind would reproduce themselves and multiply as a re­sult of their success? This is not to forget that games of this kind are highly simplified models of a multifactorial process going on in human society for thousands of years.

“Silent trade,” which has been called the earliest form of for­eign trade, calls for attention in this context.⁶⁵ Its classical de­scription can be found in Herodotus. In Africa, south of Gibral­tar, Phoenician merchants anchor their ships upon arrival,

take out their goods and deposit them in order at the beach. Then they retreat to their ships and make a smoke signal. Then the natives, seeing the smoke, come to the beach and deposit gold, and they retreat again from the merchandise; then the Karchedonians come back and examine the amount of gold, and if the gold is seen to match the value of the goods, they

take it and depart; otherwise they retreat to their ships and remain there, and then the natives come and bring more gold, until they accumulate a convincing quantity. There is no cheat­ing.⁶⁶

Later authors relate that the trade of silk with the Chinese was also effected in this way.⁶⁷ Similar forms have been found every­where in the world. They seem to arise spontaneously, especially in situations of utter distrust and quite limited communication. The principle of reciprocity is recognized from the start, even without direct contact, let alone discussion; it makes continued cooperation possible. It is certainly reinforced by practical ex­perience; the system will break down, of course, if excessive cheating or violence takes over. In other words, it is a matter of course for humans to try out “nice” strategies, and these are found to succeed. The returns of contin ued trade are greater than the profit collected by cheating or robbing in a single case. Note that the phenomenon is anthropologically universal; it comes into being in different times and places even without continuous tradition; it is exclusively human. You cannot do it with chim­panzees.

The procedure of silent trade has evident analogies to certain forms of gifts to the gods. Offerings are deposited at some place outside the normal habitat; the giver retreats, sometimes without looking back, and waits for the “gracious return.” In Greece such practice is especially common in the context of first fruit offer­ings. In the course of the seasons, horaia, seasonal products, are regularly deposited at some simple altar or just on the ground in honor of local heroes or nymphs, or of the respective gods. This is to uphold the circle of gifts and expectations on which life is found to depend. What is distinctive though, as against silent trade, is the charts usually involved in offerings to gods, some flowers added to the tribute, for instance.⁶⁸

But the unmistakable analogy brings back the “prisoner’s di­lemma” with special force. How can the practice of gift offerings prevail when the return is not at all obvious? The principle of

reciprocity, which is seen to control the dealings with the sacred again and again, is not based on unambiguous experience, let alone statistical evidence; nor should we understand giving as expression of individual feelings of gratitude, because these are 141 taught and strengthened by traditional beliefs. The principle of reciprocal giving is not verifiable in relation to gods—nor in re­lation to the dead, the other sphere where giving, often lavish giving, occurs in practically all human societies. And it is defi­nitely not “natural,” that is, biological. Nonetheless it appears to dominate religion, especially in primitive and archaic civili­zations.

Failing Reciprocity: Religious Criticism

“Look at all these votive gifts,” Diagoras the atheist was told in the sanctuary of Samothrace, which houses the great gods who were famous for saving people from the dangers at sea. “There would be many more votives,” the atheist unflinchingly retorted, “if all those who were actually drowned at sea had had the chance to set up monuments.”⁶⁹ There is no statistical proof for the relevance of religious giving; statistics might rather prove the

contrary.

In fact there are drastic counterexamples in individual cases that have resulted in bitter complaints. The catastrophe of the pious is set out in the example of Job, and Near Eastern parallels are not lacking.⁷⁰ In Greek literature we find similar laments that giving to the gods has been in vain. “Oh my father’s sacrifices before the walls, prodigal in slaughter of the grazing flock: they availed not any cure.”⁷¹ Concerned discussion seems to have fol­lowed the misfortune of King Croesus of Lydia, in 547 B.C., who had “given to the immortal gods” more than any other mortal and still met a violent fate through Kyros, king of Persia. He­rodotus has him send envoys to Delphi to ask “whether it is the custom of the god to cheat his benefactors”;⁷² the god should have been “ashamed of the gifts.”⁷³ The god’s answer was that the catastrophe had been ordained by fate, that there was the

forefather’s offense, the crime of Gyges, and that the god had still provided a three years’ delay. These are three problematic excuses instead of one good one; but charis seemed to be saved 142 in some small measure.

