Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

146 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [ch.
with the simple meaning to kill an ox for eating purposes. ' The
sun went down and the work of the Achaeans was finished '—they
had been burning their dead— ' and they slaughtered oxen amid
the huts and took their supper.' The scholiast on the passage,
with probably the Bouphonia in his mind, says explicitly, 'ftovcpoveiv,
to slay or murder oxen, is not sacrificing to the gods (for it would
be absurd to apply the term of murder to a sacrifice) but it is
slaying oxen as a preparation for a meal.'
The scholiast rightly notes that the ' ox-slaying ' concerned the
ox as food, not the god as eater. What he could not know was
that a Bouphonia, a slaying for a Banquet, though it need have
nothing to do with gods, could yet be of supreme sanctity—
sanctity preceding the gods and even begetting them. The
speaker in a fragment of the Triptolemos of Sophocles says more
truly than he knows,
1 .'
'Then came fair Dais, the eldest of the Gods
You eat your sacred animal to get his mana ;
a
you then personify
that mana, informing it with the life-blood of your own desire,
provide him with your own life-history, and then, if you are an ortho-
dox ritualist, you land yourself in the uncouth predicament that
you must eat your personal god. From such relentless logic all
but the most convicted of conservatives are apt to shrink. There
are side ways, down which you may go, softenings and obscurantist
confusions by which you may blunt the horns of your dilemma.
Ritual says you must eat the holy ox ;
imagination has conceived
for you a personal Zeus, Father of Gods and men. You slay your
ox, partake of his flesh, sew up his skin and yoke it to a plough.
Yet all is well, for the whole holy and incompatible hocus-pocus
is a ' sacrifice to Zeus Polieus.'
Such strange blendings of new and old, such snowball-like
accumulations, are sometimes caused, or leather precipitated, by
definite political action. Peisistratos, feeling no doubt that
Otympia might be a dangerous religious and social rival to Athens,
conscious too that, at a time when the Homeric pantheon was
rapidly being domesticated in Greece, the fact that Athens should
have no important local worship of Zeus stamped Athens as*
1 Hesych. s.v. Sots* ~o4>ok\t}s
t) St' epdvoiv ei)w%ta.
T)\0ev 5e Aais dd\eia irpea^iarrj dewv,