Abstract
The evolutionary emergence of the human species in a predatory niche has often been seen as the root cause of all the bloodshed and aggression that besets the human condition, particularly religious violence. This is certainly the case with the thought of Walter Burkert and René Girard, both of whom argue that, because the earliest humans were hunters, collective murder or “sacrifice” is the founding practice of all religions. Consequently, for them, the dark specter of bloodshed and violence lies at the heart of all religious thought. However, Burkert’s and Girard’s accounts rest on unexamined and problematic assumptions concerning predation, hunting and violence. Specifically, their characterization of predation and prehistoric hunting peoples as intrinsically aggressive is both ecologically and anthropologically naïve and ill-informed. By contrast, the ecologist Paul Shepard’s empirically informed account challenges not only the link between aggression and predation but also that between hunting and sacrifice. He argues that, far from producing a “killer ape,” the evolutionary transition of early hominids into a predatory niche resulted in a “tender carnivore” with an increased capacity for empathy with other humans and animals. Furthermore, he argues that blood sacrifice, far from lying with hunting at the dawn of human history, in fact emerged with the advent of agriculture and domestication. Thus, in challenging the commonly held association between hunting, violence and sacrifice, Shepard is asking us to rethink our understanding of the sacramentality of hunting, nature and life itself.
Can one be sure of making a distinction between the sacrificer holding the knife and the wolf with gaping jaws reddened with blood? The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices or their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilation and necrophiliac practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator –, this predacious habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him with the deadliest of the Carnivora. (1953: 201)
Yet the widespread acceptance of the killer ape hypothesis within the common cultural milieu is not simply due to the popularizing skills of its proponents but also rests on its possessing what seems to be a certain prima facie intuitive correctness. After all, the link between hunting, murder, warfare and other forms of violence in the minds of most is a fairly straightforward and obvious one in that all involve the taking of a life. Indeed even the staunchest critics of the killer ape hypothesis seem to share this assumption; they may debate the foundational or pivotal role that hunting played in human evolution and suggest that gathering was equally, if not more, significant, but generally they leave the link between hunting and violent human depravity unchallenged.1 For surely it is simply a given, according to the grand, deeply entrenched narrative we tell about nature, that when early hominids switched from being “gentle” herbivores to “savage” carnivores they ceased being the victims of the “violent war” of natural existence and instead became its perpetrators. In short, when humans became hunters, they became carnivorous predators or, as one individual observed, nature’s “bad guys.”2
Perhaps, then, it is hardly surprising that when many theorists turn their attention to a consideration of the influence that the evolution of humans as ecological predators may have had in the origins of that dimension of human existence most commonly associated with the affirmation of life – namely religion – they tend to understand it as generally responsible for the darkest and most violent aspects of the religious experience. This is certainly the case with two very highly regarded intellectual luminaries considered in this paper, Walter Burkert and René Girard. Both of them contend that the evolutionary origins of early humans as hunters meant that the foundation of all religion rests on an act of communal killing or what they term “sacrifice.” From this they infer that violence and bloodshed lurk at the heart of not only human nature but humanity’s experience of the sacred. Although the two disagree over which was the causal antecedent of humanity’s experience (Burkert argues that sacrifice is a re-enactment of Paleolithic hunting whereas Girard claims that hunting is a re-enactment of a primordial human sacrifice), both arguments, it will be observed, rest upon an explicit, though rarely argued for, conflation of hunting, blood sacrifice and an innate human propensity for violence, and imply not only a very misanthropic philosophical anthropology but also a tacit condemnation of nature itself.
Both Burkert and particularly Girard have enjoyed considerable intellectual celebrity for their views. Their works were the theme of a 1983 conference hosted by the Claremont Graduate School, whose proceedings were published under the title Violent Origins by Stanford University Press, and Girard’s thought is not only the subject of several edited academic volumes but also has its own academic journal, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture. Indeed, Girard has been called “one of the most original, challenging and interesting of European thinkers” (Antonello and Rocha, 2007: 2) and his intellectual stock is so high that he is routinely cited in both popular and academic anti-hunting texts as the preeminent authority who has decisively demonstrated the link between hunting and sacrifice and thus the inherently violent and morally detestable nature of human hunting (Adams, 1990; Ehrenreich, 1997; Preece, 2008).
Yet, how decisively established is the connection Burkert and Girard make between hunting and sacrifice? This paper will argue that in large part the widespread acceptance of Burkert’s and Girard’s celebrity rests less on firm empirical and ethnographic grounds and more on the fact that their theories, far from challenging conventional deeply-established associations concerning nature, predation, hunting and violence, actually recruit them. For, surely, in the popular mindset, hunting and religious sacrifice (particularly the ritual killing of animals) appear to be so similar, if not almost identical, that few would quibble with Barbara Ehrenreich’s statement: “There is no question that the sacrifice of animals re-enacts human predation on animal life” (1997: 58). Moreover, sacrifice, like hunting, is commonly associated (if not equated outright) with violence and bloodshed. To the modern ear, the word “sacrifice” tends immediately to conjure up bloody images of the ritual killing of animals (or more disturbingly, humans), with its more prosaic and pacific connotations of renunciation and self-denial overwhelmed by a blood-drenched flurry of associations. Indeed Girard, in particular, seems to actively enlist this nebulous web of associations as his conception of sacrifice is so diffuse and expansive as to include any form of violence, religious or otherwise, under its rubric. Thus, so seamlessly does Burkert’s and Girard’s theory recruit and appeal to pervasive, unexamined stereotypes and assumptions that the rather hyperbolic and highly empirically and ethnographically dubious nature of their claims frequently goes unnoticed and passes for common sense. After all, “everybody knows” that all of nature is so mired in the bloody battle for existence that it surely stands to reason that the earliest religious sensibilities of our first human ancestors, particularly given their intimate proximity to their wild environment and their violent predatory existence, must have been infused by the same blood-soaked, violent vision that is held to rule all of nature. Surely, they must have so delighted in and celebrated violence and death for its own sake that sacrificial killing must have been the highest, if not the only, expression of their sacred communion with all life. Perhaps then it is little wonder that we face an environmental crisis of such epic proportions, for these blood-drenched tacit assumptions concerning the nature of nature are so antithetical to what we consider a “humane” virtue that not only does it make it exceedingly difficult to see what there is to respect and preserve, but it also strongly implies that all moral sanctity and goodness rests on escaping and transcending such blood-soaked grounds.
It is these widespread and deeply entrenched assumptions, upon which Burkert’s and Girard’s arguments for the link between hunting and sacrifice rest, that this article seeks to contest and overturn by recruiting the ecologically and anthropologically informed thought of the environmental thinker Paul Shepard. For arguing that behind this demonization of hunting lies a condemnation of the trophic cycle and hence nature as a whole, Shepard sets out to turn these received truisms on their head, by provocatively asking us whether our predatory natural past, rather than being the root cause behind all current and historic violence, was not indeed responsible for those very qualities we associate with being humane. Indeed, he contends that the evolutionary transition of early hominids, far from producing the popular image of the “killer ape” with its blood-soaked religiosity, turned us into a “tender carnivore” whose religious vision saw its relationship to other humans and species in terms of amicable reciprocity, not animosity.
In order to support his challenge to conventional wisdom, Shepard draws on findings in ecology, ethology and anthropology which, he argues, overturn not only the link between predation, hunting and aggression but also the link between hunting and sacrifice. Insights in ecology demonstrate that the relationship between predator and prey should not be understood as one of all out conflict, but rather one of balanced reciprocity. Nor should the occupation of a predatory niche be understood as indicative of a propensity for greater violence, in fact quite the opposite if ethological evidence is to be believed. Moreover, extensive anthropological case studies of the mythological thought and discursive reasoning of hunting and gathering or foraging peoples, whose life-ways most closely approximate the Paleolithic conditions in which 95 to 99% of human history was spent, provide a vision of the religious worldviews of our earliest ancestors in stark contrast to the one posited by Girard and Burkert, in that foragers see themselves as engaged in ties of empathy and kinship with their prey rather than in terms of superiority and murderous hostility. Indeed, directly challenging Burkert’s and Girard’s central claim concerning the intimate link between hunting and sacrifice, Shepard argues that, “(t)he primal thought of Pleistocene peoples had nothing to do with the concept of sacrifice” (1998: 114). For he contends that the hunt was not conceived of by early hunters as a form of sacrifice – or, as Claude Lévi-Strauss defines it, as a form of substitution in which something (such as the life of an animal) is given up in order to obtain another thing – but as a sacrament in which the animal itself is understood as giving its life to the hunter. In fact, Shepard argues that the practice of sacrifice, far from standing at the dawn of human history, is actually a product of the Neolithic revolution and the adoption of domestication. It is to this historic moment that he traces the origins of the popular perception of nature as an omnipresent orgy of death and violence that has led to its historic religious and cultural devaluation and demonization, which has ultimately, he argued, culminated in our current environmental crisis. Consequently, Shepard argues that if we are to attempt to fully address the environmental crisis we must not only uncover and deal with the intellectual and cultural legacy of our agrarian past, but attempt to recover the religious and ecological sensibility of our hunting ancestors.