This indeed is the counsel of piety: to take a selective yet op­timistic view. It is also what the anecdote of Diagoras finally teaches: the living count, the drowned do not. The Athenians must sacrifice as their ancestors did “because of the good luck that has come from those sacrifices.”⁷⁴ “It is good to give gifts to the immortals,” Priamos ends up saying in the Iliad.⁷⁵ The gods have not forgotten the pious men; if Zeus did not save Hector despite all his sacrifices, he has yet intervened to secure him a noble funeral. The exchange, amoiba, has been effected.

Disappointments thus do not stop people from believing that all the good things they need and may get in their lives—food and health and success—are gifts of the gods, the “givers of good things,” or gifts “from above,” as the apostle says. “Man, do not be ungrateful... but for seeing and hearing and, by Zeus, for life itself, and for what helps for living, for corn, for wine, for oil, thank God,” Epictetus proclaims.⁷⁶ The very cycle of the ag­ricultural year is interpreted as a cycle of gift exchange.⁷⁷ In the practice of hunting, at a much earlier stage in the evolution of civilization, the game hunted down could be taken as a gift sent forth to men by some supernatural owners, a Master or Mistress of Animals, who of course demanded gifts in return; if annoyed, the master or mistress would deny their gifts, and catastrophe would ensue.⁷⁸

Criticism of religious gift exchange has been more effective at other levels. For one thing, religion is expensive. The speech “Against Nicomachus,” in the corpus of Lysias, claims that Ni- comachus, charged with the job of collecting and inscribing the sacred laws of Athens, had worked out such a long list of sac­rifices that the city would go bankrupt if it kept to the code.⁷⁹ “Look at the gods,” the cynical and cunning citizen says in Ar­istophanes while refusing to give his private property to the com­munity in compliance with the communist law just passed by the

Women's Assembly, “look at the hands of the statues: if we pray to them to give us good things, the god stands there, stretching out his hollow hand, not as if to give, but in order to get some' thing."⁸⁰ “It is not allowed to know the gods for nothing: they are for sale," non licet deos gratis nosse: I'enales sunt. Tertullian scornfully comments on the pagan gods.⁸¹ It is true that Chris­tianity developed as a “cheap" religion; but remember Jahweh, who dislikes the “empty hands" of worshipers. One line of Aes­chylus became famous in this regard: “Alone among gods, Death is not desirous of gifts.”⁸² Normal gods, by contrast, are greedy, exacting gifts at every occasion.

Thus injustice seems to prevail in the face of expectation of a just and “pleasant recompense.” The ancients raised the problem in these terms: how can a “trade” of interests go together with the rule of absolute justice as postulated of the gods? If returns count, the rich man will have much better chances in his dealings with the gods, since splendid rituals involve costly sacrifice.⁸’ Reflections on this problem go far back. Wise Hesiod already said that one must sacrifice “according to one’s means.”⁸⁴ Other anecdotes point out how the gods prefer the simple offerings of a poor and pious man, be it first-fruits or frankincense, to the lavish sacrifice of the rich.⁸⁵ Ever since prehistory we find cheap and simple objects, usually made of clay, as votive gifts in sanc­tuaries; they evidently are humble substitutes for what might be a real gift. Should this be called symbolism, fiction, or cheating? “And you must know that in sacred dealings fakes are accepted for the real things,” Servius wrote; indeed, the god Men accepted a stele instead of a bull’s sacrifice, and Heracles even enjoyed it when children “sacrificed” an apple for a ram.⁸⁶ A more ad­vanced morality claimed that the god only looks at the thoughts or the “heart” of the worshiper, not at the cost of the gift; this is found in the Bible as well as in Greek ethics.⁸⁷

A more thorough criticism of religious gift-giving, advanced notably by Plato, is that gifts to the gods constitute a form of bribery. With the advance of city organization directed by writ­ten laws, and with money ruling the market, the old forms of

mutual obligations became suspect; dorodokia, “acceptinggifts,” came to mean “corruption.”™ Thus Plato is shocked at the prin­ciple which I lesiod accepted, that “gifts persuade the gods, gifts |sway| the respectable kings,”™ or that “even the gods are flex« ible,” as Homer had it. ’" Could punishments in the netherworld be avoided by offering the proper gifts to Persephone, as the old hymn had stated?‘^M In his later works Plato is adamant that the gods, representing the principle of the good, cannot be influenced by either gifts or prayer.⁹² This would abolish the central forms of cult, leaving only a philosophical “assimilation to god,” ho- moiosis theoid'

