GRAVE PAWNS Civilization`s Animal Victims Jared Christman

GRAVE PAWNS
Civilization’s Animal Victims
Jared Christman
TIER BOOKS
Old Bridge, New Jersey
TIER BOOKS
P.O. Box 5492
Old Bridge, NJ 08857
www.tierbooks.org
Copyright © 2010 by Jared Christman
All rights reserved.
Brief excerpts from this book
may be used for educational purposes.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Christman, Jared.
Grave pawns : civilization’s animal victims / Jared Christman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
LCCN: 2010929999
ISBN-13: 978-0-6153-7592-2
ISBN-10: 0-61537-592-8
1. Human-animal relationships.
2. Animal welfare.
3. Death–psychological aspects.
4. Jungian psychology.
5. Fear of death.
I. Title.
QL85.C47 2010 179'.3
What shadows over the earth!
Carl Jung, The Red Book1
CONTENTS
Introduction
1
1. Liquidation
19
2. Speculation
40
3. Incorporation
62
4. Fetishism
96
5. Appropriation
129
References
161
Index
182
INTRODUCTION
Animal Victimization and the Shadow
One who wishes to understand the killing of
animals must first acknowledge that the shadow is
deepest in the grave. When Carl Jung peered into the
human mind, he glimpsed the morbid sense of
creaturely inferiority that casts the shadow outside the
self, into prejudicial and violent behavior. Such behavior
certainly includes the human treatment of animals—
the killing of animals ranks high on the list of the
incarnations of the Jungian shadow. Killing other
creatures is so pervasive an instance of the repressive
behavior that gives the shadow its power that ritualistic
zoocide forms its own “shadow economy.” The purpose
of this shadow economy is to overcome the human fear
of death by pawning the lives of animals. Under the
shadow, animals become “grave pawns” whose vitality is
sought by people yearning to transcend the finitude of
human existence—to cheat death in the game of life.
Arising from the depths of the human psyche,
the Jungian shadow economy of zoocide imposes its
grip well beyond the financial shadow economy of illegal
killing. The illicit trade in the remains of endangered
species certainly falls under the Jungian shadow, but so
do animal experiments that follow the law to the letter.
Because the Jungian shadow economy is a type of ritual
economy,1 the shadow also motivates customs of killing
that lack a clear financial component—for instance,
traditional rites of religious sacrifice. In fact the shadow
economy originates in a non-financial, animistic
1
conception of animal value that precedes by vast spans
of time the commodification of animal bodies.
In the modern world of speculative markets and
mechanized production, the shadow belies the proliferation of animal-based commodities. The Jungian
shadow economy is far from a marginal or hidden
phenomenon within larger economic systems of
modernity, though the act of killing is typically
relegated to the dusky outskirts of geography and
consciousness. What is usually obscured in modern
societies is the motivation for animal killing, whose
metaphysical roots are buried under excuses of material
expediency. The active repression of the shadow in the
victimization of animals explains not only the
widespread complacency, even exuberance, about the
contemporary scale of animal killing, but also the
scarcity of studies of the sources of zoocide. Few people,
however intellectually inclined, are eager to face the
shadow, and few human behaviors reach more
intractably into the shadow than violence against
animals.
The shadow is deepest in the grave because it
emanates from there. Jung’s analysis of “the inferiorities constituting the shadow”2 tip-toes around the
grave, but his insights can readily be extended to the
role of thanatophobia—the fear of death—in the lethal
treatment of animals. No greater sense of inferiority
plagues humankind than mortality; people fear death so
profoundly because they possess an irrepressible urge to
leap free of the bonds of animal existence. A trenchant
summation of this quintessentially human dilemma
comes from Ernest Becker’s magnum opus, The Denial of
Death: “Man is literally split in two . . . he sticks out of
2
nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back
into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly
to rot and disappear forever.”3 The desire to redefine the
facts of existence, to imprint a human mark upon the
world, need not be stultifying—witness many of the
marvels of modern science and the fashionings of the
artistic imagination. These creative artifacts of the
shadow offer a glimpse of the blossoming of human
potential that the dissipation of the shadow could
engender, liberating people from violence and victimization without tempering creativity. Overcoming
denial is the catalyst of this dissipation, since according
to Jung “[t]he shadow personifies everything that the
subject refuses to acknowledge about himself.”4 We
should add that the shadow animalizes as well as
personifies. The self in the thrall of the shadow casts the
animal victim as the embodiment of salvation against
human mortality.
The ritual killing of animals could not occur
without a worldview of human biological superiority,
otherwise known as speciesism, but the shadow
economy of animal killing springs first and foremost
from the mortal trembling of the human creature.
Struggling against the fallenness of terrestrial life, too
many people presume to find the secret of immortality
in the concentrated, dynamic vitality of animal victims.
Joseph Campbell, an avid Jungian scholar, understood
this ethos of human transcendence: “The first myth of
the self-protective ego, defending itself from the
necessity of yielding its own blood to be the life of the
world, is that of an immortal ground underlying the
phenomenology of the passing world.”5 Gifted by nature
with vitality at the very least equal to that of people, and
3
often superior because of human physical frailty,
animals are perceived as the vessels of this immortal
ground of nature, and the violence that kills them is
perceived as the unleashing of an immortal force.
The psychological mechanism fueling this
violence is the projection of the shadow onto animal
victims. Projection is the translation of psychological
processes into objective reality; people who confront the
world through projection are actually encountering
their own inner schemata. “In the darkness of anything
external to me,” says Jung of the projecting self, “I find,
without recognizing it as such, an interior or psychic
life.”6 To lay the foundation for rituals of zoocide,
people project onto the bodies of animals the essence of
deathless vigor of which the victimizers fear an impoverishment in themselves. The immortalizing value
attributed to the substances of the animal frame,
whether this attribution is conscious or unconscious, is
a reflection of the human rejection of the finality of
death. Any surface distinctions among the motivations
of the victimizers—the motivations of the producers of
animal products versus those of the consumers, for
instance—are incidental to the thanatophobic origins of
animal victimization. These origins transcend the choice
of victim, the mechanism of killing, and the division of
zoocidal labor.
The model of shadow projection I am using is a
radical departure from the character-based model
formulated by Jung. For him the process entailed the
imposition on others of one’s own character inferiorities.
Shadow projection in animal killing extends far beneath
the surface foibles of personal character, into the
domain of humankind’s mortal terrors. Jung’s general
4
remarks on the alienating costs of projection are
nevertheless relevant to animal victimization:
The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from
his environment, since instead of a real relation to
it there is now only an illusory one. . . . The resultant
sentiment d’incompletude and the still worse feeling
of sterility are in their turn explained by projection
as the malevolence of the environment, and by
means of this vicious circle the isolation is
intensified.7
The killing of animals fails miserably as a project of transcendence, entrenching the victimizers ever more
stubbornly in alienation from their own mortality and
from the surrounding world. What is needed instead for
human social and psychological maturation is a mode of
transcendence that frees the fear of death from its
prisonhouse of violence-provoking repression.