In the following essay, we will first consider Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans, examining how his thought is profoundly influenced by both the hunting hypothesis and, particularly, Konrad Lorenz’s theory of redirected aggression and reveals an implicit conflation of hunting, aggression and sacrifice. The second section will examine the work of René Girard, which displays not only the very same Lorenzian influence but an even more pronounced and vehement assumption of this link between hunting, violence and sacrifice. We will then turn to the work of Paul Shepard and his three-fold argument against the popular confusion of predation and hunting with aggression and sacrifice, upon which much of Burkert’s and Girard’s case rests. Beginning with Shepard’s ecological account of the relationship between predator and prey, we will see how this relationship does not constitute a form of all out inter-species warfare and conquest, but is rather one of balanced reciprocity, and that the occupation of a predatory niche is in no way symptomatic of a greater capacity for violence or aggression, but can in fact be indicative of precisely the opposite. Next, we will focus on Shepard’s anthropologically informed account of the mythological thought and discursive reasoning of hunting and gathering or foraging peoples. Here we will see how, in contrast to Burkert’s and Girard’s contentions, the hunt is conceived of by these peoples not as an act of violent bellicosity and domination of the prey but rather as an act of reciprocity in which the prey are seen to graciously give their life to a hunter, who demonstrates appropriate humility and respect. Finally, we will turn our attention to Shepard’s contention that sacrifice, far from being a primordial religious rite, is actually quite historically recent, at least from the perspective of humanity’s natural history, and owes its origins to the advent of the Neolithic and the beginning of agriculture. To conclude, we will demonstrate how, in contesting this conception of hunting as a form of sacrifice and asking us to see it instead as a form of sacrament, Shepard is calling on us to profoundly rethink our understanding of not only hunting and predation but also the sacramentality of life itself and our relationship to the natural world.
“Homo Necans” – Man the Killer: Walter Burkert on How the Killer Ape Got Religion
In his book Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, the classicist Walter Burkert attempts to explain the origins of Greek religion as well as religion in general in reference to the hunting hypothesis. Drawing upon the work of Karl Meurli, who noted in terms of the placement of animal bones certain similarities between Ancient Greek sacrificial ritual and prehistoric archeological sites, Burkert posits that sacrifice is the oldest form of religious activity and argues that its origins lie in the occupation by the earliest hominids of a hunting niche. For from the start of this monograph, Burkert leaves little doubt as to the central role that he believes hunting played in human evolution: The transition to the hunt is, rather, one of the most decisive ecological changes between man and the other primates. Man can virtually be defined “the hunting ape” (even if the naked ape makes a more appealing title). This statement leads to a second indisputable fact, namely, that the age of the hunter, the Palaeolithic, comprises by far the longest period of human history. No matter that estimates range between 95–99 percent: It is clear that man’s biological evolution was accomplished during this time. By comparison, the period since the invention of agriculture – 10,000 years, at most – is a drop in the bucket. From this perspective, then, we can understand man’s terrifying violence as deriving from the behaviour of a predatory animal, whose characteristics he came to acquire in the course of becoming man. (1983: 17; italics mine)
Nevertheless, while Burkert sees the primary import of this switch to a more predacious niche as indicative of a greater capacity for aggression and violence, he also acknowledges that, by the same token, “the success of the hunting ape was due to his ability to work cooperatively, to unite with other men in a cooperative hunt” (1983: 18). Consequently, the question for Burkert becomes how to balance the seemingly contradictory demands introduced by the evolutionary transformation of a previously vegetarian ape into a predatory carnivorous hunter. How, in other words, to balance the seemingly “antisocial” drive of aggression unleashed by hunting with the increased need for the communal cooperation also required by it. Burkert finds his solution to this conundrum in the ethology of Konrad Lorenz and his work on aggression and ritual.
In On Aggression, Lorenz argues that aggression is one of the four primary drives that fuel and shape animal behaviour – the other three are hunger, reproduction, and fear. According to Lorenz, the aggressive drive is operative only in intra-species relationships (inter-species predation, he contends, is fueled by hunger, not aggression) and serves three main functions in maintaining the survival of a species and of the immediate intra-species group: (a) to balance the dispersal of the species (i.e., a species’ territorial distribution), (b) to select the strongest, and (c) to defend the young. Nevertheless, Lorenz acknowledges that while aggression may play a certain positive role in the preservation of the species and of local intra-species groups, he also posits that, by the same token, aggression poses certain obvious internal dangers. According to Lorenz, the aggressive drive, as is the case with hunger and the sexual drive, operates in terms of a hydraulic model, in which instinctual energy continually builds up until it reaches a catastrophic point unless some means is found by which regularly to satiate or discharge it. Consequently, he argues that each species must find a way to moderate and discharge this aggressive drive before it threatens to destroy or totally annihilate the local species group. Lorenz observes that most species’ intra-specific contests are rarely to the death and are largely ritualistic. From this he posits certain aggression inhibiting mechanisms, one of the most common of which is aggression redirection, in which aggression or hostility between mates or against another member of the group is diverted by redirecting it towards another weaker member of the group or an outside object. For instance, to provide one of Lorenz’s most famous examples, when two Greylag geese aggressively approach one another, frequently this aggression will be violently redirected onto an innocent third party or object which had little to do with the quarrel (Lorenz, 1966: 165).
Burkert takes Lorenz’s framework and applies it to a consideration of hunting by humans. For while he acknowledges Lorenz’s distinction between intra-specific aggression and the carnivore’s catching of the prey as well as the well-known ethological observation that many predatory species have an instinctual inhibition against killing their own kind (1983: 19, 1987: 170), nonetheless he (along with, it must be noted, Lorenz) asserts that with hominids the transition between herbivore and carnivore, along with the acquisition of hunting tools or weapons, was too quick for any intra-species killing-inhibiting instinct to arise. He writes: What an experience it must have been when man, the relative of the chimpanzee, succeeded in seizing the power of his deadly enemy, the leopard, in assuming the traits of a wolf, forsaking the role of the hunted for the hunter! But success brought its own dangers. The earliest technology created tools for killing. Even the wooden spear and wedge provided man with weapons more dangerous than his instincts could cope with. His rudimentary killing inhibitions were insufficient as soon as he could kill at a distance; and males were even educated to suppress these inhibitions for the sake of the hunt. Moreover, it was as easy, or even easier, to kill a man as it is to kill a fleeing beast, so from earliest times men slipped repeatedly into cannibalism. Thus, from the very start, self-destruction was a threat to the human race. (1983: 18)
Leaving this aside, it is clear that Burkert takes the fundamental problem faced by these new hunters to be how to prevent their new “heightened aggressiveness” from leading to communal annihilation. This threat, he argues, was averted by early humans redirecting this murderous social aggression onto other species through the hunt. Thus “the heightened aggressiveness” aroused by the predation could be “turned to the service of the community by means of redirection, as has been described by Konrad Lorenz” (1983: 20).
This explains, according to Burkert, the well-known anthropological phenomenon of animistic thought among hunting and gathering peoples, whereby animals are imbued with human qualities and motivations and spoken of as kin, since one of the consequences of this re-direction, he argues, is that the prey is anthropomorphized and seen as both human companion and adversary. Hence, “(b)ecause the hunter’s activity was reinforced by behavior aimed originally at a human partner – that is through intraspecific aggression – in place of a biologically fixed relationship of beast and quarry, something curious occurred: the quarry became a quasi-human adversary, experienced as human and treated accordingly” (1983: 20). Hence the hunt, he suggests, is initially conceived of by hunters as a quasi-military war-like enterprise against a human foe. Indeed, Burkert frequently terms these hunting parties “männerbund,” a term popularized by Nazi ideologues which refers to Ancient Germanic sacred warrior groups. It also accounts, he argues, for the profound sense of guilt that emerges amongst hunters at the end of a successful hunt as this anthropomorphic identification of the prey means that its death is understood as akin to the murder of a fellow human being.