Ending the gift-giving also eliminates another disturbing con­clusion to be drawn from this commerce, whereby the recipient becomes dependent upon the donor, the god becomes dependent on men’s gifts. The Hittite hymn to Ishtanu the Sun God says: “Be gracious to this man, your servant, then he will go on sac­rificing to you bread and beer.” “Where will you get a sacrificer like this man to honor you?” is the question put to Zeus in Aes­chylus.⁹⁴ A Christian prayer goes: “Lord, give us grace; for if thou givest us not grace, we will not give thee glory—and who will win by that, Lord?”⁹⁵ Aristophanes, in his Birds, has the gods starving after the birds’ empire has blocked the sky and the traffic of sacrifices has come to a stop. The same idea occurs in even more drastic terms in the Orient. Because of the deluge, the gods have long missed the sacrifices, hence at the first offering they hasten to assemble “like flies.”⁹⁶ “If you annihilate mankind, they will no longer give their supplies to the gods, nobody will offer bread or libation,” a Hittite mythical text explains.⁹⁷ “You can make your god run after you like a dog,” claims a text from Mesopotamian wisdom literature.⁹⁸

Despite the attempts of philosophers to strive for a more sub­lime theology, based on gods who are self-sufficient and not de­pendent on anything human, giving has not been ousted from the practice of religion, on the contrary. Practically everywhere it is understood that communication with the divine should be through exchange, through mutual giving, which is reflected in

the circulation of gifts within the community or hierarchy of believers. One might indeed he tempted to say that every form of religion is, among other things, an organization to elicit gifts. Some of the so-called new religions or sects provide the most striking examples.

Failing Reciprocity: The Facts of Ritual

If it seems paradoxical that giving is so important in all forms of religion, this is followed by another paradox: in the realm of reality, religious giving will never reach the addressee. There is a striking divergence between religious ideology and ritual prac­tice. Whereas the vocabulary of offerings consciously and con­stantly invokes the principle of reciprocity, this is not at all en­acted in ritual. The question asked before, how the principle of giving could become dominant in religion in spite of the other­worldly partners’ ’’unclearness” or “nonevidence” (adelotes), is transformed by this observation and finds a partial and prelim­inary answer: reciprocity, nonobvious from the side of the gods, is not even enacted from the human side. The commerce with the divine is executed by formulas and symbolism that, from a distanced view, may come close to tricks. The dialectical coex­istence of practice and ideology must go back to most remote times, and there is no reason to suppose that primitive man did not realize the divergence. Deception does not postdate piety in the human mind.

In fact there never was a possibility of sending gifts to the gods in a direct way. There are two contrasting ways of handling them: they can be definitely withdrawn from human consump­tion or redistributed within human society. In other words, gifts presuppose some sort of economic surplus; in dealing with gods as in dealing with the dead such surplus changes hands. It can be ceremoniously destroyed, or it can be recycled. One of these practices strikes us as irrational, the other as rational. Instead of flowers, send money to Amnesty International or to some other humanitarian organization, we are asked in modern obituary no-

tices. Still, we cannot do without flowers at burials. Indeed, both forms of practice have evidently been around for thousands of years, and we should beware of simple evolutionary patterns.

The ceremonial destruction of valuables undergoes one of three impressive forms of ritual: dumping in water, burning by fire, and just pouring out liquids." In addition, gifts may be en­tombed with the dead. Customs of this kind took place ever since prehistory, possibly since the Upper Paleolithic. They are evident in civilizations all over the world and are especially notable in ancient religions. Immersion sacrifices abound, and they leave archaeological traces, especially if swamps have been chosen in­stead of ponds or rivers. Precious objects, animals, and even hu­mans may be the objects of such “giving.” In addition, objects may be made unusable, for example by breaking or twisting be­fore deposition or immersion. The act of giving must be irre­versible; it is seldom spelled out how the gift should actually reach the addressee.¹⁰⁰ There is a slight chance of recovery by humans of immersed objects; think of the coins in the Fontana Trevi at Rome, a late and playful case of immersion sacrifice. But it ought not to happen, as the example of Polycrates demon­strates.¹⁰¹ If edible gifts or valuables are simply placed some­where in the open, chances for recovery and reuse are high; this may be the beginning of “recycling.” If humans keep away, an­imals will take advantage of such edibles. Interpretation can even make these animals the impersonation of divinity, as is the case with dogs and birds of prey in Iranian religions.¹⁰² Greeks, by contrast, were more inclined to find the ravens at the altars com­mitting sacrilege. Abraham too wards the birds off his sacrificial animals cut in halves, to let the god pass through them.¹⁰³

