The Soulful Eye

An unexpected little blurb about suicide food.    Martyrs are fed to vicious animals to propitiate the vicious animals, God seething mob.  Pigs and cows are martyrs animals .   Jesus was an animal God incarnate, who, as the ultimate martyr, was fed to vicious animals slaughtered for the animals, God us so we could be fed saved.  It’s all the same clear now.

In the transition from a pagan to a Christian culture, Christian conceptions of sacrifice were sometimes combined with traditional conceptions.  From the Nolan countryside, the Christian monk Paulinus wrote in 406 ce about a pig and a heifer that offered themselves for slaughter at the tomb of Saint Felix (Carmen, 20).  As Denis Trout has recently shown, when animals were slaughtered at the tomb of Saint Felix, the needs of rural life were thus taken care of, and Christian and pre-Christian religious practices were combined. (Trout 1995; cf. Trout 1999: 179-86).  It is worth noting that in the Christian amalgamation of traditional sacrificial ritual and Christian piety, the animals were not merely cooperating as they had been expected to do in the traditional sacrificial cults.  The pig and the heifer were eagerly and happily hurrying towards their destiny as the Christian martyrs were thought to do.

~ Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Animals, Gods And Humans:  Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 157.   The Trout reference is from Trout, D.E. (1995) “Christianizing the Nolan countryside: animal sacrifice at the tomb of St. Felix”, Journal of Early Christian Studies 3, 3, 281-98.  and  (1999) Paulinus of Nola:  Life, Letters, and Poems, Berkely, Los Angeles and London: Univ. of California Press.