SBL 2019 Review Panel | Food for Thought: Eating and Drinking with Meredith J. C. Warren

Dr. Meredith Warren has produced a fascinating and delectable study of food and the transformative effects of eating in a wide range of ancient texts. Her study gives us much to ruminate over and digest. If we think about our own phenomenal experience of eating, we know that eating certain foods can certainly produce tangible effects on the body. For some, eating fried chicken, biscuits, and what my mother-in-law would call “greasy cut-shorts” (a type of bean) would lead to an entire night of indigestion. So too, certain drinks such as black coffee, tea, and various supplemented beverages promise to boost our energy.

The subject of this book is the phenomenon of hierophagy: “the mechanism by which characters in narrative cross boundaries from one realm to another.” (2) Dr. Warren begins this study by observing that the effects of eating otherworldly food are: (1) Hierophagy binds the person to the place of origin of that food; (2) Hierophagy transforms the eater in some way; (3) Hierophagy transmits knowledge. These ancient stories about “otherworldly foods that transform” participate in a particular type of narrative genre. Warren writes: “The importance of narrative-level performance to the narrative events has been underappreciated; this study participates in the move to prioritize an examination of this kind of event, especially as it reflects not an equivalent historical ritual, but rather a pervasive worldview that has crafted the genre governing the accessibility of other realms.” (7)

Warren clearly states that she is not interested in using narratives about hierophagy as evidence to reconstruct ancient rituals; instead she focuses on how these narratives describe the effects of ritual consumption of otherworldly food or drink within narrative worlds. Warren is more concerned with describing how the activity of eating otherworldly food creates a special bond between the individual and the heavenly realm. She carefully articulates that these texts provide us with a cultural knowledge about an ancient worldview that understands the boundaries between ‘this-worldly’ and ‘other-worldly’ realms as “porous-but-present” (9). In ancient texts, ingesting otherworldly foods creates a lasting bond with the heavenly realm, and it is also a way of speaking about the acquisition of knowledge (14). Her study of the phenomenon of eating otherworldly food and drink gives us access to the cultural conventions presumed by the narrative world, and perhaps a glimpse of how ancients conceptualized this-world and otherworldly realities. In this project, Warren rejects traditional understandings of transformational eating as directly mapping out Christian conversion rituals (in the case of Joseph and Aseneth), and the eucharist (Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity). Here, Warren draws our attention to other narrative elements in which Christian sacraments do not fit precisely. Warren reminds us that the sensory experience of eating is intimate and experienced at the level of the individual. In this way, it is different from hearing (in which many people may report hearing something but not able to distinguish clearly the sounds); or seeing, which is also available to more than just the visionary (although it is frequently restricted to just the visionary).

Warren has chosen a sampling of apocalyptic visionary texts that depict a solitary individual of some standing ingesting food or drink; Ezra, 4 Ezra, drinks a fiery liquid; John, consumes a scroll in Revelation; Aseneth, eats a mysterious honeycomb; Perpetua consumes runny cheese in a vision of an otherworldly garden. Warren also includes early Greek and Roman stories about Persephone or Proserpina and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses. In my comments, I will focus on the early Jewish and Christian narratives that Warren discusses, namely 4 Ezra, Revelation, Joseph and Aseneth, and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity.

Even though it may or may not be done with a group, eating remains an intimate and solitary experience. Warren also treats the phenomenon of eating and sharing tastes with a community dispersed over long distances (see p. 70). The experience of eating is one in which the person who ingests is left to savor or delight in the flavor, yet the experience itself is private and demands disclosure to another. It is this quality that eating and drinking share with visionary experiences. Warren’s study of transformational eating, like visions or other altered states of consciousness, examines an interior experience that must be disclosed. Through the act of telling about the experience, the listener may still only receive a partial or incomplete understanding of what has taken place.