This book is an attempt to lay bare the inner
workings of the shadow economy of zoocide and the
status of animals as grave pawns. My guiding premise in
writing such an exposé of benighted human behavior is
that awareness of the origins of animal killing is the
first step away from our stunted relations toward other
species and toward each other. The book covers what I
consider to be the five major shadow-economic modes
of animal killing: liquidation, speculation, incorporation,
fetishism, and appropriation. That the book’s chapter
headings have a dual meaning, both ritual and financial,
is no accident. As a chorus of anthropologists has
insisted, forms of ritual economy have had in the course
of human history an unshakeable grip on our behavior,
right up until the present day. Wendy James, author of
5
The Ceremonial Animal, conveys the importance of ritual
economy in the financial sphere: “People are playing
complex symbolic games over wealth . . . games which
are not only rooted in the immediate material world but
refer to an invisible world too.”8 Upon the bodies of
animals, the material and invisible spheres of the
shadow economy converge, and humans partake of that
Promethean substance with which they strive to push
themselves further and further from biological
determinism. For the “ceremonial animal,” a seemingly
prosaic activity like predation suddenly takes on
symbolic overtones that can be parsed psychologically.
Throughout this book, the reader ought not forget that
human relations to animals, in particular lethal
relations, unfold within a ritual-economic system of
extracting, exchanging, and consuming the materials of
the regenerative world.
The shadow economy of animal killing is every
bit as real as a financial economy, if not more real. The
accumulation of money and other liquid assets, a
ubiquitous form of death transcendence, is heavily
shaped by cultural institutions and thereby detached
from sources of natural fecundity. On the other hand,
animal killing invariably presumes that culture can
make no claims to timeless value without borrowing
from nature. The shadow economy of animal killing and
its various components should be construed not as
metaphorical equivalents of a financial economy, but
instead as foundational forms of economic behavior.
Some scholars have partially realized this—like Nicole
Shukin with her theory of “animal capital”9—but they
usually pretend that capitalism is the only meaningful
context in which to critique the killing of animals, that
6
wider anthropological claims have little merit. This book
adopts the opposite premise: that the study of the
killing of animals must begin at the crossroads of
anthropology and psychology. Attempting to claim that
the economy of zoocide has meaning only within a
modern capitalist society is akin to arguing that Rolex
invented time. Although the killing of animals has
rapidly intensified within the networks of capitalism, on
a scale that dwarfs even the massive ceremonial killings
of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the shadow economy
of zoocide reaches into the recesses of human evolution,
to the primeval fears of hominid creatures in large
measure at the mercy of nature.
What has changed in modernity is the level of
repression of the shadow economy. The real reasons
that people lay a ritual claim to the lives of animals have
been driven further underground in capitalism than in
any other type of socio-economic system. For zoocidal
groups with organic, holistic philosophies of nature, the
shadow economy is relatively out in the open, animals
in general assume a more sacrosanct quality, and the
degree of violence against animals is more circumscribed. The march of Western civilization has ushered
in the relentless stomping out of animal life. “Advanced”
Western societies impose upon their environments an
elaborate façade of artifice that accelerates the need for
compensatory bloodshed. The epic ox-killing rites of
the 4th-century (BCE) Athenian city-state, a kind of
bloody pièce de résistance of ancient Greek religion, are
a gruesome way-station in the evolution of Western civilization from restrained killing to unbridled slaughter.
Most cultures of modernity, contrary to their claims of
rationality, have not abandoned an animistic framework
7
of animal killing—they simply strip violence against animals of its traditional ritual inhibitions. People who
claim to be fully “modern” exhibit a stubborn unwillingness to relinquish the basic psychological stratagems of
the pre-modern world, and the victimization of animals
is hardly an exception to this psychological rule. Then as
now, the central component of the zoocidal shadow
economy is indemnity: taking the lives of animals as
insurance against the threat of the grave.
Paradoxically, the more advanced a society tends
to become, the more fervently that society seeks to
indemnify itself against decay, and the more it relies on
the lives of animals to bolster its growth. Industrial
society has achieved a substantive victory over nature in
physical terms, but demands an enormous share of
nourishment from the groundwork of nature to prevent
its plastic institutions from breaking down. As culture
grows distant from nature physically, it craves sustenance
from nature metaphysically, feeding as Becker says “an
ever-growing sense of invulnerability.”10 Even so, the
sense of invulnerability of civilized society is an illusion
that hides the repressed shadow and its core of
inferiority. What is ultimately behind the massive
scale of animal killing in our artificial world is an
ever-growing sense of vulnerability in the face of
“the innermost abyss of things” (Friedrich Nietzsche).11
The urge to kill animals, and to utilize the
substance of dead animals, is very much a part of the
collective unconscious of civilized society. Because the
shadow is secreted away so fully, the killing of animals
arises as a psychological complex, and people radically
deceive themselves about their lethal behavior toward
animals. Elsewhere I have called this shadow pattern of
8
behavior the “Gilgamesh complex,” named for the
eponymous hero-king of the Babylonian epic.12 The term
“Gilgamesh complex” should make clear to the reader, if
it were not fairly apparent already, that Jungian
psychology plays a central role in this book. Jung
developed a brilliant system of thought for understanding the types of archetypal human behavior
embodied in myth, and the killing of animals is one of
the most basic such practices.
Like so many other great thinkers, however,
Jung unfortunately skirted around the issue of zoocide,
giving only relatively superficial explanations of the
phenomenon. The conventional Jungian wisdom about
animals is summed up in the following axiom: “a primitive cold-blooded animal . . . stands for the instinctual
unconscious in general, which by a slow process of
development is to be spiritualized and ennobled.”13 By
killing animals, the story goes, we conquer the beast
within ourselves and claim our human transcendence.
The problem with this premise is that the killing of
animals becomes more acceptable, and more frequent,
as the heroic ego exerts itself against the world. As a
rebellion of the unconscious against death, killing the
beast triggers a worsening of repression, not an escape
from repression. In the most psychologically meaningful
myths and stories about animal killing—the Gilgamesh
epic and Lord of the Flies, for instance—the characters
kill animals in order to indemnify themselves against
death, yet end up in a quagmire of self-defeating violence.
This self-perpetuating reliance on violence to solve the
problem of human mortality is an inescapable component of the shadow economy, exposing the fatal
9
fallacy in the argument that the killing of animals can be
part of genuine human spiritualization or enlightenment.
Becker helped to unveil this fallacy when he
wrote that the effort to defeat evil in others and in the
external world is the wellspring of violent victimization.
Just as evil is equated psychologically with death, so too
is the shadow economy of animal killing designed to rid
the human world of evil—albeit at the cost of the transgression of life. The shadow economy has its own
internal moral system of good and evil which is fundamentally anthropocentric: encroachment on human
vitality is evil, enlargement of human vitality is good. As
the shadow is projected onto animal victims, this moral
system is projected along with it. Within the shadow
there is always the “good” in the bodies of animals, the
vitality that derives from the immortal ground of nature.
