Cosmologies of Pure Realms and the Rhetoric of Pollution 9780367712051, 9780367722777, 9781003154150

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Cosmologies of Pure Realms and the Rhetoric of Pollution

This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture’s beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices. The authors of this study refine Mary Douglas’ foundational theory of pollution as “matter out of place,” using a comparative approach to make the case that a culture’s cosmology designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. By bringing together a historical comparison of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, an ethnographic study of indigenous shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea, and the reception history of biblical rhetoric about pollution in Jewish and Christian cultures, the authors show that a cosmological account of purity works effectively across multiple disparate religious and cultural contexts. They conclude that cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution, and also that embodied experiences of purification help generate cosmological ideas. Providing an innovative insight into a key topic of ritual studies, this book will be of vital interest to scholars and graduate students in religion, biblical studies, and anthropology. Yohan Yoo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Humanities at Seoul National University, Korea. James W. Watts is Professor in the Department of Religion of the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University, USA.

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Cosmologies of Pure Realms and the Rhetoric of Pollution

Yohan Yoo and James W. Watts

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Yohan Yoo and James W. Watts The right of Yohan Yoo and James W. Watts to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367712051 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367722777 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003154150 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

for our fellow Syracusians

Table of contents

Prefacevii 1. Finding realms: Purity and pollution in theory and practice 

1

YOHAN YOO AND JAMES W. WATTS

2. Changing realms: Cosmology and pollution in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures

22

YOHAN YOO AND JAMES W. WATTS

3. Separating realms: Purity and pollution in the indigenous religion of Jeju-do, Korea

75

YOHAN YOO

4. Interpreting realms: Pollution and cosmology in the history of biblical rhetoric

99

JAMES W. WATTS

5. Feeling realms: Cosmology and bodily experiences of purity and pollution

127

JAMES W. WATTS AND YOHAN YOO

References Index of authors and shamans Index of subjects

143 161 165

Preface

This book has been in development for a long time. Its origins lie in Yohan Yoo’s doctoral research. James Watts was initially skeptical of Yoo’s thesis linking cosmology and pollution, but was convinced by his arguments, first in a term paper and then in his dissertation. The thesis of this book, therefore, had its origins in Yoo’s Ph.D. dissertation, A Theory of Purity from the Perspective of Comparative Religion (Syracuse University, 2005), for which Watts served as his adviser. Yoo’s dissertation research on ancient Greek, Egyptian and Israelite purity ideas provided the basis for Chapter 2, which Watts revised and updated for this book, especially by adding material on Mesopotamian practices. Yoo’s field work from 2010 to 2011 on shamanic religious practices on Jeju Island provided the basis for Chapter 3. In the years since, he has continued to discuss purity ideas and practices with Jeju shamans regularly and has observed many more rituals. Watts suggested to Yoo that we write this book together to address long-standing puzzles about purity and pollution in religious studies research. Watts added Chapter 4 based on his ongoing research on the rhetoric of the book of Leviticus and the history of how Jews and Christians have received and used its pollution rhetoric. So, our long-standing research relationship has allowed us to advance Yoo’s original thesis through our different research methodologies and very distinct sources of information. This collaboration enabled us to reproduce the methodological breadth that Mary Douglas utilized nearly sixty years ago to theorize about purity and pollution and to suggest an alternative to her theory. Our research for this book has benefited from the support of Seoul National University and Syracuse University, and from colleagues at both universities who have been generous with their time and advice. Three reviewers for Routledge made excellent suggestions that have allowed us to improve this book. Any remaining problems are our responsibility alone. English translations of Korean and Hebrew quotations are by the authors, unless otherwise indicated by abbreviations in biblical quotations such as NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) or CEB (Common English Bible).

1

Finding realms Purity and pollution in ­theory and practice Yohan Yoo and James W. Watts

Cleansing is a basic feature of human biology, psychology, and sociology. Our bodies cleanse themselves of waste by exhaling, urinating, and defecating. Our cultures concretize cleansing behavior in standardized baths and toilets. We internalize the value of staying clean from a very early age. Beyond routine cleansing and washing, however, human cultures also tend to turn cleansing into a social and religious ideal. This ideal seems to demand a vocabulary of purity, and religious cleansing tends to be called the purification of pollution. Ideas about purity and pollution and ritual practices of purification appear in very many cultures around the world. People have typically thought that some objects or activities may pollute them and that there are specific ways of purifying themselves as well as the spaces they find themselves in and the objects they touch. Before engaging in religious activities, polluted persons are often required to remove any pollution. In most religions, purification involves ritual cleansing, such as washing, immersion, or sprinkling with water. In Islam, for example, “minor impurity” caused by natural evacuations is removed by washing just parts of the body, such as hands, face, or mouth, while purifying “major impurity” caused by such things as sexual activity, menstruation, and childbirth requires a full bath. Before Japanese enter a Shinto shrine through the torii, or sacred a­ rchway, they should rinse their hands and mouth at a stone basin with fresh water. The biblical books of Exodus and Leviticus often require washing hands and feet or the whole body for ritual purification. All these practices suggest that if contaminated people wash with water, they will no longer transmit contamination by touch. Purity ideas engage more than customary rituals. Purity vocabulary is a common feature of religious rhetoric, ranging from sectarian polemics to the most refined theological and mystical speculations. Theology tends to associate both holiness and morality with purity. Preachers and t­ heologians may employ pollution vocabulary not only to condemn opponents but also to explain the nature and sources of evil and suffering. The ideas of purity and pollution inflect much religious thought just as purification rituals accompany many forms of religious practice.

2  Finding realms Analysis of pollution ideas and purification rituals should therefore be a major topic in the academic study of religions. The fact is, however, that purity and pollution have played only a minor role in the history of religious studies, much less than categories like holiness, sacrifice, religious experience, and, of course, the divine. And when purity and pollution are mentioned in academic research, the ideas of one scholar dominate the discussion. We therefore begin our review like everybody else with the pioneering and foundational work of the British anthropologist, Mary Douglas.

Mary Douglas’s theory and its problems Almost all theoretical discussions of pollution practices begin with Mary Douglas’s book, Purity and Danger (1966). Douglas’s definition of purity was based on the function of ritual within a society. In Purity and Danger, Douglas probed deeply into the social functions and roles of ritual, articulating some critical characteristics of ritual. According to Douglas, ritual provides a mnemonic method and formulates experience. It is necessary for controlling human experience at a societal level: “as a social animal, man is a ritual animal. … there are some things we cannot experience without ritual.” Through the function of ritual, people symbolically create a unity that structures all experience. Douglas argued that ritual maintains “the cosmic outlines and the ideal social order” (2002 [1966], 77, 78, 80, 85, 90). In short, ritual creates a symbolic universe that unifies a society and maintains social order. Douglas emphasized the significance of ritual for understanding purity ideas, articulating her conception of purity as symbolic ritual cleanliness. Douglas understood uncleanness as “matter out of place,” which therefore involves conceptions of order (2002 [1966], 45–50). Her discussion of danger emphasized fear of crossing boundaries and fear of internal contradictions (2002 [1966],141–72). Douglas maintained that cultures exclude disorder or danger in the form of pollution in order to maintain social order. She observed that “Pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic and social, are clearly defined” (2002 [1966], 140). It is ritual therefore that holds back social disorder, namely, pollution, by controlling the danger of disorder, by recognizing the potency of disorder, and by finding “powers and truths which cannot be reached by conscious effort” (2002 [1966], 117). Douglas agreed with Victor Turner (1964) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958 [1949]) that “ritual is creative,” offering “meaning to existence” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 88–90). When she published Purity and Danger in 1966, this new paradigm of ritual theory was just beginning to appear among some anthropologists. As Ronald Grimes (1982, 117) noted, “The most general claims for ritual have been … the traditional religious, Durkheimian sociological, Freudian psychoanalytic, and Cambridge school theories which

Finding realms 3 have dominated modern ritual theory” until the growing influence of LeviStrauss (1981, 667–82). However, Victor Turner (1964) was the first to look upon ritual as having creative and critical capacities (Grimes 1990, 21). More recent theorists, including Catherine Bell, argued that ritual not only informs meanings but also creates meanings. Bell (1997, 80) therefore advocated “the study of ritual as practice” or as performance. Roy Rappaport (1999, 3, 12–16, 52–57) even asserted that “religion’s major conceptual and experiential constituents, the sacred, the numinous, the occult, and the divine, and their integration into the Holy” are all the creations of ritual.1 Douglas’s 1966 book can be considered one of the major sources for this new paradigm of ritual theory that found its footing in the 1980s (Grimes 1990, 21). She even criticized the “anti-ritualist prejudice” that has made it difficult to find instances of ritual uncleanness in Christian practice (Douglas 2002 [1966], 76–77). Douglas brilliantly related concepts of purity and pollution to ritual. Furthermore, since most ritual theorists have not delved into purity matters, Douglas’s work remains the dominant anthropological analysis of the ritual function of purity ideas. However, Douglas’s theory suffers from several problems that undermine her general thesis. The first shortcoming of Douglas’s theory is that, by overemphasizing societies, social systems, and social order for understanding purity, Douglas overlooked religious dimensions of purity ideas that cannot always be explained by social systems. For Douglas, a functional anthropologist, society was “a powerful image. It is potent in its own right to control or to stir men to action” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 141). Ritual was important for her because of the function it plays in society. In particular, she related purity systems to functions of the social order, including social hierarchy. According to Douglas (2002 [1966], 140; also 139, 152–57), “all spiritual powers are part of the social system,” and “the power of the universe is ultimately hitched to society.” Without a series of social processes that create order, nothing can be explained: “Dirt was created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 198). There can be no question that many cultures do connect purity and pollution to social hierarchy and order. However, if we limit purity to matters related to the social order, as Douglas did, we miss much about how people see the world and themselves. In Purity and Danger, she argued that purity and impurity are supposed to be critical for determining a society’s hierarchy and structure. She defined dirt as “matter out of place” and “disorder … is in the eye of the beholder” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 2, 44). According to Douglas, ideas of impurity uphold moral values, define social rules, and create unity in experience. She observed that “some pollutions are used as analogies for expressing a general view of the social order” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 4). She viewed purity and impurity as socially constructed and determined by the order that a society requires. Douglas’s impurity

4  Finding realms represents disorder in the symbolic world. Purification therefore means the same thing as maintaining social order and uniting society. Though it is appropriate to see dirt and pollution as a “matter of place,” we do not agree that these places only consist of socially constructed ones. Our view here is more like that of Kimberley Patton (2007, 15, 21), who accepted many of the details of Douglas’s theory while rejecting Douglas’s view “that dirt (or pollution) is purely a socially constructed category.” Studies that stress only functional aspects of religion for building and maintaining social order have often neglected the elements of religion in which adherents place the most value. For example, the ethnographer, Anne Meigs, found that the Hua people of New Guinea were more concerned by pollution from bodily excretions than from crossing social boundaries. She concluded that their purity concerns focus a fear of death (Meigs 1978). As many scholars of religion have pointed out, thinkers in the various fields of religious studies should pay more attention to the emic religious meanings that adherents give to their behaviors and beliefs (Kristensen 1960, 2–14; W. C. Smith 1971, 131–40; Eliade 1982, 142; Paden 1988, 178–79; Patton 2009, 161). Douglas’s explanation for purity and pollution changed conspicuously when it came to the social function of the Bible’s lists of pure and polluting animals. In Purity and Danger, she analyzed the biblical diet system as symbolic of maintaining social order by labelling those animals as impure that crossed the boundaries between natural spheres (Douglas 2002 [1966], 51–71). In her later work, Douglas argued that the Israelites’ ritual impurity system did not work for maintaining social order: “in so far as the Levitical rules for purity apply universally they are useless for internal disciplining. They maintain absolutely no social demarcation” (Douglas 1993/1994, 112–13). However, she continued to emphasize the social system in explaining purity. For example, she argued that the Israelites’ purity rules were based on their religious beliefs in the order of Creation, which in turn reflected Israelite social order (Douglas 1993/1994, 110; Douglas 1999, 176–94). 2 In as much as ancient people did not distinguish society from religion, Douglas’s argument may be right. Yet, we cannot ignore Clifford Geertz’s argument that culture and social structure are different and that there are often radical discontinuities between them (Geertz 1973, 114–45). Contrary to Douglas’s argument that “all spiritual powers are part of the social system” and that “the power of the universe is ultimately hitched to society” (Douglas 2002 [1966],140), religious beliefs, which include the belief in spiritual power, cannot be explained only in relation to society. We will suggest a theory of purity that includes dimensions of religion other than the social dimension (similarly Smart 1999, 8–10). Douglas’s social functionalist theory has another major problem: by emphasizing social order, her theory does not recognize the possible coexistence of various views on purity within a single culture. Douglas utilized the concept of “primitive cultures” in which unity is created by means of ritual,

Finding realms 5 without clearly defining what constitutes the “primitive.” In the fifth chapter of Purity and Danger, she summarized characteristics of primitive worlds, including that they are “pollution-prone,” “personal,” and “man-centred” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 92, 100, 101). The standards for this demarcation are abstract and idealizing. She freely used the term “primitive,” arguing “our professional delicacy in avoiding the term ‘primitive’ is the product of secret convictions of superiority” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 93). To Douglas, the Israelite society that produced Leviticus was primitive just like the Bushman, the Ndembu, and the Dinka. She did not articulate exactly what constitutes the boundary between “primitive” and “us.” She  argued that “each primitive culture is a universe to itself” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 4) and explained the nature of purity within the context of “a total universe” of a primitive culture. According to Douglas (2002 [1966], 85), For the Bushman, Dinka, and many other primitive cultures the field of symbolic action is one. The unity which they create by their separating and tidying is not just a little home, but a total universe in which all experience is ordered … Our rituals create a lot of little subworlds, unrelated. Their rituals create one single, symbolically consistent universe. In short, she presupposed a unified or “consistent universe” that is created by ritual within each “primitive culture.” She often alternated between the phrases “the unity of a culture” and “social order.” According to Douglas, ritual behavior creates social order, and pollution is a by-product of this social process. Though she sometimes recognized social conflicts within a culture and the modifications of rituals that can result from them (especially in Douglas 2002 [1966], chap. 9), she focused on how ritual and purity ideas help society overcome conflicts. The claim, however, that primitives lived in “one single, symbolically consistent universe” is an outdated social-functionalist argument (Kazen 2018a, 79–83). In 1973, Clifford Geertz pointed out this problem in the sociological or functional approach to studying ritual that stemmed originally from Émile Durkheim (2008 [1912]). Geertz called this “a bias in favor of ‘well-integrated’ societies.” He claimed that, “in analyses of religion this static, ahistorical approach has led to a somewhat overconservative view of the role of ritual and belief in social life” (Geertz 1973, 142; see 142–69). Using a Javanese example, he meticulously demonstrated how ritual can create cultural ambiguity and social conflict. Jonathan Z. Smith (1987, 39–45) has also shown the potential differences among ideological groups within a culture. Douglas originally failed to recognize such discrepancies or variations among groups that share the same culture. In the preface to the 2002 edition of Purity and Danger, Douglas acknowledged this problem and stated that she should have added examples of “radical taboos” that change social order.

6  Finding realms The examples of taboo that I gave to illustrate the themes in Purity and Danger are mainly conservative in effect. They protect an abstract constitution from being subverted. If I had anticipated the political implications of taboo, I could have mentioned radical taboos …. If I were to write the book again, I would know what to look out for to balance the original account. (Douglas 2002, xix–xx) She recognized that her theory is too conservative. However, while Douglas continued to develop and change her own theory of purity, the field of religious studies has not, but continues to rely heavily on her now fifty-fiveyear-old theory. We will suggest a theory of purity that instead allows for the coexistence of various ideas of purity within a given culture.

The topic of purity and pollution in contemporary religious studies Since Douglas’s 1966 book, broad comparative studies of religions have given purity and pollution only perfunctory attention, while detailed studies of the topic have restricted themselves to one or another particular religious tradition or historical time period. Though systems regulating purity and pollution are found in almost every culture and across historical time periods, and though the similarities among the purity systems of different cultures have been noticed, the field of comparative religion has failed to develop sophisticated cross-cultural theories about the concepts of purity and pollution. Many contemporary scholars have simply adopted Mary Douglas’s theory. The value of this monumental work to the field of religious studies is manifest, as James Preston in The Encyclopedia of Religion recognized, This landmark volume [Purity and Danger] has had a profound effect on our understanding of religion. Pollution and purity are analyzed in different religious systems to reveal underlying structural similarities. The author stresses the need to understand concepts of pollution and purity in the context of a total structure of thought. (Preston 1986, 99). Theoretical research on purity and pollution has therefore not been highly developed in religious studies. Most comparative theorists of religion do not deal with the issue of purity in depth. Though some studies of particular religious traditions have dealt with this issue seriously, theoretical explanations for ideas about purity and purification rituals within each tradition have not been sufficiently developed. Broad comparative studies and studies of particular traditions have this in common: the two major branches of religious studies rely heavily on Mary Douglas’s theory

Finding realms 7 of purity and pollution in Purity and Danger. For obvious examples, one has only to look at The Encyclopedia of Religion (1986) and The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (1995): both authoritative guides to religious concepts cite just one twentieth-century scholar for theoretical explanations of purity and pollution: Mary Douglas. Douglas’s theory continues to dominate twenty-first century reference articles in Religion Past and Present, vol. 10 (Stausberg 2011), in Carl Olson’s Religious Studies: the Key Concepts (2011), and in The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religions (Urban 2016). The lack of serious scholarly attention to the issue of purity is also clear when one examines the foundational books about comparative religion, most of which do not cover purity as an independent subject. In Joachim Wach’s Comparative Study of Religion, “purification” was mentioned just once. This pioneer of the Chicago School noted that purification is a preparatory ritual for the central cult, like prayer, sacrifice, and sacraments (Wach 1958, chap. 4). Wach’s famous three categories of religious experience did not have room for purity ideas or purification rituals. Mircea Eliade, the leading twentieth-century theorist of religious cosmologies, sometimes dealt with the issue of purity: he recognized the symbols of purity in religion including, for instance, the purificatory function of water (Eliade 1996 [1949], 194–97; Eliade 1987 [1957], 131). He briefly claimed that the meaning of ritual purifications is “a combustion, an annulling of the sins and faults of the individual and of those of the community as a whole,” and that they help individuals and the community construct cosmic time (Eliade 1991 [1949], 54). However, Eliade did not treat purity as an independent subject. Most recent books that are used in introductory religious studies courses follow the example of their forerunners. For instance, Ninian Smart’s six dimensions of religion did not include purity or purification rituals (Smart 1999). The authors of Introduction to the Study of Religion did not deal with this matter, either (Ring, Nash, MacDonald, Glennon, and Glancy 1998), nor did Mark Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998; but cf. Olson 2011). William Paden’s Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion is an exception because it devotes one chapter to “Systems of Purity.” He clearly differed from Wach by arguing that the concept of purity is “not limited to such motifs as chastity or ritual preparations for worship” (Paden 1988, 142). Paden, as a scholar of the comparative study of religion, tried to utilize the terms of religious studies to describe purity. Most of all, he applied the Eliadean concept of “religious experience.” He equated impurities with “feared profanities” and with “what is incompatible with the sacred,” and regarded purification as “the exorcism of profanity” (Paden 1988, 141–44). Thus, Paden emphasized the role of purity ideas in “the separation of the sacred and the profane” more strongly than Douglas, who tried to overcome Durkheim’s strict distinction between the sacred and the profane by arguing that there is “no clear-cut distinction between sacred

8  Finding realms and secular” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 50). However, Paden otherwise simply recycled Douglas’s theory and terminology. Just like Douglas (2002 [1966], 14–27), Paden explained the concept of purity by first criticizing Sigmund Freud’s and Robertson Smith’s outdated explanations of purity, which distinguished “between primitive and modern systems of cultural order.” He introduced and summarized Douglas’s argument that “any system will have its own version of pollution and danger.” Following Douglas, Paden also emphasized the importance of social order by claiming that “social order is often the infrastructure of religious order” (Paden 1988, 142, 144). While comparative studies of religion have not focused much on questions of purity, scholars of particular religious traditions, on the other hand, have treated purity matters in considerable depth. This is especially true of Jewish studies and biblical studies, which have produced many important books and articles on purity and purification rituals (see Chapter 4). Works on Greek religion, Japanese religion, and Hinduism also often include extensive discussions of purity ideas or purification rituals (e.g. Dumont 1970, 33–64; Parker 1983; Bremen and Martinez 1995). However, studies of these traditions have not advanced the theoretical understanding of purity very much. For example, books in Jewish studies that treat purity and pollution in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud usually work at the level of exegesis. For a theoretical framework, they still rely on Mary Douglas. Thus, after summarizing the history of research on purity and pollution in Jewish studies, Jonathan Klawans stated, It need hardly be said that Mary Douglas’s work has proven tremendously influential in the field of anthropology and religious studies … in addition to inspiring lasting interest in the topic, Purity and Danger also laid the theoretical foundation for all subsequent work on ritual impurity in the Hebrew Bible. (Klawans 2000, 7–8). Klawans’ own work depended considerably on Douglas’s symbolic understanding of purity systems (Klawans 2000, 8, 10, 19, 25, 32, 36, 39). Jacob Milgrom’s well-known commentary on Leviticus also showed Douglas’s influence. Not only did Milgrom often cite Douglas regarding the issue of purity, his premise that “the ritual complexes of Lev 1–16 make sense only as aspects of a symbolic system” was one of the “lasting achievements of Purity and Danger” (Milgrom 1991, 45; Klawans 2000, 8–9). The book by Christine Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities, also depends on Douglas’s theory. Her main thesis that “in ancient Jewish culture, the paired terms ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ were employed in various ways not only to describe but also to inscribe socio-cultural boundaries between Jews and Gentile others” clearly shows Douglas’s influence on her, as she herself noted (Hayes 2002, 2, 223). More recently, however, critiques of Douglas’s

Finding realms 9 social functionalism have begun to be voiced in biblical studies by, for example, Tracy Lemos (2013) and Thomas Kazen (2010, 16; 2018a; 2018b). Kazen also surveyed a wide range of twenty-­fi rst-­century ritual theories to explore their possible application to pollution concepts in the Bible (Kazen 2018b, 15–19). He and Yitzaq Feder have instead employed cognitive science approaches to understanding biblical purity (Feder 2013; Kazen 2014; Kazen 2018b), a theoretical framework that we will also engage in Chapter 5 below. For another example, it is worthwhile to consider research into purity in the study of ancient Greek religion. In 1951, before Mary Douglas, E. R. Dodds suggested his own theory about Greek purity ideas, which had a great effect on many scholars of Greek religion. In The Greeks and The Irrational, Dodds argued that the idea of guilt develops from the practice of purity ideas and purification rituals. His second chapter, titled “From shame culture to guilt culture,” maintained: And while catharsis in the Archaic Age was doubtless often no more than the mechanical fulfillment of a ritual obligation, the notion of an automatic, quasi-physical cleansing could pass by imperceptible gradations into the deeper idea of atonement for sin. (Dodds 1951, 37) Walter Burkert summarized Dodds’ theory: “from the practice of ritual, in the figure of impurity, a concept of guilt develops; purification becomes atonement” (Burkert 1985 [1977], 77). However, this theory is no longer widely accepted. As Robert Parker (1983, 2) pointed out, “in the sphere of values, a question arises about the relation of pollution to morality; the irrationality of the former, perhaps, makes it hard for a rational system of the latter to develop.” Changing his theoretical position, Burkert also rejected this theory in his more recent book (Burkert 1996, 125–26). Parker’s monumental work, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (1983), examined Greek purity ideas and purification rituals. However, Parker did not develop his own theory in this book. Rather, he concentrated on meticulous explanations of Greek purity by applying old theories such as those of Edward B. Tylor, William James, and Mary Douglas. In addition, both Parker and Burkert advocated the social function of purification for maintaining the social order and social unification. Here, Douglas’s influence on them is obvious (Parker 1983, 19, 24; Burkert 1985 [1977], 77–79). However, later studies of Greek religion have questioned Douglas’s social functionalism. Kimberly Patton (2007, 14–15) concluded that [Douglas’s] view that dirt (or pollution) is purely a socially constructed category, an arbitrary indicator of position on a graded hierarchy that lacks any corresponding objective reality … is solipsism writ large,

10  Finding realms born in anthropological discourse but then detrimentally applied to environmental policy. As this quotation shows, the modern ecological crisis is driving new concern for understanding pollution as more than a metaphor for social disorder (see further in Chapter 5 below). Thus it is fair to say that studies of religion, both research on particular traditions and broader comparative theories, have mostly depended on Douglas when they have dealt with purity issues, if they have dealt with them at all. They have also tended to focus narrowly on particular cultures or textual traditions. However, comparative religion can and should develop a theory from its own perspective which is based on a deeper understanding of religious concepts and practices themselves, rather than just reproducing social-functionalist theories or generalizations from cognitive science. By simply adopting Douglas’s theory, academic studies of purity have deferred the work of defining purity and pollution in constructive terms. This definition of purity involves only structural relations: purity is defined as the absence of pollution and pollution as the destroyer of purity. A new comparative study of purity is needed to provide a constructive theory of purity and pollution. Douglas has exerted such influence over academic thinking about purity and pollution because of the innovative brilliance of her ideas, and also because she united three different methods of analysis in their support. She compared different cultures by providing examples culled from historical records. She also grounded her observations in ethnographic field work, especially her own among the Lele people of the Belgian Congo. And, finally, she engaged in detailed exegesis of scriptural texts, especially the diet rules of Leviticus 11. Few other scholars have been capable of matching her methodological range. Even Douglas herself did not maintain such methodological diversity: her later work increasingly focused on biblical exegesis alone, and is less convincing as a result (Houston 2003, 142–61; Watts 2007, 17–27; Lemos 2009, 236–51). Like Douglas’s Purity and Danger, this book incorporates a similar methodological range—a comparative survey, an ethnographic thick description, and a history of Leviticus’s interpretation—in the service of a single thesis about the cosmological basis of purity beliefs and pollution practices. That effort requires combining the skills and experience of two researchers of comparative religions. Yohan Yoo also brings to bear his ethnographic studies of the culture of shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea. James Watts also deploys his historical and exegetical studies of Leviticus. Our utilization of these three analytical methods is more delimited than that of Douglas: our comparative survey is limited to the temporally and geographically contiguous cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, Yoo’s ethnography is limited to the indigenous cultures of Jeju Island, and Watts’s textual study is limited to the attested history

Finding realms 11 of Leviticus’s interpretation. These limitations are the products of our training and experience. They also, however, provide better methodological control over the range and depth of the data. The results are a thesis that was developed through comparative study that is then verified and nuanced by ethnographic thick description on the one hand and by the cultural history of a scriptural text on the other. We think this thesis can be verified in many other cultures and time periods as well, but we must leave it to our readers to do so on the basis of their own training and experience.

Thesis: cosmologies of pure realms In this book, purity will be explained in relation to a particular culture’s understanding of the cosmos. We will argue that purity beliefs should be described on two levels. First, purity refers to the requisite conditions or necessary qualities of each realm within a cosmological worldview. Second, purity is also defined by the rules that regulate the interrelationship among the various realms that constitute the total cosmological worldview. Pollution, then, is the state of not satisfying a realm’s requisite condition. Pollution should also be understood as the negative effects of one realm on another when their rules contradict each other. Purity and impurity ideas come about when people distinguish the realms of various beings in the world and accord different conditions to each realm. William Paden observed that human beings feel a need to separate realms and that purity is the factor of consistency in every realm of existence. The separation of realms is part of all natural, social behavior, as in the observed boundaries between adults and children, females and males, insiders and outsiders, superiors and subordinates, one caste and another …. Purity is the factor of consistency in every domain of existence. (Paden 1988, 144) Here, realms and their conditions must be distinguished. Cosmic “realms” are symbolic spaces in people’s minds. As people experience and represent to themselves their own space, the living human realm is established in each culture’s cosmological worldviews, and then other realms are described and understood in relation to the living human realm. The characteristic conditions of one realm can then be described through the realm’s relationships to other realms. Because realms are constructed when people recognize their own place and surroundings, they are not determined by one specific social or physical situation. A place or a realm that requires a condition of purity may reflect “a general view of the social order” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 3), but it is also the case that it may not reflect society but rather

12  Finding realms typical individual, even bodily, experiences. Likewise, realms may or may not be related to physical environments that people see and inhabit. By describing purity in this way, we can better understand how ideas about purity have clashed with other ideas about purity within a s­ingle culture, as well as how ideas about purity have changed over time. Because ideas about purity as rules of a total cosmological system include various rules for each smaller realm within it, a synthesized rule of the whole system often contains discrepant subsidiary rules. Furthermore, when a new realm is formed or old realms abandoned as a result of cosmological beliefs changing over time, purity ideas change accordingly. And, finally, our demonstrations that purity beliefs and cosmologies interact will s­ uggest that cosmology not only shapes pollution beliefs, but also that purification practices shape cosmological beliefs. This book presents a theory of purity and pollution that responds to the problems of Mary Douglas’s theory and the lack of more developed purity theories in the field of comparative religion. In fact, we agree with Mary Douglas that pollution is “matter out of place”—but not just any matter and not just any place. It is a culture’s cosmology that designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. As the anthropologist Valerio Valeri (2000, 82) concluded, “Only an analysis of classifications in the totality of their social and cosmological contexts can explain why anomalies are given positive or negative values.” In Chapter 2, we review textual evidence from ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures in Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel to show that purity described the requisite conditions or necessary qualities of each realm within each culture’s cosmological worldview. Purification rules regulated interactions among the various realms that constitute the total cosmological worldview. Whether the realm of life was separated from the realm of death depended on the soteriology of each of these cultures. In Chapter 3, Yohan Yoo demonstrates the connection between cosmological beliefs and purity practices among the indigenous people of Jeju Island. He shows that Jeju shamanic rituals and myths also support this theory of purity based on cosmology and soteriology. In Chapter 4, James Watts focuses particularly on the purity regulations of Leviticus to show how ancient pollution rhetoric remains forceful even in the changing cosmologies of different Jewish and Christian cultures, up to and including modern secular culture. Our conclusions in Chapter 5 build on these different demonstrations of our single thesis to ask what pollution beliefs tell us about the nature of cosmologies. Here, with the help of cognitive theories of metaphors, we will consider the possibility that embodied experiences of purification help to generate cosmologies as much as cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution. Mary Douglas provided a precedent for employing cultural comparisons, ethnography, and scriptural interpretation for constructing a theory of purity, but there are more reasons for our use of them than just her

Finding realms 13 example. The three methodologies that we deploy in the three following chapters each bring specific strengths to this project because they draw attention to different things and also because they have each contributed in substantive ways to many modern theories of pollution and purity. So here we describe them each in turn. The need for comparative surveys of purity and pollution Comparison is an essential method for any cross-cultural explanation of purity beliefs and purification practices, if it is deployed in an appropriate way. Comparative methods have been commonly used since the beginning of academic studies of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century (Sharpe 2003, 1–7). We agree with Paden (1988, 2–3) that without it no real understanding of religion is possible … In some ways comparison is simply unavoidable. We all employ comparison every day, and thinking itself is in large measure based on it. It is built into language and perception …. Science would be impossible without it and without it the realm of metaphor would vanish …. As we thematize our world so we thematize religion… It is as if the mind innately needs to reduce and typify experience in order to avoid the confusion and contradiction that might come with confronting religious diversity. Therefore, the first reason that cultural comparisons should be used for a constructive theory of purity involves the fundamental goals of religious studies. In Paden’s words, the comparative study of religion not only presents “the description of various religious traditions” but also provides “general categories of religious behaviors” or “of the structure of religion” (1988, 1). The second reason for using a comparative methodology is more specific to the study of purity. The emphasis on purity and the activities or events considered to be polluting vary from culture to culture, even though purity ideas are found in “virtually all the religions of the world” and similarities exist among the purity systems of different groups (Preston 1986, 91). While concerns for purity are nearly universal, purity practices vary dramatically between individual cultures. Because of this variety, without comparison a general theory of purity cannot be formulated at all. The study of purity ideas in a single culture can only demonstrate the local features of purity ideas. These specific studies, however, provide the information necessary to create a theoretical basis for an explanation of purity ideas and purification practices through comparison. A theory of purity that is based on a comparative methodology should be able to account for the differences between the purity practices in different cultures and recognize discrepancies across ideological groups within a culture, as well as articulate general characteristics of purity.

14  Finding realms In applying a comparative method, however, we must be cautious about the dangers of misusing it. As Paden (1988, 3) observed, Comparison has also been used as a polemical weapon by religions themselves to show the inferiority of other traditions and the superiority of one’s own. It has been used to show that all religions are really the same. It has been used to show that all religions are false … So there is a kind of politics of comparison. In order to compare fairly, the historical, geographical, and literary contexts of the religious data will be considered fully, as per J. Z. Smith’s (1990, 18–25) methodological recommendation. In addition, following Smith’s advice, we will pay attention to differences among cultures as well as similarities: while we focus on the similarities across cultures with respect to what can be labeled “purity,” we will also describe the different characteristics and historical developments of purity ideas and behaviors within each culture (J. Z. Smith 1978, 258–59; J. Z. Smith 1990, 36–53). At its best, the comparative method involves both theory and thick description of comparative data. While suggesting a theory of sacrifice in Violent Origins, Smith recommended a procedure that exemplifies this approach: We’re not going to solve the issue of induction and deduction, whether one moves from what’s thick and attempts to achieve some clarity, or whether one starts with where one’s relatively clear and complicates it. I take it that’s actually what comparison is all about and why it seems to me that comparison becomes an important object of attention. What we want is the revisionary juxtaposition of both: on the one hand, let’s formulate a theory and then go and get evidence for it; on the other hand, let’s be as thick as possible in the description of the evidence on which we base the theory we use. (J. Z. Smith 1987, 211) On the same page, Smith argued that data should be examined from a ­theoretical position and then re-described by using “language like rectification or ingenuity in place of some of the other more solemn words” that already exist. We will attempt to both formulate a theory of purity and offer thick descriptions of the evidence for the theory. Therefore one of the most important purposes of this book is to suggest a theory of purity formulated and supported by the comparative study of religion, which is based on insightful examination and correct understanding of religion per se. In this process, beliefs and practices of purity should not be explained away as functional by-products of societies. Some scholars have opposed the idea of defining religious studies as a branch of the humanities, arguing instead that its proper place is among the social

Finding realms 15 sciences (Allen 1996, 32). They assert that, to be taken seriously, scholars of religion have to follow the methods of sociologists or anthropologists (McCutcheon 2001, 175; Fitzgerald 2000, 10, 50–53). They believe that the study of religion has neither been academic nor scientific (Wiebe 2000, 113), and that there is no “non-theological theoretical basis for the study of religion as a separate academic discipline” (Fitzgerald 2000, 3). In fact, Purity and Danger, which is written by an anthropologist, is an example of a work that studies purity using the “methods of sociologists or anthropologists.” By accepting Douglas’s theory, the field of religious studies has also accepted her reduction of purity ideas and practices to boundary markers of social systems. We assert that sociological and anthropological study cannot sufficiently explain all dimensions of religion or culture. According to Ninian Smart (1999, 8–10), “the social dimension” of religion is just one of the six dimensions of religion. Clifford Geertz (1973, 114–45) pointed out that radical discontinuities often exist between cultural and social structures. Yet studies of purity have not paid enough attention to the religious ­dimensions of purity ideas, which cannot be explained by social analysis alone. Significantly, studies have neglected the “mythic” dimension of purity that was as palpable as human society to ancient people (Smart 1999, 75). Those scholars who do not take the religious dimensions of religion seriously have considered divine systems to be subject to, or at least to reflect, human social systems. Comparative religion needs to develop a purity theory that can move scholarship beyond Douglas’s overly reductive socio-functional understanding of purity. Douglas herself pointed toward a wider perspective when she observed that “pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 140). By saying “cosmic or social,” she observed the role of cosmological beliefs in structuring purity systems, as well as in undergirding social hierarchies. J. Z. Smith’s brief explanation of the purity ideas of religious groups in the Mediterranean area in Late Antiquity in Drudgery Divine provides a good model for understanding purity and pollution in a different way than socio-anthropological methods that focus on society. By maintaining a perspective that sees cultures “from the outside” (Smith 1987, 98–99), he paid attention to what sociological studies often overlook. He distinguished two worldviews in Mediterranean religions, the “locative” worldview of religions concerned mainly with “the cosmic and social issues of keeping one’s place” and the “utopian” worldview of religions more concerned with rebellion or transcendence. Smith argued that while locative religions emphasize matters of pollution and purity, utopian religions lay more stress on sin and resurrection. In other words, Smith (1990, 118–25, 132–33) related the purity ideas of various Mediterranean religions in Late Antiquity to the soteriology of each religious group. Our own survey will

16  Finding realms confirm that purity was related to soteriology broadly defined, but we emphasize that purity ideas may change when cosmological worldviews vary or change. Purity is determined by and in turn shapes the way adherents of a religion understand their cosmos. The way people understand the cosmos may or may not be about defining social order and place. In two senses, J. Z. Smith’s theory of utopian and locative traditions is a good example of the study of purity from the perspective of comparative religion. First, as a historian of religion, Smith paid attention to historical changes involving these two worldviews in Late Antiquity; when some of the mystery cults of archaic locative traditions adopted the utopian model, most hints of this process occur “in the context of purification.” Smith demonstrates “the shifting from a language of ‘dirt’ to one of ‘sin’” and the shifting “from locative rituals productive of purgation to utopian goals of salvation” (Smith 1990, 132–33). Chapter 2 of this book will describe in more detail the historical changes of purity ideas and practices in the Eastern Mediterranean cultural area. Second, though Smith only briefly mentions the relationship of soteriology to purity ideas, by focusing on soteriology he suggests a way to categorize purity ideas that is different from structuralist or functionalist theories that mainly pay attention to the function of ritual within social structures. We argue that purity ideas and purification rituals should be studied not just in relation to society but also in terms of religious beliefs and ideas, especially soteriology and cosmology. Thus, establishing a deep understanding of the religions themselves should be the starting point for students of religion studying purity ideas and purification rituals. A theory of purity should illuminate the relationship of purity to the cosmology and soteriology of a culture through comparative work based on a deep understanding of religious materials. The need for ethnographic study of purity and pollution A theory of purity formulated by comparative study of religion, which necessarily depends mostly on written documents, should be checked and corrected based on the lived religion of those who try to stay in a pure state while avoid pollution. In this contemporary world, there are still many religious people who practice their purity regimens. Scholars of religion therefore have an opportunity to observe their lives, sometimes participate in their practices, and learn in person what they think about the necessity and basis of their efforts. Purity ideas and purification practices are still influential in the real life of religious people in various cultures of the contemporary world. They are not ancient traces found only in old documents. Ethnographic field work has therefore played a major role in modern theorizing about purity and pollution. Mary Douglas (2002 [1966]) drew on her own field work among the Lele people as well as synthesizing the findings of other anthropologists.

Finding realms 17 So did Anna Meigs (1978) who wrote about pollution beliefs in Papua New Guinea, and Valerio Valeri (2000) who wrote about the nature of taboo on the basis of his field work in the Moluccas Islands. For a theory of purity, scholars need to participate in and observe what religious people think of the pure and the polluted and what they do to maintain their purity. Yohan Yoo discovered a remarkable set of purity practices and pollution beliefs in Jeju indigenous shamanic religion, where the issue of purity and pollution is still very prominent. In Chapter 3, therefore, Yoo thoroughly examines the lived religion of the indigenous people of Jeju Island, South Korea. The case of Jeju Island strongly supports the thesis of this book. Over the past ten years, Yoo took many trips to Jeju to observe people’s daily lives as well as ritual processes, and converse with dozens of Jeju people. He interviewed nine simbang (Jeju shamans) extensively, and also reviewed older records and published research about Jeju myths and rituals. In Jeju, the purity system is based on the cosmological beliefs of religious people, emphasized by their rituals and practiced in their daily lives. Interviews and observations confirm how cosmology influences daily life and how it is ideally embodied in the sacred, or separated, places and times of religious rituals. Purity ideas and purification practices impact not only the ritual process itself but also the non-ritual situation even before a ritual begins, as well as normal life to which participants return after the ritual. To understand how their cosmology and practices are interrelated, we need to take into account the reasons religious people give as to why they think and act in these ways. Scholars of religion often point out weaknesses in a theory or verify critiques of a theory by observing and examining carefully the lived religion of a group of people. Ethnographic research can supplement and correct the written texts of religious people, for example scriptures or books containing doctrines, and written texts about religious people, for example records or reports of myths and rituals. Scriptures, doctrines, myths, and rituals have been the main material studied by scholars of religion and remain crucial for understanding religious ideas and practices. However, written materials show what writers reconstruct. They are often idealized and exaggerated versions of what people really believed, thought, and practiced. Since the 1920s, scholars have increasingly recognized that studying written texts alone is not enough for understanding what is going on in the real life of religious people. As Eric Sharpe summarized it, Bronislaw Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) was concerned with “the actual, day-to-day lives of living human beings,” rather than “with theorizing about remote origins” (Sharpe 2003, 176). As Daniel Pals put it, E. E. Evans-Pritchard did fieldwork in Sudan from 1926 because he thought he “could no longer stay in a library or read the reports of missionaries about this strange notion or that odd habit” (Pals 2006, 235). In the Department of Religious Studies at Seoul National University, where Yoo teaches and studies, students are taught that the method of

18  Finding realms “jwa-sa-u-sa” should be used for the study of religion. That is, scholars of religion should grasp a dictionary (sajeon) in the left hand (jwa) and a camera (sajingi) in the right hand (u), studying written documents and simultaneously observing the real lives of religious people in person. Yoo tried to use the method of jwa-sa-u-sa faithfully in working on the third chapter. This book therefore provides a thick description of pollution beliefs and purity practices in one place, Jeju Island, to check and correct comparative theories of purity. For example, Yoo’s research in Jeju corrects many scholars’ conflation of the concept of purity with that of holiness. Paden maintained that the phrase “system of purity” refers to “those many ways that religious systems deal with negativity.” He did not distinguish purity and impurity from “what is compatible and what is incompatible with the sacred” and often equated impurity with “profanity” or “what offends the gods” (Paden 1988, 141, 143). This confusion goes back to William Robertson Smith who, in the late nineteenth century, distinguished two kinds of taboos in ancient Semitic religions, taboos corresponding to rules of holiness and taboos related to the rules of impurity. He argued, however, that the boundary between holiness and the purity is vague because all taboos are “inspired by awe of the supernatural” (W. R. Smith 2002 [1889], 152–54). By contrast, Jonathan Z. Smith argued that conceptions of the sacred and the profane should be distinguished from systems of purity and impurity. He argued that the sacred has been considered ambiguous or ambivalent as a “result of the fusing of three systems”: the distinction between the sacred and the profane, the distinction between the clean and the unclean, and the distinction between the permitted and the forbidden. According to J. Z. Smith, “the three systems are homologous in important respects, but they are neither identical, nor are they interchangeable.” He regarded “the sacred/profane distinction as an essentially royal one, the clean/unclean distinction as a cultic one, and the permitted/forbidden as a legal one,” though he did not demonstrate this categorization convincingly (J. Z. Smith 2004, 107–108; see our comparison of different ancient configurations of holiness and purity vocabulary in Chapter 2 below). But he was right to advise scholars against confusing the sacred and the pure. In Chapter 3, it will be shown that in Jeju indigenous religion, the sacred and the pure are concepts that belong to different aspects of religious experience and belief. In brief, the sacred is a category that describes the status of the gods and the places and things belonging to the gods in contrast to the profane places of human lives, while the impure is a relative concept that designates the state in which the required condition of a realm is violated by the influence of another realm. We are well aware that it would be hasty to produce a theory of purity on the basis of only one specific culture studied through fieldwork. For a general explanation of purity and pollution, just like most human phenomena, multiple cases should be examined and connected to each other. To

Finding realms 19 avoid a “top-down” Western-centric universalism that has long dominated the field of comparative religion, Wendy Doniger (2000, 70–72) suggested a comparative method of “pointillism,” which emphasizes “the individual” or “real people.” However, without a rough sketch of the overall plan, we doubt that we would be able to create a painting just by gathering “individual points.” Pointillist paintings must be planned and viewed from a distance as well as close-up, because close-up they look like a random gathering of points. Furthermore, it is very difficult to obtain enough thick descriptions of individual cultures to formulate a theory from the bottom up. Instead, fieldwork can be an invaluable tool for verifying and correcting a theory that is developed by comparative research on written materials. Such theories should be verified in the real, daily lives of religious people by observing how they live and by asking what they think. Such verification provides “a rectification of the academic categories,” which J. Z. Smith (2000, 239) regarded as “the aim” of comparative research. In Chapter 3, description of Jeju indigenous shamanic religion verifies and deepens our thesis about the relationship between purity and cosmology, while providing the basis for distinguishing theoretically between the concepts of the sacred and the pure which have been confused in academic discourse for a long time. The need for cultural histories of interpreting purity and pollution A well-known drawback of ethnographic thick descriptions of specific cultures is that they focus only on selected historical moments. Though historical records can be used to contextualize ethnographic observations, as Yoo uses them in Chapter 3, the weight of ethnographic description falls on the short period of time observed by the ethnographer. Human cultures, however, are constantly changing. Despite religious people’s assertions that their essential beliefs and practices remain the same, historical study often uncovers evidence of deep changes in both beliefs and practices as generations and centuries pass by. Like ethnography, comparative studies can note these changes as part of their survey, as we do at the end of Chapter 2. Comparison can also theorize about the social forces that drive change in one or another direction, as J. Z. Smith did in describing locative and utopian religious movements. Such large-scale theories, however, cannot engage many of the inner-cultural (emic) interpretations of ritual and doctrinal change. Over time, religious cultures with literate traditions of interpretation build up vast commentary literatures that continually reinterpret past beliefs and practices for present applications. Such commentary traditions show how changing cosmologies become incorporated into rhetoric about purity and pollution. In Chapter 4, Watts surveys one set of interpretive traditions that have played a major role in shaping academic research on purity and pollution—the purity rules found in the Hebrew Bible in

20  Finding realms Leviticus 11–15 and the history of their application and interpretation. This tradition, too, shows the continuing influence of changing cosmological ideas on Jewish and Christian practices and beliefs about purity. Leviticus 11–15 presents a very systematic description of purity ideas and purification rituals. Its rules about inedible and polluting animals invite its readers to reason inductively from lists of examples and deductively from criteria to apply them to any animals they may encounter. Its rules for skin infestations depict the diagnostic methods, including quarantine, that priests must use to determine the nature of the affliction. In this way, the text itself invites interpreters to try to systematize its rules and expose their underlying principles. For two thousand years, Jewish and Christian interpreters have tried to do so. The results, however, never quite fulfill the text’s promise of an internally consistent system. The history of these interpretive efforts reveals clearly the influence of prevailing cosmologies. The diet rules explicitly evoke the cosmological division of the natural world into the three realms of land, air, and water presented already in the world creation story of Genesis 1. Polluted animals seem to be those that cross between these realms. Ancient interpreters spiritualized the characteristics of these animals to adjust them to a Hellenistic cosmology of a continuum of infinite gradations between physical and spiritual realities. Christian interpreters rejected the social distinctions based in diet rules in favor of their cosmological story of divine salvation for all humans. Modern interpreters have tried to find microbiological disease vectors in biblical rules about skin infestations. Claims for the eternal truth of the scriptural text lead interpreters of all periods to reinterpret it to match the cosmological realities conveyed by their own cultures. This extensive history of interpreting Leviticus 11–15 in commentary and in ritual practices over more than two thousand years also illustrates the continual frustration of interpretive consistency in both theory and practice. Scholars repeatedly try to reduce the biblical rules to a consistent system by discerning the underlying principles of that system, but elements of the text never quite fit. Furthermore, religious communities continue to feel impelled to follow at least some of the instructions in Leviticus 11–15 even when scholarly authorities advise them to do differently, or even to not follow these biblical rules at all. Thus this history of interpretation and practice shows the continual influence of cosmological categories on purity ideas and purification practices, and also the resistance of these cosmological ideas to consistent rationalization or ­systematic implementation. In every time and culture, the biblical purity rules appear more systematic in their use of cosmological categories than their interpretation or implementation proves them to be. This history of interpretation and practice therefore poses the question of what, exactly, a culture’s cosmology really is.