Consequently, the conclusion of the hunt and the killing of prey, Burkert suggests, provoke among members of the hunting party or “männerbund” intensely powerful and conflicting feelings of overwhelming power, fear and guilt which paradoxically both threaten and provide the very basis for the human community. Following Rudolf Otto’s phenomenological description of the Holy as an experience of “terror, bliss, and the recognition of an absolute authority, mysterium tremendum, fascinans and augustum” (Burkert, 1983: 40), Burkert argues that the experience of the killing of prey gave rise precisely to this experience of the sacred, which is the foundation of all religion. As he explains: Feelings of fear and guilt are the necessary consequences of overstepping one’s inhibitions; yet human tradition, in the form of religion, clearly does not aim at removing or settling these tensions. On the contrary, they are purposely heightened. Peace must reign within the group, for what is called for outside, offends within. Order has to be observed inside, the extraordinary finds release without. Outside, something utterly different, beyond the norm, frightening but fascinating, confronts the ordinary citizen living within the limits of the everyday world. It is surrounded by barriers to be broken down in a complicated, set way, corresponding to the ambivalence of the event: sacralization and desacralization around a central point where weapons, blood, and death establish a sense of human community. The irreversible event becomes a formative experience for all participants, provoking feelings of fear and guilt and increasing desire to make reparation, the groping attempt at restoration. For the barriers that had been broken before are now all the more willingly recognized. The rules are confirmed precisely in their antithetical tension. (1983: 21)
For in order to buttress themselves psychically against the overwhelming emotional intensity and disturbing implications of this experience, Burkert argues that primitive hunters had to ritualize the hunt. Beginning with the preparations for the hunt, hunters had to ritually build up the enthusiasm for the pursuit and killing of their foe. Then, upon their witnessing the death of the prey and experiencing the accompanying sense of guilt and horror at taking the life of a “fellow” being, hunters needed rituals to assuage and atone for their guilt; they atoned by displacing ultimate culpability for its death onto the prey or master of animals. Finally, this assault on communal bonds is further repaired through ritual sharing of meat and communal celebration. This tripartite structure would later become a template for ritual sacrifice, and the last fourth-fifths of Homo Necans consists in demonstrating how all sacrificial ritual throughout the Ancient world, particularly Ancient Greece, conforms to this pattern.
However, the vast majority of the argumentative weight of Burkert’s case for the primordial nature of sacrifice is borne precisely by this extensive survey of sacrificial ritual in Ancient Greece. Meanwhile, his references to any current anthropological research on contemporary hunter-gathering people (upon which one would assume the strength of his argument would critically depend) is remarkably slight if not largely absent. For instance, in elucidating the supposed beliefs of Paleolithic hunting peoples in a “master of animals” or the tripartite structures of their hunting rituals no reference to contemporary anthropological case studies of hunting and foraging peoples is made. The only ethnography that he does draw upon is that of Karl Meurli, whose work was already considered extremely limited and out of date at the time of the original publication of Homo Necans in 1972. In other words, Burkert’s account of the culture and religious beliefs of early hunters seems to be a speculative reconstruction derived predominantly from his investigations of the religious practices of classical Greece rather than from any anthropological investigation of contemporary hunting and foraging people, whose life-ways and mode of subsistence would surely provide a far more appropriate approximation of that of the Paleolithic than the great agrarian civilizations of Ancient Greece.
In the face of such criticisms Burkert has argued that all reconstructions of the Paleolithic past are in some sense speculative. Certainly, there is a degree of truth to this: after all, it is unlikely that we will ever have a direct and unimpeachably true account of the religions and cultures of the Paleolithic, and hence all such accounts will be speculative reconstructions based on analogies with historical and contemporary cultures. Nevertheless, we surely want such accounts, speculative though they may be, to be as well informed and comprehensive as possible and thus based on evidence from Paleolithic analogies drawn from contemporary forager societies. In any case, one cannot help but think that if the anthropological support was there for Burkert’s speculative account he would have provided it by the bucket load and that his reluctance to include any reference to current ethnography of hunter-gatherers stems from the fact that it provides a picture of the religious life of prehistoric hunters in direct contrast to the one he assumes and is arguing for. For throughout the anthropological record of hunting and gathering peoples there is no record of either the master of animals or of the hunt being considered as a quasi-military venture with its success capped by a “Nuremberg rally”-like religious celebration. If anything, quite the opposite appears to be the case. As we shall see, the hunt is not conceived of by foragers as an act of violent confrontation with a hated enemy, but rather, almost as an act of courtship between members of two different but related communities, and while at the communal meals following a successful hunt certain protocols of respect are followed, they seem to be largely bereft of the atmosphere of sturm und drang or mysterium tremendum that Burkert attributes to them. Indeed, perhaps it is because these accounts seem so bereft of the hyperbolic violence that Burkert assumes infuses the rest of nature that he has such difficulties taking them seriously. Time and time again in defending the “scientific legitimacy” of his theory, Burkert has emphasized that evolutionary and genetic theory dictate strict self-interest and violent competition, thereby implying that the most scientific account will be one that is predicated on this. Hence, Burkert’s dogged insistence on the scientific basis of his theory (despite readily admitting that some of the very scientific theories upon which it relies appear to undermine it) seems to stem ultimately from the fact that it mirrors the vitriolic tone and rhetoric in which evolutionary theory and naturalistic accounts are often popularly presented. Thus, he sees the “scientific realism” of his theory as underscored rather than undercut by his hyperbolic insistence and fixation on violence, combativeness and blood-shed. A similar conviction and argumentative strategy is even more obvious and overwrought in René Girard, the next thinker we will consider before turning to Shepard’s correction of such sensibilities.
Scapegoats and Sacrifice: René Girard’s “Scientific” Doctrine of Original Sin
Many commentators, Burkert included, have noted the profound theoretical parallels between Homo Necans and René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. Indeed, in later editions of Homo Necans, Burkert suggested that it could very easily have been given Girard’s title La Violence et le Sacré, as the similarities between the two were so close. Not only were both works published in their respective original language in the same year, but both also posit that violence, as exemplified by the religious ritual of sacrifice, lies at the very heart of the sacred. Moreover, both share the desire to give an evolutionary account of religion. Girard writes: Initially, my interest in Christianity was rooted neither in Scripture, nor theology, nor in any of the pursuits that tend to promote a religious view of reality. I was studying a scientific theory that many people regard, mistakenly in my view, as incompatible with the Christian tradition: Darwinian. (Quoted in Palaver, 2010: 123)
Yet while Girard acknowledges his considerable debt to Lorenz, he contends that Lorenz’s ethological project cannot adequately account for the dynamics of the scapegoat mechanism as it does not take into account the radical difference between humans and all other animal species. For “in addition to the appetites we share with animals, we [humans] have a more problematic yearning that lacks any instinctual object: desire” (Girard, 2004: 9). According to Girard, human desire is fundamentally imitative or mimetic. As he explains: When modern theorists envisage man as a being who knows what he wants, or who at least possesses an “unconscious” that knows for him, they may simply have failed to perceive the domain in which human uncertainty is most extreme. Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. (1977: 145–146)
Girard argues that at its most basic level mimetic rivalry is structured according to a triangular framework between (a) my self – the desiring subject, (b) the other human subject or model whose desire functions as a model for my desire, and (c) the desired object; he appeals to this triangular model in order to account for the incremental and contagious dynamic at work in mimetic rivalry. For through my pursuit of the object I am also drawn to my rival, as the more intensive and rancorous our rivalry becomes, the more paradoxically my behaviour becomes imitative of my model and vice versa. Hence, as mimetic rivalry progresses in intensity the two antagonists become more akin and undifferentiated from one another, each appropriating the other’s subject position or identity until they become mirrors or “doubles” of the other. As this doubling occurs, the identity of the two becomes merged and increasingly identical, and the rivalry between the two increases till it reaches a frenzy of undifferentiated rage in which the original object of conflict becomes lost and the two antagonists pursue the conflict for its own sake. Girard terms this point the mimetic or sacrificial crisis. Moreover, as this crisis escalates, Girard contends that it becomes contagious, drawing in more and more bystanders. While the mimetic machine of this reciprocal imitation of rivals, of this “double business”, is in operation, it stores up conflictual (sic) energy and, of course, it tends to spread in all directions because as it continues, the mechanism only becomes more and more attractive to bystanders – if two persons are fighting over the same object, then this object seems attractive to bystanders. Therefore, it tends to attract more and more people, and as it does so, its mimetic attractiveness keeps increasing. (2007: 64)
Perhaps a fruitful way of understanding the mimetic mechanism is the example that Girard provides of two children fighting over a toy (a phenomenon familiar to most parents), in which as soon as one child expresses interest in a toy, another one and then another will quickly want it as well, until the playgroup is a seething pit of vitriol and antagonism (2007: 61). Girard sees this basic inter-subjective dynamic of the playground as lying at the heart of the human condition. The great wars, revolutions and great works of literature of human history are simply an elaboration of this underlying pre-school logic.
