Animals in Ancient Greek Religion

Julia Kindt, Julia Kindt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429754593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement des arts et des sciences humaines

This book provides the first systematic study of the role of animals in different areas of the ancient Greek religious experience, including in myth and ritual, the literary and the material evidence, the real and the imaginary.

An international team of renowned contributors shows that animals had a sustained presence not only in the traditionally well-researched cultural practice of blood sacrifice but across the full spectrum of ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices.Animals played a role in divination, epiphany, ritual healing, the setting up of dedications, the writing of binding spells, and the instigation of other 'magical' means. Taken together, the individual contributions to this book illustrate that ancient Greek religion constituted a triangular symbolic system encompassing not just gods and humans, but also animals as a third player and point of reference.

Animals in Ancient Greek Religion will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek religion, Greek myth, and ancient religion more broadly, as well as for anyone interested in human/animal relations in the ancient world.

Part 1

Perspectives

1 The ‘entanglement’ of gods, humans, and animals in ancient Greek religion

J. McInerney

In one of the most famous thought experiments of the 20th century, Erwin Schrödinger imagined the case of a cat in a box containing a small amount of radioactive matter which, upon breaking down, causes a hammer to shatter a flask of hydrocyanic acid, killing the cat. Schrödinger’s elegantly conceived scenario was designed to expose flaws in the superposition principle of quantum mechanics by revealing the absurdity of imagining the cat to be both dead and alive at the same time.¹ The complexities of quantum mechanics might seem more appropriate to a paper on Plato than a chapter on the spheres of the human, animal, and divine but in the course of another paper written in the same year, Schrödinger employed the term Verschränkung (‘entanglement’) to describe what Einstein and others called a ‘spooky’ aspect of quantum theory: namely, the observation that the quantum state of some particles cannot be described without reference to the quantum state of certain other particles.²

Without wishing to press the analogy too far, and certainly without wishing to harm any cats, I propose that ‘entanglement’ is, in fact, a useful way of analysing the triad of human, animal, and divine in ancient Greek religion. Rather than postulating that animals are creatures lower down the food chain or the chain of consciousness, or that they are simply a medium for communicating with the divine through sacrifice, oracles, and omens, I suggest that all three are recursively linked, that the boundaries between them are permeable, and that Greek culture recognised that behind the seemingly obvious and firm distinctions between them, the three classes of living beings were actually in a constant state of flux.

In his description of Arcadia, the nearest to a primeval landscape available to a second-century CE Greek, Pausanias offers the following description of the statue of Black Demeter, located 30 stades from Phigaleia, in a cave sanctuary:³

καθέζεσθαι μὲν ἐπὶ πέτρᾳ, γυναικὶ δὲ ἐοικέναι τἄλλα πλὴν κεφαλήν: κεφαλὴν δὲ καὶ κόμην εἶχεν ἵππου, καὶ δρακόντων τε καὶ ἄλλων θηρίων εἰκόνες προσεπεφύκεσαν τῇ κεφαλῇ...Μέλαιναν δὲ ἐπονομάσαι φασὶν αὐτήν, ὅτι καὶ ἡ θεὸς μέλαιναν τὴν ἐσθῆτα εἶχε.

It was seated on a rock, like to a woman in all respects save the head. She had the head and hair of a horse, and there grew out of her head images of serpents and other beasts...They say that they named her Black because the goddess had black apparel.⁴

Far from being unique, Black Demeter was part of a cluster of myths and cults that reflected a very fluid boundary between the animal and the divine in Arcadia. At Lykosoura, for example, the cult statue of Despoina was adorned with an elaborately carved veil that appears to show animals in human dress dancing in the goddess’s honour.⁵ Nearby Konstantinos Kourouniotis found a number of terracotta animal-headed figurines, presumably representations of the initiates to the Mysteries held at Lykosoura.⁶ Nor was transformation confined to the human initiates. Pausanias tells the story of Demeter pursued by Poseidon.

πλανωμένῃ γὰρ τῇ Δήμητρι, ἡνίκα τὴν παῖδα ἐζήτει, λέγουσιν ἕπεσθαί οἱ τὸν Ποσειδῶνα ἐπιθυμοῦντα αὐτῇ μιχθῆναι, καὶ τὴν μὲν ἐς ἵππον μεταβαλοῦσαν ὁμοῦ ταῖς ἵπποις νέμεσθαι ταῖς Ὀγκίου, Ποσειδῶν δὲ συνίησεν ἀπατώμενος καὶ συγγίνεται τῇ Δήμητρι ἄρσενι ἵππῳ καὶ αὐτὸς εἰκασθείς.

