Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One
Book 1: A Thermodynamic Genealogy of Primitive Religions

1.1. Chapter 4: The "Logic of Sacrifice"
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POSTSCRIPT: (4) Just while the European scholars (e.g. Frazer, Durkheim, Freud) were at the beginning of the twentieth century seeing totemism as the most primitive base of human religiousness, "the whole system of totemism began to be questioned by American anthropologists... By the mid-twentieth century, totemism, as a complete religious and social system, had lost credibility everywhere." (Jay, ibid., p. 137) Our framework in the preceding has been showing how what has been considered as "totemism" is just as equally as ancestor- and deity-cult (considered generally as "shamanism") an aspect or "specialization" of the atmospheric animistic world-view of the primitives based on a functional perspective on the thermodynamic cosmos. ("...totemism does not occur universally as a stage in the history of human development, as was initially supposed in the 19th century when the phenomenon was first discovered, but is rather a specialized development." Joseph Henninger, "Sacrifice", Encycl. of Rel., ibid., p. 551. Shamanism is another specialization of animism.) What has been called "totemism" in Australia, for example, is part of a larger animistic world-view commonly called "Dreaming". The Walbiri, for example, "postulated the earlier existence of the Dreaming, an era in which the behavior of demiurgic totemic beings [i.e. the various ancestral animae] ordered an inchoate world to the degree that all its components became subject to lawful processes and combined to constitute an environment in which people could live as social creatures." (M. J. Meggit, "Walbiri Religion", The Encyl. of Rel., vol. 15, p. 323) That is, it is a cosmogonic process in which the ancestral animae "shaped the land, preparing it for the human populations that were to follow them. They created or gave birth to people, allocating particular territories to them (and vice versa) and linking them, by divine decree, with particular languages and codes of behavior." (Ronald Berndt, "Dreaming", ibid., vol. 4, p. 479) "The Dreaming heroes [animae] secured these changes by enacting for the first time the [cosmogonic] rituals the Walbiri were to perform and by naming the natural phenomena they met on the journeys." (Meggit, ibid.) Thus like all other cosmogonies, the initial Dreaming is the differentiation of order from the undifferentiated chaos or equilibrium, and as such is correlative to the episode in modern cosmology of differentiation of subatomic particles out of the initial hot-soup (quark soup) of Big Bang and the winding up of them by gravity into local concentrations of order (stars and galaxies) whose winding down is to create more orders of the biospheric level. But just as in the Gospel of John or the Memphite theology, this initial ordering (diakosmein) is identical with the emergence of language to cut up the world into an ordered system of components. "This was a monistic worldview that characterized people, society, and nature as interacting parts of a larger totality, in which each element was held to be morally constrained to maintain itself undiminished for the proper functioning of the system." (Ibid.) Traces from the Dreaming cosmogonic period can be seen in the vicissitudes of contemporary landscape. "Wherever they went in their travels through the land, these mythic characters [the Dreaming ancestral beings] left some evidence of their presence:... a waterhouse formed from their tracks, a rock outcrop that came about through the weapons or other objects they left, a deposit of red ochre from the blood they spilled, a depression left by the mark of their buttocks as they sat or an indentation as they slept, water holes or soaks where they had urinated or that they dug or made by using their sacred emblems, and so on... Moreover, in the formative era of the Dreaming, some of these mythic characters were killed or died 'naturally' [in the transformative or metaphorical sense] or were metamorphosed as features of the landscape or as natural species [the materializations of the atmospheric animae]; some went into the sky or disappeared beyond the confines of a particular social group. Whatever they did, they remain eternally alive spiritually [i.e. the atmospheric anima is the eternally conserved substrate of all being]." (Berndt, p. 480 - 1)

But this cosmogonic Dreaming "was also a perduring state of being that persisted as a noumenal ground to sustain the continuing stream of phenomenal existence"; in order for the kosmos ("arrangement-as-the-world") to persist against its inherent tendency to collapse back into equilibrium (the second law), "the Dreaming has to be constantly re-created through ritual performances... [Such] regeneration [against entropic disintegration] is possible only through the aide of the Dreaming deities, who must be persuaded through ritual to release their life-giving power [i.e. the anima-mana as energy]." (Berndt, p. 481) The Dreaming ritual is thus expiatory or endergonic (below) or the Australian equivalent of the Mesopotamian and Iranian New Year Festival: the regeneration of the cosmos, the magical feeding of it, the periodic input of energy, or the re-winding up of the system of ancestral animae so that it may be ready for the next round of entropic winding-down. "Walbiri thus did not simply inherit the right to exploit the material resources of their own domain [using-up, i.e. winding-down, of the cosmos]; they also incurred the heavy obligation of maintaining -- through the performance of song, myth, and ritual -- the sacred sites marked by ancestral Dreaming beings who first formed the land and its occupants [the obligation of expiation]. If contemporary Walbiri failed to enact the rituals [the "refuelling" or "feeding" of the cosmos] or to hand on the myths [the drama of "refuelling"], not only would the local territory and its resources suffer, but the precarious balance of the total system would be overturned [entropic disintegration of the cosmos!]. In this sense the Walbiri did not merely possess their land; it in turn possessed them [they were the catalysts of a metabolic, i.e. open system; below]..." (Meggit, p. 324) "Dreaming" therefore denotes the "sacred" (ibid., p. 479); "this concept [of Dreaming] has its own identifying terms among differing Aboriginal groups: alcheringa (Aranda), djugurba (Western Desert), bugari (La Grange), ungud (Ungarinyin), djumanggani (eastern Kimberley), wongar (northeastern Arnhem Land)... nearly all of them refer in one sense to a category of actions and things, mythic beings, natural species and elements, and human or human-type characters of the far distant past, the creative era, or the beginning." (Ibid.) In other words, it is the ancestral anima-mana with its order, like the Egyptian Maat or the Chinese Dao but inclusive of a mythic drama (instead of a discursive metaphysics) of diakosmos (ordering). Contemporary metaphysicians would be glad to find in the "Dreaming" firstly the pre-philosophical expression of Being and secondly the mythic, dramatic equivalent of Kant's categories of understanding or Hegel's categories in the Encyclopedia.

The totem, such as a species, is just the re-materialization of the ancestral demiurgic Dreaming anima. "[T]he mythic character may have mythic associations with a member of that species and may be manifested in that form. If the mythic character is symbolized by a particular creature, then all creatures of that genus are believed... to have within them the same life force [i.e. anima] as that being... the same Dreaming essence." (Berndt, p. 481) That Dreaming produces an aspect called totemism is manifested in "the question to be asked of an Aborigine... 'What is your dreaming?' The answer... would point to a 'totem' creature or some other mythic representation." (Ibid., p. 480) The clan (collective) totem is the materialization or reincarnation of one of the ancestral demiurgic animae involved in the original Dreaming cosmogony that is especially relevant to the clan under question. For the men of each collective unit in a certain interaction sphere -- here, the Walbiri world -- covered by a Dreaming "emphasized in a diacritical manner their relationships with certain of the more significant Dreamings. Thus, the Waneiga [of the Walbiri] were more concerned with fire and the Mamandabari -- the two heroes of the Gadjeri ritual complex; the Lander group of the Walbiri focused on the Walangari heroes; the Ngalia with the Two Kangaroos, Wallaby, and Traveling Women Dreamings; and the Walmalla with the Yam, Opossum, and Fire Dreamings. Understandably, the several tracks of the Rain Dreaming were held to be important by all the communities." (Meggit, p. 324) The reincarnation of the ancestral anima in the group via the totem animal (such as during communion feast) explains the Aboriginal's -- and all primitives' -- sense of consubstantiality "in which all [natural species and humans] are within the same universe of life [the atmospheric ancestral anima] and meaning and are bound together by strong emotional ties." (Berndt, p. 481) The personal totem on the other hand is distinguished by Elkin as "a dreaming". "Justification for the use of the term dream... rests on the Aboriginal belief that, prior to a child's birth, his or her 'totem' makes itself known to the child's parents or certain close relatives in a special dream." The personal totem concerns the individual animae whose reincarnation or rematerialization results in the birth of individual persons. We have already encountered this. "Thus, a sacred linkage between a human being and a particular mythic character [that individual ancestral anima] is revealed through some peculiar or special event prior to his or her birth -- not necessarily in a dream. Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence from many different Aboriginal areas to substantiate the belief that a dream, in this connection, is a vital medium for establishing a person's association with the Dreaming." (Berndt, p. 480)

Dreaming is animism. "Further, the entry of these noumena into representatives of all living species [i.e. the reincarnations or re-materializations of the ancestral anima as the living beings around that could serve as nourishment] was responsible for their continuing reproduction." (Meggit, p. 323) The Intichiuma is the ritual whereby each of the reciprocally named patrimonies of the Walbiri "is responsible for the ritual replenishment of some (economically significant) natural species". (Roy Wagner, "Totemism", p. 573) In principle then it is another of the expiatory sacrifices: the feeding of the cosmos, its re-energization, to ensure human groups' further use of its resources. Dreaming places (Walbiri nguru) were local concentrations of the ancestral anima-mana. Human beings ritually acting on these places (much like enzymes acting on substrates) through songs and dances could catalyze "a series of reactions that led to successful floral and faunal (including human) reproduction, the enhancement of human personalities, the recovery of people's health, and the intensification of social euphoria and solidarity", i.e. the release from the substrate (the "reactant", such as from ATP) -- and then the transformation -- of the anima-mana ("energy") into the "products" sought for. (Meggit, p. 325) The fanciful nature of these Dreaming cosmogonic rituals (compare it with the Mesopotamian New Year ritual of the death and resurrection of the king) -- that somehow through people's performance of a drama the external cosmos would metaphorically replicate the drama -- disappears when it is recognized that humans are the most concentrated (re)embodiment of the ancestral anima-mana so that their re-performance of the demiurgic ordering of the ancestors would have the same catalytic and ordering effect as that of the original diacosmic acts of these ancestors.

We need to keep in mind that reincarnation is the original materialization of a certain living being; re-vitalization on a periodic basis is in principle the same as reincarnation: periodic reincarnation to maintain the order originally reincarnated, like eating.

We may finally understand the experiential origin of the primitives' division of time into the sacred and the profane, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the "ritually on" (the ascetic time) and the "ritually off" (the time for festive orgy) in the words of Chris Knight. There are two manifestations of this. In one way the "sacred" period is the period of the "refuelling" or "re-energizing" or "feeding" of the cosmos (endergonic deposit of energy in the cosmos: below), and the "profane" period is that during which the social group reaps the fruit of such refuelling (feasting: the exergonic release of the deposited energy to regenerate the group). The cosmos has to be fed first (expiatory, as in the firstlings sacrifices) before it can release its nourishment for the human group (communion): and ritual is the system of catalyses (like the enzymatic system of an organism) that keeps this cycle running in proper pace. In the second way the "sacred period" is that during which the group regenerates itself through the ritual reincarnation in it (its "eating") of the ancestral anima (the refuelling of the group), and the "profane period" is that during which the group returns to its ordinary life of enjoyment, subject to entropic disintegration and spending away the ancestral energy it just incorporated, until the next regenerative "refuelling" or "meal" time. To return to the example of the Walbiri, whose men "are divided into about 40 lines of paternal descent, each associated with a totemic lodge devoted to the lore and ritual communication with an ancestral Dreaming totem (kangaroo, Wallaby, rain, etc.)": "when they enact the Dreaming rituals [to regenerate the cosmos: first way], the men are believed to enter the 'noumenal' phase of existence and to merge with the totemic ancestors themselves." That is, the men, as literally the embodiment of the ancestral animae, could thus replay the demiurgic ordering of the latter at the beginning of time. Hence during the "sacred time" "men of the different lodges actually belong to different totemic species. When the ritual is concluded, however, they return to everyday 'phenomenal' existence and reassume their human character, so that the totemic designations revert to mere names, linked to respective moieties, linked subsections, and other constituents of the complex Walbiri social structure." (Roy Wagner, ibid., p. 574) That is, the creative energetic flow of the ancestral anima within them is turned off, like the flow of electricity in the conductor is turned off when lighting is no longer needed. At the foundation of both the Dreaming rites and sacrificial religiousness and determining these, therefore, is the same metaphor of metabolism, the cosmos seen as an ecosystemically metabolizing organism and society as an open system embedded therein and feasting on it: an image of a system formed of an infant and his mother, as we shall see.


