It'll be helpful for us now to take a
quick half step back and think a little bit about ritual.
We made some commentaries in the beginning opening lecture talking about how
important the establishment of rituals in honor of the gods are in these Homeric
hymns, and we're going to see that in many of them, ritual activity is actually built
into the mythic narrative. Well, in the broader scheme of things,
rituals and myths are intimately connected, and we're going to find this
focus on the Homeric hymns gives us a chance to draw up these connections and
look at how these two areas are quite interestingly and mutually illuminating of
each other. One quick note on term, terminology before
we get started we're going to use the word cult in this class to mean just ritual
activity at all. So, any time we talk about.
Human beings worshiping divinities, we're gonna use the word, cult, for the activity
that they're engaged in. Ritual for us is going to be labeled as,
cult. Now this is not a value, judgment, term.
The term in English, cult, sometimes has, a very specific kind of definition of a
splinter, nonstandard group that may do, be doing something out of the ordinary.
That's not at all how we use it when scholars refer to ancient, ritual
activity. We'll talk about cult in honor of Athena,
or cult in honor of Dionysus, or whatever it happens to be.
It's a standard term in our field. Now you're neutral.
That label's ritual activity. Any rites performed in honor of a god.
We don't know a lot about specific religious rituals across the board in
antiquity. There's not a lot of information about how
specific rituals worked. We do have some windows in to one or the
other of these what we'll be reading with Homeric hymns to the meter gives us a
close up look at Eleusinian mysteries. It's one of the cultic practices details
we know something about, but for the most part we don't know a lot of details about
any individual religious cult. There are, we know some things about them
in general. They are very important in each city.
The cities themselves have a civic component to their religious activity.
To worship the god or goddess that is the patron of the city is also an expression
of civic collectiveness and being together,
Having a sense of identity as a Spartan or an Athenian, or whatever it might happen
to be. There is also a linkage between the
calendration. So the months of the year such as they
unfold according to the normal cycle of seasons, and religious festivals and
activities. So the calendration, the time, our, our
understanding of time in our city is linked to our practice of religious cult.
These festivals can be in honor of, of will be in honor of a god.
They could be in special locations, sometimes in the civic center, sometimes
far away. A long's day walk maybe even two to three
days walk and be cast outside of the normal environs of the city giving us an
open space in which we can engage in something that's a little bit out of the
ordinary for our normal civic life. Ritual activities, there are many that are
common in antiquity. There is the act of purification.
So in order to get engaged in an activity before we engage in ritual action we've
got to clean ourselves. That could mean in a river, in any piece
of water any body of water. An ablution that helps wash away whatever
impurities might be on us. We may then put on special clothing that's
a certain kind of clean and not normally used in everyday life kind of clothing.
We have processions as indicated here in our wonderful, frieze, from located
currently in the British museum. We have processions, where we'll have a
dedication. A long march of us, all together walking
up to a temple or an altar and some dedication given to the god.
There will be fasting that's involved at different points in the ritual calendar.
There might be fasting that leads into ritual activity.
Fasting during ritual activity or after. There are certain kinds of foods that we
may associate with these ritual actions. There will be some kind of special drink
or food that we only eat during certain times, that are connected, with our, with
our ritual action. One focus that generally shows up in
ancient cult is the practice of sacrifice. You can see our poor bull here behind me
getting some nasty treatment from the human beings that are surrounding him.
Yes indeed the ancient Greeks did practice live sacrifice.
They would take animals. The larger the mammal the, the better.
And put the an-, give the animal a special kind of preparation, making it go through
a certain kind of purification. There may be particular kinds of
decoration that are attached to the animal.
The animal is then led to an altar and ritually slaughtered,
Where it's cut open, it is killed in honor of the divinity.
At that point you and I then would carve up the meat and share it out and have a
chance of having a large protein rich dinner in honor of a god. we would give a
god a certain kind of sacrifice we've already discovered from Hesia's theogony,
that we know what that is, thigh bones wrapped in fat.
That's what apparently the gods want. You and I get to keep the good stuff for
ourselves. We can eat the meat and the entrails and
all the rich food from the, from the animal ourselves.
Cows are the sort of best of the kind of sacrifice a person could give.