Animals would not be killed within the shadow economy
unless such killing were perceived to aggrandize human
well-being. The goodness of the wicked animal emerges
in the redemptive act of dying—the “bad” animal is
morally redeemed by successfully falling prey to human
victimization. Both virtuous and wicked victims redeem
the victimizers, imparting their precious vitality to
people, and are themselves redeemed from biological
finitude. Such is the anthropocentric pablum of the
morality of the shadow.
The “good” animal victim, preeminently the
sacred animal, is a far more common figure in the
historical annals of zoocide than the “bad” animal victim.
Victimizers of animals seek to overcome the evil of
death by appropriating the “goodness” of creaturely life.
No animal victim could be more replete with goodness
than the thak gareda, the initiation ox of a young Nuer
10
man. The young man goes well beyond taking
immaculate care of his thak gareda, removing parasites
with greater alacrity than an oxpecker bird; he actually
receives a cot thak, or ox name, so that his identity
dovetails with that of his beloved animal.14 On the other
side of the spectrum of shadow morality are animal
victims who elicit the human fear of death. The
projection of evil onto certain animals may be a pretext
for appropriation when the vitality of those other
creatures seems an affront to human life. The killing of
wolves during the conquest of the American West and
the war of extermination against scurrying “pests”
feature this type of shadow projection; these are
animals tainted by their fearsomeness or loathsomeness.
Regardless of whether the victim is virtuous or
wicked, as Erich Fromm has argued, “[k]illing in this
sense is not essentially love of death. It is affirmation
and transcendence of life on the level of the deepest
regression.”15 The killing of animals is surely among the
most regressive, the most repetitive and circular, of
approaches to healing the shadow, for it flaunts violence
and the expendability of life, both of which heighten
the “fear and trembling” (Søren Kierkegaard) at the
heart of the shadow.16 Until people come to terms with
the fact of death, the morality of the shadow will dictate
the seizing of animal life to counteract the fallenness
of earthly existence. Meanwhile, the paradox of evil
described by Becker will only grow worse.
Psychologically as well as economically, the
killing of animals offers security—fraudulently—
against humankind’s mortal insolvency. Animals are
compensatory victims with whose lives the victimizers
try in vain to pay down their own indebtedness as
11
“grave pawns.” The nobleman Gloucester in King Lear
gives poetic flavor to the dreaded invertibility of animal
killing: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the
gods;/They kill us for their sport.”17 The anthropologist
Maurice Bloch has given a more scholarly voice to this
process of compensatory victimization in his book Prey
into Hunter. Bloch proposes that rituals of animal killing
incorporate the dilemma of “what would happen if the
sequence of rebounding violence [the conquest of
external vitality] was reversed so that it ended with the
consumption of humans.”18 This possibility—the
consumption of human life by more powerful forces—is
confronted and then repudiated in zoocidal rituals.
Indeed, recent work in evolutionary
anthropology has shown that the model of “Man the
Hunted”19 captures the primordial stages of human
social and psychological development, preceding and
sustaining robust hunting cultures. Early hominids were
subject to all manner of threats from their environments, not least of which was predation from other
creatures. If the killing of animals is a form of
compensation for the perils of anti-human victimization,
then the growth of hunting cultures makes sense for a
fledgling human race facing a host of environmental
perils. Based on the evidence, we must agree with
Walter Burkert that ancient peoples composed a race of
Homo necans (literally, deathly humans) who developed
ritualistic modes of predatory role reversal:
What an experience it must have been when man,
the relative of the chimpanzee, succeeded in seizing
the power of his deadly enemy, the leopard, in
assuming the traits of the wolf, forsaking the role of
the hunted for that of the hunter!20
12
Of course, this type of direct compensation is relatively
absent from the modern world, with its tools of mastery
over nature. Yet we must remember that animal-onhuman predation is a sign or symptom of the larger
problem of death, of natural evil, of which beasts of prey
are merely agents.
The problem of guilt in the killing of animals has
its ancestry in the paradox of compensatory victimization. Expanding upon Bloch’s theory of rebounding
violence,21 we can call the behavioral expression of the
shadow economy “compounding violence” and its
psychological expression “compounding guilt.” Since
guilt is the psychological recoil of the self’s encroachment on powers greater than the self, the compounding
guilt of zoocide is a reaction to the ever-present reversibility of victimization. The explicit danger of animal
victimization in traditional societies is that it can
rebound to its human perpetrators, in precisely the
same manner that humans themselves have thrown off
the mantle of prey for that of hunter. Those Homo
necans who would kill animals to compensate for human
mortality are playing a lethal game with nature’s
archetypal substances, one in which their own lives
could be pawned as readily as those of their victims. The
ritualized killing of animals is the playing field on which
the identities of Homo necans and Homo ludens meet,
where life and death, good and evil, are the stakes of the
game.22
If the animal victim is sacred or otherwise
socially safeguarded, the death anxiety that motivates
the killing can reach an acute degree of guilt-ridden
salience. Most archaic rituals of animal killing have
elaborate procedures of propitiation designed to
13
forestall any risk of retribution from the spirits of the
victims themselves or from higher cosmic forces of
which the victims are wards. The Koryak of the
Kamchatka peninsula, in killing their reindeer, beg for
forgiveness and pour copious offerings of water onto
the maws of the dead animals.23 Ndembu hunters of
Africa’s sub-equatorial forests appease the ancestral
spirits who oversee the hunt by placing yijila, tabooed
pieces of the game animal, on a specially prepared treebranch shrine, or chishing’a.24 Not surprisingly, the
dissipation of the guilt of animal killing in modern
Western societies follows the guidelines of capitalism:
perceptually divorcing the production of animal-based
commodities from their consumption, scapegoating the
producers for the blame of killing, and alienating the
commodities from their natural origins.
With the birth of civilized living, especially in the
West with its intensive harnessing of nature’s energies, a
new problem of guilt has arisen: guilt over the hubris of
artifice. This repressed guilt originates in the human
presumptions of divinity that accompany massive
bureaucratic institutions and industrial processes. The
killing of animals allows for the expiation of the guilt of
human over-reaching of natural design. Denizens of
technological societies turn to the fruits of zoocide to
insure themselves against the risks of flouting nature’s
boundaries. Killing becomes a way to offset the natural
tenuousness of human culture, creating a symbiotic
relationship between the shadow economy and the
financial economy. As the artifice of human culture
grows through economic development, so too does the
need for the life-power of animals. A spiraling logic of
violence emerges. An increase in human domination
14
over nature predicated upon victimization requires a
colossal ledger of victims to secure indemnity for that
domination.
Some scholars, while recognizing the
compounding costs of animal victimization, have been
too quick to call for a return to archaic modes of killing.
Paul Shepard, who has led the pack in the elegance and
rigor of his scholarship, has a misguided view of the
solution to the shadow economy. To demonstrate the
fallacy of his thinking, and that of other scholars in the
regressive camp, we need first quote his take on
mortality salience from his book The Tender Carnivore
and the Sacred Game:
It is not prey but carnivores who fear death; in man,
not the vegetarian but the meat eater. The prey
flees from the predator, but it has no personal
experience with death. . . . [T]he carnivore sees
death every day. As a sentient being, the human
carnivore is forced to have a philosophy about it.