The "logic of sacrifice" is a term adopted from Nancy Jay. "Sacrifice joins people together in community, and, conversely, it separates them from defilement, disease, and other dangers." (Throughout Your Generations Forever, p. 17) This basic opposition will here be phrased thermodynamically: the formation and consolidation of the order of the community (i.e. of the social organism; "joining") against the equilibrium (disorder) state of the external environment ("separating") back to which, however, it has, because of the second law, an inherent tendency to disintegrate. Joining and separating mark the thermodynamics of sacrifice. "Thermodynamics is the study of energy transformations that occur in a collection of matter [what sacrifice is about!]. In discussing energy transformations, we call the collection of matter under study the system and the rest of the universe the surroundings. A system could be an automobile engine, a single cell, or the entire planet [in the case of primitive religiousness, it is the society]. Like those examples, a living organism [and a society here] is an open system; that is, it exchanges both energy and matter with its surroundings. The firefly, for instance, takes in food and oxygen and releases heat, light, and chemical waste products, such as carbon dioxide." (Campbell, Mitchell, Reece, Biology, 2nd ed. p. 72) In the case of sacrificial religiousness, what is exchanged between the social organism and the atmospheric environment (anima-mana) in the former's attempt to maintain its order is just the ancestral spirit (energy for the primitive mind). "This opposition of joining and separating is so widespread that one of the clearest indications that a ritual killing is properly sacrifice is that it is part of a religious system of this kind. Joining and separating aspects of sacrifice have received different names, for example, 'conjunctive' and 'disjunctive' (Luc de Heusch 1985 [Sacrifice in Africa]), or 'collective' and 'piacular' (Evans-Pitchard 1956 [Nuer Religions]). The traditional terms 'communion' and 'expiation' recognize a similar distinction. The logic of sacrifice I want to describe is grounded in this opposition." (Jay, p. 17) Despite the fact that the society in consideration may focus on one of these two aspects of sacrifice at the expense of the other or have one form of sacrifice for one of these two aspects but many forms for the other, Nancy Jay perceptibly realizes that "communion and expiation are two aspects of one process, no matter how heavily one or the other may be accentuated in particular sacrificial acts." (p. 18) As she puts it, "atonement is also at-one-ment." (p. 19) This shall be our view.

"Communion sacrifice unites worshipers in one moral community [we have already seen this in how the totemic feast cements social solidarity and confirms a singular social identity through the collective reincarnation of the ancestral anima] and at the same time differentiates that community [now a social organism] from the rest of the world [i.e. from the equilibrium state of the surroundings]. Expiatory sacrifice integrates by getting rid of countless different moral and organic undesirable conditions: sin, disease, drought, divine wrath, famine, barrenness, spirit possession, armed invaders, blood guilt, incest, impurity of descent, pollution of childbirth or of corpses... What is integrated is one." (Ibid.) These are all signs of entropy-increase, either within the group or in the cosmos, indicating an impending necessary entropic disintegration here or there unless energy be re-input: signs that the social organism as an open ordered system might risk reaching equilibrium with the surroundings. We must first cover the struggle against entropy outside. The primitives' experience of the order of their society as only precariously balanced against, and as increasingly threatened by, the disorder outside is most understandable when it is seen as expressing their understanding of the second law; to continue from the necessary imperfection of any energy conversion: "The second law of thermodynamics implies that if a particular system becomes more ordered, its surroundings become more disordered, and this concept has direct application to cellular activities [and, for the primitives, to society as well!]. A cell creates ordered structures from less organized starting materials. For example, amino acids are ordered into the specific sequences of polypeptide chains. However, this increase in order, which corresponds to a decrease in entropy, is accompanied by an increase in the entropy of the surroundings." (Campbell, et al, ibid., p. 72) This means that the communion sacrifice which increases -- or rather restores and re-aligns -- the order of the society concomitantly increases the disorder, the amount of evil, in the surrounding (atmospheric) environment which is the raw state of the ancestral anima. This is most evident in the killing of the sacrificial animal: the raw, atmospheric state of the ancestral anima is in the disordered state but its regional concentrations, such as in the animal species, are its high ordered state. The society, to consolidate its order against the external disorder and to keep itself functioning (animated!), has destroyed some of this high ordered state of the ancestral anima. This means that the ancestral anima, which is the rest of the (atmospheric) cosmos, has become increasingly disordered (this is the meaning of the "hunger of the ancestral ghost") and thus more dangerous. The consequent anxiety over the increasing entropy of the ancestral surroundings caused by one's own action, by one's own need to maintain one's order -- yet, the second law dictates that order can only subsist as an open system: there is no way out! -- underlies the primordial experience of the indebtedness to the ancestor, of sin, of guilt. The ill-will of the ancestral ghost is the impending collapse of the external cosmos due to excessive disorders therein (like the "heat death of the universe"). If natural disasters (thunderstorm, drought, plaque, bad harvest) happen, these are signs of the increase of entropy or randomness of the atmospheric ancestral anima, of the loss of the differentiations of the cosmos between its various components formerly well-aligned (drought means the sun stays not in its proper place but intrudes also into the place of rain; storm means the wind has exceeded its proper boundaries; earthquake means the similar; flood means, as said, the blurring of the distinction or boundary between river and land: the cosmic system is reaching equilibrium). This is the bottommost layer of the experience of the "anger" of the ancestor. That is, the former good will of the ancestor, as when nature offers up nourishment to feed us (order-restorative), can turn to evil (order-dissoluting) when he, through feeding us, is "weakened", "unfed". The restoration of the order of the ancestral anima (feeding the gods) to render it safe (and nourishing again) is the (first, primary) meaning of expiation. (I'm trying to get here at the concrete manifestation of the "original sin" in terms of the second law and at the same time find it in childhood experience which is now rendered in thermodynamic terms: e.g. "The Taiwanese inherited the cult of ancestor worship from their mainland China progenitors. Since ancestors were thought to exist in the spirit world, the living descendants, therefore, were to serve these spirits as if they were still living in the present physical world. By propitiating the ancestral spirits with sacrifices, the descendants would receive from them protection and blessing. If, however, the ancestors were not adequately fed, cared for and propitiated, they would then turn into 'hungry ghosts' [that most terrifying entity in Chinese folk experience], malevolent spirits, who would roam and cause misfortune to fall upon the descendants." Robert Bolton, Taiwan's Ancestor Cult: A Contextualized Gospel Approach. Here, again, the sacrificial meaning of do ut des is also rendered thermodynamically.) Since such sacrifice offered to restore the order of the external environment is food for the ancestor-god, expiatory sacrifice is usually forbidden to us (we cannot eat it, unlike communion sacrifice).

But in expiation the restaurant for the cosmos not only re-aligns its various components in order (as when sacrifice is made to "cure" flooding or more regularly during the firstlings thanksgiving offerings) but can also build up the society's boundary to defend against intrusions by external disorders. Expiatory sacrifice then acquires a second meaning. "In a thermodynamic sense, a cell or an organism [and for the primitive, the society] is an island of low entropy in an increasingly random universe." (Campbell, ibid.) To establish, through the restaurant called sacrifice, the sharp distinctions not only between the various component orders of the cosmos but also between the social organism and the external equilibrium state, between the localized order and the disordered background, then becomes connected with the subsequent repair of the cosmos increasingly damaged by the continuous establishment of this boundary or what it encloses: at-one-ment is atonement which is at-one-ment. The build-up of the boundary can be accomplished either through the already established communion feast restorative for the group (to make it "strong") or through a different sacrifice especially for the establishment of such boundary. In the former case one sees still that sacrifice primordially as restaurant would at once be a communion feast (by the group itself) and a thanksgiving give-away (to the Ancestral Ghost), the two as yet undifferentiated one from the other.

This distinction between order and disorder is what Jay refers to as the A vs. Not-A logic of sacrifice. "We can describe a logical structure maintained by sacrificial integration-and-differentiation as a purely logical structure, A vs. Not-A, leaving aside its contents -- which do indeed vary from culture to culture. The distinction 'Israel/Nations', in which the Nations, unclean in relation to Israel, have in common only that they are not Israel, is unique to Israelite religion [wrong!], but as a formal structure, 'Israel/Nations' is the A/Not-A distinction found everywhere." (Jay, p. 19; emphasis added.) Underlying the opposition pure vs. unclean here (and frequently elsewhere) is the fundamental opposition of pre-salvational religiousness, order vs. disorder: Israel, the omphalos, is the island of order within the sea of disorder represented by other nations. For this reason, the other nations are described as "corrupted", "with detestable practices" (Ezra 9: 11), with whom association and intermarriage will cause the corruption of one's own order (Ezra, 9: 12) but to whom it is fitting to give polluted (i.e. order-corrupting) food (the dead: Deut. 14: 21).1 In the same way is the Middle-Kingdom the island of low entropy (good, pure) in a environment of disorders (the barbarians: evil, unclean). Also of this is the Roman Pomoerium, a sort of supraorganismic membrane marking off the interior region of low entropy (the settlement) from the exterior region of high entropy (Leonhard Schmitz, in William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1875; p. 930 ‑ 1). This is the "lesser taboo" on the grandest scale. "In contradictory dichotomy, only one term, A, has positive reality. Not-A is only a privation, a negation or absence of A." (Ibid.) That is, privatio boni (evil, unclean) means the absence of order: disorder. Jay complains of this logic: "when the sexes are conceived as contradictories, only one sex can have positive reality. (Guess which.)" (Ibid.) It seems that at some point in the development of religiousness among the primitives, male religious system suddenly predominated concomitantly with the rise of male counter-dominance toward females. Men then perceived the female order as also part of the disordered background against which male order (properly so-called) was differentiated. This will have important implications later for the consideration of the sociological function of sacrifice (in-surance of patriliny). Jay, under the influence of contemporary (cultural) feminist spirit (male = analytical, female = holistic), sees this A/Not-A logic as the expression of the binary narrow-mindedness typical of male thinking, as she cites John Dewey's criticism: "direct application of the excluded middle is 'the source of more fallacious reasoning in philosophical discourse and in moral and social inquiry than any other sort of fallacy.'" (p. 20) This type of feminist critique of the supposedly male analyticality has already been dismissed as a fallacious ideological product of consumerism which only makes sense in a limited experiential horizon and is experientially reactionary against the analyticism bequeathed by Enlightenment ("The Problem of Cultural Feminism"). Jay thus fails to see the real meaning behind the logic of sacrifice at which her descriptions sometimes actually hint: primitive understanding of the thermodynamic meaning of life as an island of order within the sea of disorder and as requiring the input of energy (destruction of other orders) in order to maintain itself against that disorder. "Not-A is without internal boundaries or order of any kind [it is disorder!]. The famous contagion of pollution is often considered to be irrational... Only the excluded middle, the essential empty space between A and Not-A, the 'difference' that must be kept between the clean [order] and the unclean [disorder], holds the chaos of Not-A at bay" (ibid.), i.e. order must not be allowed to be contaminated by, i.e. reach equilibrium with, the disordered surroundings. The binary thinking (order vs. disorder; good vs. evil) is in fact fundamental to human experience, male or female, and is actually most manifest today in the Western hemisphere precisely among the cultural feminists (women = soterically good, order-preserving; men = destructively evil, order-dissoluting, disorder). The question is why in the course of history men had monopolized the binary symbolism based on thermodynamics and applied it to women without reciprocity.