The more brutal, obvious, and definite destruction is through burning; it can be visualized as if the smoke rising to heaven were directly reaching the god or gods. In West Semitic and Greek animal sacrifice only parts of the victims, including inedible parts, were burned.¹⁰⁴ Burning of whole animals, holocaust, came to special prominence in West Semitic religion, most of all in the daily service at the Temple of Jerusalem; there is also the

burning of children, attributed to Phoenicians and Carthaginians in particular.¹⁰⁵ The more innocent form of worship was the burning of fragrant wood and especially of frankincense, a ritual which spread from the Semitic world all over the Mediterranean through trade with southern Arabia, always the sole source of production.¹⁰*' This was the smallest sacrifice that was finally re­quired from citizens as a token of allegiance at the time of Dio­cletian; Christians refused to do it.

Another old and simple form of ceremonial waste is libation. It is an enactment of frustration, even if only plain water is poured out, for water does not gush from the faucet but must be laboriously brought from some distant well. But often more valu­able liquids are used, poured from rare and beautiful vessels; a complicated agenda of what and where to pour can be con­structed, always ending in the irretrievable waste.¹⁰⁷ The New Testament has the story of the “great sinner,” traditionally iden­tified as Mary Magdalene. Breaking the alabaster container she pours out her ointment, nardos, worth 300 denarii, as the more practically minded disciples quickly calculate. These riches should have been given to the poor, they protest, but Jesus en­dorses the ceremonial waste, with the partial rationalization that the offering anticipates his impending funeral.¹⁰⁸ Using perfumes on the dead is not much more rational than giving them flowers, which Neanderthal man already did.

Recycling pious gifts, as suggested by Jesus’ disciples, is an old invention too. It is in fact basic for the temple system as it evolved in the ancient Near East and in Egypt and may be called the conditio sine qua non for these civilizations.¹⁰⁹ The temple per­sonnel lives on the tribute brought to the god so that regular gifts to the temple resemble taxation. The “ten percent” principle seems to have evolved at an early date.¹¹⁰ At a Mesopotamian temple the gods were regularly fed in a daily ceremony, with the statues moved to the dining room, tables set up, incense burners lit; happily the gods would leave the meal untouched, so the remains were left to the priests and their dependents for second­ary consumption.¹¹¹ This system made it possible for specialists

to concentrate as a group at one place without having to worry about making their living; it implied access to coveted privileges, of course. The same was true in Egypt; even the food for the 148 dead so prominent in ancient Egypt was in some form recycled

to the living, although pious inscriptions are silent about this. The tithe owed to Jahweh is to be “eaten” at the temple “in front of Jahweh,” without any direct share for the god, evidently.¹¹² At the Ara Maxima in Rome, people “sacrifice” their tithe to Hercules with lavish meals, inviting everyone.¹¹³ Customs of meals for the dead survive to the present day, though it is the living who eat the meal. In all the sacrifices still performed today in Japan or South East Asia—for example on Bali, that island untouched by the expansion of Islam—sacrifices are mainly food offerings while the ceremonial act is in presenting and displaying the gifts, but de facto “recycling” covers almost 100 percent of the produce.¹¹⁴ It must have been similar with food gifts placed on the offering tables in the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, and the trapezai set up in Greek temples at sacrifice, laden with portions of meat that finally went to the priests. Even the meals offered to the dreaded goddess Hecate, to be deposited at the crossroads at night, were immediately snatched by the poor.¹¹⁵

In a more straightforward form of recycling, gifts are directly collected in the name of a god by the god’s representatives. These are forms of sacralized begging, most prominent in the practice of Buddhist monks, who have to go around every day to have their bowl filled with offerings of rice. In the ancient world the most notable counterparts were the “beggars of the mother,” me- tragyrtai, officiating in the name of the Anatolian Great Goddess, but there were many kinds of itinerant seers and purifiers, or agyrtai. Their returns, even “pleasant returns,” were given by securing divine gifts for the giver’s benefit through oracles, pu­rifications, blessings, and prayers; if repelled, though, they might threaten with curses. The New Testament has the project of a similar organization for the apostles of Christ;¹¹⁶ but in effect Christians soon declined to be agyrtai, “not taking anything from the pagans.”¹¹⁷