Finding realms 21 Purification practices define cosmological boundaries By devoting one chapter each to a comparative survey, an ethnographic thick description, and a cultural history, this book defends a single thesis about pollution on the basis of three different methods and sets of evidence. Each chapter shows that the rhetoric of pollution is used in many different cultures to define the negative effects of one cosmological realm on another, and also to describe failures to meet the requisite conditions of one’s own realm. Each method of analysis casts special light on different aspects of the relationship between cosmology and pollution, and also on beliefs and practices that show inconsistencies in the relationship between cosmology and pollution. Our last chapter summarizes these conclusions. It also raises questions about why pollution rhetoric tends to invoke cultural cosmologies. Their regular correlation raises the possibility that purification practices play a role in projecting and maintaining cultural cosmologies. Chapter 5 will explore some explanations for these correlations in cognitive metaphor theory and sketch their implications for modern pollution rhetoric about the interaction of human realms and the realm of nature.

Notes 1 According to Rappaport (1999, 52–57), this problem-solving process through ritual can be expounded more deeply by messages that are transmitted by ritual. He suggested two message streams in ritual. First, canonical messages, which are already encoded in liturgy, are invariant, impersonal, concerned with the universal, and the eternal, and often provided with elaborate propriety. Second, self-referential messages contain information that is transmitted by the participants concerning their own current physical, psychic, or social states to themselves and other participants. Canonical messages are not encoded by performers even though they are transmitted by performers. They are only found in symbols, though they employ icons and make limited use of indices. In contrast, self-referential messages may be more than symbolic and be represented indexically. Here, the idea of “index” is very important. Drawing on the semiotic theories of C. S. Pierce (1982 [1867]), Rappaport defined an index as “a sign that refers to the object it denotes by being really affected by that object” (1999, 54). An index signifies the presence or existence of imperceptible aspects of events or conditions through perceptible aspects of the same events or conditions (55). When the problem of falsehood that is generated by symbols becomes serious, it is overcome or ameliorated by the indexical use of rituals. 2 Klawans (2000, 19) added three other points that demonstrate an overall unity in Douglas’s work: she still emphasized the importance of body symbolism, she was still interested in structures, and she remained engaged in a critique of “anti-ritualistic” understandings of religious behavior. Douglas herself argued for the interrelatedness of her work: see Douglas 1985, ix–x, and her introduction to the 1996 edition of Natural Symbols.

2

Changing realms Cosmology and pollution in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures Yohan Yoo and James W. Watts

A comparative study of cultures and religions lays the basis for developing a general theory of purity ideas and purification practices because such ideas and practices appear in very many different cultures, usually reinforced by religious teachings. They appear in a variety of forms, yet similar practices also show up in unrelated cultures. Therefore, in this book, like in the ­history of the academic study of pollution, a comparative study begins the process of charting the relationship between cosmological beliefs and purity practices through cultural variations and changes over time. Comparative studies of purity and pollution in different cultures and religions are necessary to maintain our thesis, but such research also encounters some famous difficulties that we need to avoid. Comparative studies have frequently confused accidental cultural similarities with causal connections. They have searched for similar patterns across cultures while often ignoring the differences. We therefore only begin to describe our ­thesis about purity and pollution with a comparative study in this chapter and continue with ethnographic thick description of one particular culture (Chapter 3) and a detailed history of interpretation within a different cultural stream (Chapter 4). We also constrain our comparative study to cultures that, while very different from one another, were geographically contiguous and in contact with each other throughout much of their long histories. These contacts allow us to consider the possibility of cultural influence and the evidence of cultural distinctiveness despite such influence. The fact that these cultures are ancient also allows us to study cultural change across the long span of centuries and millennia. A study of the ancient history of religions depends almost entirely on textual remains to describe ritual practices and beliefs in cultures long ago. This textual dependence imposes limitations because of gaps in the record and also because of the nature of written texts. Ancient scribes were not anthropologists investigating the nature of ritual; they wrote for other reasons. They mentioned purity and purification only when it served their rhetorical goals in writing (Watts 2007, 27–36; Watts 2021). We therefore have access only to their rhetoric about purity and pollution (for more about pollution rhetoric, see Chapter 4). It is supplemented by some art and

Changing realms 23 the mute testimony of artifacts used in ancient purification rituals, such as baths and water jars, but artifacts usually require textual references to confirm their ritual roles. Those rituals and ancient people’s beliefs about them can only be reconstructed from such fragmentary and partisan textual evidence. However, examination of purity and pollution in historical cultures also presents analytical advantages. The cultures of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean were distinct yet also influenced one another over long periods of time. Historical comparison therefore provides an opportunity to compare and contrast different but not entirely unrelated cultures as they changed over time.

Ancient textual sources about purity and purification practices Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian, and Israelite texts agree that places, artifacts, and people associated with gods must be pure. However, these civilizations have bequeathed to us no completely systematic discussions of purity practices or beliefs. Textual evidence for ancient purity practices and beliefs comes from diverse time periods, cultures, textual genres, and social situations. This diversity makes it difficult to generalize about ancient Egypt or Greece and especially about the broad cultural sphere of ancient Mesopotamia and its environs. In the Mesopotamian region, very different cultures, languages, and religions mixed and interacted across three thousand years of turbulent ­history. Nevertheless, Michaël Guichard and Lionel Marti (2013, 47) noted that the notion of purity is nonetheless omnipresent—to the point of ­ bsession—in the texts of rituals, in incantations, in prayers and hymns o in Sumerian or in Akkadian, in juridical documents, etc. It is not only a matter for priests, but rather society as a whole that was affected by this topic. Texts from the Mesopotamian periphery written in Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, and Aramaic also frequently mention purity practices and beliefs. Beyond such general observations, however, Mesopotamian purity practices and beliefs should not be harmonized on the assumption that religious practices were consistent across this territory over three millennia. It is somewhat easier to generalize about Egyptian, Greek, and Israelite purity practices and beliefs, though for different reasons in each case. Ancient Egyptian culture was as old as Mesopotamian and also lasted for three millennia. Nevertheless, Egyptians maintained a fairly consistent political ideology centering on the king, or Pharaoh. This uniquely constant emphasis gives the impression, in the words of Françoise Dunand and

24  Changing realms Christiane Zivie-Coche (2004, xiii, 72), of “one religion throughout the land and through the course of three millennia of a specific, uninterrupted culture.” Pharaonic Egypt had a centralized political system and a decentralized religious system. Kings held such strong sovereign power that they were thought of, or at least depicted ideologically, as either gods or their representatives. Official state temples were expected to promote the well-being of the gods and maintain the established order of the world. In theory, the Pharaoh was the chief priest in every official temple under royal control (Watterson 1991, 36; Quirke 1992, 39, 70). Nevertheless, the religious system of Pharaonic Egypt remained decentralized because official temples were scattered throughout the land and in many cases served local deities who had their own purity rules (Quirke 1992, 72–73, 126). There were also numerous private chapels and pilgrims’ stations dotting the villages and countryside (Bomann 1992; Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, 113). Religious texts were never canonized or even standardized, but reflected the various theological positions of different temples and groups throughout Egyptian history. For instance, though The Book of the Dead is often called “the Bible of the ancient Egyptians” (Hornung 1999, xvii–xviii), the text was never canonized in the Egyptian religious situation (Goelet 2000, 14). The evidence for ancient Egyptian purity ideas is found in a variety of written data dating from all three millennia B.C.E., including mortuary texts, monumental inscriptions, royal inscriptions, personal letters, tales, wisdom literature, prayers, hymns, lamentations, and pseudepigrapha. Written inscriptions are relatively abundant because they have been well preserved by Egypt’s dry climate, and many papyri survived in Egyptian tombs. In addition, archeological excavations have discovered n ­ on-­textual evidence that supplements our understanding of Egyptian religious practices. However, this rich source material from Egypt and Mesopotamia does not make it is easy to interpret their religions. It is difficult to understand the written sources in their entirety, not only because most are f­ ragmentary, but also because they were only a small part of these ancient civilizations. Oral traditions were certainly more important in ordinary life than writing, and they have not survived. Some texts allude to secrets regarding ­deities and their rites that should not be written down; those who knew these secrets must have passed them on orally. Also, the available written sources are often difficult to interpret. While ritual processes were often recorded in detail on papyrus, clay, or stone, their connection to myths found in these or other texts is rarely made clear (Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, xi; see also J. Z. Smith 1990, 52). In contrast to Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts found by archeologists, many Greek texts have been preserved through continuous transmission in Western cultures. The sources that are most helpful for understanding

Changing realms 25 Greek religion and purity ideas include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (ca. 700 B.C.E.), Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days (ca. 700), the Homeric Hymns (seventh-sixth century), Pindar’s Odes (fifth century), the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes (fifth century), Herodotus’s Histories (ca. 425), and the sayings of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. In addition, starting from the second half of the eighth century, thousands of Greek inscriptions provide religious calendars, descriptions of rituals and festivals, financial accounts of sanctuaries, rules of religious associations, dedications and thank-offerings to the gods, records of oracular pronouncements, prayers, mystical texts, and other religious data (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 19; see also Parker 1983). Most books on ancient Greek religion focus on the Archaic and Classical periods, ca. 750–400 B.C.E. (e.g. Burkert 1985 [1977]). According to Burkert (1992, 56), “concern about purification appears to be characteristic of the archaic period.” Up until the end of the fourth century B.C.E., the ancient Greeks resided in several hundred small city-states that prided themselves on their independence from one another. Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, and the others differed in their religious practices and institutions, as well as in their political, social, and economic structures (Mikalson 1983, 4). Many gods had different names in different regions (Ferguson 1989, 12). Furthermore, not all gods were of Greek origin. Phoebus Apollo, for example, is believed to have come from the far north (Ferguson 1989, 15). In spite of the diverse practices of different Greek city-states, there is also evidence for common Greek religious customs and beliefs from the Archaic period on: there is material evidence for civic sanctuaries beginning around 800 B.C.E., Olympia and Delphi emerged as sanctuaries of regional interest in the eighth century, and the games at Olympia began in the eighth century (Price 1999, 6). Similar dedications appear in sanctuary inscriptions all over the Greek world (Price 1999, 4). Every Greek was not only familiar with Zeus the Savior, but also understood what a proper sacrifice to him entailed. Greeks emphasized the importance and value of these common practices in order to strengthen unity in times of crisis (Herodotus, Histories 8.144). Though individual communities paid special honor to particular gods, they should not exclude others. In Euripides’ play, Hippolytus, for instance, when Hippolytus shows his preference to Artemis and dishonors Aphrodite by saying, “No god worshipped by night wins my respect,” the vengeful god Aphrodite conspires to kill him (Dave 1996, 104). In ancient Greek religion, just like Egyptian religion, there was no single canonical version of the divine system. Hesiod noticed this, writing that in his time there were “many falsehoods that seem real” (Theogony, 53). The list of the “twelve Olympians” (Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Hera, Ares, Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo, Athena, Hermes, Dionysos, and Hephaistos) was widely recognized, but Louise Zaidman and Pauline Pantel (1992, 183) remarked that this list represented “solely a classificatory convenience.”

26  Changing realms While the evidence of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek purity practices comes from a variety of ancient texts from various periods and provenances, the Israelite evidence comes only from the Hebrew Bible. Despite the diversity of its contents, biblical literature was selected and edited by ancient scribes to reflect, for the most part, a particular theological view regarding Israel’s religion and its history. The Hebrew Bible admits that other views prevailed in many periods of Israel’s history. Of course, all ancient texts present partial and interested accounts that do not reflect the whole range of ancient people’s beliefs or practices. Nevertheless, that range has been deliberately restricted by editors and canonizers of the Bible, while our knowledge of Egyptian, Greek, and Mesopotamian literatures is limited more by the accidents of historical preservation than by active redaction. Furthermore, modern surveys of purity and pollution practices in ancient cultures regularly begin by remarking that the Greeks, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians did not leave us systematic discussions of the issue like we find in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the book of the Leviticus (e.g. Guichard and Marti 2013, 47; Quack 2013, 115). So Israel’s pollution ideas and practices stand out in the first place for their relatively consistent theology and secondly for their apparently systematic literary form. Biblical literature has also been the subject of continuous interpretation through both commentary and ritual practice in Jewish and Christian traditions up to the present day. Unlike other ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean literatures, the Bible’s prescriptions about pollution and purity continue to influence people’s lives and contemporary debates over moral issues as varied as sexual identity and behavior, eligibility for congregational leadership, and humans’ impact on the earth’s natural environment. Because of these differences in the nature of the ancient evidence and in the process of its transmission and influence on contemporary ­culture, we will omit discussion of the most systematic biblical account of purity, Leviticus 11–15, from this survey of ancient cultures and reserve its ­discussion for Chapter 4. Here we will focus on the contrasting examples of ancient Egyptian and Greek cultures, and the more diffuse cultures of Mesopotamia and its environs, while making only occasional references to Israel’s parallels and contrasts as reflected in the Hebrew Bible.

Ancient cosmologies and purity beliefs What do these sources tell us about cosmological beliefs and purity practices in different cultures? Many historians have, in fact, commented on the close connection between cosmological beliefs and purity practices in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Guichard and Marti (2013, 79, also 106) pointed out that, for the priests of Ur in southern Mesopotamia in the early second millennium B.C.E., purity and cosmology were intimately related:

Changing realms 27 The universe rested on the dynamic of purification; the cosmic order was based on this fluctuating equilibrium between life and death. What gave life its strength and quality was precisely the purification acts. … Since such rites were the prerogative of only a limited number of specialists in the temples, … these people then perceived for themselves an essential function within their civilization. But notice that they themselves would disappear behind their gods, such as Kusu, the actual actor behind the lustration rites. Manfred Hutter (2013, 159) began his discussion of ancient Anatolian purity practices by noting that purity systems have the function of systematizing an unsystematic experience: thoughts on and observations of dirt and pollution in early cultures at the same time include a symbolic consideration of order and disorder, of life and death. Robert Parker (1983, 33) observed that “The two natural pollutions most often referred to in Greek sources are those of birth and death” and that the Greeks made every effort to keep the Olympian gods and their temples pure from both. Egyptians made the connection between cosmology and purity explicit: graphic depictions of the cosmos in New Kingdom royal tombs gloss the passing into the underworld of the sun-god Re at night as “he becomes pure in the embrace of Osiris his father” (Allen 1997b). Elizabeth Castelli (2013, 263) summarized the situation in ancient cultures succinctly: Purity systems separate the material word into distinct categories, and they are particularly concerned with the policing of the boundaries in between. … Purity regulations are often most highly articulated on occasions when boundaries are being crossed—the boundaries of the body …, the boundaries separating one class of reality from another (e.g. human/divine), the boundaries between one mode of life and another (e.g. birth, marriage, death). The cosmologies of ancient Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean cultures depended on two basic distinctions: between the divine and the non-divine realms, and between the realms of life and death. The ancient sources reflect the belief that impurity resulted from the state of one realm not meeting its own requisite conditions or from one realm infringing on another. The ancient Egyptians’ understanding of purity was directly related to their cosmology that distinguished divine realms above and below the human realm. Leonard Lesko (1991, 116–22) described the ancient Egyptians’ cosmos as consisting, roughly speaking, of the place in which

28  Changing realms they were living (earth), the visible but not reachable place above (sky), and the invisible place below (the underworld). All three places were thought to exist physically. The waters of the sky were visually apparent just like the water of the Nile. The invisible part of the cosmos was thought to lie under the earth, a counterpart to the sky and atmosphere of the visible world. Egyptians believed that by day the sun sailed across the surface of the sky-ocean, animating those who lived on the earth below. After sunset, the sun descended into the underworld while the stars sailed through the sky (Allen 1997a, 114). These unreachable places, the sky and  the underworld, were the realms of the gods, but the blessed dead could also enter them if they were pure. Though texts reflect some variations, this concept of the world remained fairly consistent throughout almost 3,000 years of recorded ancient Egyptian history (Allen 1997a, 115). This consistency was due, in part, to the continuity of temple rituals that participated in the cosmic cycles with prayers, spells, and offerings (Velde 1995, 1741–44). Ancient Greek cosmology distinguished sharply between the human realm and the divine realm, and between the realm of death and the realm of life. The realms of the gods, the human realms, the realm of death, and the realm of material nature, even though conceptually differentiated, actually overlapped, generating numerous smaller realms or territories. Each of the gods had a defined mode of activity that differentiated their spheres of influence in the human realm (Parker 2011, 71–98; Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 185). The various gods had their own sanctuaries, each with purity regulations of their own. The Olympian gods and the chthonic gods were grouped separately. Hades, who was sovereign over the realm of death and gave his name to the underworld kingdom over which he ruled, was feared by humans and the Olympian gods as well. The Olympian gods’ most important feature—immortality—is the opposite of death. In short, the non-chthonic divine realms were supposed to be separated from the realm of death. Athenian inscriptions, according to Jon D. Mikalson (1983, 50), “indicate that popular belief, like most of the literary treatments, kept the gods apart from all matters of death.” Human pollution was thought to be created by an offense against the gods or their rules. Therefore, Greek purity ideas distinguished various cosmological realms, each of which had their own individual purity rules and purification rituals. Mesopotamian cosmology distinguished divine realms, consisting of the sky and the ocean abyss, as pure. Mesopotamian rituals strove to keep the gods’ temples pure as well. Sumerian myths such as Enki and Ninhursaga, building inscriptions like the Gudea cylinder, and hymns such as the Hymn to Nanna attest to a notion of pure divine space from which all ­ unpleasantness—violence and annoying sounds as well as unclean materials—have been banished. The Sumerians imagined time before ­ human creation as entirely pure. The rise of human civilization brought with it pollution (Guichard and Marti 2013, 105).

Changing realms 29 The divine realm in the ancient Israelite cosmology also had to maintain a state of purity and thus required purification rituals. But the Hebrew Bible depicts the divine realm and the human, or at least the Israelite, realm as overlapping: “You will be a kingdom of priests for me and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) and “Do not pollute the land in which you reside, in which I dwell, because I, YHWH, dwell among the Israelites” (Numbers 35:34). As a result, the Hebrew Bible relates many purity rules to its ideal of the divine realm that reaches from the core of the temple out to the whole land of Israel. The extent to which biblical texts regarded Israelite dwellings as part of sacred space seems to vary, and has been debated by biblical interpreters (see Milgrom 1991, 773; Olyan 2000, 50–54). For example, Saul Olyan argued that the Priestly writers regarded only the tabernacle as holy, not the camp, based on the contrast between Leviticus and Deuteronomy. While in Leviticus 15:16–18 there is no indication that “persons polluted by an emission of semen must change locus for the period of their defilement and purification” (Olyan 2000, 51), Deuteronomy 23:10–11 requires that the polluted individual be excluded from the camp because the camp was regarded as holy. Leviticus, however, emphasizes the ritual purity of the people themselves even when they did not have to go to the tabernacle, most obviously in the diet regulations of Leviticus 11 that specify not only which meats pollute but also which meats “you must not eat,” without any mention of the sanctuary (Lev. 11:10–13, 20, 23, 41–43). We conclude therefore that all Israelites belonged to the divine realm, from the high priest to the general public, even though the temple priests must maintain a higher degree of purity than Israelites in their daily lives. The realm of the dead was polluted and contagious (Numbers 5:1–4; 6:6–12; 19:10–22; 31:19). So death avoidance has frequently been cited to explain biblical rules about pollution and purification even when they do not mention death explicitly (but see Chapter 4). Jonathan Z. Smith (1990, 124) related the purity ideas of various Mediterranean religions in Late Antiquity to the soteriology of each religious group. He argued for the existence in Mediterranean religions of two worldviews, which he called “locative” and “utopian.” He described the locative traditions as “religions of sanctification.” The soteriology of a locative tradition emphasizes emplacement, and breaking that norm requires rituals of rectification, i.e. purification. The major cause of pollution in locative traditions is “corpse pollution—the mixture, the contact, of the living and the dead.” In contrast to this emphasis on sanctification in locative traditions, a utopian soteriology emphasizes “resurrection” or “rising.” Salvation is achieved through acts of rebellion and transcendence. Smith observed that in locative traditions, “what is soteriological is for the dead to remain dead.” While beings from the realm of the dead are welcomed among the living in utopian traditions, they are the objects of rituals of relocation in locative traditions.

30  Changing realms J. Z. Smith classified religious beliefs of different Mediterranean people in Late Antiquity as either locative or utopian. According to his classifications, the soteriologies of Mesopotamia and Israel can be considered ­locative traditions. They did not orient themselves toward transcendence or deliverance from this world. (Daniel 12 exceptionally deals with “the time of the end” and the final judgment, but reflects the influence of apocalyptic soteriology that was changing Jewish expectations in the Hellenistic period, long after most other books of the Hebrew Bible had been written.) In such locative traditions, strict rectification or purification had to be undertaken when the boundaries between the cosmological realms were threatened (J.  Z. Smith 1990, 121). Egyptian afterlife practices clearly expressed a more utopian set of beliefs. Greek soteriology was both utopian and locative (J. Z. Smith 1990, 125). It was locative in the sense that death was a strong pollutant and the dead were objects of rituals of relocation to the realm of death— the peculiar characteristics of a locative soteriology according to Smith (1990, 132–33). But the Greeks also celebrated the dead in rituals that were not only locative but also utopian. In the Athenian Genesia, which was a publicly funded celebration of the dead, the spirits of the dead were first invited to the realm of living human beings and then relocated to the realm of death: For this was the ghosts’ high noon, when the spirits of the dead were free to return above ground from the underworld and roam among the living—who were careful to take such precautions as smearing their doorways with pitch and locking up all the sanctuaries to keep them out. When the day ended, the spirits were packing back to Hades again, with the cry of ‘get out, hobgoblins, the Anthesteria is over!’ ringing in their phantasmal ears. (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 77) This chapter explicates the connection between cosmological ideas and purification practices in ancient cultures by focusing first on purity in relation to divine realms, then turning to the human realm, before concluding with the realm of the dead.

Cosmology and purification practices in different divine realms and temples Our thesis (see Chapter 1) maintains that purity involves, first, preserving the requisite condition or the necessary quality of each realm within a given cosmological worldview and, second, observing rules that allow crossing between the various realms. This description understands pollution as due to failures to preserve a realm’s requisite conditions, often because one realm’s rules contradict those of another.

Changing realms 31 In many cultures, the realms of life and death and of the divine and the human contain subordinate realms. For example, Indian social castes are divisions of the human realm. In classical Greek theology, both the realm of Zeus and the realm of Demeter belonged to the divine realm but were distinguished from each other. When realms are subdivided, rules about pollution and purification procedures can govern contact between different divine and human realms as well. Different cosmological realms come into conflict when gods or humans or animals or artifacts move from one realm into another. Gods in other realms Kimberley C. Patton collected much evidence that the ancient Greeks conceived of gods themselves performing rituals. She observed that such reflexive divine rituals appear in many other traditions as well (Patton 2009, 306). Patton demonstrated that gods perform the rituals appropriate to their own temples. Thus a vase painting of Apollo washing his hand in a lustral basin shows “a central aspect of the cult of Apollo: purity is his distinct sphere” (Patton 2009, 171). Purification rituals can also depict contact between different divine realms. When ancient Near Eastern myths depict gods performing purification rituals, they often state explicitly that the context involves one god acting within another god’s realm. For example, an Egyptian tomb inscription reported, “When the god Thoth plans to read spells for Re, he purifies himself through a nine-day purification” (Schott 1972, 20). A Sumerian text depicts the god Ningirsu boasting of being a priest who performs purification: I lay the ritual table and perform correctly the hand-washing rites. My outstretched hands wake holy An from sleep. My father who begot me receives the very best food from my hands. An, king of the gods, called me therefore “Ningirsu, king, lustration priest of An.” (Black, Cunningham, Robson, and Zólyomi 2004, 50–51) It was also the case that, in Mesopotamia at least, their own pollution could force gods out of their heavenly residences and earthly temples, and prevent them from exercising their divine duties. In the Sumerian epic, Enlil and Ninlil, the high god Enlil (also called Nunamnir) is forced from his own temple because of ritual impurity due to sexual intercourse with the goddess Ninlil. Enlil was walking in the Ki-ur. As Enlil was going about in the Ki-ur, the fifty great gods and the seven gods who decide destinies had Enlil arrested in the Ki-ur. Enlil, ritually impure, left the city. Nunamnir, the ritually impure left the city. [Or Enlil, ritually impure, leave the city!

32  Changing realms Nunamnir, ritually impure, leave the city!] Enlil, in accordance with what had been decided. Nunamnir, in accordance with what had been decided, Enlil went. (Black, Cunningham, Robson, and Zólyomi 2004, 104) In a later Akkadian epic, Nergal and Ereshkigal, the underworld goddess Ereshkigal, after an affair with Nergal, complains to the other deities: That god you sent me, he has had intercourse with me, so let him lie with me. Send that god that he may be my husband and spend the night with me. Am I defiled, impure? Can I not render judgments for the great gods, the great gods who reside in the netherworld? If you do not send that god, I shall raise up the dead to devour the living, I shall make the dead outnumber the living. (Foster 2005, 520) The Mesopotamian texts portray gods as polluted by sex with other gods and needing purification before being able to return to their own realms and duties. Ancient cultures also feared the effects of gods moving through the human realm. When the gods enter the human realm and appear to a person, the human realm is threatened because it cannot endure the qualities of the divine realm. Though ancient people did not describe this danger as impurity or pollution, the textual evidence shows that their recognition of danger was rooted in a concern that the divine realm could exert a destructive effect on the human realm. Seeing the real features of the gods was often believed to kill human beings. In Greek myths, for instance, Semele died when Zeus revealed himself to her in his true form (Bayor 2004, nn. 1). Similarly, when Anchises realized that he had slept with Aphrodite without knowing who she was, he feared he would die (Bayor 2004, 180–90). Examples of the danger associated with seeing divine beings also occur in the Hebrew Bible. Jacob celebrated his survival after meeting YHWH (Genesis 32:31). Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting when “the cloud had settled upon it, and the glory of YHWH filled the tabernacle” (Exodus 40:35, following NRSV). When Gideon recognized that he was meeting an angel of YHWH, he was frightened. “‘Help me, YHWH God! For I have seen the angel of YHWH face to face.’ But YHWH said to him, ‘Peace be to you. Do not fear, you shall not die’” (Judges 6:22–23 following NRSV). Isaiah saw God in a vision and explicitly cited his pollution as the source of danger: “Woe is me! I must be silent, for I am a man of polluted lips, and I dwell among a people of polluted lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, YHWH of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). The Egyptian situation was somewhat similar. Though most Egyptians were not supposed to come into direct contact with the deities except for a small number of the most highly ranked people (Sauneron

Changing realms 33 2000 [1957], 81), they could do so through sacred animals. These animals were regarded as divine epiphanies that made it possible for their deities to be tangible (Quirke 1992, 16; Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, 21). So the danger of divine contact could be avoided if beings from the divine realm (the gods or angels) took harmless forms, most often the forms of animals or people. Human forms were more common in Greek and Israelite stories (e.g. Genesis 18:2, but cf. Exodus 3:2). This piecemeal evidence from a variety of times and cultures indicates a widespread conception of gods living in their own pure realms, purifying themselves before or after entering each other’s realms, and taking precautions to avoid endangering humans when entering their realm. To paraphrase Mary Douglas, purification provided a means for dealing with gods out of place. Purifying temples Rituals for cleaning pollution from temples were overtly aimed at the opposite concern: human pollution of the divine realm. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous concern for controlling the boundary with the divine realm probably reflected anxiety that divine outbreaks against humans would manifest themselves in famines, plagues, revolts and invasions. For example, Hittite kings tried to avert a plague by searching archives for forgotten treaties and rituals, and then reinstituting their requirements and practices (Singer 2002, 58–59, 83; Watts 2009, 39–66). The Hebrew Bible regularly interprets plagues as punishments from God (Leviticus 26:16, 21, 25; Deuteronomy 28:21–22, 27; 2 Samuel 24:15). The Athenians cited oracles describing the plague of 430/429 B.C.E. as divine punishment for their war against the Peloponnesian Greeks (Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 53). The purification of temples was also important because all these cultures conceived of temples as divine residences. A temple was a portion of the divine realm that existed within the human realm. Temples therefore concretized cosmological schemes architecturally and were the sites of the most elaborate purification rituals. Water, both fresh and ocean water, was considered the purifying gift of the gods. It was found in temples in the form of springs and/or pools. In Mesopotamian temples, such pools were called Apsû like the cosmic ocean (Guichard and Marti 2013, 70, 102–103). Liturgies described the water as coming from the cosmic ocean, while rituals actually drew it from the pool with the same name inside the temple, such as in this late-first-millennium Akitu ritual: The lustral waters emerge from the Apsû The water is consecrated for the body, the saponaria is purified for the body. The lustral water is mixed with the sacred saponaria. (Guichard and Marti 2013, 77)

34  Changing realms Every temple in Egypt was supposed to contain a sacred lake or at least a reservoir for use in ritual purification (Sauneron 2000 [1957], 77). In Greece, water was the most widespread and efficient means of purifying infected people and things. It was used in various ways: washing, drenching, sprinkling, and rinsing. In some areas, fumigation, incense, and fire were also prescribed for purification. Winnowing fans and squill (sea onions) were also widely used in Greece for purification. The Phoenicians, about whose beliefs we know very little, built their temples near springs or installed pools with water tanks on the premises (Mathys 2013, 179–81), as did most other Near Eastern and Mediterranean peoples from the third millennium B.C.E. until the Christian era. (For that matter, fountains and fonts of water remain typical features of Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches, and of Muslim mosques, to this day.) Ancient temples had to be purified periodically in order to maintain the qualities of the divine realm and to protect them from the pollution of the human realm and from the possible pollution of death that always haunts mortals. The job of maintaining the requisite condition of the divine realm on earth was assigned to human beings. Temple spaces were therefore dependent on the human realms around them (Guichard and Marti 2013, 61–69). Two kinds of ritual purification needed to be performed for this work. We will summarize in the next section purification rituals that were intended to prevent the pollution that might result from a human being entering the temple. In order for people to be allowed into the divine realm of the temple without exerting a negative influence on it, they had to possess the necessary quality of the divine realm—qualities that were not always required in the human realm.1 Here we discuss purification rituals that were intended to remove pollutions that had already affected the divine realm. Egyptian purity regulations for temples are best attested in sources from the Ptolemaic period (third-to-first centuries B.C.E.) and later. The library of the temple at Edfu in the Ptolemaic period preserved Egyptian records of purity regulations. The Greek historian Herodotus also wrote about some Egyptian purity regulations (Sauneron 2000 [1957], 188; Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, 233). However, some ­r ituals from the New Kingdom period in the later second millennium B.C.E. have also survived (Quack 2013, 116–22). Joachim Quack described the typical pattern for performing purification rituals in Egyptian temples: Purification scenes are usually placed at the beginning of a ritual, in order to define the place, persons and objects involved as being pure. Within a ritual, purification plays a particular role where the serving of the food-offering is concerned. (Quack 2013, 117)

Changing realms 35 Examples from both ends of ancient Mesopotamian history suggest a persistent concern for preserving purity while constructing or renovating temples. Without purification rites, Mesopotamian gods could not enter their new temples or remain in their old ones. Performing the rites not only assuaged the gods but was also believed to keep the human and natural worlds tranquil (Guichard and Marti 2013, 73). The Sumerian king, Gudea, claimed to have banned unclean people from the city when he rebuilt the temples: The impure man who is frightening, the man inflamed with venereal disease, (and) the woman in (her impure) birth period went out of the city. … In the city cemetery no hoe was used, no corpse was brought there, no cult singer brought his harp there, no one intoned lamentation music, (and) no (hired female) mourner wailed a lament. (tr. R. Averbeck in Chavalas 2006, 48) Two thousand years later, in the Babylonian New Year’s Akitu Festival, ­ urification of the temple was performed by a specialist mašmašu priest who p was then exiled along with the slaughterer for the rest of the ritual period. The chief urigallu or šešgallu priest also absented himself: “The urigallu-priest of the temple Ekua shall not view the purification of the temple. If he does view (it), he is no (longer) pure” (tr. A. Sachs in Pritchard 1969, 333; see also Bidmead 2002, 70–76). Hittite texts provide many more examples of rituals for purifying deities and their temples (Wilhelm 1999, 200–201). Similarly, in Israel, the Jerusalem temple was built out of stones hewn and finished at the quarry, so that “neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron was heard in the temple while it was being built” (1 Kings 6:7 NRSV). The divine realm of Greek temples and even the gods themselves needed to be ritually purified. In myths, the gods had to be purified after being polluted by other realms, such as the pollution of murder and death. One myth describes a priest in Crete who purified Apollo after the god had slain the Delphic dragon (Burkert 1992, 63). In the physical world, the statues of the gods in the temple needed to be purified periodically because their residence was surrounded by the human realm and they always faced the possibility of pollution by human beings. Euripides described how the statue of Artemis had to be purified by being washed clean after she was defiled by the approach of blood-polluted Orestes (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1042–43, 1176–77). Priests or priestesses serving the sanctuaries cleaned the statues of the gods daily. During special occasions, especially before festivals, the statues were purified in more complicated ways, including immersion in deep water. Washing was the most common way of purifying Greek shrines and statues. Blood sacrifice was also used for purifying some specific places. Greeks used blood from offered animals especially for purifying specific sacred places and for mitigating the consequences of murder. Meetings of the Athenian

36  Changing realms assembly, including the Athenian council, began with the purification of the auditorium by sacrificing a piglet and carrying its body around the auditorium (Price 1999, 76). The auditorium seemed to become a divine realm at least temporarily: other complicated religious rituals that were usually performed in the temple were performed before discussing political issues. Households also performed purifications of private cults (Parker 1983, 29). When Heracles returned home from the realm of Hades in Euripides’ play, the first thing he had to do was to purify his house by giving offerings to household gods and to Zeus (Euripides, Heracles, 606–9, 923–24). In Egypt, purifications of temple images were important rites. The Egyptian Opening of the Mouth ritual reached its climax in which the corpse or statue was (re)vivified when a freshly severed foreleg of a bull, which continues to twitch for twenty minutes after being cut, was pressed to its mouth. David Lorton described it as “a twitching, writhing mass of ‘live flesh,’ blood streaming from its severed end (and it is this end that is pressed to the mouth of the statue!)” (Lorton 1999, 165). Purification of Hittite temples involved blood offerings to chthonic deities and wiping the rooms or objects with bloody carcasses (Beckman 2011, 99–101; Feder 2011, 9–33). In Israel, sprinkling the blood of animal offerings maintained the purity of the tabernacle and temple, as well as playing a role in inaugurating priests (Leviticus 8:30; 16:16, 20, 33). The divine realm of the temple was within the human realm which increased the danger of pollution by the human realm. It was therefore necessary to purify YHWH’s “house” and also to keep human beings away from its innermost sanctum, as in many other cultures. The first high priest, Aaron, was warned of the danger of entering its innermost room at will. YHWH said to Moses: Tell Aaron your brother not to enter just any time into the Holy Space inside the veil in front of the mitigation center on the chest, so he doesn’t die, because I appear in the cloud above the mitigation center. (Leviticus 16:2) Israel’s tabernacle and temples had to be purified annually because they were located in the midst of human impurity. The high priest sprinkled ox blood in the inner sanctum and then put blood upon the horns of the courtyard altar (Leviticus 16:11–19). Leviticus summarizes the effects of this ritual: He will mitigate the Holy Space from the pollutions of the children of Israel and from their transgressions, for all their sins. Thus he must do for the tent of meeting which dwells with them in the midst of their pollutions. (Leviticus 16:16)

Changing realms 37 Offerings had to be carefully chosen from “pure” animals without physical defects which precluded, for instance, blemishes on their coats (Leviticus 1:3; 22:18–25). These animals also had to be ritually purified. Before slaughtering the animal, Greek priests sprinkled the victim’s head with lustral water (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 35). Israelite rituals required washing the entrails and legs before burning the cut-up carcass on the altar (Leviticus 8:9). The meat for Egyptian offerings had to be purified twice: first the veterinary priest purified the animal before killing it, then the portions of meat had to be purified with water from the holy font (Sauneron 2000 [1957], 77). Karel van der Toorn concluded from such descriptions that the purity rules simply meant to convey respect and submission to the gods. The deities wanted to be approached by worshippers who respected their holiness and took pains to please them. … The observance of a code of cultic conduct implied a (temporary) separation from the profane world in which people made love and died, and thus gave one an inkling of the divine transcendence. (van der Toorn 1985, 37) He argued that ancient purity rules originated from the standards of etiquette prevailing in royal courts. The gods are pure and holy and man’s purity and holiness depends on the degree of conformity with their standards. What is acceptable in social intercourse may be unacceptable in the presence of the gods, just as one is permitted manners at home which could not be displayed at court. (van der Toorn 1985, 27; also van der Toorn 1989, 339–56) Standards of behavior thus varied depending on one’s location, that is, on which realm one finds oneself in. Couto-Ferreira and Garcia-Ventura (2013, 516) observed, however, that as soon as the discussion turned to women’s impurity, the focus shifted from etiquette to contagion. Contagion of all kinds threatens to cross and even erase boundaries—the boundaries of bodies and also of cosmological realms (see further below). Purity requirements for entering temples Many ancient sources detail the purification rituals that people had to perform to enter temples. In these ancient cultures, people entering the divine realm had to satisfy first the necessary criteria of the human realm. A person who was unfit according to the standards of the human realm could not qualify to enter the divine realm. These cultures thought their gods abhorred human beings who did not satisfy the requisite condition

38  Changing realms of the human realm. In addition, in ancient Greece and Israel, pollution from the realm of death had to be purified before entering the temple. In these two cultures, the pollution of death and the things that are associated with death were considered dangerous both in the human and the divine realms. The requisite conditions of the human realm in these cultures consisted, at least in large part, in moral criteria. Moral requirements for entry into the divine realm are explicit in Egyptian temples. The doorjambs of gates and passages leading to more sacred parts of the temples prohibit people suffering from impurities from entering, and also require them to be free of moral misconduct. Some require entrants to recite formulas of innocence, the so-called “negative confessions” that also appear in Egyptian funerary texts known today as the Book of the Dead. A doorjamb in the Edfu temple requires entrants to recite: I have not been partisan in the judgment, I had not allied with the strong one, I have not convicted the weak one, I had not led things in a violent manner, … (Quack 2013, 126) These requirements that mix moral with ritual purity led Joachim Quack (2013, 152) to question whether the distinction between them was valid for Egyptian culture at all. In ancient Egyptian religion, human beings entering the divine realm also had to achieve the ritual purity of the divine realm. There were two kinds of divine realms, each of which required Egyptians to purify themselves before entering. First, the earthly divine realm—the temple— required people entering it to satisfy its requisite condition. Second, the divine realm of the underworld, where Egyptians thought that the dead could go, also had its own requisite conditions. In later Egyptian eschatology as reflected in the Book of the Dead, all dead people had to be judged in the court of Osiris. Those who met the requirements of the divine realm of the underworld, especially ritual purity, could enjoy its blessings. The Egyptian priests who worked inside the earthly divine realm of the temple had to maintain a state of ritual purity (Quack 2013, 122–28; Velde 1995, 1733–34). In fact, the majority of the priests were called wab “purifier” or “purified” priests (Gahlin 2002, 105). Although the office was often hereditary, anyone prepared to maintain ritual purity could be a priest. Kings often appointed priests in order to control the office, but the position could also be purchased. The major requirement of the priestly office was purity, rather than ritual expertise (Watterson 1984, 38–39). Hieroglyphic inscriptions on gates and doorjambs emphasized the requisite conditions for entry (Quack 2013, 123). Priests had to purify themselves through

Changing realms 39 ablution twice a day and twice every night. Before entering the temple, they chewed natron and fumigated themselves with incense. In first-­millennium Egyptian temples, priests also had to remove all hair from their heads and bodies, including their eyelashes and eyebrows. A  long ­inscription in the Esna temple describes these requirements and then demands that those entering the temple must swear to a priest that they have fulfilled them. Part of the inscription reads: Whoever wears a hairstyle of grief does not enter into this temple! Shaving, nail clipping and combing is what (justifies) entering into it. All fine linen as a dress is what (justifies) entering into it. Natron water is what (justifies) settling down in it. As for all having allowance to enter it, they should be pure from a woman in a purification (period) of nine days and should not have eaten any taboo in a purification (period) of four days. (Quack 2013, 120) The temples of Mesopotamia and surrounding areas (Anatolia, SyriaPalestine, Iran) were governed by similar purity concerns. For example, Hittite temple personnel, including the bakers, had to be “clean (ritually pure), let them be washed and removed (of impurities). Let the hair and the fingernails be taken (off) for them, and let them be dressed (in) clean clothes” (Taggar-Cohen 2006, 160). Egyptian priests wore no wool or leather clothing because the material coming from animals could pollute their bodies and the temple. Instead, the priests’ clothing had to be made of fine linen and their sandals were made of papyrus. Only funerary specialists, sem priests, were clothed in panther skins. Male priests were supposed to be circumcised before they officially assumed their duties. In addition, priests had to observe the prohibitions of their particular temples, especially its dietary regulations (Sauneron 2000 [1957], 36–42). Besides contact with the physical divine realm of the temple, contact with the invisible divine realm also required ritual purity. For instance, before Egyptian lector priests entered into direct contact with the deity, they had to be ritually purified (Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, 127). If the rite took place outside the temple, ritual purification of that place was also required. Though Greeks could be chosen as priests by lot, election, birth, or by buying the office, it was purity practices that separated priests from ordinary people. The purity rules for Greek priests, like those for Egyptian priests, varied among the local temples and were related to the characteristics of the individual local deity. For instance, the priest of Athena Polias at Athens could not eat cheese from Attica, though the reason is unclear. Priests of Poseidon did not eat fish from Poseidon’s realm of the sea (Price 1999, 69). Sexual abstinence was also widely required of priests. Male priests were expected to abstain from sexual intercourse temporarily

40  Changing realms before entering the sanctuary. Some female priests, for instance the oracles at Delphi, were required to remain chaste. Ritual purification was required whenever Greeks entered the divine realm. Sacred laws inscribed on stone were usually displayed at the entrances of Greek temples. For example, this ca. 200 B.C.E. inscription was placed in Magalopolis in front of a temple dedicated to the imported Egyptian deities, Isis, Sarapis, and Anoubis, and is similar to others at temples dedicated to traditional Greek gods: Whoever wishes to sacrifice shall enter the sanctuary, being pure: from childbirth on the ninth day; from an abortion, for forty-four days; from menstruation, on the seventh day; from bloodshed(?), for seven days; from (eating) goat meat and mutton, on the third (day); from other foods, having washed oneself from the head down, on the same day; from sexual intercourse, on the same day, having washed oneself; from [—] on the same day, having washed oneself [- - -] no one shall enter(?) [- - -] (Lupu 2005, 206–207) These rules were typical in many Greek temples (see Herodotus, The Histories, 2.64; Burkert 1985 [1977], 78; Parker 1983, 74; Darshan 2018, 34–36). Noel Robertson described their contents: A person is told just how—in what physical respects—he must be pure in order to approach a given deity …. A typical form of the words is … “enter pure from wife and childbed and mourning.” The meaning is that after marital intercourse or after a birth or a death in the family one must wait a certain time—one must be pure for so many days as specified in each case. After intercourse, much the commonest case, it may be only till next morning, otherwise for just a day or two; birth and death take longer. The forms of pollution can be refined or multiplied to various degrees. We hear of intercourse other than marital (more polluting because more extreme, not because it is somehow wrong), of miscarriage, abortion, infant exposure, death outside the family. (Robertson 2013, 195) A fountain for purification was set up beside the entrance of the sanctuary. This place within the temple complex was not for purifying the pollutions from the realm of death but for the ritual purification that temporarily removed the trace of the human realm and granted human beings the necessary quality to enter the divine realm. If a person had been polluted by sexual intercourse, birth, or death that pollution had to be removed before entering the water basin (Burkert 1985 [1977], 87). Everything that would produce a miasma within the temple was forbidden. After

Changing realms 41 they removed their pollutions, they could perform ritual purification at the entrance of the sanctuary to temporarily remove any remaining traces of the human realm. Corpses and blood were the main pollutants related to death in Greece, but impurity also surrounded sex and childbirth. A person of notorious sexual license or blood-guiltiness could not be a priest because of pollution, rather than immorality (Ferguson 1989, 48). While the pollution of childbirth came about due to the blood that was shed in the process of labor, it is unclear why pregnancy and sexual activity also caused ritual impurity in the divine realm (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 65). Both pregnancy and sexual activity were pollutants to the divine realm but were not impure in the human realm. Pregnancy itself seems to not even be impure to the divine realm. When a woman became pregnant, she was excluded from temples for some time (purportedly forty days), while later in pregnancy, she was expected to visit temples. Perhaps the initial exclusion was due to the strong possibility of miscarriage during early pregnancy, but this is nowhere explicitly stated (Parker 1983, 48). Everyone who entered a temple for any reason had to be ritually pure. For instance, before inquirers entered the place of oracles, they had to be ritually cleansed (Ferguson 1989, 79). Greeks also had to purify themselves to participate in the rituals of the Mysteries. According to archeological evidence, water basins for purification were set around the space for Mysteries (Ferguson 1989, 109). The Eleusinian Mysteries dedicated to Demeter and Persephone are an instructive example. The Mysteries were open to all regardless of gender or social status. Even slaves could be initiated. The only formal rule was that candidates for initiation should be pure and speak Greek (Price 1999, 102). So candidates for admission had to be purified in order to be admitted to the place for the ritual. On the second day of the initiation, they “sacrificed, burned, and scattered the ashes of a ‘scapegoat’ pig to cleanse them of their pollution” (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 137). Then they took a purifying bath in the sea and another purifying sacrifice was held. Though the ban on sex before entering a temple was widespread in ancient cultures, the reasons for it are not clear. Sexual abstinence before entering the temple seemed to aim at removing the trace of the human realm, rather than purifying the pollution from the realm of death, because the sexual activity was polluting only to the divine realm and not the human realm. Biblical scholars frequently explain purification after sex in ancient Israel as purifying the pollution of death, though this explanation is not clearly supported by biblical texts (see Chapter 4). Leviticus 15 mentions mild pollution from contact with semen. Moses requires sexual abstinence and laundering clothes before the covenant ceremony at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:15; also 1 Samuel 21:4; cf. 2 Samuel 11:11). Similar requirements for abstinence seem to have governed entrance to many temples in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece.