The primordial undifferentiated form of sacrifice is seen when part of the sacrificial animal is eaten and part burnt back into the atmosphere (ancestral anima): e.g. among the Hawaiians, "[a]ll victims contain the subject [actually, the ancestor: thus Valeri's Feuerbachean interpretation must be changed] in objective form; this must be given to the gods [ancestors] where it belongs... before the remainder can be used as profane food." (Jay, p. 143) Like the firstlings offerings in the style of thanksgiving. Conscious of the sorrowful state of affairs dictated by the thermodynamic structure of reality (energy for the sustenance of the order of the self and of society can only be had through the destruction of the order of the ancestor-atmosphere: "Hunters feel the slaying of the animal to be a sacrilege... For cultivators the sacrilege consists in the violation of the earth", as is quoted), men calmed their anxiety over the disorder they have created by returning first a portion of the ancestral energy thus released back to the ancestral atmosphere to repair the damage done (expiatory), and only then consuming the energy left-over to restore their own order (communion or alimentary). "In many... traditions, expiation and communion are thoroughly combined in the same sacrifice; a good example is the Israelite Passover sacrifice in which the blood turns away the destructive power of Yahweh [i.e. the entropic increase generated by the restoration of the order of the group] and the flesh provides a communion meal [for this restoration]." (p. 23) If one does not give some back to re-align its order the cosmos runs the risk of losing its differentiations (then: natural calamities). This is, again, the full-range of the (thermodynamic) experience underlying the formula do ut des or do ut possis dare, that to receive one must first give: to withdraw money from the bank one must first deposit it there.

Even when the two aspects of the sacrifice have separated, the mainly communion and the mainly expiatory may still contain elements of the other. For example, among the ancient Greeks thusia is primarily communion (or alimentary) and enagismos primarily expiatory. "Thysia was typically a festive daytime celebration with music and procession (pompe [lit. "a sending away, despatching"]) to the temple. The victim, ideally white [pure; i.e. more concentrated with mana and less in equilibrium with the disordered surroundings], often a bull [the most sacred, i.e. totemic, around the Near East] decorated with gilded horns and garlands of flowers, was killed with its throat pointing skyward, its head pulled back. The fat and bones were burnt on a raised altar [to be returned to the ancestral atmosphere: the lingering expiatory aspect], and the flesh was shared among the participants [communion]. Non-alimentary enagismos was commonly a nighttime ritual. Processions were called apopompe [lit. "a sending away, getting rid of"], a leading away from the temple or city. The victims, often rams or pigs, were ideally black and killed with the throat pointing downward toward the earth. Instead of the raised altar, offerings were made on a ground level hearth or in a pit in the ground. Usually the two kinds of sacrifice were offered to two different kinds (or aspects) of divinities. The fragrant smoke of thysia ascended to the heavenly gods, the Olympians [i.e. the good gods, representing the forces of order of the cosmos]. Recipients of enagismos were the dead and the gods of the earth and of the underworld: chthonic gods." Among the dead are included "those mythical mortals who once had dealings with the gods, the heroes." (p. 22) The chthonics thus represent the forces of entropic disintegration (linear thermodynamic equilibrium). To understand the reason for the difference between the two (what are commonly called "Olympic" and "chthonic" ritual), it is instructive, Jay says, to turn attention away from the gods and toward the people instead; then "it becomes apparent that the consistent difference between alimentary and non-alimentary sacrifice was not who the recipient divinities were, but whether the sacrifice joined people together in alimentary community or, conversely, separated them from defilement and other dangers. All the symbolic elaboration of the opposition, such as the ritual use of day vs. night, black vs. white, oxen vs. pigs, music vs. silence, and especially the Olympic/chthonic opposition, are specifically Greek. But logically analogous oppositions of joining and separating are present in very different sacrificial traditions." (p. 23) It appears that (1) the thusia allowed the community to have the Olympian anima trapped in the oxen reincarnate in it so as to regenerate it against its otherwise necessary entropic disintegration; that (2) the fragrance (like that in the Israelite whole-burnt offering; below) ascending to the Olympians during the thusia was the food to regenerate the cosmos-gods; that (3) enagismos was the accumulation of the raw energy released from the pigs (the black dirty animal whose anima was more congruent with the chthonic forces of disorder) into a wall that would sharply separate the island of order (the community) away from the increasing disorder that was already there in the surroundings and here objectified as "chthonic", in order to prevent the former from reaching equilibrium with the latter ("a sending away of the disorders"). In other words, sacrifice released energy that re-concentrated the ghosts of the dead in their place or inversely accumulated into a barrier, in all cases preventing the mixing or equilibrium between the two sides. The actual identity of the chthonics thus did not much matter, as the same anima (energy) could pass from order-formative and order-regenerative to entropy-increase afterwards which threatened the order it had formed (more on this, below). "There are records of 'Olympic' sacrifice to chthonic divinities. The orgeones, localized patrilineal groups of 'sacrificing associates', worshiped a hero and heroines, yet their records reveal a 'complete absence of chthonic ritual'". Here the anima, manifested as ancestral heroes, etc., was conceived in its replenishing aspect. "The Olympians, especially Hermes and Zeus, had their chthonic aspects and were not consistently heavenly." (p. 22)

Expiatory sacrifice in this second aspect is therefore like cellular membrane formation. Typically it is expressed as "giving food to the ghosts of the dead to placate them so that they won't harm the living". Since an organism in thermodynamic terms is an island of order in a surrounding of increasing disorder, its order has to be protected, i.e. it has to be stabilized away from the surrounding equilibrium by the partitioning of the membrane. Expiatory sacrifice in this aspect is the building of such partitioning. An analogy can be given of a person on a raft in the ocean surrounded by sharks. To protect himself (his order) he can throw into the sea the chunks of delicious meat he has with him so that the sharks would eat these instead and not him: this appeasement of the sharks stabilizes them in their proper place. This analogy helps us understand better how this version of expiatory sacrifice as fortification or "sending disorders away" can be derived from the expiatory sacrifice of the primary (first) sense as feeding the gods or repairing their damage and exhaustion. But, as said, there are two ways to build such partitioning. Whereas the Hellenic enagismos consists in sending energy released from sacrifice to the (chthonic) forces of equilibrium so as to block them (appease them), among the east African Gusii the expiatory sacrifice takes on alimentary features, in opposition to the Hellenic. The Gusii funeral sacrifices "separated the living from the deceased, who by dying had become a source of danger both in spirit and flesh [i.e. they became the equilibrium-environment threatening to dissolute the order of the living]; but these same sacrifices also reintegrated the community that death had damaged [i.e. the partitioning had re-concentrated the order of the social organism]. The first sacrifice, a goat, 'was explicitly interpreted by informants as intended to placate the deceased' [this sounds like feeding the ghosts, blocking them, cordoning them off with a 'dam'], but it was roasted intact, 'with the skin on, and the whole thing eaten on the spot; unlike other sacrifices, the meat was not allowed to be taken home'..." (p. 23) The expiatory cordoning-off in this case is accomplished by the strengthening of the order of society to enable it to resist reaching equilibrium with the disordered surroundings; hence expiation passes into a communion meal. "The obligation to consume the victim in this way both identified the mourning group ('the nuclear patrilineal group' [which became the representative, the core of social order through male predominance in society]) and vividly asserted the oneness of this alimentary community... In the second sacrifice, communion aspects were more widely extended. 'The meat of this goat was distributed to all the houses in the homestead... Each house was likened to a part taken from a whole, emphasizing the unity of the whole without denying its segmentation; the message was similar to 'e pluribus unum'... The series concluded with sacrifices at the houses of all the sons and grandsons (sons' sons) of the deceased. Once again, these sacrifices turned away the ill will of the deceased, but at the same time, they identified and affirmed in alimentary community the patrilineal ties uniting the participants [i.e. the social order]." (p. 23 - 4)

Then there is the Roman lustratio (purification) to best illustrate the second aspect of expiatory sacrifice: "... une cérémonie qui, tous les cinq ans, servait à purifier le peuple rassemblé sur le Champ de Mars et donnait lieu à des rites solennels accompagnés d'une revue des troupes." ("Sacrifice", Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 2, p. 230) The most explicit textual description of this rite, Tite-Live I, 44, "relate la fondation de la cérémonie du lustre, lors des premières opérations du cens. C'est à l'occasion du recensement édicté par Servius Tullius que le rite aurait été institué. Après le recensement, Tullius enjoint à tous les citoyens romains de se présenter sur le Champ de Mars, rangés en centuries:... 'edixit ut omnes ciues Romani... in compo Martio prima luce adessent' ['he led so that all the citizens of Rome be present in the field of Mars at dawn']... Ibi instructum exercitum omnem suouetaurilibus lustrauit, idque conditum lustrum appellatum, quia is censendo finis factus est', 'Toutes les troupes une fois alignées, il les purifie par les 'suouetaurilia'; et cela s'appela 'conditum lustrum' parce que ce fut la fin du recensement'". (Ibid.) Now "suouetaurilia" is sacrifice of taurus or pork. "Les purificateurs, prêtres ou rois, effectuaient un circuit autour du groupe de gens ou de l'édifice à purifier, en se dirigeant toujours vers la droite; la purification donnait ainsi lieu à une circumambulation: lustrare signifiait donc 'parcourir, passer en revue' et 'purifier' en même temps." (Ibid.) The energy released from the sacrifice of the bull is thus used to re-align the order of the centurion (instructum) and to circumscribe this order clearly and visibly (circumambulation of the group by the king or priest); only thus is "purification" established (conditum lustrum). So perfectly is the metaphor of cellularism in the concept of purification borne out here.