A third way of handling gifts to the gods became fundamental in archaic Greece in particular. These gifts are neither destroyed nor recycled but transformed into durable monuments that be­long to the deity in perpetuity, as they are ceremoniously set up in the god’s precinct, anathemata.¹¹⁸ Metals were among the scarcest goods, thus the most prestigious anathemata were big metal objects, especially tripod cauldrons that marked the early Greek sanctuaries—not too different from those at the Temple in Jerusalem.¹¹⁹ Such gifts were demonstrations of the wealth and piety of the dedicants and of the skill of the craftsmen as well; through accumulation they also represented the power and pres­tige of the god and of the city in charge of the sanctuary. The temples and the divine statues themselves were anathemata, forms of costly communal dedication, including the most splen­did and famous examples, the temple of Zeus at Olympia and the Parthenon. Economic surplus thus assumed a permanent function in the service of prestige and honor. This took place in a society mainly based on these values, but it was done in def­erence to the higher authority of the gods, who “rejoice if they are honored by mortals.”¹²⁰ Profane use of temple properties was not excluded: Athena would generously grant loans to her people in Athens. But in principle, to set up anathemata in honor of the gods meant to put an end to the circle of exchange for the sake of permanent order. In the long run, however, reality hardly cor­responded to the postulate. Whatever curses had been pro­nounced against hierosylia, in the end all temple treasuries and costly statues were robbed or plundered; the gold of Delphi went to finance a so-called holy war. We should hardly wonder at such violent endings; it is more amazing that “niceness,” the charis of reciprocal giving, had ever prevailed.

Gift and Sacrifice

It has been impossible to avoid mentioning sacrifice in the pre­ceding reflections. The concepts of gift to the gods and sacrifice largely overlap, but are not coextensive. The central ritual of

ancient sacrifice is sacred slaughter introducing the common feast, in which the share of the gods is disconcertingly meager. Here, as in gift-giving, actual ritual and pious ideology diverge. 150 Although sacrifice is wholly dedicated to the gods, even in Greece, it turns out not to he a real gift at all.'-’¹ It celebrates the commensality of men in the presence of the sacred, while the gods receive mainly the inedible parts, bones and gall bladder. The Prometheus myth explained how the share of the gods had been defined by trickery, a deception wrought against the ruling god; if this did not go unpunished, the results persist. This was the “separation of gods and men,” Hesiod says.¹²²

Sacrifice not only includes but largely consists in the sacrificial feast. This ceremony seems to derive from the practice of hunters, acting out the concern for life and the anxiety of killing while providing the most valued food.¹²³ The feast constitutes the par­adigm of food-sharing, which in turn is a basic form of collab­oration among humans. Apes normally do not share food, even if an incipient practice of food-sharing has been observed at the rare occasions of chimpanzee hunt.¹²⁴ For humans, however, food-sharing had become central just because hunting had be­come so prominent by the Paleolithic epoch. Hunting was an exclusively male occupation, while a great percentage of food was gathered by the women. Both sexes were dependent upon mutual exchange, which accounts for the structure of the human family, too. Hence we are still dealing with the universalia of human civilizations. Many will share the outcome of a successful hunt, exchanging gifts and countergifts both within the family and among the members of a tribe. Recognition of equality and rank comes in from the start, as “parts” are distributed in due order; this is characteristic of the sacrificial feasts in primitive and in ancient societies alike. The Greek concepts of moira and aisa, constitutive of the Greek world picture, have been traced to this sharing of meat. The words simply mean “part, portion, share,” but they came to designate the appropriate order in gen­eral, the world order, and Fate.¹²⁵

In his “Reciprocity and the Construction of Reality,” E. L.