42  Changing realms The Hebrew Bible stresses that priests had to maintain purity to an exceptional degree (Leviticus 21). Purity was also required of the Levites “who carry the vessels of the LORD” and of Nazirites (Isaiah 52:11; Numbers 6:6–11; Judges 13:7, 14). Priesthood was hereditary, but among Aaron’s male descendants, those who had a physical “blemish” could not officiate over offerings in the temple (Leviticus 21:17–23). A high priest had to marry “a virgin of his own people” (Leviticus 21:14) which was not required of ordinary Israelites. A priest could not touch corpses other than those of his near kin, and a high priest should not approach even the dead body of his father or mother. The consecration ritual for a priest included bathing and an animal “sin” offering which was used to provide both purification and forgiveness (Exodus 29; Leviticus 4, 8). It therefore prevented the possible pollution of the divine realm by removing any trace of the human realm, as well as any sin or moral impurity that was a violation of the requisite condition of the human realm (Milgrom 1991, 253–54). In addition, purification before each entry into the divine realm was necessary. A laver for the priests’ ablutions was placed in the courtyard of the tabernacle and temple. Whenever priests entered the temple and approached the altar for sacrifices, they had to wash their hands and feet, “so that they do not die” (Exodus 30:20, 21; Leviticus 16:4). Purification rituals were required before any other person could enter the tabernacle or temple, YHWH’s divine realm. Throughout the history described in the Hebrew Bible, the tent tabernacle or temple was the most important divine realm: the tabernacle was designed by YHWH (Exodus 25, 26, 27) and the temple of Solomon and the Second Temple built in Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile were called “the house of YHWH” (1  Kings 7:48, 51, 8:34; Ezra 6:10, 16, etc.) where the Israelites offered “pleasing sacrifices to the God of heaven” (Ezra 6:10). In Israel, purification rituals usually involved bathing. Leviticus explicitly demands that the bearers of these pollution bathe: those contaminated by skin disease (14:8–9); those with genital discharges (15:13); the corpse-­ contaminated person or object (22:4–6); those who emitted or touched semen (15:16); those who found and ate animal carcasses (17:15); those who touch the bed or sit on the chair of people with genital discharges or who are menstruating (15:5–6, 21–22, 25–27); those who touch someone with genital discharges or their spit (15:7–8); those who carry a­ nything that was under a person with genital discharges (15:10; Harrington 1993, 115–16). Bathing became the paradigmatic ritual for removing the human realm’s influence, even when not polluted by specific pollutants, and for preventing the human realm from polluting the divine realm. More ­serious pollution also required animal offerings (e.g. 12:6–8; 14:4–5, 10; 15:14–15, 29–30; see further in Chapter 4). Walther Sallaberger (2011, 40) observed that Mesopotamian thought reduced social conflicts to illnesses. As in Israel, the healing and cleansing from polluting illness was also the path to social restoration. This idea

Changing realms 43 is especially prominent in royal ideology. Royal inscriptions across the ancient Near East used purity rhetoric to emphasize royal virtue and to index social status. Sumerian King Shulgi claimed the role of priest and diviner for himself because of his purity: “I am a ritually pure interpreter of omens. … These words of the gods are of pre-eminent value for the exact performance of hand-washing and purification rites” (Shulgi B, lines 131–33, in ETCSL). In Egypt, the king underwent elaborate purification procedures to worship in a temple, as the Piye Stela illustrates. Piye ordered his army to wash before worshipping Amun at Thebes. Piye was purified “in the robing room” of the temples of Memphis before he worshiped: His purification was done: he was cleansed in the pool of Kebah; his face was bathed in the river of Nun, in which Re bathes his face. … performing the ritual of the robing room; putting on the sdb-garment; cleansing him with incense and cold water; presenting him the garlands of the Pyramidion House; bringing him the amulets. (Lichtheim 1980, 3:77) Egyptian people who were not royalty or priests attached to the service of a deity and his/her temple were excluded from the royally sponsored temples. However, this does not mean that the divine realm was limited exclusively to the priests. Ordinary private persons sought to have relationships with their deities outside the state cult. These people could visit numerous private chapels and shrines (Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, 113). Every person who went into these private religious places also needed to be ritually pure, though perhaps only through bathing (Baines 2001, 9–10). So most Egyptians were familiar with the necessity of purifying themselves in order to enter and to stay inside the divine realm of a temple or shrine. Kings had to purify themselves to lead rituals in Anatolian and Levantine cultures as well. In the Ugaritic Rites of Vintage, the king passed from the profane realm to a state of purity and then back to the profane. “On the thirteenth—the pure king bathes himself.” The next day, “the king is seated, the pure one.” After the rituals, “at the setting of the sun, the king is profane” (tr. by B. A. Levine, J-M. de Tarragon, and A. Robertson in Hallo and Younger 1997, 1.95). Dennis Pardee described the purity vocabulary in this text: Because the king was … the principal cultic actor, he was required to pass regularly from the ‘profane’ sphere of his daily functions as king to the cultic and back again. Though the passage to the cultic is expressed only as purification (RHS + brr), the return to the ‘profane’ is expressed by the root HL(L), with a good Hebrew cognate. (Pardee 2002, 239)

44  Changing realms Hittite kings also had to purify themselves (van den Hout 1998). Purity concerns penetrated into private homes as well. Hittite house shrines required the house to be sanctified and, if desecrated, to be purified and resanctified (Hutter 2013, 170–71). Again, the ritual mixes moral concerns with ritual ones. It begins, “When they cleanse a house of blood, impurity, threat, (and) perjury, its treatment (is) as follows …” (tr. by B. J. Collins in Hallo 1997, 1.68). Thus throughout these ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, entering the divine realm of temples required purification first. Dietary requirements for crossing realms Entry into temples frequently required the avoidance of certain foods. The dietary rules are the most complicated of the purity rules in each culture and the most difficult to explain. Dietary practices often get treated separately from purity rules, both in some ancient cultures and by some modern scholars. In Late Antiquity, for example, the Mishnah addressed dietary rules not in Tohoroth, the section on purities, but in Kodashim, the section on holy things (Klawans 2000, 31–32). Leviticus 11 in the Hebrew Bible, however, treats diet explicitly as a purity concern—in fact, as the first set of regulations in its collection of purity rules (Leviticus 11–15; see Chapter 4). Dietary rules seem to have been conditioned by many factors, such as a culture’s physical environment, available kinds of food, and historical traditions, but they were also related to the division of realms within the worldview of each culture. For that reason and in spite of these other factors, dietary rules were influenced and even dominated by cosmological beliefs. Some foods were unclean to eat and would pollute people, either at all times (as was the case in Israel) or only in certain ritualized places and contexts (as was the case in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece). Israel’s distinctiveness in this regard shows how dietary rules were conditioned by relationships to the divine realm. In other ancient cultures, dietary rules applied when people entered temples (or temple cities) or approached altars (Borgeaud 2013, 261–87). The rules varied because different deities were believed to have different requirements. In ancient Judaism, most of the dietary laws applied to all the Israelites but not to gentiles, because the Israelites had only one god, YHWH. The Israelites belonged to YHWH’s realm and therefore had to keep God’s dietary code. Milgrom (1991, 726) summarized this to mean that “abolishing the dietary laws, Scripture informs us, also abolishes the distinction between gentile and Jew” (see Leviticus 20:24–26). The gods were usually offered the foods typically eaten by people of each culture. The kinds of food offerings were different from culture to culture. The Egyptians offered all kinds of food to the gods, including bread, cake, fruit, fowl, and meat (e.g. Book of the Dead, spell 69 and

Changing realms 45 the rubrics of spells 99 and 125). The Greek gods were offered first fruits, wine, and the fat and bones of sacrificial animals (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 28–30, 39–40). In Israel, YHWH was thought to enjoy the aromas of fine flour with oil, of bread made without yeast and mixed with oil, and of roasted animal meat, specifically cattle, sheep, goats, and pigeons (see Leviticus 1–4). But there were also specific kinds of food that particular gods preferred or abhorred, preferences dictated by the characteristics of the gods and their sacrificial rituals. A list of offerings from Uruk in lower Mesopotamia not only specified which animals must be offered to which deity, it also precluded certain animals from certain temples: In the temple of the god Shamash, ram’s meat shall never be offered to the deity Shakkan. In the temple of the god Sin, bull’s meat shall never be offered to the god Harru. Fowl flesh shall never be offered to the goddess Beletseri. Neither bull’s meat nor fowl’s flesh shall ever be offered to the goddess Ereshkigal. (tr. A. Sachs in Pritchard 1969, 343–45) A tablet from Emar in upper-Mesopotamia explicitly distinguished pure offerings for celestial deities from impure offerings for chthonic deities (Hallo 1997, 1.122). Each divine realm specified kinds of foods that were either required to be offered or barred from being prepared for the owner of that realm. In Egypt, the purity regulations of each temple were tied to the religious practices of the individual nomes (districts). Dietary regulations, which mention both sacred and prohibited animals, varied according to which gods the locals favored (Sauneron 2000 [1957], 39). The deity of each religious capital loathed a certain animal. A doorframe of the temple at Philae, for example, specifies what one may not eat if one wishes to gain access to the next court: “These are the taboos, which you should not eat, which are not allowed to come near to the inner part of the temple.” The list that follows includes red onions, donkeys, dogs, and small cattle (Quack 2013, 121). The third-century C.E. philosopher, Porphyry, quoted a book by the Egyptian priest, Chaeremon, that prohibited priests from eating “from animals with a cloven hoof, from meat-eating birds, and from a large number of special cases, such as female cows” (Quack 2013, 127, referring to Porphyry, De abstinentia IV 6–8). Therefore, priests of Egyptian temples especially had to avoid eating certain animals or plants that were abhorred by the god of the local temple. For example, specific parts of slaughtered animals (e.g., the head or the hoofs) had to be avoided by some priests, certain animals, such as, cows, pigs, ewes, pigeons, or fish, were not eaten in some areas, and beans and garlic were considered disgusting in some areas. Egyptian funerary texts include a mythological explanation for why the

46  Changing realms god Horus finds pork abominable, because when his eye was injured, it hurt him to look at a pig (Coffin Text 157, Book of the Dead spell 112 in Hallo 1997, 1.19). The Egyptian Book of the Dead shows some examples of foods that had to be avoided in certain divine realms. Spell 65 alludes to the sun god Re’s abhorrence of fish, and the rubric of Spell 64, which is dedicated to Re, prescribes that this spell should be recited without eating fish. Spell 158 in the older Coffin Texts specifies that it should not be recited while eating pork (Hallo 1997, 1.19). While myths provide possible explanations for some food prohibitions, the reasons for other aversions are not clear. In Egypt, the sacred animal of the god of a temple was prohibited from the tables of those living in the vicinity of that temple, while neighboring cities enjoyed consuming it in the normal manner. These local differences sometimes caused conflicts between towns (Sauneron 2000 [1957], 39). According to The Victory Stele of Piye, three of the four Egyptian princes who came to pay homage to this Nubian conqueror were not admitted to Piye’s royal presence because they ate fish, which was regarded as an abomination (Lichtheim 1980, 3:80). The princes are also rejected for being “uncircumcised” in Lichtheim’s translation, but Quack (2013, 136) argued that the term refers to some kind of sexual behavior instead. Only one prince who “was clean and did not eat fish” was allowed to enter the palace. It is not clear why fish eaters could not see Piye, though the reason is likely due to distinctive Nubian or Upper Egyptian religious practices. Some animals that represented a certain god or that were protected by a god were not supposed to be eaten in the god’s realm. Greek priests of Poseidon had to abstain from eating fish, a food that came from Poseidon’s realm of the sea (Price 1999, 69). Pigs, which were widely domesticated in the ancient Near East (Lion and Michel 2006), declined as attested offerings and even as a food source in the first millennium B.C.E. (Foster and Salgues 2006). In Greece, while pigs were usually sacrificed to Demeter, pigs were not only improper sacrificial animals for some other gods but no one could enter certain temples in shoes made of pigskin or wearing anything else associated with pigs (Ferguson 1989, 32). Cows were sacrificed for Athena, but the priests of Athena in Athens could not eat cheese from Attica (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 69). Food taboos could also be closely associated with certain days of the annual calendar and particular rituals (van der Toorn 1985, 33). In short, in these ancient cultures, people who visited or belonged to the realm of individual gods had to eat food that was thought to be proper for that realm. They had to eat those foods they thought the god preferred and had to avoid eating both what the god abhorred and what was sacred to the god. However, in each culture, the specific rules were influenced by many other factors as well, most of which can no longer be recovered.

Changing realms 47

Cosmologies and purification practices in different human realms and cultures The human realm was distinct from other realms in the cosmologies of these ancient cultures. Scholars today often use the terms “secular,” “common,” or “profane” to describe the human counterpart to the “sacred” or “holy” divine realm, but these ancient cultures emphasized the interaction between the human realm and the divine realm. Nature by itself was neutral most of the time and it was not usually believed to have strict requisite conditions as an independent realm (unlike popular modern cosmologies; see Chapter 5). Issues of purity in the natural world occurred when animals, plants, matter, or natural phenomena came into contact with the divine realm or the realm of death. The ancient Egyptians believed in the existence of a realm of animals in addition to the human realm (Ray 2002, 87). For the ancient Greeks, the gods were more interested in the human realm than the animal realm or other parts of nature (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 178). The Hebrew Bible seems to indicate the existence of realms of animals and plants that were dominated by human beings and that had to be maintained according to the order of YHWH’s creation (Genesis 1:28–30; Leviticus 19:19; Douglas 1999, 132–51). Moral rules often demarcated the human realm from other realms, including nature. Morality and purity In all these ancient cultures, some moral sins were regarded as polluting, and they could be purified by ritual, at least to a certain degree. Spell 125 of The Book of the Dead shows how moral sins could be related to purity in Egyptian religion. After the speakers of the spell enumerate moral sins that they did not commit while living, they proclaim, “I am pure, pure, pure, pure!” The dead try to prove their eligibility for the divine realm by claiming, “I am pure from evil” (also Spells 15 and 86). The Hebrew Bible treats some moral sins as polluting. For example, Job asserts: “I am clean without transgression” and the psalmist pleads, “cleanse me thoroughly of my liability, purify me from my sins” (Job 33:9; Psalm 51:2). We may well wonder whether such poetry is using the language of purity metaphorically, but we defer the question of metaphorical purity and pollution to Chapter 5. In both Israelite and Greek thought, some moral sins, such as unprosecuted murders or murders in sacred spaces, caused divine anger. Their pollution was thought to be contagious and require purification (Deuteronomy 21:1–9; Parker 1983, 10). In ancient Egypt, morality was a necessary quality of the human realm. Indeed, the cosmos itself was believed to depend on the moral order ­exemplified by maat (Frandsen 2004, 497–99). Maat is usually translated as truth, order, justice, harmony, or balance. Ancient Egyptians personified this ­concept in the divine being of the goddess Maat. To satisfy this requirement,

48  Changing realms Egyptians were supposed to lead lives in accordance with maat, which involved, in Gahlin’s words, the whole range of “socially acceptable or ethical ways to behave” (Gahlin 2002, 80; also Baines 1991, 128; Lipson 2004). Many types of literature dating from all periods of ancient Egyptian history, including mortuary texts, autobiographies, and wisdom literature, related living by maat to the moral code. Crimes against maat included disorder, rebellion, envy, deceit, laziness, injustice, and ingratitude in, for example, the Old Kingdom Instructions of Ptahhotep (Lichtheim 1973, 1:61–82), the Middle Kingdom The Eloquent Peasant (Lichtheim 1973, 1:169–83), and the negative confession of spell 125 of the New Kingdom Book of the Dead (Lichtheim 1976, 2:124–26). Qualifying morally within the human realm was a major requirement for entry into the divine realm after death. In every period, Egyptians thought they had to live morally or they would be condemned after death and would not be allowed to pass into the divine realm of the underworld, thus ending their existence. According to the inscriptions on private tombs of the third and early second millennia B.C.E., the dead persons could justify their qualifications by e­ numerating their moral behaviors and negating their sins (see Lichtheim 1973, 1:17, 1:121–22). The importance of moral behavior is clearly emphasized in the literature from this period. For example, a royal instruction circa 2100 B.C.E. claimed, “the loaf of the upright is preferred to the ox of the evildoer” (Lichtheim 1973, 1:106). Since morality was the requisite condition of the human realm, Egyptians who could satisfy this condition better than others were often proud of their accomplishment. Members of each class were supposed to follow the moral code that governed their social status. The rich were supposed to take care of the poor while the poor were supposed to work diligently. This ethic is clearly apparent in The Eloquent Peasant, a piece of wisdom literature from the Middle Kingdom ca. 2000 B.C.E. (Lichteim 1973, 1:169–84). If people conformed to these principles, they could expect to obtain in return the respect and love of others, an accomplishment about which some elite Egyptians boasted on the walls of their tombs (Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, 179). Moral justifications written in autobiographical texts reflected the elites’ own sense of status: they claimed a higher morality because of their higher social status (Baines 1991, 140). However, the Egyptians did not apply morality tests to kings. They depicted Pharaohs as unconcerned with issues of moral purity, at least ideologically. Their responsibilities were ritual rather than moral. Kings were believed to have closer relationships with the divine realm than the earthly human realm. Just like the gods, to whom people were not supposed to apply their own moral standards, pharaohs were exempted from moral purity and were required to maintain ritual purity alone. The most ­fundamental role of the reigning king was maintaining universal harmony or order, maat, by building temples and making offering to placate the gods (Baines 1991, 128–29; Gahlin 2002, 80). That is, pharaohs were

Changing realms 49 responsible for the maat of the whole cosmos rather than simply for that of the human realm. It is difficult to determine whether most of the common people accepted ­living pharaohs as gods, because texts were written mostly for the upper classes. Though the perception of the king underwent changes during the course of Egyptian history (Silverman 1991, 58), many Egyptologists conclude that the Egyptian people generally considered the king to be a human being. Only when the king performed official ceremonies was he considered to have a divine character (Wildung 1977, 1–2). There is evidence, however, that moral purity and the purity necessary to enter a god’s temple were conceptually fused when approaching a king. A rebel commander surrendered to king Piye of the 25th Dynasty by, among other things, “cleansing himself” by a divine oath of loyalty. He also described his failed rebellion as purification: “It is a year that has purged my ka and cleansed your servant of his fault” (Lichtheim 1980, 3:79). So, in some cases, the violation of moral purity in the human realm could be purified through ritual processes, and vice versa. Some funerary purification rituals were originally performed only for the Pharaoh, until the popularization of the mortuary cult and its ritual texts from the elite to the wider public in the later second and first millennia B.C.E. After the popularization of the mortuary cult, ritual processes were more widely believed to allow Egyptians to satisfy the requisite condition of the human realm which they had to demonstrate to the gods of the underworld (Assmann 2005, 156). However, morality was still important to the human realm. The literature from the New Kingdom and the Late Period articulates the importance of both morality and ritual purity to one’s fate after death. The statue Inscription of Nebneteru (ninth century B.C.E.) states: You have entered pure with words of cleansing. You have made great your monthly cleansing. Your hand was sound, your tongue exact, your mouth shut against speaking falsely. Your tongue was guarded … Your speech was free of evil. (Lichtheim 1980, 3:21) Moral activities of the general public came to include religious responsibilities, such as offering the gods food and respecting the temples. Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead claims: I have not lessened the food-offering in the temples, I have not destroyed the loaves of the gods, I have not taken away the food of the spirits, … I have not trapped the birds from the preserves of the gods, I have not caught the fish of their marshlands, … I have not neglected the dates for offering choice meats, I have not withheld cattle from the god’s offerings, I have not opposed a god in his procession. (Faulkner 2000, 115)

50  Changing realms Moral and ritual purity remained essential to Egyptian hopes for the afterlife. In Greek religion, the gods also required human beings to uphold certain standards of behavior to maintain the human realm (Parker 1986, 255). Myths and plays frequently depicted the gods as amoral, but Greeks believed that all the gods, and particularly Zeus, insisted on moral behavior by humans. The gods were believed to punish people who committed offenses against parents, guests and hosts, suppliants, and the dead. The gods abhorred those who broke oaths and would curse them because of their offense. Hesiod named shamelessness, injustice, and violence as evils that the gods hated (Works and Days, 188–90). Greeks believed that the gods could see human intentions and judged their thoughts as well as actions (Petrovic and Petrovic 2016, 266–68). The gods also expected human beings to be industrious: “Even the gods are disgusted, like men, with a chap who is lazy, living in idleness, like drones lacking a stinger to sting with” (Hesiod, Works and Days, 299–300, tr. in West 1978). The coexistence of amoral (or sometimes immoral) gods and human morality in Greek religion was based on the divisions among the realms of the gods. The Greek gods each had a defined realm of influence within human culture (Parker 1986, 248). In the same way that many Greek cities were said to belong to particular gods, specific moral principles related to particular human realms were also thought to be related to each god’s realm of influence. According to Walter Burkert (1985 [1977], 247), moral barriers depended on people’s fears of the gods of each domain. For instance, Zeus took care of general justice and hospitality, 2 Apollo was related to purification, 3 Hades was in charge of proper funeral procedure for the dead (Sophocles, Antigone, 519), and the Furies cursed and punished people who murdered their kin (Aeschylus, The Eumenides, 262–66). Burkert claimed, Every god protects his domain; he intervenes if, and only if, this domain is specifically violated. This is true at first even of Zeus. He guards the laws of hospitality in the domain of house and court, and over strangers and suppliants who have arrived in the protecting domain. What happens on the other side of the boundary does not affect him …. Whoever crosses a certain boundary or lays a branch on a certain altar is doomed to die. (Burkert 1985 [1977], 248–49) So, clear boundaries between divine realms of activity in Greek thought shaped their expectations of divine retribution. However, moral behavior was not enough to please the Greek gods. The first responsibility of human beings was serving the gods through ritual.

Changing realms 51 Hesiod indicted the Greeks for being immoral and for being unwilling to serve and sacrifice to the gods according to custom: Much in their folly; they could not keep themselves back from their wicked Violence on one another; nor were they willing to serve the immortals Or sacrifice using the Blessed One’s sacrosanct altars, As it is lawful for humans to do and according to custom. Thereupon, Zeus, son of Cronus, suppressed them all in his anger, Seeing they did not worship the gods who inhabit Olympus. (Hesiod, Works and Days, 129–34, tr. in West 1978) Morality was, in Parker’s words, “a prerequisite for winning divine favor by ritual, not a substitute for it” (Parker 1986, 256). The link between morality and inner purity and pollution throughout Greek thought has been emphasized by Petrovic and Petrovic (2016, 265): “Inner impurity … is regularly associated not just with wrong intentions and transgressive thoughts in the ritual context, but also and relatedly with disregard of and disrespect for moral values.” Morality was maintained through human relationships to the divine realm, which means through ritual purity. In the Greek purity system, the requisite morality of the human realm was often contrasted with impurity resulting from an offense directed against the divine realm. While pollution was a spontaneous and automatic product of transgressing divine rules, it could also be produced by cursing moral offenders. A common form of curse was, “let pollution come upon those who have sworn the oath should they transgress it” (Parker 1983, 191). Curses often specified by name the offended god. Holding public office or high rank increased the power to curse effectively. For example, the king or magistrate had the power to curse the offenders against a state or community. In many archaic Greek  communities, magistrates pronounced curses in advance against ­certain categories of treacherous behavior. Then the offender was thought to be polluted from the moment of his crime. Additionally, priests could curse sacrilegious persons. Fathers also had the power to curse members of their families (Parker 1983, 192, 196). Other ancient cultures promoted similar ideas about the relationship between morality, ritual purification, and the gods. Just as in Egypt, Mesopotamian cultures inculcated behavior that respected and preserved social and religious hierarchies. Karen van der Toorn therefore concluded that “the gods shared human values” and were expected to enforce them (van der Toorn 2004, 499). Akkadian incantation texts describe curses produced by contact with impurity, or by oaths sworn by others, or by ignorant oaths, from which the “burning” rituals offered relief (Geller 1980; Watts 2013a, 356). Israel’s rituals required a “guilt offering” of a ram from those

52  Changing realms who make false oaths in YHWH’s name, among other things (Leviticus 5:1–4, 6:1–7). These sins required ritual purification because they infringed on the divine realm by breaking an oath in God’s name. In the same way that in Greek religion both perjury and taking temple materials caused pollution that required ritual purification, Israelites thought that these sins provoke God and thus require ritual purification through the guilt offering (Watts 2013a, 366–75). Ancient oaths often involved self-curses if the person failed to perform what they promised, such as the biblical oath, “May God do so to me and more also, if …” (2 Kings 6:31). A curse or oath may be a mechanism for transferring offenses in the human realm to the divine realm, and so for invoking the gods’ help in punishing them. Mary Douglas collected evidence from a variety of traditional societies in which suspected offenders are required to take an oath in the name of a king, ancestor, or deity. Doing so makes the crime a problem for that higher being’s reputation, so that the penalties become more severe (Douglas 1999, 127–33). In other words, self-curse or oath functions as a way of appealing to the court of a different realm. Israel’s covenant, which concluded with proleptic curses (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 27–30) functioned like individual oaths to shift Israel’s actions from the human to the divine realm. Therefore, the god of Israel dictated moral standards for the people and supervised their morality. YHWH was supposed to intervene in maintaining the requisite condition of the human realm of Israel, because the covenant made Israelites part of the divine realm. The first duty of Israelites as residents of the divine realm was to serve their god (the first three commandments of the Decalogue, Exodus 20:3–11). Therefore, worshiping other gods became a violation of the requisite conditions of the human realm of Israel. Idolatry also simultaneously defiled the sanctuary, since it violated the requisite conditions of the divine realm. Other serious moral sins that caused impurity in Israel included murder and sexual sins such as incest and bestiality (Leviticus 18:24). Murder was one of the most serious moral impurities that violated the requisite conditions of the human realm, and it was also a source of ritual impurity through contact with death. Blood pollution from intentional murder could not be ritually purified in Israel, but rather demanded capital retribution: Do not defile the land where you are. Because blood defiles the land, and the land cannot be mitigated for the blood shed on it, except by the blood of the one who shed it. (Numbers 35:33) On the other hand, the theft or destruction of sacred things could be ritually purified after paying compensation:

Changing realms 53 They must make good what they sinned against the holy (things) and add one-fifth to it and give it to the priest. Then the priest will mitigate for them with the guilt ram and they will be forgiven. (Leviticus 5:16) Though the Hebrew Bible articulates that idolatry and moral sins would result in polluting the people and the land of Israel, it does not explicitly prescribe ritual purification for such defilement. Nevertheless, several texts presuppose the existence of such rituals: King Hezekiah’s priests purified the Jerusalem temple after disposing of idols, and the annual rituals for the Day of Atonement mitigated for “all” of Israel’s sins (2 Chronicles 29:16; Leviticus 16:34). The Maccabees cleansed the temple after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes (1 Maccabees 4:36–58). These texts understood that idolatry and immorality led to temple defilement and divine punishments, including exile from the land, but they also imply that ritual mitigation can play a role in restoring both cult and people. Even before making the covenant with Israel, however, the Hebrew Bible portrays “YHWH of hosts” responding to disruptions of the requisite human condition of other nations besides Israel. Violence committed by gentiles, especially murder and severe sexual sins, were believed to defile the land and to cause YHWH’s anger (Genesis 6:11–12, 15:16, 18:20; Leviticus 18:24, Numbers 31:16; Jonah 1:2). YHWH even condemned all of humankind to death by flood for their violence and bloodshed (Genesis 6:5; also Leviticus 18–19; Psalm 5:4; Isaiah 26:21, 22:14; Habakkuk 1:3). The god of Israel seems to be unconcerned with the ritual purity of other nations because they had no ritual relationship with the divine realm, but YHWH did intervene to maintain morality—the requisite condition of the human realm. For example, Leviticus justified the dispossession of the Canaanites from their land as due to their sexual immorality and human sacrifices (Leviticus 18:24–27; 20:23; on the violent legacy of these biblical verses, see Watts 2020). The Hebrew prophets also announced divine judgement against foreign nations for their sins (Isaiah 31–34; Jeremiah 46–51; Ezekiel 25–32). Greeks who committed immoral behaviors that threatened the social order were treated as if they had trespassed in the divine realm. Male prostitutes, runaway soldiers, and perjurers could incur polluting curses in the same way that robbers of a temple could (Parker 1983, 195–96).4 However, though offenders against the social order were polluted, Parker maintained that their pollution was not “a source of religious danger” because they polluted not the gods but the state. The offender was shunned because of “unease about supernatural consequences even by those sympathetically disposed to him morally” (Parker 1983, 195). While murderers, who cause blood pollution, were barred from the agora and temples to protect these places from pollution, the offenders of social rules that

54  Changing realms were not related to the divine realm or the realm of death were avoided simply because they were socially disgraceful. So, the Greeks seemed to distinguish between immorality within the human realm and impurity that comes from one realm infringing on another. However, curses could equate one with the other. Some moral sins that involved pollution could be purified in Greece. Like minor violations of sanctity, perjury could be purified. Even a murderer who fled from the community where the murder occurred could be purified through ritual (Parker 1983, 144). Purifying pollution and its effects often required an offering, because it involved the divine realm (Parker 1983, 10). Pollution that polluted an offender’s neighbors or the land needed to be purified, because it could lead to civil strife, military failure, sterility of women and land, and plague. In cases where it was certain who was the source of the pollution, that person could be killed or banished in order to purify the land and community (see Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 95–102; Euripides, Heracles, 921–23, 1233–34; 1399–1400; 1410–25). When the source of the pollution was unknown, the imperiled Greek community could perform a pharmakos “scapegoat” purification. In this ritual, one or two “repulsive” or “ugly” persons were chosen to represent evil. After being fattened by good food, the victims were driven out of the city or sometimes stoned. Greek texts unequivocally called this procedure katharsis “purification” (Burkert 1979, 64–67). There are also some other records of human sacrifices for the purification of the community (Parker 1983, 259). Morality was the requisite condition of the human realm in all these ancient cosmologies. While not usually subject to moral restrictions themselves, the gods were believed to require humans to abide by them. Divine enforcement of moral rules could be expected when humans approached the divine realm in temples or in the afterlife, or when some people were defined as belonging to the divine realm, such as priests or the Israelites. The gods could also be provoked to maintain the moral condition of the human realm by oaths and curses. Different human realms Like the divine realm, ancient cosmologies could divide the human realm into different spheres. Mesopotamian cosmology divided the profane world into civilized space and the wild spaces of the animals (Guichard and Marti 2013, 74). Lands and people beyond the Mesopotamian periphery were regarded as unclean, because they did not perform the proper cleansing rituals (Guichard and Marti 2013, 78–79). The Hebrew Bible depicts a more complicated conception of the liminal space of the wilderness: it is the site of religious revelation, but also where the scapegoat can carry Israel’s impurities to be eliminated (Exodus 19; 1 Kings 19; Leviticus 16). Rivers and oceans also lie beyond human space, but are

Changing realms 55 intrinsically purifying in Hittite rituals. That was also the case in Greece, where “the sea washes away all human evils” (Euripides, Iphigenia in Taurus, line 1193; for that idea in many religions and cultures, see Patton 2007). It is not difficult to see the origins of these conceptions in the experience of uncivilized places as “dirty” like the grave, and so as polluting like the underworld. By contrast, humans experience water, and so most rivers and oceans, as clean and cleansing. These places beyond the human realm do not seem to have their own requisite requirements. They are defined simply by their status as inherently polluted or as inherently cleansing. There is no evidence that these ancient cultures divided the human realm into subordinate realms whose requisite standards of purity conflicted with each other. Social classes did not pollute each other in these cultures, unlike the Indian caste system, because social classes were not regarded as independent realms that had their own purity standards. 5 Though purity and pollution are often understood as based on social hierarchy (see Chapter 1 on Douglas 2002 [1966], 3–4, 111–14, 126), purity was not a formal means of maintaining internal social hierarchies in Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. These societies extended the purity ideals of kings, priests, and scribes as ideals for all of society. Nevertheless, in practice such purity rhetoric benefited elites and disadvantaged everyone else. Quack argued that in Egypt, “Purity … is clearly a concern for the elites, not the population at large” (Quack 2013, 140). He observed that food and sex restrictions were demarcated for a certain time only, and that lay people could undergo purification to work in temples, indicating that they did not need to observe these rules at other times. The ruling classes did not categorize themselves as a separate realm with distinct purity rules. However, the status of Egyptian royalty reached very close to the divine realm. Kings were understood to share the purity of the divine realm. Because the Pharaoh was believed to belong to the divine realm, he could be polluted by other Egyptians. The purity of the divine realm also helped the high priests of Second Temple Judaism distinguish themselves as a ruling class within Israel. In general, however, the priests of Greece, Egypt, and Israel were required to preserve the purity of the divine realm in order to serve in temples, rather than for the purpose of separating themselves from other social classes, at least overtly. Water was regarded as purifying in many Mesopotamian and Anatolian cultures even within the human realm (Guichard and Marti 2013; Collins  2004). Human impurities stemmed from sexual intercourse and various kinds of foods, among other things. Personal impurities, even unconscious ones, could drive away one’s personal god. People were expected to wash themselves regularly, including before meals. However, water also became polluted by the impurities it absorbed. Dirty water then became a major source of pollution. Because rituals of exorcism, healing,

56  Changing realms and protection always required purification at the end, purification came to be associated with all kinds of apotropaic rituals. Guichard and Marti (2013, 49) pointed out that one set of rules obtained in daily life, while a more elaborate set of rituals were required to deal with breaches of purity taboos that required propitiating divine anger and absolving sin. The cosmologies of these ancient cultures did not distinguish women categorically from men. There was no separate women’s realm that had its own purity rules. Egyptian women were accorded a relatively high social status and exerted quite a bit of influence both inside and outside the domestic sphere, so there was no separate realm of women in the Egyptian cosmos. Though some male Greek writers expressed their unease and suspicion about women (e.g. Hesiod, Works and Days, 57–105; Theogony, 570–600; see Doniger 1999, 3), women’s access and roles varied from one temple to another. Women priests were known in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, though the priests of specific gods and temples were often restricted to one gender or the other (Hawass 2000, 163; Dillon 2002, 73). In practice, however, women could be severely disadvantaged by purification rules regarding menstrual blood. The Hebrew Bible states that women become temporarily polluting after they menstruate or give birth, though it does not attribute impurity to women in general (Leviticus 12, 15; see Chapter 4). In Hittite culture, purification was required after sex and during pregnancy, and continued for some time after giving birth (Collins 2004, 505). Historians of other ancient cultures have generally assumed the prevalence of restrictions on women during their menstrual periods and after childbirth. However, the textual evidence for these claims is very thin in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hittite, and Greek sources (Couto-Ferreira and Garcia-Ventura 2013, 519–22; Quack 2013, 142–43; Collins 2004, 505; Parker 1983, 100–102). For example, Egyptian myths in which goddesses like Isis, Nephthys, Meskhenet, and Hathor give birth make no mention of blood pollution. Paul Frandsen (2007, 81–106) argued that menstruating women were threatened by the realm of death, which is why men working on Egyptian tombs were excused if their wives or daughters were menstruating. So menstrual blood may have been regarded as dirty but not polluting in Egypt, except when people came into contact with the realms of the gods or the dead. In Greece, impurity of female bodily discharges was not as widely recognized as in Israel. While Greeks also believed in pollution from childbirth as shown above, pollution from menstruation goes generally unmentioned in Archaic and Classical Greek sources (Parker 1983, 101). The cosmology of each culture centered on its own people. Egyptians believed that they shared the positive purpose of maintaining the order of cosmos and that “all others were to be pitied for being foreigners” (Sellers 1992, 255). The strongest evidence that Egyptians regarded foreigners as polluted comes from foreign writers, specifically the Hebrew

Changing realms 57 Bible (Gen. 43:32) and Herodotus. Egyptian sources themselves are less clear about this (Quack 2013, 140–42). The Greeks also were proud of their civilization and culture, and called non-Greek-speaking people “barbarians.” However, contact with people from other nations did not require purification. Though the ancient Israelites thought that they were the chosen people of YHWH, contact with non-Israelites did not cause impurity. Of course, there were exceptions. For example, foreign invasions could be regarded as polluting. Herodotus reports that the Egyptians purified their temples after the Assyrian and Persian invasions (Herodotus, Histories, 20.4). According to the postexilic book of Ezra which describes conflicts over Israelite identity, marrying foreigners polluted the holy seed of Israel (Ezra 9:1–10:15; Hayes 2002, 26; and Chapter 4 below). Similar developments in the same century in Athens and, perhaps, in other parts of the Persian Empire may reflect Athenian and Persian imperial attempts to restrict intermarriage in order to prevent alliances among subject groups and conflicts of interest among imperial officials (Fried 2014, 24–27). It is notable that these developments occurred in various cultures in the middle and later first millennium B.C.E. when growing empires threatened the political independence and, increasingly, the cultural distinctiveness of many peoples. Jan Assmann (1997, 180) observed that xenophobia and fear of pollution typically increase during invasions and foreign rule. This confirms the observation of Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan (2013, 19) that It is not clear-cut social/religious entities that develop coherent purity systems. On the contrary, purity issues apparently arise when those borders are ‘in the making’ or when they are challenged. … Understood in this way, one can speak of the ‘demarcational’ function of purity. Frevel and Nihan observed historically that the trend to demarcate one’s culture over against others by means of purity restrictions was already growing in Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian cultures of the Persian period, though it intensified in reaction to spreading Hellenistic culture after Alexander’s conquests (Frevel and Nihan 2013, 39–43). But external threats are not the only thing that prompts people to tighten purification practices: cross-­ cultural studies suggest that inner-cultural ambiguity generates gendered purity rules (Douglas 2002 [1966], 173–95). While foreigners and women could sometimes be treated as polluted, social classes within a culture were not often demarcated by purity in the ancient cultures discussed here.6 Generally speaking, therefore, it seems that subordinate realms within the human realm in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cosmologies did not usually have their own requisite conditions of purity that conflicted with each other.

58  Changing realms

The realms of death and life These ancient cultures distinguished the realm of death from the realm of life. The realm of living human beings and, in the cases of Greece and Israel, the realm of the living gods constituted the most important parts of the realm of life. The realm of life was threatened by pollutions from the realm of death, which included those things associated with death, such as graves, chthonic deities and demons, and perhaps emissions from the human body. James J. Preston observed that bodily emissions are frequently associated with death or putrefaction. Emissions from the human body that represent death and putrefaction can be dangerous to living human beings, who belong to the realm of life (Preston 1986, 12:92). In many cultures, however, death should not be understood as a transitional stage in the life cycle, as Preston argued, but rather as the realm that is the counterpart to the realm of life. How dangerous each culture considered the realm of death to be and how the culture prescribed ways of overcoming death were closely related to its understanding of the pollution of death. This claim accords with broader anthropological observations that, in many human cultures, death and life are distinct realms. The dead, in crossing this boundary, convey pollution to those who come into contact with them (Turner 1977, 38; Block 1982 215–17). Comparison of these ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures shows, however, that the danger posed by the realm of death was understood differently according to the soteriology of each culture. Each of these cultures had its own peculiar soteriology, and thus ideas about the realm of death varied among the cultures. While the ancient Egyptians distinguished the realm of death from the world where they lived, they regarded it as the paradise where the gods resided and which they longed to enter after they died. Egyptians thought they could become like the gods in the realm of death. As a result, death pollution was not emphasized by the Egyptians. The Greeks considered the impurity of death to be very dangerous, but they at least hoped to be blessed in the underworld. Evidence suggests that they had rituals for their well-being in the afterlife and also had ritual means to prevent the dead from endangering the realm of the living. The cultures of Mesopotamia and its environs had mixed attitudes towards death. While some literature, such as the Gilgamesh Epic, declared a human afterlife almost impossible, other texts as well as archeology and art show that the living cared for the dead with offerings and meals (Scurlock 1995; Cohen 2005, 102–106; Barrett 2007). The Hebrew Bible focuses its attention on the divine realm and the realm of living human beings and says little about any afterlife. But the Israelites recognized the impurity associated with the realm of death: corpses and carcasses, some kinds of blood, and other things associated with death could cause severe pollution (Numbers 19).