This aspect of disclosing the taste of the food (the sticky sweetness of honey, the bitterness of the scroll, the sweetness of the runny cheese), intersects well with the activity of disclosing revelatory experiences—making public that which is experienced personally. So, I read these chapters about the transformational effects of eating otherworldly foods, with special attention to how they appear in apocalyptic narratives in which the eating of the food participates in the (apocalyptic) theme of disclosure of revelatory knowledge or provides access to otherworldly experiences. What is notable is the significant effort made to convince the reader that these ‘otherworldly’ experiences generated ‘this worldly’ effects. For example, after eating the heavenly honeycomb, Aseneth washes her face in a basin of water and “notices her brilliant visage: her face ‘was like the sun’ and her eyes ‘like the rising morning start’ (Ph 18:7)”. So, while the eating was purely interior and experienced solely by Aseneth, the effects of eating were plainly visible for all to see. Her face becomes bright, “like lightening.” Aseneth shares a feature fitting for her heavenly visitor, paralleling visionary experiences of seers who refer to bodily changes as proof of their experiences. In the midst of retelling the nighttime vision in 7:15, Daniel recounts his interoceptive experiences: “As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me”.[1] Readers are also given interoceptive details of the seer’s vasomotor flush: “As for me, Daniel, my thoughts greatly terrified me, and the pallor (of my face) changed; but I kept the matter in my mind” (7:28). Unlike the scenario in Daniel 10:7-9 in which the people around Daniel can see that he has had a vision because he grows pale and faints, these references in chapter 7 to Daniel’s nighttime vision describe interior emotional states that were not witnessed by anyone. They are details that must be divulged during the process of retelling for the benefit of the reader.[2] Enoch’s description of his entry into the heavenly throne room is accompanied by his report of his body’s display of trembling (“And I went into that house—hot as fire and cold as snow; and no delight of life was in it. Fear enveloped me, and trembling seized me; and I was quaking and trembling, and I fell on my face. . . And I had been until now on my face, prostrate and trembling, and the Lord called me with his mouth and said to me, "Come here, Enoch, and hear my word(s)" (1 En 14:13-14 and 24). So too, the phenomenon of eating otherworldly foods also seems to be accompanied at times by details that speak to the ‘effects’, especially the display of the experience of the otherworld on the one who is ingesting the supernal food and drink. Even in the case of Ezra, the drinking of the mysterious fiery liquid results in his heart ‘pouring forth’ understanding; and the seer is also ‘caught up’ into heaven and carried away (56). It is significant that both of these images underscore the seer’s passive state. He is overwhelmed by the feeling of something ‘pouring forth’—not unlike the effects of eating something unfamiliar which can bring on sudden feelings in the stomach like a sudden and violent bout of queasiness or the unstoppable experience of vomiting. The otherworldly drink could be said to produce real effects on Ezra. Ezra becomes a figure who is now ‘acted upon’ by the revelatory elixir—he is changed by it and no longer in control.

Another apocalyptic feature that appears in Warren’s texts is that of the dream vision and the acquisition of special knowledge from the otherworld. In the vision in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, Perpetua ascends a tall bronze ladder, enters into a wide-open garden space and experiences a vision of the otherworldly garden with an unidentified grey-haired man milking some sheep. He greets her by saying, “Welcome child!” and gives her what he has just milked from the sheep. She cups her hands and drinks (Perpetua, 4.8-4.10). Perpetua then awakens, with the sound of their voice ringing in her ears—although, interestingly, we are not told who is speaking or what is said. She also awakens with the taste of the sheep curds coating her tongue. The sweet taste in her mouth is taken as physical proof that some kind of experience has taken place. Here, Warren understands the cheese as a token, which Frances Flannery says “Illustrates the shifting borderline between dream-world and waking-world.”[3] Perpetua awakens with “the lingering taste of the sweet cheese in her mouth”. While the bodies of both Perpetua and Felicitas show the undeniable effects of their maternal state—their breasts dripping with milk—after her vision, her milk dries up and she no longer experiences concern for her child. The realization upon awakening is the knowledge that they will die, but that they have a place in the heavenly realm—thus the otherworldly food binds the eater to the heavenly realm.

