Fall                                                              Fallowturn Moon

Sat down to supper tonight.  Beef.  Rare.  Kate’s a great hand with the steak. Always gets it right.  As I cut through a piece, the course I’m taking on mythology flashed to mind.  Just before I ate supper, as a happenstance, I listened to a lecture on ritual and religion.  A major part of Greek rituals was sacrifice.

The sacrifice was usually an animal and, though piglets, pigs, chickens, sheep and goats could be offered, the very best was cow, a bull or an ox, the bigger the better.  Last week we learned about Prometheus and his deception of Zeus which involved wrapping thigh bones in glistening fat and offering them to the gods while the humans kept the meat for themselves.  Professor Struck suggested in this case the myth served to justify the odd habit of giving the gods the least of the sacrifice.  Could be.

A more cogent argument this week, from anthropology, about why sacrifice animals at all.  The sacrifice, commanded by the gods, offsets, according to this line of thought, the blood guilt humans experience when killing and eating animals.  This makes sense to me.

Now, we don’t have the ritual context, not even the native american habit of thanking the animal for the gift of their life.  My rationale has always involved anthropology; that is, we humans are built as omnivores and as apex predator we eat at the top of the food chain.  No blood guilt, just animal nature.

Probably no more defensible than the gods made me do it.