Lévites, who constituted a priestly caste analogous to the Druids, held a monopoly over the slaughter of animals for food. Meat had to pass through their hands—literally, since they supervised or actually carried out the butchering of the animals and the redistribution of animal flesh, returning the largest share to the owner and his guests while holding back selected morsels for themselves and Jaweh.
W. Robertson Smith long ago pointed out in his important book Religion of the Semites that in old Israel all slaughter of animals was sacrifice: “People could never eat beef or mutton except as a religious act.” Anthropologists who have studied modern pastoral peoples in East Africa have seen the same situation from a slightly different perspective. East African pastoralists generally live not from the meat of the herds but from their milk and blood. As among the Pakot studied by Harold Schneider, herd animals can only be slaughtered on “ritual and ceremonial occasions.” The number of animals slaughtered per occasion and the number of occasions, however, are regulated by the availability of the animals. Anything as costly as an ox is too valuable not to be made part of some ceremonial. Americans who barbecue steaks for honored guests have much in common with the Pakot and the beef-loving peoples of the ancient world. (Incidentally, the word “barbecue” has an interesting history. It comes from the Carib word barbricot. The Caribs—whence the word “cannibal”—used the barbricot, a grill made of green boughs, to prepare their cannibal feasts.)
Returning to the Israelites, there is no doubt that at one time animals were sacrificed primarily to be eaten at redistributive feasts sponsored by “great provider” headmen and chiefs. “Open-handed generosity” was as important for the ancient Israelites as it was for the Teutons:
As early as the time of Samuel we find religious feasts of clans or towns.… the law of the feast was open-handed generosity; no sacrifice was complete without guests; and portions were freely distributed to rich and poor within the circle of a man’s acquaintances.
By the time of Christ, the Levites’ slaughter monopoly had been given a monetary value. The faithful brought their animals to the temple priests, who slit throats at so much per head. Passover pilgrims traveled great distances to the temple at Jerusalem to have their lambs slaughtered. The famous temple moneychangers whose tables Jesus overturned ensured payment in coin of the realm. The Jewish rabbinate gave up the practice of animal sacrifice after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70—but not quite, since Orthodox Jews to this day insist on having animals slaughtered by a slitting of the throat under the supervision of religious specialists.
Because the crucifixion of Jesus occurred in association with the celebration of Passover, his death was readily assimilated to the imagery and symbolism of both animal and human sacrifice. John the Baptist called the coming messiah “the lamb of god.” Meanwhile, the Christians maintained tokens of the original redistributive functions of animal sacrifice in their rites called “communion.” Jesus broke the Passover bread and poured the Passover wine, and distributed the bread and wine to his disciples. “This is my body,” he said of the bread. “And this is my blood,” he said of the wine. In the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist these redistributive activities are repeated as ritual. The priest eats the bread in the form of a wafer and drinks the wine while the members of the congregation eat only the wafer. Appropriately enough, this wafer is called the “host,” a word derived from the Latin hostis, meaning “sacrifice.”
Protestants and Catholics have spilled much blood and ink over the question of whether the wine and wafer are actually “transubstantiated” into the corporeal substance of Christ’s blood and body. But theologians and historians have up to now generally failed to see the real evolutionary significance of the Christian “mass.” By spiritualizing the eating of the paschal lamb and by reducing its substance to a nutritionally worthless wafer, Christianity long ago unburdened itself of the responsibility of seeing to it that those who came to the feast did not go home on an empty stomach. It took a while for this to happen. During the first two centuries of Christianity the communicants pooled their resources and actually held a communal meal known as the agape, or love feast. After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Church found that it was being used as a soup kitchen and in A.D. 363 the holding of love feasts on church premises was forbidden at the Council of Laodicea. The point that really merits attention is that the nutritive value of the communion feast is virtually zero, whether there is transubstantiation or not. Nineteenth-century anthropologists saw in the line of development which led from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the wafer and wine of the Eucharist a vindication of the doctrine of moral progress and enlightenment. I cannot share their optimism. Before we congratulate Christianity for its transcendence of animal sacrifice, we should note that corporeal protein supplies were also being transcended by a rapidly expanding population. What the end of animal sacrifice really signified was the end of ecclesiastical redistributive feasting.
Christianity was only one of several religions that opted for generosity after death when generosity in life ceased to be practiced or necessary. I do not think it detracts from the acts of mercy and kindness performed in the name of such religions to point out that it was a great convenience for the rulers of India, Islam, and Rome to humble themselves before gods to whom heaven was more important than earth, and a former or future life more important than this one. As the imperial systems of the Old World grew larger and larger, they chewed up and depleted resources on a continental scale. When the globe had filled with tens of millions of ragged sweating drudges, the “great providers” were unable to act with the “open-handed generosity” of the barbarian chiefs of yore. Under Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam they became “great believers” and built cathedrals, mosques, and temples where nothing at all was served to eat.