When Demeter was wandering in search of her daughter, she was followed, it is said, by Poseidon, who lusted after her. So she turned, the story runs, into a mare, and grazed with the mares of Oncius; realizing that he was outwitted, Poseidon too changed into a stallion and enjoyed Demeter.⁷

The cults of Arcadia may not have been typical (if such an adjective is in any way applicable to Greek religious practice), but they powerfully remind us that Greek religion was polymorphous and that the gods were, to use Marcel Detienne’s useful term, polyhedrous.⁸ If, as Xenophanes complained, the gods’ behaviour was characterised by Homer and Hesiod as resembling the ‘stealings and adulteries and deceivings of one another’, the tain of the mirror revealed quite a different picture, more blurry, where the image of the divine could look more like an animal than a superhuman.⁹ The realms of human, animal, and divine morphed into one another. Each was entangled with the other; each helped shape how the others were imagined.¹⁰

Recognising this ‘entanglement’ has become easier because, if the last generation witnessed a ‘spatial turn’, it is equally plausible to speak now of an ‘animal turn’. Since Edward E. Evans-Pritchard’s identification of the bovine idiom in his studies of the Dinka and Nuer, there has been a growing awareness among anthropologists and philosophers that the human/animal relationship is fundamental to our sense of self.¹¹ Roderick Campbell has recently observed that ‘definitions of animality are by implication definitions of humanity’.¹² A similar line of thought runs through the work of major thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and Tim Ingold.¹³ At its most radical, this ‘animal turn’ has led to the claim that ‘the human–animal distinction can no longer and ought no longer to be maintained’.¹⁴ At an ethical level, this may well be the case, in the same way that biological race is an outmoded concept. Yet, just as race is still a powerful weapon in political discourse, so, too, the belief that animals and humans are fundamentally somehow distinct remains firmly embedded in popular thinking. The recent trend towards declaring pet owners ‘guardians’ signals an evolving relationship but it is not a sign that we can yet speak of humans and animals interchangeably.¹⁵

It is a philosophical shift that, the politics of animal liberation aside, has proved productive in a number of areas. For example, Jacques Cauvin and other prehistorians at the Maison de l’Orient have made the case that the coming to consciousness of the human species was largely effected through the imaginative confrontation of humans and animals, especially those animals that humans hunt or those animals by whom humans were hunted.¹⁶ From the beginning of settled life, ritual space in places such as Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe attest to the insistent presence of animals in shaping human identities.¹⁷ This is what makes the hybrid Löwenmensch (Figure 1.1) so striking: not that it stands at the head of a long tradition of figural art, but that by hybridising human and animal it foregrounds the question ‘What makes a lion and a human what they are?’ Subsequently, during the Neolithic, domestication would profoundly shift human/animal relations, but it is now rarely interpreted as a simple narrative of human dominance and is most often viewed as a symbiotic relationship. We owe animals our sense of humanity, and, consequently, classifying them is one of the earliest mental operations preserved in the literature of Mesopotamia.¹⁸

In the study of the Greeks, the investigation of animality in relation to humans and gods has largely followed two trajectories. An older line of enquiry concerned the animal avatars of Greek gods revealed by their epithets: ‘Athena the owl’, ‘ox-eyed’ Hera, Apollo Lykeios, and so forth.¹⁹ Investigations of this phenomenon have tended to downplay the animality of the Olympian gods (but see this volume, Chapter 5). Athena simply appears to be an owl, as if described in some hyper-vivid metaphor, to explain the way she suddenly disappears into the rafters. Similarly, Hera’s bovine associations are put down to her connection to the pastures and fecundity associated with the grazing herd.²⁰ In this line of argument the Greek gods are not genuinely theriomorphic. A god may momentarily take on the form of some other creature, but in Maurizio Bettini’s words, ‘il ne se transforme pas en cette autre entité’.²¹ In some readings these appearances are no more than a relic of an earlier substrate. Robert Luyster, for example, asserts that Athena’s ‘incarnation in (or at the least, accompaniment by) [the owl] displays once again her character as Mistress of the Dead’.²² Her essence is as a goddess of death, which is evoked by the owl, which may be a temporary incarnation of the goddess. This contingent and uncertain animality makes the Greek gods different from the Egyptian gods whose animality is unavoidable, persistent, and undeniable (see this volume, Chapter 9). (It is worth noting, in this respect, that some early 20th-century scholars dismissed Pausanias’ account of a horse-headed Black Demeter; the periegete had been duped by local storytellers.²³)

The second line of enquiry has focused on the prominence of animals in the Greek imagination, particularly expressed in the Greeks’ powerful devotion to sacrifice (on which see also, in detail, this volume, Chapter 8).²⁴ Why do the Greeks in endless variation and repetition offer sacrifices of domesticated animals to their gods? Although the ‘Paris School’ of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne has offered a striking structuralist reading that sees animals serving as a principal mediator between the Greeks and their gods, it was Walter Burkert, more than anyone else, who framed the question in terms of historical processes. For Burkert, the answer was that, as hunters, we established modes of action and thinking over thousands of years. This resulted in a fundamentally tripartite system: we kill animals, but by offering them to the gods, we sacralise these murders.²⁵ Thus, humans and animals are actually only two legs of the tripod. Where we are and where our anima...