Communion and expiation together constitute the general energetic structure of sacrifice whose double-sidedness can be clarified via analogy with the thermodynamics of chemical reactions in general or of cellular metabolism in particular and thus be termed exergonic and endergonic. Recall that cellular metabolism is the totality of chemical reactions which a cell carries out to convert and transform energy in order to do work. These, and in fact all, chemical reactions, are of two types. "One type, called 'endergonic reactions', requires a net input of energy (endergonic means 'energy in'). Endergonic reactions yield products that are rich in potential energy. As you can see in Figure A, an endergonic reaction starts out with reactant molecules that contain relatively little potential energy. Energy is absorbed from the surroundings as the reaction occurs, so that the products of an endergonic reaction store more energy than the reactants. The energy is actually stored in the covalent bonds [e.g. elements, such as a carbon and hydrogen, sharing electrons together in their outer shells to make up a hydrocarbon organic molecules] of the product molecules. And as the graph shows, the amount of additional energy stored in the products equals the difference in potential energy between the reactants and the products." (Campbell et al, ibid., p. 74) Expiatory sacrifice in general -- and in its aspect of restoration of the external in particular -- is endergonic, and can in fact be conceived of as two-directional, forward and backward, of which Nancy Jay and we following her have only considered one. An example of the un-considered would be the king's sacrificing animals or even his son to the deity in order to secure a victory in the upcoming battle. (E.g. King Mesha of the Moabites sacrificing his elder son in order to force a victory for his army into the structure of the cosmos; King II, 3: 27.) The uncertainty over the victory in battle field or over the future prosperity of the social collective signifies a cosmos (the reactant in "sacrificial catalysis") of uncertain energetic state which is identified as low in structural order and so high in entropy: the cosmos, structured as the patron deity (ancestral anima), is in this way experienced as endangering the society embedded therein. When something especially dear to oneself (i.e. considered to be highly concentrated with energetic anima, especially if it is of "royal lineage") is sacrificed, energy is thought to be released to the cosmos whose structural order thus becomes replenished, restored (the product), and consequently "society-friendly". In mythic terms, the god is fed with extra nutrients so that he may have the energy needed to triumph over the enemy's god. In the bio-sphere, "[p]hotosynthesis, the process whereby plant cells make sugar molecules, is one example of a strongly endergonic process. Photosynthesis starts with energy-poor reactants (carbon dioxide and water molecules) and, using energy absorbed from sunlight, produces energy-rich sugar molecules" whose stored energy then during the subsequent exergonic reactions of cellular respiration is used to carry out the biosyntheses the tree needs in order to grow, etc. (Ibid.) In the realm of religiousness, when the tribe wins the battle or otherwise prospers, it is exergonically cashing in on the energy (the order generated by this energy) it has formerly "deposited" in the cosmos through an endergonic sacrifice -- just as the tree is doing during the cellular respiration subsequent to photosynthesis: spending what one has saved up.2 The king of Moab in his case, after making the "deposit" of extra energy, then awaited its transformation into a different form. Just as, in the case of the contemporary American famed singer who paid the witches tens of thousands of dollar to sacrifice small animals as a way to clear his debt, the "energy" released from the animals was expected to transform itself into the different form of "money" ("he actually believed that money would appear out of nowhere with the ritual", so the tabloid reports), so the king, with the same superstition justified however by the prevalent worldview of the time, believed that the released energy would transform itself into the different form of "victory", this expressed via the symbolism of an invigorated god thus willing and able to show favor. The sacrificial ritual "catalyzes" a transformation of energy, or the release of it to do work (below). The expiatory sacrifice which follows the communion feast consists also in storing up in the cosmos potential energy exergonically released from the sacrificial animal and which will benefit the group in the time to come. Or rather: in replenishing the energy of the cosmos which is running low because the cosmos has exergonically via the ancestral animal released much of it to replenish the group (back to the firstlings offerings again). In other words, in the example of the Moabite king the temporal sequence of expiation is reversed: storing up energy first and reaping the reward of its work later on; that is, here the remission of sin precedes the incurment of debt, whereas normally the former postdates the latter. The case of the king having to sacrifice his daughter after the victory then falls into the "normal" sequence of expiation (the reference is to Judges, II: 30 sq.: "Jephté, qui s'engagea envers Yahvé à lui offrir en holocauste la première personne qui, après la victoire, viendrait à sa rencontre, sans s'imaginer que ce serait sa propre fille, son enfant unique." Mircea Eliade, Hist. des croy. et des id. rel., I, p. 188).

The use of sacrifice to obtain magical protection later on is the same reversal of the "normal" sequence of expiation. For example, "[i]n Benin, human sacrifice was the major defensive strategy, reminiscent of the Moabite king who turned back the Israelites by sacrificing his son on the ramparts... It didn't work against the British. A diary of a British surgeon describes the approach to Benin: 'As we neared the city, sacrificed human beings were lying in the path and bush -- even in the king's compound the sight and stench of them was awful. Dead and mutilated bodies seemed to be everywhere -- by God! may I never see such a sight again. Just before we came upon these horrors an old man appeared from behind a big tree which had fallen across the bush path we were following. He was using bow and arrow, and believed (as we were told afterwards) that he was invulnerable. He was, however, shot.'" (Jay, p. 66) In this case, the king of Benin thought that by releasing the energy from so many nutritious and therefore energetic human beings he had built a stern membrane which no bullets could penetrate. One can imagine his shock during the flash of instant when his animistic belief about how the world worked was falsified by new experience.

Endergonic sacrifice as the deposit of energy for later use ("to withdraw money from the bank one must first deposit it") is again borne out in the Latin word for "offering", daps, which "ou plus communément le pluriel dapes désignent le repas rituel d'offrande qui suivait le sacrifice [i.e. the communion taking-in after the thanksgiving], terme qui s'est assez rapidement vidé de son sens religieux, au point de ne plus signifier que 'repas, mets'... Festus... définit daps: 'Apud antiquos dicebatur res diuina quae fiebat aut hiberna sementi aut uerna.' L'offrande avait donc lieu aux semailles d'hiver et de printemps." During the period of the sowing of seeds, one makes endergonic sacrifice to deposit energy in the cosmos to ensure that the latter may have enough of it to produce healthy crops. Hence the derivative dapatice, "dont le sens est 'magnifice'; dapaticum negotium, c'est-à-dire 'amplum ac magnificum'. Comment concilier avec le 'repas d'offrande' la notion de 'ample, magnifique, large, libéral'?" (Benveniste, ibid., p. 226) Easy: food, or its energy, makes large, magnificent. "D'après le dictionnaire de Ernout-Meillet, le sens premier de daps serait 'sacrifice'. L'affirmation s'appuie sur Gaius Inst. 4, 28: pecuniam acceptam in dapem, id est in sacrificium impendare'" (p. 226 - 7), i.e. "money received in sacrifice, which is suspended in sacrifice". In (endergonic) sacrifice, one deposits, so as to withdraw later (in a different form: good fortune, good harvest, etc.). Benveniste, of course, goes the other way, citing the meaning of another pair of derivatives, damnum and damnare, as "damage" and "spend" ("dépenser"). "Il nous semble que daps, proprement, n'est pas l'offrande en général aux dieux, mais le repas offert après une consécration, repas de largesse, fête de magnificence... C'est cet engagement que signifie proprement la 'dépense', l'argent qu'on prodigue pour un 'sacrifice' sans escompter une compensation quelconque". "voilà l'origine du sens de damnum comme 'domage'; c'est proprement de l'argent donné sans contrepartie. L''amende' est bien de l'argent donné pour rien. Damnare n'est pas d'abord condamner en général, mais obliger quelqu'un à une dépense pour rien." (p. 227 - 8) I quite disagree: daps is spending in the hope of receiving, while damnare is paying for the debt earlier incurred.

In the Chinese context, starting with the Lung-Shan period (from the late Neolithic to the early Bronze era, 2 - 3 millennium B.C.), animals and even humans were often found sacrificed and buried at the foundation of the buildings. This is endergonic, the nutritious energy from the sacrificial victim being deposited and incorporated into the architecture to fortify it against its otherwise necessary decay through time (it is because of the second law that buildings always become more shappy through time and never more orderly of its own accord without energy being spent to fix it). "Whereas human sacrifice was offered to ancestral deities, such sacrifice (including that of children and women) was also believed to strengthen the foundation (and pillars) of buildings, building gates (entrances), dikes, embankments and other water works. After he was caught in a battle that brought ruin to his kingdom, the crown-prince of Ts'ai, for example, was sacrificed to strengthen a dam, suggesting a possible correlation between sacrifice to the founders of the human order and to important buildings and public projects that uphold that order." Persons of royal lineage, superior to commoners, were thought to be the most nutritious of all, i.e. with the highest concentration of energy-mana. The "ingestion of these by the constructions" therefore more than the ingestion of any others made these constructions strong and sustained their order against the disintegrating effect of the second law. "The more important the construction, the more humans were sacrificed. Hundreds of human skeletons, sometimes with chariots and horses, were found at the site of the royal palace." (Plutschow, ibid.) Recall that among the Germanic peoples of Roman time, during the inauguration of a new building, they would similarly sacrifice an animal and bury the victim underneath as “guardian spirit,” i.e. to strengthen and protect the order of the construction.

But consider now the endergony of the expiatory sacrifice implicit in II Sam. 21: 1 - 14. Here the ambiguity of the endergonic mechanism signifies a third aspect of expiation. King David sought answer from Yahweh concerning the "cure" for the three straight years of famine at the beginning of his reign. "There is blood guilt upon Saul and his house because he slew the Gabaonites", thus answered Yahweh. ("Super Saul et super domum eius est sanguis, quia occidit Gabaonitas." Nova Vulgata) Because human social order was an integral component of the cosmic order, the disorder that one generated in the former caused the entropic disintegration in the latter. This is the thermodynamic meaning behind Yahweh's anger. The cure for the high cosmic entropy indexed by famine was therefore the sacrifice of the seven sons of Saul, "hanging them in the mountain (the sanctuary of Yahweh) during the beginning of sowing" (21: 9: "et dedit eos in manu Gabaonitarum, qui suspenderunt illos in monte coram Domino. Et ceciderunt hi septem simul, occisi in diebus messis primis, incipiente messione hordei"). The rich energy released from them replenished the cosmos and re-aligned its components: the thermodynamic meaning behind the appeasement of Yahweh. But reversely the causal mechanism embedded in this sacrifice can be conceived of as the expulsion of "sin" within: no longer feeding, but defecation. Consider the correlative Chinese example: "The hunchback, another favorite sacrificial victim, was believed to be the drought spirit among humans. According to the Tso-chuan, in the year 639 BC, the duke of Lu wanted to expose a hunchback to the heat of the sun during a severe drought. When his minister discouraged him, for reasons of humanity, he selected a shamaness but finally decided to close the market as a sacrifice. (Confucian ideology)." (Herbert Plutschow, ibid.) Thus in Tsuo Chuan, Hsi yr. 21, we read: "Summer, there is severe drought. The king wants to burn the shamaness. The minister Wen Zong says: 'This is not the way to deal with drought. Proper maintenance and administration of the city, conservative consumption of food and resource, industriousness in agriculture and diligent performance of one's assigned duty -- these are the obligations. What did the shamaness and [hunchbacks] do? If Heaven wished to kill them, it wouldn't have produced them. If they could really cause drought, burning them would simply exacerbate the situation. The king took the advice and this was the sowing period; famine subsisted and yet [the shamaness, etc.] remained unharmed." (夏, 大旱, 公欲焚巫尪.臧文仲曰.非旱備也.脩城郭.貶食省用.務穡勸分.此其務也.巫尪何為.天欲殺之.則如勿生.若能為旱.焚之滋甚. 公從之.是歲也. 饑而不害.) Yuan-Ke remarks in Ancient Chinese Mythology (in Chinese, 1951, 1957) that "In ancient time there was the method to obtain rain by exposing the shamaness [to the heat of the sun until death] or by burning the [hunchback?]. In The Rich Dew of Spring and Autumn [by Dong Zhongshu, Han dynasty], the chapter on 'Obtaining Rain': 'During the drought of spring time, rain is obtained by exposing the shamaness or burning the [hunchback?].'" (p. 178, ftnt. 10; [董仲舒 春秋繁露求雨篇: 春旱求雨, 暴巫聚尪。) In The Classics of Mountains and Seas, "The Chapter of Western Outer Sea" (山海經海外西經), it is stated that once a severe drought was caused by 10 suns appearing simultaneously, and that a certain shamaness (女丑), often dressed in green, was fried to death on the occasion, her right sleeve covering over her face (to block sunlight). This passage relates probably also to the rain-inviting ritual. Whereas normally the offer of human sacrificial victim to gods during severe weather is endergonic repair of the disorder-anger of the ancestor-god ("the hungry [ancestral] ghost wants to eat us", as the Chinese saying goes; hence a human being is chosen to feed him in order to appease him and to spare us all), in this case the experiential content seems to be one of defecation: the presence of the "drought spirit" in the form of witches and hunchbacks among us is the presence of the forces of disorder (remember, linear entropy-increase) within us which cause the entropic disintegration -- i.e. loss of differentiated order -- of the cosmos above but inclusive of us; these forces of disorder must consequently be expelled from us. The example of king David is ambiguous because it contains symbolism of both: the expulsion of disorder ("sin") from society is indicative of defecation, but the timing of such sacrifice during sowing period points toward endergony.