His philosophy may be defective. He may pretend
he is only an herbivore and live on potatoes, hide his
head in pseudo-innocence, and return to the
primate patrimony of the flowers. . . . But it is the
carnivore in man that has created sensitivity to
death and psychological machinery for a mature
perspective of life in death. These cannot be turned
off at will or escaped in sleep or in pretending to be
a herbivore.25
Shepard starts with a faulty premise about the bases of
the human fear of death, which lie in the sentient
experience of animal-on-human predation and the rest
of the gamut of nature-on-human victimization. Just as
erroneously, he confuses a mature conception of death
15
with the consequences of compounding guilt; the
human carnivore fears death in direct proportion to his
immersion in the blood-logic of animistic nature. It is
doubly ironic that Shepard has such a deterministic view
of human predatory behavior, considering that the
entire point of the compensatory victimization of
animals is human transcendence over the determinism
of death and decay. Archaic hunting cultures of the sort
that Shepard valorizes have had a more mindful system
of animal killing than moderners, but these cultures
were thoroughly enmeshed in the shadow economy.
Calling animals “grave pawns,” as I have done, is both
paying homage and playing counterpoint to Shepard’s
“sacred game.” I have tried to challenge his notion that
the killing of animals is the outgrowth of the most noble
human sentiments with my own thesis that such killing
is the psychologically and socially damaging outcome of
compensatory victimization.
The ethical perspective of this book is that it is
better to achieve complete transcendence over the
violence and guilt of animal killing, freedom from the
shadow economy altogether, than to replace compounding repression with self-aware regression. The
talionic principle of the shadow economy—kill or be
killed—hardly serves as a sound ethical foundation for
the maturation of human consciousness and creativity.
We ought to learn to accept the “gift of death” as an
unconditional natural endowment without endeavoring
to extract this gift from animals.
The gift of death is simultaneously the leitmotiv
of the shadow economy and the means of its dissipation.
Zoocidal shadow projection revolves entirely around the
gift of death; people refuse to accept the gift in
16
themselves and seek instead to claim it in animal
victims. In archaic rituals the projection of the shadow
is usually triangulated, with the gift of animal death
channeled through a supernatural intermediary before
arriving in its human recipient. The triangular
channeling of the gift of animal death—through the
gods, the ancestors, and so on—is a conscientiously
orchestrated affair which aims for human transcendence in a posture of humility.
Any pretense of humility has disappeared in the
modern world. The animal has gone from a willing
participant in divinely-mediated gift exchange to a
hapless object of gift expropriation. It is a stretch to call
the vitality of the modern animal victim a “gift” at all,
because of the extent to which the animal is no longer a
“partner” in the bargain. The term does have a provocative bilingual meaning—das Gift in German denotes
poison. Resolving the double bind of the gift/Gift is
integral to salvation from the shadow economy.
The gift of death only becomes poisonous when
it is the mechanism of shadow projection; unrepressed
acceptance of the gift of human mortality is therapeutic
for human psycho-social development. Jacques Derrida,
philosopher of the gift, offers this kernel of truth:
“death must be taken upon oneself. One has to give it to
oneself by taking it upon oneself, for it can only be mine
alone, irreplaceably.”26 Derrida’s language tells us that it
is a mistake to attempt to take the gift of death from
others—in the case of the shadow economy, nonhuman others. When taking the gift upon oneself, one
treats it not as Pandora’s box, some receptacle of
festering evil, but as the catalyst of every productive
possibility of human transcendence, including authentic
17
transcendence over evil. This does not mean that people
ought to abandon themselves to suffering and abscond
from mitigating the pangs of mortal existence. It means
that transcendence in the guise of animal victimization
compounds the problem of evil by poisoning human
consciousness and the living world. Understanding the
shadow economy of animal killing is a crucial phase in
the detoxification of the gift of death, and so in a spirit
of comprehension and compassion worthy of those with
fearless minds and unbridled hearts, I offer this book to
the reader.
18
CHAPTER ONE
Liquidation
Before we turn to a discussion of liquidation, the
shadow-economic mode of sacrificial slaughter, a note is
warranted about the methodology of the book’s main
chapters. In writing a book of an analytic nature, an
author must somehow divide up his or her subject into
manageable segments, or else risk setting the reader
adrift in incoherence. The study of zoocide is a prime
example of this authorial imperative. And so I have
partitioned the shadow economy into distinct modes.
Each mode has its own psychological and behavioral
traits that cannot be reduced to those of any other. A
particular instance of ritualistic killing may nevertheless
resonate within more than one mode. The only claims
that I make for each ritual arrangement are that it
clearly exemplifies the mode of the chapter, and that it
springs predominantly from that mode. One should not
come away with the faulty impression that the slaughterhouse, the primary focus of this chapter, is “only” a
site of liquidation, not of any of the other modes of
lethal violence against animals. One should simply
appreciate that liquidation is the sine qua non of the
slaughterhouse.
The reader may likewise be skeptical of my choice
not to examine animal experimentation in this chapter,
given how the oft-cited “sacrifice” of laboratory victims
seems a part of the sacrificial paradigm of liquidation.
Indeed it is. Insisting that the meaning of “sacrifice” in
lethal experimentation is no more than euphemistic is
19
wrong. It is undeniable that zoocidal scientists seek to
defuse guilt through euphemisms and appeals to
rationality; still, experimentalists are the modern,
antiseptic descendents of the sacrificial hierophants of
yesteryear. All lethal faunal blood rites, including those
of laboratory research, involve a degree of liquidation.
Focusing wholesale on the sacrificial motive of laboratory killing, however, misses what I believe to be the
ultimate rationale: divination of the roots of human
mortality. Immolating lab animals is first and foremost
a divinatory ritual. I feel the term “speculation” covers
both the ritual and the financial levels of the killing of
animals in the guise of laboratory inquiry. The next
chapter will explore speculation in some detail.
We are now ready to plunge headlong,
analytically speaking, into sacrificial violence against
animals. The violence of animal killing is more than a
precondition for the pragmatic rendering of other
creatures; it is an act of world-splitting transcendence.
The moment of killing opens a rupture in the regenerative latticework of nature from which humans can
seemingly draw a share of limitless sustenance.
“Violence,” reveals Jean-Paul Sartre, “is unconditioned
affirmation of freedom . . . what is negated is the fact
of being in the world, of having a facticity.”1 The
existential schism of killing is the product of a sentient
animal, the human, looking upon the violence of the
world and learning a lesson: regeneration through death,
affirmation through negation, transcendence through
abjection. Liquidation is the name for killing inspired by
the blood-mythology of nature.
As cash is to financial liquidation, so blood is to
shadow liquidation. Animals killed for money are simul20
taneously killed for blood and for the substances that
partake of the essence of blood. The bodies of animals
bound for slaughterhouses have both a cash-value and a
blood-value; the former may fluctuate but the latter is
eternal. One of the most pressing ironies of contemporary liquidation is the role reversal of money and blood
from the ancient ritual landscape. Blood has a long
pedigree as a sacred substance, far above the profane
status of money. Now people shudder at the thought of
the blood-splattered surfaces of abattoirs, yet simper at
fantasies of rolling in piles of clean, crisp currency.
