Preserved Smith (1880–1941)

I wish that I could officially give two separate star ratings, one for the pre-Luther chapters and one for the Luther-and-beyond chapters. If it was so, then I would give 4 stars to the former and 1 star to the latter. The discrepancy reflects a book that started off with a bang but fizzled early, and my persistence in reading it reflects a hope that the bang would return; it did not.

It was fascinating to learn about the prevalence of god-eating among the religions of the world, and how Christianity first came to embrace the idea and practice. It was also interesting to learn that this belief and practice caused a lot of controversy in the early Church, primarily between the Jews-turned-Christians and the Pagans-turned-Christians. Very good stuff.

Once the book got to the age of Luther, though, it became page after page of old white guys debating the same three points endlessly. And that's History - sometimes it is freaking boring.… (plus d'informations)

Ah, this book.

I'd been itching to read up on theophagy ever since it was briefly mentioned in an anthropology class I took. It took a while to make that happen because I promptly forgot the word theophagy and when I remembered it turned out to be so esoteric a term that a google search for it literally had one result - an abstract for this book I believe. Thankfully since my initial interest was peaked the internet has filled out quite a bit and there are now actual articles on the practice to be found. However this stands tall to me as a reminder that the internet does not have a monopoly on information and there are things you can still only learn by cracking a book, especially when it comes to theophagy.

This book, written in 1922 by the historian Preserved Smith, was the only credible book I could find on the subject. Apparently, though the practice of eating god is still fairly wide spread and super interesting, not many have bothered to to study it in any detail. I was a little nervous that with only one option on the subject I might be stuck with something dry and unreadable, but that really wasn't the case at all. A Short History of Theophagy is clearly academic in tone, but not at all dry.

The book starts out with an introduction to pre-Christian theophagy which is fascinating. Theophagy was widely practiced in early religions, not just in the Middle East and Mediterranean, but also in the Americas. Smith traces the development of pre-Christian theophagy from the mysteries like the cult of Bacchus who pretty much set the bar by running down their god-meat in the form of a wild animal and devouring it raw on the spot. Back then the god-blood they drank was blood, maybe with a little wine mixed in. It didn't take too long for the practitioners of theophagy to regard devouring actual flesh and blood as a barbaric practice and shift to eating their god impanate (in the form of bread) and drinking his blood as wine. The Romans looked down their noses at the mysteries that practiced theopagy and were more than a little suspicious of the whole thing. This was all before Christianity.

The discussion of Christian theophagy is more structured and takes advantage of the copious amount of literature and dogma the church has generated on the subject. Smith explains the theological justifications the church produced in defense of the Eucharist. They are generally bizarre and hard to believe today. Transubstantiation and it's newfangled competition, consubstantiation, are explained and then Smith throws you into the vitriolic rhetoric that dominated the discussion as the Protestant Reformation made mass and communion one of their primary points of contention. Smith observes the theologians were fairly bad at defending their views and were often reduced to using obscurantism as a tactic saying:

"...the reason for these interminable beatings around the bush lay in the fact that both parties started from a false premise, namely that reason and the Scripture could be reconciled."

They certainly tried to explain the Eucharist in reasonable terms...but it had a way of degenerating to absurdity. For instance, of those that argued that Jesus' body was physically (or sometimes spiritually) present in the Eucharist, none could find a satisfactory answer to the question of what happened when the holy host hit your stomach and your bowels. Reformation theologians were very concerned with if they were pooping Jesus. That and name-calling. Lordy, I've never seen so much historical shit-talking. Luther was particularly bad and enabled by his unflinching conviction "that he had a monopoly of truth and that those who advanced independent opinions were, so to speak, infringing his copyright."

Yep, good old Martin Luther was a sonuvabitch. His position on the Eucharist was nigh indistinguishable from the Catholic church (he was very possibly the most conservative branch of the Protestant Reformation), but he didn't let the difficulty of defending a god impanate stop him. Nope. Luther just kept busy accusing those with differing opinions, like that the Eucharist was merely a symbol, of being in league with the devil, possibly the Antichrist, a threat to Christianity, as bad as the pope (ironic since it was Luther whose views were most closely related to the Catholic church) and that their writings were "dung" and that they smeared Christianity with "dung". What a classy guy huh? He certainly wasn't the only one name-calling, but he did seem to produce more bile than any of the others. I think he hit the ultimate low when he declared the death of one of his opponents to be proof that god had smote him for disagreeing with Luther.

All and all it's a fascinating read, complete with bizarre factoids like that the holy host was on more than one occasion poisoned and employed in murder and at least one assassination. It would have been easier to follow the rancor between the Protestant reformers if I had a better understanding of the Reformation, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this. And I learned some new words! How cool are "impanate", "artolatry" and "zwinglian"? Smith has more books on Martin Luther and the Reformation and I expect I'll come back to them at some point.… (plus d'informations)