SBL 2019 Review Panel | Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature

You may read the original AJR article on this publication here

When Alice takes her tumble down the rabbit hole, she lands in a liminal hallway, lined with doors she can’t open or fit through. She is trapped between the real world and the world of Wonderland. “‘Oh,’ said Alice, ‘how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.’”[1] As luck would have it, there appear before her a small bottle labelled “DRINK ME” and a small cake with the words “EAT ME” spelled out in currants.[2] Alice eats the EAT ME cake and drinks the DRINK ME drink. When she has, she discovers she understands now how to “shut up like a telescope.” Alice is able to fit through the doors into Wonderland and enters, beginning her adventures in that other world.

I use this example when I try to explain to non-specialists what it is this book discusses. For people without familiarity with 4 Ezra, Joseph and Aseneth, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, and the other ancient texts I go through in my book, Alice is an accessible example that conveniently points out what happens when a person consumes food belonging to another world. Because she has eaten and drunk, Alice’s physical appearance changes; she gains access to Wonderland in a way that she could not before she ingested the items provided by the liminal room. In Alice’s case, as in the examples from antiquity, it isn’t explained exactly why it would be that food works this way. The text takes for granted that we readers can follow along. And once you recognize what’s happening, you begin to catch glimpses of hierophagy in a range of texts.

Hierophagy is the word I chose to describe this genre of transformational eating.[3] I define hierophagy as a mechanism by which characters in narrative cross boundaries from one realm to another through ingesting some item from that other realm. Hierophagy results in three specific types of transformations: (A) the binding of the eater to the place of origin of the food; (B) the transformation of the eater either in terms of behaviour or physical appearance; and/or (C) the transmission of new knowledge.

So given this definition, I could point you to other examples from contemporary cinema and literature: the Turkish delight in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; the red pill in The Matrix; both the buffet and the small morsel of ingested food in Spirited Away – you can probably come up with others. But for me, what was fascinating was how prevalent but overlooked the genre was in literature from a range of religious contexts in the ancient Mediterranean world, and in particular in texts where the example of eating caused trouble for its interpreters.

I became interested in the transformative nature of food more than ten years ago. I was writing a Master’s thesis on Joseph and Aseneth and like everyone else who’s wrestled with that captivating text, as Angela well knows, I was having trouble with a scene toward the middle of the book. In that scene, our heroine Aseneth receives a heavenly visitor into her room. This visitor makes a honeycomb appear as if by magic, and feeds some of it to her, asking if she’s understood. I puzzled over how to understand what I was reading, and how ancient readers of the scene could possibly have created meaning of it. The text seemed to take for granted the clarity of what it described. I became fascinated not with possible historical or ritual parallels to Aseneth’s taste of honey, but with literary ones. My Master’s came and went, and even though I wrote on other foodie topics for my PhD and first book, I couldn’t stop thinking about that honeycomb. In trying to find an explanation for that scene and how it worked, I tumbled into a rabbit hole of my own, finding many more examples and even bigger questions.

Those bigger questions have to do with the embodied experience of ingestion and its associated experience, taste. In other words, if transformational eating like hierophagy is something that ancient authors took for granted, why is it that eating or tasting other-worldly food has such a profound effect? What makes taste or ingestion functionally transformative? Part of why I think hierophagy functions as it does is because of the accepted division between the mortal and immortal realms, or between the upper world and the underworld; these categories are often reflected in the food each type of being consumes. Angels and gods consume heavenly food like nectar, while human beings consume mortal, perishable food. Behaviour like fasting, for example, creates space for the divine realm to punctuate the human realm in part because of this kind of distinction; on the flip-side, angels visiting mortals can get pretty anxious about whether they might have to eat mortal food, such as in Testament of Abraham 4. That division is part of what makes eating other-worldly food so transformative: in crossing culinary boundaries, eaters also cross cosmological ones.

Then there is the question of taste. Alice’s DRINK ME bottle has “a sort of mixed flavor of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast.”[4] For many of the texts I cover in Food and Transformation, flavour is also an important factor, signifying the markedness of the ingested item and signaling the transformation to come. Perpetua wakes up from her vision with the sweet taste of the cheese she’s been fed still in her mouth; Revelation’s scroll starts out sweet but in John’s belly it tastes bitter; and Aseneth, of course, eats honey itself. Sweetness is commonly associated with divine foods, like nectar (e.g. Porphyry, De Antro Nymphorum 15-19) or manna (e.g. Wis Sol 19:21), so this isn’t really surprising. But it shows that flavour works symbolically to alert the reader to the transformative properties of the ingested item, since, as Caroline Korsmeyer notes, our understanding of what a flavour means is governed by cultural categories.[5]

Apart from the symbolic association of the flavours of ingested items, though, the sense of taste is itself operative in hierophagy. Taste is the most intimate of the senses because of how private it is: in tasting we internalize the sense object and take it into ourselves. The body is penetrated by the sense object such that it becomes a part of us.[6] This is why tasting is so fundamental to how hierophagy functions: it transforms what was external or alien into what is internal and intimate. Through ingesting otherworldly food, eaters are bound to that realm, or internalize other-worldly knowledge, aspects which are sometimes physically manifested by bodily changes, like Aseneth’s shining face after she consumes the honeycomb.