These are conscious attractions and repulsions, of
course—dig a little deeper and the blood-provenance of
liquidation retains its sanctity.
The ancient Greeks knew this provenance in
intimate detail. In the ritual microcosm of the Greater
Panathenaic hecatomb already resided the basic
ingredients of capitalist slaughter.2 This quadrennial
festival, the most ecstatic of the celebrations of
Athena’s birthday, featured the sacrifice of 100 oxen on
the altar of the Acropolis. The Greeks were unabashed
in melding the economic and religious underpinnings of
the Panathenaic sacrifice. While upholding the highest
spiritual principles of the Athenians, the festival (and
other, smaller celebrations) helped support a thriving
economy of animal husbandry in the Attican pastoral
landscape. The municipal authorities of Athens also
recouped some of the financial expenditures of the
bloodshed, paid directly from the city coffers, by selling
the skins of the animal victims. The metaphysical
expenditures flowed from the animals into the
empyrean coffers of the goddess and into the sanctified
bodies of her congregants.
21
Like the daily megatomb of the contemporary
slaughterhouse, the Panathenaic hecatomb supplied the
members of the community with the currency of mortal
transcendence—the flesh of vanquished beasts. Bound
together by the sublime consumption of the fruits of
cataclysmic violence, the community momentarily
purged itself of its fear of decay. Once their civilization
reached a critical mass, once the artifice of their world
had spread to every corner of life, the Greeks needed
such a gargantuan sacrificial catharsis. For the civilizations of modernity, in which artifice has achieved the
web-like complexity of a natural ecosystem, the demand
for animal bloodshed grows spasmodically, virally,
without any limit in sight.
Thanks to René Girard, it has become widely
known that violence and the sacred are ritual bedfellows.3 Thanks to him as well, the misconception has
arisen that scapegoating is the raison d’être of sacrificial
killing, that the seething dissensions within a community are heaped upon the bodies of all sacrificial victims.
Far from it. Scapegoating is one type of liquidation
among many, probably not even the most ubiquitous
type. The anthropological record is bursting at the
seams with sacrificial rituals that have little or nothing
to do with scapegoating. Agricultural fertility rites,
extremely common in the annals of animal bloodshed,
bear at best an incidental relationship to communal
tension. The Nigerian Ibo farmer paying a blood homage
to the Ajokko-Ji, or king yam, is not releasing through
the vanquished life of the sacrificial fowl the essence of
collective disharmony. He merely wants the renewal of a
robust harvest.4 The most valuable legacy of Girard for
understanding animal victimization is twofold:
22
underscoring the inseparable bond between divine
aspirations and degenerative aggression, and illustrating how sacrificial rituals are designed as vehicles of
collective immortality. The model of compensatory
victimization of animals outlined in my book owes
much to Girard’s work on mimetic violence, while
hopefully adding breadth and depth to his analysis.
Sacred violence against animals is the epitome of
ritual economy, the platform of transcendental
exchange. Conversely, exchange in the marketplace is
among the most scatological of human activities, about
as debased an expression of human enterprise as can be.
The ideal sacrifice is an economic interchange of human
and divine assets, a circuit of reciprocity between the
empyrean and the pedestrian. Time and again, the
killing of animals is the key to activating this circuit, of
accessing the mysteries of mastery over life and death.
The shadow-economic liquidity of blood renders the
animal the essential “good” in this transaction; the
animal’s exchange value, seen from a sacrificial
perspective, is potentially infinite. The conventional
wisdom of modernity gainsays the sacrificial role of
animals, proposing that sacrifice is non-productive, a
waste of utilitarian resources. The industrial system, in
which ideology and reality are inverted by false
consciousness, treats sacrifice on the same level of nonproductiveness as defecation. Yet how tidily has this
system managed to conceal a sacrificial logic behind the
market value of animals, to seize the primeval power of
blood for a few bucks.
The multiplication of financial assets in the
marketplace is a wan imitation of the productivity of
sacrifice in the zoocidal imagination. The liquidity of
23
money, of course, allows goods to have exchange value;
physical goods lack perfect symmetry in exchange,
necessitating the intervention of a liquid medium. Only
metaphysical goods, like life and death, can exhibit
completely symmetrical exchange value. When one
trades a physical good for its symmetrical counterpart,
one is no better off than before. When one exchanges
the death of an animal for a measure of immortality,
one is immeasurably enriched and has lost nothing,
since sacrificial life is ceaselessly recuperative. The
more the industrial collective tries to follow the pseudoreligion of money, the more it grasps at animal
immolation as the salvation of enterprise. Jean
Baudrillard explains this best:
The reversibility of the gift in the countergift, of
exchange in the sacrifice, of time in the cycle, of
production in destruction, of life in death . . . puts
an end to the linearity of time, language, economic
exchange and accumulation.5
Awareness of the reality of sacrifice likewise puts an end
to the illusion of rational pragmatism in the modern
killing of animals. Can we really deny that we have
perpetuated the sacrifice of animals as the highest form
of exchange, that blood trumps money in the life-anddeath bargain of our existence? Sacrificial slaughter
persists in our world as the only pure means of
exchange with forces greater than ourselves, forces that
we stumble desperately to harness and nervously look
down upon. Psychologically speaking, not too great a
distance separates La Villette, the Haussmannian
shambles built in 19th-century Paris, and the Minoan
24
“House of the Sacrificed Oxen,” an abode on Crete dating
to around 1700 B.C.6
The slaughterhouse fulfills the ancient cathartic
function of animal bloodshed without the numinous
aura of traditional ritual, ensuring that the dying throes
of the animal have no more sanctity than the mechanical spasms of industry. Immersed in the full repression of the shadow, the industrial slaughter of an
animal is a scene of ritual hollowness worthy of the
poetic lines of T.S. Eliot: “Shape without form, shade
without colour,/Paralysed force, gesture without
motion.”7
The Hainuwele myth is instructive here. This
Ceramese tale, a variation on a pan-cultural theme of
telluric creation, has attracted the attention of a
procession of academic heavyweights: Carl Jung, Joseph
Campbell, and Jonathan Z. Smith, to name but a few.