Yet if Girard’s explanatory schema has explained war and conflict, there is a straightforward sense in which, as many have pointed out, he has simply ontologized violence and set conflict at the heart of his philosophic anthropology. The question of social cohesion and solidarity would seem to pose a bit more of a theoretical challenge to him, given that the fundamentally anti-social nature of mimetic rivalry appears to guarantee endless violence and killing and undermine the very possibility of the existence of any sort of community. In other words, how did society come into existence in the first place if human psychology itself is so riven by the undifferentiated rage and aggression of all against all?
Girard’s answer to this is what he variously and interchangeably refers to as the scapegoat, surrogate or sacrificial mechanism. Postulating that at the dawn of human evolution early hominids existed in a state of constant mimetic crisis and bloodshed, Girard conjectures that, as this generalized violence grew in ever greater intensity and indistinguishable frenzy, a focal point of amenity emerged, focused upon a single individual or victim. The particular choice of this victim, Girard contends, is totally arbitrary (though in numerous passages he does suggest that weaker, more marginal members of the group, or those deemed different and exceptional, are more likely to be singled out); nevertheless, once the particular individual is singled out he or she quickly becomes a magnet or lightning rod for all the violent and aggressive energies of the group. The victim is held to be singularly responsible for all the ills and disorder that beset the community, and becomes the focus of the community’s collective fury and aggression until, in a frenzy of communal blood-rage, he or she is seized by the group (or as Girard frequently refers to it, the “mob”) and is either torn apart, killed and consumed, or violently expelled from the community. Having thereby discharged every last modicum of collective rage and aggression, the primordial community, which until then has been caught up in an endless cycle of violence, experiences what to them appears as a miraculous state of collective peace, wellbeing and solidarity. It is this event then that, for Girard, marks the advent of the social. Communities come together not out of any shared sense of fellow feeling but out of a shared collective hatred towards a marginalized other, and the genesis of all society and communal identity owes its roots to a shared culpability in a collective crime in which the innocent were quite literally sacrificed for the sake of communal cohesion and collective harmony.
Girard sees this dynamic as the generative mechanism from which all social processes – political, economic and particularly religious – emerge. Indeed, because in archaic societies, “religion and culture are absolutely one” (2008: 3), Girard places religion at the very heart of the formation of culture, and the scapegoat mechanism as central to the formation of religion. According to Girard, having stumbled upon the means by which to dispel the dark tensions that threatened the community, the earliest humans would seek – when confronted by the return of the mimetic crisis – to re-enact this original act of collective violence upon a surrogate victim who resembled in some way the original victim in order to re-establish communal peace and solidarity. Thus, he argues that the replication of this initial blood-crime and the slaughter or sacrifice of the “innocent” becomes the template for all religious ritual. Moreover, because the victim is seen as both the cause of all the ills that beset the community as well as its beneficent provider of the miracle of renewed peace, the victim comes to be seen as sacred, and the victim comes to be seen as a god who not only willed its own death but is also the attributed origin of all social and moral codes, prohibitions and mythology. For, influenced by the contention of certain 19th century schools of European anthropology that myths were the narrative corollary of ritual, Girard contends that the recounting of this original crime becomes the foundation of all myths, and therefore, insofar as all rituals are a re-enactment of this act of collective violence, so too all myths are its narrative encapsulation. Hence Girard writes: The innumerable crimes of sex and violence in the mythologies of the entire world suggest that the mob and its logic play a role in the genesis of mythology, and the myths themselves seem to confirm that suggestion when they show us as they often do, the collective expulsion or death of those who supposedly committed these crimes. (1987b: 85)
This touches on the issue that while Girard is famous for comprehensively demonstrating that the practice of sacrifice lies at the heart of all religion, his definition of sacrifice is quite extensive and vague. Throughout his work he variously refers to diverse practices such as cannibalism, head-hunting, blood-letting, witchcraft, hunting, excommunication, and symbolic scapegoating interchangeably and includes all under the definitional rubric of sacrifice with little more justification than that he can discern the hint of an underlying reference to collective violence and death. This certainly appears to be the case with Girard’s contention not only that hunting is a form of sacrifice but also that the sacrificial mechanism is responsible for early humans adopting hunting.
Despite the fact that Girard is widely celebrated for establishing the link between hunting and sacrifice, oddly enough much of his written work is largely bereft of any sustained discussion of hunting. His seminal work Violence and the Sacred contains scarcely even a mention of it and in his later works, such as Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the Earth and Evolution and Conversion, the passages in which he does directly address hunting are little more than a couple of pages long and contain little or no direct reference to any ethnography of hunter-gathering groups. Indeed, having surveyed his works in chronological order, one could be forgiven for thinking that Girard was perhaps initially oblivious to the link between hunting and the sacrificial mechanism and that he only started to explicitly refer to this link after others had pointed it out to him. In any case, where Girard does address this link he appears to find it so obvious that he finds it scarcely worth arguing for. Assuming that hunting is motivated by little more than an innate predilection for violence and killing, he argues that the practice of violent sacrificial homicide was prior to and explains the adoption by early humans of hunting. According to Girard, humans did not adopt hunting out of any dietary or nutritional needs, as he declares that “Specialists tell us that the human digestive tract has remained that of a mainly vegetarian omnivore” and “man is not naturally a carnivore” (1987a: 73). Rather, he writes: To understand what might have impelled human beings to set off in pursuit of the largest most dangerous animals or to devise the strategies necessary for prehistoric hunting, it is necessary and sufficient to recognize that hunting was first linked to sacrifice … What impelled men to hunt was the search for a reconciliatory victim. (1987a: 73)
Moreover, Girard argues that the sacrificial crisis explains not only the adoption of hunting but the Neolithic revolution and the introduction of domestication as well. He argues that the process of domestication, particularly of animals, arose out of the sacrificial mechanism. Girard observes that as “hunter-gatherers started to settle permanently because of the increasing importance of ritual sites and the complexity of rituals of which they were part…[this] in turn produced…the domestication of animals and the discovery of agriculture” (2007: 121). In fact, Girard sees the sacrificial mechanism as the fundamental drive of all cultural change, and interprets all of history as the uncovering of the process by which we have come to have greater and greater knowledge of the importance of the scapegoat/sacrificial mechanism. This process culminates, he argues, with the advent of Biblical religions, particularly Christianity. For the Bible, according to Girard, is the first religious document ostensibly to side with and identify with the victim and castigate the victimizers, thus reversing and exposing the victimage mechanism which had been “hidden since the foundations of the world.” Nowhere is this more decisively demonstrated, Girard contends, than with the passion of Christ, where Christ’s death on the cross as a sacrifice for all humanity’s sins reveals for all time the innocence of the scapegoats and the rotten, violent sacrificial core at the heart of all archaic, pre-Judeo-Christian religions. Thus, the passion and the gospels, Girard argues, represent a profound rupture and reversal of the violent psychosocial mechanism upon which all human culture, religion and history were heretofore based. For presenting a wholly innocent victim who advocates the renunciation of all violence and retribution not only reveals the violent core and dynamic at the heart of human nature but also the possibility of its overcoming and repudiation. Hence, Girard argues, contemporary western society’s “uniqueness in regards to sacrifice” is that while “all other societies before ours regard some form of sacrificial immolation as a normal part of culture,” our society finds sacrifice “abhorrent” (1987b: 107). This uniqueness, he posits, is due to the unique historical, cultural and religious legacy of Christianity and Christ’s unmasking and disavowal of violence. Consequently, as one critic notes, under Girard “the Kingdom of God has become scientific” (Kirwan, 2009: 27) in that his work can be understood as a scientific re-articulation and apologetics of Christian theology, particularly the notion of original sin and salvation. Though by our nature humans and the rest of nature are “fallen” and innately sinful, riven by greed and violence, the example of Christ’s death on the cross and his unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism has demonstrated to humans the possibility of salvation and redemption from this endless cycle of murder and violence through the renunciation of all violence.