For me, these sensory questions only make me hungry for more. Currently I'm working on a project looking at conceptual metaphors and the phrase used frequently in biblical and later ancient literature, tasting death, and I'm putting on a workshop in July on the topic of “What the Body Knows: Embodied Senses and Meaning Creation in the Biblical Imagination.” The call for proposals is still open so let me know if you're interested! Taste is at a very exciting point in its exploration in biblical and classical studies, and my work on hierophagy has whet my appetite to continue my work on taste and meaning-creation in ancient literature.

Depiction of Rev 10:1-2, Trinity Apocalypse, ca. 1250; the James Catalogue of Western Manuscripts, Trinity College Cambridge

Responses to Panelists

Since the issue of genre was raised by more than one respondent, I will address that first. Both Elizabeth and Angela noted that I employ genre slightly differently than is usual for the discipline. I take my cues in this regard from the field of genre studies, and most directly from the work of Carolyn R. Miller. Miller’s understanding of genre moves beyond Aristotelian genre categories and their derivatives to view genre as actions that take place in the social realm. She proposes a five-part understanding of genre:

1. Genre refers to a conventional category of discourse based in large-scale typification of rhetorical action; as action, it acquires meaning from situation and from the social context in which that situation arose.

2. As meaningful action, genre is interpretable by means of rules; genre rules occur at a relatively high level on a hierarchy of rules for symbolic interaction.

3. Genre is distinct from form: form is the more general term used at all levels of the hierarchy. Genre is a form at one particular level that is a fusion of lower-level forms and characteristic substance.

4. Genre serves as the substance of forms at higher levels; as recurrent patterns of language use, genres help constitute the substance of our cultural life.

5. A genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence; it motivates by connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent.

Miller’s definition allows intercourse between the social realm and the realm of discourse, articulating that genres are culture-bound ways of expressing even the smallest action and ways of creating meaning from those actions. In other words, genres are functional and bring about action among those participating in the discourse. Sune Auken has begun to apply Miller’s analysis of genre in the social realm to the fictional realm. Auken points out that, internal to the narrative, generic actions advance the action of the story. Within the fictional frameworks social action takes place and creates meaning that characters react to and understand. It is this use of genre as social action that I apply to analyse hierophagy. Indeed, it is this kind of analysis that allows hierophagy to be visible. It allows me to illustrate how hierophagy is not just about the presence of divine food in a narrative, but rather the social and cosmological ramifications of its ingestion in a way that advances the action of the story in a particular way.

Angela Kim Harkins brought up a number of implications I hadn't yet considered that might arise from thinking about hierophagy as an embodied revelatory event. Angela rightly pointed out how hierophagy crops up in apocalyptic narratives as a way of revealing divine knowledge. The physical changes experienced by the taster aside from the flavour of the ingested item, such as Aseneth’s shining face, allow the intimacy of the taste experience to be shared with others -- namely, as Angela points out, with potential readers. I hadn't thought about these physical after-effects as functioning rhetorically; Angela’s examples of interoception from Daniel illustrate this important point more fully, and make me wonder about other implications between text and reader. Some of these Angela has already raised -- for example about translating Daniel’s experiences in a way that are comprehensible to the reader -- and I am fascinated. Another example that Angela raises is the fluidity of the Garden as potential luminal space, something that leads Angela to raise the liminality of the fictional world generated by the text, created in partnership with the reader’s own imagination. This collaboration between the imaginative, embodied experience that a reader has in digesting a story creates new worlds. I also agree with her word of caution about the pitfalls of over determining apocalyptic or revelatory scenes such as that of Perpetua in the Garden. I certainly don't mean to imply that there can only be one way of reading these texts, which the authors likely intended to be inscrutable to a certain extent.