Part of Warren’s thesis is that baptismal imagery is not the best lens through which to understand the instance of eating in this vision. Perpetua’s eating of the milky curds are not understood as Eucharistic.[4] Instead, Warren proposes that this scene in the Martyrdom is an example of hierophagy — “a mechanism by which characters in narrative cross boundaries from one realm to another.” In the case of eating, taste is a sensory experience that allows for “a very private” encounter. According to Warren, the sweetness of the cheese conveys the proof that Perpetua has surely been in the heavenly realm--this, I think, is exactly right.

One question that Warren discusses in some detail is: what exactly does Perpetua eat? Warren helpfully points out that what Perpetua consumes is cheese (caseus) and not milk, as it has been translated very early on. Both cheese and milk, or even soft cheese or curds, have the property of coating the tongue or clinging to the surface in the mouth. It lingers or stays with you, even after you have swallowed. It is this quality of milk that might make you want to drink water after eating a high-fat ice cream cone; or to enjoy wine after tasting a creamy cheese.

Part of Warren’s thesis is to eschew any sacramental understanding of this vision. She notes that Perpetua’s baptism is described later on with no notable emphasis. Indeed, it may be that an ancient reader would not readily imagine this vision to refer to any ritual at all, and perhaps the soft cheese connects somehow to the broader general notion, like the one that was attached to milk. John Penniman’s work has shown clearly how milk functioned as a cultural trope in the ancient world for the deep inculcation of identity, ethnicity, and beliefs in the ancient world.[5]

Even so, one of the things that interests me about Perpetua’s vision is the otherworldly space that she enters by means of the ladder. She arrives in a broad and open garden space. Gardens are otherworldly spaces that signal the power and prestige of the sovereign deity—in this heavenly cultivated space we expect to find exotic cultivars that delight the eyes and perfume the air with pleasing scents. In ancient texts, gardens were situated on the periphery or on the boundaries of realms—in the way that a garden is the liminal boundary between a king’s palace and the ordinary world. This heavenly garden scene may point to the liminal space traversed on the way to a further realm. Also, how can we understand the reference to the lingering sound of the voices of the multitude who spoke “amen” after her drinking? How can we understand this in a way that is not a ritual—is it this word or other words that linger in Perpetua’s ears upon her awakening? I wonder what more could be said phenomenologically about the sensory experiences that appear in Perpetua’s vision. How might we understand these auditory perceptions along with the lingering taste of cheese connected also to the knowledge that she receives? Like a dream, the vision is a pastiche of elements—but here, are we to think that vision’s abruptness and incongruity is evidence of narrative art imitating reality, that is a dream state? This, I am not sure.

We cannot say what Perpetua heard exactly or what exactly it was that she ate, (here, I do agree with Warren that it seems that she is consuming something more viscous than milk--)—the visionary narrative remains elusive in its details. In the end, we can appreciate how Warren’s project draws attention to how modern scholars tend to overdetermine this scene as a specific sacramental or Christian ritual. While I agree that the details of the vision do not bring a one to one correlation with any one Christian ritual, I would prefer to say that these revelatory texts were intentionally undetermined and thus keeping them open to interpretation.

In my own work, I am especially interested in how apocalypses seek to make revelatory experiences accessible with first-hand vividness, what we might call experience of presence.[6] ‘Presence’ is a cognitive state in which a reader gains awareness of ‘being’ in a particular narrative world, an otherworldly space.[7] Narrative worlds, sometimes referred to as “possible and fictional worlds” by critical literary theorists, are described as experientially fluid spaces that are generated in part by the text and in part by the reader’s imaginative experiencing of the text through enactive processes.[8] When we immerse ourselves in these texts, bodily metaphors readily come to mind: We get lost in a book, or we speak of a plot’s twists and turns. In the case apocalyptic texts, the experience of being in otherworldly spaces can also be described through body’s experiences eating. Indeed, the language that is used for describing experiences of reading or contemplation with a high level of absorption can be cast in gastronomic terms: “I was consumed by the story,” “Happy is the one who (chews over) ruminates on the Torah of the Lord, day and night” (Ps 1). To “chew over” a text is also an image for the ongoing experience of contemplation or the experiencing of rumination—a way of making presence from absence.