Schieffelin has proposed that the principle of gift, le don, is in fact an extension of food-sharing.¹²⁶ This would derive gift ex­change in toto from a simpler practice of similar importance. Certain mental prerequisites have to be met to make the progress from commensality to gift exchange in the full sense possible: recognition of the claims of partners not personally present at the moment, and recognition of the passage of time together with the ability to mark and to remember postponed retribution. This implies a stable mental world anchored to time and place; it also requires proto-mathematical concepts of measure and equal­ity.¹²⁷

If the discussion of the exchange of gifts with gods left irre­ducible problems, at this new level the question recurs in another form. What is the role of gods in human commensality? Why is the reference to unseen partners so frequent and important that the ceremonial feast regularly takes the form of sacrifice, of ritual legitimated by its relation to the divine or sacred? It is safe to assume that this must be quite an old tradition, although ideas about the actual participation of gods vary even within a single civilization. Do the gods take part in the eating? Yes, but only in the case of marginal Ethiopians and Phaeacians, Homer says.¹²⁸ Are they superiors who dine first and leave the rest to their ser­vants, as in the Mesopotamian temple system; or is it enough if only the smoke reaches heaven, as Israelites and Greeks normally believed?¹²⁹ At any rate, consumption of meat and/or the previ­ous slaughter is sacralized; it can even be forbidden in a profane context.¹³⁰ The rituals used to prepare and to accompany the slaughter and the feast—purification, offerings, appeasement, restitution—both increase and overcome special forms of anxi­ety. They entail the use of weapons, the drawing of blood, the enactment of death, and frequently propitiatory gifts to return the life force to the lord of life.¹³¹ The integration of gods into the common meal serves the purpose of consolidating the group by establishing a superior authority, and ensuring continuity in the precarious transfer of life. Two constructions characterize the oldest Neolithic settlements and the earliest cities, the first forms

of communal life that were able to achieve and retain stability for many generations: the granary and the place of sacrifice. Ac­cumulation and consumption have to balance each other. In a 2 way this still enacts the the law of reciprocity.

Aversion and Offerings: From Panic to Stability

The idea of reciprocity characterizes the act of giving. But some forms of giving reverse the link to the expectation of pleasant returns, and refer rather to situations of threat and violence. Forms of involuntary, compulsory “giving” abound in real life. Contributions may be exacted by barbarous neighbors or the local mafia, by marauding soldiers, pirates, thieves of all kinds; in more secure civilization they are replaced by taxation systems. Herodotus narrates how King Psammetichus of Egypt success­fully pacified the invading Scythians “by gifts and prayers.”¹³² These are exactly the words used in religious ceremonies.

Even within a religious tradition, gifts to the gods may be re­garded as a tribute exacted by their threatening power, which makes it necessary to “turn off” their impact. Remember the Indian myth about the origin of sacrifice to appease the devour­ing Fire God, Agni.¹³³ “I give in order that you go away,” do ut abeas, is a formula coined by Jane Harrison for “apotropaic” sacrifice.¹³⁴ Gods may be oppressive. Hence it is not too strange that gods of pestilence and fever are worshiped too, in an effort to maintain good relations so as to keep them off.¹³⁵ “Erinys, clad in black, leave the house when the gods receive the sacrifice from the hands of the worshiper.”¹³⁶ The sacred law of Selinus has an elaborate ritual to get rid of an oppressive demon, called elasteros, and concludes: “If he wishes to make sacrifice to the elasteros, he shall make sacrifice as to the immortal gods, but shall cut the throat with direction toward the earth.”¹³⁷ It may be desirable to be on good terms even with the devil.

A related field of irrational offerings is the ubiquitous custom of gifts to the dead. Here too we find the explanation or illusion of familiarity continuing beyond the grave, and the belief that

countersifts of various forms of prosperity come from the dead, mduding food chat grows from the earth. Earth herself is a god­dess who produces everything and is honored by appropriate gifts; birth and death become a great circle of getting and giving back.' "⁵ At the same time there is a strong belief that the dead and the heroes become dangerous when angry; hence it is better to appease them with riches to keep them quiet and out of one’s life. The horror of death is the clear background of these fears.

The tale which has been widely taken as the foundation of sacrifice in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, the sac­rifice of Isaac, is a story of yielding everything to threat rather than giving to express mutual familiarity. The demand of god is made without explanation, without any promise of compensa­tion. Abraham is to “give” by destroying what is most dear to him. In the end the loss is modified by substitution, a ram for the burned offerings as they were practiced later in the Temple.