Changing realms 59 The ancient Egyptians developed a “funerary religion,” in contrast to the formalized state temples (Gahlin 2002, 9), that made mortuary rituals and texts very important to their culture. To Egyptians, death meant the movement from the earthly human realm to the celestial divine realm. The realm of death was not strictly separated from the realm of the gods. Therefore, the gods do not seem to have been polluted by death. In the royal mortuary temples which were one of the major types of Egyptian temples,7 the statue of the deceased king was flanked by statues of gods or goddesses. During the Old and Middle Kingdoms, the royal mortuary temples were attached to the north or east face of the tombs of the kings. By the time of the New Kingdom, mortuary temples were separated from the royal tombs. However, most private tombs and mortuary temples were still part of the same building (Bomann 1991, 106–10). The popularization of the mortuary ritual—its spread from royal figures to the general public—produced a change in the purity ideas of Egyptian culture by extending some of these royal purification rituals to a wider swath of society (Silverman 1991, 78; Roth 2002, 148). Funerary religion therefore not only reflected purity and pollution ideas but also changed them over the long course of Egyptian history. The lack of pollution from death can be explained by the ancient Egyptian soteriology, which regarded death as the gateway to the celestial paradise. Ancient Egyptians referred to this idea of a paradise after death by several names. Besides Duat, Inhet can also be translated as “afterworld,” referring to the western horizon of the sky. In the afterworld, there was a paradise that was called “the Field of Hetep” or the land of Osiris. According to spells 464–468 of the Coffin Texts and spell 110 of The Book of the Dead, this land was no different than a rich and abundant earthly land. Its fields were irrigated by channels full of water; its crops of emmer wheat, barley, and flax grew tall and strong; its fruit trees were heavy with ripe dates and figs. The blessed dead of this paradise did not have to work hard because shabtis were supposed to work for them, according to spell 6 of The Book of the Dead (see Gahlin 2002, 23–24, 30). All ancient Egyptian mortuary texts proclaimed that life in the paradise of the divine realm is the true and lasting life.8 Thus death was merely the passage to a new life (Hodel-Hoenes 2000, 1). From the Old Kingdom onward, the belief in an afterlife judgment presided over by the god Osiris dominated Egyptian descriptions of the underworld, and artwork regularly depicted the deceased person’s heart being weighed in a scale. If the heart of the dead and the feather of Maat were in perfect balance, the dead could attain the state of blessedness as an effective spirit, akh. The deceased person then would become a distinct aspect of the god of the underworld and be called “Osiris NN (name of the dead).” Through this merging with the god, the deceased person attained divine status and powers. The blessed dead (akh) would join the sun god on his journey through the sky and the underworld. If the feather and the heart were out of balance, however, the

60  Changing realms heart would be devoured by a beast who sat ready and waiting beside the scales. These condemned dead persons were believed to cease to exist. But ancient Egyptian texts do not portray this as inevitable. Those who could afford to include spell 125 of The Book of the Dead in their tombs with the proper ritual processes almost guaranteed their successful passage into the divine realm in the afterlife (Gahlin 2002, 14–15). The ancient Egyptians’ confidence in the efficacy of the spell was based on their belief in the power of the funerary texts and funerary rituals. The Book of the Dead for example, articulates the magical power of its text and rituals very clearly (e.g. spells 29, 30, 72, 140, 155, 156, 157, 159, and 160; see also Gahlin 2002, 15, 28, 39, 60; Goelet 2000, 146–47). Nevertheless, purification also played a vital role in transitioning the soul to the next life. For example, consider these spells from the Book of the Dead (tr. Faulkner 2000): I have brought incense to you, to purify with it, to purify your sweat with it. Whatever evil speech I made, whatever evil deed I did, be it removed from me (spell 105) A man says this speech when he is pure, clean, dressed in fresh clothes, shod in white sandals, painted with eye-paint, anointed with the finest oil of myrrh (spell 125) You are pure, your front is pure, your back parts are clean by means of natron, fresh water and incense … (spell 169). Egyptian purification rituals were mainly intended to purify traces of the human realm that could pollute the divine realm. Just as the purification of the priests entering temples and the purification of statues and temples were performed for this purpose, purification rituals were also performed for the dead to be able to enter the underworld, the Duat, where the blessed dead joined the gods. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, the purification of the dead body was one of the key rituals performed at funerals (Quack 2013, 144–50). The dead body was taken first to a “place of purification” where it was washed using a solution of natron, the same substance used to wash the cult statue in a temple every morning (Gahlin 2002, 16). After the dead body was embalmed and bandaged, the mummified body had to be  ­purified again with incense and a solution of natron in water. Then the mummy was anointed with sacred oils, and the ceremony known as the “Opening the Mouth” was performed on it. This rite was also performed on any statues of the deceased as well as on the statues of gods in temples (Gahlin 2002, 39; Roth 2002, 250–52). These two uses of this ritual provide more evidence that the divine realm and the realm of death overlapped in ancient Egypt. Therefore, the realm of living human beings was not necessarily endangered by contact with the dead. The Egyptians believed that the dead,

Changing realms 61 especially deceased spouses and relatives, possessed supernatural powers that might be helpful in solving problems in the lives of those still living. The best evidence for this belief is found in letters to the dead, dating from ca. 2100 to 1200 B.C.E. Only twenty or so are extant, but the wide range of their dates suggests that a corresponding oral practice was common throughout Egyptian history. The Egyptians placed the letters in the tombs of the people to whom the letters were addressed at the time of their funeral or when the tomb was reopened for later burials. According to these letters, a dead person was believed to be closer to the gods and, as a result, was thought to have power to influence the realm of living human beings (Gahlin 2002, 90). These distinctive Egyptian beliefs therefore provide strong confirmation of the thesis that purity rituals involve cosmological realms. In light of the Egyptians’ ideas about the realm of death, it makes sense that there is less evidence for purification from death in their culture. Unlike other ancient cultures, ritual purification of corpse pollution is not readily apparent in ancient Egyptian sources (though there is some evidence that menstruation was incompatible with the realm of death; see above). In Greek religion, the realm of death and the realm of life were clearly demarcated. In Euripides’ play, Alcestis, Heracles says, “Being alive and being dead are regarded as two separate things” (line 528, tr. Dave 1996). In the same play, Apollo describes death as “one that men and the gods regard with loathing” (line 62). These examples and others suggest that, for the Greeks, life in this world was more precious than blessings in the underworld (lines 704–705). Greeks classified their gods as underworld gods or as Olympian gods. The Olympian gods abhorred death pollution, and when their temples or statues were polluted by death, the pollution had to be purified. However, though they surely preferred the living world to the underworld, Greeks believed in an afterlife where the dead could hope to receive the rewards due them according to the moral code of the living: “May Hermes of the nether world and Hades give you kindly welcome, and, if even there virtue has its reward, may you benefit from this and attend upon Hades’ bride!” (Euripides, Alcestis, 745–46, tr. Dave 1996; see Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 78). The Eleusinian Mysteries especially offered Greeks hope of blessings in the afterlife. According to writers of the Classical period, the Mysteries ­represented Demeter’s gift to Athenians which, in Price’s words, gave “its participants hopes about the consummation of life and eternity” (Price 1999, 106–107). The “Homeric Hymn to Demeter” promised a happier afterlife for initiates: Blest are earth-bound mortals who have seen these rites, but the uninitiate, who has no share in them, never share the same lot when dead in misty darkness. (Rayor 2004, 14).

62  Changing realms In spite of the blessings that were available through the Mysteries, fear of death was still strong in ancient Greece. The best the initiate could hope for was a future in which the conditions in Hades were merely ameliorated (Price 1999, 107). The hope that a person could become an immortal being, which was evident in Egyptian religion, is not found in the Archaic and Classical Greek tradition. It was only in myths that a hero could overcome the power of death (see Euripides, Alcestis, lines 1139–50). The negative influence of the realm of death on the realm of life was regarded by Greeks as the most dangerous pollution. A dead body had to be treated very carefully because a corpse could pollute not only the people who came into contact with it, but also the place and the community in which the death had occurred. A house became polluted the moment someone died in it. A special water vessel was set outside it to purify those coming out of the house and to warn others who did not want to incur pollution not to approach the house. The water was supposed to be brought from a neighboring house, because the polluted house’s own supply was also polluted. To be a mourner meant to be polluted. Herodotus records, “at the death of a king two free individuals from each household, a man and a woman must be polluted.” In this passage, “being polluted” means “going into mourning” (Herodotus, Histories, 6.58; see Parker 1983, 39). Before the funeral, the body had to be purified. The women of the household had the corpse washed, anointed, crowned, dressed in clean robes, and laid upon a bier. Graveyards lay outside the city, away from the temples. Priests could not accompany the mourners to this place out of fear of the pollution of death. After the funeral, the mourners were purified by means of bathing. But in spite of bathing, the m ­ ourners were still excluded from temples for several days. Death pollution also had to be removed from the house by sweeping the whole house. If the death had occurred in a public place, the whole community required cleansing (Zaidman and Pantel 1992, 74; Price 1999, 38). Murder trials took extraordinary precautions to avoid contamination by the accused murderer’s pollution (Harris 2015). In Greek culture, however, the impurity of things that evoke fear of death was not as strongly emphasized as it may have been in ancient Israelite religion (see Chapter 4). The pollution of skin diseases or bodily discharges is not found in ancient Greek texts. Nor do they attest to the pollution of menstruation very often, leading to conflicting evaluations by modern historians (compare Parker 1983, 101 with Preston 1986, 93). Ancient Mesopotamian texts typically portrayed a cosmology in which the realms of the living and the dead are mirror images of each other. Andrew Cohen (2005, 100) summarized it as a spherical universe that was divided into two hemispheres …. One hemisphere was occupied by the living and ruled by their deities, while the other was occupied by the dead and ruled by another set of deities.

Changing realms 63 The hemispheres were formally linked by gates through which the sun and moon passed. Holes, pits, and drains were also said to bridge the two hemispheres. Literary texts consistently described the underworld as dark and dusty. This bleak view often imagined the afterlife as little more than being alive in the grave (Barrett 2007, 8–9). As in many other cultures, Mesopotamian literature also provided a more elaborate picture where underworld courts are ruled by various deities and potentates (Scurlock 1995, 1886–88). However, the underworld was notable for lacking food or, at least, good food. Therefore, a regular feature of funerary and memorial rituals in Mesopotamia and its environs involved feeding the dead (Scurlock 1995, 1884, 1888–89; for the third millennium B.C.E., see also Cohen 2005, 102–108; for the second and first millennium, see also Hays 2011, 34–56, 98–127). The cultures in and around Mesopotamia were diverse and so were their funerary practices, which makes it very difficult to generalize from beliefs to practices. For example, sometimes an “Opening the Mouth” ritual used otherwise to vivify cult statues was conducted on corpses before burial, just as in Egypt (Cohen 2005, 150). To take another example, the Hittites like many other ancient peoples conceived of their gods as living either above or below. The temples of the heavenly deities had to be kept clean. However, purification rituals that invoke the underworld deities implored them to take away impurities and confine them in iron pots in the underworld or the ocean (Wilhelm 1999, 199). In these rituals, the underworld became the location for disposing of pollution. The Hebrew Bible does not mention the realm of the dead much. The term Sheol occasionally refers to it in biblical poetry and wisdom literature (e.g. Job 7:16; Psalms 49:14, 55:15; Proverbs 1:12, 7:27). This word’s exact meaning is not clear (Barstad 1999, 768–70; Hays 2011, 176–79). It is clearly negative: it is often used either to indicate the place where the wicked are destined to go or to figuratively describe the author’s suffering on earth. Let death come upon them; let them go down alive to Sheol; for evil is in their homes and in their hearts. (Psalm 55:15 NRSV) The cords of Sheol entangled me; the snares of death confronted me. (Psalm 18:5 NRSV) For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. (Psalm 88:3 NRSV) Among English versions, some simply transliterate “Sheol” while others translate it as “hell,” “the pit,” “the grave,” or “the gates of death.” Prayers in the Hebrew Bible appeal for God’s help to escape from this place:

64  Changing realms You do not give me up to Sheol, or let your faithful one see the Pit. (Psalm 16:10 NRSV) Great is your steadfast love towards me; you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol. (Psalm 86:13 NRSV) God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol. (Psalm 49:15 NRSV) God seems to have control over this place of the dead: “Sheol and Abaddon [destruction] lie open before YHWH” (Proverbs 15:11; see Hays 2011, 184–90). Yet the people here cannot come into contact with the divine: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?” (Psalm 6:5 NRSV; also Isaiah 38:18–19). Biblical heroes are not described as going down to Sheol when they die, but rather as “going to their ancestors” or “being gathering to their people” (Genesis 15:15, 47:30; Numbers 20:26, 27:13, 31:2). This imagery evokes the experience of family graves; the Hebrew Bible does not explain if it differs from going to Sheol or not. So YHWH seems to be capable of delivering people from Sheol while they are living by saving their lives, but seems not to care about the place people go when their lives are over. Though this depiction of Sheol is reminiscent of Mesopotamian views, the Hebrew Bible distinguishes itself among ancient Near Eastern cultures by condemning many kinds of interactions between the living and the dead (Leviticus 19:31; 20:6, 27; Deuteronomy 18:11; 2 Kings 21:6; 1 Chronicles 10:13–14; see Hays 2011, 168–74). In this regard, the biblical books stands in contrast not only to surrounding cultures but also to the archeological remains from Israel and Judah, where tombs were regularly provisioned with pots of food and other grave goods typical throughout the ancient world. Thus the biblical pollution beliefs and purification practices became a social means for enforcing a strict separation between the cosmological realms of the living and the dead. As Elizabeth Bloch-Smith observed: “Purity laws distanced the living from the world of the dead by decreeing ritual impurity from physical contact with the dead” (Bloch-Smith 1992, 128; also 147–92). The book of Numbers describes the dangers of pollution from contact with death (Numbers 5:1–4; 6:6–12; 19:10–22; 31:19). It includes extraordinary instructions for rituals to create “purifying water” that can cleanse death pollution. The Hebrew Bible’s monotheistic ideology, however, has no room for chthonic deities or demons to explain why contact with dead bodies is dangerous (see especially Milgrom 1991, 258–61, who developed the observations of Kaufmann 1952, 1:350–416, 458–573, 2:111–37, 404–503). Rituals for cleansing death pollution, like Israel’s funerary rituals generally, lack any theological rationale in ­biblical literature.

Changing realms 65 In this section, we have discussed the mainstream soteriologies in each of these ancient cultures and their relation to the impurity of death. These soteriologies and ideas about death pollution do not cover all periods of each culture or all groups within them. As will be shown below and in Chapter 4, soteriology and purity ideas could vary among groups within a culture and could also change over time. This survey, however, shows the importance of understanding the degree to which the cosmology of each culture separated the realm of life from the realm of death. The separation between the realm of death and the realm of life was not rigid in ancient Egypt, where people hoped to be accepted into the divine realm and become like the gods after death. Greek cosmology strictly separated the realm of death from the realm of life, but Greek soteriology at least allowed the Greeks to hope for blessings in the underworld. Mesopotamian soteriology is less clearly expressed in surviving texts, but some people expected at least to remain in contact with their dead ancestors. The separation of the realm of death from the realm of life seems most strict for the biblical writers, and an afterlife is not even mentioned in most of the Hebrew Bible. Ideas of impurity from the realm of death varied in proportion to these differences among the cultures. While death was feared as a serious pollutant in Israel, the ancient Egyptians did not recognize that kind of pollution.

Ancient criticisms and changes to cosmologies and purification practices Some changes in ancient purity beliefs and purification practices can be observed in the textual sources and artifactual remains. For example, prohibitions on pork appear in Mesopotamia in the first millennium B.C.E., but not earlier (Guichard and Marti 2013, 48–49). Egyptian priests adopted shaved heads as markers of purity in the later New Kingdom and Late Period, that is, from the later second millennium B.C.E. on (Quack 2013, 127–28). The architectural remains of late Second Temple Judaism (ca. 200 B.C.E. to 100 C.E.) show expensive investments in pools and stone  jars for bathing rituals (Miller 2015). In some parts of Classical Greece, the requirements for temple purification increased over time. For example, Burkert (1985 [1977], 87) observed that purification of pollutions were once allowed on Delos Island where the Apollo sanctuary was located, but were later prohibited. First, Pisistratus removed graves from the area of the Apollo temple in the sixth century. Then, from 426 B.C.E. on, pregnant women and the dying were transferred to the neighboring island of Rheneia. It is more difficult to find explicit evidence of changing beliefs about cosmology and purity. Two conceptual issues do, however, appear in the sources with significant differences over time and between cultures. One is the relationship between purity and the idea of holiness or sanctity. The other involves ideological critiques of purity practices.

66  Changing realms Changing conceptions of holiness Theorists have been obsessed with the relationship between the ideas of holiness and purity, largely because the Hebrew Bible draws such a stark contrast between them: “(This is) a permanent mandate throughout your generations: to separate the holy from the secular and the polluted from the pure” (Leviticus 10:8–10; cf. Ezekiel 22:26; 44:23; Milgrom 1991, 256–59, 616–17, 731–33; Klawans 2000; Nihan 2013, 311–67; Hieke 2013, 119–31). However, the idea of the holy differs from one culture to another and even within cultures, and a strict separation between the sacred and the profane or secular realms does not appear in some cultures. This comparative evidence therefore makes it difficult to articulate the relationship between holiness and purity at a theoretical level. Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary does not strictly distinguish between mundane cleanliness and ritual purity, though one can observe the distinction operating in practice (Sallaberger 2007; Sallaberger 2011; Guichard and Marti 2013, 49–52; Couto-Ferreira and Garcia-Ventura 2013, 516–17). Nor did Akkadian emphasize the difference between holiness and purity as strongly as did Sumerian and Biblical Hebrew (Wilson 1994, 93–95). Gods were described as “pure” (ellu) far more often than “holy” (qadašu), and the latter term seems to have indicated ritual purity as well (van der Toorn 1985, 28). The situation is even more complicated in Hittite sources. The Hittites of Anatolia showed great concern for purifying pollution and, like the later Greeks, distinguished general purity (parkul) from cultic purity (šuppi). The Hittites were deeply influenced by Hurrian and Luwian ritual practices and texts, but the purity vocabulary of the three languages is not completely congruent (Hutter 2013, 161–64). Furthermore, the Hittites do not seem to have developed a dichotomy between sacred and profane realms like Israel did, but focused on distinguishing pollution from all kinds of purity (so Wilhelm 1999, 204–205, followed by Hutter 2013, 165–66, but contra older scholarship that equated Hittite conceptions more closely with those of the Israelites). While Hittites distinguished the divine realm by its special purity rules, they did not conceptualize the human realm in opposition to it as “profane” or “secular.” The Egyptian vocabulary for holiness and purity was described by David Warburton. The classical language distinguished between holiness (dsr) meaning something separate and unfathomable, and purity (wʿb) indicating the state of being clean. While holiness described the innermost chambers of temples and tombs, the entire temple complex should be pure and the act of burying a corpse was described as purification. However, Coptic (late Egyptian) translated Greek hagios “holy” with wʿb, with the result that holiness and purity were identified as a spiritual ideal in Coptic Christianity. Holiness then became disassociated from its original spatial and architectural referents (Warburton 2012, 308–309).

Changing realms 67 Greek terminology distinguished the purity required for entering the divine realm, hagnos, from the purity required of people at all times in the human realm, katharos. The latter must be cleansed to remove a community’s blood guilt, for example, but people needed to be hagnos to participate in temple rituals (Parker 1983, 147). The word, hagnos “ritually pure,” is related to hagios “holy, sacred,” but the opposite of both hagnos and katharos is miaros “polluted” (Robertson 2013, 197–200). Overall, then, Greek sources also do not support a strict distinction between holiness and purity, or between ritual and moral purity (Günther 2013, 247–48). The separation of the sacred from the profane is rooted in the distinction between the divine realm and the human realm. But as this discussion of terminology has shown, this distinction between the divine and human realm is not everywhere the same. It can also change over time. The divine realm might not even exist or be emphasized in some cosmological worldviews. For instance, in the cosmology of early Indian Buddhism, the separation between the divine realm and the human realm was not stressed.9 If a culture does not clearly distinguish the realm of supernatural beings (usually gods, ghosts, and/or ancestors), the requisite condition or the necessary quality of the divine realm is not emphasized.10 However, the cosmologies of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Israel clearly distinguished the divine realm from the human realm. When the divine realm came into contact with the human realm or, often, with the realm of death, ritual purity rules were prescribed. The degree to which they separated the sacred from the profane depended on how they understood the relationship between the divine realm and the human realm. Because the Hebrew Bible located the Israelites within the realm of YHWH and obliged them to observe its purity requirements, its sharp distinction between holy and secular served to distinguish the temple as especially divine within Israel’s territory. Originally, none of these ancient languages, including Hebrew, equated the purity of the divine realm with the sacred itself (on the Hebrew evidence, see Watts 2013a, 540–43). While the sacred is a characteristic of divine beings, purity is a requisite condition of the divine realm which “only serves as a means to the sacred; it never constitutes the sacred itself …. Purity and impurity thus characterize the conditions of contact between the sacred and profane but do not alone define the essential opposition between the two” (J. Z. Smith 1995, 868). However, religious and philosophical developments around the turn of the Common Era obscured or eliminated this distinction. Ancient criticisms of purity regimes There is evidence from many cultures that purity rules become stricter over time. In Egypt, for example, the artistic depiction of priests with clean-shaven heads became stereotypical only in the late second and first

68  Changing realms millennia B.C.E., from the middle of the New Kingdom on (Quack 2013, 127). In Israel, concern for maintaining purity increased markedly in the later first millennium B.C.E., as attested both by texts and by artifacts (Miller 2015). Zoroastrian teachings demanded very strict personal purity, but historians have difficulty establishing the antiquity of these practices (Jong 2013, 183–94). Though they reflect these developments, Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts have not preserved much criticism of dominant purity practices or cosmologies. Critiques of purity practices emerged clearly in the later first millennium B.C.E. only in Classical Greek texts and in texts from Second Temple Judaism. During Greece’s Archaic period, purity ideas and purification rituals seem to have been accepted without significant challenge. Nevertheless, various interpretations of the purity rules of the divine realm probably existed in ancient Greece. According to Herodotus, in the late sixth century Isagoras and others accused Kleisthenes of being polluted because his family, the Alcmaeonidae, had killed suppliants in the temple of Athena a generation earlier. It was common at that time to think that pollution for such grave impiety could not be purified. But Herodotus disputed the idea that severe pollution was passed from generation to generation (Histories, 5.70–71; see Mikalson 2003, 18). Political changes in late Archaic and early Classical Athens led to changes in religious institutions and organizations. For instance, the reforms of Solon in 594 B.C.E., the democratic reforms of Kleisthenes in 507, and political strife between oligarchs and democrats in the late fifth century all involved religious changes, such as revisions of sacrificial calendars and extensions of the scope of religious ceremonies. It is in this period that doubts were also cast on the ritual purity of the divine realm and the pollution of death. In sixth-century Ionia, traditional ideas of the divine were challenged by Hecataeus, who set out to rationalize Greek mythology, which he found “funny.” Historians have discerned in the course of the fifth century “a kind of religious crisis” in Athens (Parker 1986, 267). These developments included challenges to traditional pollution ideas and purification rituals. The common characteristic among the different philosophical schools was their rejection of traditional mythology and theology (Price 1999, 127). Athenian theater tended to become more humanistic, secular, and realistic, and less religious and mythical (Levi 1986, 151). Purity rules were widely regarded as amoral and irrational, though pollution beliefs might sometimes, as in Sophocles’ Antigone, reinforce a moral principle (Parker 1983, 34). Perhaps Athens’ sacralization of the human political realm and overt politicization of religious decisions had the effect of applying human morality to the divine realm, which in turn led to questioning myths of amoral gods. In particular, some philosophers and dramatists focused their attacks

Changing realms 69 on the moral standards that were applied differently in the divine realm and the human realm. This criticism began in the sixth century B.C.E. with Xenophanes (Parker 1986, 266–67; Price 1999, 82), who criticized traditional understandings of the gods, but maintained a pious attitude. He stated, “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all sorts of things which are matters of reproach and censure among men: theft, adultery, and mutual deceit” (Xenophanes, Fragments, no. 11, tr. in Lesher 1992). At the same time, cosmological ideas were called into question along with some purity practices. The traditional division of realms and their associated purity ideas became frequent targets of criticism. Dramas began to depict their heroes overcoming their fear of impurity. For example, Sophocles’ Theseus does not hesitate to show kindness to Oedipus without fearing that he might become polluted (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 550–78, 1119–41). Parker interpreted this scene as showing that “in the magnanimous man, human sympathy dissolves the fear of pollution” (Parker 1983, 311). It was Euripides who most strongly criticized amoral and irrational purity rules through drama. Euripides’ plays treated traditional purity ideas and purification rituals with suspicion and criticized them vehemently. For instance, in Iphigenia at Tauris, Iphigenia criticizes Artemis: What does Artemis ask of me here? She who forbids approach by any man whose hand is stained with bloodshed or with touch of childbirth or of burial, finds him unclean and bans him … yet she demands the blood of human beings on her altar-stone! I will not believe it of a god! (lines 381–90, tr. in Arrowsmith 1983) In Heracles, Euripides questioned the traditional belief in the effectiveness of purification rituals by placing the most tragic moment of the drama during their performance. It is while Heracles is performing a purification ritual to Zeus before the hearth that he is struck mad and kills his family. A ritual that is in theory supposed to remove pollution instead results in an extreme form of pollution by killing family members. Furthermore, the traditional religious notions of purification and pollution are challenged by, or perhaps even replaced with, human values in this play. Theseus talks with Heracles after his episode of madness: Heracles  Away, rash friend! Flee my foul pollution. Theseus  Where there is love, contagion cannot come. Heracles  Take care. I may pollute your clothes with blood. Theseus  Pollute them then. Spare not. I do not care. Heracles  My sons are dead; now you shall be my son. Theseus  Place your hand on my shoulder. I shall lead you. (Euripides, Heracles, 1133–34, 1399–1402, tr. in Arrowsmith 1983)

70  Changing realms In this scene, Theseus rejects the traditional religious notions of impurity. Instead love and friendship replace concerns about pollution.11 Euripides also criticized the immoral behavior of the gods: “I, mere man, am nobler than you, a great god” (lines 341–42). Heracles not only blames Hera for causing all his troubles, he also criticizes the immorality of the whole Olympian pantheon (lines 1340–46). By proclaiming that he does not believe the myths and by criticizing the morally imperfect gods, Euripides’ Heracles became a voice for applying traditional Greek understandings of moral purity to the divine realm as well as to humans. Some religious and philosophical movements, such as the Pythagoreans, Empedocles, and the Orphic hymns, emphasized purifying the soul instead of the body. Parker (2004, 508) summarized these developments: In these Pythagorean-Orphic contexts, “purification” began to refer not just to specific rituals but to a way of life (the chief element of which was vegetarianism), which would liberate the soul from inherited guilt and give it access to a better lot in the afterlife. Plato (in the Phaedo above all) was much influenced by such ideas. This conclusion was contradicted, however, by Petrovic and Petrovic (2016, 262) who argued that “concepts of morally understood inner purity and pollution can be found in Archaic and Classical sources as much as in later periods.” In the fourth century, Greek elites criticized traditional purity ideas even more boldly. For example, Plato viewed a description of avenging spirits roused by pollution from the blood of homicide victims as just “a tale of olden time” (Plato, Laws, 9.865, tr. in Jowett 1892; see Mikalson 1983, 41, 52). Theophrastus taunted a person who was rigidly concerned with matters of pollution for superstitious cowardice (Diggle 2004, xvi. 2–6). Greek elites appear to have often excluded the topic of purity from discussions on public issues. They believed that they could replace the traditional ways of maintaining their society with ways that appeared more reasonable to them. According to Mikalson (1983, 52, 88), sources from the fourth century stress the importance of law and tradition in these public matters and do not treat the evils of pollution itself. Though they said that murderers and adulteresses must be excluded from the sanctuaries, they emphasized the authority of the laws of Draco and Solon in observing the prohibition, rather than the danger of pollution. This challenge to traditional purity ideas can be summarized as a change in the Greek elites’ views of cosmological realms. Most importantly, they challenged the distinction between the divine realm and the human realm. Some Greek philosophers and dramatists criticized the gods for being immoral and emphasized human values such as friendship and charity

Changing realms 71 instead of purity rules. In contrast to Israel in the Second Temple period where the elites increasingly maintained purity as a sign of their separation from other nations, in Greece purity came to be recognized as a sign of superstition and as part of the irrationality characteristic of the lower classes. However, these various interpretations and criticisms of traditional Greek purity rules did not lead to changes in traditional temple rituals. Deviations in actual practices were limited to schismatic groups whose distinctive beliefs called for fundamental changes in diet and ritual practice. As Parker (2004, 508) noted, “They remained outside the mainstream, and for most Greeks ‘purity’ remained a matter of humdrum precautions and routines.” So challenges to traditional religious ideas did not change Greek purity practices. Mikalson (1983, 52) observed that though some important beliefs “upon which the belief in pollution was at least partly based had largely disappeared,” the prohibitions based on belief in pollution continued to be practiced in the following centuries (see Parker 1983, 34). In Israel, by contrast, critiques of purity practices and temple rituals preserved in the Hebrew Bible were voiced from within the Bible’s dominant belief system. Prophets accused the priests of malpractice and of polluting the sanctuary they were supposed to purify (Ezekiel 22:26; Haggai 2:14; Malachi 1:7). They also accused the people as a whole of polluting the temple and the land by immoral behavior, which most importantly involved worship of other gods rather than YHWH, but also violence, death pollution, sex during menstruation, and incest (Joshua 22:17–19; Jeremiah 19:13; Ezekiel 22:6–11; 36:17–18). Many texts claimed that the pollution of Jerusalem led to the city’s destruction and exile (Hosea 5:3; Lamentations 4:13–15; Ezekiel 22:15; 36:22–29). Some texts declared that immorality cannot be rectified by ritual offerings alone (Psalm 51:16–17). This theme laid the basis for the distinction between ritual and moral purity that became increasingly prominent in subsequent Jewish and Christian tradition. However, late Second Temple sectarian arguments over purity rules presupposed the Torah’s requirements while differing over how to apply them. It would take the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. to create the conditions for purification rituals to be individualized in Rabbinic Judaism. At that same time, early Christians raised a direct ideological challenge to most forms of ritual purification (see Chapter 4). Both Greek and Jewish conflicts over purity ideas and practices have echoed through subsequent Western cultures, because most texts that voice these critiques have continued to circulate in the West either as classics or as scriptures. Western cultures, then, inherited from ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures their ideological arguments about pollution more than their ritual practices of purification.

72  Changing realms

Conclusion This chapter’s survey is by no means comprehensive. Important ancient cultures have been omitted, such as Iranian purity beliefs and practices as preserved in Zoroastrianism (see Choksky 1989; Choksky 2004; Achenbach, 2009; de Jong 2013; Kazen 2015), ancient Roman beliefs and practices (Beck 2004; Lennon 2014), and the development of distinctive Christian ideas about purity (see Chapter 4 below). Nor have we discussed one of the world’s most distinctive cultural expressions of ancient purity beliefs, the Hindu caste system (Dumont 1970; Doniger 1999). Nevertheless, our review of the evidence for purification practices and purity ideas in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Israelite cultures has answered our initial questions in the affirmative. These cultures’ purity practices clearly demarcated different cosmological realms as described by each culture’s ancient texts. And the fact that their cosmologies make typical distinctions between human and divine realms and between the realms of life and death does seem to account for the appearance of similar purity practices in these different cultures. This review has also shown that differences between these cultures’ cosmologies correspond to differences in purification practices. We have therefore exposed a clear link between ritual purifications and cosmological beliefs in these ancient cultures. However, we have also described changing practices over time due to ideological critiques. These changes raise questions about the origins of cosmological beliefs and their relationship to purification practices. We will return to these questions in Chapter 5. But first, Yohan Yoo in Chapter 3 will demonstrate the same link between cosmology and pollution through an ethnographic study of purity beliefs and purification practices among the indigenous inhabitants of Jeju Island. This example will show that the relationship between cosmology and purity is not just a Western cultural construct on the basis of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern sources. Then in Chapter 4, James Watts returns to the Western preoccupation with purity and pollution by focusing on how the ancient world’s most systematic textual description of pollution and purification, Leviticus 11–15, has been interpreted in subsequent religious commentary and academic interpretation as well as in Jewish and Christian ritual practices.

Notes 1 This description of the divine realm is different from Eliade’s notion of “sacred space.” Eliade (1987 [1957], 59) argued that by virtue of a sacred place, especially the temple, “the world is resanctified in every part.” According to Eliade’s idea of the sacred, “religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real e­ xistence …. To settle somewhere, to inhabit a space, is

Changing realms 73











e­ quivalent to repeating the cosmogony and hence to imitating the work of the gods” (­Eliade 1987 [1957], 64–65). That is, all human beings imitate the sacred, which is the archetype or model for their lives (see Eliade 1991 [1949], 12–16). This theory fits only cultures in which the divine realm and the human realm overlapped. For instance, Eliade’s notion of sacred space is valid in the case of ancient Israel where the human realm was an imitation of the divine realm. In ancient Greece and Egypt, however, there was something within the divine realm that should not be imitated and that was separated from the human realm. The every-day lives of people in these cultures were often distinguished from the rules of the divine realm. 2 Hesiod claimed, “Zeus, son of Cronos, who sees far and wide, metes justice to those who care for evil and violence, foster criminal actions” (Hesiod, Works and Days, 236, tr. in West 1978) 3 Classical drama depicted Apollo as the god who was most concerned with the  purification of blood pollution. Apollo of the Pythian temple commanded the Thebans to drive out pollution from their land. Apollo prescribed that the rite of purification should be done by banishing the murderer or expiating the blood of the killed with the blood of the murderer (Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 95–102). Apollo not only demanded that Orestes remove the pollution of Agamemnon’s blood by killing his mother, but also protected and purified Orestes (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, 541–45, The Eumenides, 70–95, 280–85, see also Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, 937; Electra, 972). 4 But social order was not always maintained by the ideal of purity. For instance, incest was believed to violate “an unwritten law.” The incestuous were excluded from sacrificial ritual and marriage exchange. However, incest was nowhere called a pollution. Only the myth of Oedipus, in which incest and patricide were associated, regarded it as a pollution (Parker 1983, 97–100). 5 For the Indian caste system and purity ideas, see Dumont (1970, especially chapter 2). Dumont argued that the Indian caste structure is based on the distinction between purity and impurity. His theory is similar to Douglas’s theory in Purity and Danger. According to Dumont, the distinction of purity is the foundation of social and religious status; even though the impure caste, “the Untouchables,” was the polar opposite of the pure Brahmin, the impurity of the Untouchable was necessary for the maintenance of the social order. He also argued that this understanding of social divisions based on the opposition of purity and impurity was not unique to India but found in many other cultures. However, Dumont’s theory of Indian caste and purity included more complicated explanations than Douglas’s comparative theory of social hierarchy and pollution. For instance, he considered sub-divided classes within a single caste and explained regional differences and irregularities among purity ideas and practices. See also Doniger 1999. 6 In Purity and Danger (2002 [1966]), Douglas emphasized the function of purity in maintaining the social hierarchical order. However, Douglas’s later work suggested that the purity rules of Leviticus were not used to maintain social hierarchy: “in so far as the Levitical rules for purity apply universally they are useless for internal disciplining. They maintain absolutely no social demarcation” (Douglas 1993/94, 112–13). 7 Two major types of Egyptian temples were cult temples, which were dedicated to local or state deities, and royal mortuary temples, which were built for the mortuary cult of the pharaoh (Gahlin 2002, 99). There were also private mortuary temples and community cult chapels.

74  Changing realms 8 However, this does not mean that ancient Egyptians did not love life on earth. Many songs praise the pleasures of life. Egyptian funerary religion was designed to maintain an individual’s life and status beyond the transition of death. See Hodel-Hoenes 2000, 2. 9 This does not mean that the early Buddhist cosmology did not include the realm of the gods. But the realm of the gods was not the object of veneration, according to Buddhist understandings of the cosmos. First, the realms of the gods belong to the world of the five senses (kama-dhatu), which is the lowest of the threefold thirty-one realms of the Buddhist cosmology. Second, the Buddhist cosmology is not only a map of different realms of existence but also a description of all possible psychological experiences. See Gethin 1998, 118–20. 10 However, there is a certain form of ritual purity that is a necessary quality for members of religious groups who are supposed to achieve religious goals such as transcendence. For instance, the Vinaya—the division of Buddhist scriptures devoted to monastic discipline, composed of a set of rules governing individual monks and regulations for broader communal ceremonies—does not say that the monk should be ritually pure but focuses mainly on moral discipline. The rules, however, require Buddhist monks to separate themselves from ordinary society and to renounce ordinary household life. They should shave their hair, wear monastic robes, and engage in complete sexual and dietary abstinence. See Gethin 1998, 87–89. 11 Likewise, in Orestes, the contagion of pollution is dismissed. When Orestes warns Pylades of the danger: Orestes:  It’s disgusting to touch a sick man. Pylades:  Not for me to touch you. Orestes:  But you might be infected by my madness. Pylades:  So be it. Orestes:  You won’t be afraid? Pylades: No. Fear ruins friendship. (Euripides, Orestes 792–94, translated by Parker, Miasma, 309.)

3

Separating realms Purity and pollution in the ­indigenous r­ eligion of Jeju-do, Korea1 Yohan Yoo

It will occur to many readers of Chapter 2 that the purity beliefs articulated in the myths and rituals of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures resemble purity systems in other cultures, including some still observed today. That resemblance raises two questions. Do other cultures’ purity practices also demarcate different cosmological realms? And are typical cosmological distinctions the reason for similar purity beliefs in many human cultures? To test the degree to which cosmological beliefs drive purity systems outside the ancient world, I turn in this chapter to an ethnographic study of the shamanic rituals and myths of a contemporary indigenous culture. This change in focus does not just involve different cultures. It also involves a shift in the nature of our evidence for purity practices. In ethnography, unlike ancient history, ritual practices can be observed first-hand, practitioners can be interviewed, and any textual archives can be checked against the stated beliefs of living people. Ethnographic field studies therefore provided much of the evidence for Mary Douglas’s (2002 [1966]) theory of pollution and have continued to generate later discussions of it and critiques (e.g. Geertz 1973; Meigs 1978; Valeri 2000). I now add to this literature the purity beliefs of the indigenous people of Jeju Island. In the island province Jeju-do, Korea, many people still repeat the myths of the shamanic indigenous religion and think its rituals to be effective (Yoo 2020, 1–2). 2 The purity practices and beliefs of the indigenous people of Jeju-do were circumscribed by island geography and relative cultural isolation, until recently. Jeju indigenous myths and rituals are therefore “alive” in the sense that they still lay the foundation for the religious lives of Jeju people. The indigenous religion of Jeju-do can be said to be “living” in that many Jeju people still accept its myths as true and earnestly participate in rituals that are connected with these myths. It is impossible to tell the exact number of people who profess the shamanic indigenous religion because the government census questionnaire deals only with institutionalized religions. But it is clear that the influence of the indigenous religion in Jeju-do is stronger than in other provinces of Korea. Not only do a large portion of those who claim to have “no religion,” about 58% of the whole Jeju

76  Separating realms population according to the November 2015 census, rely on the popular religious tradition, but so do many who identify themselves as Buddhists, 23.9% according to the same census. In some villages of Jeju-do, more than half of the inhabitants regularly participate in communal shamanic rituals that are performed or led mainly by simbang, Jeju shamans (see further in Yoo 2020). Jeju indigenous myths and rituals are very useful for explaining important concepts in Jeju indigenous religion. Among these concepts are purity and pollution. Jeju people participating in indigenous rituals pay very careful attention to purity. Jeju religious practitioners make zealous efforts to remain in a pure state when they prepare and conduct gut. Gut are Korean indigenous rites for propitiating the gods that are performed by Korean shamans for the benefit of individuals, families, and village communities. When I observed and ­video-recorded two traditional ceremonies performed in Jeju villages in 2011 and 2013, the Jeju people’s attention to matters of purity was immediately apparent. Each time, when I sought permission to record the rituals from the fishing village cooperatives that hosted them, I was asked not about my religion or whether I believed in their gods; instead, I was asked when I last ate pork. Even visitors cannot attend one of these rituals without momjeongseong, a sincere effort to purify their bodies, which includes an avoidance of pork for at least three days. (Pork avoidance is one of the most crucial and complex elements of Jeju purity, as we will see below.) In Jeju, purity is perhaps the most important factor mediating the relationships between humans and gods. I will analyze two archives of ritual information: bonpuri and gut. Bonpuri are Jeju indigenous myths that have been transmitted orally. The name originally meant “explanation of the roots of the gods.” Simbang, Jeju shamans, recite bonpuri in performing gut. Among the various kinds of gut, I focus on dang-gut, rituals for village shrine gods. Dang indicates a shrine for an indigenous god. Bonpuri, in which gods are the main characters, are narratives that allude to relations between gods and relations within the realms of gods. Though there are slight differences between the transmitted versions of bonpuri, the emphasis on purity is a common feature.3 Bonpuri are helpful for understanding the separation between the realm of one god and that of another. They also show the separation between the divine realm and the human realm because some of them explain rules that govern how the gods meet people. But rules that direct gut and other rituals reveal more clearly the conditions that separate the human realm from the divine realm. Few scholars have studied purity in Jeju religion and no studies to date have tried to provide a theoretical explanation of purity through the example of Jeju religion. Though some studies have provided useful clues for grasping Jeju purity ideas, they do not go so far as to elucidate the overall purity system in depth. For example, Hyeon 2002 and

Separating realms 77 Mun 2008 introduce taboos and purifications rituals for performing gut. Though both books are helpful for obtaining basic and background knowledge of the purity system in the Jeju indigenous religion, they do not suggest analytical or theoretical frameworks for understanding matters of purity. A field survey contains interviews with randomly selected Jeju people concerning causes of impurity in performing gut (KNRICH 2007). But the fragmentary information from general lay people of Jeju in this book is not a great help for understanding the purity ideas of Jeju indigenous religion. Sin and Yi (1998) briefly deal with the pork impurity of lying-in goddesses in Jeju myths. Kim (2007) relates pork impurity in bonpuri to the taboos for pregnant women. Though these two papers try to explain pork impurity in relation to the experience of women, they neither support their argument with strong evidence nor suggest any important traits of pork impurity. Kang (2012) proposes that pork impurity helps distinguish between the chief god of a village community, who is in charge of all lives of the people and the domain of the village, and other gods of the village who hold lower positions. He also says that rituals for the chief god require taboos on pork while those for other lower gods do not. Kang analyzes bonpuri and gut that are related to pork impurity and suggests a very persuasive conclusion. But his interest is limited to impurity from pork and he does not explain it in the context of the purity system as a whole. In this chapter, I will account for conspicuous features of the purity system in the Jeju indigenous religion by scrutinizing bonpuri and gut, ­supplemented by the statements of ritual specialists whom I interviewed. To understand Jeju ideas about purity, we must first consider how adherents understand the cosmos that includes human beings and the gods as well as their surroundings.