Bulls, oxen, the largest ones larger ones the better.
But there are other things that are sacrificed, that are appropriate
sacrifices to the gods, Including things like sheep or goats.
Pigs also. Piglets are there.
They're very cheap. So is poultry.
You can sacrifice that to a god. Typically it's not the case that the
ancients would have sacrificed fish. They didn't really do that.
Other kinds of birds they didn't really do, either.
If it is a bird it would be something like poultry.
The things that a god likes to eat, map on pretty closely to things you and I like to
eat. At the end of this ceremony comes the
consumption. There could also be a non animal,
non-animal sacrifices. We could sacrifice grains, first fruits.
We pour out ablutions to the gods, pouring out wine, water, milk whatever it might
be. In the sacrifice it's a curious kind of
custom to imagine that the gods want us to kill animals.
That's strange. It's not idiosyncratic to the Greeks.
It's actually common all around the ancient Mediterranean and in other parts
of the Old World as well. There are generally different kinds of
customary explanations for why this activity is engaged in.
As anthropologists in contemporary world have looked back on the rituals some
suggestions have been made as to why this thing might be done, why is it that we as,
as Greeks engage in the killing of a live animal, why does our god want us to do
this? There's a clear.
Indication here that there's a demand by the god that such a thing be done.
And there's been a suggestion among contemporary scholars that one thing
that's happening, is that human beings are transferring, whatever guilt they might
feel at killing a live animal and consuming its flesh, they're transferring
that guilt onto the gods. The gods made us do it, we have to kill
this thing. Now, now that we've killed it and given
the bones and the fat to the god, all this leftover meat, well, we might as well eat
that too. There's a possibility here that there's a
kind of blood guilt that humans feel at killing and eating animals and so we
enlist the gods to help us explain why it is we do it.
The. Thematics of the sacrifice are pretty
clear, we're killing an animal and that killing of the animal reinforces its
mortality may also remind us of our own, and sets all of us, humans an animals and
the rest of us that are destined to live these terrestrial lives, in strong
contrast to those Olympian divinities that live forever and ever.
So the death of a sacrifice confirms by contrast the deathlessness of the gods to
whom we sacrifice. Then also at the end of the sacrifice, we
have mentioned this in two earlier classes in fact when we talked about Hesiod and
Homer, You and I get a chance to share some yummy
kind of meat. So we get a chance to dig into some really
extraordinary foodstuffs. Those, you and I who are living on
grape-based diets, we ancient Greeks. Also, wine is an important part of the
sacrifice, or, or of the, of the ritual. There may be some pouring out, poured out.
On the alter we'll see some wine that gets poured out as a libation, but we'll also
have wine that's consumed. In the Rites of Dionet, Dionysus, this
wine is consumed to utter excess, to the point where a person is drunken in, in an,
in an almost violent way, extreme and completely out of their mind.
This was part of what the ritual as all about, as depicted here, on a lovely
amphora. We see that, that kind of thing is going
to happen. It's typical in.
All ancient ritual that wine is a part of it, excessive drunken, drunkenness is
actually a, perfectly acceptable in ancient religious context excesive
drunkenness, such as we see in Dionysiac cults though, is idiosyncratic to Dionysus
We'll also see this examples as we see here of, of we, we have an example of the
pouring out of libations out on top of an altar.
Such a thing is going to happen. As the wine becomes a part of the
sacrifice too. Now we're going to see grand events that
happen, round festivals. There'll be theatrical performances built
into religious festivals such as what happened here at our lovely theater of
Dionysus. There are also going to be games built
into religious sacrifices, songs, contests of all kinds.
It's likely, but we're not absolutely sure of this context, but it's likely that it
is within these festival and religious contexts that the hymns would have been
originally performed. So when we have a long weekend festival in
honor of Athena, and there are games and feasts and festivals, sacrifices,
drinking, all in her honor, we would have a closing off ceremony where there would
be some or at least some moment during the ceremony where there would be some singing
in honor of a god or goddess, and a hymn would have been a very appropriate form
for that to be. Now see, we're not 100% certain of that
context, but it seems to stand to reason that this ritual activity is going to be
built into not just the thematics of the stories that we see, but also into the.
Modes by which they were performed and heard by the ancient audiences.