Photo by tuchodi
Benjamin Franklin asserted that the turkey , not the eagle, should be our national symbol, calling the former a “much more respectable bird.” I’ll give you another reason to favor the turkey for this job: We eat it in our national feast. In order to explain this, I must relate some facts from long ago.
Among the greatest Biblical scholars of the 19th century was the Scot William Robertson Smith. Smith was excommunicated by his church, however, because his findings did not sit well with the religious authorities of the time. Perhaps the most influential of his ideas was that a common ritual stood at the heart of ancient religions. In this ritual an animal that symbolizes the group of worshipers is sacrificed and then eaten by the group. This communal feast, held Robertson-Smith, was the basis for the kinship that held the group together: it was by eating together that a common bond of kinship was created. Robertson-Smith based his argument on documents describing the early religious practices of Semitic peoples, but he also held that similar communal feasts could be observed world-wide.
One of Smith’s readers was Sigmund Freud, who used Smith’s theory as a basis for his book Totem and Taboo. Freud combined his own ideas about the Oedipus Complex with Smith’s about the communal feast, and came up with the following: The communal feast is a somewhat watered-down version of a ritual that was practiced at the very origin of our species. In the original form, the sacrificial victim was not an animal representing the group, rather it was the dominant male in the group; his male offspring eventually became strong enough to kill their father, thereby ending his monopolistic control over the females of the group. Then, for good measure, the group of sons ate the old guy, gristly though he must have been. Later, feeling guilty about the whole business, they came to worship his memory.
Is any of this true? Probably not: Smith combined some interesting evidence with a good deal of conjecture and speculation, and then Freud added another layer of speculation. But I also think it would be wrong to dismiss these theories as simple nonsense. After all, billions of people do in fact believe some version of the idea that it is important to share a meal comprised of the (either symbolic or real) body of God; Christians call this communion. And it really is also true that many other religions contain some version of this idea—a ritual based on eating a sacrificial victim that represents both the worshippers and God. But of course, at the end of the day, these are simply interesting observations, and no one really knows how (or if) they fit together.
So we are left with a mystery: When Americans feast on an animal that can be said to represent them, they express elements of a strange human behavioral pattern that surely stretches back before the beginning of recorded history. Why does this basic ceremony appear so often across different cultural traditions? The answers that Freud and Robertson Smith offered were probably wrong, but that doesn’t mean the mystery isn’t real.