Now here it is difficult to ignore how deeply Girard’s thought reveals a certain obvious ethnocentric prejudice as well as a pejorative attitude to non-western peoples, bordering on outright racism. After all, in a nutshell his argument contends that all non-Christian cultures and religions are saturated through and through by a bestial violence and bloodlust and that all notions of compassion and non-violence are the unique gift of Christianity and western culture. This may be highly appealing to some Christians and Eurocentrists but it is hard to see how this is not deeply offensive to the rest of humanity. Indeed, the considerable scholarly inadequacies of Girard’s anthropological account as well as its obvious ethnocentrism have been repeatedly raised by many anthropologists and religious theorists. His ethnography is largely informed by that of the Victorian imperialist and anthropologist James George Frazer, whose work has been widely criticized by contemporary anthropologists for trivializing and disparaging the thought of non-European indigenous peoples. Indeed, in one passage Girard notes that he has “often thought that in order to understand myths, one has only to observe the behavior of groups of children” (1987a: 123), thereby repeating a familiar trope of 19th century anthropology that saw “primitive” peoples as, basically, overgrown children and held their modes of thought and reasoning to be essentially childlike.
Moreover, despite drawing on a wide survey of myths and rituals of archaic and indigenous religions, from which he has cherry picked support for evidence of the primordial basis of his sacrificial mechanism, oddly enough Girard makes almost no reference to the myths or religious life of hunting and gathering people. Perhaps this is because he seems to include all premodern and non-western societies under the rubric of “primitive” or (when he is feeling generous) “so-called primitive” peoples, with little indication that he sees differences in modes of production as having any relevance. Hence, because Girard seems to believe that “a primitive is a primitive is a primitive” he appears to hold that any ethnographic example culled from a society he deems primitive can justifiably serve as an illustrative example for any other, in his mind, equally primitive society. Consequently, Girard has remained largely unperturbed by such criticisms, dismissing them as motivated solely by misplaced political correctness and the distaste of his critics for the type of “broad theorizing” that attempts to explain phenomena which he sees as exemplified by the scientific disciplines (1987a: 5–7). For like Burkert, Girard has been unreservedly emphatic about emphasizing that he sees his theory as a naturalistic and scientific account of the origin of religion.
Yet aside from a few nods to Lorenz and to Richard Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene, Girard’s claim to scientific legitimacy, like Burkert’s, seems to rest more on his recruitment of popular understandings of evolutionary theory rather than on any deep engagement with contemporary scientific theories or methodology. In the minds of most, the theory of evolution is understood to disclose that the very laws of nature are strictly ruled by a violent and unremitting war of all against all for survival and dominance, in which only the strongest and most aggressive survive. Indeed, Girard explicitly appeals to this common understanding of evolution and natural selection in order to ground the scientific basis of his theory when he writes: (T)here is a Darwinian perspective in the process of hominization as I present it in Things Hidden…The theory of natural selection seems to me quite powerfully sacrificial. After all, Darwin, in resorting to Malthus’s theory of population, stresses the importance of death just as much as the importance of survival. In some sense it is representing nature as a super-sacrificial machine. (2007: 96; italics mine)
Nevertheless, recent findings in the empirical disciplines of ecology and ethology have done precisely this, providing us with a much more nuanced and tempered account of the natural process than that decreed by a popularly held blood-splattered one. It is to these disciplines Shepard first turns in his efforts to correct contemporary assumptions concerning the link between hunting, predation and violence. For while Shepard also wishes to provide a naturalized account of religion and agrees that hunting was a central aspect of hominization, he profoundly disagrees with Burkert’s and Girard’s interpretation of both nature and predation as a blood-spattered war of conquest, arguing instead for a more nuanced approach in which hunting is understood in its ecological context as a reciprocal relationship between species. It is this context that Shepard recruits in challenging the popular caricature of predators as innately violent and aggressive, as well as the link made by Burkert and Girard between hunting and sacrifice.
The Ecology of the Sacred: Paul Shepard on Hunting as Sacrament, not Sacrifice
Unlike Burkert and Girard, whose scholarly backgrounds are firmly within the humanities, Shepard’s academic training was primarily in the empirical sciences, namely ecology. Ecology is the science of bio-diversity and the study of an organism’s relationship to its wider biotic environment, and perhaps Shepard’s project can be most aptly summarized as the attempt to “apply the same ecological principles and insights to a study of the human animal as applied to any other animal” (Leopold, 1969: iii) or, to put it more bluntly, provide an ecological account of our humanity. This means, according to Shepard, understanding not only how our physiology, our morphology and our more obviously physical traits evolved in reference to our ecological circumstances, but also how traits more commonly thought of as “higher,” such as cognition, culture, morality, etc., evolved as well. In this light Shepard’s work attempts to account for the origins and historical development of religion in terms of humanity’s relationship to its natural environment. Thus, in seeking to understand what role hunting played in the origin of religion, Shepard argues that we must first understand hunting in its ecological context as a form of predation. Such an ecological understanding of hunting, he argues, not only corrects the common assumption of the relationship between predator and prey as one of all out violence and conquest, and predators as the violent villains of all creation, but it also contextualizes and validates the mythological and religious setting in which hunting and the wider natural environment are understood by contemporary hunter-gatherers or foragers, whose life-ways most approximate those of our Paleolithic ancestors.
For if we turn our attention to anthropological case studies of contemporary foraging cultures we find an ethnographic picture in stark contrast to the one that the common assumptions of nature “red in tooth and claw” would lead us to expect. Far from finding the hard-hearted, psychopathic killer-apes of popular imagination, we find people who appear to modern sensibilities almost embarrassingly “tender” and “soft-hearted” in their concern for cultivating peaceful and egalitarian relations not just between themselves but with other species as well. Indeed, according to ethnographic accounts of their myths, hunter-gatherer societies do not see themselves as being in an antagonistic relationship with the rest of nature but rather as enjoying a rather cordial one. This contrast between the direct empirical observation of foraging peoples and the blood-drenched expectations of received wisdom has frequently led such ethnography to be widely dismissed out of hand as woolly-headed romanticism. After all, if all nature is ruled by violent conquest and combativeness, then surely it stands to reason that those deemed to be closest to nature, stone-age hunter-gatherers, must be most infused by this “natural” bloodlust, particularly if they occupied the supposedly ultraviolent natural niche of a predator. Shepard, however, argues that an ecologically and ethologically informed account of predation and predators, far from negating anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherers, corroborates and supports them.
In the following section, we will examine Shepard’s three-fold argument against the conflation of hunting, violence and sacrifice. First, we will examine Shepard’s argument derived from findings in ecology that predation should not be confused with and should not be understood as one of all out conquest but is rather, from an ecological perspective, one of balanced reciprocity. Nor is the occupation of a predatory niche symptomatic of a greater predisposition for aggressiveness and violence: rather, as many ethologists point out, it can be indicative of a greater capacity for cooperative behaviour and empathy. Indeed, Shepard argues that the transition of early humans into the ecological niche of a social predator, far from demanding a greater capacity for violence and aggression, required quite the opposite: a more cooperative, egalitarian social structure and the capacity to empathize with not only other humans but other animals as well. Secondly, we will see how Shepard sees this ecological vision as informing the rather benign view of nature in hunter-gatherer mythology in which nature is conceived of as a web of reciprocal relationships between species, and hunting is understood not as an act of violent domination or sacrifice but as a sacrament or gift. Thirdly, we will see how in contrast to Burkert and Girard, Shepard argues that the practice of sacrifice, far from standing at the dawn of human history, is actually a product of the Neolithic revolution and the adoption of domestication.