A most conspicuous (societal) defecatory image is provided by the Ashanti kunkuma. "It is made of an old broom, chosen because it has been in contact with every kind of filth, and hidden in it is a piece of fiber polluted with menstrual blood." (Jay, p. 70) Among the Ashanti the taboo nature of women and their menstrual blood has already passed into "evil", the equilibrium state (for this, later); but because kunkuma is "a kind of 'moral black hole', able to draw down into itself all kinds of sin and sacrilege" (p. 71), it "is invulnerable to this [female] danger" (p. 70). "Not content with thus defiling it, the owner had taken every tabooed object that concerned him in any way and brought each in turn into contact with the kunkuma... 'The kunkuma can save you', said the priest, 'it takes on itself every evil.'" (Rattray, cited by Jay, p. 71) Whereas the social order is sustained by the energetic vitality of the ancestral spirit, the kunkuma is the "toilet" for the "spiritual waste", the toxic equilibrium material, produced and persisting within the group, including femaleness. "The salvation offered by this fetish is of a special kind. It can do no active good, neither heal nor grant fertility [it is not the sacred that makes 'whole', healthy, or 'vitalic'], for it has only apotropaic or expiatory power." (p. 71) For this reason, "it must never be sprinkled with water to purify it." (p. 70) The "sacred" (food, nourishment) is incompatible with the "dump" (toilet). It is the anti-sacred. The erection of the kunkuma is actually somewhat like the planting of trees today: part of our society's metabolism consists in taking in fossil fuel and exhaling carbon dioxide as waste; since this waste is toxic to us, we plant trees to absorb it (and recycle it into the wholesome oxygen again). "Before the conquest, the uses to which the executioners put the kunkuma were all expiatory. Spilling the blood of human victims on it ensured that no vengeful ghost [the forces of equilibrium threatening to dissolve the order of the living-society] could return. [For they have been 'disposed of'.] Human victims killed on such a fetish were not buried but thrown away; they were distinguished from victims called by the name of one of the patrilineal souls and intended to serve another human spirit after death." These, in other words, are bad, toxic anima, i.e. anima in disordered, equilibrium state. Hence "[t]he victims of fetish execution were banished even from the spirit world. The kunkuma is a means of dealing with evil as that which must be made absolutely other, like menstrual blood." (p. 71) That is, the impure, unclean, the equilibrium state.

The simultaneous presence of the multiple aspects of sacrifice -- of the defecatory and the ingestive-restorative on one side, and even the communion-festive on the other -- in a single instance of it can be seen in another Nuer example as related by Evans-Pritchard (from Bruce Chilton, Toward a Typology of Sacrifice): "E. E. Evans-Pritchard presents a particularly succinct observation of a sacrifice among the Nuer which he describes as both social [i.e. communion] and piacular [i.e. expiatory], and which illustrates his generalization that the line of demarcation between those two kinds of sacrifice is not always easily drawn. When a youth in the village Evans-Pritchard was staying in was wounded by a man in another village, the latter immediately sent his spear, which was used in a sympathetic manipulation designed to reduce the inflammation of the wound. The next day a deputation arrived with a goat for sacrifice, so that 'The wound would, as the Nuer put it, be finished with the goat.' The visitors consecrated the goat by rubbing ashes on its back, and a 'leopard-skin priest' (a tribal neutral) delivered the invocation, in which the details of the accident were rehearsed and assurance was given that the youth would not die. People from the village then brought a wether for a similar invocation, and the meat of both animals was consumed by the home villagers, after the visitors have departed. In that an ox was not at issue within the proceedings, the importance of the case was not marked as great. The ashes are associated with the potential guilt of the visitors [i.e. the disorder they have caused], and the sacrifice as a whole is simply designed both to restore the good relations of the two villages and to effect a removal of the offense which might divide them. In regard to the latter purpose, a generalization Evans-Pritchard makes later in his book is apposite: The sense of fault is, as we have noted, clearly expressed in the sacrificial rites, in the confession of grievances and resentments, which is a feature of some sacrifices, and also in the sacrificial invocations, which must state a true account of everything which has led up to the crisis. But it is most clearly and dramatically expressed by the common practice of all present placing ashes on the back of a beast and then either washing them off or slaughtering it. Nuer say that what they are doing is to place all evil [forces of disorder] in their hearts on to the back of the beast and that it then flows into the earth with the water or the blood [i.e. the disorders are "defecated" away]. In the case of the sacrifice of the goat, it seems clear that the ashes are the guilt of the second village, which is expunged by the offering. The first village accepts the meat of the animal, and the life of the animal is accepted by kwoth for the health of the youth [i.e. the energy released from the animal energizes the god who then has extra energy to revitalize the youth]; anything which happens thereafter is outside the parameters of blame, at least in principle. The use of a leopard-skin priest in the sacrifice underlines that understanding. More properly known as 'priest of the earth' such a figure is in the category of strangers, not 'clans which own the tribal territories,' and he represents the concerns of 'of man below to God above'. That a piaculum is involved in the sacrifice Evans-Pritchard described is evident, and requires no discussion. A mistake has been made, and the village of the wounded party and kwoth are both appeased. The second village pays for the sacrifice, and associates its guilt with the ashes rubbed on one of the offerings. A priest of the earth, not of either village or a territorial clan, warrants that satisfaction has been made at the level of the human and the divine...." The defecatory type of sacrifice ("scapegoating") is more thoroughly examined below in the case of Israelite sin-offering.

Nancy Jay also comments on the multivarious ways of the combination of all three aspects of expiation -- lowering of external entropy, membrane building to ward off external entropy, and the expulsion of internal entropy -- in Nuer sacrifices. The Nuer "piacular" sacrifice -- so named because this expiatory sacrifice is done for the persons -- embodies "the notions of elimination, expulsion, protection, purification, and propitiation". (p. 27) Their collective sacrifice is on the other hand a communion feast like the eucharist to index the unity and order of the social group. "The flesh of victims of collective sacrifice is distributed according to kinship relations and, like communion sacrifice everywhere, always eaten." Later we will learn that insofar as the eating of the sacrificial animal means the (collective) reincarnation of the ancestral anima in the whole group, the distribution of its flesh in a manner reflective of social divisions allows such reincarnation to regenerate and reinforce these divisions which are what properly constitute the social order at all: the re-alignment of the differentiated components of society and the prevention of their collapse into equilibrium with one another. "In many sacrificial traditions, expiatory sacrifice is not eaten, or is eaten only in severely restricted ways... When expiatory purposes are intensified, the form of the sacrifice changes: 'In sacrifices in which the idea of separation is strong, as in cases of incest, to sever kinship, and in one of the mortuary rites [to separate the dead from the living], instead of the ox being speared and then skinned it is thrown on the ground and cut longitudinally in half.' Only the right, male half is eaten by the sacrificing group; the 'thrown away' left, evil, female half is eaten by unrelated persons." (The association of gender with order-disorder is considered below.) Thus purification, regeneration of the group, is here done by an intake of energy accompanied by an expulsion of internal waste (eat and defecate at the same time). When piacular sacrifice is made for the whole community, such as to stop an advancing plague or enemy, victims are killed in the bush outside the village or camp, and the bodies are abandoned there uneaten." (p. 27 - 8) To defend against external equilibrium, the Nuer, instead of membrane-building, defecate out disorders to keep themselves strong.

Logically communion sacrifice is exergonic. "An 'exergonic reaction' is a chemical reaction that releases energy (... 'energy-out'). As indicated in Figure B, an exergonic reaction begins with reactants whose covalent bonds contain more energy than those in the products. The reaction releases to the surroundings an amount of energy equal to the difference in potential energy between the reactants and the products. As an example of an exergonic reaction, consider what happens when wood burns. One of the major components of wood is cellulose, a larger carbohydrate composed of many glucose monomers. Each glucose is rich in potential energy. When wood burns, the potential energy is released as heat and light. Carbon dioxide and water [what originally went into photosynthesis as the reactants] are the products of the reaction." (Ibid.) Restoration of the social collective in the case of communion sacrifice is exergonic in that the ancestral anima-mana has through endergonic reaction crystallized, concentrated, or stored up itself (such as during the endergonic Intichiuma) in the sacrificial animal whose exergonic release of energy in turn replenishes the human group. Endergony and exergony are different stages of the same sequence: endergony stores up energy which during exergony is to be used.

Let us finally look at the mixed form of the Israelite sacrifices to conclude our "logic of sacrifice". In the Israelite case, Nancy Jay writes, "[e]xpiatory elements strongly predominated in late [sacrificial ritual], but several centuries earlier, communion sacrifice had been of fundamental importance. At no time was sacrifice entirely reduced to one of these modes. Both communion and expiation are logically necessary in sacrificial systems [just as in metabolism exergonic and endergonic reactions are both logically necessary], but they need not be equal in any quantified way... The most important of Israelite sacrifices, the burnt offering, cannot be categorized as either expiatory or communion sacrifice. It appears as a midpoint, flanked on one side by joyful communion 'peace offering', and on the other by gloomy expiatory 'sin offering'". In other words it is the usual undifferentiated or ambiguous mode. "Accounts of communion sacrifice are unelaborated: peace offerings are all pretty much the same. But on the expiatory side of the spectrum the priests distinguished many kinds of sin and guilt offerings, and beyond these, some still more intensely expiatory sacrifices." The feeding of society to restore its order is a simple matter, but even we have already isolated three varieties of expiation. The emphasis on expiation becomes especially predominant during the latter days of the Israelites because, according to Wellhausen's explanation, the proliferation of threats from international troubles in the external has produced among them a strong sense of sin incurred (disorder created outside and accumulated inside the social organism). "[E]xcept that only priests could eat it, there was almost no difference in performance between [sin offering] and peace offering." Historically the Israelite sacrifice evolves from emphasis on peace through that on burnt to that on sin offerings (peace-BURNT-sin). "Most early accounts describe burnt and peace offerings performed together; later accounts pair burnt and sin offerings." (Jay, p. 24 -5) The burnt offering "is called both the 'ascent sacrifice' ('õlah) and the 'holocaust' (kâlil)" (J. Pohle, "Sacrifice", Catholic Encyclopedia), as we shall see why. Pohle however defines the "peace offerings" (victima pacifica, shelamim)" as "sub-divided into three classes: the sacrifice of thanks or praise, the sacrifice in fulfilment of a vow, and entirely voluntary offerings." (Ibid.) But the most primitive peace offering is the communion feast called zebach, where, as Robertson Smith describes it, "the animal victim was presented at the altar and devoted by the imposition of hands, but the greater part of the flesh was returned to the worshipper, to be eaten by him under special rules." (Cited by Chilton, "The Challenge of Understanding Sacrifice from an Anthropological Perspective") Pohle divides sin offerings as either "the absolution of the person from sin" (expiatio or sacrificium pro peccato, chattath), or "the making of satisfaction for the injury done (satisfactio)", "guilt offering" (sacrificium pro delicto, asham; ibid.). In the Septuagint the word for whole-burnt offering is olokautwma; for peace offering, qusia swtheriou; for sin-offering, armatiaV.