The separation of realms The Jeju shaman, Simbang Sunsil Seo, discusses the separation between realms in the following way: When we simbang performs a gut, we often say “separation by a piece of white paper.”4 When we ride in a car, its door separates the inside of the car from the outside. Just one door can screen and separate us from the impurity. Therefore, when we perform a rite of pork offering, for instance the rite of pork offering in Gimnyeong village, we separate [pork from the gods who regard pork as impure] by using a piece of white paper. By doing so, we notify the gods that impurity lies beyond the paper… There is also the term “one hundred feet away.” We think that impurity is in effect within one hundred feet, not beyond that distance. But a window or a piece of paper can make a distinction between realms.5

78  Separating realms As we can see in the expression, “one hundred feet away,” adherents of the Jeju indigenous religion think that people should avoid impurity from quite a long distance. But the symbolic boundary of the realm that requires a condition of purity can also be defined “by a piece of white paper.” Though the realm of the gods is distinguished from the human realm by hanging paper blinds, sometimes invisible dividing lines are also drawn ritually. For example, the realm of the gods is thought to be separated without visible marks when gods are seated at the end of chogamje, which is a ritual process that calls the gods into the ritual place and has them seated in the place prepared for them. The representative of the Bukchon village fishing cooperative said that he could not enter the ritual place because one of his family members had passed away a few days before and he had become impure. He was worried that he could pollute the divine realm.6 But he could go there after chogamje because his impurity would not influence the realm that had been distinguished by seating the invited gods in their places. It is possible to clearly define purity and impurity in Jeju by using the notion of realms. Understood in this way, purity is the requisite condition or necessary quality of each realm produced by people’s interpretations of the world and their own place in it. A purity system is a system of rules that regulates the interrelationship among the various realms that constitute the total cosmological worldview. To be pure, the requisite condition or adequate state of a realm should be maintained. Pollution should be understood as the failure of a realm to meet its requisite conditions. Pollution is also the negative effects of one realm on another when their rules conflict with each other. It should be noted that purity and impurity are relative concepts. A pure person in the human realm might be impure in the divine realm. Even if a person is pure in his or her own house, he or she is required to purify themselves before entering a shrine. If a person becomes impure, it means that he or she comes to have qualities that are not adequate for the place he or she is in. Trouble often comes about when realms overlap. Beings from different realms of the cosmos–which usually includes the human world, the divine realm, and the realm of the dead—should be kept separate. Many cultures, including Jeju, have used symbolic and ritual purity systems to distinguish between the divine realm and the human realm and between the realm of death and the realm of life (see Chapter 2). Subrealms of the divine are obvious to people in Jeju, while human subrealms are vague and those of the dead are nonexistent. Souls of the dead that are wandering around the living human realm are considered dangerous to living people, and people should not approach the divine realm without careful preparation. A purity system often distinguishes one human realm from another when people of different subrealms should not share the same place. The beings of respective realms that are distinguished by a purity system cannot coexist without specific methods for controlling the polluting situation, namely purification rituals.

Separating realms 79 Purification rituals are needed to maintain the purity of a specific realm and to remove the negative influence of other realms. Purification rituals serve three important functions. First, purification rituals are often performed in order to obtain or maintain the pure state of a realm. This purification can temporarily change the place where people live in ordinary circumstances into the place where gods can visit and be served. Saedarim of the Jeju indigenous religion belongs to this type of ritual. Saedarim is an essential part of a gut and is performed to make the ritual place appropriate for gods to be served. It purifies not only the human participants and the place but also the invited gods who are thought to become polluted when they enter the human world. Periodic purifications of sanctuaries and statues are also examples of this kind of purification ritual. Second, a purification ritual is necessary to remove certain conditions or qualities that belong to the realm of a person or a thing that comes into contact with another realm, so that he/she/it can be safely incorporated into the different realm. People who want to enter a temple or shrine are often asked to clean their whole body or a part of it to prevent the negative influence of the human realm, which is the most common example of this second function of the purification ritual. Adherents of  the Jeju indigenous religion do momjeongseong, a sincere effort to keep their bodies pure, before participating in a gut. Momjeongseong includes taking baths or showers, avoiding contact with corpses, and refraining from food that the god of this shrine does not like. According to bonpuri and gut, some pork-eating Jeju gods are believed to perform purification rituals so as to stay in the same place with or marry gods who do not eat pork. Though these gods are not impure in their own realms, they produce a negative effect in the realm of other gods who feel disgusted by pork. Before meeting the other gods, they should remove the smell of pork from their bodies. Third, purification rituals also serve to remove impurity that results from dangerous contact with another realm. Many cultures prescribe purification after a person comes into contact with pollutants that are associated symbolically with death, such as corpses, blood, semen, pus, and excrement. A person or a thing that is polluted by one of these things must remove the impurity through a purification ritual before visiting a temple or a shrine and in some cultures even before returning to their ordinary lives. In Jeju-do, persons who have recently had sexual relations or visited a house where a death occurred are not believed to be impure in their daily lives. However, they are regarded as inappropriate, that is, impure for the divine realm. For these people, a certain period of time should pass before they enter the shrine or participate in a gut. During the gut which the polluted persons must inevitably participate in, they must perform purification rituals such as eating boiled adzuki beans, washing with water in which they boiled part of a juniper tree, and sprinkling that water inside their house. I will describe these purification rituals further in the following sections.

80  Separating realms

Separating the divine realm from the human realm Jeju myths called bonpuri distinguish the realm of the gods from the realm of human beings. For example, some bonpuri maintain that the gods should not carelessly eat food that belongs to the human realm if they would maintain the requisite states appropriate for the divine realm. Gods are expelled from the celestial sphere to the human world because they eat human food while they are visiting this world for a short while. The chief god of the Utmudeunaegwedang shrine in Yong-gang village of Jeju city is believed to have been originally the youngest daughter of the Great Jade Emperor, Cheonjiwang, who is the king of heaven. She was driven out of heaven because she ate some grains while she was traveling in the human world. The dangsin-bonpuri of the village does not explain why gods eating human food causes such big trouble. (Dangsin designates the chief god of a village, who is believed to be in charge of birth and death for village people, as well as the village’s main shrine.) However, the dangsin-bonpuri of the Utddang shrine of Haeandong village in Jeju city and of the Odeusidang shrine of Byeongdadong village in Jeju city clearly indicate why gods eating grains in the human realm is problematic. Daebyeolwang, the chief god of the Utddang, and Sobyeolwang, the chief god of Odeusidang, were thrown out of the divine world into the human world. In other villages of Jeju-do, they are general gods and important characters of Cheonjiwang-bonpuri, the Jeju creation myth, which is recited at the beginning of most Jeju gut by simbang. Daebyeolwang and Sobyeolwang are sons of the king of heaven. The first governs the other world and the second governs this world. But in Haeandong and Byeongdadong, they are believed to be shrine gods of the villages. According to their bonpuri, these brothers came down to the human world to look around. As rice looked most intriguing to them, they tasted several ears of rice. When they came up to heaven again, their father Cheonjiwang drove them out to the human realm because of the smell from human food (Hyeon 2002, 507; Mun 2008, 186–87). So, gods have to be served with food prepared according to the regulated ritual process. If they carelessly eat food of the human realm, they become inappropriate for the divine realm. Many things that are regarded as normal in the human realm can be impure to the gods. Therefore, when gods seek for dwellings within the human world, namely shrines, they take a lot of trouble to find a suitable place for the divine realm. In Seogwibonhyangdang-bonpuri, Baramutddo and Jisanguk refused to stay at the house of a man named Bongtae Kim, who offered his house for the two gods’ dwelling, because they could not stand the smells of normal human life such as “the smell of the dust, the smell of the soot, the smell of cooked food.” Though the dust, the soot, and the cooked food are not impure in the human realm, they do not satisfy the requisite condition of the divine realm. In other words, human life itself can be the source of impurity to the divine, separating the gods from

Separating realms 81 human beings. When Bongtae Kim took these gods to Utddangpat, they refused to stay there because they could see dogs and people on horses from there (Mun 2008, 118–21).7 The gods feel uncomfortable if their dwellings are not clearly distinguished from the human realm. The divine realm must be separated from the human realm.

Major causes of impurity in the divine realm Because bonpuri are stories whose main characters are not human but divine, most of them do not explain the separation between the human realm and the divine realm in detail. The rules that human beings should abide by because they are separated from the divine realm are more ­obviously articulated in rituals in which humans are involved. There are not, however, many recorded materials concerning the purity rituals of Jeju indigenous religion (JDEC 1976). The first records are from the beginning of the twentieth century. A Catholic priest, Wonyeong Kim, who was the first Korean parish priest in Jeju-do between 1899 and 1901, wrote his Susinyeongyak, which can be translated as “miraculous medicine for cultivating the body,” for the purpose of introducing Catholic doctrine to Jeju and criticizing the ideas and rituals of the indigenous shamanic religion. In this book, Father Kim briefly explained the customs of performing “­s­imbang gut” and “idolizing every god” in a very critical manner. After he mentioned various gut conducted both by the village communities and individual families, he introduced the causes of impurity. Things that make people impure are as follows. Seeing a dead snake makes one impure for seven days, and eating meat of horses and dogs three days. Women are impure for seven days after childbirth and seven days after menstruation. Wounds, cuts, and injuries from floggings make people impure until they are healed. Some say that seeing a dead cat can make a person impure. (Kim 2001 [1900], 757–99) This passage appears right after his explanation of gut that serves the gods of the indigenous religion, so it is clear that he is trying to explain the factors that make people unable to contact the gods in gut. For example, if a person sees a dead snake, he or she cannot participate in gut for the next seven days because of their impurity. Though Susinyeongyak was written by a Catholic priest for the purpose of missionary work and for teaching Christian doctrine, the book provides some valuable information (see further in Yoo 2020, 8–10). Many religious ideas and behaviors that are introduced in this book can still be found in Jeju-do. The simbang that I interviewed mentioned most of the causes of impurity that are included in Susinyeongyak when I asked what they should avoid before gut. Of course, Father Kim did not give a complete list of the

82  Separating realms causes of impurity of his time in Jeju-do. His list is too simple to show the pollutions that differ depending on the region and the features of the gods. His work shows, however, that Jeju purity practices have remained fairly consistent over the past century. It should also be noted that the lists of causes of impurity provided by simbang do not always coincide with each other. In addition, what simbang should avoid is different from what other participants in a gut, including the host family members, should avoid. However, we can recognize pollutions that Jeju people commonly avoid and the ways they maintain their purity. Before participating in gut, adherents engage in the indigenous religious practice of momjeongseong, a sincere effort to purify their bodies, in order to be fit to enter the divine realm. Simbang usually do momjeongseong for seven days before gut while, currently, general participants do it for three days. It is said that in times past, all the participants were required to do it for seven days before a gut. During this purification period, a straw rope is hung at the entrance of the village for the community gut and across the alley leading to the house of the family gut to prevent impure people or things from approaching. Participants try to avoid and cleanse the factors of their human lives that may pollute the divine realm. They should avoid seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching what may make them impure. Generally speaking, participants in gut should neither see nor touch the dead bodies of people and animals. They should wash themselves every day to keep clean. They are asked not to cook and eat specific kinds of meat, mostly pork. Sexual relations are strictly prohibited. People should not touch things regarded as very dirty, such as excrement or manure pails (which are scarcely seen in Jeju-do nowadays, since the modernization of houses and farming methods). They also should be careful not to say or hear bad words. I gained a clearer idea of what makes one inappropriate for entering the divine realm by asking simbang what is required before participating in gut. I interviewed nine simbang of good reputation among Jeju people about what they think of momjeongseong and other purification rituals.8 Each simbang had slightly different ideas about the momjeongseong and the kinds of impurity. Most significantly, while female simbang Sunsil Seo and Yeonhui Kim argued that menstruation is just a minor impurity, male simbang Taejin Jeong asserted that women on their menstrual period can never participate in the gut for the shrine god. Simbang also did not share the same opinion as to the degree of impurity from the dead carcasses of animals. Though all simbang recognized the purification method of eating boiled adzuki beans and washing with water in which part of a juniper tree had been boiled, they had different ideas about the effectiveness of the ritual. Their views on pork impurity were different according to the characteristics of the gods they mainly serve. Pork impurity in the Jeju indigenous religion is a subject that is very difficult to fully grasp, for both simbang

Separating realms 83 and researchers. While most simbang said pork should be strictly prohibited before gut, simbang Yunsu Kim argued that pork was not a significant cause of impurity in the coastal village in which he was in charge, because the shrine god of his village, who provides fishermen with great hauls of fish, eats pork. But he also emphasized that members of the family that enshrine and serve the gods Bulddojosang or Chaekbuljosang, who hate pork, should not eat pork before gut.9 He said that dog meat is always prohibited: if a simbang should eat dog meat, he or she will be punished by the gods and surely die. In some cases, participants should avoid not only pork but also beef for the preparation of the gut for the chief goddesses of the Buldotddang shrine and the Songdang shrine, though most gods in Jeju-do, including the chief gods of villages, are believed to accept beef willingly in their gut. When asked about pork impurity, simbang Yeonhui Kim said, “I am not sure. Pork seems to be impure on the one hand but sometimes it does not seem to be impure.” She was confused because some gods are believed to allow pork while others prohibit it. She pointed out that pork is strictly forbidden for the village community gut, bulddomaji, and irwolmaji, while it is allowed for siwangmaji, gwiyangpuri, and seongjupuri. Pork is impure in the realms of some gods but not in those of other gods because the ­conditions of the realms of the gods vary according to the characteristics and propensities of each god. What characteristic or propensity of a god may allow people to eat pork? We know that the higher position of the chief god of a village is confirmed by the fact that he or she does not accept pork. But is the pork prohibition only used to the mark the higher position of the chief god or is a distaste for pork attributed to any specific characteristic of that god? While it is possible that pork is forbidden in bulddomaji and irwolmaji due to the influence of Buddhism (see note 9), we still have to explain why the god of the house who is invited for the seongjupuri allows pork. Siwangmaji and gwiyangpuri rituals, which allow for pork, invoke and praise Siwang, the ten kings who rule different parts of the underworld and judge dead p ­ eople’s souls, and Chasa, messengers who take dead souls to the underworld. There may therefore be a connection between permission to eat pork and underworld deities. At any rate, simbang obviously share common ideas about impurity. Above all, they all think that human beings should avoid specific things that are regarded as impure to the gods if they want to meet the gods in gut. Some things or behaviors which are not impure in daily human life, such as pork, are deemed impure to the gods. All of the simbang counted childbirth, sexual relations, and dead bodies as impurities. Most of them said seeing blood makes one impure. These causes can be regarded as symbolically related to death. In Jeju-do, things related to death make people impure only when they make contact with the divine realm, but not in the human realm. A Jeju person who participates in funerals or sees a woman

84  Separating realms in childbirth does not have to go through a purification ritual or period before seeing other people. However, things that are symbolically related to death are the most powerful causes of impurity to the realm of the gods in Jeju-do. When the gods enter the human realm, the impurity related to death, which always threatens living human beings, can be transmitted to the gods. Persons who meet the gods in the human realm should be careful not to leave human traces that could bother the gods and also not transmit to them the influence of the realm of death that haunts mortals. Myths teach that things related to death and the human realm p ­ ollute the divine. Segyeong-bonpuri, Sehwabonhyangdang-bonpuri, and Tosanyeodeuretddang-bonpuri articulate that the Jeju gods see human blood as impure. Igong-bonpuri also demonstrates that human blood can pollute the divine realm. Hallakgungi, the main character of Igongbonpuri, went up to the flower garden in the western heaven, obviously the realm of the gods, in order to meet his father. He bit his finger to make some blood and shed several drops of it in the garden pond. The pond immediately became impure and ran dry.10 One can understand the ambivalence around blood, childbirth, and sexual relations due to the fact that they are the basis of human life and also related to death. While blood is the symbol of human life, spilling human blood can result in death. Childbirth brings a new life into the world, but it simultaneously sheds a lot of blood and runs the risk of death. Sex has the potential to create a new life in the human body, but it also involves males losing semen, which is a source of life. These are features of the human realm that are abominating to the gods and are also impurities of the realm of the death that threaten living human beings. Without doubt then, in Jeju-do as in many other religious contexts, dead bodies cause impurity. Human corpses give rise to strong impurity, while not all carcasses of animals cause serious impurity. For example, seeing a dead mouse is not regarded as a serious impurity. In general, only the dead bodies of animals that are characters in Jeju myths or have close relationships with Jeju people seem to cause impurity, such as dogs and cats, which are the closest companions of people; crows and snakes which appear in bonpuri; and snakes which have been identified with family gods in Jeju-do.

Purification rituals for contact with the divine realm Simbang whom I interviewed said that persons who have serious impurity cannot have contact with gods in principle, but most of them also prescribe ways of counteracting impurity, if not removing it completely. As mentioned above, polluted persons may wash with water in which they boiled a juniper branch and then sprinkle this water around the place they live. Simbang Sunsil Seo added that juniper trees not only have the power of cleaning impurity, they attract the gods as well. Jeju people also think

Separating realms 85 that polluted persons can purify themselves by eating boiled adzuki beans or adzuki bean soup. The purifying power of adzuki beans is used by Geumsangnim in Sehwabonhyangdang-bonpuri who cleansed his throat with adzuki bean soup in order to remove his pork impurity. So water boiled with juniper branches and boiled adzuki beans helps to correct one’s inappropriate state in order to enter the divine realm. However, the more important and ­effective way of maintaining a pure state is by attenuating the characteristics of the human realm and avoiding what is inappropriate for entering the divine realm, that is, what may cause impurity in the divine realm. During the momjeongseong period, Jeju people try to avoid what the gods do not like and keep their bodies and minds clean. They endeavor to avoid exposure to the influence of death and to wash away the characteristics of the human realm that bother the gods. The saedarim purification ritual, which is one of the proceedings of the gut, is conducted for the purpose of removing minor impurities that participants may contract in spite of their best efforts to stay clean. Saedarim also drives out all the impurities that may be lurking around the passageway by which the gods reach the ritual place after “the gate of the divine palace” is opened by simbang. This process is believed to purify the gods as well as participants and the ritual place. Saedarim should be conducted to ensure that everything is made and remains appropriate for the gods to visit and stay, even if there is no specific source of impurity. Saedarim is conducted repeatedly to welcome the invited gods in many different performances of the community gut, such as chogamje, bulddomaji, irwolmaji, chogongmaji, igongmaji, and siwangmaji. A simbang sings songs for washing away impurity accompanied by Korean shamanic instruments.11 Then the simbang sprinkles water from his or her mouth, or by using bamboo branches with green blades dipped in water, onto the people and around the ritual place, making gestures of driving away impurity or birds. In the name saedarim, sae is equal to sa of mainland Korea, which means “impure” or “evil.” Jeju people have generally read sa as sae, which has another meaning: “bird” or “birds.” In ritual, both meanings of sae are confused, often intentionally. Segyeong-bonpuri and Jijang-bonpuri include examples in which sa, “the impure” or “the evil,” is expressed as sae, “birds.” In the former, Seosuwangddanimagi, who bore a grudge, incarnated herself in evil birds and entered into human bodies, with evil effects. Jijangagi, the heroine of the latter, who lived a harsh life as a victim of fate, was reborn as evil birds and enters human bodies, causing impurity. Therefore, removing impurity is equated with driving away birds, a pun, and a simbang makes gestures of scaring away birds while reciting ritual songs (Hyeon 2002, 32, 87, 115). The water that is used for removing impurity in saedarim is called “cosmic and heavenly water” (eunhabongcheonsu). Though it is said in principle that gathered morning dew should be used, most often bottled mineral water is used instead.

86  Separating realms Saedarim purifies the ritual place and participants, making them appropriate for contact with the divine realm. In addition, it purifies any impurities that gods may get while visiting the human realm. Whenever a gut is performed, the gods have to go through purification rituals in order to eliminate impurities they get from entering the human realm. In the Jeju religion, even Cheonjiwang, the king of heaven, should undergo saedarim to wash away impurities that he gets when he enters the human world. In performing siwangmaji, which is the welcoming ritual of the king of the world of the dead and one of the proceedings of the formal community gut, simbang try to remove both the impurity of the human realm and of the realm of the dead from the king of heaven. When the king of the nether world comes into the ritual place, the king of heaven, who is also thought to be in the ritual place, is likely to be polluted by the influence of the realm of the dead. Simbang Yeonhui Kim said, “saedalim comprehensively drives away all kinds of impurity.” According to her, by conducting saedalim, simbang drive away both the impurity of this world and that of the other world all together, singing, “the king of the heaven is coming, impurity is following him, let’s drive away that impurity.” In the Jeju indigenous religion, the human realm and the divine realm are strictly separated. Because the gods are averse to things that are normal in ordinary human life, such as the smell of dust, the smell of soot, and the smell of cooked food, it can be said that human life itself is the source of impurity that separates the human from the divine. In addition, if a deity eats human food in the human realm without the required ritual procedures, he or she becomes inappropriate for the divine realm. The gods have to eat offered food in accordance with the ritual procedures. People should be ritually prepared for entering the divine realm in order not to cause impurity there. The characteristics of the human realm and the possible effects of death should be avoided and cleansed before making contact with the divine realm.

Separating the different realms of gods Jeju people adhering to the indigenous religion say that the gods they serve number around 18,000. Though all of the 18,000 gods in the Jeju pantheon belong to the divine realm that is distinguished from the human realm, the realms of various gods are often understood to be separate from those of other gods. That is to say, within primary large-scale realms there may be subordinate realms that have their own purity rules or standards. The conditions of purity and impurity that separate a certain god’s realm from that of another god are clearly demonstrated in bonpuri, where many stories describe the often complex relationships between the various gods. A deity may distinguish his or her realm from that of another deity whom he or she regards as impure. If a deity calls another deity “impure”

Separating realms 87 in bonpuri, the deity is proclaiming “I cannot be with him (or her).” In some myths, two gods who are separated because of impurity can meet each other again and stay together. In Segyeong-bonpuri, for example, when the heroine goddess Jacheongbi sees her lover god Mundoryeong after a long time, she frivolously pricks his finger with a needle. Angered, Mundoryeong goes up to his home in heaven after saying, “It is full of impurity!” In Jeju myths, this expression is a common one, meaning, “I cannot stay with you anymore,” and is used when the speaker feels displeased with the other deity. The separation is not necessarily permanent: Mundoryeong and Jacheongbi meet each other later and get married. In Samseunghalmang-bonpuri, when the goddess of birth Samseunghalmang talks to and asks a favor of the god of smallpox Daebyeolsang, he scolds her severely saying, “How dare a woman, who is a sae-mul appear to me even in a dream!” Since in bonpuri and gut the word sae means impure while mul means thing, Daebyeolsang is refusing to be together with Samseunghalmang. Later when his wife suffers from hard labor and fails to give birth, Daebyeolsang begs for Samseunghalmang’s help with his sincere apology and invites her to his house. Though Daebyeolsang says that a woman is impure, men and women are not distinguished by rules of purity in Jeju indigenous religion. Men and women are not thought to belong to different realms in either their daily lives or their religious activities. Gods and goddesses also are not distinguished according to conditions of purity. In myths and rituals, gods and goddesses get married and share realms. In addition, goddesses often expel  gods from their realms because of impurity. What Daebyeolsang says seems to reflect the male-centered society of the period of the Joseon Dynasty when this myth took its current form. In some cases, when a deity separates from another deity because one regards the other as impure, it ends their relationship completely. Tosanyeodeuretddangagissi, the heroine goddess in Tosanyeodeuretddangbonpuri, leaves Gaeroyukseoddo ­ permanently when he forcefully grabs her by the wrist. She proclaims that Gaeroyukseoddo is impure because his behavior is disgraceful. She is saying that she cannot stay with him because of his bad behavior. Though she regrets the parting later in some versions of this bonpuri, the two deities never meet each other after their separation. In Sehwabonhyangdang-bonpuri, goddess Baekjuddo meets the hunter god Meongdongsocheonguk while she is on her way to the house of her maternal grandfather Cheonjaddo. Although Meongdongsocheonguk was  well-dressed like a noble person of Seoul and appeared decent, his home was full of the bones of animals and stank of fat. Thinking that the place  was unclean or impure, Baekjuddo tried to leave. Meongdongsocheonguk took her by her wrist to hold her back. She shook his hand off and peeled the skin off of her polluted wrist with a knife. Baekjuddo wanted to remove the impurity of Meongdongsocheonguk

88  Separating realms so much that she made herself impure by cutting off the skin of her wrist and making herself bleed. When Cheonjaddo heard about this from her, he became furious and said “Meongdongsocheonguk was disgraceful because he tried to rape my descendant visiting me.” He commanded that his village Sehwari should be completely separated from Meongdongsoncheonguk’s village Ganmari. The realms of these gods were completely separated and their relationship ended not because of Meongdongsocheonguk’s impurity, but because of his disgraceful behavior. This separation between the gods is also said to result in the separation of people living in each village. According to the bonpuri, people of Ganmari and those of Sehwari were commanded to drink different water, to walk by different paths, and not to intermarry. Seogwibonhyangdang-bonpuri includes a story of separation between the realms of sister goddesses who fought each other for a husband. In this myth, Baramutddo deserted his wife Gosanguk and married her sister Jisanguk. In another version, he was fascinated by his wife’s sister Jisanguk after he married Gosanguk, and in yet another, he really wanted to marry the beautiful Jisanguk, only to marry the ugly Gosanguk. At any rate, in all versions, Gosanguk became angry and separated her realm from that of her sister. Gosanguk occupied Seohong, a village west of Hakdam, while Baramutddo and Jisanguk took Seogwi and Donghong, villages east of Hakdam. According to the bonpuri, since then villagers of Seohong could not marry villagers from Seogwi or Donghong. In addition, they were commanded to be very careful not to cross the village boundaries when they put livestock out to pasture or when they cut down trees. However, though these bonpuri prescribe that the people of Ganmari and those of Sehwari, and the people of Seohong and those of Seogwi/Donghong, should separate themselves from each other, there is no evidence that they have ever really kept apart. Further research on this is needed. In the two bonpuri summarized above, the separation between the realms of two gods resulted in the separation of two villages. Residents of each village not only serve different gods but also live in completely separate areas. The reasons for the conflicts were disgraceful behavior and a love affair. While the most common reason for separation between the realms of gods is pork impurity, it is not the immediate cause in these cases for the complete separation between villagers and their living spaces. When the realms of gods are separated because of pork impurity, a god usually separates his or her realm from that of another god residing in the same village. In dangsin[shrine god]-bonpuri, myths about gods who are thought to be in charge of each village community in Jeju-do, pork impurity functions as the criterion for determining the hierarchy of the village gods. However, if the relationships between gods who separate their realms are broken off, that is to say, if they come to reside in or take charge of different villages, pork impurity no longer determines their rank order because they are served by different village communities.

Separating realms 89

Pork impurity creates hierarchy among gods residing in the same village While most offering rituals for pork-eating gods can be conducted individually by villagers when needed and if circumstance permits, rituals for the chief god are performed seasonally at the community level on a large scale and cannot be done by individual villagers. Since pork has been “the most ordinary meat” eaten most often by Jeju people during holidays, ancestral rites, and family feasts (Kang 2012, 53), pork-eating gods are easily accessible to Jeju people. People feel close to pork-eating gods whom they regard as similar to human beings. Bonpuri depict most pork-eating gods as defective in character. Some of them are quick to anger, some are intemperate, and others have severe mood swings. Jeju people feel affinity with the humanlike pork-eating gods. A person who comes into contact with a specific god’s realm should observe the necessary condition that the realm requires, such as dietary rules, in order to be accepted as appropriate, namely pure, in that realm. Likewise, a god should satisfy the necessary conditions of a realm in order to be pure in that realm. If a god or a person who has eaten pork enters the realm of a god who hates pork without purifying themselves, the intruder is impure in that realm and breaks the pure state of the realm. However, the appropriate or the necessary condition of the realm of a pork-eating god is not damaged by offering pork or people who eat pork. Jeju people can pray to or ask favors from a pork-eating god right after they eat or cook pork at family feasts or ancestral rites. Therefore, pork-eating gods are usually the gods whom people commonly and freely invoke for favors (Kang 2012, 36–41). In most villages, Jeju people offer pork to illwetddangsin, local goddesses in charge of birth and healing. According to Kang, if a pork-­eating illwetddangsin comes to take the position of the chief god of a village, she gives up eating pork. In the examples of the Buldotddang of Wasanri v­ illage and the Samsingdang of the Hadori, Jeju people think of the goddesses who gave up eating pork as deities who came from the Buddhist pantheon. Pork-eating male gods are usually gods of abundance, such as the god of longevity, the hunter god, the god of forges, and Seonwangsin who is in charge of ensuring a great haul of fish. The god of forges and Seonwangsin are identified with Yeonggamsin, that is, a dokkaebi that is very similar to a goblin in Western folklore. According to bonpuri, gods began to eat pork for two reasons. The first reason involves a goddess who has not previously been a pork-eater, but eats pork for the first time during pregnancy or after childbirth. She usually cannot resist her craving for pork and eats a very small amount of pork, or just smells it. While pork-eating male gods eat the whole pig from the start, goddesses begin to eat pork by smelling a scorched hair of a pig, sipping water collected in a depression of a pig’s footprint, or by eating a little pork soup. The spouse of the goddess, often the chief god of a village,

90  Separating realms discovers her pork pollution and expels her from his shrine. The second reason involves a gluttonous god who is a war hero and eats enormous amounts, who is offered a whole pig instead of a whole bull or cow. When he comes into a village, he asks villagers who serve him for a whole bull or a whole cow. The poor villagers try to offer cattle at first, but soon they cannot afford to continue. They ask the god if a pig can replace a bull. The god agrees and people begin to offer whole pigs to him. Gwenegitddo, for example, finds a place for himself at a distance from the shrine of the chief deity and Sorosocheonguk is expelled from the shrine of the chief goddess who is his wife, ostensibly not because of his pork-eating. But it is clear that they are pork-eating gods, so in that regard they do not differ from goddesses who are driven out due to their appetite for pork. Both have to reside apart from the chief deity. Goddesses who are separated from their husbands because of pork impurity go to separate shrines that are built at a distance from the shrine of the village’s chief god or at least outside the fence of the chief god’s shrine. Male gods who expel their impure wives usually have the name “Baramutddo,” which is a common noun that indicates a so-called pure god who does not eat pork and simultaneously is often used for the proper name of the chief god of a specific village. But “Baramutddo” literally means “the god who is above the wind” (Kang 2012, 35–36). In the Jeju indigenous religion, “above the wind” indicates the realm of the pure god that an impure god cannot approach because they reside “below the wind,” the place for the impure gods. When Jacheongbi in Segyeong-bonpuri climbs up a hill after killing her mischievous servant Jeongsunam, three sacred immortals who are playing baduk (the game of go) ask her to pass by “below the wind” on account of her being full of impurity. Though there is no particular name for the goddess who expels her pork-eating husband, some names of shrines reflect the higher position of the goddess who does not eat pork, while her spouse enjoys it. For example, the name of the hall where the chief goddess of the shrine Songdang stays is “Utsondang,” which means “shrine of what is above,” while the place of her expelled husband Sorosocheonguk is called “Alsondang,” that is, “shrine of what is below.” These names show the hierarchical relationship between the separated gods. There are several examples from bonpuri of goddesses expelled by their spouses due to pork impurity. Sangsadaewang, who is believed to be in charge of Naewatddang shrine in Yongdamdong village, drove out his first wife Jungjeondaebuin as well as his second wife Jeongjeolsanggunnong. Though it was only the second wife that broke the pork taboo, both wives had to move to another shrine, Gungdang, which is also in the Yongdamdong village. According to the bonpuri, the pregnant second wife dared not eat pork meat but just scorched a hair of a pig and smelled it because she desired pork. Just the smell of a pig alone made her impure. When her husband recognized the impure smell of pork from his second wife, he announced that the impure wives could not stay with him

Separating realms 91 in his place and drove them out. Sinsanguk, the chief god of Gujwa-eup Weoljeongli, threw out his wife Seodanghalmanim who had seven children by him because she ate a hair of a pig. On the way home from a village feast, she got thirsty and drank water that pooled in the depression of a pig’s footprint. When she found a pig hair in the water, she could not resist her appetite for pork. She scorched the hair and ate it. Sinsanguk smelled the impure pork on his wife and expelled his wife and children, saying “I have not the heart to separate my earth and water [village] from my wife’s because I have children with her. But we have to live in separate places.” Since then, Seodanghalmanim could not share the position of the chief god with her husband any more, taking a different position and job as the goddess of medicine in that village, where the villagers began to offer her pork. Likewise, Sinjungddo of Tosanri was also driven out by her husband to become an illwetddangsin because she drank the water collected in the depression of a pig’s footprint and ate a scorched pig hair. Sinjungddo of Bomokri village is exceptional in that she actually ate pork firsthand. She separated from her husband Baramutddo because “she put her hand around which she wound a wet silk towel into a pig’s anal passage, plucked out its liver, and ate it raw” (Mun 2008, 183). Songdang-bonpuri is a story in which a pork-eating husband god is driven out by a pure wife goddess and becomes a lower god of the village. In Songdang-bonpuri, though the divine couple separated their realm because of the bad behavior of the husband, the separation ultimately distinguished the pure wife goddess from the pork-eating husband god. The native hunter god Sorosocheonguk decided to provide for his children by farming after he married the farmer goddess Baekjuddo, who was non-native to Jeju-do. When he felt hungry soon after he began to work in the fields, he roasted and ate his plow bull (or cow). His plow bull did not satisfy his hunger, so he ate his neighbor’s bull that was roaming around the fields. He was not a faithful husband and father because he broke his promise to eat the crops of his fields and ate his own bull that was necessary for farming instead. But Baekjuddo became furious at him not for these reasons, but because he was “a cattle thief who butchered and ate another’s bull.” She separated her realm from her husband’s, declaring that she could not be together with the cattle thief. Many Jeju gods, who used to eat a whole bull, including Sorosocheonguk, eventually come to eat a whole pig. Though the goddess says that she cannot stay with her husband because of his bad behavior in stealing cattle, it is clear that the pork-eating god and the pure g­ oddess were separated in the long run. In rituals, Baekjuddo, the chief goddess of the village, is served with rice food and non-pork side dishes, while Sorosocheonguk is offered pork. One of their sons, Gwenegitddo became one of the gods of the Gimnyeong village after he rendered distinguished military service in foreign countries and returned to Jeju-do. At first, he was served cattle by villagers. Just like his father, he ate the whole bull or cow. But considering the poor economic situation of the village, he agreed

92  Separating realms with the villagers’ request to be offered pigs. Guenegiddo is not the chief god of the village, but the pure goddess Gaeksajeonbuin, who hates pork, is the chief goddess. Village gods eating mainly meat are led to eat pork and take a lower place than the pure gods who do not eat pork.

Purification rituals performed by gods Jeju myths describe the gods performing rituals or observing the rules of rituals, just as do many myths around the world (Patton 2009). Gods are thought to need purification rituals when they try to enter a realm in which the necessary conditions are different from their own or when they have to remove their impurities that are not appropriate for a certain realm. The hero god Geumsangnim in Sehwabonhyangdang-bonpuri, who eats pork, lives with his goddess wife who does not eat pork. When they are served food during gut, they eat at tables that are set in different realms. Cheonjaddo, the chief god of Sehwari village, and his granddaughter Baekjuddo eat mainly rice food and side dishes. When Geumsangnim made a marriage proposal to Baekjuddo, he was turned down due to his pork diet. Geumsangnim could only marry Baekjuddo after he pledged not to eat pork anymore. When pork-eating deities enter the realm of pure gods who do not eat pork, they have to purify themselves. Therefore, before Geumsangnim entered the realm of Cheonjaddo and Baekjuddo, he underwent a purification ritual “in which he cleaned his throat with adzuki-bean gruel, bathed with Soju (Korean distilled spirits), rinsed out his mouth with refined rice wine.” But soon, he became severely emaciated because he gave up pork. In order to revive her husband, Baekjuddo asked Cheonjaddo to allow him to eat pork again. Geumsangnim started eating pork again and became inappropriate to the requisite condition of the realm of the gods who do not eat pork. So whenever he finishes eating pork, he goes through the same purification ritual that he performed before his marriage. The purification ritual of the pork-eating god that is described in Sehwabonhyangdang-bonpuri takes place in practice in a gut. Simbang and villagers first offer Cheonjaddo and Baekjuddo cooked rice; rice cakes; side dishes including eggs, vegetables, fish, and some beef; distilled spirits; and other beverages. Then they separate the seat of Geumsangnim by a piece of white paper and serve him pork. After the offering is over, a simbang should purify Geumsangnim in order for him to go back to the realm of his wife and her grandfather. The simbang says, “[He is] bathing with clean rice wine, cleaning all the dirt” and then sprays some distilled spirits from his or her mouth. Geumsangnim is believed to purify himself in person while the simbang conducts the purification rituals, according to Simbang Sunsil Seo and Simbang Yongok Yi. The purification ritual performed by the simbang can be said to represent the purification rituals performed by the god himself.

Separating realms 93 Another example of a ritual that uses a piece of paper to temporarily separate the realm of a pork-eating god and that of a god avoiding pork is Yeonsin, the offering rituals performed on a fishing boat for great hauls of fish (Hyeon 2002, 172–73). The host of the ritual and simbang offer food to Yongwangsin, the dragon king of the sea, who does not eat pork and Seonwangsin, the king of the ship, who eats pork. The higher god Yongwangsin is first served with cooked rice, rice cakes, fruits, cooked vegetables, and liquor. Then a simbang screens the table for Yongwangsin from that for Seonwangsin with a piece of large white paper and offers pork to Seonwangsin. Indigenous gods are thought to perform rituals for getting children, for which they have to purify themselves. In Chogong-bonpuri, maternal grandparents of Chogong, the ancestor god of all shamans, first went through purifying processes such as having their hair cut, paring nails, and eating white rice with salt before they held a Buddhist ritual for offspring, through which Nogadanpungjajimaengwangagissi, the mother of Chogong, was conceived. In summary, Jeju indigenous gods avoid contact with other gods whose realms are separated from theirs. If the rank order between the gods who reside in the same village is determined by their pork diet, a lower god eating pork can cause impurity in the realm of the higher gods, especially the chief god of the village. Geumsangnim eating pork and Baekjuddo abominating pork establish the different conditions of their realms, so they cannot stay in the same realm. However, they decided to get married and be in the same realm, which would obviously cause impurity. Geumsangnim is believed to maintain the pure condition appropriate to the realm of Baekjuddo by performing for himself the purification ritual while simbang reenact the divine purification ritual.

The difference between the pure and the sacred I have tried to articulate the idea of purity in the Jeju indigenous religion with examples from bonpuri and gut. The idea of purity and impurity arises when people distinguish realms in the world. It is the product of human beings’ interpretation of the world and their own place in it. Jeju people believe that the divine realm should be separated from the human realm. Some characteristic features of the human realm cause impurity in the divine realm. In addition, Jeju bonpuri and gut illustrate ways of distinguishing the realms of gods from one another, the conditions of the divine realm that demarcate it from the human realm, the rules that humans must observe in order to approach the divine realm, and the purification rituals that should be performed to correct violations of the rules. The gods of Jeju indigenous religion are without doubt sacred because they are believed to be superior to human beings and have superhuman

94  Separating realms powers that may affect and control human lives. However, it should be noted that separation between humans and deities on the basis of holiness is different from separation on the basis of purity. The separations between the gods in the Jeju indigenous religion clearly demonstrates that the ideas of holiness and purity are based on different concepts. All of those within the realm of the gods are sacred to human beings, but some are impure to other gods. Just as purity and impurity are relative notions that are determined by the state or the condition of each realm, a god who is impure to another god can be pure in his or her own realm. It is wrong to suppose that if a person or thing is sacred, they are therefore pure, or that the sacred is ambivalent or that the sacred/profane distinction and the purity/impurity distinction are identical and interchangeable. Sacred gods are pure when they are in their own place, but they may cause impurity in another god’s realm. Human beings are pure in the human realm if they observe the conditions appropriate to their realm, but they will cause impurity if they contact gods while in the same state. The sacred and the pure are concepts that belong to different aspects of religious experience and belief. The sacred is a category that describes the status of the gods and places and things belonging to the gods in contrast to the profane places of human lives. On the other hand, the impure is a relative concept that designates the state in which the required condition of a realm is violated by the influence of another realm. Jeju beliefs provide a concise example of this distinction: though all the gods of the Jeju indigenous religion are sacred beings in contrast to human beings, gods eating pork are clean in their own realms but are viewed as impure in the realms of gods who do not eat pork. With this observation about Jeju indigenous religion, we can generalize to rectify preexisting academic categories, which J. Z. Smith (2000, 239) regarded as the aim of comparative research. As mentioned in Chapter 1, William Robertson Smith asserted that there are two kinds of taboos. Firstly, there are taboos “that exactly correspond to rules of holiness, protecting the inviolability of idols and sanctuaries, priests and chiefs, and generally of all persons and things pertaining to the gods and their worship.” The second kind includes taboos related to the rules of impurity. “Women after child-birth, men who have touched a dead body and so forth … are separated from human society” and belong to the second kind of taboo. People with the second taboo cannot come into contact with other people or enter the sanctuary. All taboos are inspired by awe of the supernatural…. in most savage societies no sharp line between the two kinds of taboo just indicated, and even in more advanced nations the notions of holiness and uncleanness often touch… the boundary between the two [holiness and uncleanness] is often vague.” (W. R. Smith 2002 [1889], 152–54)

Separating realms 95 In this way, he identified the concept of the sacred with the impure and influenced many subsequent theorists of religion (e.g. Durkheim 2008 [1912], 409–14; Eliade 1996 [1949], 14–15; Douglas 2002 [1966], 8–13). W. R. Smith confused the system of the sacred and the profane with that of the pure and the impure because both systems involve taboos. But the sacred and the impure should not be confused just because both are the objects of taboos. Eliade observed, “the elements of the taboo itself are always the same: certain things or persons, or places belong in some way to a different order of being, and therefore any contact with them will produce an upheaval at the ontological level which might well prove fatal” (Eliade 1996 [1949], 17). Taboo is, as Eliade said, a device that prevents an upheaval or impurity which results from the contact between different orders or realms. Though Eliade then tried to use this observation to demonstrate the ambivalence of the sacred, by doing so he also failed to ­distinguish between the sacred and the pure. It is true that the causes that motivate the activation of taboos sometimes correspond to the rules of the sacred and sometimes to the rules of the impure, as W. R. Smith pointed out. But there is a delicate and remarkable difference between the two kinds of taboos. Taboos related to the sacred can be operated in order to protect a temple, for instance, by preventing impurity that is caused by a person who may pollute the temple by entering it without purification though he is considered pure in the ordinary life. These taboos are motivated to protect the sacred and to prevent the sacred from being polluted. No impure or polluted things or persons are needed to activate these taboos. On the other hand, some other taboos are activated by persons or things that are polluted already. These taboos are supposed to protect the necessary condition of the divine realm or the ordinary human realm by preventing preexisting impurity which has already occurred, for example, by a person who became impure due to the contact with a corpse. They should be activated when there is something impure. In short, while taboos corresponding to Smith’s “rules of holiness” protect holiness, taboos related to Smith’s “rules of impurity” do not protect the impurity, but only correct for its occurrence. The boundary between the two is not vague, contra Smith. While the sacred is protected by taboos, the impure is prevented by taboos. For example, a person who is regarded as pure in ordinary life may cause impurity when he or she enters a shrine. In order to protect the shrine, some taboos may be placed on the reckless entrance of the person. These taboos, which work for protecting the sacred shrine from the impurity produced by the profane person, can be said to correspond to Smith’s “rules of holiness.” On the other hand, another type of the taboo may work to block the pollution that is caused by contact with a corpse. W. R. Smith (2002 [1889], 152–53) observed this taboo “has its parallel in rules of uncleanness.” The purposes of these two kinds of taboos are clearly different. While rules of holiness mainly serve to protect the divine realm by preventing humans from entering the divine realm, most

96  Separating realms rules of uncleanness in Jeju work to prevent the human realm or death from polluting gods. In the myths and rituals of Jeju indigenous religion, two kinds of taboos are especially emphasized. The first kind protects the divine realm by preventing impurity that is produced by human beings entering the divine realm. The second taboo protects one god’s realm from the possible pollution that can be caused by another god’s realm, by preventing the effect of the other’s impurity on the one’s realm.

The realm of death I have focused on the requisite conditions required for the realm of the deities in the Jeju indigenous religion and the rules that its adherents must observe in order to establish and maintain relations with their gods. However, the scope of research should be extended for a more comprehensive understanding of the purity system in Jeju religion. The separation between the realms based on the idea of purity and impurity is not confined to the divine realm and the human realm. Though we cannot clearly see the influence of the impurity of death on living human beings, it is possible to ferret out evidence of efforts to distinguish the realm of death from the living human realm on the basis of purity ideals in the funerary customs of Jeju-do. For example, family members of the dead person should cleanse the impurity from death by eating adzuki gruel which is usually cooked by the family of the dead person’s in-laws. The adzuki of the dead person’s house may be considered polluted because Jeju people often think that food from the house of a dead person is impure. In Jeju-do, most families hosting funerals present the participants with some rice cakes. The participants often cut and throw away small parts of the rice cakes before they bring them home to their families. It is said that they do so in order to remove the impurity of death that has come from the funeral (Hyeon 2009, 179). Another example can be found in the belief that living persons should be protected from the influence of the dead person. On the night of the funeral, a gwiyangpuri gut is performed in order to send away the dead spirit to the other world. The house should be protected from the influence of death by doing away completely with the dead person. In Jeju-do, the effect of the impurity of death on the living human realm is not as serious as in many other cultures where a person or a thing polluted by the contact with the realm of death is admitted neither to the divine realm nor to the human realm (W. R. Smith 2002 [1889], 152–54; see also Chapter 2 above). However, indigenous Jeju people are at least conscious of the realm of death, since they are concerned about preventing people who are polluted by death from influencing the divine realm. Though Jeju people’s wariness of the realm of the death now seems to have attenuated, research on the characteristics of the realm of the death in Jeju people’s ­cosmology should be developed further. Jeju deities eating pork may be related to death.

