Proxy Sacrifices and Persecution

A few nights ago, I did some light bedtime reading that had nothing to do with YSEE’s lexicon or the Eumenides. The article, “Sacrifice and Pagan Belief in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Byzantium” by K. W. Harl, was cited in another article about sacrifice that I read a few months ago. I drew some thought-provoking points from this article. (If you don’t have a lot of time, Point #2 is the coolest.)

1.    There are scholars out there who seem to portray the persecutive reality of living as a polytheist after the ascent of Christianity. Finally.

Along with blood sacrifices — long offensive to Christians — such pagan devotions as sprinkling incense on altars, hanging sacred fillets on trees and raising turf altars were classified as acts of high treason punishable by death and confiscation of property. There was no mistaking the intent of Theodosius’ laws: henceforth Nicene Christianity was the official religion of the empire. (Harl, 2) 

This guy later mentions the death penalty for worshipping the Gods. Thank you, scholar who takes religious persecution seriously!

2.    Polytheists in the fifth and sixth centuries decided that they could proxy-pray/sacrifice for an entire community. “The persistence of pagans in sacrificing to the Gods is astonishing and perplexing,” (3). What was it that Sallustius said about prayers without sacrifice being empty? 

In a letter to Eutherius, [the Emperor Julian] noted that a single pious individual could sacrifice as a surrogate for the entire community of “Hellenes,” by which term Julian meant all true believers in the gods. The notion of sacrifice by a pious proxy inevitably gained popularity when pagans faced the choice between sacrificing to the gods in violation of imperial edict or denying the gods true worship. (Harl, 7)

This sentiment was echoed by other polytheists of the time, too.

The ritual innovation in the face of anti-polytheist laws/policy during the 400s and 500s CE is really useful material for modern Hellenists.

The idea that a single polytheist makes sacrifice on behalf of an entire polis of human beings makes some sense to me; it also makes me wonder what people of Abrahamic persuasions would think. On a practical level, it means that we have such potential to work as a coordinated community in honoring the Deathless Ones.

It sounds mystical, but that’s how polytheism rolls.

3.    There is an ideological disconnect between polytheism and monotheism.

There were several reasons for the lack of action to restore the cults on the part of the pagans of the fifth and sixth centuries. By no means the least was the inability of most pagans to comprehend a conflict of religions. (14)

One of the things that modern polytheists struggle with is reconciling our deep response to the centuries of anti-polytheistic genocide and suppression with a tolerant polytheistic world-view. In the past few days, I also read a great essay by a Gnostic Christian published in 2006 that discussed how the trauma of persecution screws with people. While Gnosticism and Hellenism are different, I think that polytheism has a lot of historical trauma to work through before we can bounce back effectively.

Reading about Christianity after it started gaining momentum makes me furious. Christian narratives glorify the extermination of indigenous traditions (the “salvation of souls”) and the acceptance of alien ones. They glorify every moment they interfere with an individual’s religious freedom by outlawing sacrifice or stripping non-Christian sacred sites of their religious images. It makes me too emotional.

The narratives about Christian extermination of traditional Hellenic and Roman religions also make me feel a special kind of despair — the kind that is coupled with an “oh s***” moment.

I have been very venomous about Christianity in the past. While there are hard lines between polytheism and Abrahamic faiths that should be emphasized — and that polytheism in antiquity should have articulated this difference a bit more clearly — I think that too much venom only contributes to the problem. I also think that Christianity just got lucky by gaining access to Imperial Rome at a really important historical bottleneck.

4.    If Christianity were such a great religion, there wouldn’t have been droves of people practicing polytheism in secret. Lots of people were executed by the government for apostasy. This makes polytheism’s tenacity very illogical, but the executions kept happening. I guess our traditional religions must have been doing something right.