Texts provide only a glimpse of a narrative world that readers must then extend and complete in their imaginations. An example of this is the New York Times: “Just as you don’t need to download, say, the entire New York Times to be able to read it on your desktop, so you don’t need to construct a representation of all the detail of the scene in front of you to have a sense of its detailed presence.”[9] So too, the narrative worlds in these texts are extended and completed when they are enacted by the reader’s imagination, assisted by the details of the sensor’s eating experiences in the process of vivid imagining.

[1] Interoception refers to an individual’s awareness of his/her interior physiological state and is usually mediated through the skin or the viscera. These experiences include those that we experience through our bodies, like “temperature, pain, itch, tickle, sensual touch, muscular and visceral sensations, vasomotor flush, hunger, thirst.” A fuller discussion of bodily perception and experience, referred to as interoception and proprioception, and their function in immersive experiences of reading (enactive reading) is available in Angela Kim Harkins, “Experiencing the Solidity of Spaces in the Qumran Hodayot,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls, Revise and Repeat: New Methods and Perspectives on the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. A. Krause, C. Palmer, E.M. Schuller, and J. Screnock, SBLEJL (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), 353-71, esp. 359-366.

[2] Other interoceptive reports include Dan 8:27, “So, I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days; then I arose and went about the king’s business. But I was dismayed by the vision and did not understand it”.

[3] Frances Flannery-Dailey, Dreamers, Scribes, and Priests: Jewish Dreams in the Hellenistic and Roman Eras, JSJSup 90 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 63 (emphasis original).

[4] In addition to the ones discussed by Warren in this section, other provocative references to milk appear in the Odes of Solomon 8:13-14 (“And before they had existed, I recognized them; and imprinted a seal on their faces. I fashioned their members, and my own breasts I prepared for them, that they might drink my holy milk and live by it. I am pleased by them, and am not ashamed by them.”) and OdesSol 19 (“A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord's kindness. The Son is the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him; Because His breasts were full, and it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released. The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom, and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father. Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, and those who have received it are in the perfection of the right hand. The womb of the Virgin took it, and she received conception and gave birth”).

[5] John David Penniman, “Fed to Perfection: Mother’s Milk, Roman Family Values, and the Transformation of the Soul in Gregory of Nyssa,” Church History 84 (2015): 495-530; and more recently, idem., Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

[6] This is the subject of my current project on the early Christian text, the Shepherd of Hermas, see too, A.K. Harkins, “Experiencing the Solidity of Spaces,” and eadem., “Immersing Oneself in the Narrative World of Second Temple Apocalyptic Visions,” in Re-Imagining Apocalypticism: Apocalypses, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Lorenzo DiTommaso and Matthew Goff, SBLEJL (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2021).

[7] Anežka Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment,” Semiotica 189 (2012): 23-48; Marie-Laure Ryan, “The Text as World: Theories of Immersion,” in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 61-84.

[8] Helpful is the discussion by Marco Caracciolo, “Ungrounding Fictional Worlds: An Enactivist Perspective on the ‘Worldlikeness’ of Fiction,” in Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology, ed. Alice Bell and Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 113-131.

[9] Caracciolo, “Ungrounding Fictional Worlds,” 127; who reuses this example from Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 50.

Angela Kim Harkins is an Associate Professor of New Testament at Boston College STM. Her work on the lived experience of religion covers a range of early Jewish and Christian prayers and apocalyptic writings. She is the author of Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions, Ekstasis 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), a study which offers a fresh look at the Qumran prayers known as the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns) and considers how the experiences of embodied mind and emotions can be brought to bear on these texts. Harkins’s interdisciplinary work seeks to move beyond purely discursive and exegetical approaches to early Jewish and Christian writings by reintegrating the mind and body in new understandings of how reading was ritualized in antiquity. She is currently engaged in a long-term project on the early Christian text known as the Book of Visions from the Shepherd of Hermas. She may be reached at angela.harkins@bc.edu.