Ecology, Predation, and Human Evolution
One of the most fundamental principles of ecology is that of interconnectedness, that the health of a particular organism is dependent on a web of relationships with other organisms and species which sustain them. This is significant, as, perhaps more than any other empirical discipline, ecology has been responsible for providing a much more nuanced picture of natural processes in which competition and aggression certainly play a role, but a much more restricted and contextualized one. As ecologists and biologists began to examine the ecological relationships between species, they began to question whether competition in nature was really as ubiquitous as previously claimed. Indeed, they found that symbiotic relationships that were to the mutual advantage of the species involved were just as relevant and important as competitive ones. Indeed, while Darwin held that speciation occurred out of the competitive struggle between two or more species for the same resource, ecologists found very little evidence either of direct competition between two species for the same resource or niche, or that this direct competition played a part in speciation. Contrary to Darwin’s findings, speciation did not occur as a result of the strong competitive struggle between species for the same resource or niche, but rather its very opposite – the avoidance of competition. New species do not evolve out of the competitive struggle for already occupied niches, but by evolving to exploit either new niches or recently vacated ones. As Paul Colinvaux writes, “Animal and plants in nature are not after all engaged in endless debilitating struggle, as a loose reading of Darwin might suggest. Nature is arranged so that competitive struggles are avoided” (1978: 144).
Even the case of one of the most stereotypical examples of competition in nature – predation – is best understood not as an all out struggle or war between species for existence, in which the predator species attempts to entirely wipe out or exterminate the prey species, but rather as a kind of balanced reciprocity between the two. In fact, given that most predator species are dependent on the prey species for their very livelihood, the complete eradication of the prey species by the predator species would lead to dire consequences for the predator. Consequently, it appears that the population level of many predator species is set to respect the minimal level of the prey species, and as a prey species becomes scarcer, the predator turns to more abundant substitutes. Furthermore, as Colinvaux points out, generally the predator species is physically incapable of eradicating the prey species, as in most cases the predator is unable to bring down healthy adult members of the prey species and is reliant for most of its food on the very young, ill and aged of the prey population. In a “battle” between a healthy adult moose and a wolf pack, for example, the advantage is almost invariably with the moose, which is not only faster than most wolves but also far stronger.
Similarly, it would be a mistake to interpret predation as an act of aggression and impart to predators, as Burkert and Girard do (despite their occasional half-hearted disavowals of this), a more violent and aggressive disposition. First of all, the occupation of a predatory, carnivorous niche is not indicative of a greater degree of intraspecies aggression and hostility in terms of fights for dominance, etc. than the occupation of a herbivore’s niche. As Shepard writes, “Lions and tigers have their socially tender side, while some of the interpersonal behavior of rabbits and sheep is exceeded nowhere in nature for its brutality” (1978: 14). In fact, if anything, a rigid social hierarchy and brutal competition for dominance is more indicative of a herbivorous niche. For unlike many social carnivores whose packs tend to be more fluid and centered upon the cooperative ventures of the hunt, the social structures of herbivores tend to be more hierarchically arranged for defensive purposes (Jerison, 1973; Colinvaux, 1978; Geist, 2010). Those in thrall to the image of herbivorous innocence and passivity, for instance, desperately need to witness deer during their rutting season. Nor should it be forgotten that two of the most popular “companion animals,” dogs and cats, are both carnivores. The well attested qualities of loyalty and companionship of canines for instance, Shepard argues, are a result of their carnivorousness, not in spite of it. In fact, he notes that whoever coined the phrase “Man is a wolf to man” was profoundly ignorant of the social behaviour of wolves, as he argues that throughout the animal kingdom wolves are unparalleled by the strength and warmth of their communal ties. Indeed, Shepard argues that the transition to a more predatory niche placed heavy adaptive demands on hominids to develop a more flexible and egalitarian social structure as hunting required not only greater cooperation but also the sharing of meat. Secondly, as Lorenz notes, inter-species predation has little to do with intra-species aggression. …the fight between predator and prey is not a fight in the real sense of the word: the stroke of the paw with which a lion kills his prey may resemble the movements that he makes when he strikes his rival, just as a shot-gun and a rifle resemble each other outwardly; but the inner motives of the hunter are basically different from those of the fighter. The buffalo which the lion fells provokes his aggression as little as the appetizing turkey which I have just seen hanging in the larder provokes mine. The difference in these inner drives can clearly be seen in the expression movements of an animal: a dog about to catch a hunted rabbit has the same kind of excitedly happy expression as he has when he greets his master or awaits some longed-for treat. (1966: 22)
Conventional wisdom, as well as Girard and Burkert, tend to regard hunting as a fairly mindless pursuit, more a matter of brawn than brain, a mere matter of walking up to the prey and figuring how to slaughter it – after all, the general sense is that other animals hunt and they don’t seem to be so intelligent. Where intelligence is seen as a factor in humanity’s primeval hunting milieu, it is commonly held to consist in our capacity to design and manufacture weapons and tools – hence, the common tendency in many palaeo-archeological circles to interpret each new technological improvement and technical refinement as evidence of a new intellectual leap forward. Yet not only do these common views considerably overestimate the importance of tool use in humanity’s survival in such a niche, they also completely underestimate the considerable sensory defenses and powers of evasion of the prey as well as the immense intellectual challenges involved in actually finding, tracking and stalking the prey.
Living in the modern world, where evidence of human superiority and dominance abounds, it is easy to forget that in many ways wild animals are far superior to humans, in terms of speed, strength and most importantly the scope and acuity of their senses. Most mammalian herbivores have incredible sensory capacities which put humans completely to shame. Deer, for instance, have peripheral vision allowing them to see almost from the back of their head, swivel mounted ears that can hear almost the slightest sound, and a sense of smell that is probably impossible for humans to imagine (Nelson, 1997: 26–27). Added to this, natural selection has provided most prey with a behavioural repertoire of concealment and evasion, such that, as the philosopher and hunter Laurence Cahoone notes, “Even seeing the prey marks a good day’s hunting” (Cahoone, 2009, 74). In short, the hunter, far from being in control or in a position of dominance over the prey, generally has the odds stacked firmly against him or her and in favour of the prey, and even today it is estimated that as little as 10% of all hunts are successful (Zencey, 1987: 10).
Even to begin to even out these considerable odds in favour of the prey, the hunter needs to have extensive knowledge of his or her environment and his or her quarry. He or she needs to be able to read the spoor (hoof prints, scat, feathers, scratching posts, drag marks, sounds, etc.) and deduce from this a wealth of information such as the sex, age and physical condition of the individual animal that left them. One has to know where it is likely to feed and what it is likely to eat, when it breeds, its seasonal movements, where it makes its den, how it behaves when threatened, and how best to approach it without causing alarm.
Even more importantly the hunter needs to be able to actively inhabit the subjective awareness of the prey, to perceive the world almost viscerally through its eyes and ears. Hunting, the poet and environmental philosopher Gary Snyder notes, requires that one “use (one’s) body and senses to the fullest”; it also entails between the hunter and hunted an inter-subjective dimension whereby one “strains (one’s) consciousness to feel what the deer is thinking today at this moment” (Snyder, 1969: 120). This ability comes in useful not only as the hunter tracks the prey over great distances but particularly when he is closing in on the quarry and must come well within the sensory defenses of the prey. To come even close to taking a shot, the hunters must exercise the utmost stealth, caution, and keen attention to the behavioural nuances of the prey, continually asking themselves, “Has the prey caught sight of them or smelled their scent? Did it hear the slightest rustle of grass as the hunter crept forward?” Consequently, successful hunting, far from requiring the hunter to violently hate, or forgo all thoughts of empathy with the prey, requires exactly the opposite: the hunter must respect the prey and constantly imagine the subjective state of their quarry, attempting to quite literally perceive the situation through its senses. Little wonder then that hunter-gatherer cultures place such emphasis on “thinking like the prey” or that the myths and discursive forms of reasoning of foragers accord such high esteem and respect to other animals, particularly the prey, as the very taskscape of technologically primitive hunting demands not only a profound sense of humility and respect towards the prey but also the ability to subjectively identify with it.