Separating realms 97 As seen above, pork is allowed in the rituals for Siwang and Chasa, deities of the underworld. This research would help us more clearly understand not only the realm of death but also the impurity of pork. More extensive data needs to be gathered on purity in the Jeju religion. Above all, we should inquire into various domestic rituals that used to be conducted in most Jeju households, especially rites of passage that were conducted throughout the lives of Jeju people. In addition, we should pay attention to sources on customs and living conditions before the rapid modernization that began in the 1970s, such as Hyeon’s recollections of village servants (Hyeon 2009, 135, 150). This research would provide the basis for a more comprehensive analysis of the purity beliefs and practices of the Jeju indigenous religion. I have written enough here, however, to show that the pollution beliefs and purification practices of the indigenous people of Jeju-do reflect their understanding of cosmological realms. Crossing the boundaries between the divine and human realms, between different divine realms, or between life and death generate pollution that must be purified. Like in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures (Chapter 2), fear of pollution shapes the residences and diets of Jeju people and their beliefs about the relationships among the gods and between the gods and themselves. Interviews with shamans also expose disagreements, especially around gender-specific impurities, but also a tendency to privilege orthopraxis over doctrinal disputes. Ethnographic interviews, however, can only catch hints of how and why these beliefs and practices have changed over time. Addressing these issues requires extensive investigation of a textual tradition over a long period of time, which is the subject of Chapter 4.

Notes 1 This chapter is an expanded and more developed version of a work that was published in the Korean language as Yoo 2013. 2 The Korean word “do” means both “province” and “island” without any change in pronunciation; therefore “Jeju-do” refers to Jeju Island as well as Jeju Province. When the word Jeju-do is used to designate Jeju Province, it includes the main island, namely Jeju Island, and 63 smaller nearby islands of which eight are inhabited. 3 I referred to recorded bonpuri from Hyeon 2005; Kim, Hyeon, and Kang 2006; Hyeon 2007; IPKS 2009; and IPKS 2010. I also consulted summarized bonpuri stories by Mun 2008 and Heo 2011. 4 Simbang Seo used the Korean word galeum for separation, which can mean both “separating realms” and sometimes “covering things belonging to the other realm.” 5 See note 8 below. 6 I interviewed him in the Buckchon village fishing cooperative building, Jocheon town, Jeju, on March 17, 2011, right before the annual village gut for a big haul of fish. 7 The gods seemed to be bothered only by the sight of dogs. In Jeju and other parts of Korea, dogs were fed leftovers or sometimes human excrement several decades ago. Though pigs were fed similarly, pigs were raised for food,

98  Separating realms

8

9

10

11

while dogs were raised to have them help keep house or hunt. Most simbang agree that they must not eat dog meat because it disgusts the gods. The myth articulates that people on horses would make the gods angry. In pre-modern Korea, people had to dismount from horses when they approached shrines. People on horses were thought to blaspheme the gods. The names of simbang and the dates I interviewed them are as follows: Yunsu Kim, Yongok Yi, Yeongcheol Kim, April 14, 2011; Taejin Jeong, Sunan Go, Yeonhui Kim, June 8, 2011; Sunsil Seo, Gongcheol Jeong, October 7, 2011. I also interviewed Daewon Kang on July 1, 2010. Since then, I have kept in touch and discussed purity ideas and practices in Jeju with these simbang. I have also observed and videorecorded more than a few Jeju rituals, not only community rituals like Yeongdeunggut, which are fertility rites mostly for marine products, but also family rituals such as Seongju puri, which are rites conducted after building houses, and neokdeurim, which are rituals performed to reintegrate the human soul by summoning its departed portion and are used mostly to heal illnesses. After I observed and video-recorded the whole process of neokdeurim in Jeju on October 20, 2017, I interviewed three simbang and one shamanic assistant, Yeongcheol Kim, Yeon-hui Kim, Sun-deok Sin, and Do-an Kim, about purity matters related to non-shaman lay people and family rituals. “Bulddojosang” and “Chaekbuljosang,” mentioned by simbang Yunsu Kim, are ancestral gods (josang means ancestor) who are also called “Irwoljosang.” Hyeon explains that Irwoljosang are gods who are ancestors of specific families and are thought to have begun specialized professions (Hyeon 2005, 246–47). Among Irwoljosang are Hongbuirwol, the ancestor who took up a public office, Chaekbulirwol, the ancestor who practiced divination and medicine, Sansinirwol, the ancestor who was a hunter, and Buldoirwol, the ancestor who was a midwife. On the other hand, families who have engaged in farming or fishing for generations do not have Irwoljosang. It is believed that Irwoljosang require stricter purity conditions than other ancestral gods. Simbang Yunsu Kim said families serving an Irwoljosang have to observe a more thorough taboo on pork. Simbang Gongcheol Jeong said that this god is a pure ancestor and that menstruating women cannot take part in the “irwolmaji” ritual that is performed to receive and welcome this god. Deeper research should be conducted on the characteristics of Irwoljosang in terms of purity matters. Considering the Buddhist characteristics that appear in gut of “bulddomaji,” welcoming the Bulddojosang, and irwolmaji, welcoming the Irwoljosang, we can infer that the Buddhist idea of purity has influenced the characteristics of these gods. Several procedures of “Welcoming Bulddo” and of “Welcoming Irwol” are almost the same except for the names of the gods. In addition, both rituals include a procedure in which simbang recite as if they were invoking the favor of Buddha in a Buddhist temple. On ­bulddomaji and irwolmaji, see Hyeon 2007, 92–122, 123–25. This brief summary is based on the recitation of the late Simbang Sain An, which Hyeon (2005, 70) and many other scholars recognize as a kind of standard version. According to the version recited by Simbang Changbo Yang, a strong blast of wind blew when Hallakgungi took out some blood and sprinkled it over the flower garden in the western heaven (IPKS 2010, 149). For the songs that simbang recite during the saedarim, see Hyeon 2007 [1980], 53–58.

4

Interpreting realms Pollution and cosmology in the history of biblical rhetoric James W. Watts

The preceding chapters have compared pollution fears and purification practices in ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures and provided an ethnographic description of them in the contemporary shamanic religion of Jeju Island. Chapters 2 and 3 documented pervasive concerns about pollution generated by humans crossing into divine realms and by the varying purity requirements of different divine realms. They also documented disagreements between cultures and between experts within a given culture due to their social positions and ideological commitments. Neither comparative ancient history nor contemporary ethnography could generate the sources to describe the internal (emic) cultural logic of purity beliefs across long spans of history. That task requires analyzing the changing beliefs and practices around the interpretation and ritual reception of a single textual tradition across thousands of years. So I turn now to a cultural history of the Bible’s most systematic description of purification practices in Leviticus 11–15 and the reception of these chapters in the ­commentaries and rituals of Jewish and Christian communities from antiquity to the ­present day. In Chapter 2, we occasionally mentioned purity and pollution ideas in the Bible when they exhibit similarities to conceptions in other ancient ­cultures, as they frequently do. We omitted, however, the most thorough and important biblical discussion of the subject in Leviticus 11–15. There were two reasons for that omission. First, historians of ancient cultures regularly observe that neither Egypt nor Greece nor Mesopotamia left us ­anything comparable to the systematic purity rules of Leviticus. The contrast is especially strong in the case of the dietary rules of Leviticus 11 (which are partially reproduced in Deuteronomy 14). Leviticus 11 attempts to provide criteria and examples for classifying all animals as either clean or unclean, and animal corpses as either edible or polluting to touch. These rules are far more comprehensive and systematic than any other diet rules that have survived from ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. The ­pollution and purification rules of Leviticus, then, engage in systematic thinking about pollution to an unusual degree.

100  Interpreting realms Second, the scripturalization of Leviticus for Jews and Christians allowed the pollution rules of Leviticus to wield unprecedented influence over subsequent purity beliefs and practices. That influence has by no means been straightforward. The rules have repeatedly been subjected to deep and radical reinterpretation, and have frequently been set aside by changing ­theologies and evolving cultures. Yet even then, their influence tends to reappear when Jews and Christians debate issues involving food, sex, gender, religious hierarchies, and ethnic differences. Leviticus 11–15 therefore brings together the kinds of sources about purity and pollution treated separated in the previous two chapters of this book. While Chapter 2 surveyed historical information about ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures and Chapter 3 explored ethnographic evidence from contemporary communities on Jeju-do, this chapter engages an ancient text that continues to serve as scripture for almost three billion people alive today. This book’s combination of ethnographic and historical case studies here becomes more than a heuristic exercise. A combination of contemporary and historical sources is necessary to understand the Bible’s influences on pollution beliefs and practices today. The biblical context of these regulations, however, complicates the relationship between pollution and purification on the one hand and cosmological beliefs on the other. The role of purification rituals in maintaining and crossing realms is relatively obvious when inscriptions on temple gates mandate purification before entry (Chapter 2) or when a shaman dictates requirements for admission to a ritual (Chapter 3). That relationship is not so obvious in a text like Leviticus that requires its readers to purify themselves despite the fact that (a) the sanctuary it describes, the tabernacle, ceased to exist long before Leviticus was written, (b) its successor temples at the time of its composition in the first millennium B.C.E. competed with each other and rival cults, and (c) neither Jews nor Christians have maintained temples or practiced temple rituals since 70 C.E. The kinds of sacred sites that anchor purity cosmologies in the ancient Near East and in contemporary Jeju have not reinforced biblical purity rules for nearly two thousand years, yet these rules continue to be promulgated as Jewish and Christian scripture. So interpreting Leviticus 11–15 requires setting our theory of pure cosmological realms within the more complicated context of the rhetoric of ritual texts and the history of the Bible’s religious interpretation and cultural use. Examination of that history will be illuminated by taking rhetorical theory into account.

The rhetoric of pollution: persuasive pathos and disgust Purity and pollution, whatever else they may be, are obviously categories used for persuasion. The dichotomies, clean/dirty and pure/polluted, are regularly invoked for persuasion. Parents stop children from putting

Interpreting realms 101 “dirty” things in their mouths. Governments require industries to sell only “clean” food and water. Religions exhort their followers to stay “pure.” The regular use of pollution language for persuasion recommends ­adding rhetorical analysis to the mix of methods we are applying to our thesis. Rhetoric is the study of the means and ends of persuasion, as Aristotle defined it already in the fourth century B.C.E.: “The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art [of rhetoric]” (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1354a, tr. McKeon 1941, 1325; for a modern defense of the same position, see Burke 1950, 49–55, 61–62). Invoking purity and pollution for persuasion is an example of rhetorical pathos, by which speakers and writers play on their audiences’ feelings of disgust. However, pollution language has not been a typical subject of rhetorical analysis (exception: Lennon 2014, 167–86), nor have theories of purity given much attention to rhetorical theory. Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1358b) organized his analysis of rhetoric around three typical Athenian settings for public speeches—the political assembly, the legal trial, and the funeral—which generated three different kinds of persuasive speeches: deliberative speeches, judicial speeches, and epideictic speeches. Applying rhetorical theory to the pollution language in Leviticus requires expanding rhetoric’s scope to include religious institutions and settings. Aristotle’s three-fold classification of persuasive speeches has shaped much of subsequent rhetorical theory. It is obvious that Aristotle did not attempt to describe the full range of persuasive speech, but limited himself to three high-profile and prestigious occasions for public speaking. Even so, he omitted a public arena that was no less prominent in Athens as in other ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, namely, the setting of the temple. The reasons for this omission may have included the ambiguous attitude towards religion in Athenian intellectual culture of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. (see Chapter 2). Greek temples, however, continued to operate and prosper throughout the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods of Greek culture, despite the fact that drama and philosophy reflected the intelligentsia’s discomfort with some religious ideas and practices. Religious rhetoric also continued to invoke purity and pollution and became, if anything, more urgent as time went on. For example, Jack Lennon analyzed a speech by Cicero in the mid-first-century B.C.E. to show “the intellectual currency of pollution” in the late Roman Republic, and “how attitudes towards pollution were shaped, as much as revealed, within this ongoing discourse” (Lennon 2014, 187). Aristotle’s division of rhetoric begins specifically from the position of the audience—“It is the hearer that determines the speech’s end and object” (Rhetoric, 1358b)—either as jury deciding past events, political assembly deciding future events, or as observers judging the speaker’s skill. Adding the religious sphere focuses rhetorical attention on listeners who are put in the position of judging their own piety, morality, and/or purity by

102  Interpreting realms anticipating a supernatural verdict on themselves. By including the religious sphere within descriptions of ancient rhetoric, we introduce into rhetorical theory not only new settings for public oratory but also a range of religious concepts employed for persuasion (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1359a). When we extend Aristotle’s three public spheres to include the arena of religion, rhetoric must then take into account another spatial and social location for public speech, the temple and other religious associations, and another conceptual complex of special topoi that were used both inside and outside temples to shape people’s ideas and behavior. The rhetorical topoi special to religion need not include the whole range of theological and mystical speculation. Aristotle limited the subjects of rhetorical topoi to “matters about which people deliberate; matters, namely, that ultimately depend on ourselves, and which we have it in our power to set going,” such as political issues and legal conflicts. He divided topoi into common ones, found in all forms of argumentation, and special topoi that are particular to each rhetorical situation. The topoi of justice and injustice are special to juridical speeches, virtue and vice are special to epideictic speeches, and the good, the unworthy, the advantageous and the disadvantageous are the special topoi for deliberative speeches (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1362a, 1366a, 1373b). Purification practices that called for distinguishing purity from pollution were prominent religious matters that lay under the control of individuals in all ancient cultures. Ancient temple rhetoric urgently exhorted people to preserve the temple’s purity by engaging in a variety of purification procedures. Mandates to preserve purity extended to a wider variety of settings (such as homes) and were more demanding for some classes of people (such as priests) than for others. Purity and pollution therefore qualify as topoi in the sphere of religious rhetoric, which here means temple rhetoric and its extensions into daily life. As Chapter 2 showed, all well-documented ancient cultures attest to pervasive concerns for preserving purity and cleansing pollution, especially from temples and from anything or anybody who entered those temples. Purity beliefs and purification practices involved cosmologies that described gods and humans as inhabiting different realms. Death was ­usually regarded as a third realm. Crossing into a different realm endangered those who did not meet the requisite conditions of that realm. Unfortunately, we do not have any descriptions of how pollution rhetoric actually affected ancient audiences. We know what behaviors texts tried to enforce, but we cannot know how often they succeeded. Our best sources for ancient pollution rhetoric are found in ritual instructions, which often took the form of temple inscriptions that directly addressed their audiences with demands to alter their behavior to maintain the purity of the temple (see Chapter 2). Like the roughly contemporary biblical rules in Leviticus but unlike older Near Eastern ritual instructions, Greek inscriptions containing so-called sacred laws from the sixth to the third centuries B.C.E.

Interpreting realms 103 addressed lay worshippers more than priestly specialists (Lupu 2005; Robertson 2013). Greek legal rhetoric also occasionally invoked pollution for persuasion. For example, a speech by Demosthenes in the fourth ­century challenged his opponent’s standing because of his sexual history, and then advocated a more universal rule: In my opinion, the man who enters temples, touches lustral water and sacred baskets, and intends to take responsibility for looking after the gods, should not only keep himself pure for a prescribed number of days, but keep his entire life pure from the sort of activities that this man has practiced during his entire life. (Demosthenes 22.78, tr. Harris 2008)1 While such instructions and speeches tell us what influence their writers and sponsors hoped for, they do not describe their actual rhetorical effects. Stories provide a little more information about how ancient pollution rhetoric could be used. Though many ancient narratives are no doubt ­fictional, they at least provide descriptions of presumably plausible situations that often involve issues of purity and pollution. Stories from various Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures use fear of pollution to invoke pathos. For example, the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh (seventh century B.C.E.) narrates a foreboding dream to provide a conventional description of death as inevitable pollution in the underworld. … to the House where those who dwell do without light, where dirt is their drink, their food is of clay, … and upon the door and bolt lies dust. (Gilgamesh, tablet vii, tr. Kovacs 1989) The eighth-century Piye Stela shows the Nubian king Piye turning the tables on Egyptian nobles. He banned them from his court for being polluted by eating fish. Now the kings and counts of Lower Egypt … could not enter the palace because they were uncircumcised and were eaters of fish, which is an abomination to the palace. But King Namart entered the palace because he was clean and did not eat fish. The three stood there while the one entered the palace. (Piye Stela, lines 149–153; tr. Lichtheim 1980, 3:80) Characters in some stories use other people’s fear of pollution to gain advantage. In Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides (fifth century B.C.E.), Iphigenia claims to be taking a cult statue of Artemis to the sea to be purified when she is in fact stealing it (lines 1157–1202). In the biblical stories about Jacob, his wife Rachel pretends to be menstruating to conceal the

104  Interpreting realms fact that she has stolen her father’s household gods and is sitting on them (Genesis 31:34–35). Myths can also depict gods manipulating pollution concerns to their own advantage (see Chapter 2 on sexual pollution among the Babylonian gods). I cite these examples simply to show that ancient writers knew how to use pollution fears to advance their plots and engage their audiences, sometimes humorously. Stories like these show that pollution fears and purification practices shaped social interactions far outside the spheres of temples and their priests. These stories provide evidence that purity and pollution were common topoi of ancient persuasive rhetoric and affected many people’s behavior. Furthermore, Chapter 2 pointed out that many cultures around the Mediterranean show evidence of intensifying concerns for purity in the later first millennium B.C.E. What are the implications of treating purity and pollution as rhetorical topoi in the Aristotelian sense? Categorizing purity and pollution in this way is important to the study of religions because it emphasizes that categories of pure and polluted do not exist per se. Historical studies tend to depict purity beliefs and purification practices as static components of cultural belief systems. They are in fact always rhetorically ascribed in order to shape human behavior. They should therefore be treated as dynamic elements in discursive struggles. Speakers and writers use purity to define status and identity for themselves and to try to impose them on others. Considering purity and pollution as rhetorical topoi reveals the persuasive influence of priests and other elites on people’s daily behavior (Kazen 2014, 71–72). Purity rhetoric extended the persuasive effects of temple rhetoric into private life. It did so by standardizing and, in cases of severe pollution, centralizing the behavior of “cleansing” or purification. Throughout ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, purification regimens brought to bear a limited range of practices to resolve a variety of polluting conditions. For example, in Israel, both purification and forgiveness could be achieved by the same ritual offering of a sheep or a goat, the “sin ­offering” (Leviticus 4–5, 11–16). The high priest must slaughter the sin offering goat that is for the ­people. … So he will mitigate the Holy Space from the pollutions of the children of Israel and from their transgressions, that is, all their sins. Thus he must do for the tent of meeting that tabernacles with them in the midst of their pollutions. (Leviticus 16:15–16) Similarly, among the Hittites, Gernot Wilhelm (1999, 198) observed that: “Contagion… which through cleansing rites can be removed is therefore something which could be due to multiple causes but which is subject to the same treatment, in so far as in every case it involves removal.”2

Interpreting realms 105 The rhetoric of purity and pollution served to standardize purification procedures inside and outside temples. Texts that promote standardized practices portray themselves as didactically detached. Yet standardizing procedures enhance social control and centralize power in the people responsible for promulgating the texts (Rhyder 2019, 10; also Bourdieu 1991; Elchardus 2011, 19). Comparative studies of purity and pollution rhetoric have long noted purity’s close association with social hierarchy (see our discussion of Mary Douglas’s theories in Chapter 1). This rhetoric provided powerful leverage for centralizing authority in the civic and religious elites in many ancient cultures. It also provided ammunition in struggles between elite groups. The rules in Leviticus 13–14 for diagnosis and quarantine of suspected infestations in people, cloth, and buildings extended the priests’ authority outside the ­temple into people’s daily lives and possessions. Stories about skin infestations elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible invariably focus on power struggles. The stories show how this diagnostic power could be deployed against prophets, military leaders, and even kings (Numbers 12:10; 2 Kings 5:3–7, 27; 2 Chronicles 26:19). Purification practices internalize standardized distinctions between polluted and pure so that they feel natural and innate. In this way, purity and pollution rhetoric lays foundations in personal behavior for cosmological beliefs that divide the world between humans and gods, between civilization and wilderness, and between life and death (as we have seen in Chapters 2 and 3). People enact cosmology in their daily experiences when they avoid crossing these boundaries for fear of pollution and when they purify themselves after unavoidable pollution. So cosmology, which is fundamental to much theological s­ peculation, can be employed for more immediate persuasive concerns by using it to identify pollution. The use of cosmologies in purity beliefs and purification practices is deeply rhetorical. Cosmological belief systems become culturally pervasive by undergirding pollution rhetoric to ­p ­ersuade people to behave in certain ways and to evaluate their actions based on purity ideals. The rhetoric of purity and pollution therefore has potent political as well as religious implications, whether it is employed to stratify human society on a purity scale, as in the Indian caste system, or is deployed as a universal ideal for everyone to emulate, as in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures and among the indigenous people of Jeju. Even as a universal ideal, purity and pollution rhetoric privileges and entrenches society’s elite in cosmological distinctions by differentiating between those willing and able to maintain purity and carry out purification rituals, and those who will not or cannot do so. That has certainly been true of the Bible’s rhetoric about purity and pollution. This chapter, after briefly describing the most concentrated and systematic collection of purification rules in Leviticus 11–15, progresses

106  Interpreting realms chronologically from antiquity to the present. We will see that, from the beginning of the interpretive record and in the text of Leviticus itself, cosmology was explicitly invoked to explain and motivate purity rules. We will also find that, throughout this interpretive history, efforts to understand the meaning of these rules have struggled to control their implications for ritual practice. This chapter will chart how the interpretation of purity and pollution has bedeviled interpreters of the Bible from antiquity to the present day. At the same time, the metaphors around purity and pollution continued to influence the bodily practices of Jews and Christians and their rhetoric about bodies more directly than commentators’ interpretations would lead us to expect.

The rhetoric of pollution and cosmology in Leviticus Leviticus 11–15 contains the most systematic set of purification regulations that have survived from the ancient world. Its presentation standardizes Jewish purification practices in order to centralize the authority of the temple priests over people’s behavior in the temple and also at home (Watts 2013b; Rhyder 2019). Yet its rhetoric has continued to influence people’s practices and beliefs thousands of years after the temples disappeared and the priests lost their religious influence. These five biblical chapters are organized topically. Leviticus 11 governs diet: it contains both criteria and long lists of examples of polluted animals that should not be eaten and animal carcasses that convey pollution to the touch (which are not always the same animals). The short chapter, Leviticus 12, addresses childbirth by dictating a schedule for presenting purification offerings after the birth of a child. Leviticus 13–14 discusses infestations (tsaraat) of skin at much greater length, and also includes infestations of cloth and buildings. Chapter 13 describes the criteria for priests to diagnose infestations. Chapter 14 then dictates the purification rituals by which cured and purified people can be readmitted to Israel’s community. Leviticus 15 addresses seminal ejaculations and vaginal bleeding. It exhorts listeners to avoid touching people and things polluted by genital emissions, and it describes rituals for purifying pollutions due to contact with common and uncommon genital emissions. Leviticus 11 explicitly mentions cosmology while distinguishing pure and polluted meats. The chapter categorizes animals according to the three realms of the natural world—the sky, the water, and the land—that appear in the description of world creation in Genesis 1. These subdivisions of the created world are not, however, distinguished by pollution, since some animals in each realm are pure for eating while others in the same realm are not. Instead, each animal realm has its own requisite conditions to which pure animals conform and polluted ones do not, as Mary Douglas (2002 [1966], 69) pointed out that

Interpreting realms 107 Leviticus takes up this scheme and allots to each element its proper kind of animal life. In the firmament two-legged fowls fly with wings. In the water scaly fish swim with fins. On the earth four-legged animals hop, jump or walk. Any class of creatures which is not equipped for the right kind of locomotion in its element is contrary to holiness. The animals which do not conform to the requisite conditions of their own realm (e.g. sea creatures that do not swim with fins) or which seem to ignore the differences between two realms and cross between them (e.g. crawling crustaceans in the sea and on land) are polluted. The carcasses of polluted animals convey contagious pollution. However, the system is modified by practical considerations: because it is nearly impossible to avoid contact with dead insects or keep dead shellfish out of water supplies, the chapter creates a separate category, sheqets “nauseating,” for animals that may not be eaten but whose carcasses do not pollute on contact (Leviticus 11:11–23, 41–43). Leviticus 11 does not employ these divisions of the natural world just for their own sake. These purity regulations are the most systematic and comprehensive to emerge from ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Leviticus therefore does not just categorize likely food. It attempts to provide criteria and lists of examples that can be applied to any animal that an Israelite might encounter. Clean and edible quadrupeds must have a split hoof and regurgitate cud (verse 3). Clean and edible insects must have “two legs bigger than the rest with which to hop on the ground” (verse 21). The chapter’s systematic presentation encourages listeners and readers to reason deductively from these criteria and inductively from its lists of examples. (Deduction and induction are the two major modes by which didactic rhetoric becomes persuasive, as Aristotle, Rhetoric 1356, observed only a century or two after Leviticus was probably written). The chapter’s conclusion is explicit that its readers should reason about polluting animals for themselves: This is the law of the quadruped, the flyer, and all living beings that crawl in the water and all beings that swarm on the ground to separate the polluted from the pure and edible animals from animals that you must not eat (verses 46–47). Lists of clean animals and polluted or nauseating animals in each of the different realms of nature provide examples which, together with the criteria, should allow Israelites to determine for themselves what they may and may not eat. The end of Leviticus 15 exhorts listeners and readers to maintain bodily purity for a different reason: “You must warn the Israelites away from their pollution, so they don’t die from their pollution by polluting my tabernacle which is among them” (Leviticus 15:31). Interpreters therefore frequently

108  Interpreting realms assume that common pollutions presented a barrier only to entering the precincts of the temple. So long as people polluted by touching animal carcasses or ejaculations of semen or their menstrual periods stayed away from holy spaces and things, they were free to go about their lives normally. Therefore, many biblical scholars attribute all of Israel’s purity rules to the attempt to distinguish the divine realm from the human realm of everyday life (Frymer-Kensky 1983, 404; Milgrom 1991, 256–59, 616–17, 731–33; Maccoby 1999, 38, 195; Klawans 2000, 10, 23–24; Trevaskis 2011, 93–101). Apart from this one verse, however, the tabernacle plays no role in the pollution regulations, except as the place to make offerings to complete purification from the more severe pollutions (Leviticus 12:6; 14:11; 15:14, 29). The rules for skin infestations require that infested people be isolated from the entire camp (Leviticus 13:46). They must live apart so as not to come into contact with the rest of the community, and not just the sanctuary. The diet rules say nothing about the sanctuary, but conclude with an exhortation to imitate God’s holiness by observing these rules: Do not nauseate yourselves with any swarming swarmer. Do not eat them and pollute yourselves with them, for I am YHWH your God. You must make yourselves holy and be holy, because I am holy. Do not pollute yourselves with any swarmer that scrambles on the ground, for I am YHWH who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be God for you. You are holy because I am holy. (Leviticus 11:43–45) This exhortation to maintain holiness reappears later in Leviticus with the added observation that Israel has been separated from other nations to be holy like God. Israel should maintain its holiness by eating only clean meats: I am YHWH your God who separated you from the nations. You must separate pure quadrupeds from the polluted, and polluted flyers from the pure, so you do not nauseate yourselves with quadrupeds, flyers and everything with which the ground crawls that I have separated as polluted for you. You are holy to me because I, YHWH, am holy. I have separated you from the peoples to be mine. (Leviticus 20:24–26) In Israel, then, concern to maintain purity should extend beyond the priesthood and involves more than just protecting the temple’s precincts (Lemos 2013, 289). These verses give explicit voice to the idea that Israel has been incorporated into the divine realm and must therefore observe the requisite condition of that realm, which is holiness. Many commentators have noticed that

Interpreting realms 109 Israel’s diet resembles that of Israel’s God, at least as revealed by the kinds of meat that may be offered on the sanctuary altar. Like YHWH, Israel may consume cattle, sheep, goats, and two species of birds (pigeons and land fowl like chickens and pheasants). Though wild quadrupeds like deer seem to be precluded from God’s altar, Israelites may also eat wild game that meets the criteria in Leviticus 11 and is not excluded by its lists of polluted and nauseating animals. While the precincts of the tabernacle/temple designate the divine realm in one way, in another way the divine realm incorporates all of Israel’s people and territory. They must therefore conform to its requisite condition, holiness, for which purity is also required. Many interpreters regard the realm of death as playing a decisive role in shaping Israel’s pollution fears (e.g. Feldman 1977; Wenham 1979, 218; Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 179; Milgrom 1991, 819, 1002–1003; Hieke 2013, 446). They think that the Israelites regarded genital emissions such as menstrual and lochial bleeding, semen, and genital mucus secretions as losses of life essence. They argue that skin infestations, in particular, raised fears of death by resembling the decomposition of corpses. Human deaths, however, are not mentioned in Leviticus 11–15, except at the end as a threat against those who bring pollution into the sanctuary (15:31). Leviticus 11 focuses on the threat of contagious pollution posed by animal carcasses, but never suggests that they represent death symbolically. Pollution from the realm of death appears more obviously in other parts of the books of Leviticus and in Numbers. Priests must minimize or avoid attending funerals lest they become polluted by corpses (Leviticus 21). Lay people may take special purity vows to become Nazirites, in which case they must also avoid the pollution of funerals (Numbers 6:6–12). People polluted by contact with human corpses are excluded from Passover celebrations (Numbers 9:6–13). The blood of murder victims pollutes the ground (Numbers 35:33). Numbers 19 presents elaborate directions for producing a potion made of water and ashes to purify people from corpse pollution. Death pollution is not mentioned in such overt ways in Leviticus 11–15. So this apparently systematic presentation of pollution practices proves to be incomplete: it does not describe the full range of pollution rituals or concerns in biblical literature, even in priestly literature, much less all the purification rituals that were probably practiced in ancient Israelite culture. Leviticus 11–15 has been shaped to give the appearance of a more comprehensive and systematic discussion of purity and pollution than it actually presents. Systematic categorization here functions rhetorically to impress listeners and readers of the text’s authority (Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 177–94; Nihan 2007, 325; Feinstein 2014, 40, 65). It emphasizes the importance of these rules and it models how to think about them, especially in the food rules of Leviticus 11. But it contains many gaps and ambiguities, which in the world of temple ritual simply reinforced the priests’ authority to adjudicate

110  Interpreting realms difficulties (Leviticus 10:10). Subsequent interpreters have struggled to resolve the difficulties—efforts which, despite frustrations, obey the text’s command to engage in thinking about pollution systematically. Interpreters of Leviticus have been very concerned to understand the relationship between ritual purity and morality. That concern has been inherited from the history of interpretation in Judaism and Christianity (see below). But it has also been stimulated by several features of the biblical rhetoric of pollution. First, Leviticus 1–16 prescribes the same rituals, sin offerings and guilt offerings, to mitigate for severe pollution as for moral offenses. Second, Leviticus 17–26 becomes increasingly strident about the polluting effects of moral offenses—a rhetorical equation that echoes through the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic literature (Isaiah 6:5; 24:5; 35:8; 52:1, 11; Ezekiel 36:24–25; also Psalm 51; see Lam 2016, 179–214). The rules for sin and guilt offerings in Leviticus 4-5 provide some evidence for suggesting that, like in other ancient cultures (see Chapter 2), morality was considered a requisite condition of the Israelite human realm. An oath of innocence in YHWH’s name elevated noncompliance from a moral breach that required a relatively inexpensive sin offering into an offense against God that required an expensive guilt offering (Leviticus 6:2–7 [Hebrew 5:20–26]). Mary Douglas observed that oaths have this effect in many cultures. In effect, they appeal the case to a higher court (Douglas 1999, 127–33). In the language of this book, oaths move the case from the human to the divine realm and change the offense from immorality to sacrilege, and so invoke divine enforcement of any offense. Israel’s covenant with YHWH made Israel part of the divine realm. This had the effect of putting all moral violations under divine scrutiny. The deity was expected to be concerned with maintaining more of the conditions of the human realm than in other ancient cultures because the covenant made Israel part of God’s realm. The Hebrew Bible depicts YHWH in the role of a just and merciful ruler who enforces the laws and moral norms of Israelite society (Exodus 34:6–7; see Watts 2018). The identification of Israel’s human realm with the divine realm of YHWH explains why the Pentateuch’s laws and instructions mix moral, legal, and ritual prescriptions that appear as separate genres in other ancient literary cultures (Watts 1999, 99–102, 147). In Israel, as conceived by the biblical writers, the deity assumed the ruler’s role just as the people assumed a priestly role. Exodus depicts God greeting the Israelites at Mount Sinai with these words: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. (Exodus 19:4–6 NRSV)

Interpreting realms 111 Therefore, the Pentateuch’s lists of instructions mix together the genres of law code, moral instruction, and ritual regulation because Israel inhabits the divine realm governed by purity and holiness as well as the human realm governed by morality. The priestly writers spelled out the consequent purity requirements for Israelite daily life as well as for its worship rituals. This cosmological conception of Israel as the people of YHWH was widely shared among the biblical writers. In this biblical context, the diet rules in Leviticus made three innovations. First, they categorized animals cosmologically in the language of the three realms of the natural world (land, air, water) described by the story of world creation in Genesis 1, and defined the sub-category of “swarmers” as small creatures that move between these realms. Second, their systematic presentation invited Israelites to distinguish polluted from pure animals for themselves, and to think about the differences based on criteria and examples. Third, they claimed that observing the diet restrictions is crucial to Israel’s distinctive identity as the people of God. Each of these innovations would influence subsequent interpreters in decisive ways.

The rhetoric of pollution and cosmology in Jewish and Christian cultures Later interpreters of Leviticus internalized its lessons. They thought about cosmology through the lens of purity versus pollution and about pollution through the lens of cosmology. Along the way, they extended cosmological interpretation to more aspects of biblical pollution beliefs than did Leviticus. For example, no explicit cosmology shapes the description of men and women’s polluting genital emissions in Leviticus 12 and 15. However, the close relationship between categories of polluting animals in Leviticus 11 and the creation stories of Genesis 1–3 led interpreters to use the creation stories to interpret genital emissions as well. Thus the book of Jubilees, in the third century B.C.E., explained Leviticus 12’s rules of purification after childbirth on the basis of its elaboration of the time-line of human creation in Genesis 2: In the first week Adam and his wife—the rib—were created, and in the second week he showed her to him. Therefore, a commandment was given to keep (women) in their defilement seven days for a male (child) and for a female two (units) of seven days. (Jubilees 3:8, tr. VanderKam 1989)3 Also in Jubilees’ version of the creation story, the first man entered the Garden of Eden forty days after his creation, while the first woman entered eighty days after her creation. Thus the rules for the blood purification periods after childbirth in Leviticus 12 became a reenactment of this sequence.

112  Interpreting realms The new mother enters the temple forty days after the birth of boy in imitation of Adam, or eighty days after the birth of a girl in imitation of Eve (Ego 2013, 486). The story of the first couple’s exclusion from Eden in Genesis 3 also resonated cosmologically for later interpreters, who often placed most of the blame on Eve. In the second century B.C.E., Jesus ben Sira pronounced her responsibility for bringing death into the world: “Sin began with a woman, and because of her all of us die” (Sira 25:24 CEB). An early midrash drew the connection between this belief and the menstrual purity regulations in Leviticus 15. It argued that women have the “religious duty involving menstruation” because Eve’s sin “spilled the first man’s blood” (Genesis Rabbah 1, 17:7r; Midrash Tanhumah 5:17; see further in Weissler 1992, 103–106). So menstrual bleeding symbolizes the cosmological fact that a woman brought the realm of death into human experience. Some Jewish women, however, internalize the menstrual connection to Eve by focusing instead on the cosmological distinction that separates Israel as the people of God from other nations. They regard going to a ritual bath (a mikveh) after their menstrual periods as a woman’s distinctive way of enacting her Jewish identity. After interviewing women in Israeli mikvehs, Varda PolakSahm (2009, 208) summarized their attitudes in these words: “We are perpetuating the chain of Jewish women that began with Eve, the first woman, and continued through the four Matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.” Christian interpreters followed the Apostle Paul in locating the origins of sin and all pollutions in the story of Adam and Eve. Paul described the effects of sin in language reminiscent of corpse pollution: “In the same way that sin entered the world through one person, and death came through sin, so death spread to all human beings with the result that all sinned” (Romans 5:12 CEB). In the early fifth century C.E., the North African bishop, Augustine, pointed to sexual intercourse as the mechanism that transmits original sin and its deadly punishment like an infectious disease (Augustine, City of God, XIV 16; Augustine, Of Sin and Merit, I 9; see Burrus 2004, 513). Other Christian authors followed ben Sira in blaming Eve especially for bringing death to humans. Purity became increasingly tied to the ideals of chastity and virginity, so that sexual intercourse, and especially transgressive sex, became the ultimate form of pollution (Nie 2000, 250). Menstruation became a symbol of sin in many Christian commentaries well into the modern era (O’Grady 2003, 16). Modernity and successive waves of feminist movements have now undermined most menstrual taboos, but “purity” remains closely associated with chastity in contemporary Christian imaginations (Moslener 2015; Klein 2018). The reduction of purity to sex was encouraged in antiquity by the widespread adoption of a dualistic cosmological scale of infinite gradations

Interpreting realms 113 between the grossly physical body and the immaterial spirit (Martin 1995, 10, 15–16, 25; Blidstein 2017, 153, 169). This cosmology could supplement or replace that of Genesis even in descriptions of the pure and polluted animals of Leviticus 11. For example, already in the third century B.C.E., the Letter of Aristeas (lines 142–48) depicted the various animals as models of moral or immoral behavior. By the third century C.E., the Christian theologian, Origen, dismissed literal readings of the food laws as absurd and replaced them with moral allegory (Origen, Homilies on Leviticus, 5.5(1), 7.6; Blidstein 2017, 207–11). Pollution remained cosmologically grounded, but the cosmology had changed. In early medieval Gaul, for example, the mind-body continuum became a spiritual explanation for outbreaks of disease and even plagues (Nie 2000). Other Jewish interpreters from the Second Temple period changed the biblical cosmology more gradually. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah showed great concern for the purity of the people of Judea in the fifth-­tofourth centuries (see Rausche 2013). On the fourteenth day of the first month the returned exiles kept the Passover. For both the priests and the Levites had purified themselves; all of them were pure. So they killed the passover lamb for all the returned exiles, for their fellow priests, and for themselves. It was eaten by the people of Israel who had returned from exile, and also by all who had joined them and separated themselves from the pollutions of the nations of the land to worship YHWH, the God of Israel. (Ezra 6:19–21, adapted from NRSV) The sectarian movement that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls extended the holy and pure temple space to the city of Jerusalem as a whole, and also to its own communities (Harrington 2004, 12–18). Archeological excavation of hundreds of ritual baths (mikvehs) in Judea and Galilee from the last two centuries B.C.E. show that practicing purification rituals had become a popular concern far from the temple’s precincts (Miller 2015). They also suggest that people increasingly tried to preserve the purity of all of the traditional land of Israel, a view explicitly stated in extant texts only in rabbinic literature of the following centuries. These developments reflected the increasingly normative influence of Leviticus and the larger Torah on Jewish thought and life, as Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan (2013, 43) noted: In the case of ancient Judaism and Zoroastrianism, specifically, this general process of ‘textualization’ of the religious experience is intimately linked with the intensification of the role played by concepts of purity. Because such concepts are no longer legitimized by reference simply to local customs, but to the sacred texts of the group, they can also take on a new, more general relevance for that group.

114  Interpreting realms The fact that the Torah itself, in Leviticus 11, linked purity beliefs to creation cosmology provided ample warrant for later thinkers to interpret purity through cosmology and cosmology through purity, as Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 221) observed: Given the close correspondence between creation and classification in the writings of the priests, we might expect any modification in taxonomic theory to involve a corresponding change in cosmogony. … Such a symbolic disruption is at work in the writings of the early rabbis. Joseph M. Baumgarten (2006) described the evidence for rabbinic cosmological speculation about one particular piece of furniture in the temple, the menorah, which was first described in the account of building the tabernacle in Exodus 25:31–40. The seven branches of this lampstand suggested, according to the midrash, that the menorah “represents the sun and the moon. Its seven lights represent the seven planets which serve the world.”4 As a result, the priestly party of the Sadducees regarded the menorah as immune from pollution, because of its celestial nature (Tosefta Hagigah 3, 35). In later medieval and early modern Judaism, the popularity of mystical traditions (kabbalah) focused attention again on biblical descriptions of the tabernacle and the temple as models for the experience of the presence of God. Sharon Faye Koren observed that the temple’s pure and all-male priesthood then provided the model for excluding women from higher levels of mystical experience, unlike in Christianity and Islam in the same periods (Koren 2011, 173). Of course, traditional commentaries also provided other explanations for pollution that did not overtly invoke cosmology. They especially emphasized the moral implications of observing purity rules, as did Philo of Alexandria already at the beginning of the Common Era and still in contemporary commentaries by Jacob Milgrom (1991, 733–35) and Mary Douglas (1999, 124–75). These approaches hold that, in one way or another, practicing purity trains people in moral behavior. However, while intellectual interpreters have always probed the deeper psychology behind immorality, communities of both religious traditions have tended to reduce issues of moral purity to sexual attraction and intercourse. In practice, that has resulted in putting the burden for maintaining purity primarily on women. Greco-Roman writers, including the Apostle Paul, worried about controlling the sexual desires of young women (Martin 1995, 212–28; Blidstein 2017, 150–55). Jewish sources from the ancients to many contemporary rabbis have interpreted the prohibition on sexual intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period as a way of disciplining male sexual desire (b. Niddah 31b; see Fonrobert 2000, 128–59). Both Christian and Jewish cultures have tended to place the burden for maintaining sexual purity primarily on women, exhorting them to dress and behave modestly to avoid inflaming male desire. And though the teachings

Interpreting realms 115 of both traditions maintain that sexual pollution affects both partners, they have produced cultural rhetoric that mostly shames women. This double standard has persisted despite the prevalence of moral theories that treat women and men equally. It points to the ongoing influence of microcosmic distinctions between the sexes. The differences between female and male bodies still function in Jewish and Christian imaginations as a symbolic microcosm that implicitly or explicitly continues to view women as more likely polluted than men, a tendency that clashes in these traditions with attempts at gender neutrality, just as in Leviticus 15 (Ruane 2013, 178, 182).

Criticisms of purity beliefs and pollution practices The end of Chapter 2 documented two historical trends about pollution in the later first millennium B.C.E. On the one hand, there seems to have been increasing concern to practice purification in various Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. These concerns were, at least in part, reactions to the universalizing politics of Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires. On the other hand, Classical Greek philosophy, drama and literature expressed strong criticisms of traditional purity practices and beliefs. These writers extended the requisite condition of the human realm, morality, to the divine realm and conversely challenged the usual purity requirements around deities. At the same time, Greco-Roman medical literature dismissed traditional explanations of disease as demonic invasions in favor of theories of imbalanced internal forces, modeled on the basic cosmological elements of earth, air, fire, and water (Martin 1995, 139–62). Thus both cultural and ideological challenges to purity practices were widespread by the turn of the Common Era. Jews in this period also felt the pressure of political and cultural imperialism, and Second Temple Jewish authors incorporated some Hellenistic philosophical and medical ideas into their interpretations of pollution and purity. For example, Aristotle thought that menstrual blood is the constituent material from which embryos form when semen contributes a soul. Menstrual bleeding therefore represented unsuccessful conception, essentially a corpse. This understanding of reproductive anatomy led to the fear that intercourse during menstruation would make fetuses develop abnormally (Aristotle, Generation of Animals 729a, 737a). Aristotle’s view was echoed by later Roman (e.g. Pliny), Jewish (e.g. Leviticus Rabbah 14:9; Maimonides), and Christian (e.g. Jerome, Thomas Aquinas) thinkers as well as in popular culture (O’Grady 2003, 7–11; Wasserfall 1992, 318). To our knowledge, however, outright rejections of the Torah’s purity standards did not appear in Jewish cultural tradition until the emergence of the Christian movement in the first century C.E. Then Christian aspirations for a universalistic message led to challenging and rejecting the purification practices taught by Leviticus.

