Happy May Day, everyone! I hope everyone is having a good day wrapping their Maypoles and Morris dancing and picking flowers and lighting bonfires and practicing class solidarity and seizing the means of production and protesting the abuses of Capital, however you choose to celebrate. In honor of the holiday *I* want to spend a lighthearted thirteen hundred or so words breaking down the implications of the human sacrifice at the heart of the story of Iphigenia, please join me!
The driving action in Iphigenia is Artemis’ demand that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter, the titular Iphigenia, to make obeisance for his crime of hunting in Artemis’ sacred grove and the killing of a sacred deer, and his monumental arrogance to brag that he was a superior hunter that the Great Huntress herself. Her demand of a human sacrifice, a virginal sacrifice no less, is unusual, almost unheard-of, in the Greek legendarium. Indeed, one of the only other times that it comes up in the extant tragedies, ironically in Iphigenia At Tauris, it is explicitly a watchword for the backwards barbarism of the Taurians who practice it, in contrast to the civilized Greeks who eschew it. In Euripides’ The Bacchae (produced in the same tetralogy as Iphigenia at Aulis), Pentheus’ death at the hands of the frenzied worshippers of Dionysus, including his own mother Agave, isn’t exactly a formal sacrifice but is explicitly the act of women in the throes of religious ecstasy acting on direct orders from a god. The annual Athenian tribute of 7 boys and 7 girls to Knossos was a marker of King Minos’ cruelty and inhumanity, not an endorsement of his methods; don’t forget that the offering was to feed the Minotaur, a living and monstrous reminder of Minos’ cuckoldry and his wife’s perverse and bestial desires. The stories of human sacrifice on Mount Lykaion refer to a dark past ancient and shrouded in mystery even to the Greek chroniclers of 2500 years ago. We will return to it another time, but for now suffice it to say it is the origin of the word ‘lycanthrope’. To the cultured Athenian, human sacrifice was at best a relic of a shameful past and at worst an inhuman, animalistic urge practiced by savages and beast-men. It is an inversion of the normal order of things, man sacrificed by beast instead of the other way around; not dissimilar to Artemis’ turning Actaeon into a stag and having his hunting dogs tear him apart.
As a quick aside before I get to the meat of this blog, it is no accident that Agamemnon son of Atreus of the line of Tantalus is the figure in Greek mythology who is FORCED to kill his own daughter. The fruit of kinslaughter grows heavy on the Atreides family tree, or as my family says, plant corn, get corn. The nature of bloodline curses in the Greek tradition is that they are cyclical and self-fulfilling. I don’t have time to totally break down the Curse of the Atreides right now [but don’t touch that dial! -KH] but Agamemnon killing his daughter both confirms his own destiny as an Atreides and renews his familial pollution for the next generation.
The Iphigenia story, both the familial connection and the last-minute reprieve, shares more than a few conceptual bones with the story of Abraham and Isaac. God tests the faith of his number one fan Abraham by demanding he sacrifice his son, but then stops him at the last second and has him switch Isaac out with a ram trapped in a nearby thicket, and rewards him for his loyalty by promising to “make [his] descendents as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore” [GEN 22:17]. Abraham is not troubled with the same moral dilemma as Agamemnon is at God’s decree; he hears the command and immediately chops the wood he will need for the sacrifice, grabs his rope and throat-slitting knife, and totters off to Mount Moriah with his son in tow. Isaac, similarly, has little compunction about obeying his father without question or explanation, even as he is bound and placed on the altar, Faramir-style. “God will provide,” his dad tells him, and that’s all he needs to hear. It takes Iphigenia a lot of hemming and hawing before she comes to her own utilitarian peace with her death, reasoning that it will protect Greek womanhood in the abstract by leading to the defeat of Troy. The will of the Greek gods are similarly irresistible to the God of Abraham, but unlike Him, Artemis has never claimed to be all-seeing or merciful. His demand may be inscrutable to His followers but His purpose is always to serve the Chosen People, so their trust in Him is implicit. Artemis has her own interests and agenda, she is largely disconnected from humanity except when their actions intersect with hers in some way, and it is clear that her demand of Iphigenia’s life is meant as a punishment for Agamemnon, not part of some divine Plan, so it is a little harder for Iphigenia to climb gracefully onto the altar than Isaac.
And of course, the reason for the season and the namer of this blog post, one of my favorite movies, The Wicker Man, has another bait and switch sacrifice at its core. Rowan, the young girl who has disappeared and who Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Constabulary is assiduously searching for, was never the intended sacrifice for Summerisle’s May Day celebration. Her replacement at the last minute with crusty, grouchy Sergeant Howie mirrors the miraculous replacement of Iphigenia with a stag and Isaac with a ram. That he is himself also virginal, the traditional measure of youth for sacrifices, along with being pious, a fool, and a servant of the crown, is just icing on the cake. The only difference is that the swap is not miraculous in nature, but a mundane and metaphorical replacement that had been in the works the entire time. And, of course, that Howie doesn’t come to terms with his demise nearly as well as his fellows.
Christ’s crucifixion also fits into this category, although His case is muddled because the Romans were merely executing Him; He and His followers were the ones who interpreted it as a sacrifice. The Abrahamic religions continue to muck things up vis a vis sacrifice by removing angst from the equation. Because their God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-merciful, there is little room for ambiguity about obedience. Jesus may have a momentary crisis of confidence in Gethsemane but there is never any doubt of the necessity or inevitability of his sacrifice. He, too, is not replaced at the last minute, though his resurrection and subsequent translation to heaven three days later does also mirror one of Iphigenia’s apocryphal fates as Artemis’ handmaiden and goddess of magic Hecate.
Sacrifice is a Rite of Spring. The crucifixion and Easter Sunday, the Festival Dionysia, and Beltane all happen in late spring for a reason. It is a thank you to the gods for surviving another winter, a celebration of the approaching warmth and sunlight, and an invocation for a fruitful harvest and another successful year. And it is significant that the humans being sacrificed in these stories are always young; you have to give up something with potential, the loss has to be meaningful and significant, or it doesn’t mean anything. In exchange, the miraculous replacement of the victim with an animal (or in the case of The Wicker Man, an outsider) demonstrates recognition of the value of the sacrifice and divine mercy. The cosmopolitan Greeks of Euripides’ time may have scorned the practice of human sacrifice as barbaric, but they certainly understood its thematic resonance. A resonance that we will hopefully capture on stage late THIS spring. We will be performing Iphigenia from May 24th to June 17th, just a week before midsummer, and I hope you can join us! Tickets are available now!
We Happy Few DC 