The myth provides valuable lessons about the role of
liquidation in the shadow economy, in particular the
nexus between transcendental exchange and commodity
exchange. The male protagonist of the myth is Ameta,
who one day embarks on a pig-hunting expedition. He
ends up killing the pig indirectly, when the creature
drowns in a pond in which he has desperately plunged
to escape the hunter’s dog. Perched upon a tusk of the
animal, Ameta discovers a coconut, a most unusual find
in a world otherwise devoid of the plant. Having sown
the seed and waited for the palm to grow, Ameta is
attempting to harvest some blossoms when he cuts
himself. The drops of blood fall upon the plant, and very
soon a young girl, Hainuwele, emerges from this
fertilized floral womb. Hainuwele displays rather
perverse digestive symptoms: she excretes a bizarre
25
collection of precious goods, including gold jewelry,
Chinese gongs, and porcelain dishware. Envious of
Hainuwele’s ability to procure such prodigious riches
from her viscera, the other villagers kill her. A griefstricken Ameta then dismembers her body, interring the
pieces around the festival grounds of the village. In a
short while, as we learn from Campbell’s account of the
myth, “the buried portions of Hainuwele . . . were
already turning into things that up to that time had
never existed anywhere on earth—above all, certain
tuberous plants that have been the principal food of the
people ever since.”8
The most important lesson of the myth is that
the death of an animal is the catalyst of human
prosperity. The fact that the hunter does not kill the pig
with his own hands is not surprising. Many zoocidal
rituals employ stratagems of denial and displacement to
abrogate human responsibility for bloodshed. A startling example of this is the prayer that the Uriankhai
people of the Mongolian Khövsgöl region tell upon
slaughtering their cattle:
I’ve not meant to kill:
[The cow] died from suffocation when lying [down],
[The cow] died from stumbling when ruminating . . .9
In the Hainuwele myth, the means of the pig’s death,
drowning, conveys the generosity of the gift of life from
the maternal foundry of nature, universally symbolized
by liquid water. This reminds us that every instance of
ritual killing involves liquidation. Hunting is not a
“classic” scene of sacrifice, the stereotype of which is the
slaying of a domestic animal upon a holy altar, but the
hunter’s arts embrace the sacrificial paradigm of tran26
scendental exchange. The liquid demise of the pig, from
which materialize the germinating goods of agriculture,
brings into dramatic relief the sacrificial interchangeability of the divine commodities of life and death.
Hainuwele’s fecal discharges bring into equally
dramatic relief the abjection of exchange commodities.
The myth implies the parity of filth and financial
intercourse, the shadow-economic superiority of killing
over trade. Hainuwele’s defecatory hijinks are in short
order brought to an end when the villagers immolate
her, thereby returning the village’s mode of exchange to
its primal metaphysical level, the one established by the
death of the pig. Under the auspices of the shadow
economy, the liquidity of cash—which facilitates
Hainuwele’s spectacular feats of commodity excretion—
is no match for the liquidity of faunal substances. Once
Hainuwele’s digestive tract becomes part of the
financial economy, her death in the myth is a foregone
conclusion, the only way of returning liquidation to its
transcendental origins. The tale of Hainuwele marks
the merchandise of the financial economy with a fecal
stigma; these emblems of human artifice are illequipped to ensure the immortality of the community.
In order for Ameta’s village to burgeon with sustainable
abundance, these moribund emblems are banished to
the same grave as Hainuwele and the pig.
The Hainuwele story points us toward the
dialectical affiliation between blood and cash in the
Western economy. The ideological narrative of industrialism employs the same terms as its Ceramese
counterpart but reverses their symbolic value, a mirror
image of the myth’s autochthonous critique of
commodity fetishism. The industrial society, with its
27
fantasies of the immortality of the plastic world,
pretends to loathe blood as the engine of the corruptibility of the flesh:
Spanning the obligatory trajectory from the fetor of
birth to the rotten stench of death, blood is the
main culprit in the tragedy of human existence. The
logic of life is under the thumb of the “fury of blood”
. . . a tumultuous, impure, excremental, mute blood,
protagonist of a game that oscillates between
ugliness and death.10
Piero Camporesi’s commentary on bodily corruption
encapsulates the modern ideology of blood, which
nonetheless belies a furtive dialectic: “Carnality and
piety find in blood the congealing element to justify an
ongoing exchange of pertinent symbols.”11 Never mind
that people have pushed the slaughterhouse to the
dimmest shadows of awareness, priding themselves on
the rationality and purity of their consumptive habits.
Hainuwele still haunts the collective unconscious of the
West, an animistic ghost in the godless machine.
Blood and cash have enjoyed a symbiotic
liquidity at least since vertically-integrated slaughter
was a gleam in the eyes of Philip Armour and Gustavus
Swift. The liquidity of money is essential for the
production and consumption of animal life in everexpanding quantities, while the liquidity of blood is
integral to the economic explosion of the society of the
simulacrum. Without cash, the blood of animals, the
soul of animal products, would cease to flow to the
farthest reaches of the marketplace, fueling the reproduction of artifice; without blood, cash would lose its
talismanic value as a medium of exchange, forcing
28
people to find other pathways to eternal lucre. Modernity thrives on the compounding gift of animal death:
the blood-value of a slaughtered beast far outweighs
the creature’s cash-value, especially when mechanized
disassembly drives liquidation to the limit point of
cost-cutting. The dual strands of liquidation are the
intertwined helices of capitalism, the genetic blueprint
of a sacrificial system that conquers death through
bloodthirsty efficiency.
At the same time, the industrial society goes well
beyond the imperatives of efficiency, luxuriating in the
fruits of liquidation. The spilling of blood in slaughter,
with its long-standing sacrificial pedigree, multiplies a
billion-fold in the Fordist industrial shambles. Not every
sacrificial practice revels in liquidation: the Iraqw people
of Tanzania suffocate their bovine victims, lest any
blood contaminate the domain of the earth spirits.12 But
it is de rigueur for the typical sacrificial rite to relieve
the animal victim of his or her “juice of life” in a spectacularly effusive fashion. This recapitulates the violent
ebb and flow of the cosmic commerce of life and death,
affording the human participants direct contact with
the substance of transcendence. Sometimes sacrifice
becomes a blood ablution, as when novitiates in the
Roman cult of Attis and Cybele immersed themselves in
the mysteries of the taurobolium, the bath of bull’s blood.
One need only glimpse the grotesque figure of the
slaughterhouse sticker, glistening with blood like a welloiled automaton, to appreciate the cultic mysteries of
the contemporary abattoir.
The slaughterhouse devotes a portion of the
surplus value of the animal victim, the differential
between the creature’s cash-value and blood-value, to
29
the sacrificial ledger of conspicuous expenditure. The
conspicuous expenditure of liquidation aims for transcendence, not of a dominant class as would be the case
for conspicuous expenditure in the cash economy, but
of a dominant species exerting its unearthly prerogatives. Georges Bataille may insist that such conspicuous
expenditure is non-productive, but the expenditure of
sacrificial blood is conducive to the efficiency of shadow
projection onto animal victims. When it comes to the
opaque spaces of the slaughterhouse, Bataille is right
about the “need for limitless loss”13 in the economy of
the gift. The loss here is metaphysical, not financial, for
little of economic value is wasted in the slaughterhouse.
The cathartic purpose of the conspicuous
expenditure of blood still seeps away under the
fluorescent lights of the shambles, unheeded by ecstatic
throngs of ritual communicants basking in the sun’s
rays. A glaring contradiction of the modern repression
of the shadow economy is that little could be less
conspicuous than the conspicuous expenditure of
slaughterhouse blood. Refusing to abdicate the cathartic
convulsions of profuse animal bloodshed, the industrial
collective relegates them to the obscurity of nondescript fortresses of slaughter where they proliferate
uncontrollably, unseen, like a ghost appendage that
won’t stop twitching. For the victims, on the other hand,
the convulsions are excruciatingly real.