Indeed, Shepard argues that the myths of foragers are not informed by the recollection of some primordial crime or act of collective violence, as Girard claims; rather, their myths are informed by their ecology. Not only do their myths encode the almost encyclopedic wealth of ecological knowledge necessary to survive in the very intellectually challenging niche of hunting and gathering, but the anthropomorphic or perhaps more precisely the zoomorphic nature of these myths allows the hunter to be able to easily intuit and subjectively imagine the prey’s inner states. Yet even more importantly, in seeing the natural world in terms of an interdependent web between different communities or species, in which no one species was hegemonic but all relied on vital gifts of others, Shepard claims that the myths of hunter-gatherers grasped a fundamental insight into the natural world that would elude the rest of humanity until the advent of the modern science of ecology: the interconnectedness and interdependency of all life.
Myth and Ecology
A prevalent theme found in hunter-gatherer mythology is that during the original mythic time different animal species (including humans) intermarried with one another and as a result of this learned the secrets and cultures of their respective spouses (stories, dances, customs, etc.), as well as (depending on the species in question) how to hunt them. According to the Plains Indian myth of the Buffalo wife, for instance, the Buffalo willingly gave themselves up as a food source to humans and even taught humans how to hunt them if a certain Indian maiden would marry the Buffalo headman and humans would treat the buffalo’s “wedding” gifts with respect. For if the hunter showed any sign of disrespect or rudeness to the Buffalo’s gift of life, such as boasting about the kill, taking more than they needed, failing to make full use of the carcass or to share the meat with other members of his group, then the Buffalo would react to such an affront in future by withholding this gift. Consequently, humans are seen as connected to other animal species in terms of relationships that correspond to exchanges between human social groups. Hunting is therefore understood as a social relationship, particularly resembling the social relationship of marriage, in so far as the latter involves fraught negotiations for the transfer of life power from one group to another. In other words, the hunt was not seen by hunter-gatherers as a raucous Bacchanalia of violence (as Girard frequently interprets it) but rather as a more formal affair of dinner with one’s in-laws, where one had to watch one’s manners and one’s Ps and Qs or one would not be invited back. The hunt therefore is not conceived of as an act of dominance or conquest, but as a gift or act of reciprocity, which must be acknowledged with appropriate respect and gratitude. Indeed, foragers see the essential fabric of the cosmos as structured according to a network of reciprocity: in order for some to live, others must die. Hence, as Ingold writes, for hunting and gathering societies: (H)unting effects the circulation of vital force between humans and animals and thus contributes directly to the regeneration of the lifeworld of which both are part. The animals offer something of their potentiality and substance to human beings so that the latter may live, while humans, in return, through the proper treatment of the animals in death, ensure the release of their life force…Human life…is here predicated upon the mortality of animals…the killing and eating of game is far more than mere provisioning; it is world-renewing. (2000c: 114)
In sacralizing the trophic cycle and placing this sacred trophism, or as Shepard refers to it the sacred game, at the heart of their cosmological vision, hunter-gatherers’ myths metaphorically expressed the ecological fact that life feeds on life or, as the ecologist Valerius Geist puts it, death is “the release of chemical energy for use by other organisms” (Geist, 2001). Thus, for Shepard, “the hunt is at the philosophical center of human life. It constantly contrasts two central mysteries: the nature of animals and death” (1973: 146). It brings us face to face with the fundamental truth at the heart of existence that all life is premised on the circulation of vitality through the food chain and our interdependence with the world. He writes, “The world-wide rules of the ‘sacred hunt’ have largely to do with the metaphors that arise as an affirmation of the food-chain structure of nature” (1998: 62). In this light, the hunt is understood not as an act of conquest in which the hunter stands over and above creation, but as a participation in the sacred game in which winning and losing is always temporary and the hunter is neither conqueror nor overlord but the humble recipient of a gift. Therefore, hunting, for Shepard, is not a form of sacrifice but a sacrament, in that the life of the prey is not seen as the property of the hunter to be used to barter for future reward but a gift given by the animal itself. Consequently, Shepard insists that sacrifice is not the re-enactment of human predation upon animals; rather, to understand the origins of sacrifice, he argues, we must look to the Neolithic revolution and the profound changes to humanity’s ecological circumstances brought about by the introduction of agriculture and domestication.
Bartering with the Sacred: The Ecology of Sacrifice
If our hunting past is often deemed responsible for all the violent and aggressive stirring of the human psyche, in contrast agriculture and domestication are frequently seen to have precisely the opposite effect, that of taming and pacifying our inherently savage, bestial souls. After all, in the minds of most, farming is seen as an essentially bucolic and peaceful pursuit in which the farmer gently and solicitously tends and cares for his crops and his chattel for their own good. Agricultural life, therefore, is held to be so deeply imbued with life-affirming and nurturing qualities that it is considered to be almost antithetical, if not an antidote, to all thoughts of violence, aggression, and bloodshed in general. Consequently, the Neolithic revolution and the dawn of agriculture are generally conceived of as not simply an economic revolution but an ethical or humanitarian one as well. For with the birth of agriculture, it is argued, humanity ceased being nature’s bullies warring against all nature and our fellow humans and became instead the care-givers and protectors of all life. Little wonder then that when searching for the roots of any practice we find the violent and ethically abhorrent, the Neolithic and the agrarian way of life are routinely passed over. When confronted with examples of violent rituals such as human and animal sacrifice, head-hunting and cannibalism among non-western horticultural and agrarian peoples and archaic civilizations, most tend to account for these as vestigial holdovers from our hunting past rather than the legacy of our agrarian turn. Indeed, the very prevalence of such practices among agricultural peoples is often taken as evidence that they must have been far worse and more rampant among hunters, for if “gentle” farmers or horticulturalists could not resist the bloody delights of ritual human sacrifice, what chance did prehistoric hunters, enthralled by the bestial hunger for blood and meat and bereft of the pacifying pursuits of planting and gardening, have? This perhaps explains why neither Burkert nor Girard see any problem with the fact that the vast majority of the examples they enlist in support of the primordial nature of sacrifice and sacred violence are taken from horticultural and agricultural societies.
Yet this widespread assumption of the inherently benevolent and pacific nature of agriculture, Shepard observes, overlooks certain obvious and practical ecological realities involved with the commitment to an agrarian way of life. For with agriculture humans ceased to be mere participants in their wider ecological environment and became its creators and overlords. At its heart, the agrarian economy is based upon the humanization of the natural environment, in that it requires the direct transformation of natural entities and ecosystems to maximize human utilization, goals and benefits. As James Serpell notes, “The entire system…depends on the subjugation of nature and the manipulation of living creatures” (1986: 218). This artificial humanized environment depends upon not only the initial destruction of the wild environment but also this human environment’s continual war against any type of wild incursion. Consequently, despite its commonly benign, gentle and pacific associations in the current popular imagination, as Daniel Hillel notes, agriculture in a very real sense is more like an all out war of conquest against the natural world than anything else. As he explains: “[B]y its very nature, (agriculture) is an intrusion and hence disruption of the environment as it replaces a natural ecosystem with an artificial one…The moment a farmer delineates a tract of land…he is in effect declaring war on the existing environmental order. Wishing to grow a particular crop…the farmer must now treat all the native species as noxious weeds or pests, to be eradicated by all possible means” (1991: 50). However, this battle, as Hillel observes, “is never finally won” as “in an open environment the wild species will continue to reinstate their stolen domain” (Hillel, 1991: 50). Wild flora or weeds will continue to pop up in farmers’ fields despite their most diligent weeding, and wild herbivores and carnivores will continually prey on the farmer’s fields and chattel with any chance they get.
Little wonder then that among almost all agrarian based societies, wildness and wild species are commonly identified with savage evil or malevolence (Kover, 2009). This is particularly apparent with carnivorous predators such as wolves, whose opportunistic predation upon the farmer’s livestock earned them the complete enmity of the farmer and the reputation of vicious abhorrent brutes. Thus, while wolves, for instance, were seen by many foraging Amerindian peoples as wise elder brothers of humanity, imparting the virtues of fortitude and cooperation, amongst many agrarian European communities they are seen as the total embodiment of blood-thirsty violence and avarice and have been hunted to the point of extinction in most parts of the continent (Pierotti, 2012). Moreover, the hunt, which had been understood by previous hunter-gatherer tribes as a reciprocal relationship between humans and other wild species, under domestication comes to be seen as a total war of annihilation against any wild herbivore or carnivore that would threaten the domestic sphere. Indeed, central to the cosmological vision of many agrarian peoples is the conception of a divided cosmos in a state of perpetual war between the forces of good identified with the domestic order, and the malevolent, chaotic evil associated with the wild (Morris, 1995; Kover, 2009; Kowalsky, 2014). Consequently, Shepard argues that it is this deep rooted cultural and historical legacy of Neolithic agriculture that is responsible for the common understanding of nature as being in a state of constant war, and of the inherent blood-thirsty viciousness of predators.
