Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
not eat (at an ordinary Greek sacrifice, by the way, those who conducted the rite would eat; Hermes is doing something unusual). I shall later speak more fully of why “his proud heart” prevails, but suffice it to say for now that Hermes restrains one desire in favor of another. It seems that Hermes’ status is not clear at the beginning of the Hymn: is he an Olympian god or is he a half-breed from a single-parent cave? As he himself says to his mother after returning from his night of crime:
“I’m ready to do whatever I must so that you and I will never go hungry. You’re wrong to insist we live in a place like this. Why should we be the only gods who never eat the fruits of sacrifice and prayer? Better always to live in the company of other deathless ones—rich, glamorous, enjoying heaps of grain—than forever to sit by ourselves in a gloomy cave.”
If the trickster in the Raven cycle comes down from heaven to the world of fish and work, here we find a cousin trickster hoping to travel in the opposite direction on the same road. In deciding not to eat meat, Hermes is preparing himself to be an Olympian. To eat meat is to be confined to the mortal realm, and Hermes has higher goals. He doesn’t want to be a cave boy, he’d rather be a shining prince. He is hungry for the food of the gods, “the fruits of sacrifice and prayer,” not the meat itself. By not eating, it’s as if he’s sacrificing his own intestines along with the meat, or, in the imagery of the Hymn, denying his salivary glands in favor of his heart’s pride. Against the rules he stole a cow and killed it, as Coyote did, but having violated that limit he imposes another in its stead. Or rather, what I’ve translated as his “heart” imposes another. The Greek word in question is thymos, usually translated as “heart,” “soul,” or “breath”; it can also mean “mind,” because the Homeric Greeks located intelligence in the chest and the speaking voice, not in the silent brain. In this story, then, we see a meat-thief intelligence setting a limit to appetite and by so doing avoiding death, the hook hidden in that meat.
MEAT SACRIFICE
It is often said that when Hermes slaughters the cattle he is inventing the art of sacrifice.* I’m not sure the Hymn itself offers enough evidence for that claim. It does say clearly that Hermes invents the lyre and the shepherd’s pipes; it says he “is responsible for fire-sticks and fire”; but it is silent as to who invented sacrifice. Nonetheless, if we set the Hymn in the context of other trickster tales the claim becomes more plausible. In West Africa, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the Yoruba trickster Eshu is “the father of sacrifice,” having gotten human beings to offer meat to the gods in return for insight into the will of heaven. Another example, the one that will help us see Hermes in context, appears in the story of that other Greek trickster, Prometheus. Both Prometheus and Hermes dream up clever tricks to change their relationship to meat, but Hermes turns out to be the more cunning of the two, for Prometheus is a little slow to figure out where the dangers of appetite really lie.
As the ancients tell the tale, Prometheus and Zeus got into a fight toward the end of the Golden Age. Prometheus had created people out of clay; from the events that follow, it seems likely that he wished to increase their portion in the world. In the Golden Age, humankind neither grew old quickly nor died in pain, but they were nonetheless mortal and perhaps Prometheus wished them immortality. In any event, he and Zeus got into a dispute that focused on which parts of a slaughtered ox the gods would eat and which would be food for human mouths. Prometheus divided the ox into two portions, and because Zeus was to have first choice, he disguised them: the better part (the edible meat) he made unappealing by covering it with the ox’s stomach (Greeks did not eat the belly, the tripe); the lesser part (the inedible bones) he covered with fat to make it look like rich meat.
Zeus was not deceived, however; he could see beneath the surfaces of the Promethean shell game. And yet he didn’t choose the “better” portion, he chose the bones. Hesiod writes: “Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw … the trick, and in his heart he thought mischief against mortal men … With both hands he took up the white fat …” Then Hesiod adds the point that is of interest here: “And because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars.” Promethean trickery thus leads to the first sacrifice.
It leads to much more, as well, which should be mentioned briefly. The “mischief” that Zeus “thought against mortals” took several forms: he hid fire from them and, after Prometheus stole that fire back, he sent Pandora as a sort of poisonous gift. For Hesiod, that earliest of misogynists, it is Pandora who really brought an end to the all-male Golden Age club, for with her came sexual reproduction, sickness, insanity, vice, and toil. After Prometheus, humans have fire and meat; they also age quickly and die in pain.
If we now look closely at the way in which Prometheus apportions the slaughtered ox, we will see that he is in fact a witless trickster here, abandoned by his fabled foresight. Not unlike Coyote, who gets too caught up in hunger to escape from it, Prometheus fails to perceive the true meaning of the portions he so carefully arranges. To see that meaning, to see what Zeus apparently sees, it helps to know that for the Greeks the bones stand for immortality. They are the undying essence, what does not decay (they are, for example, what was preserved when the Greeks cremated a body). Conversely, in all ancient Greek literature the belly stands for needy, shameless, inexorable, overriding appetite. In this tradition, the belly is always called “odious,” “evil-doing,” “contemptible,” “deadly,” and so on. At one point in the Odyssey, Odysseus exclaims: “Is there nothing more doglike [or shameless] than this hateful belly? It always arouses us, obliges us not to forget it, even at the height of our troubles and anguish.”
The symbolism suggests, then, that those who eat the belly-wrapped meat must take the same thing as their portion in the world. When Zeus leaves for mortals that Promethean “better” share, mortals perforce become the very thing that they have eaten; they become meat sacks, bellies that must be filled over and over with meat simply to delay an inexorable death. Prometheus tries to be a cunning encoder of images, but Zeus is a more cunning reader, and the meat trick backfires.
The story of Promethean sacrifice, then, is not one in which a hungry trickster sacrifices appetite or intestines but one in which, as a result of a foolish trick, human beings get stuck with endless hunger as their portion. Like the tale of Raven eating the shin scabs, it is a story of the origin of appetite, and of descent. After Prometheus, humans are snared in their own hunger, a trap in which they quickly age and die. Prometheus does not suffer that human fate himself, nor does he become an insatiable eater like Raven, but Zeus binds him to a rock where an eagle eternally devours his liver—each night the liver grows back, each day the eagle eats it again. In his own way, then, Prometheus suffers from unremitting hunger, as do humans—and Raven.
With this Promethean trick in mind, let’s now return to the question of whether or not trickster invents sacrifice. To answer, it helps to know that, in the culture from which Prometheus and Hermes come, sacrifice is ritual apportionment. That is to say, the distributed portions of a Greek sacrifice represented the more abstract “portions” of the parties involved, their political and spiritual functions. The bones, for example, are the gods’ concrete portion but also stand for their spiritual portion, their immortality. Or—another example—priests cooked and ate the viscera of a sacrificed animal; it was at once their portion in fact and a symbol of their place in the community. The way the Greeks divided an animal made a map of the way their community was divided. If you saw someone eating the thigh of an ox, you could assume he was a high magistrate of the city.
In such a system, when people imagine the first sacrifice they will also be imagining an original apportioning. And if the beginnings amount to a change in apportionment,* as seems to be the case with both Hermes and Prometheus, then sacrifice will probably be invented by way of some trick or deceit, for such a change usually has the less powerful taking a share away from the more powerful (in this case, for example, Prometheus hopes to take power away from the gods). Whatever trickster pulls this trick does not initially invent sacrifice, therefore; first