In West Semitic as in Greek ritual we repeatedly find the se­quence of a burned sacrifice followed by a sacrificial feast. “Ir­rational” abandonment—that is, destruction—precedes com- mensality. A sheep or a pig is burned, and meat is consumed by humans; the relation is clearly to the profit of the worshipers, but the renunciation comes first.¹³⁹ The proceedings emphasize charts, the smiling face of the gods with whom we are familiar, and the joy of the meal is unmistakable. This does not, however, impeach the seriousness of sacrifice, the meaning of which is to acknow ledge a higher authority.

In conclusion, giving to the gods or to the dead can also mean giving in to threatening powers. This brings back the prehuman anxiety reaction, throwing valuables away in a situation of pur­suit and anxiety.¹⁴⁰ It must be earlier than food-sharing and be­fore any calculations of equality and reciprocity. Still, giving achieves something: panic can be turned into controlled behavior and even a form of manipulation, with calculation of anticipated profit versus evident but limited losses, especially as substitution becomes possible. If one can get the god to “run after you like a dog,” it makes quite an effect. In a way, this is what religious

offerings undertake to do. A calculable loss turns into something like a bait. Anxiety is masked by a tentative smile, and hope for stability in the future remains. An early Christian inscription 154 states that a benefactor has adorned a church “for release (lytron) from his sins and remission (anesis) for those who have died,” and hopes at the same time that “he will get the gift of god as recompense (antimisthia)”^ The donor of this expensive gift wants to use it both to pay up his debts and make an investment, reflecting the double aspect of giving something up and getting something back in return.

Reciprocity could develop from commensality within a circle of familiarity, protected from outside dangers—dangers that could still be controlled by vicarious giving. Thus is anxiety over­come. The principle of reciprocity in dealing with human part­ners as in dealing with gods is not only a “nice” and widely successful strategy but a postulate acted out to create a stable, sensible, and acceptable world, gratifying both intellectually and morally and bridging the gap of annihilation—something that still refuses to disappear completely from the horizon of that “intelligent and mortal animal,” zoon logikon thneton, as the ancients defined “man.” In relation to gods the practice of sac­rificial gifts results in an interpretation of life’s vicissitudes which is generally both rational and optimistic, Job and other excep­tional cases notwithstanding. The postulate of cosmic sense over­rides the evidence of deplorable examples of catastrophe. Thus teaching and rehearsing “nice” strategies has widely prevailed in religious tradition. Life is bound to optimism—even this may be called a biological necessity.

The strange fact remains that the postulate of equality and reciprocity appears to meet with “objective” laws of reality and has therefore been highly successful in the mathematical-physical interpretation of our world. Physics works through propor­tions-—note the “portions”—and equations, the postulates of symmetry and equilibrium that are also the basis of mathematics. In this sense the principle of reciprocity is the very foundation of our rational, scientific world. It is not by chance that this is her-.iklccl right at t he beginning of Greek philosophy in its most gen­eral terms: “All things are exchange (antamoihe) for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods,” Heraclitus wrote, explicitly referring to commerce as the paradigm of the 155 cosmic order.¹'¹² And before Heraclitus, Anaximander said that things coming to be and being destroyed again are “paying pen­alty and retribution to each other for the injustice according to rhe assessment of time.”¹⁴³ This formulation seeks to make de­struction—even personal death—acceptable through the postu­late of reciprocity. For Plato too it is the principle of giving back (antapodidonai) that guarantees the continuity of life. “If things that come into being did not give recompense to others, as if going around in a circle... everything finally would come to a stop.”¹⁴⁴ The very constituents of the human body are “parts, borrowed from the universe, to be given back again.”¹⁴⁵

Should we apply the “evolutionary theory of knowledge” (in the sense of Konrad Lorenz) to explain the correspondence of the universal moral postulate of “equal exchange” with natural laws?¹⁴⁶ Did the principle of reciprocity become fixed in men’s minds as a widely successful strategy for dealing with reality? Or is it just that the main mechanism of optimism is designed to circumvent or to hide the irreversible flux by concentrating on closed circles which indicate stability? The more trendy theories current today enthusiastically embrace chaos, and many contem­porary observers have come to suspect the ideal of the mathe­matically ordered universe is more a projection of the mind in quest of stability than a reflection of what is at the heart of mat­ter. In all this, biology is still at work. Life is homoeostasis: a transient stability depending upon the “just” exchange; a pre­carious equilibrium in the flux of matter and energy. The rational postulate of reciprocity fits the biological landscape, and it is duly inculcated through religious tradition.