God Against the Gods (8 page)

Some of the most common examples of human sacrifice are among the most horrifying and heartrending: the burial of a child in the foundation of a new building, the drowning of a virgin in a river or stream, or the mass cremation of slaughtered babies, all in an effort to please or appease some god or goddess. Such may have been the fate of the two six-year-olds whose blackened skeletons were uncovered at the sanctuary of Gezer or the fifteen-year-old girl whose remains were dug out of the foundations of an ancient building at Megiddo, both sites located in Israel and dated back to the biblical era, or the hundreds of urns containing the charred remains of children that were uncovered at the site of Carthage, which may have been the farthest outpost of the Middle Eastern god known in the Bible as Moloch.

Men and women all over the world have been inspired to perform the same rites, of course, the Incas of South America no less than the Carthaginians of North Africa. Stripped of the ghastly details, however, the underlying transaction was always the same: the goodwill of the gods was purchased at the price of human life. “Human sacrifice,” argues anthropologist and philosopher Edward Westermarck, “is essentially a method of life-insurance—absurd, no doubt, according to our ideas, but not an act of wanton cruelty.”
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One crucial benchmark in the history of religion, of course, is the shift from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice, a phenomenon that can be found in both monotheism and polytheism. The Bible depicts the very moment when God is first shown to express a preference for animals rather than human beings as sacrificial offerings—he demands that Abraham slay his own son, Isaac, and offer the corpse on the altar fire, then changes his mind even as Abraham is holding a knife over his son’s throat, finally providing the dutiful Abraham with a ram as a replacement.
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Thereafter, Yahweh demands only the sacrifice of animal life and the cutting of human flesh in the ritual of circumcision, a practice that may have originated as a surrogate form of sacrifice in which the foreskin of the male infant, rather than the whole child, is offered to the deity.

But monotheism cannot claim a monopoly on the replacement of human beings with animals as acceptable offerings on the altar of sacrifice. According to Greek myth, Agamemnon, who has managed to offend the goddess Artemis by hunting down a stag that she holds sacred, is warned by a soothsayer that the goddess will afflict his army with pestilence and his navy with an unnatural calming of the winds unless he offers his virgin daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice. Agamemnon, just like Abraham, finds the demand to be unremarkable and is perfectly willing to comply. At the last moment, the goddess Artemis—like the God of Israel—spares the young woman and provides a young deer to take her place on the altar fire.

The myth suggests that human sacrifice was already in decline in the Greco-Roman world in distant antiquity. The Vestal Virgins, for example, engaged in a ritual of sacrifice to Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, but they used straw effigies rather than human beings when they symbolically cast thirty sacrificial offerings into the Tiber on the Ides of May. By 97 B.C.E., when the Roman Senate formally adopted a law that criminalized the offering of human victims, animal sacrifice had long before replaced the offering of human flesh and blood to the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome.

Thus, for example, a hecatomb might be offered to Apollo, one hundred oxen slaughtered, quartered and put to the flames in a single offering, with a few pieces cast on the altar fire as a sacrifice to the high god and the rest offered to the celebrants as a pious feast. More exotic sacrifices depended on the tastes of the particular deity—Artemis, regarded as the protector of women ever since that episode with Agamemnon and his daughter, was believed to favor offerings of eggs, dates or the testicles of stallions. Priapus was thought to prefer a whole donkey. But human flesh was no longer on the divine menu.

Indeed, classical paganism prided itself on its highly civilized rituals of worship. Among the distinctions that the ancient Romans drew between themselves and the “barbarians” who threatened their empire was the
absence
of human sacrifice in their own religious practices. They were as shocked and disgusted as any of the biblical prophets at the tribes of northern Europe, who believed that the high god called Odin preferred to see his sacrificial victims put to death by strangulation and thus dubbed him “the god of the hanged,”
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or the Celts of Britain, who enclosed their human offerings in wicker baskets fashioned in the image of a god and then lowered the basket into a bonfire. Such pagan luminaries as Pliny and Cicero condemned these practices, and the Roman generals who conquered the barbarians and occupied their tribal lands expended much effort in suppressing the practice of human sacrifice.