But let’s get back to the time when there were still enough animals around so that meat could occasionally be part of everyone’s diet. Persians, Vedic Brahmans, Chinese, and Japanese all at one time or another ritually sacrificed domesticated animals. In fact, it would be difficult to find a single society in a belt across Eurasia and North Africa in which domesticated animal sacrifice was not part of state-supported cults. The entire repertory of herbivores and ruminant species was drawn upon for the purpose of these redistributive sacrifices, although some regions displayed preferences dictated by special ecological considerations. North Africa and Arabia, for example, were noted for camel sacrifices; horses were sacrificed among the central Asian pastoralists; bulls were given special attention throughout the Mediterranean area. Meanwhile, across the same vast belt stretching from Spain to Japan, cannibalism was generally practiced on a very small scale, if at all. The Eurasian state religions prohibited the eating of human flesh and though this proscription was not sufficient to prevent sporadic outbreaks of cannibalism during times of hunger brought on by sieges or crop failures, such lapses had nothing to do with ecclesiastical policy and were usually discouraged rather than promoted by the governing classes.
Much of what I have said thus far has been commented on by previous authors. I am certainly not the first to discover the relationship between the scarcity of domesticated stock in Mesoamerica and the peculiar intensity of the cult of human sacrifice among the Aztecs. Yet it was not until Michael Harner linked the scale of human sacrifice among the Aztecs to the depletion of protein resources that a scientific theory of the divergent trajectories of early Old and New World state religions could be formulated. Others had previously reasoned that it was the lack of animals “suitable” for sacrifice that set the Mesoamericans off on their ghastly career. Allegedly, the Old World had a supply of animals whose demeanor was “suitable” for sacrificial rites. Hence there was no need to employ prisoners of war for such purposes and human sacrifice was replaced by animal sacrifice. Reay Tannahill, to name one recent adherent of this view, aptly notes that the native American horse had been wiped out, that caribou and bison were
not found so far south as Mexico, and that other game was scarce. But as to why the dog and turkey—“the only domesticated livestock”—were not used instead of people, her answer is: “These were too contemptible to be worthy of the Gods.”
I feel that this kind of explanation is as defective as the explanations the Aztecs themselves gave for eating their prisoners of war. What people think or imagine is contemptible to the gods cannot be taken as an explanation of their religious beliefs and practices. To do so is to rest the explanation of all social life ultimately on what people arbitrarily think or imagine—a strategy doomed to nullify all intelligent inquiry since it will always come down to one useless refrain: People think or imagine what they think or imagine. Why should dogs and turkeys be deemed unsuitable for the majesty of supernatural appetites? The members of some cultures find it easy to imagine that the gods dine on ambrosia or nothing at all. Surely a people who were capable of imagining what the face of Tlaloc looked like were capable of imagining that their gods were passionately fond of turkey giblets and dog hearts. It was the Aztecs, not their gods, who felt that it wasn’t worth their while to wrench out the beating hearts of turkeys and dogs. And the reason they felt that way had nothing to do with the inherent dignity of dogs, turkeys—or, for that matter, domesticated ducks. Rather, it had to do with the cost of obtaining large quantities of meat from these species. The trouble with dogs as a source of meat is not that they are contemptible but that they thrive best when they themselves are fed on meat. And the trouble with turkeys and other fowl is that they thrive best when they are fed on cereal grains. In both cases it is enormously more efficient to eat the meat or the grain directly than to pass it through another link in the food chain. On the other hand, the great advantage of the Old World domesticated species is that they are herbivores and ruminants and thrive best when they feed on grass, stubble, leaves, and other plant foods which human beings cannot digest. Because of the pleistocene extinctions, the Aztecs lacked such species. And it was this lack, together with the extra costs involved in using carnivores and birds as a source of animal protein, that tipped the balance in favor of cannibalism. Of course, the meat obtained from prisoners of war is also costly—it is very expensive to capture armed men. But if a society lacks other sources of animal protein, the benefits of cannibalism may outweigh these costs. On the other hand, if a society already has horses, sheep, goats, camels, oxen, and pigs to eat, the cost of cannibalism may outweigh its benefits.
No doubt my story would be more inspirational if I could set aside this cost/benefit approach to cannibalism and return to the old theory of moral progress. Most of us would prefer to believe that the Aztecs remained cannibals simply because their morals were mired in primitive impulses while the Old World states tabooed human flesh because their morals had risen in the great onwards-and-upwards movement of civilization. But I’m afraid this preference arises from provincial if not hypocritical misconceptions. Neither the prohibition of cannibalism nor the decline of human sacrifice in the Old World had the slightest effect on the rate at which the Old World states and empires killed each other’s citizens. As everyone knows, the scale of warfare has increased steadily from prehistoric times to the present, and record numbers of casualties due to armed conflict have been produced precisely by those states in which Christianity has been the major religion. Heaps of corpses left to rot on the battlefield are no less dead than corpses dismembered for a feast. Today, hovering on the brink of a third world war, we are scarcely in a position to look down on the Aztecs. In our nuclear age the world survives only because each side is convinced that the moral standards of the other are low enough to sanction the annihilation of hundreds of millions of people in retaliation for a first strike. Thanks to radioactivity the survivors will not even be able to bury the dead, let alone eat them.