116  Interpreting realms The Christian critique paralleled some of the Classical Greek criticisms by, for example, emphasizing morality over purity. It was also supported by another intellectual tendency among some Hellenistic and Roman writers who criticized Jews for separating themselves from other peoples. Greek authors commented on Jewish diet laws, especially pork avoidance, already by the second and first centuries B.C.E. (so Diodorus, perhaps quoting Posidonius; see Schäfer 2009, 66–67). They usually did so while ­making broader cultural comparisons about food taboos in different cultures. For example, they talked as much about the Egyptians’ distinctive dietary preferences, which they exaggerated, as about Jewish food laws (Borgeaud 2013, 269–74).5 Greco-Roman critics, however, also knew about Jewish rhetoric of ethnic separation through diet restrictions. They charged Jews with hatred of other people (misanthropia) because they avoided pollution in general and, especially, from food (Schäfer 2009, 21–22, 67). According to Jewish sources, this evaluation fueled active persecution of Jews under the Seleucid Empire in the early second century B.C.E. Imperial troops required Jews to offer pigs “and other unclean animals” as ­ offerings (1 Maccabees 1:44–48; Josephus, Antiquities xii 235–36). Another source accused Seleucid torturers of tempting faithful Jews to eat pork in order to escape alive (2 Maccabees 6:18, 20; 7:1; see Ego 2013, 477–92). So, before the appearance of Christianity, this history had turned Leviticus’s exhortations for Jews to distinguish themselves by eating differently than other nations into an external marker of ethnic and religious difference. Most readers discern two tendencies in the New Testament’s discussions of purity and pollution. First, the early Christians spiritualized pollution as morality to the point of cancelling most purification rituals and restrictions. The Apostle Paul, in the earliest extant Christian discussion of these issues, proclaimed: “Everything is permitted, but everything isn’t beneficial. … So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, you should do it all for God’s glory” (1 Corinthians 10:23, 31 CEB; cf. 8:1–13). The earliest Christian account of Jesus’s life, the Gospel of Mark, records Jesus proclaiming: “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. … Thus he declared all foods clean. … For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7:15, 19, 21 NRSV). Second, many New Testament texts highlight debates around polluted foods and hand washing to distinguish Jesus and his apostles from other first-century Jewish groups. Mark’s quotation of Jesus about pure foods was introduced by the explanation that “The Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders” (Mark 7:3 NRSV). Modern scholars disagree about whether these tendencies can be traced back to Jesus himself or developed in the later first century C.E., when this literature was written down, and to what degree they were really distinctive to early Christians. For example, in the same volume of essays, Eric Ottenheijm (2000, 129–47) argued that,

Interpreting realms 117 in contrast to Qumran, both Hillelite Pharisees and Jesus emphasized that people’s mental intentions pollute, rather than any physical material itself, while Peter J. Tomson (2000, 84–88) argued that Jesus (Mark 7:1–23) took a more conservative position than Pharisaic halakhah, whereas Peter challenged social separation over pollution (Acts 10:1–29) which was more like Hillel’s position (m. Avot 2:4). What is clear is that the tendency to generalize purity concerns as “Jewish” obscures how much New Testament ideas about this subject, which vary among themselves, were shaped by wide-ranging debates within first-and second-century Judaism (Blidstein 2017, 154–55, 232–34). How did cosmology shape Christian criticisms of “Jewish” purification practices? The New Testament depicts the first generation of Christians emphasizing the common status of all humans before God. The Christian mission aimed to convert “all nations” (Matthew 28:19; Acts 9:15; Galatians 1:16). Paul extended this universalistic rhetoric even to the point of ignoring social distinctions around gender and slavery, at least in theory (Galatians 3:28). Early Christian universalism, however, was shaped by conflicts over diet regulations. In Acts, the Apostle Peter proclaimed that “God shows no particularity, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable” (Acts 10:34–35 adapted from NRSV). Peter gained this realization from a vision about eating animal meat in which God ­proclaimed, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (Acts 10:15 NRSV). As a result, he could accept an invitation to dinner from a non-Jewish Roman. Thus Christian universalism grew out of a critique of Jewish purity practices for dividing the human realm, especially through diet restrictions (Blidstein 2017, 228–29). The cosmological grounds for Christian universalism were drawn explicitly by Paul. He interpreted Genesis 3 as exposing the universal human problem of sin and death, for which faith in Christ, “the second Adam,” provides a universal solution (Romans 5:12–14, 18–19; 1 Corinthians 15:45–49; see Burrus 2004, 511). Indeed, Paul was willing to read this story as a history of the cosmos itself, which is “groaning … in bondage to decay” (Romans 8:21–22). Christian cosmology then became centered on a story of the human realm separated from the divine realm by sin, then reunited with the divine through faith in Christ. This cosmology seemed to leave no room for one ethnic group to claim distinctive religious status on the basis of holiness or purity, an issue that Paul struggled to address in Romans 9–11. Biblical and later Jewish cosmologies of pure realms, however, did not regard Israel as a separate section of the human realm so much as incorporated into the divine realm. This is clear already in Leviticus’s exhortations to imitate God’s holiness. It becomes even clearer in the efforts of Jewish interpreters, summarized above, to extend the boundaries of the Jerusalem temple to the city and then to the whole land—that is, to extend

118  Interpreting realms the footprint of the divine realm on earth. Therefore, attacks on Jewish particularism depended on refusing this cosmology in which Israel was uniquely chosen as God’s people, that is, to inhabit God’s realm. In its place, Greco-Roman and Christian critics misread Jewish claims as a division of the human realm, which they then attacked as misanthropic and elitist. Christian anti-pollution rhetoric still reinforces some anti-Semitic prejudices today (Jenkins 2006, 65–66). This is, of course, a common reason for conflict in many families and religious communities: those who seek a holier way of life are often resented for being arrogant and elitist. However, it is very rare for such resentments to lead to a long history of persecution, as they have in Christian anti-­ Semitism. One possible reason for the persistence of anti-Semitism is its cosmological basis: it denies the cosmological claims about Israel in Exodus and Leviticus and replaces them with a cosmology of universal human sin and a universal offer of salvation. Nevertheless, despite Christians’ universalizing theology and tendency to label concern for pollution as “Judaizing,” there have been repeated revivals of pollution rhetoric in Christian cultures. These persisting concerns about pollution have mostly focused on food, on women and sex, and on foreigners. Regarding early Christianity, Moshe Blidstein (2017, 229) observed that “concerning food and death, polemical interests serving to buttress Christian identity were much more central, while concerning sexuality and baptism, questions of human nature, theology, and ritual theory are paramount.” In early medieval Europe, various Irish, Anglo-Saxon and German Christian communities regarded sexual intercourse, childbirth, and menstruation as polluting. We know this because Roman popes on several occasions wrote letters contesting these practices, which still persisted for many centuries (Meens 2000). Notably, the ritual “churching” of new mothers became common, at least in Greek Orthodox communities, only because of increasing fears of blood pollution in the twelfth century and later (Synek 2006, 144–45). Churching new mothers was commonly practiced in Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and many Protestant communities well into the twentieth century. These rituals conveyed unmistakable impressions of purification, even as their theological justifications increasingly emphasized themes of thanksgiving and blessing instead. Churching slowly disappeared from many congregations in the twentieth century when fewer and fewer women were willing to subject themselves to such ritual purification (Roll 2003; Cressy 1997, 197, 199; Caspers 2000). Pollution rhetoric has also flourished in Christian political contexts. The widespread human tendency to demonize enemies has often led Christian nations to justify their wars as “purifying” land from polluted and polluting enemies. In the Middle Ages, for example, popes accused Muslims of polluting sacred sites in the Holy Land to spur the Crusading armies of Europe to invade the Middle East (Cole 1993; Angenendt 2009). In early modern times, colonizers of the Americas denounced intermarriage with

Interpreting realms 119 indigenous peoples as polluting the Europeans (Stevens 1993, 453). Still today, ethnic minorities get vilified as dirty and as polluting a pure nation. This common motif in American racist rhetoric is exemplified by, for example, the Klu Klux Klan’s handbook: “The very blood of the Caucasian race was seriously threatened with an everlasting contamination” (Kloran 1916, 50). Though Christian theologians continue to attack rhetoric about human pollutions as antithetical to Christian universalism, this argument does not seem to have stanched its use within and between communities. An outside observer witnessed staff and students at a prominent American Evangelical Christian college employing purity rhetoric around three subjects (Roose 2009, 24–25, 69). They utilized the polarity of the body’s inside and outside to identify a Christian’s body as a temple that they must guard from pollution, thereby encouraging sexual purity for men as well as women (a view derived from the New Testament: 1 Corinthians 3:16–17; 6:19–20). By contrast, spiritual purity involved defending against unorthodox beliefs. The third kind of purity was institutional purity, by which they cast the college itself as a bastion defending the purity of the nation. National purity is an idea that has recently been popularized among U.S. Christians by “the Patriot’s Prayer,” which concludes with the line, “that old Book that’s from above that keeps a nation clean and blessed” (Central Connection, June 22, 2005, a newsletter of the Central Christian Church in St. Joseph, Missouri, quoted by Parmenter 2009, 154). These examples reveal a stubborn resistance among Christians to universalistic dismissals of purity rhetoric. They especially reflect the continuing cultural relevance of micro-cosmic distinctions at the level of the human body between men and women. They are used at the cosmological midlevel to justify the patriarchal family as the basic unit of society and insider/ outsider distinctions along lines of ethnicity, class, and religious affiliation. The inability of Christian universalism throughout most of the religion’s history to overcome slavery and patriarchalism, and universalism’s continual fueling of anti-Semitism (Watts 2020), shows the ongoing impact of cosmological distinctions that the official theologies of most churches do not recognize. These cosmologies and their social distinctions continue to fuel the rhetoric of pollution.

The rhetoric of pollution and cosmology in modern biblical interpretation Modern biblical scholars invariably begin their discussions of biblical purification by assuming that modern readers find it strange. Despite the continuing role of pollution in parts of Jewish and Christian rhetoric and practice, the prevailing conceptions of cleanliness, contagion, pollution, and disease have been decisively shaped by empirical science. Today, the vocabulary of purity evokes ideas of either hygiene or sterility, while pollution raises images of environmental degradation by the waste products of

120  Interpreting realms human industrial consumption. Lingering notions of religious purity are equated with sexual morality (see above). So, biblical interpreters begin by distinguishing “ritual purity” from any of these concepts. In other words, they describe the cosmology that governed Israel’s pollution ideas as very different from the cosmology of modern science and medicine. Modern ideas about purity and pollution also involve making cosmological distinctions. In that sense, they are like ideas about pollution in Jeju, the ancient Near East, the Bible, and post-biblical Judaism and Christianity. The common observation that modernity has restricted God to heaven or to the individual soul points out the transcendentalizing and internalizing of the realm of religion, that is, a change in religious cosmology. As a result, the divine realm no longer impinges on human society much or vice versa. In place of concern over divine-human interactions, modernity has intensified ancient Hellenistic rhetoric about nature into a cosmological scheme dividing the natural from the human (Martin 1995, 3–6). For modern medical and environmental rhetoric, the distinction between nature and the human realm plays a large role. Much of environmental rhetoric depicts natural conditions as pure and human artifacts and industrial waste as polluting nature. Pollution becomes internalized within human bodies when the subject turns to food and, especially, to health. Food is often described as pure when in its natural state, but impure or diluted when artificially modified. Human bodies may be infected by microscopic organisms common in nature but dangerous to human biology. So, as in the other cultures we have discussed, modern people do not employ their cosmological categories consistently. Nature is not always valued positively but can be threatening as well. Externalized nature is romanticized in comparison with human society, but an ­i nternal/external dichotomy leaves moderns conflicted about nature’s effects in their own bodies. These modern ideas owe their origins to environmental science and microbiology, but they do not necessarily accord with the latest thinking in these scientific fields. Many environmental scientists, for example, contest popular distinctions between natural and human realms and insist that humans must understand themselves as an intrinsic part of the earth’s biosphere (Purdy 2015; Vogel 2015). Nevertheless, the cosmological boundary between natural and human still governs much modern discourse about disease and the environment. The various values attached to these cosmological realms by different people and by the same people in different contexts generate controversy and conflict over policies pursued by governments and corporations and the choices, especially the consumer choices, of individual people. (See further in Chapter 5.) The writers of Leviticus and other biblical books had no conception of microscopic disease vectors or of balanced ecosystems. Nature was, at most, a neutral category in ancient cosmologies that instead emphasized the boundaries between the human and divine, and often between life and

Interpreting realms 121 death. Nor did they think of nature as a whole, as moderns often do, but divided the animals by their generalized habitats (land, sea, air) and the pure and polluted animals within them, and distinguished cultivated land from “the wilderness.” Though biblical writers implicitly depicted the wilderness as a polluted place (e.g. Leviticus 16:22, 26), they also designated closer areas just outside the camp or the town as dumps for polluted carcasses and materials (e.g. Leviticus 14:45). Only later interpreters tried to extend pure territory to a whole city or country (see above). Biblical scholarship has therefore rightly emphasized the very different cosmology behind the purification rules of Leviticus. The divine-human distinction was demarcated physically by the boundaries of the tabernacle/ temple. The life-death distinction was also demarcated physically by graves that polluted the land around them. Crossing these boundaries brought fear of impure human bodies polluting the temple or death polluting the realm of the living. However, in the process of describing the Israelite or, at least, the biblical cosmology, interpreters have made the cosmology of Leviticus 11-15 more consistent and comprehensive than it really is. Doing so naturalizes and internalizes the rhetoric especially of Leviticus 11 that encourages its hearers and readers to reason deductively and inductively about polluting and inedible animals. Biblical interpreters have usually organized the cosmologies that they reconstruct from Leviticus around key dichotomies. Leviticus 10:10 encourages this course of action by laying out two basic and, apparently, related dichotomies. It tells the priests to “separate the holy from the secular and the polluted from the pure.” The concluding summary to the diet rules extends this obligation to all Israelites: Leviticus 11:47 requires them to “separate the polluted from the pure and edible animals from animals that you must not eat.” Modern scholarship on Leviticus therefore joins traditional Jewish and Christian interpreters in elaborating the text’s explicit and implicit cosmology to distinguish polluted from pure. Jacob Milgrom enunciated a theory of the antagonism between holiness and pollution that has been reproduced by many subsequent interpreters. Though Leviticus 10:10 simply mentions two dichotomies, holy-secular and polluted-pure, without stating any relationship between them, other texts emphasize that gaining or maintaining the holiness of the temple and/or the people requires purification of pollutions: “You must warn the Israelites away from their pollution, so they don’t die from their pollution by polluting my tabernacle which is among them” (Leviticus 15:31). Milgrom argued that the priestly writers of Leviticus regarded holiness and pollution as dynamic and incompatible forces (Milgrom 1990, 346–48, 444–49; Milgrom 1991, 256–59, 616–17, 731–33). The secular (profane) and the pure were static states marked by the absence of holiness or pollution respectively. In a properly functioning ritual system, the static secular and pure states act as buffers to ensure that pollution never comes into contact with holiness, according to Milgrom’s understanding. This schematic

122  Interpreting realms description of pollution allowed interpreters to draw a direct link between cosmology and contagion, as David Wright (1987, 163) did: Priestly legislation contains several prohibitions against or cautions concerning impure persons and things coming in contact with two different spheres: that of the holy and that of the profane (i.e., the nonholy or common). These prohibitions and cautions when viewed together as a system indicate that whether an impurity is restricted from both the holy and profane or just from the profane is contingent upon the strength of the particular impurity. Specifically, only communicable impurities, those which can pollute the profane sphere, are excluded from or restricted in this sphere, while noncommunicable impurities, those which cannot affect other nonholy persons and objects, are not excluded from or restricted in this sphere. If holy spaces and people did become polluted, this would drive the presence of God away from the temple and Israel, with catastrophic results. Milgrom’s analysis of the interaction between the two dichotomies, holy/ secular and polluted/pure, made the cosmological distinction between the divine and human realm generative for understanding the entire purity ­system. As we have seen, however, this theory placed more emphasis on the contamination of sacred spaces than does Leviticus, which mentions this theme but also emphasizes the obligation to purify pollution quite apart from the sanctuary. The theory of holiness and pollution as opposing dynamic forces also does not explain why pollution poses such a threat to holiness. To explain the threat of pollution, Milgrom appealed to another cosmological opposition in Israel and in other ancient cultures, the opposition between the realms of life and death. Unlike other cultures, biblical writers did not personify the power of death in the form of demons. But they still portrayed death as opposed to the “living God” and to the realm of living human beings. The elaborate and unusual ritual in Numbers 19 to create water that can purify corpse pollution illustrates this opposition most explicitly. Milgrom, like many other interpreters, found death symbolically represented to ancient Israelites (1) in swarming ground animals that can be found in graves as well as elsewhere, (2) in genital fluids, semen and menstrual blood, associated with procreation but which become associated with death when they flow freely and unproductively, and most of all (3) in infestations of skin, cloth and buildings that look like the decomposition of corpses. In this way, interpreters unified all the major categories of pollution found in Leviticus and Numbers into a cosmological threat of death against the people and things belonging to the living God and against the created order itself.6 As we saw above, death does not explicitly play such a large role in the priestly texts as this interpretation of their cosmology suggests. That fact has led other interpreters to translate the opposition between pollution and

Interpreting realms 123 purity, or pollution and holiness, into a more basic dichotomy to explain Israel’s pollution beliefs and purification practices. One such principle is the fundamental idea of cosmology itself, that is, order and its opposite, disorder. Purity can be understood as the proper state of each cosmological realm and of their proper relationships to each other. Anything that threatens the boundaries between realms then is conceptualized as pollution. We have seen the power of this cosmological model to explain the rituals of shamans on Jeju Island as well as the cosmologies of ancient cultures. Biblical interpreters have deployed this basic cosmological principle to analyze Israel’s purification rituals as well. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz found three key dichotomies in the Bible’s priestly literature and also in later Second Temple Judaism: life/death, men/women, and control/loss of control. Uncontrollable genital emissions and growing infestations of skin, cloth and buildings all exhibited loss of control as well as these other dichotomies (Eilberg-Schwartz 1990, 186–92; see also Nihan 2007, 328–36). This approach provided a more flexible system that allows for the integration of the pollution fears generated by patriarchal family structures (e.g. menstrual pollution) into the system of temple and food pollutions. Dorothea Erbele-Küster analyzed the depiction of menstruation in Leviticus 12 and 15 as expressing the idea that women feel destabilized during their monthly periods (ErbeleKüster 2017, 127–33). However, the biblical literature resists being reduced to such consistent cosmological schemes. The systematic reconstructions of biblical scholars run aground against elements of Leviticus 11–15 that do not fit their systems. These chapters do not generalize about destabilization and loss of control, but instead specifically portray the pollution of menstrual periods as the paradigmatic bodily pollution (Leviticus 12:2; 15:33). Later in Leviticus and in many other biblical books, menstrual pollution became paradigmatic for all kinds of offenses against God (Leviticus 20:18; Ezekiel 7:19–20; 36:17; Zechariah 13:1; Lamentations 1:8, 17; Ezra 9:11; 2 Chronicles 29:5). Cosmological systems struggle to explain the rhetorical force that biblical literature develops around menstrual pollution. They also struggle to explain why biblical literature, and Leviticus 11–15 in particular, understate the power of the realm of death in comparison with many other ancient cultures as well as later Judaism and Christianity, where personified demons were believed to spread pollutions and diseases of all kinds. The realm of death seems to play a lesser role in the Hebrew Bible than it did in earlier and later religious cultures. In the broader biblical literature, the chronic mixing of moral rhetoric with pollution, especially in prophetic diatribes (but already in Leviticus 18–27 and Deuteronomy) has meant that biblical scholars, like the Jewish and Christian traditions before them, have been preoccupied with distinguishing moral from ritual purity and discovering their spheres of influence. Israel Knohl (2004, 503) voiced a widespread view that,

124  Interpreting realms In the Priestly Code, holiness and impurity are connected with only cultic objects and conceptions. However, already in the Holiness Code (Lev. 19) we see that the conception of holiness is broader and encompasses cult and morality. … According to the Hebrew Bible, however, only cultic impurity is contagious. The conclusion drawn by many interpreters is that, in ancient Israel or at least for the priestly writers, ritual purity was only important when one wished to visit the temple, not in everyday life (see especially Klawans 2000). This distinction can be described cosmologically by saying that ritual purity involves the dangers inherent when crossing from the human to the divine spheres, while moral purity was regarded as the requisite condition of the human realm itself. Once again, however, Leviticus 11–15 does not clearly distinguish purity from morality, not does it emphasize preserving the sanctuary’s purity, except in one verse (Leviticus 15:31). The mixture of moral and ritual concerns is even more evident in other biblical texts, as well as in other ancient cultures and in later Jewish and Christian traditions. Frevel and Nihan (2013, 20) therefore concluded: The separation of the two categories is misleading in several ways: The dimensions of physical and moral purity differ (for example on the level of acts) but are not two separate concepts, either in synchronic or in diachronic respects. They are close to each other and are often intertwined. There is neither a ‘pure’ moral purity nor a physical impurity without any link to the ethos of a specific society and thus to a certain ethic. Both dimensions interfere with each other and may be separated for heuristic purposes only. Every physical purity or impurity has a moral aspect and all purification has a moral dimension as well. Sometimes the moral aspect is strengthened explicitly, and sometimes the physical, but they are never totally detached from each other. Tracy Lemos argued, therefore, that attempts to understand biblical pollution practices systematically on the basis of one or more rationales inevitably distort the biblical texts. She concluded that “there is not one, but rather various sets of purity constructions in the Hebrew Bible … because rituals are by nature constantly shifting and, more often than not, localized” (Lemos 2013, 283).

Limitations to systematizing pollution with cosmology This chapter’s survey shows that the invocation of creation cosmology in Leviticus 11 by categorizing animals according to their habitats (land, water, air) pointed later interpreters towards cosmological explanations for the purity laws. Commentators have built on the cosmological references in

Interpreting realms 125 the text itself to construct systems around not only cosmic but also moral dichotomies. Yet every interpretive system has left lingering suspicions of being imposed on the biblical text rather than evident within it (Lemos 2013). All the more so have such reconstructions seemed unlikely to reflect the lived experiences of many ancient Israelite people. If that is the case for Leviticus 11–15, the most systematic description of purification rules among surviving ancient texts, it is all the more true of reconstructions of ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek cosmologies of pollution (Chapter 2). It is even true of ethnographic descriptions of indigenous pollution beliefs, such as those of Jeju Island (Chapter 3). Though the ethnographer has the advantage over historians and biblical scholars of being able to ask questions of informants, the resulting synthesis has been constructed by the interpreter out of partial and sometimes contradictory information. In every case and by every method of scholarship, the data about pollution practices and purity beliefs produces more or less systematic pointers towards overarching cosmological schemes. But a consistent cosmology must always be (re)constructed secondarily from partial and contradictory information. Therefore, analysis of this history of biblical interpretation invites justifiable criticisms (e.g. by Lemos 2013; Kazen 2018a) of systematizing efforts on the basis of dichotomies, taxonomies, or more elaborate cosmologies. But we need to also reflect on the fact that Leviticus 11–15 invites systematic explanations of Israel’s pollution fears and purification practices even as it fails to support them fully. Tendencies towards taxonomy and cosmology are evident in the text itself. This book has documented such a tendency towards cosmology in other texts and cultures concerned with purity. We must therefore take seriously the possibility that purity practices typically encourage systematic speculation. Purification rituals stimulate systematic thinking about purity, which takes the form of cosmologies of pure realms. At any rate, it is clear that the systematic cosmologies available to us are the work of scholars, whether ancient, indigenous, or modern. It is also clear that popular ideas about pollution in very many cultures have been shaped by cosmological ideas. What is the nature of these cosmological ideas promulgated by cultures prior to intellectual reconstructions? We will address that question in our conclusions in Chapter 5.

Notes 1 Similarly Cicero’s speech analyzed by Lennon (2014, 167–86). 2 “Miasmen können durch Meineid, Bluttat, Zauberei, Götterzorn oder (Krankheits-) Dämonen bewirkt werden. Das, was durch Reinigungsriten abgelöst wird, ist also etwas, was zwar vielgestaltig in der Verursachung, aber doch einheitlich in der Behandlung ist, insofern als es in jedem Falle um Ablösung geht” (Wilhelm 1999, 198). 3 A similar interpretation appears in the Qumran scroll, 4Q265; see VanderKam 2012, 185–90.

126  Interpreting realms 4 The idea appears already in Philo (Quis rerum divinarum heres 225; De vita Mosis 2, 102) and Josephus (Ant. 3, 146), and in later midrashim (Yalqut Pequdei 40, #419; cf. Midrash Tadshe 11, Bet ha-Midrash 3, p. 175). See Baumgarten 2006, 143–44, who thought this interpretation of the menorah may have developed from Zechariah 4:10’s reference to its seven lamps as “the eyes of YHWH which range over the whole earth.” 5 Giuseppina Lenzo, Christophe Nihan, and Alessandra Rolle in an unpublished paper, “Jewish and Egyptian Food Prohibitions: A Reexamination of Ancient Sources” presented in Lausanne in 2017, argued that the Greco-­ Roman tradition of comparing Jewish and Egyptian food prohibitions dates only from the second century CE and later. 6 E.g. Frank Gorman (1990, 168), who commented on Leviticus 14, which never mentions death explicitly: “Death was viewed as a disruption of the creative order. … ‘death’ is understood as a state of contagion that reflects the disruption of the divinely created order.”

5

Feeling realms Cosmology and bodily e­ xperiences of purity and pollution James W. Watts and Yohan Yoo

In the preceding chapters of this book, we have presented three sets of cultural evidence about purification practices and purity beliefs. Using ­ three different traditions of academic analysis—comparative religions, ethnography, and the cultural history of interpretation—we have given careful attention to the meaning of purity and pollution and to prescribed practices for achieving purification in each cultural context. We have also described the cosmologies of each culture and the forces that maintain them and change them. Each chapter has shown that ideas about pollution and purification practices in these cultures engage with the cosmologies taught by those cultures. These observations lead us in this conclusion to ask, why? What leads people to enact cosmologies through bodily and spatial purification? Why should cultures regularly expect the macrocosm to be reproduced in social and bodily microcosms? And what human experiences generate cultural cosmologies?

Cosmologies of pure realms This book began with a critique of Mary Douglas’ theory of pollution. Our criticisms were largely directed at her emphasis on the social functions of purity beliefs. While pollution often reinforces social hierarchy, the comparative, ethnographic, and interpretive surveys of this book have also described many cases where it does not seem to do so. In the end, we agree with Mary Douglas that pollution is “matter out of place”—but not just any material and not in just any place. It is not social hierarchy so much as a culture’s cosmology that designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. Specifically, the requisite conditions of each cosmological realm are usually considered pure. Pollution arises either from failing to meet these conditions, or from bringing the conditions of one realm into another. We do not have to look to shamanic cultures or ancient cultures for examples of this phenomenon. There are many examples in modern cultures of cosmology determining pollution. If soil from a flowerpot spills

128  Feeling realms onto the kitchen table, the table becomes “dirty” and can be cleaned of dirt with water and perhaps also with disinfecting chemicals. If the soil falls into a plate of food, the food is discarded as hopelessly contaminated, and the plate is cleaned with water and soap. However, if that same soil is deposited in a forest, it falls in an appropriate place and therefore will probably be considered pure. But if soap and disinfecting chemicals used to clean a kitchen are discarded in a forest, they will likely be regarded as polluting the natural environment. Modern cosmologies that separate strictly between “natural” environments and “artificial” human habitats dictate which materials are considered pure and polluting in each of these places. Materials like soil, soap, and disinfecting chemicals may be regarded as purifying in one place and polluting in the other. This distinction does not encode any clear social hierarchy, or even a settled hierarchy of values. Either the realm of nature or of humans may be regarded as superior or more favorable than the other, depending on the individual person and the circumstances. Textual records from the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean societies enable us to describe similarities and differences in the purity beliefs and purification practices of different cultures over centuries and millennia (Chapter 2). They also provide descriptions of the dominant cosmologies of these cultures. Ancient cultures distinguished normal human life from divine realms in heaven and in earthly temples, and also from the realm of death. People entering temples in any of these cultures risked polluting the divine realms unless they took the precaution of purifying themselves. The extent of these rules varied, depending on their understandings of the number of gods and the relationships between them. Each culture distinguished holiness, as a characteristic of the gods, from the purity required to enter a god’s realm, but not consistently within cultures or in the same ways across these cultures. The relationship between death and the cosmological realms of living humans and gods also differed from one culture to another based on their expectations for an afterlife (their soteriologies). These comparisons confirm that cultural cosmologies shaped purity beliefs because purity is the requisite condition of divine realms. Changing or contested cosmologies in antiquity led to challenging purity ideas and, sometimes but not always, to changing purification practices. Yohan Yoo’s ethnographic study of purity beliefs and purification practices in the shamanic religion of Jeju Island also shows a strong correlation between cosmology and purity beliefs (Chapter 3). Interviews with shamans allowed him to correlate mythic stories about the gods with purity practices on the ground, especially around those gods’ shrines in the villages where they are located. Myths tell of gods separating themselves from each other, with consequences for the different kinds of purity required to enter their realms on earth. This correlation of mythic cosmologies with ritual space showed that in Jeju, like in the ancient Near East, the categories pure and sacred do not mean the same thing. Though gods and their

Feeling realms 129 realms are holy, and purity is the requisite condition of divine realms, both gods and their realms may suffer pollution that does not threaten their sacred status. Ethnographic interviews, however, also reveal inconsistencies between different shamans’ explanations for the causes of pollution. Some of these differences depend on which deity a shaman serves, that is, on the place of that deity in the cultural cosmology as told by myths. Other differences, especially about gender-specific impurities, can depend on the gender of the shaman, which affects the degree of their concern for the polluting effects of menstruation. In Jeju, sexual intercourse is still strictly prohibited before rites. Both semen and blood are regarded as impure now, just as they were a century ago. Recently, however, some female simbang began to argue that menstruation is not a serious pollutant for the practical reason that they cannot or would not avoid conducting rites during their periods. Many male simbang do not agree, but they often do not raise objections because they need female shamans to conduct the rituals. For a gut ritual, a minimum of four shamans are needed, and if it is a full gut that takes several days, many more may be needed. Interpretations may differ between shamans, but they set aside disagreements in order to conduct the rituals, which are more important. This then is an example of how the importance of ritual practice may bring about changes in the requisite conditions of the divine realm and the living human realm, that is, in cosmology. Thus in Jeju as in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures, pollution from menstruation does not correlate as well with cosmological realms as do other forms of pollution. The cultural history of biblical interpretation, particularly of the purity rules in Leviticus 11–15, also confirmed the ancient correlation of cosmology with purity (Chapter 4). The diet regulations explicitly invoke the cosmological division of the world into three realms—land, water, and sky. James Watts showed, however, that biblical interpreters from antiquity to today have struggled to find consistent explanations for the biblical purity rules. The explicit invocation of cosmology in the biblical text gave interpreters expectations of finding underlying systematic consistency which the details of the rules failed to support. Sex-based pollutions, in particular, failed to conform to the large-scale cosmologies projected by the text, but instead reified microcosmic distinctions between human bodies. Later interpreters systematized these inconsistencies by telling a myth of cosmological change, in which death invaded the human realm through a woman’s sin. As in Jeju, the nature and importance of such gendered cosmologies varies depending on the gender and personal inclinations of the interpreter, even among those who voluntarily perform the customary purifications. Our three different methods of analysis—comparative history of religions, anthropological ethnography, and the history of cultural i­nterpretation— have allowed us to view the subject of purity ideas and pollution practices from three different perspectives on three different kinds of evidence.

130  Feeling realms While each approach has confirmed the connection between cosmology and pollution, each has also drawn attention to particular features of this subject. Comparative ancient religions allowed us to correlate the history of changing cultural cosmologies with evolving controversies in those cultures over purity beliefs and practices. It also highlighted the fact that modern scholars seeking underlying consistency have often supposed the presence of purification practices that are in fact poorly attested in the textual record, such as menstrual pollution. Ethnographic interviews allowed Yoo to correlate local topography, specifically the locations of shrines in and between villages, with cosmologies, myths, and differing purity rules. They also highlighted the gender-bias in different shamans’ interpretations of gendered pollutions. The history of the Bible’s cultural interpretation foregrounded interpreters’ frequent attempts across history to use cosmology to systematize the Bible’s purity beliefs more than they already are in the text. Watts also highlighted the religious persistence of purification p ­ ractices despite longstanding theological and ideological resistance. Thus all three sets of information used in this book and interpreted through three different academic methodologies have confirmed the following claims. (1) In many different cultures and languages, “pollution” describes most, if not all, of the negative effects of the conditions of one cosmological realm infringing on another. It may also describe internal failures to meet a realm’s requisite conditions. (2) These cultures distinguish the nature of deities and divine things as “holy” from the conditions required of gods, people and things to enter or remain in divine realms, which is “purity.” Despite many variations in how different languages label these phenomena, holiness tends to be an intrinsic quality of the divine, while purity is a requirement of divine realms that may or may not be met. (3) The connection between cosmology and pollution has been apparent to many ancient and traditional interpreters, as well as modern academics. These interpreters have then tried to systematize the relationship between cosmology and purity more consistently than the cultures did themselves. (4) In every case, such intellectual projects have confronted irreconcilable purity beliefs or purification practices that undermine the consistency of the cosmological system. (5) These irreconcilable elements most often involve sexual intercourse and bodily differences between the sexes. They therefore seem to enact microcosmic distinctions that are poorly integrated into macrocosmic systems.

The nature of cosmologies What is cosmology that it should shape our thinking and behavior about purity so profoundly? Scholars of religions have traditionally categorized cosmology as an aspect of myth and mythic thinking.1 The connections between cosmologies and myths are most obvious in cosmogonic myths that tell of world creation. Such cosmogonies through divine procreation

Feeling realms 131 and/or violence were common in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greek cultures. Two monotheistic creation stories from ancient Israel’s culture appear at the beginning of the Bible, in the first two chapters of Genesis. Cosmogonies have provided a model for understanding the function of all myths. Peter Berger (1967, 22) described myths as participating in a process of “world-building,” in which people impose order upon their experience of reality. Cosmogonies then become models for establishing social order as well, and for guaranteeing its stability (Lincoln 1991, 167–75, 182–83). Joanne Waghorne (2020, 31–33) observed, however, that governments can weave myths of social stability without invoking cosmic origins at all. Despite the apparently static structure of mythic cosmogonies, Charles Long (1963, 17; see Waghorne 2020, 36, 53) argued that myths enable creative responses to novel situations. Religion is related to crisis situations. These are the generic situations of birth, puberty, and death; and, in addition, there are those crisis situations which are particular to the culture and history of a people. From this point of view, we may define a crisis situation as a situation in which a person or a culture is in transition from one mode of being to another and therefore is threatened with nonbeing. (Long 1963, 9) Since everyone experiences most of these crises, myths address nearly universal aspects of human experience (Doniger 1999, 4; Doniger 2005, 4). Wendy Doniger emphasized that part of these common human experiences is storytelling: “Myths are about the human experiences and events that we all share—birth, love, hate, death—and one of those experiences or events is storytelling. Storytelling is one of the few truly universal human bonds” (Doniger 1988, 1). Stories usually invoke moral as well as circumstantial causality, so myths end up encapsulating at least implicit morals. Therefore, Charles Long (1963, 19–20) observed that cosmogonic myths express a cosmic orientation that involves the moral as well as physical order of the universe (also Waghorne 2020, 37–38). This book, too, has had recourse to myth to explain purification practices in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, on Jeju Island, and in Leviticus. However, the pervasive connection between purification practices and cultural cosmologies has drawn our attention more often to metonymy than to myth. Cosmologies tend to connect the human body with the cosmos by metonymy. Many religious systems suggest that the macrocosm of realms is or, at least, should be reflected in the microcosms of society, of the village and home, and of the human body. Pollution incurred by crossing bodily, spatial, or social boundaries then mirrors the pollution generated by crossing between cosmic realms. Connections between cosmologies and myths lead scholars of religion to think of these cultural systems from the top down. They tend to “assume

132  Feeling realms that ideas go before behavior,” observed Thomas Kazen (2014, 63; see also Lemos 2013, 294). Interpreters postulate that different realms are generated at the general level of myth and then applied by metonymy to particular bodies and social structures. The pervasive links between cosmologies and pollutions raises the possibility that this process can also work from the bottom up. Purification practices distinguish realms in daily life that get projected onto the larger universe as cosmological realms. Myths may then serve as secondary rationalizations for states of affairs generated by bodily and social practices. Thus the pervasive link between a culture’s purification practices and its cosmology leads us to wonder if cosmology can be a consequence of purification practices and the purity ideas they generate, as well as the source for them. Though we have called attention to cosmological references throughout this book, all of our sources spend much more time and space ­describing purification rituals than they do making connections between purity and cosmology. Catherine Bell observed that part of the function of, at least, some rituals is to “generate the sense of a basic and compelling conflict or opposition in light of which other contrasts are orchestrated” (Bell 1992, 37). Valerio Valeri argued that “Taxonomy intervenes as a ‘rationalization’ or, better, as a way of rendering a part of the factual … normative by generalization” (Valeri 2000, 78). Cosmologies, then, can encode the fundamental oppositions experienced in ritual practices. Cultures may generate a shared set of cosmological ideas by socializing people through routine experiences of purification.

Disgust and the bodily experiences of pollution In 1967, Victor Turner, on the basis of ethnographic field work among the Ndembu of Zambia, described symbols as simultaneously conveying two kinds of meaning. The “ideological pole” of a symbol indicates conscious norms and ideals. The “sensory pole” depends on sensory and emotional associations “closely related to the outward form of the symbol” (Turner 1967, 28). Turner noted that verbal explanations, both by members of the culture and by outside observers, emphasize the ideological pole of a symbol’s meaning but struggle to comprehend and express the sensory pole. The sensory meanings stem from unconscious associations that dictate ritual actions even while evading both emic and etic ideological explanations. Nevertheless, rituals may consistently evoke emotions, such as joy, pain, fear, and rivalry that are obvious to participants and observers alike, even if their verbal explanations do not account for them (Turner 1967, 39). Turner argued that rituals and symbols therefore represent more than just social distinctions. They also evoke and develop common bodily experiences, to the extent that “the human organism and its crucial experiences are the fons et origo of all classifications” (Turner 1967, 90).

Feeling realms 133 The idea of pollution seems obviously related to experiences that elicit an emotional reaction of disgust. Feeling dirty and cleaning yourself are basic human experiences. Fear of contamination produces feelings of disgust. Psychological studies of pollution avoidance have therefore focused on disgust. They find that feelings of disgust strengthen moral judgments that people often find hard to explain (Haidt, Koller, and Dias 1993, 613–28; Schnall, Benton, and Harvey 2008, 1219–22; Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz 2011, 295–99; Zhong and House 2014, 109–31). That is because disgust is a basic and immediate emotional reaction, as Thomas Kazen (2011, 36) summarized: At its core, [disgust] is a bodily reaction, like fear, against that which is understood as being dangerous for human life, regardless of whether triggered as a result of human choice or not. At a more developed stage, disgust is a reaction against that which is understood as threatening to throw society back to a world where basic order and human identity are absent. It causes humans to shun perceived threats associated with dirt, disorder, demons, decay and death. Death is often identified as the root of people’s concern with pollution. Psychological studies have noted, however, that disgust is triggered not so much by a corpse as by a decaying corpse (Kazen 2011, 35, citing Menninghaus 1999, 7; Miller 2004, 187–88). It is not death itself but the touch, taste, or smell of decay that triggers immediate feelings of disgust. We have all been socialized from a very early age to avoid dirt and to engage in bathing ourselves and cleaning our surroundings. Pollution and purity therefore feel more basic than just persuasive rhetoric (Chapter 4). They motivate habitual behavior to ensure our own bodily integrity and to clean our local environments from sources of possible contagion. Nevertheless, they provide a potent set of common experiences that can be used to evoke rhetorical pathos. Speakers and writers use fear of pollution to elicit visceral reactions of disgust and revulsion. At this point, the ­distinction between purity and morality blurs, because people are socialized to feel disgust at moral infractions as well as physical decay (Kazen 2017, 100–101). Sometimes people charge other people with pollution simply to express their feelings of disgust. These attitudes also get projected onto the gods, whose purported disgust at pollution and immorality reinforce this socialization (see Chapter 3 above and Kazen 2011, 89). 2

Metaphors in the experience of pollution More precise descriptions of disgust and other feelings arising from bodily experiences are now available from the observations of some anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, and philosophers that in recent decades have coalesced into the field of “cognitive science.”3 Cognitive theories allow us

134  Feeling realms to see the tendency to use cosmology to explain pollution as a metaphorical extension of the psychology of personal boundary maintenance and bodily cleansing. Metaphors mediate the relationship between bodily feelings and verbal language about purity and pollution. Interpreters in religious studies commonly distinguish metaphorical uses of purity and pollution language as extensions of more direct experiences, which they usually locate in ritual. They find it necessary to do so because pollution and purity rhetoric gets used in a wide range of situations that vary from precise ritual instructions through heartfelt and desperate prayer to polemical prophetic preaching and academic theology and philosophy. It is unlikely that any of these reflect a consistent conception of the nature of pollution and of the means for its rectification, even within the restricted context of the Hebrew Bible  or of Jeju Island, much less in the full range of ancient Greek, Egyptian, or Mesopotamian texts, in the cultural history of Judaism or Christianity, or in modern pluralistic cultures. Therefore, like many other interpreters, Karel van der Toorn (2004, 500) observed that “Purity and defilement are notions that lend themselves quite easily to metaphorical use: moral guilt can be compared to a stain; the comparisons become so obvious that its metaphorical nature falls into oblivion.” And metaphor facilitates the connection between purity and myth, as Wendy Doniger (1988, 2) observed about myths: The stories are not designed as arguments, nor should they be taken as arguments. Rather, stories provide us with metaphors that make the argument real to us, the metaphors … are a way of thinking that works better than the development of step-by-step arguments. Cognitive science casts doubt on how easily we can distinguish between metaphors and more literal descriptions of experience (Kazen 2017, 105). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, a linguist and philosopher respectively, argued that the conceptual system that determines our thinking and acting “is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980], 3). They pointed out that orientational metaphors (up/down, in/out, etc.) are based on bodily experience, while their value-laden extensions are culturally variable (14). Metaphors and metonyms “structure not just our language but our thoughts, attitudes, and actions, and … are grounded in our experience” (29). Though even basic physical experiences tend to be conceptualized metaphorically, Lakoff and Johnson allowed that some experiences “are ‘more’ physical, such as standing up, and those that are ‘more’ cultural, such as participating in a wedding ceremony” (57). Human thinking is therefore metaphorical almost all the way down.4 Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory provides an analytical framework for understanding why the ideas of purity and pollution structure cosmological beliefs in a wide variety of unrelated cultures.

