however one might imagine the connection, there are trickster tales in which a limit to appetite is intended rather than accidental. In fact, we have already seen such a moment: when the father in the Raven story has his son’s intestines burned, he consciously attempts to effect the change that the Winnebago trickster suffers witlessly.
If we turn to the Homeric Greek tradition, we will find a similar pattern, though somewhat differently elaborated. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes tells about the days immediately following Hermes’ birth.* He is the illegitimate child of Zeus and a nymph named Maia. At the beginning of the story, the newborn babe wanders from his mother’s cave, stumbles upon a turtle, and, from its shell, makes the first lyre. After singing a song about himself on this instrument, Hermes lays it aside. “His mind wandered to other matters. For Hermes longed to eat meat.” He sets off to steal cattle from the herd of his half brother, Apollo.
In many a Coyote story the phrase “he longed to eat meat” would lead willy-nilly to some sort of disaster. And the frank declaration of carnivorous desire in the Homeric Hymn makes it clear that this Greek trickster is a cousin to Coyote, as does a later remark that Apollo makes when he finally catches his thieving brother. “You’re going to be a great nuisance to lonely herdsmen in the mountain woods when you get to hankering after meat and come upon their cows or fleecy sheep.”
So the Hymn itself lets us know that Hermes is a meat thief like Coyote, and given his transgressive nature, we will not be surprised if he breaks the rules and eats the cow he steals. But the plot of this particular story differs in one significant detail. The crucial scene occurs after Hermes has led the stolen cattle to a barn near the river Alpheus. Having kindled a fire in a trench, Hermes drags two of the cows from the barn and butchers them.
He cut up the richly marbled flesh and skewered it on wooden spits; he roasted all of it—the muscle and the prized sirloin and the dark-blooded belly—and laid the spits out on the ground …
Next he gladly drew the dripping chunks of meat from the spits, spread them on a stone, and divided them into twelve portions distributed by lot, making each one exactly right.†
And glorious Hermes longed to eat that sacrificial meat. The sweet smell weakened him, god though he was; and yet, much as his mouth watered, his proud heart would not let him eat. Later he took the fat and all the flesh and stored them in that ample barn, setting them high up as a token of his youthful theft. That done, he gathered dry sticks and let the fire devour, absolutely, the hooves of the cattle, and their heads.
And when the god had finished, he threw his sandals into the deep pooling Alpheus. He quenched the embers and spread sand over the black ashes. And so the night went by under the bright light of the moon.
Here, then, is a meat-thief trickster who does not eat (at an ordinary Greek sacrifice, by the way, those who conducted the rite would eat; Hermes is doing something unusual). I shall later speak more fully of why “his proud heart” prevails, but suffice it to say for now that Hermes restrains one desire in favor of another. It seems that Hermes’ status is not clear at the beginning of the Hymn: is he an Olympian god or is he a half-breed from a single-parent cave? As he himself says to his mother after returning from his night of crime:
“I’m ready to do whatever I must so that you and I will never go hungry. You’re wrong to insist we live in a place like this. Why should we be the only gods who never eat the fruits of sacrifice and prayer? Better always to live in the company of other deathless ones—rich, glamorous, enjoying heaps of grain—than forever to sit by ourselves in a gloomy cave.”
If the trickster in the Raven cycle comes down from heaven to the world of fish and work, here we find a cousin trickster hoping to travel in the opposite direction on the same road. In deciding not to eat meat, Hermes is preparing himself to be an Olympian. To eat meat is to be confined to the mortal realm, and Hermes has higher goals. He doesn’t want to be a cave boy, he’d rather be a shining prince. He is hungry for the food of the gods, “the fruits of sacrifice and prayer,” not the meat itself. By not eating, it’s as if he’s sacrificing his own intestines along with the meat, or, in the imagery of the Hymn, denying his salivary glands in favor of his heart’s pride. Against the rules he stole a cow and killed it, as Coyote did, but having violated that limit he imposes another in its stead. Or rather, what I’ve translated as his “heart” imposes another. The Greek word in question is thymos, usually translated as “heart,” “soul,” or “breath”; it can also mean “mind,” because the Homeric Greeks located intelligence in the chest and the speaking voice, not in the silent brain. In this story, then, we see a meat-thief intelligence setting a limit to appetite and by so doing avoiding death, the hook hidden in that meat.
MEAT SACRIFICE
It is often said that when Hermes slaughters the cattle he is inventing the art of sacrifice.* I’m not sure the Hymn itself offers enough evidence for that claim. It does say clearly that Hermes invents the lyre and the shepherd’s pipes; it says he “is responsible for fire-sticks and fire”; but it is silent as to who invented sacrifice. Nonetheless, if we set the Hymn in the context of other trickster tales the claim becomes more plausible. In West Africa, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the Yoruba trickster Eshu is “the father of sacrifice,” having gotten human beings to offer meat to the gods in return for insight into the will of heaven. Another example, the one that will help us see Hermes in context, appears in the story of that other Greek trickster, Prometheus. Both Prometheus and Hermes dream up clever tricks to change their relationship to meat, but Hermes turns out to be the more cunning of the two, for Prometheus is a little slow to figure out where the dangers of appetite really lie.
As the ancients tell the tale, Prometheus and Zeus got into a fight toward the end of the Golden Age. Prometheus had created people out of clay; from the events that follow, it seems likely that he wished to increase their portion in the world. In the Golden Age, humankind neither grew old quickly nor died in pain, but they were nonetheless mortal and perhaps Prometheus wished them immortality. In any event, he and Zeus got into a dispute that focused on which parts of a slaughtered ox the gods would eat and which would be food for human mouths. Prometheus divided the ox into two portions, and because Zeus was to have first choice, he disguised them: the better part (the edible meat) he made unappealing by covering it with the ox’s stomach (Greeks did not eat the belly, the tripe); the lesser part (the inedible bones) he covered with fat to make it look like rich meat.
Zeus was not deceived, however; he could see beneath the surfaces of the Promethean shell game. And yet he didn’t choose the “better” portion, he chose the bones. Hesiod writes: “Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw … the trick, and in his heart he thought mischief against mortal men … With both hands he took up the white fat …” Then Hesiod adds the point that is of interest here: “And because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars.” Promethean trickery thus leads to the first sacrifice.
It leads to much more, as well, which should be mentioned briefly. The “mischief” that Zeus “thought against mortals” took several forms: he hid fire from them and, after Prometheus stole that fire back, he sent Pandora as a sort of poisonous gift. For Hesiod, that earliest of misogynists, it is Pandora who really brought an end to the all-male Golden Age club, for with her came sexual reproduction, sickness, insanity, vice, and toil. After Prometheus, humans have fire and meat; they also age quickly and die in pain.
If we now look closely at the way in which Prometheus apportions the slaughtered ox, we will see that he is in fact a witless trickster here, abandoned by his fabled foresight. Not unlike Coyote,