"Leviticus 1-7 sets out rules for doing sacrifices." The description here is of course of late origin (P strand), as the Aaronites are said to be charged with the rites. "They [whole-burnt offerings, peace offerings, and sin-offerings] all begin in the same way: The offerer lays his hands upon the victim's head and kills it before the altar; then the priest pours out the blood at the base of [or around] the altar. This blood rite is an expiatory element present even in communion sacrifices. Across the spectrum of sin offerings, as they intensify in expiatory quality, the blood rite becomes more and more complicated." (Jay, p. 25)

"In peace offerings only the fat, kidneys, and appendage of the liver are burnt on the altar. Part of the remainder is given to the priest, and all the rest reverts to the offerer to be eaten at a festival meal. In [whole] burnt offerings all but the skin is burnt on the altar." (Ibid.) The animals (cattle, oxen, or sheep, all unblemished) have to before burning be cut to pieces, their entrails and feet washed in water. "In all sin offerings the same portion as in peace offerings is burnt on the altar. The kind of animal used and what is done with it varies according to whether it is offered for the sin of the high priest, of the whole community, of leaders, or of ordinary persons. The flesh of victims offered for the sins of common people and leaders is eaten only by males of priestly families, for its sacredness [high concentration of energy, of anima-mana] spreads to anything it touches [mana almost becoming taboo: this means either that only those considered with especially concentrated dose of mana can handle it without being vaporized, or that the high concentration of the mana in the cosmos must be protected against reaching equilibrium with the low concentration of the environment]. The alimentary community it indexes (identifies) is likewise strictly distinguished from other groups [i.e. the order, the especially concentrated sacredness of that special portion of the community, must be protected against reaching equilibrium with the disordered surroundings]. Except for this contagious sanctity, these 'edible' sin offerings are almost indistinguishable from peace offerings for priests only. The only difference in the procedure is that a little blood is put on the horns of the outer altar." (Ibid.) The description of the burnt offerings as "a sacrifice, a smell of sweet savour [ascending] to the Lord" in the Septuagint (karpwma esti qusia osmh euwdiaV twi Kuriwi) indicates that it is food (in smoky form) for the god-cosmos to regenerate and re-align its order, while the edible part signifies a communion feast to regenerate and re-align social order: typical endergonic-exergonic coupling.

In the extreme case of sin offerings ("if a soul shall sin unwillingly [akousiwV] before Yahweh in any of his commandments... if the anointed priest sin so as to cause the people to sin..." Lev. 4: 2 -3), although the animal (unblemished calf) is slain in the same way, the consecrated priest "shall dip his finger into the blood, and sprinkle of the blood seven times before the lord, over against the holy veil. And the priest shall put of the blood... on the horns of the altar of the compound incense [tou qumiamatoV sunqesewV] before Yahweh, in the tabernacle... and all the blood... shall he pour out by the foot of the altar of whole-burnt-offerings which is by the doors of the tabernacle of witness." (Lev. 4: 5 - 8) The same fat, kidneys, and appendages as in the peace offerings are burnt on the altar, but "[f]lesh, bones, skin, dung, all the remainder must be taken outside the camp and burnt there, and those who burn it become temporarily unclean." (Jay, p. 25)

The former, primary expiatory sacrifice we have described as repair of the entropic disintegration in the external environment. We have also pointed to the other entropic disintegration internal to the social organism that must be "defecated out". "Sin" is thus double-sided. To recapitulate, then, the metabolic process captured in religiousness: (1) order, such as of the social organism, is non-random, differentiated arrangement of constituents. (2) Such order is maintained only through the input of energy, whose influx re-aligns the arrangement away from equilibrium or randomness and keeps the organism moving. But in this process greater amount of disorder must have been created in the external environment. Part of the reason for this is that energy can only be obtained through the destruction of another order because energy is stored in physical matter: the substratum of being is energy. (3) While part of this disorder created is in the external, another part accumulates in the internal, as the order in- and di-gested to release the energy needed, once it finishes up this re-alignment, has become equilibrium-inducing or randomness-generating, i.e. toxic, impure, and must be expelled. As an open system maintains its order through the intake of energy and/or order and the disposal of waste, the entropy within ("sin") is this waste to be disposed of. (4) The "energy" for the primitives is the concrete air -- but also blood, which is considered the condensed form of the life-principle (soul, breath, air). We have said that the gaseous and the liquid state have this "special status" in that they easily remind of the first law of thermodynamics and so of the substratum-energy because of their quality of undifferentiated formlessness from which definite forms emerge (wind, tornados, or waves) but into which they then disappear back. (5) This energetic blood can somehow, like sponge, soak up the waste and carry it away ("washing away one's sin").

In the intensely expiatory sacrifice just described, while part of the animal is still fed to Yahweh, the rest has soaked up all the toxic entropic disintegrations or disorders -- waste -- inside the group and is to be "defecated" out of the social organism. The sacerdotal who touches the "shit" of course becomes temporarily "unclean", disorder-causing. "Number 19 gives the rules for the powerfully expiatory red heifer sacrifice. A red heifer is slaughtered outside the camp and the priest sprinkles its blood [seven times, just as in previous sin offerings] in the direction of the altar. The victim is then and there entirely burnt, and the priest throws cedar, hyssop, and a scarlet cloth into fire. Afterwards he must bathe and wash his clothes and even so he remains unclean [Sept. akathartos: impure] until evening, as if he had touched a menstruating woman. But the ashes of this sacrifice are like a magnet for pollution [and the Israelites are instructed to keep watch of it]: mixed with water from a running stream [Sept. "living water", udwr zwn] and sprinkled on persons and objects, they have the power to take away pollution from contact with corpses." (p. 26, emphasis added.) That the meaning of "sin", "impurity" (akatharsia), or "pollution" here refers to the order-dissoluting, equilibrium-causing, entropically toxic waste that the social organism itself has produced can be gleaned from the description in Num. 11 - 16 of the impurity incurred by touching the dead: one who has touched the corpse shall remain impure for 7 days, and must be purified [agnisqhsetai] at the third and seventh day; otherwise he is considered to have defiled the tabernacle and must be cast out, excommunicated. The decomposition of the corpse indicates that this former order is now reaching equilibrium with the environment, that it is like the "dung" left behind after the order of the organism, the soul, has departed from it; anyone who has touched it has partaken of the equilibrium of the environment and threatens the order of the social group (its stabilization away from equilibrium). The "sin" internal to the group that the "scapegoating" type of sin offerings attempts to erase -- the toxic, used energy in equilibrium state -- refers, of course, to the breaking of Yahweh's commandments, just as in the previous Nuer example it refers to some act disruptive of social order. The energy in the ashes and blood, by absorbing the "stains of disorder" and taking them away with it -- just as real water is able to do because of the polarity in its covalent bonds -- re-establishes the differentiation between order and disordered environment. "Still further along the expiatory end of the sacrificial continuum is the scapegoat (Lev. 16). Laden with all the sins of the people [the toxic disorderly waste of the social organism], it is too unclean to sacrifice, and is driven into the wilderness to the mysterious 'Azazel'. Another goat is sacrificed at the same time as a non-alimentary sin offering." (Ibid.) It seems like a coupling of the repair of external entropic disintegration (the "appeasement" of Yahweh) with the expulsion of internal entropic waste. Throughout, the application of Nuer's explanation of the mechanism of their scapegoating to the Israelite seems warranted. Finally, the defecatory meaning of the scapegoating expiatory sacrifice becomes explicitly visualizable in the religious injunction concerning (alas!) defecation in Deutoronomy 23: 12 - 14: "Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. For Yahweh your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy" -- i.e. clean, orderly, with disorder-causing toxic waste properly expelled -- "so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you." Now, to diagram the ideal structure ("logic") of sacrifice:

To conclude: We today find the primitive religious mindset strange and shrouded in mystery: why is it that in time past people used to think that they could change the weather by hanging someone else or by chopping off his or her head? Or prevent flooding by drowning someone? Yet it is even stranger that we moderns would find this strange: for if everyone at that time was thinking and doing this way, the mechanism involved must have been extremely common-sense -- yet we can no longer grasp it. Currently we reveal that this whole otherwise strange thinking of the primitive sacrificial religiousness is just a metaphor of metabolism -- but a system of two-unit metabolism, one (society) embedded in and dependent on another (cosmos-god); it is all about the intake of energy to restore order and the disposal of the waste generated thereby. It is a metaphor, that is, not true, because the components of "metabolism" here are not sugar molecules from food and enzymes and so on but the macroscopic functions of the cosmos (spirits, societies, priests). The harvest-threatening and group-dissoluting "bad weather" (whether excessive sunlight during drought or excessive watering during flooding) was experienced as the entropic disintegration of the atmospheric ancestral anima, i.e. as the cosmos' running low of energy and hence lack of structural order: like a hungry person. Human sacrifice in such occasion can then easily be explained: human being was the richest in energetic anima-mana, and his or her destruction would exergonically release the most energy to "re-fuel" the cosmos or feed ("appease") the ancestor-god which would otherwise be unable to maintain its order, that is to say, to keep in balance the natural seasonal cycle, here taken to be like the metabolism of the ancestor-god.

Within this "metabolism" of the god the function of the human magical or sacrificial rituals is catalytic or enzymatic. Just as the endergonic and exergonic reactions of cellular metabolism require catalysts (enzymes) to speed up and increase the yield of their energy-releasing or energy-storing functions -- left to themselves the organic chemical reactions involved in metabolism might produce products so slowly that they are destroyed almost as rapidly as they are made, and the enormous amount of reactants would only have resulted in a small amount of reactions -- so human beings sacrifice to endergonically deposit energy in the cosmos and to exergonically release the energy of the cosmos for themselves, all in order to artificially speed up the pace and increase the yield of the natural energy-transforming processes that would otherwise be unable to keep up with the energetic demands of the existence of the human group. Consider the Hawaiian "feudalistic" system of tribute of the "first fruit": "Rights in land are determined by the sacrificial system, not by inheritance through the genealogical system. Each right to a piece of land is contained in a more encompassing right above it in the sacrificial hierarchy. The ultimate right to all land is vested in the king, who sets aside some for himself and divides the remainder among the high-ranking nobles who are his main supporters. The recipients, in turn, keep some land for their use and distribute the rest among their own main supporters. Each of these does the same with his own portion, and so on, down to the bottom of the sacrificial hierarchy; 'every land right rests on a relationship of subordination'. Land is distributed to men only, for control of an area is exercised through control of the temple connected with it. Land is of divine origin and women are almost entirely excluded from its agricultural use, from food production as well as from food preparation... The chain of land rights and the chain of the temple hierarchy are made manifest (indexed) in firstfruit sacrifices. The most important requirement for legitimating a man's land rights is for him to make offerings of its produce, especially of its firstfruits, to his overlord as to a god. These offerings move up the hierarchy until they reach the king, who consecrates them to the major gods. 'At each point in the chain the human recipient of the firstfruits of a land segment is only the representative, through his own overlords, of the major gods. The higher one [a man] is in the hierarchy, the most closely one represents these gods'. The final sacrifice, that of the divine king as the gods' closest representative [in fact as the reincarnation of the supreme god, Ku], makes all the lower offerings it encompasses not merely tribute, but sacrifice." (Jay, p. 81) The land on which the commoner tills is the possession, the flesh and bone one can say, of the noble; it is the substrate (reactant) on which one as a catalyst merely operates to exergonically release its energy ("fruit") needed for the social collective: an instrument for the metabolism of the whole group. The first fruit is given back to symbolize that the metabolic reaction carried out is for the group represented by the noble -- and finally for the god within whose metabolism that of the human group is embedded. The whole cosmos, the ancestral anima, is the substrate on which the human group as the catalyst operates to keep running the metabolic cycle of the cosmos in which it has a place (survives) -- although a very special place: the representative manifestation of the ancestral anima -- because it is caught therein (as catalyst). The firstlings offering, which from the point of view of the human society is an insurance for future food supply, is from the point of view of the cosmos-god a catalytic event.