I see two ways to add up the cost/benefits of cannibalism in the early phases of state formation. First of all, there is the question of the use of enemy soldiers as producers of food rather than as meals in themselves. Ignace Gelb points out in his discussion of the evolution of the state in Mesopotamia that at first men were killed either on the battlefield or in sacrificial rites, while only captive women and children were incorporated into the labor force. This implies that it was “relatively easy to exert control over foreign women and children” and that “the state apparatus was still not strong enough to control the masses of unruly male captives.” But as the power of the state apparatus increased, male POWs were “marked or branded, tied with ropes or kept in neck stocks” and later “freed and resettled or used for specialized purposes of the crown, such as the personal guard of the king, mercenaries, or a movable force.”
The change of status of POWs represents the main factor in the creation of the second most important source (after the native impoverished classes) of productive labor in Mesopotamia.
Gelb emphasizes the fact that POWs in Mesopotamia, India, and China were not used as slaves but were deported from their homelands and established as more or less free peasants throughout the kingdom. It was clearly advantageous in a cost/benefit sense for these early Old World state systems to use their domesticated animals as a source of milk and meat and to use their captives as agricultural laborers and cannon fodder. And underlying this adaptation was the fact that the presence of domestic animals made it possible to expand and intensify the productive and reproductive base of the ancient Old World states and empires far beyond the level to which the Aztecs could go without suffering severe cuts in their standard of living (although the wages of the sins of intensification were shortly to catch up with them also).
The second dimension that must be considered in assessing the cost/benefits of cannibalism is more political than economic, even though it too ultimately boils down to a question of maintaining standards of living in the face of population growth, intensification, and environmental depletion. As I’ve shown, states emerged from band and village societies through the enlargement and stratification of leadership responsible for economic redistributions and the conduct of external warfare. The earliest kings, such as Sigurd the Generous, cultivated the image of the “great provider” which “big men” everywhere have always used to justify their preeminence: “His liberal hand scattered his sword’s gains o’er the land.” Continued generosity in the face of rapid population growth and environmental depletions, however, demanded continued expansion into new territories and the progressive absorption of additional masses of peasant producers. Not only did the eating of prisoners of war represent a great waste of manpower under the ecological conditions characteristic of the early Old World states, but it was the worst possible strategy for any state that had imperial ambitions. Empire building is not facilitated by the promise that those who submit to the “great provider” will be eaten. Rather, the fundamental principle guiding all successful imperial expansion is that those who submit to the “great provider” will not be eaten—literally or figuratively—but in fact their lives will be preserved and their diet improved. Cannibalism and empire don’t mix. Throughout history people have been duped again and again into believing that enormous inequalities in the distribution of wealth are necessary for their own welfare. But the one thing no “great provider” has ever been able to do is convince people that there is some kind of parity in the relationship between eating and being eaten. To opt for a cannibal kingdom, in other words, is to opt for perpetual war with one’s neighbors and for a revolt-ridden realm in which people are literally treated as being good for nothing but stew meat. Such a choice made sense only for a state which—like the Aztecs’—had already so depleted its environment that the imperial phase of politics could not be attained.
I should also point out that there was an internal counterpart to the policy of mercy toward prisoners of war. The growth of empire promoted the image of rulers as divine figures who protect the meek from overexploitation at the hands of other members of the ruling class. Imperial governments had to tread a fine l
ine between too much and too little taxation. If the power of local officials to tax the peasantry was not restrained by the emperor, the people would become disorderly, the cost of maintaining law and order would soar, and the survival of the empire would be jeopardized. The natural outcome of the “great provider” image spread over a canvas of continental dimensions was that of the great dispenser of justice and mercy and divine protector of the meek. Here lies the origin of the Old World’s universalistic religions of love and mercy. In the earliest law code known 1,700 years before the birth of Christ, Hammurabi made the protection of the weak against the strong a fundamental principle of Babylonian imperial rule. Hammurabi pictured himself as the greatest of “great providers”: “shepherd,” “giver of abundant riches,” “bringer of overflowing wealth,” “provider of abundant waters for his people,” “giver of plentiful abundance … who enlarges the tilth” … “heaps the granaries of grain” … “bountiful provider of holy feasts” … “giver of the waters of abundance” … “who has firmly laid the foundations of habitations and supplies them with abundance and good things.” Then he declared himself to be divine: “the sun-god of Babylon who makes the light to rise on the land.” And finally the great protector: “destroyer of the evil and the wicked so that the strong may not oppose the weak.”
The same imperial calculus lies at the heart of the political religion known as Confucianism. The early Chinese kings kept a kind of “brain trust” at court from whom they sought expert advice on how to stay rich and powerful without being overthrown. The most famous of these advisers were Confucius and Mencius, both of whom never tired of telling their royal majesties that the prescription for a long and prosperous reign was to see to it that the common people were well-fed and not taxed too much. Of the two, Mencius was the more daring; he even went so far as to say that the sovereign was relatively unimportant. Only the emperor who was good to his people could expect to endure:
Cannibals and Kings Page 15
