Easter: A time for ritualized death, rebirth and cannibalism

From Something to chew on :

 

...Also known as Bacchus, the figure of Dionysus predates the Greeks - the Egyptian Osiris is one doppelgänger - but it's in his Hellenic form where parallels with Christian tales and rituals are clearest. Both are clearly "Resurrection Gods", or "dying and rising" deities as James Frazer terms them in The Golden Bough.

Connections are many and deep, such as both having as parents a mortal woman, and a god, both having principle festivals falling at the winter solstice. But there is one area that stands out: the bloody ritual at the centre of the Dionysian cult, and the most shocking and baffling ritual practised by modern Christians - cannibalism.

The Eucharist as practised by most branches of Christianity may look to non-believers like the consumption of wafers and wine, but doctrinally this is the flesh and blood of Christ - not symbolically, but in actuality. From the perspective of believers in this doctrine of transubstantiation it's hard to see how this apparent ritual is anything other than real, bloody cannibalism ...

Dionysian rites involved a similar substitution; the Athenians, according to the Golden Bough, believed that at festivals Dionysus could be persuaded into the body of a goat, which they then tore apart with their teeth. Similarly, Cretans beseeched him to enter the body of a bull, which they also ripped to shreds and ate. Quite how an unarmed mob could attack and kill a fully-grown bull is perhaps puzzling to us, but Frazer lists many more comparable rituals from around the globe.

We know that cannibalism is integral to the Dionysian cult. Various legends, sometimes conflicting, revolve around Dionysus's death, torn apart by his enemies, then his rebirth, via the unusual mechanism of his mother, Semele, eating his heart and falling pregnant once again as a result. However, we can only guess at the meaning of this cannibalism. Frazer, seeing connections with more recent tribal rituals, considers the devouring of the god as a wish to become the god, to absorb his powers - and that seems plausible. With Christianity, though, we get at least one meaning straight from the horse's mouth - or at least, from a biographer: "And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, 'This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me'."

So, virtual cannibalism to unbelievers, but real to adherents - an instruction to remember their god by eating him; and this the religion at the centre of western civilisation. Yet at the same time cannibalism is viewed as completely taboo, aberrant in all circumstances...