To come back to the gender problem: Nancy Jay notes that a strange commonality among all sacrificial religiousness is "an association of femaleness with what must be expiated" (p. 28). In addition to Nuer's identification of the female-left with evil, there are the Greek association of the pollution of childbirth with that of death (ignoring however menstrual blood) and the Israelite consideration of both childbirth and menstruation as pollution (p. 29). How did this come about? We have noted that taboo is not the same as evil -- although both are destructive and dangerous -- but can pass into evil: this is because the ancestral atmosphere-god, although good in that it offers up energy and so is order-restorative, can pass into evil when, unfed, it loses its order and brings on natural calamities, becoming order-dissolutive. (See the diagrammatic representation of the trinitarian meaning of the sacred below.) Originally the menstrual blood, associated with the blood of the game and so with raw meat, is tabooed, the menstrual woman and raw meat being too energetic to be touched or consumed. Only after emergence from seclusion is the "sacred" woman safe for intercourse, just as it is only after the meat is cooked by the woman that it is safe to be consumed. If the sacred when maximally entropic can become the source of dangers and threats -- evil -- then the sacred menstrual blood can also pass into evil without mystifying us so much. What does mystify is how and why this should have occurred. The answer, I think, can be sought in the male use of (especially, but not exclusively, sacrificial) religiousness to constitute the male order in general and patriliny in particular as a counter-dominance toward the female ritual order. In this way we can make use of Jay's analysis to continue with the narrative by Chris Knight and Camilla Power of the origin of rituals in the sexual division of labour.

destructive   excessively energetic ----------------- maximally entropic 
(order-dis-                                 |
soluting)                                   |
    |                                       |
    |                                       |
    |                                       |
order-pre-                             "wholesome"
servative
 (good)                 taboo ------------------------------- evil

POSTSCRIPT: In sacrificial religiousness the whole cosmos and human society can be legitimately (common-sensely) taken as a metabolic unit or totality only because of the primitives' animistic conception of nature which itself is derived from the conservation of the soul and the identification of breath as the soul. Atmosphere is taken to be the conserved substrate of all being and is energy (just like energy today is the conserved substrate of all matter) because air is literally seen as animating living things (the anima which animates makes energetic), as the material making them up and at the same time as the fuel responsible for their motion and maintaining their ordered state. We asked: Why did the primitives not understand that energy was automatically pouring in from the sun to regenerate the biosphere every day and that humans really had no need to pump energy into the cosmos themselves? As indicated, the primitives saw their catalytic activities as necessary to the metabolism of the cosmos because they compactedly understood their society as an integrated component of the cosmos: the automatic infusion of energy from an external source (i.e. sunlight) was dismissed because social order did disintegrate from time to time despite the input of sunlight and the cosmic order did (or rather was perceived to) disintegrate also such as during natural calamities despite again the infusion of sunlight. The cosmos, as a metabolic open system, therefore depended on the catalytic activity of humans to sustain its order, just as humans and society, as open systems, depended on their search for food to sustain their order. The image of the "world" -- the totality of cosmos-gods vs. society-humans -- offered by the magico-ritual religiousness in general or by sacrificial religiousness in particular is one equivalent to a mother-infant relationship, with the ancestor-cosmos being the parent and the human-society the infant. That religiousness captures this primordial human relationship is not because religion is men's projection of infantile desires but because an equivalent situation produces an equivalent response. The animistic worldview -- the belief in the continual existence after death of the ancestors as the cosmos -- makes the primitives see a parent in the cosmos; their precarious dependence on nature for survival causes them to see their acquisition of nutrients as rather the offering-up by the parental nature; and their egocentricism which prompts them to define entropy-increase only in reference to their social order allows them to see their own actions as essential in catalyzing the parental nature to give. This in effect illuminates, contra Freud, what the real infantile desire is. The infant finds the cause for happiness, order, and low entropy entirely in the experience of being full and fed, and the cause for unhappiness, disorder, and high entropy entirely in the experience of hunger. When during hunger his order declines (becomes weakened, is about to collapse into equilibrium), he needs to eat of the mother: this is communion or exergonic sacrifice. If somehow the mother becomes capricious, angry, abusive, i.e. disorderly, and fails thereby to offer up nutrients, the infant, because of his definition of entropy entirely in terms of hunger and the satiation of appetite, diagnoses the cause for the mother's high entropy in her hunger just as he senses the cause for his impending collapse in his own hunger: this is the situation of the unfed ancestor-god who, hungry and in control of the cosmos, collapses and becomes capricious and disorderly, resulting in such natural calamities as drought, flooding, earthquake, storm, and failing thereby to yield up nutrients. In such cases the infant may wish to be able to feed the mother in order to restore her order, vigor, and happiness so that she may continue to offer up nutrients for him. Again, the fact that the mother has sources for her own nourishment other than the infant (e.g. the father) and that she may have become capricious and unyielding for reasons other than hunger goes unnoticed because she fails to yield despite these other sources and because the infant knows only hunger as the reason for any collapse of order. The offering of nourishment he wishes to make in this case is like the expiatory sacrifice ("the whole-burnt offering") to restore the ancestor-cosmos to low entropy. If he, during breast-feeding, senses that his taking from the mother is going to weaken her and wishes to pre-empt the resultant upcoming disorder of the mother and to ensure the future supply of nourishment, he may offer some of the milk received back to the mother to regenerate her, in which case we have the "firstlings offerings" or the usual undifferentiated form of sacrifice. This is the most primordial form of sacrificial religiousness, the eating of "god" -- game caught or crops harvested which are the manifestation of the ancestor (or the mother) -- together with god: part of god we eat and part god eats back so as to not "run out" while providing for us. (We have mentioned that the necessity of eating out of god and consequently of weakening, destroying, and offending him [or the mother] in order to stay alive and maintain our own order is the origin of our experience of "primordial sin".) In extreme instances, the disorderly (i.e. abusive) conduct of the mother caused by her hunger (so perceived) may signify that she is about to eat the infant, and the latter may therefore want to offer up his own brother as especially nutritious to feed the mother: this is the tribe's offering of human sacrifice such as to cure famine or extreme environmental disasters. ("Take him, mother-god, for he also comes from you and is therefore sacred, i.e. especially nutritious and highly concentrated with energy. He is of the same substance as I, so take him, regenerate yourself (and continue to produce milk), and spare the rest of us.") Recall in this connection the Scandinavian ("Viking") human sacrifice by hanging the person from the tree as offering to Odin, the "god of the gallows". (The person sacrificed may have been ritually slaughtered before being strung up; more on Germanic "paganism" later. But the "suggestion of Turville-Petre [regarding the Scandinavians] that 'sacrificial victims were criminals [such as a thief or bandit], and that the death penalty had a sacral meaning'" (cited by James Montgomery, "Ibn Fadlan and the Russiyah", Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 3 (2000), p. 12) implies that here the impending disorderly (and hence possibly devouring) conduct of the Ancestor ("Odin") on the macrocosmic scale was caused, or incited, by the disturbing, disorderly conduct of a human person on the microcosmic level, and that the appeasement of the god-cosmos consists in feeding him the culprit himself: more realistic than the Nuer piaculum above.) Insofar as the "brother" is the substitution for oneself, the tribal adult (in the role of the baby) might just as well use an animal instead. To go back to the case of the Nuer, "[t]he necessity of a piaculum, according to Evans-Pritchard, lies in the 'danger arising from the intervention of Spirit in human affairs,' which is held to be an abnormal circumstance [e.g. an abusive mother harming the infant]. An ox is typically offered, which is identified with the offerer; the identification lies in the general and social affinity between people and cattle among the Nuer, the invocation over the victim with the spear (which 'represents the virtue and vitality of man') by the sacrificer, and in the placing of ashes on the victim, 'a gesture of identification of man with victim.'... To some extent, [Evans-Pritchard's] preference is grounded in his observation that the Nuer do not regard Spirit as consuming the flesh of the sacrifice, which is rather eaten by the participants. They eat the meat [for self-regeneration]; Spirit [Anima, kwoth] receives the life [anima, energy] which is given. The function of the gift, from the point of view of Spirit, is 'to separate God and man, not to unite them.' [I.e. to prevent the destructive force of god.] That separation is possible because the offering is accepted by Spirit in substitution for the person who offers." (Chilton, "Two Recent Theories of Sacrifice", emphasis added.) Alternatively the infant may wish to build up defense against the mother's disorderly and destructive conduct: expiatory sacrifice as membrane-building such as in the case of the Roman centurion lustratio. Finally, the infant experiences an entropy-increase in his own body that is different than hunger: the accumulation of used energy or waste to be disposed of. The waste, if not disposed of in the right place and staining him, would make him "unclean", "impure" (akathartos), and unpleasant to the mother (Yahweh does not like anyone unclean among his congregation): this is the scapegoating, defecatory purification. Exactly these things which the infant would like to do but could not do when dependent on a mother becoming abusive -- but which he would not dream of doing if the mother remains always gentle and ready to offer up milk -- the primitive adults proceeded to do -- and these constitute the phenomenon of tribal religion -- because they were faced with a not-so-gentle and not-always-offering nature.

Primitive religion therefore "speaks out" and "acts out" the infantile desire otherwise neither spoken nor acted upon. If the infant could speak and act according to his desire, he would probably produce precisely a "religion". E.g. at the stage when he understands object-permanence while playing the game of making something disappear from sight and then getting it back into sight again (both Freud and Piaget made much of this game), he might say: "There is proven 'mommi-permanence': just because mommi steps out of sight that doesn't mean she ceases to exist. This is a law of nature: things can never just disappear; nothing ever disappears from something just as something never appears from nothing; mommi can never 'just disappear' or cease to exist. Mommi always exists -- even if she isn't here any longer. Mommi is a permanent structure of reality. Even if you destroy mommi, she would merely continue to exist in a different form" as he crushes the something into fragments (the "new form"). The phylogenic stage in human evolution which corresponds to this ontogenic moment when the infant comes to grip with the presence and absence of the mother is the moment when the human species comes to realize "ancestor-permanence". After mommi's death: "Mommi is permanent -- but now where is mommi? Alas [when mommi gives up her 'ghost', the last breath is seen 'returning to the atmosphere'], she's permanent as nature, she is nature. She now exists in this new form called 'nature', called 'animals', called 'plants'... What nature produces -- crops and games -- are mommi's continual nourishment for us." But nature after giving needs replenishment. Hence the infant-early humanity sets up the idol, and offers back parts of the nourishment received in front of it. Then, alas, the offering disappears (as when burnt into smoke). The infant-priest happily walks out of the sanctuary and declares to his people: "My people, mommi has accepted our offering. This means that this year will be a good year. Crops will burst forth from soil and games be easy to hunt." The people dance in joy. The parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny in the understanding of "permanence" or conservation -- the most fundamental law of nature -- can therefore be mapped out:

                       ONTOGENY                       PHYLOGENY
 
after 8 months     object-permanence   -------- "ancestor-permanence"  late Homo
                  ("mommi permanence")              ("religion")        erectus?
                           |                             |
                           |                             |
                           |                             |
operational           conservation    ----------   philosophical                
thought                                            anamnesis (e.g.      First 
(7 yrs)                                            Presocratics)        Axial   
                           |                             |                    
                           |                             |                     
                           |                             |                    
college                First Law      -----------   modern physics      20th 
physics                                                                 cent.

During the earliest stage of the comprehension of the conservational principle conservation is understood entirely qualitatively and tied to particular objects ("something permanence"); then it is seen partly quantitatively and correctly applied to amorphous mass (e.g. water, or the totality of being); at the most mature stage consciousness applies conservation correctly, such as to the quantity of energy and the totality of CPT (on this, later).

