the true meaning of the portions he so carefully arranges. To see that meaning, to see what Zeus apparently sees, it helps to know that for the Greeks the bones stand for immortality. They are the undying essence, what does not decay (they are, for example, what was preserved when the Greeks cremated a body). Conversely, in all ancient Greek literature the belly stands for needy, shameless, inexorable, overriding appetite. In this tradition, the belly is always called “odious,” “evil-doing,” “contemptible,” “deadly,” and so on. At one point in the Odyssey, Odysseus exclaims: “Is there nothing more doglike [or shameless] than this hateful belly? It always arouses us, obliges us not to forget it, even at the height of our troubles and anguish.”
The symbolism suggests, then, that those who eat the belly-wrapped meat must take the same thing as their portion in the world. When Zeus leaves for mortals that Promethean “better” share, mortals perforce become the very thing that they have eaten; they become meat sacks, bellies that must be filled over and over with meat simply to delay an inexorable death. Prometheus tries to be a cunning encoder of images, but Zeus is a more cunning reader, and the meat trick backfires.
The story of Promethean sacrifice, then, is not one in which a hungry trickster sacrifices appetite or intestines but one in which, as a result of a foolish trick, human beings get stuck with endless hunger as their portion. Like the tale of Raven eating the shin scabs, it is a story of the origin of appetite, and of descent. After Prometheus, humans are snared in their own hunger, a trap in which they quickly age and die. Prometheus does not suffer that human fate himself, nor does he become an insatiable eater like Raven, but Zeus binds him to a rock where an eagle eternally devours his liver—each night the liver grows back, each day the eagle eats it again. In his own way, then, Prometheus suffers from unremitting hunger, as do humans—and Raven.
With this Promethean trick in mind, let’s now return to the question of whether or not trickster invents sacrifice. To answer, it helps to know that, in the culture from which Prometheus and Hermes come, sacrifice is ritual apportionment. That is to say, the distributed portions of a Greek sacrifice represented the more abstract “portions” of the parties involved, their political and spiritual functions. The bones, for example, are the gods’ concrete portion but also stand for their spiritual portion, their immortality. Or—another example—priests cooked and ate the viscera of a sacrificed animal; it was at once their portion in fact and a symbol of their place in the community. The way the Greeks divided an animal made a map of the way their community was divided. If you saw someone eating the thigh of an ox, you could assume he was a high magistrate of the city.
In such a system, when people imagine the first sacrifice they will also be imagining an original apportioning. And if the beginnings amount to a change in apportionment,* as seems to be the case with both Hermes and Prometheus, then sacrifice will probably be invented by way of some trick or deceit, for such a change usually has the less powerful taking a share away from the more powerful (in this case, for example, Prometheus hopes to take power away from the gods). Whatever trickster pulls this trick does not initially invent sacrifice, therefore; first he invents the trick of reapportionment, some sleight of hand by which the thigh of an ox ends up on the plate of a slave. In the case of Prometheus, the trick backfires (humans get the meat and their lot in life becomes more grim); in the case of Hermes, the trick works (he refuses the meat and his lot improves). In both cases, though, there is a change of apportionment and a form of sacrifice emerges that memorializes both the trick and its consequences, the new order of things.
We can now give a general shape to this material on the sacrifice of appetite, and link it to the earlier discussion of traps. A trickster is often imagined as a sort of “hungry god.” The image can be read from two sides: tricksters are either gods who have become voracious eaters, smothered in intestines; or they are beings full of appetite who become a little more god-like through some trimming of the organs of appetite. The stories we’ve seen have a hierarchy: at the lower levels, trickster is bound by appetite (Coyote must eat his entire cow); at the higher levels, he is either freed from appetite (that anorexic shining prince) or given an appetite for more ethereal foods (the smoke of sacrifice). Moreover, trickster walks the path between high and low (descending into hunger at the end of the Raven and Prometheus stories; ascending and restraining hunger in the Hymn to Hermes and the opening of the Raven story). On this path between high and low we also find sacrifice. At its simplest, it seems unintended (the devoured penis, the lost intestines of many Coyote stories); at other times, there is conscious action (the burned intestines in the Raven story, Hermes’ restraining pride).
Now let us return to the idea that trickster intelligence arises from the tension between predators and prey. Behind trickster’s tricks lies the desire to eat and not be eaten, to satisfy appetite without being its object. If trickster is initially ridden by his appetites, and if such compulsion leads him into traps, then we might read intentional sacrifice as an attempt to alter appetite—to eat without the compulsion or its consequences. In the Greek case, the foods identified with heaven satisfy an appetite shed of its usual, odious baggage: old age, sickness, and death. These stories imagine a final escape from the eating game in which, beyond the edge of predator-prey relationships, immortal eaters feast on heavenly foods and never themselves become a meal for worms or for time.
As I have been suggesting, in these tales of sacrifice a hook is hidden in the meat portion: mortality itself. Prometheus doesn’t see it, and the Golden Age ends with humans hooked on meat, and mortal. Hermes avoids it. He changes the eating game by inventing a sacrificial rite in which he forgoes the meat and, more important, his own desire for meat. Figuratively, to slip the trap of appetite he sacrifices the organ of that appetite, his odious belly. So, although the Hymn contains no direct declaration in this regard, I think it is correct to say that Hermes invents the art of sacrifice and that he does so out of a struggle over appetite.
Moreover, when he refrains from eating he is not only sacrificing appetite, he has also gotten “wise to the bait.” Coyotes who avoid poisoned carcasses restrain their hunger and do not get killed. Hermes does the same thing, if eating the meat means becoming mortal. But for those with actual bellies, such restraint is only a partial solution. No one imagines that coyotes avoiding strychnine give up eating, and even Hermes makes it clear that he doesn’t eat the cattle because he hopes later to enjoy the fruits of sacrifice and prayer. (Those are more ethereal foods, but they are foods nonetheless; when Hermes imagines heaven he doesn’t imagine an absence of hunger, he imagines gods who eat.) Let us say, then, that wise-to-the-bait Hermes is a bait thief as well. Raven, remember, figures out how to eat the fat and avoid the hook. Hermes steals the cattle and, dedicating the smoke of sacrifice to himself, consumes only the portion that will not harm him. To say that Hermes will enjoy “the fruit of sacrifice and prayer” is an elevated way of saying we’ve met another trickster who eats the fat and leaves an empty hook behind.
* This cycle of tales was first printed in the key early work on trickster figures, Paul Radin’s The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956). Radin was an anthropologist with a 1910 doctorate from Columbia University. He lived and worked with the Winnebago in Wisconsin for many years, and his commentary places their trickster cycle in its cultural contest with great finesse.
* Trickster eats his own intestines. He does not do this intentionally, but nonetheless it is a kind of self-sacrifice. When Carl Jung said that the trickster “is a forerunner of the savior,” he had in mind this motif of unconscious agony.
* This could be read as a strange version of the vagina-dentata motif (which does occasionally appear in trickster stories). If so, rather than understanding the toothed vagina as an image of horrific castration, we could take it as an image for the conversion of crippling desire into appropriate desire. These teeth don’t