Yet perhaps more relevant to an understanding of the Neolithic origins of the practice of sacrifice is a consideration of what happens to those wild animal species brought across the domestic line, for these species are incorporated into the agrarian ecosystem not as independent communities with their own interests and customs but as defeated subjects or slaves at the lowest rung of the social order under the total mastery and authority of one species alone, humans. From birth to death their movement, behaviour, feeding, and even sexual relations are under the direction of their human master. Any sign of willfulness, independence or obstinacy on their part is deemed illegitimate and must be curtailed or “tamed,” usually through liberal recourse to physical coercion. Indeed, to speak of the farmer’s domestic chattels as slaves is no idle play on words, for as Tim Ingold demonstrates, many of the techniques of control and justificatory ideologies underlying human slavery were themselves derived from analogies with animal husbandry (Ingold, 2000b). Indeed, nowhere is the element of control and the unequal power relationship implicit in agriculture more apparent than with the slaughter of the farmer’s domestic chattel, which, Shepard argues, provides the actual template for sacrifice. For unlike hunting, where the hunter is never really in control of the prey and the outcome of the hunt is always in question, the farmer’s slaughter of one of his domestic charges takes place under circumstances over which the farmer has maximum control and the animal has little chance of escape, and the successful outcome is rarely in doubt. In his essay “The Domestication of Sacrifice,” the historian of comparative religion Jonathan Z. Smith observes that the concept of sacrifice is ultimately a “ritual meditation on domestication” (1987: 197). According to Smith, sacrifice is essentially the selective killing of an animal or individual under highly controlled ritual circumstances, with the expectation of a future pay-off. As such, it approximates not so much the fortuitous killing of the hunt, whose success is always in question, but the context of domestication, where the domesticator kills his livestock or other living property with precise discrimination. Consequently, Smith argues that sacrifice is an elaboration of the selective killing of domestication rather than the fortuitous killing of hunting.
Furthermore, unlike the prey who is seen as giving his life to the hunter, the life of the domesticated chattel is not even seen as its own to give. As Ingold explains: Like hunters, (the farmers) depend on animals, and their relationship with these animals may similarly be characterized by a quality of attentive, and at times even benevolent regard. (Farmers) do indeed care for their animals, but it is care of a quite different kind from that extended by hunters. For one thing, the animals are presumed to lack the capacity to reciprocate. In the world of the hunter, animals, too, are supposed to care, to the extent of laying down their lives for humans by allowing themselves to be taken. They retain, however, full control over their own destiny. Under pastoralism, that control has been relinquished to humans. It is the (farmer) who takes life-and-death decisions concerning what are now “his” animals, and who controls every other aspect of their welfare, acting as he does as both protector, guardian and executioner. He sacrifices them; they do not sacrifice themselves to him. They are cared for, but they are not themselves empowered to care. (2000b: 72; italics mine) I would argue that sacrifice is most fundamentally a logic, language, and practice of transformative negation, in which one entity – a plant or animal, a bodily part, some portion of a person’s life, energy, property, or even the life itself – is given up for the benefit of some other species, group, god, or principle that is understood to be “higher” or more deserving in one fashion or another. By this logic, animals are regularly sacrificed for humans…humans for gods. (1991: 204)
For this artificial domesticated ecosystem is always a very precarious one. In completely tying their fortunes and fate to that of their land, farmers place all their eggs in one basket and thus become somewhat ironically even more dependent and at the mercy of the elements and their environment than hunter-gatherers. Unlike hunter-gatherers who in the face of bad weather, fire, flood or localized ecological collapse can generally easily switch to a new food source or area, the farmers’ dependence on a localized area of planted crops means that a year’s worth of work can be lost in a day and their very survival threatened due to a sudden flash flood, blight, freak hail storm, or touch of frost. Thus, farmers live in a state of continual anxiety due to their dependence upon “things beyond their control” and “responsibility in a situation of certain failure – if not this year, then next, or the year after that…Blights and witherings were inevitable, bringing not only food shortage but emotional onslaughts. The judgment is guilt, for which the penalty is scarcity” (Shepard, 1982: 31). No wonder then that the farmers wished to placate their fears by currying favour with human-like gods who were held to be ultimately responsible for all such capricious natural and meteorological phenomena. Thus, according to Shepard: Sacrifice reverses the hunter/gather idea of gifting in which humans are guests in life who receive according to their due; in its stead it substitutes offerings as a kind of barter with blood as currency…Harmony with the world is reckoned in terms of mastery over parasites and animal competitors by enlarging the scope of the simplification of ecosystems and, ceremonially, by sacrificial rites of negotiation with gods with human faces. Ostensibly a participation with the cosmos, the sacrificial ceremony is only a thinly disguised bribe. (1998: 91) “Primitive” man lived in constant terror of finding that the forces around him which he found so useful were worn out. For thousands of years men were tortured by the fear that the sun would disappear forever at the winter solstice, that the moon would not rise again, that plants would die forever, and so on…this power is a precarious one, one day it may wear out. (1958: 157)
Shepard, however, argues that their conception of all nature as one “super-sacrificial machine” owes more to the legacy of Neolithic agriculture than to Paleolithic hunting. For not only is the practice of ritual sacrifice more a meditation on the selective killing of domestic butchery than the fortuitous kill of the hunt, but also the very notion of nature as a super-sacrificial machine in which a ravenous, blood-thirsty earth must be placated and satiated through blood sacrifice is itself a motif of agrarian mythology, not a hunting one. Furthermore, this common assumption of all nature being in battle for conquest and dominance is more a reflection of an agrarian ecology than of a wild one. For unlike either predation or hunting, agriculture in a very real sense is a constant war of conquest on the natural world, in which lesser beings and species must be either subdued and pacified or exterminated. Herein lies the vision of a dichotomous cosmos riven by a war between the good humane order structured to cater to human goals and dreams and the chaotic, malevolent wild which threatens it, and it is a vision so deep-seated in the myths, cosmology and metaphysics of domesticated peoples – ourselves included – that Shepard claims that it has informed everything from the Judeo-Christian legacy to the scientific revolution and, most importantly, our current environmental crisis. For Shepard sees this denigration and demonization of the wild, non-human natural world inaugurated by Neolithic domestication as one of the root causes behind our inability to find value in and celebrate the existence of the wild natural world so imperiled by our actions and assumptions of superiority. Hence, Shepard argues, to find a resolution to this crisis we must look back to and attempt to recover not the domesticated religious sensibilities of the Neolithic but the cynegetic ones of the Paleolithic.
Conclusion
In this article, we have argued that to modern ears “hunting” and “sacrifice” are two words that seem to inevitably evoke notions of primordial barbarism and bloodlust. For on the surface, at least, surely the connection between hunting and blood sacrifice seems a fairly basic and self-evident one, hardly worth commenting on. Perhaps then it is hardly surprising that the theories of Burkert and Girard have enjoyed such widespread influence and acclaim despite the considerable empirical and anthropological shortcomings of their accounts.
By drawing attention to the distinction between hunting and sacrifice, therefore, Shepard is not simply making some dry, obscure academic distinction but rather calling into question a whole range of deep-seated assumptions concerning nature, our humanity, and the cultural progress upon which the association of hunting and sacrifice is based. By situating human hunting in its original evolutionary and ecological context, Shepard challenges age-old Neolithic stereotypes concerning the inherent wickedness and violence of predators and predation. He asks us to understand hunting as contemporary hunter-gatherers do and perhaps our Paleolithic ancestors did, not as an act of conquest or domination but as one of cosmological reciprocity in which we humans are the recipients, not the givers of the gift of life. For it is this understanding of life as sacrament not as sacrifice, he argues, that is “the metaphysical gift” of our hunting past: a gift which in light of our current crisis we would do well to acknowledge.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.