“A GRATEFUL READER” writes:

Your discussion of Solange Hertz recalls today’s article on the Orthosphere  by Kristor. He discusses the book, The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks. He writes:

Three key insights inform everything in the book:

1. In the ancient world, essentially all the meat available for consumption in human settlements was the fruit of sacrificial rites.

2. Cookery and sacrifice were therefore aspects of the same procedure. Sacrifice was the way animals were slaughtered and butchered in preparation for cooking; cooking the meat was part of the sacrificial rite.

3. Participation in the communal feast on the fruits of the sacrifice was the rite of social assimilation. To share the common meal was to declare loyalty to the cult, and to the settlement that it informed. To refuse participation – as with, e.g., vegetarian cults like that of the Pythagoreans – was to refuse membership in the community.

I always appreciate a good synopsis of a book or movie or situation, especially when I do not expect to read the book or watch the movie or delve into the situation in detail. So, I accept as a great gift someone else’s competently analysed explanation. After the above introduction, Kristor goes on to give us five pages of his notes on the subject, all of which are interesting, but the most important is that the altar and the communal meal are essential to civilization.

Thus it really is literally true that if there is no altar of sacrifice, there is no people, and a fortiori no civilization.

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