The dialectical paradigm of liquidation, of blood
and cash, can be traced historically and ritually to the
notion of stock. The institution of animal domestication
arose in large part for sacrificial reasons: early agrarian
societies needed stable reserves of animal life to secure
indemnity for their increasingly ostentatious, method30
ical exploitation of nature. To this day, many ritualbased agrarian groups like the Nuer raise their stock for
one all-consuming sacrificial end. “It is a fact,” writes
E.E. Evans-Pritchard of the Nuer, “that all cattle are
reserved for sacrifice.”14 From extinct Neolithic
agrarians to the Nuer, the assumption that animal
killing proceeds from pristinely pragmatic imperatives
falls to the wayside in favor of the dictates of the
shadow economy. The domestication of stock in the
Neolithic revolution was simply the opening salvo in the
massive intensification of animal liquidation that has
reached such stupefying rapacity in the contemporary
marketplace. We can hardly demur at Girard’s conjunction of sacrifice and domestication:
Everyone believes that the principle of domestication is economic. In reality, however, this is unlikely.
. . . The process of domestication must have come
about through the cohabitation of animals and
human beings over many generations and would
have produced the effects of domestication in the
species commonly used for sacrifice.15
The cash-value of animal stock entered the sacrificial
equation well before animals became rarefied financial
units bought and sold in the halls of commerce. Who
therefore can deny the genealogy of liquidation that
runs from the birth of domestication, through the
livestock exchanges of the medieval merchantile
economy, to the financial stock exchanges of our world?
The regulation of animal life is an indispensable
precursor of a magisterial economic system that holds
everything animate and inanimate under its sway.
31
Much more than geographic proximity connects
London’s Smithfield Market, a livestock exchange that
existed at least as far back as the 12th-century reign of
Henry II, and the first London Stock Exchange of 1801.
These two stock markets share a preoccupation with the
interchangeability of blood and cash as the catalysts of
the human conquest of mortality. And this trajectory of
liquidation curves exponentially into late-industrial
capitalism, with its technological tendrils that may very
soon discover how to extract blood from a turnip.
Financial stock allows animal stock to be manipulated—
concentrated and disseminated—at a pace that makes a
mockery of zoological time. The reservoir of cash
liquidity in the stock market, and that of blood liquidity
in the bodies of animal stock, sustain each other symbiotically in an ascending spiral of value with no end in
sight—or at least that is the modern ideal. Reducing
animals to financial stock, masquerading the bloodvalue of animals as computerized digits that can
approach the speed of light, carries the sacrificial logic
of domestication to the reductio ad absurdum of artifice
feeding on life, deathly afraid of its own shadow.
One important methodological guideline bears
mentioning at this point in the discussion. I have been
following Jonathan Z. Smith’s postulate of “no unambiguous instance of animal sacrifice that is not of a
domesticated animal.”16 Later in the book, under the
rubric of appropriation, I include the lion’s share of
my analysis of the interception and killing of undomesticated animals—e.g., hunters’ prey, commercially
harvested wildlife, and so-called animal “pests.” Animals
killed in slaughterhouses have already been appropriated from nature through the process of domestication,
32
adding stock to the repertoire of sacrificial rites. In the
same chapter on appropriation I expound briefly on the
Spanish bullfight, a portmonteau custom that borrows
equally from the ritual prescriptions of liquidation and
appropriation. I explain how the bullfight recapitulates
the drama of domestication, culminating in the postdomestic liquidation of the beast.
Placed in tandem, the religious heritage of
sacrifice and the extravagant industrial expenditure of
domesticated stock divulge the secret identity of the
slaughterhouse as a vestigial temple. This identity is
submerged so deeply within the shadow that it takes
sublime works of art to bring it into cultural consciousness. A handful of creative works have illuminated the
sacrificial nature of the industrial liquidation of animals.
These works lend credence to Bataille’s designation of
the soul of the slaughterhouse-as-temple: “a disturbing
convergence of the mysteries of myth and the ominous
grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows.”17
Two works in particular—James Agee’s story “A
Mother’s Tale,” and Georges Franju’s film “Blood of the
Beasts” (Le sang des bêtes)—plunge even further into
this tenebrous soul than Upton Sinclair’s default go-to
classic, The Jungle.
Agee’s story has a mythic framework in which
archetypal figures loom large. The One Who Came Back
is a cow who escapes, freakishly lacerated, from a slaughterhouse; and The Man With The Hammer is the aweinspiring slaughterhouse knocker about whom the
escaped anthropomorphic cow warns his fellow
creatures before he is gunned down. The narrative
revolves around a mother cow, who lives long after the
experiences of The One Who Came Back, telling a group
33
of calves his saga. In the mother's tale within a tale, The
Man With The Hammer has all of the attributes of lifewrecking divinity:
A little bridge ran crosswise above the
[slaughterhouse] fences. He stood on this bridge
with His feet as wide apart as He could set them. He
wore splattered trousers but from the belt up He
was naked and as wet as rain. Both arms were raised
high above His head and in both hands He held an
enormous Hammer. With a grunt which was hardly
like the voice of a human being, and with all His
strength, He brought this Hammer down into the
forehead of our friend: who, in a blinding blazing,
heard from his own mouth the beginning of a
gasping sigh; then there was only darkness.18
If The Man With The Hammer is a terrible god, then
The One Who Came Back is a perverse bovine Christ
who urges other cows to stop reproducing and to engage
in deicide as their means of salvation. The slaughterhouse of “A Mother’s Tale” is a sacrificial temple,
complete with cruciform (“crosswise”) artifacts, whose
inner workings reveal the terrible outcome of animal
victimization for both animals and humans: “only
darkness.”
Franju’s film performs the same function with
the visceral horror of documentary authenticity.19 The
movie, made in the aftermath of the Second World War,
features a series of Parisian scenes of animal slaughter,
surreally interlarded with shots of civilization’s decrepitude. Most jarring (and relevant to my hierological
argument about liquidation) are Franju’s persistent
religious allusions during the slaughterhouse sequences,
from nuns receiving bits of freshly-slain animals to a
34
shambles that resembles a church. The documentary is a
sickening exposé of the talionic principle of animal
killing: time and again, the camera forces the viewer
into the animal’s perspective as the axe swings and the
knife plunges. This type of victimary reversal should
remind us of why we target animals—to compensate for
our own mortal fears as self-fancied victims of The
Cosmos With The Hammer.
