Smoke Signals for the Gods

F.S. Naiden’s Smoke Signals for the Gods is a landmark study of Greek sacrifice.

Naiden’s main opponents are Walter Burkert (Homo Necans), who views sacrifice psychologically as an act of sublimated violence, and Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, whose Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks replaces Burkert’s “Teutonic guilt” with French sociology, commensality, and “Gallic deletation” (Naiden, 4). For Detienne and Vernant, sacrifice centers on the solidarity of an egalitarian mean; for Burkert, it centers on an act of killing that is covered by the pretense that the animal is a willing victim.

Naiden thinks that both paradigms leave out some of the most important features of sacrifice – gods and priests and prayer, for instance.  Both Burkert and Detienne/Vernant also view sacrifice as more or less automatic; so long as it’s done according to procedure, and the worshiper is not in a state of impurity, the ritual has its effect. 

Naiden thinks that it’s time to give up “atheistic” interpretations of Greek sacrifice and reintroduce religion into Greek religion. For the ancient Greeks, Naiden argues, sacrifice was not primarily killing or a community-forming meal. It was an effort to gain the attention and favor of a god. Greeks sent up smoke to heaven, accompanied by prayers that the god would pay attention and respond. They dressed up their sacrificial victims with shining foil on the horns to give pleasure to the gods, and they accompanied the sacrifice with singing and dance, again to entertain the gods who were the watchers of the sacrifice. Priests often performed the killing and burning, a fact that undermines the egalitarian image presented by the French school. Contrary to Burkert, the gods gave instructions about the requirements and procedures for sacrifice.

And the worshipers had no guarantees that the sacrifice would work. They prepared themselves ceremonially with lustrations, but they also had to be prepared morally, and past infractions might prevent a god from responding (Zeus doesn’t respond to Odysseus because Odysseus abused Poseidon’s son the Cyclops, and Zeus was showing deference to his fellow deity).

Naiden traces both Burkert and Detienne/Vernant back to the nineteenth century, nicely observing that the nineteenth century has somehow survived into the twenty-first. These contemporary paradigms of Greek sacrifice haven’t advanced much beyond Hegel, Robertson Smith, and Durkheim. His genealogy of contemporary theories of sacrifice goes wobbly when he turns to theology. He states, for instance, that “the Eucharist was unproblematic” in the Middle Ages (291), which would be news to Berengar, and he says, weirdly, that Jonathan Edwards rejected the Eucharist and attacked the sacrifice of Christ (294). 

Despite missteps, Naiden is able to show how indebted anthropology and classics remains to Christian categories, long after the practitioners of these disciplines have renounced any Christian confession. As Naiden says, “Paul bequeathed to nineteenth-century social scientists ideas about the willing victim, redemption through bloodshed, and the sacred meal” (314).

Naiden’s volume is a joy to read – breezy and witty, but obviously the product of deep exposure not only to classical sources but to modern classical scholarship. He is at home in the current scholarly landscape, but unlike his trendier colleagues (in most every discipline) he draws on nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship as well. His book is a giant step forward in the effort to put religion back into scholarship on Greek religion.