scholarly journals Monumental altar from Singidunum with scenes of a sacrificial procession - pompa et immolatio

Starinar ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 95-109
Author(s):  
Nadezda Gavrilovic-Vitas
Keyword(s):  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
Lower Rank ◽  
Ritual Sacrifice ◽  
The Sacrifice

A monumental altar was found in the very centre of Belgrade, ancient Singidunum, in 1932, with iconographic scenes of the sacrificial procession for a ritual animal sacrifice - immolatio. The scenes depict the procession of sacrificial animals to the altar known as pompa, by the victimarii, but also represent priests of a lower rank (flamines minores), with ritual utensils like a wine-pitcher, patera and acerra, used for the ritus of purification which precedes the sacrifice and for ritual acts during the sacrifice. The altar from Singidunum represents a unique monument with the described iconography in the territory of Moesia Superior and it has only been published in catalogue form to date, never fully analysed or interpreted. Through the analysis of its iconography, typology, function, geographically closest analogies and possible context of its finding, new conclusions regarding the praxis of public ritual sacrifice are brought to light related to the period from the second half of the 2nd century to the first decades of the 3rd century in Singidunum, one of the main centres of Moesia Superior.

scholarly journals Castration, cult and agriculture. Perspectives on Greek animal sacrifice

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 153-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunnel Ekroth
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Adult Males ◽  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
Economic Reality ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Sacred Laws

The castration of most male animals seems to have been the rule in ancient Greece when rearing cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs; only very few adult males are needed for breeding purposes and flocks of bulls, rams, billy-goats and boars are difficult to keep, since they are too aggressive. Castrated males yield more and fattier meat, and, in the case of sheep, more wool. Still, sacred laws and sacrificial calendars stipulate the sacrifice of uncastrated victims, and vase-paintings frequently represent bulls, rams and billy-goats in ritual contexts. This paper will discuss the role of uncastrated male animals in Greek cult in the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods, both from a religious and an agricultural perspective. Of particular interest are the relations between the practical, economic reality and the theological perception of sacrifice. These issues will be explored using epigraphical, literary, iconographical and zooarchaeological evidence.

scholarly journals The Dark God: The Sacrifice of Sacrifice

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Joseba Zulaika
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Initial Approach ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Real Issue ◽  
Ritual Sacrifice ◽  
Sacrificial Crisis ◽  
The Sacrifice

The Frazerian question of murder turned into ritual sacrifice is foundational to cultural anthropology. Frazer described the antinomian figure of a king, who was, at once, a priest and a murderer. Generations of anthropologists have studied sacrifice in ethnographic contexts and theorized about its religious significance. But sacrifice itself may turn into a problem, and René Girard wrote about “the sacrificial crisis”, when the real issue is the failure of a sacrifice that goes wrong. The present paper addresses such a “sacrificial crisis” in the experience of my own Basque generation. I will argue that the crisis regarding sacrifice is pivotal. But my arguments will take advantage of the background of a more recent ethnography I wrote on the political and cultural transformations of this generation. This requires that I expand the notion of “sacrifice” from my initial approach of ethnographic parallels towards a more subjective and psychoanalytical perspective. As described in my first ethnography, the motivation behind the violence was originally and fundamentally sacrificial; when it finally stopped in 2011, many of those invested in the violence, actors as well as supporters, felt destitute and had to remodel their political identity. The argument of this paper is that the dismantling of sacrifice as its nuclear premise—the sacrifice of sacrifice—was a major obstacle stopping the violence from coming to an end.

scholarly journals Parts and Wholes: The Role of Animals in the Performance of Dolenjska Hallstatt Funerary Rites

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Adrienne C. Frie
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Faunal Remains ◽  
Mortuary Practice ◽  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
Animal Bones ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Funerary Rites ◽  
The Sacrifice

There is a rich iconographic tradition demonstrating the importance of animals in ritual in the Dolenjska Hallstatt archaeological culture of Early Iron Age Slovenia (800–300 bce). However, the role of animals in mortuary practice is not well represented iconographically, though faunal remains in graves indicate that their inclusion was an integral part of funerary performance. Here, animal bones from burials are compared to images of animal sacrifice, focusing on the ritual distinctions between the deposition of whole animal bodies versus animal parts. It is proposed that human–animal relationships were a key component of funerary animal sacrifice in these multispecies communities. The deposition of whole horses may have been due to a personal relationship with the deceased human. In turn, the sacrifice of an animal and division of its parts may have been essential for the management of group ties with the loss of a community member. Particular elements such as teeth, horns, and claws may have served as amulets—perhaps indicating that these were personal items that had to be placed in the grave with the deceased or that the deceased needed continued protection or other symbolic aid.

Bulls and rams. The sacrifice to Erechtheus

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 331-339
Author(s):  
Jenifer Neils
Keyword(s):  
Young Men ◽  
The South ◽  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
The North ◽  
North Side ◽  
The Sacrifice

The earliest literary reference to animal sacrifice in Athens is the passage in Homer’s Iliad (2.550–551) that mentions Athenian youths propitiating their legendary king Erechtheus with bulls and rams. It is surprising that this passage has not been associated with the north frieze of the Parthenon, where twelve young men are leading four bovines and four sheep to sacrifice, in contrast with the ten cows on the south frieze which clearly represent the hecatomb for Athena Polias at the Panathenaia. While it is difficult to ascertain the sex of these eight animals, the horns and size of the sheep suggest that they are male. Given the prominence of the cult of the hero Erechtheus on the north side of the Acropolis, it is reasonable to identify these sacrificial animals as an offering to the pater patriae of the Athenians.