The purpose of the use of an analogy with the possible infantile psychology is to render the experience behind sacrificial -- or any magico-ritual -- religiousness common sense, which it has to be. The "common sense" thus made manifest reveals the utter narrowness, hence irrelevance, and anachronicity of such modern interpretation as René Girard's. Recall that Girard starts with an analysis of the structure of human desire as "mimetic", always desiring what the other desires, of which the "natural conclusion is the displacement (that is, the destruction) of the other [on whose desire one models one's own and] who is [thus] both model and rival." (Chilton, "An Analysis of Sacrifice: the Systematic Approach of René Girard") The emergent "war of all against all" makes society (social order) impossible. But a solution to the conflict (and to the resultant social disorder) is found by all vending their destructiveness on a single, innocent scapegoat. "Where only shortly before a thousand individual conflicts had raged unchecked between a thousand enemy brothers, there now appears a true community, united in its hatred for one alone of its numbers. All the rancors scattered at random among the divergent individuals, all the differing antagonisms, now converge on an isolated and unique figure, the surrogate victim." (Violent and the Sacred, p. 179; quoted by Jay, p. 131) The hatred and concentrated violence that unite therefore bind the society together, making it possible. The anachronism is that such mobish, scapegoating mentality presupposes a post-tribal, urbanized society where people are strangers to one another. I could not imagine people of a farming village in China 3,000 years ago, everyone of whom knew everything about every other one, could have so objectified one of their own kins into a representative evil. The offer of human sacrifice to god means simply what the participants in it say it means, to appease the god's anger. By inventing an imaginary reality of the unconscious, which in principle cannot be known by its participants ("the celebrants do not and must not comprehend the true role of the sacrificial act", ibid, p. 7, quoted by Jay, p. xxv; "scapegoating cannot be done effectively if we are conscious of it", Interview with Girard), the Girardian thinking can make the appeasement of god into that of the self (the same atheistic approach). The only sacrifice it somewhat describes is the "defecatory". Sacrifice in fact is not about violence, and there is violence in it only insofar as alimentary function necessarily involves the destruction of another order, this being dictated by the thermodynamic nature of things: Energy is the substratum of the physical, material reality; it crystallizes into matter which is just the concentrated form of energy, as relativity has taught us. Matter then forms into orders (open systems) which get sustained through the influx of energy. The manifestations of god eat of god itself, and god also eats the manifestations of itself to maintain its order: that is why the word for "sacrificial food" is frequently that for "god" itself: there is nothing other than energy (the "sacred"). (Note then the thermodynamic impossibility in primitive religiousness: the open system of the cosmos is recycling its own energy to sustain itself, like a perpetual motion machine.) It is precisely because matter is mere local concentration of energy that it must be destroyed in order to release any energy so as to sustain another order formed of another bundle of local concentrations of energy. In metabolism, the covalent bonds that bind chemical elements together must be broken to release energy; the nuclear power plant produces energy because, as in atomic bomb, the nucleus of the uranium-235 atom is bombarded with neutrons and broken into smaller components (barium, krypton, and more neutrons), with an enormous release of energy. Since the ancients mistake energy to be "spirit", anima, the organism which embodies it must be broken up so as to release it to do work. Henninger somewhat gets it right when he says: "Perhaps we may say that originally what was sacrificed was either something living or an element or symbol of life; in other words, it was not primarily food that was surrendered, but life itself." (Ibid., p. 545) Life, as anima, is energy, hence the Latin vita "life" and vis "force, energy". This is the easy, common sense response to de Heusch's statement: "...the most perfect sacrificial debt is that which a man must pay with his own blood in order to continue to exist. The animal victim is only a substitute. [Recall again our infant's situation in face of the abusive mother.] The phenomenon of 'displacement' is problematic. If animal sacrifice has received little attention from anthropologists it is because, more often than not, they perceived it as a banal phenomenon, a form of offering, a mere gift. Yet the 'thing' given must be put to death in order to affect the invisible forces so that life may be perpetuated. This is surely the crux of the matter of sacrifice." (Cited by Chilton, "Recent Theories...") In sacrifice we give some of the life-energy we have received from god back to him in order to regenerate him so that we may receive further from him in the future, do ut possis dare. The principle of my interpretation is that it has to match with my childhood experience of the cultic custom around, the cognitive understanding of the realness of it all that motivates people to engage in it: "'Everything has meaning,' becomes an axiom of the anthropologist as he examines artifacts, rituals, and other concomitants of a given culture. The ancestor cult, involving periodic worship of the deceased, who are in a sense deified, deployment of ancestral tablets, and the upkeep of graves, is no exception. Indeed, the ancestral tablet, for example, has significance, for it implies a reciprocity: the living care for the dead by bowing to the tablet and placing food offerings and burning incense before it. The deceased ancestors, represented by the tablet, the shen-wei (sin-ui, in Taiwanese), literally, the 'god-seat,' in turn, grant propitious favor to the descendants, in terms of wealth, success, abundant harvests and many offspring" (Bolton, "Taiwanese Ancestor Cult"). The sense of "realness" -- that, for example, if when one wakes up one finds the living room downstairs suddenly becoming messy, or things mysteriously displaced, one feels, and is convinced, that the ghost of great grand aunti has done all these as a sign of her anger, as a warning that her hunger needs to be taken care of, or else... that, that is, the meaning of personal life- and natural events, even the vicissitudes of weather, lies not in the movement of molecules but in the psychology of the deity -- does not contain any trace of violent desire toward others. "Scapegoating" is simply not common sense (i.e. not there) in most of the ritual experiences. Modern scholars ignore the superstitious experiential core of religiousness and start inventing fancy psychological "projections" or "representations" (Girard: the "deferral of violence through representation") to explain it because they, having grown up in the structural perspective, simply cannot understand why people from the previous stage of the development of consciousness could have interpreted the events of the empirical world not in terms of the impersonal mechanics of molecules and atoms but entirely as the manifestations of an "unseen" conscious being. "God", of course, is actually "seen" in his manifestations (the events in question), and the belief in him is not fantasized but reasonable, as I have tried to show. Others, such as Chilton and Jay here, simply dismiss that there is any rationality in sacrifice at all, and consequently adopt the nihilistic view that no comprehensive explanations can possibly exist. Both Jay and Chilton point out the fact that sometimes the participants themselves either did not have explanations for their sacrificial rituals or did not agree on a single explanation. (Jay, p. 10; Chilton, Typology and the End of Explanation.) For Chilton, "the grand design of explaining sacrifice is itself a product of modern mystification." (Ibid.) This seems certainly applicable to Girard. Jay is of the opinion that any post-sacrificial explanation of sacrifice itself is a social act just as much as the sacrifice is, and hence already determined by the social circumstances of the explaining person which are different from those of the act s/he seeks to explain. One then goes on to show how sacrifice "creates" the institution of patriliny just as the wedding vow ("Yes I do") "creates" marriage -- since one can as well stand on one's head to "index" the existence of marriage, the act itself becomes wholly arbitrary and conventional -- and the other looks into the mimetic structure in a meal. They completely ignore the experience of the sacrificing people, whose origin is indeed hard to put into rational causal terms, as my struggle has taught me. (Chilton, after all, comes near: "By 'ideological transaction' [his interpretative scheme], we do not predetermine the meaning or sense which sacrifice will be accorded in a given culture; nor do we presuppose that conscious meaning or sense is a necessary part of a given act of sacrifice. What we do observe under the third aspect of the typology is that peoples who sacrifice generally believe that they and/or their gods are different after the sacrifice from what they were beforehand." Ibid. In a chemical reaction the reactant has become different in the product.) Since sacrifice seems to be a relatively late phenomenon in human tribal existence, all the sacrificial traditions around the world must have arisen independently of one another; their similarity therefore only indicates that there must be a universal human experience running through them all and motivating diverse peoples to engage in them. In the end, it is the older theorists such as E. B. Tylor or Robertson Smith who are closer to the experiential content of sacrifice: "The analogy [Tylor] pursues is that as prayer 'is a request made to a deity as if he were a man, so sacrifice is a gift made to a deity as if he were a man'"; moreover, "[Tylor]... discusses the ways in which the medium of sacrifice in smoke and fire indicates an interest in the 'essence' [i.e. life, energy] of what is offered, rather than in the thing itself." Whereas Tylor is more on the expiatory side, R. Smith is on the communion: "insofar as sacrifice is a species of social eating, that food is the predominant material of sacrifice is not in the least unusual... He understood sacrifice as a systemically communal act... Moreover, Robertson Smith correctly recognized that it was the social dimension of sacrifice, its celebration and consumption of the fruits of common labor, which produced 'the habitually joyous temper of ancient sacrificial worship.'" (Chilton, "The Challenge of Understanding Sacrifice from an Anthropological Perspective") In the Chinese tradition the communion is also not to be missed: "According to the [oracle bone] pictographs archaeologists have been able to decipher, there were in Shang thirty-seven categories of blood and food sacrifices. Some of them were completely or partially burned or buried. The total burning of sacrifice has usually been interpreted as a way to feed the spirits in the form of smoke climbing up the heavens. Humans were completely burned either to satisfy the ancestral appetite, or, as scapegoats, to exonerate the community from evil. Partial burning may have had, in addition, the purpose of communal feasting." (Plutschow, ibid.) As Chilton elegantly puts it: "For Girard, in the beginning was the mob. In my understanding, the meal is prior." ("A Response to Things Hidden From the Foundation of the World: In the Beginning Was the Meal")

Sacrifice, as Jay insists, is mostly practiced by agrarian societies and is rare among the simple hunter-gatherers. Other than with patriliny and property rights (Jay's focus), this probably has to do with the fact that the hunter-gatherers have less surplus resources to waste on rituals, let alone human sacrifices. But as the case of the Australian Aborigine has demonstrated, the regeneration of the cosmos can be accomplished through other means than physically feeding it with food, such as the cosmogonic-catalytic drama they enact periodically. It is therefore the same strand of experience which runs through all religions, sacrificial or not, i.e. that -- as Mircea Eliade has noted -- the cosmos and society are conceived of as organisms like human beings that would collapse unless it takes in energy -- based on the understanding of the thermodynamics of entropy and of order as an open system.

Girard's consequent exaltation of the New Testament, of the love that Christ brings when he, totally innocent of any crime, voluntarily offers himself to be scapegoated in order for us to be sustained in social order, is therefore similarly suspect. In the following we shall note two meanings of Jesus' sacrifice. One is of the expiatory, a sort of ultimate karmic compensation, that we have sinned so much, injured God so much, that nothing short of the sufferings from our utter destruction can be enough to compensate God's suffering. We must consequently be put to death: it is really becoming a punishment, a legalistic problem of justice, rather than sacrifice. God's mercy then results in his offering of himself as a substitute: it is not quite the same as a piaculum. This is the meaning that subsists ordinarily in contemporary Western Christianity. The other, rather forgotten, is the communion. Jesus refers to himself as the true bread fallen from heaven, the bread of life (John, 6: 32, 35), egw eimi o artoV o zwn o ek tou ouranou katabaV. ean tiV faghi ek toutou tou artou zhsei eiV ton aiwna, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eat of this bread he shall live for ever. kai o artoV de on egw dwsw h sarx mou estin uper thV tou kosmou zwhV, "and the bread I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the cosmos." (J. 6: 51) o trwgwn mou thn sarka kai pinwn mou to aima ecei zwhn aiwnion, kagw anasthsw auton thi escathi hmerai. "Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day." (J. 6: 54) Jesus is thus like the totemic sacrificial animal for a communion feast: the manifestation of God himself which we eat to regenerate our order. But here the order is regenerated once and for all for it is regenerated beyond the world (after the last day of the world, after the world has perished from total entropic disintegration: eschatology of the Israelite prophets!) onto eternity, never to degenerate again. In other words, this ultimate eating has cancelled the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that the open system would collapse to equilibrium except with the influx of energy; and has raised the eater to the world of eternity, the world of eternal conservation, where this order of ours need no longer any energy influx as in the temporal world in order to subsist -- because, that is, temporality and spatiality no longer apply in the world of eternity. What happens in Christianity is therefore that sacrificial religiousness -- communion sacrifice here, but also expiatory sacrifice -- which is periodic in structure has been linearized into a process pointing toward a single act of communion-expiatory restoration at the end of time. This is the operation of eschatology as "diachronization of primitive religiousness" which we'll see later. In the analogy with the infant, Jesus' sacrifice is like the infant completely eats the mother and by so doing never has to experience hunger again.

Footnotes:

1. The versions of the Old Testament used here: the New Internation Version, Nova Vulgata, and the Septuagint.

2. How a tree works.


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