What to make of the strange image of a god performing religious rituals?
Years ago, while walking through the familiar classical galleries of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I was arrested by a detail of Attic red-figure vase-painting that had escaped me before: an altar. Not an unusual feature. Making offerings to the divine was a potent, ubiquitous fact of ancient Greek religious life: "The central ritual of Greek religion, from the pouring of libations onwards, is the offering to the god." This particular altar is the organizing axis of the register of a great three-handled kalpishydria, a water-carrying vessel. The vase is ascribed to the Berlin Painter, one of the great masters of ancient Greek vase-painting. It dates from about 485 B.C.E., that is, from the very late archaic period -- in fact between the two times of Hellas's greatest menace from Persia.
What stopped me was that the altar was not the focus of a sacrifice performed by human beings. Instead, six Olympian gods and goddesses converged on it from either side. The deities appeared to be themselves worshipers at a sacrifice, forming their own procession. What did this majestic vase mean?
A painted plaque from the archaic Saphtouli cave-site near Pitsa gives us the elements of canonical Greek animal sacrifice. The animal victim, in this case a ram, is led to the altar in procession, accompanied by the music of flutes. The atmosphere is one of order, peace, and holiness. The worshipers bear the ritual implements of wine jug, basket (kanoun), barley (oulai), and woolen fillets, called stemmata. The wine jug, or oinochoe, was used to fill the libation bowl, or phiale, whose contents were poured out as an offering, either directly onto the altar to the Olympian powers, or into the ground to the chthonian powers or to the dead -- that is, to the underworld.
Despite the contemporary belief that "the normal sacrificial cult is a cult without revelation or epiphany," primary evidence suggests that the Greeks believed that the gods both attended and responded to sacrifice. In Book 12 of the Odyssey, the island Phaiakians are described as being so blessed that when they sacrificed they could actually see the gods' huge, luminous forms superintending. The presence of the deity is often implied in art by a cult statue, as we see in an archaic belly-amphora in Berlin, in which Athena Promachos receives a sacrificial procession at a stone altar or in a trefoil oinochoe from the same museum showing a Dionysiac herm presiding over a flaming altar as two worshipers approach with basket and flute. But sometimes it is no stiff image that the vases show us at the altar, but the god's epiphany in his or her sacred animal or bird -- as in a black-figure hydria in Uppsala, in which an enormous owl just outside Athena's temple (as designated by the column) surely stands for the numinous presence of the goddess herself. The divine bird is the focus for the worshiper, hand raised in a canonical gesture of awe or reverence at the appearance of a deity, and also for the sacrificial beasts symmetrically ranged around the altar that is the bird's platform. Finally, there are vases like the Louvre red-figure bell-krater from the classical period in which the "living god" himself, in this case the ephebic Apollo with laurel staff and crown, serenely observes a sacrifice to himself in full swing with grilling meat, cake offerings, and poured libations upon an altar behind which grows the tree that is special to him, the laurel.
Erika Simon has identified the work of Nikolaus Himmelmann-Wildschutz as the most important response to her pioneering Opfernde G.tter. One can understand why. Rather than offering a superficial defense such as Nilsson's (which ends by collapsing upon itself ), this scholar dives deep into the heart of Simon's ideas, as well as those of Eckstein-Wolf and others, and thoughtfully refutes them on their own terms. He is familiar with and respectful of what has already been written on the subject, even though he profoundly disagrees with his predecessors. His own explanation for the numerous images of the "spendende Gotter" completely differs from the preceding general hypotheses offered as alternatives to Simon's.
Far from dismissing the frequent portrayal of the libating gods as an annoying footnote in ancient Greek iconography, Himmelmann calls it "the most important religious phenomenon in all of classical art." He claims that what we have is in a fact a brand new category of picture, in which the gods are exempt from all episodic contingency. He conceives of the world of the ancient Greek gods not as a mirror of the overheated, turbulent human world, but rather as a timeless, self-sustaining universe. Greek gods exist only for themselves. Their purpose is to be, not to do. Human beings may react to, importune, or seek to emulate them. But that is not the gods' concern; they are unaffected by the human drama below them, even though it is so drastically affected by the divine. This immortal "state of being" in splendid isolation takes place on a different, higher plane than the mortal. Accordingly, Himmelmann believes that archaic cult statues did not relate in any way to their viewers, even devotees.
Even more important, he feels that research indicates that "the phiale in the hand of a [cult] statue or an unmoving solitary figure cannot be related to mythical events." Rather, "it functions as a formulaic designation of a sacrificial recipient, intended to make visible his (the recipient's) relationship to the sacrificing mortal." Furthermore, he maintains that the god with the libation bowl from fifth-century vase-painting, whether motionless or animated, has an unassailable iconographic heritage in the earlier phiale-bearing cult statues. As in the case of the earlier plastic images, the gods' libations are an expression of their divine nature. These he calls Daseinsbilder: "images of being."