عید الاضحیٰ کی قربانی سے پہلے اور اُس کے بعد کے مراسمِ عبودیت ( جاوید احمد غامدی صاحب کے موقف کا ایک تنقیدی مطالعہ)

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Amir Gazdar
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Body Hair ◽  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Temporal Restriction ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Rational Arguments

Jāvaid Aḥmad Ghāmidī, a contemporary Muslim modernist scholar, holds that the three established rituals of ḥajj and ‘umrah can be regarded as independent rituals in religion, which he categorises asnadhar (votive offering). The ritual is performed by fulfilling three conditions: 1) abstaining from removing body hair, 2) refraining from clipping nails, and 3) trimming or shaving the head. According to Ghāmidī, all believers can perform this rite, without any spatio-temporal restriction, as a supererogatory act. The Prophet (P.B.U.H.), he believes, encouraged Muslims to voluntarily observe it on the occasion of ‘īd al-aḍḥā. This is inferred by combining the information found in two Prophetic narrations, one reported by Umm Salamah and the other by ‘Abd Allah b. ‘āmr. In Ghāmidī’s view, all believers whether or not they are offering the animal sacrifice may offer such nadhar. For doing so, they would follow the two aforestated restrictions from the beginning of Dhū al-Ḥijjah (the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar) and trim or shave their heads on the ‘Īd day after the animal has been slaughtered (if they are to offer the sacrifice) orin anytime during the day (if they are not to offer the sacrifice). This last act is seen as a token of the completion of their votive offering to God. After a careful discussion of Ghāmidī’s view, this article concludes that the religious and rational arguments put forward by Ghāmidī are insufficient to relate the three rites (separately mentioned in the above Prophetic narrations) to the corresponding rites of ḥajj and ‘umrah and generalize them, out of the context, as one standalone ritual.

After Alice After Cats in Derrida's L'animal que donc je suis

Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Polish
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human World ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Sacrifice

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.

Queer Seductions of the Maternal in Dorothy Macardle's Earth-bound

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-308
Author(s):  
Abigail L. Palko
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Maternal Attitudes ◽  
Female Autonomy ◽  
National Autonomy ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Sacrifice

During her lifetime, Dorothy Macardle was a prominent public intellectual in both her native Ireland and post-war Europe. Her passionate engagement in Irish nationalism found expression in her writing; in her only collection of short stories, Earth-bound: Nine Stories of Ireland, published early in her writing career, she protests Irish women's socially restricted status and offers literary models of female solidarity to her audience (her fellow prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol, where she was imprisoned during the Civil War). Complex and ambiguous messages regarding maternal attitudes and female sexuality are encoded within the collection, particularly in the two Maeve stories (as I have labelled them because of their shared narrator), ‘The Return of Niav’ and ‘The Portrait of Roisin Dhu’, in which she offers coded expressions of the realities of women's lives in early twentieth-century Ireland that the larger public would have preferred remain unspoken, particularly with regard to expressions of maternal inclinations and female sexuality. Earth-bound, driven by her reactions to the many ways that the Irish struggle for national autonomy was purchased by the sacrifice of female autonomy, becomes a vehicle through which she explores socially taboo issues, most notably mothering practices and both heterosexual and homosexual expressions of female sexuality.

Thresholds of Time and Space

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-28
Author(s):  
Susan Milbrath
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
Cardinal Directions ◽  
Death Imagery

Analysis of the iconography in a directional almanac on Codex Borgia pages 49–52 invites comparison with almanacs in a related set of divinatory manuscripts known as the Borgia Group, but one aspect of the Codex Borgia almanac remains unique. It records real-time dates employing the central Mexican system of year dates that help identify the images as year-end rituals. These fifteenth-century dates correlate with the last twenty-day “month” in the year, known as Izcalli in the Valley of Mexico and neighboring Tlaxcala. Izcalli rituals in February involved drilling a new fire, the erection of sacred trees, and animal sacrifice, all of which appear on Borgia 49–52. During Izcalli, human sacrifice was performed only every fourth year, a pattern like that seen in the Codex Borgia and the Codex Cospi, where death imagery and decapitated humans appear prominently on the fourth year-bearer page, associated with the southern direction. Borgia Group codices also depict trees and birds representing the four cardinal directions. These are most prominent on Codex Fejérváry-Mayer page 1 in a cosmogram representing two different calendar formats, like those seen in the Borgia almanac. The 5 × 52-day format was used to measure the solar year and Venus cycle, and a second set of day signs appears in a 4 × 65-day pattern useful in calculating the fifty-two-year cycle and the Venus cycle. This provides a subtext for understanding the dates represented on Borgia 49–52 and the extension of the almanac on page 53, where the Venus almanac begins.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document