A sacred gift in a rock filled with resources

According to the anthropological timeline, we did the hunter-gatherer thing long before we did the agriculture thing. Those old hunter-gatherers lived awful, violent, short lives. They were what we call simple people.

They didn’t have huge, complex economic systems with paper money and stocks and bonds and savings accounts. All they had was what they could find and what they could kill. They didn’t even have television.

For entertainment, they hit each other with sticks. Science had not yet been invented. And yet, in some ways, these people had a better understanding of the world around them than we do today.

The people and the animals of that time were on a pretty even playing field. Because of this, the hunters felt a certain kinship with the animals. The hunt was an orchestrated game of sorts, designed by the gods. The hunters had their parts to play, and the animals had theirs. It was a ritual, perhaps the first ritual, and it was sacred.

The hunters needed to kill the animals, and yet, they weren’t entirely comfortable with it.

Because they felt so close to the animals, killing them was a constant reminder of their own mortality. So the people developed the ritual of animal sacrifice to help deal with this unpleasant necessity.

Animal sacrifice seems senseless and cruel to us more civilized folks. And, indeed, it was cruel.

But, as cruel as it was, it certainly wasn’t senseless. It was a way of giving something back to the gods who had given the people their sustenance. It also honored the animal and renewed the life cycle, because if you pour lifeblood into the land, the land will spit out more life.

To put it in terminology modern Christians will understand, it washed away their sin. Killing animals was a sin, but they needed to kill animals in order to live, so to cover their sin, they gave the best of what they had back.

When the agricultural revolution hit, people began settling down, forming villages and working the land. The farmers tried to keep their rituals, but it didn’t feel quite the same, as the story of Cain and Abel makes clear. In the story, Cain tries to sacrifice vegetables, but God is having none of it. Cain, upset that he can no longer reach God, lashes out and kills Abel. In moving from Abel’s nomadic lifestyle to Cain’s settled lifestyle, people started losing touch with the sacred, with God.

In the ancient Assyrian epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is conceived when a goddess spits on a rock. He lives in the forest with the animals, as an animal (just as Adam and Eve did, before they took the leap into self-consciousness). But Enkidu causes problems for the hunters nearby. He protects the animals he runs with, and won’t let the hunters catch their prey. So Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, sends a prostitute to tame the wild man. It works. After a seven-day sexual union (he had a bit of pent-up energy), the prostitute leads Enkidu through the walls of Uruk, into settled civilization.

Even as Enkidu is seeking civilization, Gilgamesh is bored with it. He wants to go out and have an adventure. Enkidu’s arrival offers him that opportunity. So Gilgamesh and Enkidu, once the protector of animals, go off to slay the greatest beast of them all, Humbaba, who guards the gateway to the heavens. And, in fact, it is Enkidu who urges Gilgamesh on for the kill, reveling in the naked brutality of the act.

Enkidu’s civilization turns what was once a sacred act into a profane one, what was once an acceptance of a gift from the gods into a cheap thrill. To Enkidu, animals are no longer the gods’ to give, but his to take. Enkidu, like Cain, has become callous to the sanctity of life.

The agricultural revolution is literally ancient history now. We have become ever more civilized and ever more intellectually advanced, a nation of progressive Enkidus.

Actually, we’re worse than that. Like Enkidu, we no longer respect the world. But unlike Enkidu, we can’t even take joy in killing it anymore.

This cannot be more clearly illustrated than by the way we treat our livestock. Even the word livestock is disrespectful. They are no longer animals; they are stock that just happen to breathe. They are currency with legs. They are money that bleeds.

Cattle and sheep and pigs and chickens are kept in cages and stuffed full of genetically modified, antibiotically enhanced food stuffings. Then they are shipped to a factory where they are lined up and unceremoniously shot in the back of the neck, skinned, drained, gutted, chopped up, processed and shaped into patties and nuggets for easy consumption.

This is symptomatic of a larger state of mind. We cut down trees, we dig for oil, we mine for ore. All of this is OK in moderation, and I certainly don’t want to give up my cushy middle-class existence. But we have gone far beyond the limits of moderation. The earth is no longer a living entity; it is a rock filled with resources.

Before Christ died, at the Last Supper, he broke bread with his disciples. “This bread is my body,” he said. “This wine is my blood.” The Communion is intricately tied into Christ’s sacrifice, which itself is intricately tied into the idea of animal sacrifice. It is not just a ritual of figurative remembrance as our modern Western minds would have us believe.

It is a reminder of the literal pantheistic aspect of God, of our connection to him and the earth. The bread is his body; the wine is his blood. The earth is a part of God. When we take from the earth, we are taking from God. It is a sacred gift. And it requires more than a short prayer at Thanksgiving.

But we give nothing back now. We barely even think about it. We just take and take and take.

Justin Fowler is a student at University College of Bangor. He may be reached via justin.fowler@verizon.net. Voices is a weekly commentary by Maine people who explore issues affecting spirituality and religious life.