In focusing so deliberately on the narrative world in which hierophagy takes place, I hadn't considered the potential effects on readers. In my own home department at the University of Sheffield there are some of the leading scholars of a concept called Text World Theory. The basic premise of Text World Theory is that human beings process and understand all discourse by constructing mental representations of it in their minds. It seems to me that this concept might help me think further about how readers and texts create meaning together through shared sensory experiences. I thank Angela for bringing these possibilities to my attention.

I am so grateful for Barbette Spaeth’s engagement with my book. As someone not formally trained in Classics, I find the insights she's brought to this topic especially valuable. As she observes, the Persephone myths in their various forms and the Metamorphoses do not utilise transformational eating in the same ways compared with the other texts I use for case studies. Persephone is only bound temporarily to Hades when she ingests the pomegranate seeds, and Lucius is actually returned to his true form rather than transformed into something or someone new. She also identifies complications with my analysis of Lucius’ knowledge, or lack thereof, after his rose event; he maintains his characteristic curiosity and ignorance from the start of the book until his initiation.

Barbette offers a very useful framework to contextualise hierophagy, which is the pharmakon or transformational substance, which can be ingested or externally applied, or even carried. I do not deny that in their literary forms, the parallel of the pharmakon certainly fits with the ideas outlined in Persephone and in Metamorphoses. Pharmaka offer an extremely useful parallel way of thinking about transformations, as Barbette’s investigation into the three realms in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter illustrates. I'm particularly intrigued by her discussion of Demeter’s kykeon-related transformation. However, part of my goal with this book is to get us to think more about why eating and tasting specifically function transformatively at all, and why texts across the Mediterranean seem to opt for ingestion for some examples when other choices were available to their authors. In other words, even within the category of pharmakon, ingestion still warrants investigation. What is it about eating that makes it “natural” for it to function this way? It's clear pharmaka are an area I should explore for further investigation of how ingestion and taste transform.

I thank Angela Standhartinger for this thoughtful response, which has pointed out points of contact between my work on hierophagy and a number of ancient Jewish texts I had not addressed, such as Philo and the Apocalypse of Abraham. Angela rightly notes how texts of this period appear anxious about how humans might be seen to eat outside of the earthly realm, and likewise angels in the human realm. Philo’s explanation about how Moses could eat in the presence of God, namely that the soul is the aspect of the human beings which is actually nourished, is also fascinating in that its allegorisation still illustrates that distinction that authors in the Hellenistic and Roman periods attempt to enforce between mortal and heavenly eating.

I am also interested in thinking more about the connection Angela proposes between hierophagy and the development of Jewish and Christian mysticism. I think the direct relationship between mystic and divine knowledge fits with what I argue about the intimacy of tasting in comparison to the other human senses. Many of the texts I've included, in particular the Jewish ones, are apocalyptic in form, and the relationship between apocalyptic and mystic is an important link.

Finally, I will respond to some of the stimulating thoughts brought up by Elizabeth Castelli’s reading. I have a lot of things I could touch on, one of which is the porouness of bodies in Perpetua and Felicitas throughout the text. This contextualisation for Perpetua’s transformation is really important, and one that I should have brought out more explicitly in the book. It also makes me think about other potential places where other embodied experiences surround transformative eating, and how other senses might work in tandem with taste to bring about change. 4 Ezra is also a text where this kind of multisensory change takes place, as Ezra moves from hearing, to seeing, to tasting at the same time as he gradually increases in understanding, culminating in his fiery cup. For Perpetua, of course, the cheese vision is only the beginning, more like John in Revelation, where other senses pile on in the wake of the little scroll. Perpetua’s multiple transformations are complex, with her body as the focal element.

Elizabeth also brings up the fact that hierophagy is a neologism. Its usefulness for me is that I hope it will nudge people into reconsidering how they read food, eating, and taste — I want to create space for imagining other options than the ritual or the social. In so many of the texts I looked at were bound by preconceived interpretive limits — focusing on finding parallels with Eucharistic meals, for example. So in some sense hierophagy provides a reminder to readers that other ways of reading texts where food and eating are used, in his case to drive the action of the story in a way that has transformational effects for the eater. But also to consider other possible ways that non-hierophagy century meals and eating can be read. I hope that this new word helps people remember the sensory as well as social aspects of taste. Only time will tell if it catches on!

[1] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (New York: Samuel Gabriel Sons, 1916), 6.

[2] Carroll, Wonderland, 7–8.

[3] A colleague suggested it to me years ago; it’s been used only once or twice elsewhere and no one had ever defined it, so I decided to take it on.

[4] Carroll, Wonderland, 7.

[5] Caroline Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1999), 90-91.

[6] Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton University Press, 1990), 25.

Meredith J.C. Warren is the Director of the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies and a Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her latest book, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (SBL Press, 2019) is now available.