Of course, some of the citizens of civilized Rome may have been as reluctant as the “stiff-necked” Israelites to give up the old ways of worship. A century after the first laws against human sacrifice were enacted by the Senate, the emperor Hadrian (76-138) deemed it necessary to issue a new edict against the same practice. “The very laws which the Romans drew up against certain kinds of human sacrifice,” observes historian Nigel Davies, “are the surest proof they existed.”
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As late as the third century, the Roman historian Porphyry was still fretting over the occasional lapses: “Who does not know that to this day, in the great city of Rome, at the feast of Jupiter Latiaris, they cut the throat of a man?”
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Then, too, some of the most familiar scenes of ancient Rome represent the survival of human sacrifice in a slightly different form. The famous gladiatorial combats in the Colosseum and other arenas all over the Roman empire were, in fact, religious ceremonies in which the victor was understood to dedicate the vanquished to the honor of the gods. Even a common criminal might be seen as a kind of sacrificial victim—if a man were arrested and convicted for the offense of stealing grain, for example, he suffered a death sentence that was understood to be both a criminal penalty and an offering to Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

But classical paganism cannot be charged with the practice of human sacrifice of the kind that is described in the Bible, and even the offering of animal sacrifice was in sharp decline by the beginning of the Common Era. The imperial cult of ancient Rome was satisfied with ceremonies that required only the offering of wine and cakes or the casting of a pinch of incense on the altar fire rather than the cutting of flesh or the spilling of blood, human
or
animal. Indeed, as we shall see, the emperor Julian was famously heartbroken when he visited a temple of Apollo in the hope of witnessing one of the legendary hecatombs about which he had read in the
Iliad
, which served some of the same functions in classical paganism that the Bible serves in monotheism, and found only a solitary priest chasing a single forlorn goose.

Goddesses and Priestesses

From its very earliest stirrings, of course, paganism envisioned the various deities as both male and female and afforded a place for both men and women in its rites and rituals. Against the Only True God of monotheism—a masculine deity, both a bachelor and a loner—and his exclusively male priesthood, the traditions of polytheism recognized and honored the fact that human beings are distinguished by gender. Some of the most beguiling and beloved of the pagan deities, in fact, were female. The tutelary spirit known as Tyche or Fortuna, who was thought to embody the “genius” and good luck of a city, was regarded as feminine, for example, and so were all the deities of love and fertility: Aphrodite and Athena, Ishtar and Astarte.

Flesh-and-blood women, too, were afforded a crucial and prominent place in paganism. They served as priestesses, presiding over cults that consisted wholly of other women or sometimes men and women alike. Some cults, like that of the goddess Vesta, required priestesses to be virgins, while others, like that of the god Dionysus, restricted the most elevated roles to women who were married. Women participated in many of the pastimes that were dedicated to the gods and thus amounted to sacred rituals—singing and dancing, oratory and recitation, athletic games and contests. Women were initiated into the highest orders of some, if not all, of the mystery cults, and they were granted the power to initiate others into the same mysteries.

Some of these women served in roles that are among the most famous and most familiar expressions of paganism: the Vestal Virgins, for example, who tended the altar fire of the goddess of the hearth; the Pythonesses, who spoke in the voice of the gods at Delphi and Eleusis; and the Sibylline oracles, whose collected writings served as the basic text of pagan prophecy. But others have been wholly forgotten—some nameless women, for example, competed in the games that were dedicated to the goddess Hera as a kind of female counterpart to the ancient Olympiad, and others actually put on armor, picked up a weapon and entered a coliseum to fight as gladiators in the formalized public combat that served as a ritual of worship in ancient Rome. But, far more often, goddesses and priestesses focused on the most basic human experiences—“childbirth, puberty, marriage, serious illness, and death,” according to Ross Shepard Kraemer
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—and the most fundamental human yearnings for comfort and cure.