Feeling realms 135 Inevitably, many primary metaphors are universal because everybody has basically the same kinds of bodies and brains and lives in basically the same kinds of environments, so far as the features relevant to metaphor are concerned. The complex metaphors that are composed of primary metaphors and that make use of culturally based conceptual frames … may differ significantly from culture to culture. (Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980], 257) In their second edition (2003), Lakoff and Johnson adopted a neural explanation for how metaphors form in the brain. They pointed out that the brain tends to grow neural connections between sections stimulated by simultaneous experiences, such as a baby’s experience of physical warmth and emotional comfort when held by a parent. The association between warmth and comfort is therefore established physically in the brain’s neural network. “This neural learning mechanism produces a stable, conventional system of primary metaphors that tend to remain in place indefinitely within the conceptual system and are independent of language” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003, 256; for a recent application to archeology, see Wiseman 2019). As the anthropologist Christopher Tilley (1999, 34–35) said, “Cognition is essentially a process of seeing something as something and this is the core of metaphorical understanding. Seeing something as something is grounded in culturally mediated bodily experiences.” He warned that, as a result, metaphorical understanding should not be overly systematized: “There is no necessity to presume a totalizing cultural coherence produced through metaphorical linkages …. One and the same symbol can serve as vehicle for several distinct metaphors” (Tilley 1999, 31). Common experiences provide a familiar basis by which to try to understand less familiar concepts and experiences, as another anthropologist, Fredrik Barth (1975, 199), had earlier pointed out: “The essence of metaphor is the use of the familiar to grasp the elusive and unrecognized, rather than the mere ordering of phenomena by homology.” The biblical scholar, Yitzhaq Feder (2014), applied cognitive theories to ancient ideas of purity and noticed that the vocabulary of “purity” in many ancient Near East languages derives etymologically from language about radiance. Thus the common human experience of radiant sunlight provides an experiential metaphor for all kinds of purity. Lakoff and Johnson interpreted ritual as an “experiential gestalt” that organizes natural experiences through sequences of actions. Religious rituals are typically metaphorical kinds of activities, which usually involve metonymies—real-world objects standing for entities in the world as defined by the conceptual system of the religion. We suggest that the metaphors we live by, whether cultural or personal, are partially preserved in ritual. Cultural metaphors, and the values

136  Feeling realms entailed by them, are propagated by ritual. Ritual forms an indispensable part of the experiential basis for our cultural metaphorical systems. There can be no culture without ritual. (Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980], 234) Rituals preserve cultural metaphors, and can also be used to create new ones by structuring bodily experiences. Conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect—it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experience: color, shape, texture, sound, etc. These dimensions structure not only mundane experience but aesthetic experience as well. (Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980], 235) That conclusion applies to the common tendency to equate purity with morality. Lakoff and Johnson observed that The range of metaphors that define our moral concepts is fairly restricted (probably not more than two dozen basic metaphors) and there are substantial constraints on the range of possible metaphors for morality. … They all appear to be grounded in our various experiences of well-being, especially physical well-being. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 290) In the theory of metaphor promulgated by cognitive science, this equation of purity with morality is a metaphor generated by the bodily experience of being clean and the evaluation of clean as healthy and therefore good, while being dirty is equated with dangerous and therefore bad. However, because the same experiences can be the basis for multiple inconsistent metaphors, cognitive science undermines efforts by interpreters to discern a rational system behind purity beliefs and purification practices. “There is nothing inherent in the notion of purity that aligns it with goodness. There can be pure evil as well as pure goodness. However, in the moral realm purity takes on a positive value” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 307; they then summarized purity’s obvious entailments, such as mind-body dualism, and personal and social purgation, 308). Lakoff and Johnson (309) noted that the metaphors of moral purity and morality as health are often conceptually linked, so that immorality is portrayed as an infectious disease. So, on the one hand, cultural morality resists ethical systematization because morality is based in various metaphors that are not internally consistent even when they are based in the same bodily experience. On the other hand, one cannot convincingly create or systematize morality de novo, because “moral concepts are not arbitrary and unconstrained … [but] inextricably tied to our embodied experience of well-being” (330–31).

Feeling realms 137 Cognitive theories of metaphor have been widely embraced (Schmitt 2014, 15–16), and reinforced by other theoretical movements, such as Affect Theory, that emphasize how culturally conditioned affects arise from embodied experience (Schaefer 2015, 39, 56–57). They have also encountered predictable resistance from those who think grounding language and thought in embodied metaphors threatens human rationality. The criticisms have attempted especially to broaden the scope of literal language in the construction of concepts (see the survey by Lam 2016, 12–13). These debates need not detain us here. The concepts of purity and pollution intuitively evoke bodily experience to a sufficient degree that their ­grounding in common pre-linguistic experiences hardly needs defending (Lam 2016, 180). For our purposes, the value of cognitive theories of metaphor lies in their ability to illuminate the connection we have observed between pollution and cosmology. The archeologist, Nicole Boivin, pointed out the distinctive role of material metaphors in turning bodily experience into verbal expression. Material metaphors, such as passing through doorways, “do not just express or ­represent social transformations, but also help to conceptualize them and thus effect them.” She argued that With material metaphors, there is no necessary conversion of an ­experiential metaphor into a verbal one. … Thus, to say that doorways and passage through them signify liminality and social transformations is in many ways to ignore the way material metaphors function, even if linguistic restrictions largely demand such a simplification. (Boivin 2009, 280–81) Material metaphors signify “by addressing a non-linguistic side to understanding.” Boivin did not minimize the role of language in making ­metaphorical comparisons, but she concluded that ritual activity and material culture are able to evoke such comparisons at a deeper and more physical level that seems to enable elusive concepts to be understood, and cosmological belief systems to be felt rather than just understood. (Boivin 2009, 284) Boivin’s insight is important for understanding the link between cosmologies and purity beliefs as well as the history of the interpretation of biblical texts about purity and pollution. Because purification practices allow cosmology “to be felt rather than just understood,” their significance often exceeds what verbal interpretations can express. That is why pollution and purity have remained potent in religious practice and rhetoric despite many traditional theologies and modern ideologies that try to explain them away.

138  Feeling realms

Purification practices can generate cosmologies These conclusions have direct consequences for the thesis of this book. Taken together, Chapters 2, 3, and 4 have demonstrated a widespread human tendency to understand pollution as a consequence of crossing between cosmological realms or as a failure to meet the requisite conditions of a realm. Cosmologies seem to shape purity beliefs and purification practices, as many traditional texts and interpreters as well as academic scholars have noted. The determinative role of cosmology is most obvious when changing cosmologies lead to changing purification practices. The cause-and-effect relationship is clear when imported religions change people’s beliefs and then their practices, such as when Christianity spread to many societies around the world leading many converts to abandon their traditional purification practices. However, by using cognitive metaphor theories on the broad set of data that we have surveyed in previous chapters of this book, we conclude that purification practices also tend to generate and reinforce cultural cosmologies. Rituals of purification in water, for example, involve the sensations of bathing: “The movement in space, down the steps into a basin, into the water, crouching or bending, inscribes an embodied memory which reinforces the sense of validity and efficacy” (Kazen 2018b, 18–19). But rituals tend to divert attention from physical sensations to what they represent (Watts 2019, §32): the sensory experiences of bathing, for example, get processed consciously and unconsciously through their regular association with rituals that promise purification from sin or from contact with genital fluids or with death. Thus pollution rhetoric and purification rituals create an experience of cleansing that points beyond dirt and water to an experience of being endangered by crossing cosmic boundaries and then of being harmonized within one’s realm. Rituals also tend to attach metaphors to particular people and things that they may carry into other situations (Reul 1987, 111; Junge 2014, 279). So once purified, people can carry that status even when they exit the ritual situation into every-day life. Therefore, the age-old interpretive enterprise of trying to explain purity and pollution by describing the taxonomies implied by a culture’s cosmology has it only half right. The experience of practicing purification rituals to attain purity generates analogies between one’s own bodily experience and the wider world. Macrocosms may be read onto the microcosm, but the bodily and social microcosms are also projected onto the macrocosm. Purification generates cosmology as well as cosmology defining purity. The ritual application of clusters of metaphors from one situation to another can be explained as “conceptual blending.” Thomas Kazen used cognitive theories of conceptual blending to suggest developmental stages for Israel’s pollution ideas (Kazen 2014, 86–87; Kazen 2017, 106–14; Kazen 2018a, 96–99). Similarly, Yitzhaq Feder (2013, 165) explained ­pollution from genital discharges as a conceptual blending of the sight of

Feeling realms 139 a stain from a discharge with the fear of infection. He also used cognitive metaphor theories about purity and disgust to suggest that ideas about pollution from physical infection in the Hebrew Bible are older than ideas about pollution from social contagion (Feder 2016). That may be the case, though the complicated history of the biblical texts makes it difficult to prove, as Feder noted. The even more complicated cultural history of Israel at the Levantine cross-roads of ancient civilizations makes such social histories of Israel in isolation from its neighbors even more unlikely. Rather than such historical reconstructions, the relationship between kinds of pollution ideas, and between purity and cosmology, is best addressed as a question of regular and repeated cultural production. That is, it is less likely that purity preceded cosmology, or that material pollution preceded social pollution, over the large timespans measured by history than that purification practices repeatedly and continually generate metaphors of social pollution and of cosmological realms, both in the experience of individuals and in broader cultural histories. These metaphors then are read back onto the social and bodily microcosm, reinforcing culture systems of purity. The question is not so much about historical sequence as about the generation of psychological tendencies. The human tendency to divide the world into cosmological realms is a projection from innate and socialized feelings of disgust and the purification practices that respond to such feelings, as much as it is an internalization of the culture’s macrocosmic views. Therefore, cosmological interpretations of purification practices are not just one more schema for understanding purity and pollution, such as those categorized by Kazen (2018a). Purification practices encourage the tendency to categorize environments on a grand, cosmological, scale in order to understand one’s place within them. Cosmologies, then, are themselves products of feeling polluted and purifying oneself. They are examples of what Feder (2013, 151) called “embodied rationality.” In that case, interpreters’ attempts to clarify taxonomies of pollution are simply further examples of the imbrication of cosmology and purity beliefs. They are futile for explaining the phenomenon itself (Kazen 2017, 104). This explains the cultural persistence of purification practices even in the face of dominating cultural critiques, as Chapter 2 illustrated in Classical Greece and Chapter 4 in Christian history. Despite widespread criticism of pollution practices and the morality of the gods in Greek philosophy and literature, the purification requirements of Greek temples were not loosened. Despite opposition in Christian scripture and theology to the social divisions generated by purification practices, such practices continued to shape many social interactions within Christian cultures. So long as people continue to purify themselves, they continue to project cosmological realms distinguished by pollution whether their theological and philosophical commitments support them or not. Conflicts may then arise between those who advocate conforming practices to the official cosmology and those

140  Feeling realms who feel committed to another, often unarticulated, cosmology because of their traditional purification practices.

Modern rhetoric of environmental pollution and cosmology Our conclusion that purification practices may generate and reinforce cosmological beliefs has important implications for modern pollution rhetoric. Mary Douglas already observed that pollution “involves no special distinction between primitives and moderns: we are all subject to the same rules” (Douglas 2002 [1966], 50). Cognitive theories of metaphor reemphasize that point. In modern pluralistic cultures, pollution rhetoric often gets used to express concern about both infectious diseases and the natural environment. Only rarely are the two topics related, so modern pollution rhetoric tends to ignore the metonymy between the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of the world. Medical rhetoric, at least in English, even uses other vocabulary than pollution, instead contrasting hygienic procedures and sterilized environments with contaminated objects and infected people. Yet its concern for contagious infections is palpably the same as in traditional pollution rhetoric, even though medical science has revolutionized understandings of the biological mechanisms of contagion. Unlike religious and medical rhetoric, environmental pollution is conceived as almost entirely externalized. Human industrial civilizations pollute the air, water, and land, which is to say that the human realm is invading and destroying the natural realm. Personal danger from pollution is mostly grounded in fear of internalizing it bodily, that is, as a source of disease. Longer-term worries include concern that the collapse of natural ecosystems will also harm agriculture in the human realm and endanger human food supplies, and that the warming earth will lead to oceans swamping coastal cities—a literal invasion of the human realm by the natural realm. Each of these environmental concerns conceptualizes the earth as divided between natural and human realms, and sees these realms threatening each other’s integrity. The threats to the requisite conditions of each of the modern cosmological realms get expressed in the traditional language of pollution. As a matter of fact, contemporary environmental theories mostly reject this boundary between human and natural realms. Recent environmental philosophies deny any dichotomy between humans and nature, arguing instead for understanding humans as an intrinsic part of the ecosystem. (The literature on this subject is vast; see e.g. Purdy 2015; Vogel 2015.) Environmental scientists replace pollution rhetoric with the vocabulary of environmental integrity, balanced ecosystems, or healthy biospheres. In other words, they replace a cosmology of distinct human and natural realms with a cosmology of humans in nature, of humans as part of the earth’s ecosystems. Within the context of cognitive metaphor theories, Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 566) reflected these developments by maintaining,

Feeling realms 141 The environment is not an ‘other’ to us. It is not a collection of things that we encounter. Rather, it is part of our being. It is the locus of our existence and identity. We cannot and do not exist apart from it.5 Modern environmental rhetoric about pollution as well as medical rhetoric about contagion are obviously rhetorical, intent on persuasion to change human behavior. They deploy the distinction between human and natural realms to encourage people to lessen the environmental destruction from industry and agriculture, or to prevent outbreaks of contagious diseases. For these efforts, the vocabulary of pollution and contagion evokes bodily metaphors of cleansing for powerful rhetorical effects. Attempts to avoid pollution rhetoric in order to conceive of humans and their environments as united with nature within a single ecosystem run up against deep-seated bodily metaphors of purity and pollution that have been utilized by religious, political, and social rhetoric for millennia. Environmental science risks losing a powerful rhetorical tool in trying to more accurately describe humanity’s place in earth’s natural environment. Traditional rhetoric about the human and natural realms projects a cosmology restricted to planet earth. Environmentalism can retain the motivating power of pollution rhetoric by employing a less restricted cosmology. Envisioning planet earth within the larger cosmos brings into focus a sharp boundary between cosmological realms: the limit of the earth’s upper atmosphere that separates all known life from lifeless space. Environmental philosophies of the Anthropocene effectively make the whole planet the realm of human/animal/plant life in contrast to lifeless nature, that is, outer space. The rhetoric of bio-sphere earth or “spaceship earth” (Fuller 1969) reestablishes the division of realms with different requisite conditions as the foundation for understanding the place of humans, and of earthlings more generally, in the universe. This conception of earth as a small realm of life in a vast lifeless cosmos was seared into the public imagination by the Apollo spacecraft’s famous photograph of the earth as a small blue marble. The literary genre of science fiction has, since its nineteenth-­century origins, regularly imagined the crossing of the boundary of the earth’s atmosphere in either direction as fraught with all the traditional pollution fears of infection, contagion, and infestation. The psychological force of pollution rhetoric can be retained by making our cosmological boundaries match those of our planet.

Conclusion Pollution today remains a socially constructed category, like all categories, but it is based on common human bodily experiences of grooming and habitat organization. Pollution is “matter out of place” as Mary Douglas said, but applies only to material that crosses the dangerous boundaries between realms or breaks the conditions of a realm that must be preserved.

142  Feeling realms Pollution defines matter or people or gods out of their cosmological realms, or in conflict with the requisite conditions of those realms. Disgust and related feelings underlie the tendency to divide the world into cosmological realms, even when theologies and academic theories struggle to express their relationship in words. The ideological underpinnings that justify which boundary crossings are dangerous vary from culture to culture. For most ancient and traditional societies, however, improper human encroachment on the divine sphere was most dangerous, and hence most likely to pollute the sanctuary and/or the person. For modern people, improper human encroachment on nature (and vice versa) is perceived as most dangerous, and hence the boundary whose transgression results in the pollution of nature or the contamination of human bodies. The purification practices of environmentalism—recycling, restricting carbon emissions, habitat restoration, etc.—may yet replace these cosmologies with a vision of earth as a unified and fragile biosphere floating in lifeless space.

Notes 1 The difficulties in defining “myth” are pervasive and well known, but need not detain us here. For a recent survey and analysis, see Johnson 2018, 1–11. 2 Older functionalist theories of purity avoided invoking basic emotions. For example, Robert Parker, in his survey of ancient Greek pollution beliefs, argued against including disgust in the definition of pollution because he considered it too vague to be useful (Parker 1983, 5). 3 For a recent survey, see Gibbs 2017. For a briefer survey and application to ancient religions, see Boivin 2009. 4 Lakoff and Johnson included metonomy along with metaphor: “The conceptual systems of cultures and religions are metaphorical in nature. Symbolic metonymies are critical links between everyday experience and the ­coherent metaphorical systems that characterize religions and cultures. Symbolic metonymies that are grounded in our physical experience provide an essential means of comprehending religious and cultural experience” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980], 40). 5 They continued in an unusually (for them) theological vein: “A mindful embodied spirituality is thus an ecological spirituality. An embodied spirituality requires an aesthetic attitude to the world that is central to self-­nurturance, to the nurturance of others, and to the nurturance of the world itself. Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals—and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve. Embodied spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the p ­ hysical world” (Lakoff and ­Johnson 1999, 566). They equated this ­understanding with panentheistic theology (567).

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160  References ———. 2012. “Jeju Tochak Jonggyo-wa Oerae Jonggyo-ui Chungdol-gwa Jilseo Hyeongseong Gwajeong-e Gwanhan Yeongu: Gaejongjuui Bigyo Jeonryak-eul Jungsim-euro” [Conflicts and Coexistence of the Native Religion with Imported Religions in Jeju Island: Focusing on Comparative Strategy of Proselytism]. Religion and Culture 22: 1–36. ———. 2013. “Sin-deul Sai-ui Yeongyeok Gubyeol, Sin-gwa Ingan-ui Yeongyeok Gubyeol: Jeju Tochak Jonggyo-ui Jeonggyeol Gaenyeom-e Gwanhan Yeongu” [Separation between the Realms of Gods and Separation of the Divine Realm from the Human Realm: A Study of Purity Idea in the Indigenous Religion of the Jeju Island]. Religion and Culture 25: 27–65. ———. 2014. Jonggyo, Sangjing, Ingan [Religion, Symbolism, and Human Beings]. Paju: Book21. ———. 2020. “Similar but Superior: Rhetoric of Coexistence Employed by Religions in Jeju Island, Korea.” Religions 11 (198). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11040198. Zaidman, Louise B. and Pauline Schmitt Pantel. 1992. Religion in the Ancient Greek City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhong, C.-B. and J. House. 2014. “Dirt, pollution, and purity: A metaphorical perspective on morality.” In The power of metaphor: Examining its influence on social life, edited by M. Landau, M. D. Robinson, & B. P. Meier, 109–131. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Index of authors and shamans

Achenbach, Reinhard 72, 143 Allen, Charlotte 15, 143 Allen, James P. 27, 28, 143 Allen, Thomas George 143 Angenendt, A. 118, 143 Arnold, Philip P. 143 Arrowsmith, William 69, 143 Asad, Talal 143 Assmann, Jan 49, 57, 143 Baines, John 43, 48, 143 Baumgarten, Joseph M. 114, 126, 144 Barrett, Caitlín E. 58, 63, 144 Barstad, Hans M. 63, 144 Basso, Keith H. 144 Barkley, T. G. W. 144 Barth, Fredrik 135, 144 Bayor, Diane 32, 144 Beck, Roger 72, 144 Beckman, Gary 36, 144 Bell, Catherine 3, 132, 144 Benton, J. 133, 156 Berger, Peter L. 131, 144 Bidmead, Julye 35, 144 Black, Jeremy 31, 32, 144 Blidstein, Moshe 113, 114, 117, 118, 144 Bloch, Maurice 144 Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth M. 64, 144 Boivin, Nicole 137, 142, 144 Bomann, Ann H. 24, 59, 144 Borgeaud, Philippe 44, 116, 145 Bourdieu, Pierre 105, 145 Bremen, Jan van 8, 145 Brown, Norman 145 Buc, Philippe 145 Burke, Kenneth 101, 145 Burkert, Walter 9, 25, 35, 40, 50, 54, 65, 145

Burrus, Virginia 112, 117, 145 Burschel, Peter 145 Caspers, Charles 118, 145 Castelli, Elizabeth A. 27, 145 Chavalas, Mark W. 35, 145 Choksky, Jamsheed K. 72, 145 Cohen, Andrew C. 58, 62, 63, 145 Cole, Penny J. 118, 145 Collins, Billie Jean 44, 55, 56, 145 Cosmopoulos, Michael B. 145 Couto-Ferreira, Érica 37, 56, 66, 146 Cressy, David 118, 146 Cunningham, Graham 31, 32, 146 Darshan, Guy 40, 146 Dave, John 25, 61, 146 Dias, M. G. 133, 149 Diggle, James 70, 146 Dillon, Matthew 56, 146 Dodd, David B. 146 Dodds, E. Robinson 9, 146 Doniger, Wendy 19, 56, 72, 73, 131, 134, 146 Douglas, Mary i, vii, 2–12, 15, 16, 21, 33, 47, 52, 55, 57, 73, 75, 95, 105, 106, 110, 114, 127, 140, 141, 146 Drijvers, Han J. W. 146 Dumézil, Georges 146 Dumont, Louis 8, 72, 73, 146 Dunand, Françoise 23, 24, 33, 34, 39, 43, 48, 146 Durkheim, Émile 2, 5, 7, 95, 146 Ego, Beate 112, 116, 147 Elchardus, Mark 105, 147 Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard 109, 114, 123, 147 Eliade, Mircea 4, 7, 72–73, 95, 147

162  Index of authors and shamans Erbele-Küster, Dorothea 123, 147 Eskine, K. J. 133, 147 ETCSL 43, 147 Fagles, Robert 147 Faraone, A. Christopher 146 Faulkner, Raymond O. 49, 60, 147 Feder, Yitzhaq 9, 36, 135, 138, 139, 147 Feinstein, Eve Levavi 109, 147 Feldman, Emanuel 109, 147 Ferguson, John 25, 41, 46, 148 Fitzgerald, Timothy 15, 148 Flinders, Petrie W. H. 148 Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva 114, 148 Foster, Benjamin R. 32, 46, 148 Foster, John L. 148 Frandsen, Paul John 47, 56, 148 Freud, Sigmund 2, 8, 148 Frevel, Christian 57, 113, 124, 148 Fried, Lisbeth S. 57, 148 Frymer-Kensky, Tikva 108, 148 Fuller, R. Buckminster 141, 148 Garcia-Ventura, Agnès 37, 56, 66, 146 Gahlin, Lucia 38, 48, 59–61, 73 Garcia Martinez, Florentino 148 Geertz, Clifford 4, 5, 15, 75, 148 Geller, M. J. 51, 148 Gethin, Rupert 74, 148 Gibbs, Raymond W. 142, 148 Go, Sunan 98 Goelet, Ogden 24, 60, 148 Gorman, Frank H. 126, 149 Grabbe, Lester L. 149 Greene, David 149 Griffiths, John Gwyn 149 Grimes, Ronald 2, 3, 149 Guichard, Michaël 23, 26, 28, 33–35, 54–56, 65, 66, 149 Günther, Linda-Marie 67, 149 Haidt, Jonathan 133, 149 Hallo, W. W. 43–46, 149 Harrington, Hannah K. 42, 113, 149 Harris, Edward M. 62, 103, 149 Harvey, S. 133, 156 Hawass, Zahi A. 56, 149 Hayes, Christine E. 8, 57, 149 Hays, Christopher B. 63, 64, 149 Heo, Namchun 97, 149 Hieke, Thomas 66, 109, 149 Hodel-Hoenes, Sigrid 59, 74, 150

House, J. 133, 160 Hornung, Erik 24, 150 Houston, Walter J. 10, 150 van den Hout, Theo P. J. 44, 150 Hutter, Manfred 27, 44, 66, 150 Hyeon, Yongjun 76, 80, 85, 93, 96–98, 150, 151 IPKS 97, 98, 150 Jay, Nancy 150 JDEC 81, 150 Jenkins, Philip 118, 150 Jenson, Philip Peter 150 Jeong, Gongcheol 98 Jeong, Taejin 82, 98 Johnson, Mark 134–136, 140, 142, 152 Johnson, Sarah Iles 142, 150 Jong, Albert F. de 68, 72, 150 Jowett, Benjamin 70, 150 Junge, Matthias 138, 150 Kacinik, N. A. 133, 147 Kang, Daewon 98 Kang, Jeongsik 77, 89, 90, 97, 151 Kaufmann, Yehezkel 64, 151 Kazen, Thomas 5, 9, 72, 104, 125, 132–134, 138, 139, 151 Kim, Do-an 98 Kim, Heonseon 97, 151 Kim, Jinyeong 77, 151 Kim, Suni 153 Kim, Wonyeong 81, 151 Kim, Yeongcheol 98 Kim, Yeonhui 82, 83, 86, 98 Kim, Yunsu 83, 98 Klawans, Jonathan 8, 21, 44, 66, 108, 124, 151 Klein, Linda Kay 112, 151 KNRICH 77, 151 Knohl, Israel 123, 151 Koller, S. H. 133, 149 Kristensen, W. Brede 4, 151 Koren, Sharon Faye 114, 151 Kovacs, Maureen Gallery 103, 151 Lakoff, George 134–136, 140, 142, 152 Lam, Joseph 110, 137, 152 Lemos, Tracy M. 9, 10, 108, 124, 125, 132, 152 Lennon, Jack J. 72, 101, 125, 152

Index of authors and shamans 163 Lesko, Leonard H. 27, 152 Lesher, J. H. 69, 152 Levi, Peter 68, 152 Levine, Baruch A. 51, 152 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2, 3, 152 Lichtheim, Miriam 43, 46, 48, 49, 103, 152 Lincoln, Bruce 131, 152 Lion, Brigitte 46, 152 Lattimore, Richard 149 Lipson, Carol S. 48, 152 Long, Charles H. 131, 152 Lonsdale, Steven 152 Lorton, David 36, 152 Lupu, Eran 40, 103, 152 Macaulay, G. C. 152 Maccoby, Hyam 108, 152 Marti, Lionel 23, 26, 28, 33–35, 54–56, 65, 66, 149 Martin, Dale B. 113–115, 120, 153 Martinez, D. P. 8, 145 Marx, Christoph 145 Mathys, Hans-Peter 34, 153 McCutcheon, Russell T. 15, 153 McKeon, Richard 101, 153 Meens, Rob 118, 153 Meigs, Anna S. 4, 17, 75, 153 Menninghaus, Winfried 133, 153 Michel, Cécile 46, 152 Mikalson, Jon D. 25, 28, 68, 70, 71, 153 Milgrom, Jacob 8, 29, 42, 44, 64, 66, 108, 109, 114, 121, 122, 153 Miller, Stuart S. 65, 68, 113, 133, 153 Miller, Susan B. 153 Moslener, Sara 112, 153 Mun, Mubyeong 77, 80, 81, 92, 97, 153 Neusner, Jacob M. 153 Nie, Giselle de 112, 113, 153 Nihan, Christophe 57, 66, 109, 113, 123, 124, 126, 148, 153 O’Grady, Kathleen 112, 115, 153 Olson, Carl 7, 153 Olyan, Saul M. 29, 154 Ottenheijm, Eric 116, 154 Otto, Eberhard 154 Paden, William E. 4, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 18, 154 Pals, Daniel 17, 154

Pantel, Pauline Schmitt 25, 28, 30, 37, 41, 45–47, 61, 62, 160 Pardee, Dennis 43, 154 Parker, Robert 8, 9, 25, 27, 28, 36, 40, 41, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 62, 67–71, 73, 74, 142, 154 Parmenter, Dorina Miller 119, 154 Patton, Kimberley C. 4, 9, 31, 55, 92, 119, 154 Petrovic, Andrej 50, 51, 70, 154 Petrovic, Ivana 50, 51, 70, 154 Pierce, C. S. 21, 154 Poirier, John C. 154 Polak-Sahm, Varda 112, 154 Poorthuis, M. J. H. M. 154 Preston, James 6, 13, 58, 62, 154 Price, Simon 25, 36, 39, 41, 46, 61, 62, 68, 69, 154 Prinz, J. J. 133, 147 Pritchard, James B. 35, 45, 154 Purdy, Jedediah 120, 140, 154 Quack, Joachim Friedrich 26, 34, 38, 39, 45, 46, 55–57, 60, 65, 68, 120, 155 Quirke, Stephen 24, 33, 155 Rappaport, Roy A. 3, 21, 155 Rausche, Benedikt 113, 155 Ray, John D. 47, 155 Raymond, Eve A. E. 155 Rayor, Diane J. 61, 155 Redford, Donald B. 155 Reul, Malcolm 138, 155 Rhyder, Julia 105, 106, 155 Rice, David G. 155 Robertson, Noel 40, 67, 103, 155 Robson, Eleanor 31, 42, 144 Roll, Susan K. 118, 126, 155 Roose, Kevin 119, 155 Rosenzweig, Rachel 155 Rosivach, Vincent J. 155 Roth, Ann Macy 59, 60, 155 Ruane, Nicole J. 115, 155 Saad, Zaki Yusef 155 Sadek, Ashraf Iskander 155 Salgues, Emmanuelle 46, 148 Sallaberger, Walther 42, 66, 155 Sargent, Thelma 156 Sauneron, Serge 32, 34, 37, 39, 45, 46, 156 Schaefer, Donovan O. 137, 156

164  Index of authors and shamans Schäfer, Peter 116, 156 Schmitt, Rudolph 137, 156 Schnall, S. 133, 156 Schott, Siegfried 31, 156 Schutt, R. J. H. 156 Schwartz, J. 154 Scurlock, Jo Anne 58, 63, 156 Sellers, Jane 56, 156 Seo, Sunsil 77, 82, 84, 92, 97, 98 Sharpe, Eric 13, 17, 156 Sin, Hyesuk 77, 156 Sin, Sun-deok 98 Silverman, David P. 49, 59, 156 Singer, Itamar 33, 156 Smart, Ninian 4, 7, 15, 156 Smith, Jonathan Z. 5, 14–16, 18, 19, 24, 29, 30, 67, 94, 156 Smith, Virginia 157 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 4, 157 Smith, William Robertson 8, 18, 94, 95, 96, 157 Staal, Fritz 157 Stambaugh, John E. 155 Stausberg, Michael 7, 157 Stevens, Paul 119, 157 Synek, Eva M. 118, 157 Taggar-Cohen, Ada 39, 157 Takabatake, S. 157 Taylor, Mark C. 7, 157 Tilley, Christopher 135, 157 Tomson, Peter J. 117, 157 van der Toorn, Karel 37, 46, 51, 66, 134, 157 Trevaskis, Leigh M. 108, 157 Turner, Victor 2, 3, 58, 132, 158 Urban, Hugh B. 7, 158 Valeri, Valerio 12, 17, 75, 132, 158 Van Gennep, Arnold 158

VanderKam, James 111, 158 Velde, Herman Te 28, 38, 158 Vogel, Steven 120, 140, 158 Waardenburg, Jacques 158 Wach, Joachim 7, 158 Waghorne, Joanne Punzo 131, 158 Warburton, David 66, 158 Wasserfall, Rahel R. 115, 158 Watterson, Barbara 24, 28, 158 Watts, James W. vii, 10, 22, 33, 51–53, 67, 106, 110, 119, 138, 158, 159 Weissler, Chava 112, 159 Wenham, Gordan 109, 159 West, M. L. 50, 51, 73, 159 Wiebe, Donald 15, 159 Wildung, Dietrich 49, 159 Wilhelm, Gernot 35, 63, 66, 104, 125, 159 Wilson, E. Jan 66, 159 Wiseman, Rob 135, 159 Wright, David P. 122, 159 Yang, Changbo 98, 150 Yang, Yeongja 153 Yi, Hyungsang 159 Yi, Kyeonghui 77, 156 Yi, Neunghwa 159 Yi, Wonjin 159 Yi, Yongok 92, 98, 150 Yoo, Yohan vii, 17, 18, 75, 76, 81, 97, 159, 160 Younger, K. L. 43, 149 Zaidman, Louise B. 25, 28, 30, 37, 41, 45, 46, 47, 61, 62, 160 Zhong, C.-B. 133, 160 Zivie-Coche, Christiane 24, 33, 34, 39, 43, 48, 146 Zólyomi, Gábor 31, 32, 144

Index of subjects

Aaron, high priest 36, 42 adzuki beans 79, 82, 85, 92, 96 Aeschylus 25; The Eumenides 50, 73; The Libation Bearers 73 Affect Theory 137 akh 59 Akitu ritual 33, 35 Akkadian 23, 32, 66 Anatolia 39 animals 4, 20, 33, 36, 37, 42, 44–46, 81, 84, 87, 99, 106–107, 122, 124, 141 anti-ritual prejudice 3 anti-Semitism 118, 119 Aquinas, Thomas 115 Aramaic texts 23 Aristophanes 25 Aristotle: Generation of Animals 115; Rhetoric 101–102, 107 Augustine: City of God 112; Of Sin and Merit 112 Babylonians 35, 104 baptism 118 bath, bathing 1, 39, 40, 42, 43, 65, 82, 84, 92, 112, 113, 133, 138 Bet ha-Midrash 126 Bible 4, 8, 19–20, 26, 28, 33, 65, 100, 138–139; Acts 117; 1-2 Chronicles 53, 64, 123; 1 Corinthians 116, 117, 119; Daniel 30; Deuteronomy 29, 33, 52, 64, 99, 123; Exodus 1, 29, 32, 33, 41, 42, 52, 110; Ezekiel 55, 66, 71, 110, 123; Ezra 42, 57, 113, 123; Galatians 117; Genesis 32, 33, 47, 53, 104, 106, 111, 131; Habakkuk 53; Haggai 71; Hosea 71; Isaiah 32, 42, 110; Jeremiah 53, 71; Job 47, 63; Jonah 53; Joshua 71;

Judges 32, 42; 1-2 Kings 35, 42, 52, 64; Lamentations 71, 123; Leviticus 1, 4, 10, 20, 26, 29, 33, 36, 41–42, 44–45, 47, 52, 53, 64, 66, 99–100, 104, 106–111, 121–126, 129; 1-2 Maccabees 53, 116; Malachi 71; Mark 116, 117; Matthew 117; Nehemiah 113; Numbers 29, 42, 52, 53, 64, 109, 122; Proverbs 63; Psalms 47, 63, 71, 110; Romans 112, 117; 1-2 Samuel 33, 41; Sira, Jesus ben (Ecclesiasticus) 112; Zechariah 123 biblical interpretation 12, 99–126 biblical studies 8, 119–126, 129 birds 85 bonpuri (myths) 76, 80–81, 84, 86–93 Book of the Dead 24, 38, 44, 46–49, 59, 60 blood 35–36, 40, 41, 52, 58, 73, 83, 84, 111, 118 bodies 12, 21, 131–137, 139, 141, 142 Buddhists, Buddhism 67, 74, 76, 83, 89, 93, 98 bulddomaji 83, 85, 98 Bushmen 5 canonical messages 21 caste 31, 55, 72, 73, 105 categories 2, 7, 12, 13, 19, 27, 109, 111, 121, 123–124, 132, 139, 141 catharsis 9, 54 Catholics 34, 81, 118 Chaeremon 45 chastity see virgins, virginity, chastity childbirth 1, 40–41, 56, 69, 81, 83, 84, 89, 106, 111–112, 118 chogongmaji 78, 85 chthonic deities 28

166  Index of subjects churching 118 Christians 3, 20, 25, 34, 100, 112, 115–119 Cicero 101 circumcision 39, 46 class 48, 55, 57, 71, 119 clothing 39 Coffin Texts 44, 59 cognitive science 9, 12, 21, 133–137, 140–141 colonialism 118–119 comparative religions 6–11, 13–16, 22–74, 94–96, 129–130 contagion, contagious 1, 37, 122, 124, 136, 140, 141 Coptic 66 corpses 41, 42, 58, 62, 84, 95, 112, 122 cosmology 7, 11, 12, 15, 17, 20, 27–30, 106, 112–113, 117–118, 120, 123, 124–125, 127, 130–132, 137, 138–141 cosmological realms 11–12, 21, 30, 72, 78, 97, 102, 105, 114, 127, 128, 130, 138, 139, 141, 142; of death 4, 12, 27–30, 32, 35, 38, 58–65, 79, 83–84, 95–97, 109–112, 117, 122, 123, 126, 128, 133; of gods 27–47, 69, 80–98, 108–109, 110–111, 117–118, 122, 128, 142; of humans 21, 27–28, 32–33, 35, 36, 38, 47–57, 80–81, 86, 117–118, 120–121, 122, 124, 128, 140–141; of life 11, 12, 27, 29, 30, 58, 60, 62, 64, 78, 121, 122, 128, 141; of nature 21, 27, 35, 47, 55, 120–121, 128, 140–142 cosmogonic myths 130–131 crisis 131 creation 130–131 crusades 118 cultures 4–5, 15 curses 51–52, 54 dang (shrine) 76 Dangsin 80 Dead Sea Scrolls 113 death see cosmological realms demons 58, 64, 122, 123 Demosthenes 103 dichotomies 66, 121–125 diet see food Dinka 5 disease 20, 42, 98, 112, 113, 115, 119, 120, 123, 132, 136, 140, 141

disgust 133, 142 disorder 2, 27, 123 Diodorus 116 dogs 83, 97–98 dokkaebi (goblin) 89 Duat 59 Egyptians 12, 22–74; Old Kingdom 48; Middle Kingdom 48; New Kingdom 49, 65; Late Period 49, 65; Ptolemaic Period 34; tombs 31 Eleusinian Mysteries 15, 41, 61 The Eloquent Peasant 48 emic 19 emotions 132–133, 142 Empedocles 70 Enki and Ninhursaga 28 Enlil and Ninlil 31 environmentalism 10, 26, 119–120, 128, 140–142 eschatology see soteriology etiquette 37 ethnic identity 44, 111, 116, 119 ethnography 10, 16–19, 75–98, 129–130 eunhabongcheonsu 85 Euripides 25; Alcestis 61, 62; Electra 73; Heracles 36, 69; Iphigenia in Tauris 35, 69, 73, 103; Orestes 74 excrement 82 fish 39, 46, 83, 93, 103 food 4, 20, 29, 39, 40, 44–46, 71, 80–93, 96, 99, 100, 106–107, 109, 111, 116, 117, 118, 120, 126, 129 foreigners 56–57, 118 friendship 70, 74 funerals 49, 50, 60–62, 83, 96, 101, 109 functionalist anthropology 3–5, 9, 14, 16–18, 23, 142 Gaul 113 gates, entrances 1, 38, 40, 85, 137 ghosts 30 Gilgamesh epic 58, 103 Genesis Rabbah 112 gods: see cosmological realms Greek culture 8, 9, 12, 22–74; Archaic 25; Classical 25, 65; Hellenistic 30 Gudea 28, 35 guilt 9 gut (ceremonies) 76, 82, 92, 129 gwiyangpuri 83, 96

Index of subjects 167 health see disease Hecataeus 68 Herodotus, Histories 25, 34, 40, 68 Hesiod: Theogony 25; Works and Days 25, 50, 51, 73 Hezekiah 53 hierarchy 3, 51, 55, 73, 88–89, 100, 105, 127 Hindus 8, 72, 73 Hittites 23, 33, 35, 36, 39, 44, 66, 104 holy, holiness, sacred 1, 3, 7, 18, 66–67, 72–73, 93–96, 108, 121–122, 128, 130 Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey 25 Homeric Hymns 25, 61 homes 36, 44 humans see cosmological realms Hurrians 23 hygiene 119, 140 Hymn to Nanna 28 ideology 5, 13, 23, 43, 53, 64, 65, 71–72, 99, 115, 130, 132, 142 idolatry 132 Igong-bonpuri 84 igongmaji 85 illwetddangsin 89, 91 incense 34 incest 73 indexical messages 21 indigenous cultures 10 Inhet 59 interpretation, history of 19–20, 99–126, 129 Iran 39, 72 irwolmaji 83, 85, 98 Islam see Muslims Israelites 4, 22–74, 107, 138–139 Japanese 1, 8 Jeju-do 17, 75, 98; religions of 75–76 Jerome 115 Jesus 116–117 Jews 8–9, 20, 25, 100, 112, 113, 115–118; Middle Ages 114; Rabbinic period 71, 112, 114, 117; Second Temple period 30, 55, 65, 111–114 Jewish studies 8 Jijang-bonpuri 85 Josephus, Antiquities 116, 126 Jubilees 111 juniper 82, 84 jwa-sa-u-sa 18

kabbalah 114 kings 23–24, 43–44, 48–49, 51, 105 Klu Klux Klan 119 language 137 Late Antiquity 16, 44 laws 70, 103, 110–111 Lele 10, 16 Letter of Aristeas 113 Levites 42 Leviticus Rabbah 115 life, living see cosmological realms locative 15–16, 29–30 love 70 Luwian 66 Maimonides 115 marriage 42, 57, 118–119 medicine 120, 140, 141 menstruation 1, 40, 56, 81, 82, 98, 106, 112, 118, 122, 123, 129 Mesopotamian cultures 12, 22–74 metaphors 12, 21, 47, 133–137, 138–139, 141, 142 metonymy 131–132, 134, 142 Midrash Tadshe 126 Midrash Tanhumah 112 Mishnah 44 modernity, modern people 20, 47, 112, 119–120, 127–128, 140–142 Moluccas islands 17 momjeongseong (bodily purification) 76, 79, 82, 85 monotheistic 64, 131 morality 1, 3, 9, 38, 47–54, 68–70, 110, 114, 116, 123–124, 133, 134, 136, 139, 142 Moses 41 mourners 40, 62 murder 35, 47, 52–54, 73 music and songs 35, 74, 85, 98 Muslims 1, 34, 114, 118 mysticism 114 myths 15, 17, 46, 80, 128, 130–132, 134, 142 nationalism 119 nature see cosmological realms natron 39, 60 Nazirites 42 Ndembu 5, 132 Nebneteru 49 Negative confessions 38, 48

168  Index of subjects Nergal and Ereshkigal 32 Niddah in Babylonian Talmud 114 oaths 50–52, 110 offerings 36, 37, 42, 45, 92–93, 108, 110; of animals 109; to the dead 63, 64 Olympian gods 25, 27, 28, 61, 70 Opening the Mouth ritual 36, 60, 63 order see disorder; society, social order Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 113 Orphic hymns 70 Orthodox Christians 34, 118 paper 77, 93 Papua New Guinea 17 Particularism 118 Passover 109 patriarchy 51, 87, 119, 123 Paul (Apostle) 112, 114, 116 Pentateuch see Torah/Pentateuch persuasion 100–105, 141 Peter (Apostle) 117 Pharisees 116, 117 pharmakos 54 Phoenicians 34 Philo of Alexandria 114, 126 pigs see pork Pindar’s Odes 25 Piye Stela 43, 46, 49, 103 plague 33, 113 Plato: Laws 70; Phaedo 70 Pliny 115 pointillism 19 politics 5–6, 36, 68, 105, 118 pollution, definition of 1, 11–12, 66–67, 85, 87, 107 Porphyry, De abstinentia 45 pregnancy 41, 56, 89 Pre-Socratic philosophers 25 pork 41, 46, 76, 77, 82–83, 89, 96–97, 116 priests 26, 28, 29, 35, 37–39, 71, 105 prophets 71 Protestants 118 Ptahotep’s Instructions 48 purity, definition of 1, 11–12, 43, 66–67, 93–96 purification 1, 7, 12, 21, 27–44, 53, 132, 138–140 Pythagoreans 70

racism 119 radiance 135 realms see cosmological realms religious studies 2, 6–11, 13 rhetoric 1, 19–22, 43, 100–111, 121, 133, 138, 140–141 rituals 1, 2, 17, 30–32, 34, 36, 53, 69, 71, 78, 79, 85, 92–93, 128–129, 132, 135–137, 138 ritual theory 2–3, 5, 9, 21 Romans 72, 101, 116 sacred see holy saedarim (purification ritual) 79, 85–86 Samseunghalmang-bonpuri 87 science fiction 141 scripture 100 Segyeong-bonpuri 84, 86, 87 Sehwabonhyangdang-bonpuri 84, 85, 87, 92 semen 29, 41, 84, 106, 122 sensation 132, 135 Seogwibonhyangdang-bonpuri 88 seongjupuri 83 sexual intercourse 1, 26, 31–32, 39–41, 79, 82, 83, 84, 100, 112, 114, 118, 119, 129, 130 shamans see simbang (shaman) shaving 39, 65 Sheol 63–64 Shinto 1 Shulgi 43 shrines see temples and shrines sight 32, 81–84 simbang (shaman) 17, 76, 82, 98, 128–129 siwangmaji 83, 85, 86 skin diseases 20, 42, 106, 108, 122, 123 slavery 119 smell 79, 80, 82, 86, 89–91, 133 society, social order 2–6, 8–9, 11, 15, 55, 73, 105, 127, 139 Songdang-bonpuri 91 Sophocles, 25; Antigone 50, 68; Oedipus at Colonus 69; Oedipus the King 73 soteriology 12, 15–16, 29–30, 38, 58–65, 128 soul 70, 78 spiritual, spirituality 119, 142

Index of subjects 169 standardization 104–105 statues 35, 60, 79, 103 Sumer, Sumerians 23, 28, 31, 66 symbols, symbolism 2, 4, 5, 8, 11, 21, 27, 78, 79, 83, 84, 109, 112, 114, 115, 122, 132, 135, 142 Syria-Palestine 39 systematic 20, 23, 26, 99, 106, 107, 109, 111, 123, 125, 129, 130, 135 Tabernacle 32 taboos 5–6, 18, 46, 77, 94–95 Talmud 8, 114 taxonomies 125, 132, 138, 139 temples and shrines 24, 25, 27–46, 73, 76, 79, 80, 90, 100–103, 107–108, 114, 119, 121–122, 124, 128, 130 Theophrastus 70 thick description 19 Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 33 Tosanyeodeuretddang-bonpuri 84, 87 Torah/Pentateuch 71 Tosefta Hagigah 114 touch 1, 42, 69, 73, 74, 82, 94, 99, 103, 106, 133

Ugaritic texts 23, 43 underworld see death universalism 117–119 utopian 15–16, 29–30 vegetarianism 70 villages 88 virgins, virginity, chastity 40, 42, 112 wash see bath, bathing water 1, 7, 33–34, 40, 42, 55–56, 62, 64, 85, 138 Western culture 71, 72 women 37, 39, 56, 62, 77, 81, 87, 111–112, 114–115, 118–119, 123, 129 xenophobia 57 Yalqut Pequdei 126 Zoroastrians 68, 72, 113