The scholarly consensus dissolves when confronted with the far more frequent representations of actively libating gods. The first is the school of Eckstein-Wolf, which Himmelmann describes as an elevation of a literal interpretation of libation scenes, which finds in the phiale a symbol of the connection between human and god. Even if one concedes this possibility in the case of individual divine figures, Himmelmann claims that it is inadequate for the "self-sufficient," self-contained world of the actively libating gods of vase-painting. His criticism is reinforced by the evidence from antiquity: Human beings virtually never appear with libating gods until the Athenian reliefs of the late fifth and the entire fourth centuries, and then they are invariably distanced from the offering scene by their size and servile attitude.
His main dispute, however, is clearly with Simon. Himmelmann insists that unique mythogical explanations for each of the major scenes of divine libation are untenable for two reasons. The first is that there are so many scenes on vase-paintings for which myth and legend do not provide us with an aition. He concedes that in myth there certainly do exist times when gods "apparently or actually" pour libations on occasions of prayer, oath, purification, reception, departure, or carousing. But these instances do not suffice to explain the abundance (or, one might add, the variety) of images that appear at the beginning of the fifth century.
That one cannot always find a narrative episode for each one of the abundant number of themes points to more than just a preliminary deficiency in Simon's approach; rather, it indicates a serious hermeneutical breakdown. For example, if one recognizes that the "sacrifice of marriage-oath" for the scenes of Zeus seated across from Hera as one or both deities pour out a libation, then what does one do with the presence of Athena, Apollo, or Ares, or Nike in the same scene, or with Zeus alone? The image must then be given a completely different explanation. What mythical episode is being portrayed? What about the libating Poseidon, Ares, or Athena shown offering with an unnamed young woman (perhaps Pandrosos)? He especially cites the depiction of the four seated deities on the pyxis in Athens, arguing that "it does not portray a unique mythological episode," but rather is presumed "to belong in the range of timeless images of being, that is, images of appearance."
In ancient Greek vase-paintings, Olympian worship seems to redound upon the gods who practice it. If there are no higher gods in sight or out of sight of the ones who are offering, what can be the religious idea behind such a phenomenon? Are the gods acting as human beings do? If so, do they do this to set an example? Or do the gods simply sacrifice to themselves? Does ritual, by dint of its performance, subordinate even the gods?
As the preceding studies have shown, the representation of gods engaged in the performance of ritual do not comprise an isolated phenomenon in the ancient Mediterranean, or even in the history of religion. The iconographic and literary evidence presented here depicts gods in highly diverse, if historically linked religious traditions, who themselves are the agents rather than the recipients of ritual. And there are others beyond the scope of this book. On classical Mayan vases, the gods perform ritual blood-letting on their own bodies, reiterating the royal -- and universal -- human obligation to recycle chul and maintain the cosmos. In Buddhist texts, the Buddha circumambulates the reliquary stu-pas of previous Buddhas. Egyptian murals of the goddess Isis show her playing the sistrum, the musical instrument of her own cult.
These anomalies -- mind-bending "exceptions" to transparent ritual hierarchies -- reimagine the relationship between gods, human beings, and ritual. We need a new theoretical framework for making sense of ritualizing gods, one that is both historically and theologically intelligible within the traditions in which such gods originate. This emic intelligibility cannot be overstressed, for without it, etic interpretation is impoverished, and ultimately fails in its inability to exegete religious phenomena according to internal logical operations.
The myriad historical data of divine religious action that have emerged in this book show the inadequacy of projectionist theorizing. Anthropomorphism, what Goitein called in the case of the paradoxical prayer of God, "religious psychology... [since] Man has always seen God in his own image..." is not enough to interpret that prayer as a historical idea. For even if ancient Greek gods -- or, pace Hegel and following Feuerbach and Durkheim, all gods -- are ultimately understood as products of human consciousness or as hypostases of social values, a currently privileged but unproven assumption, I have tried to show that ritualizing gods are too complex for projectionist theory to illumine completely; there remains too much in their deep structures, their matrices, for which we must account.
For example, as we have seen, the gods' rituals are, ironically, often somewhat "unorthodox" (such as God's mikveh in fire, not water, in the Talmud) and thus dissimilar from orthodox human ritual prescriptions. This is because the nature and agency of the gods in ritual always changes the ritual situation, and thus the hermeneutical task. The representation of the goddess who pours libations -- or the god who hangs himself as a sacrifice, or circumambulates, or purifies himself, or prays -- should not be understood as a straightforward case of replacing the human agent of religious action with a divine one. The utter difference of the divine as a category affects not only the action but also the agency of the ritual.
Along the same lines, the didactic or mimetic function that is ascribed to pious deities fails to account for the elements of ipseity, noncontingency, and autonomy that chronically characterize the holy. Whereas, as Rappaport remarks, the performance of human ritual generally subordinates or binds the performer on a number of levels -- that is, compromises her freedom and negates the possibility of randomness in her actions, at least temporarily -- divine ritual does not have that effect on its also divine performer.