“Female deities were extolled as healers, dispensers of curative herbs, roots, plants and other medical aids,” explains Merlin Stone in
When God Was a Woman
, “casting the priestesses who attended the shrines into the role of physicians of those who worshiped there.”
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Pagan women were commonly accused of bad motives and bad conduct by both Jewish and Christian sermonizers. If a woman presided over the ritual of worship to a goddess of love, for example, she was condemned as a whore. If she concocted one of the brews and potions that were thought to cure illness and promote conception, she was condemned as a witch. But the priestesses and prophetesses, seeresses and sorceresses, can also be seen as practitioners of something far more benign: “Even the witches of Thessaly, whom people credited with the power of making the moon descend from the sky,” allows Franz Cumont, “were botanists more than anything else, acquainted with the marvelous virtues of medicinal plants.”
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Pagans as Puritans

To be sure, the pagans of imperial Rome indulged in some of the practices that are harshly condemned in the Bible. Prostitutes were readily available, male and female alike, and slave owners were not reluctant to bed down with their female slaves. A Roman patrician might dally without censure with a beautiful young boy, a beautiful young girl or both. Even the sexless were sometimes put to use as sexual objects: “[T]he emperors of the Late Empire employed the services of eunuchs,” explains historian Pierre Chuvin, “and sometimes their bodies when they were attractive.”
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Homosexuality, bisexuality and prostitution all served a dual purpose—they were sources of sexual pleasure and, at the same time, they functioned as a form of birth control, which may have been one reason that they were tolerated. Abortion, too, was available, and the most appalling form of family planning was the exposure of infants—an unwanted baby, especially a baby girl, might be abandoned in some out-of-the-way place and left to die. Abandoned babies were sometimes snatched up and later sold off as slaves—the Greek surname Kopreus, which means “off the dung-heap,” was sometimes taken as a sign that its bearer had been abandoned at birth and then rescued.
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But paganism had its prudes, too. Pagans in polite society placed a high value on virginity, and women were expected to refrain from sex until they married. Adultery was regarded as a sin and even a crime. One temple in ancient Pergamum, for example, required a worshipper to wait for one full day to pass after having sex with his wife before he was permitted to participate in the ritual of sacrifice—and two full days after having sex with someone else’s wife. Tellingly, the dream collector Artemidorus, anticipating Kinsey as well as Masters and Johnson by some eighteen centuries, confirms that men who paid for the services of prostitutes reported that they experienced feelings of shame and remorse and, not incidentally, a pinch on the pocketbook.

Nor were the rituals of worship in classical paganism the scenes of orgiastic excess that are depicted in both religious tracts and Hollywood movies. Priests and priestesses in many of the pagan cults were expected to remain celibate—the virgins who tended the altar of Vesta in ancient Rome were the most famous example but hardly the only one. Indeed, the priests of Isis and Cybele were expected to castrate themselves to remove any possibility of breaking their vows of celibacy. If some of the worshippers of Bacchus or Cybele were prone to public displays of sexual excess, the more refined polytheists were just as scandalized as the monotheists. The Bacchanalia, as we have seen, was banned by the Roman senate precisely because it was regarded as an offense against pagan morality.

Contrary to what we have been encouraged to believe by the teachings of monotheism, the phrase “pagan morality” is
not
a contradiction in terms. The pagans may have been guilty of hypocrisy, praising virginity and fidelity while indulging in sexual adventures of various kinds, but they were no more hypocritical than worshippers of the Only True God who have shown themselves to be equally capable of failing to practice what they preach. Indeed, the moral aspirations and the moral failings of polytheism and monotheism—the longing to lead a decent life in the face of the thoroughly human tendency to do otherwise—were often one and the same. Thus did the pagan emperor Julian echo the prophet Isaiah when he describes the ideal pagan ruler as “one who is just, kind, humane, and easily moved to pity” and one who champions “the poor against those who are strong, dishonest, and wicked.”
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