jacktellslies

I wrote this some time ago as a comment to a friend. She suggested then that I post it here as well, and I am doing so at last.




I often wonder: if there are gods, why would they require sacrifice, and what reason would they have to care for the things that we offer them?

In some cultures, sacrifice seems to serve to encourage contact where otherwise there would be no reason for any. In some places sacrifice is specifically the price of divination, or of a successful hunt. Sometimes it seems that the gods want to be fed, and, or, the gods want to be remembered.

I have questions about what it means to feed the gods in a post-industrial society. The cultures of which I know that interacted with their gods through sacrifice seemed to have specific formulae for doing so: the gods got the best portion of the hunt, the first harvest, or they got the last of the harvest, and the things humans couldn't eat. The gods in Greece, for example, got the bones. People don't eat bones, so it was convenient for earthly bellies, but they stood for the immortal part of the animal, the true part, and thus were thought to reflect and in ways actually create the immortality of the gods. At any rate, a sacrificial exchange seems historically to have occurred between a people who laboured directly for their food, and were willing to offer a portion of that food in the hopes that they would be able to find, raise, kill, and grow more of it.

My fishcarving might place me closer to such possibilities, but not close enough for my tastes. My labour is with bones and flesh and entrails, true, but it was not my wit nor was it my skill that brought these dead things to my table. Are they mine to offer in trade for divine attentions? Perhaps. The Grecian priests didn't raise cattle, after all. But they were sanctioned by the people. The system seemed more closed, the relationship more clear. The lives of the people, their desires, the hunger of the gods, and the form the gods took in the minds of the people all reflected one another quite directly. Lacking that symmetry, I do not understand what either side expects from the other.

Of course, sacrifice doesn't seem to have lasted as long as agriculture. People continued hunting and farming through the rise and spread of Christianity. I might consider this a sort of inversion: rather than offering the gods the smoke of things uneaten and burnt in exchange for more food, the priests of that god seem to have enforced a switch. The people now were to subsist on spiritual food, sometimes to the exclusion of something real and nourishing. That god wanted prayer, praise, and purity, and had little to do with the success of the harvest. That god did care for the starving destitute, but he had little to do with the richness of the soil, with the things that the people grew there. Food became incidental, fuel for a machine, and the purpose of that machine was to pray.

I wonder if this strange modernity in which our labours are so far removed from our desires and our needs could have happened without the creation of that separation. What does filing papers have to do with a warm house or good food? What does my fishmongering have to do with my internet connection, new shoes, or the meals that I cook? With my time, my work, and my needs so distant from one another, who are the gods on whom I ought to call, and what do I have that they would want?

I'm not one for sacrifice. I am not necessarily at odds with systems built around denial, but I think that a better idea might be a sort of rapturous hedonism. One should deeply appreciate the physical, and if you aren't sufficiently amazed and overwhelmed by it, then it isn't worth doing, or you don't deserve it, as you please. However, I like the idea of Lent. I admit, as with a good many of the things that I believe, I'm only playing with it. But repenting can be very pretty when done properly, and, obviously, refraining from things forces them out of the commonplace, reminds us to adore them.

Besides that, I am above all things a fishmonger, and Lent, for us, is a time of plenty. (The reversal is further proof that real fishmongers, true fishmongers, are something other and clearly better than human.) Even in this modern age, repentance means fish. An artist and fishcutter initiate and I were discussing the idea that the Church has deemed three professions worthy of patronage: the arts, architecture, and fish. For a time, all three were likely supported almost exclusively by Catholicism's attentions. Artists and architects have outgrown the association, but our year is still largely measured by an ecclesiastical calendar. Sicut erat in princípio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculórum. Amen.

It has come to my attention, however, that the Church has betrayed us! In this time of sin and war, even a Christian's most holy duty, to eat fish on Fridays in Lent, is dispensable. Our priests have stated that eating meat on days of abstinence is not a sin if one has forgotten that one shouldn't. Blasphemy! If this is the case with all of the Church's regulations, and every wicked act only counted if I was actively thinking, while doing it, that I was making the whole chorus of saints and angels cry, then I've sinned far less than I previously thought. Not only is my accounting all off, but I feel slightly less accomplished.