The sacrificial nature of industrial slaughter also
expresses itself through character-based shadow
projection, though this type of projection is not the
origin of animal victimization (see Introduction). As
Jung noted in his discussion of the shadow, people
project onto others the undesirable character traits that
they are trying to hide from themselves. It should be
crystal-clear that the industrial collective tries to
conceal the real, sacrificial reasons that it liquidates
animals, so we would expect killing that is explicitly
sacrificial to draw the ire of the “enlightened” citizens of
modernity. Indeed it does. Those who continue to
practice ancient traditions of ritual slaughter are
accused by more “civilized” types of the sins of primitivism and irrationality, at least after the accusers have
finished digesting their fast-food hamburgers and
putting away their leather accessories. Theodore Dreiser,
always a keen observer of modern life, put it bluntly in
his essay on the slaughterhouse:
We have been flattering ourselves these many
centuries that our civilization had somehow got
away from this old-time law of life living on death,
but here amid all the gauds and refinements of our
metropolitan life we find ourselves confronted by
it.20
35
Capitalism showcases the irrationality of its own lethal
exploitation of animals no more forcefully than when it
lashes out at the backwardness of pre-capitalist modes
of zoocide.
Anti-Semitism has long nourished itself on this
sort of shadow projection, well before modernity
entered the picture. The Christian Church has prided
itself on its renunciation of the animal-sacrificial
practices of Judaism, placing its faith instead in the
world-saving sacrifice of the man-god. Because of the
Hebraic tradition of shechita, or ritual animal slaughter,
Jews in Christianized regions have suffered the worst
recriminations for their supposed blood-lust. Shechita,
like its Islamic counterpart dhabiha, is a sacrificial pact
between deity and devotee: the faithful are permitted by
divine decree to utilize the flesh of animals, so long as
they return the blood of the slain creatures to its
ultramundane source.
The Christian rejection of shechita as an archaic,
bloodthirsty practice fulfills a basic repressive
function—denial of the centrality of zoocidal sacrifice in
Christianity. In the words of one cultural anthropologist
with expertise in zoomorphic anti-Semitism: “For
Christians . . . the Jew gives concrete form to the ever
veiled horizon of their own practices.”21 The irony of the
Christian paradigm of sacrifice is that the immolation of
Christ, the Lamb of God, gave new spiritual gravitas to
the liquidation of actual lambs, who share with pigs the
dubious distinction of being the animal victims of
choice in the celebration of Christian festivals.
The Nazi Party carried such subterfuge to
appalling extremes, perpetrating the most flagrant
shadow projection imaginable against Judaism.
36
Perpetuating the vilest of the anti-Semitic screeds of the
medieval Christian Church, the Nazis were morbidly
preoccupied with Jewish protocols of animal liquidation.
One of the earliest Nazi legislative acts was the 1933
Gesetz über das Schlachten von Tieren (Law on the
Slaughtering of Animals), which proscribed Jewish
ritual slaughter. To add insult to injury, the 1940 Nazi
propaganda film “Der ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”)
inundates the viewer with graphic scenes from the
abattoir of the Warsaw ghetto, accompanied by the
pejorative narration that these images “reveal the
character of a race that conceals its crude brutality
under the cloak of pious religious practices.”22 In this
statement the absurd Nazi worldview implodes under
the weight of hypocrisy. The intensity of the Nazi
vituperation toward Jewish models of sacrificial
bloodshed mirrored the intensity of the Nazis’ own
ideals of effusive liquidation—of animals, of Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”), of soldiers in
battle. In effect, the Nazis pushed the principle of
liquidation to an apocalyptic limit, far beyond the
meticulous ritual prescriptions of religious sacrifice, all
the while mocking the “savagery” of their victims.
A world apart from Nazi Germany, the capitalist
juggernaut of the United States has nevertheless had its
share of chauvinistic shadow projection. One stigmatized group that has stirred public disquietude is
Santería, a syncretic Latin American religion with roots
in the west-African Yoruba region. Liquidation is
intrinsic to Santería: guardian spirits known as orisha
partake of the animal blood supplied in veneration
ceremonies. Unsurprisingly, most members of the U.S.
public, the “civilized” beneficiaries of animal death that
37
they are, quaver with nausea at the presence of
unabashed sacrifice in the midst of the godless machine
of animal rendering. Those enlightened Americans
yearning to banish the logic of liquidation from cultural
consciousness, enabling them blithely and guiltlessly to
reap the fruits of animal victimization, have run up
against the Constitutional protection of religious
freedom. The exalted law of the land will not brook
unequal access to the sanctified law of the claw.
Attempts to prohibit Santerían sacrifice in one community—Hialeah, Florida—sparked a Constitutional
battle ultimately adjudicated by the United States
Supreme Court in 1993 (Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye
v. City of Hialeah).
Six years earlier, practitioners of Santería had
dared to open a place of worship in Hialeah, a
municipality that had been participating in the shadow
economy of animal killing with nary a care. Brought
mortifyingly close to the metaphysical origins of
modern slaughter, local authorities went into full-bore
repressive mode. They quickly passed a series of antiSantería ordinances, among them the fiat that “It shall
be unlawful for any person, persons, corporations or
associations to sacrifice any animal within the corporate
limits of the City of Hialeah, Florida.”23 The Supreme
Court unanimously nullified all of these municipal
ordinances on First Amendment grounds, but was
powerless to resolve the shadow projection that brought
the case to its doorstep in the first place.
Like a god feasting on the blood of beasts, the
shadow of the human psyche gorges itself on the
liquidation of animal victims. Thus it is only fitting that
Jung, habitué of the realm of religious archetypes, faced
38
the sordid drama of animal slaughter in the course of
his psychological development. As a boy growing up in
the Swiss town of Klein-Hüningen, Jung was one day
mesmerized by a scene of primal bloodshed, a story he
relates in his autobiography with a healthy dose of
maternal anima: “I was fascinated to watch a pig being
slaughtered. To the horror of my mother, I watched the
whole procedure.”24 Jung does not pursue the implications of this encounter for the genesis of his adult
ideas; nor does he investigate in his psychological works
the victimization of animals through shadow projection.
All the same, we can set Jung’s writings and his
experiences upon the proverbial couch and infer the
close relationship between the slaughter of animals and
the magnitude of the shadow. Just as importantly, we
can envision the status of the victim of liquidation once
the shadow has been vanquished, once people have
authentically embraced the gift of human mortality.
Since the exchange value of the animal is a phantasm of
shadow projection, the dissipation of the shadow
restores to its rightful owner, the erstwhile victim, the
value of biological autonomy alienated from the victim’s
body. An animal freed from the shadow is transformed
from a vehicle of exchange value to a repository of
inalienable value. Then the animal has a newfound
sanctity beyond the reach of gods—and even of
humankind.
39
CHAPTER TWO
Speculation
The lives of animals killed in rites of speculation
are pawned in the name of divinatory truth. The
meaning of these rites, like that of the term “speculation” itself, is both epistemic and economic. Divination
is the ancient, archetypal form of speculation which
aims to unveil the grand cosmic design in which the
most rational of people still find themselves secretly
believing, to shield themselves from the meaninglessness of randomness. Divination, remarks Cicero in his
critical treatise on the topic, takes its name not only
from the ritual scrutiny of the divine mind of nature,
but also from the human pursuit of transcendence,
“since by its means men may approach very near to the
power of gods.”1 Zoocidal divination is yet another
attempt undertaken by those mired in the shadow
economy to find the solution to the problem of human
mortality, in this case by piercing through the tumult of
terrestrial existence to the timeless architecture of
creation.
Enshadowed animals possess locked in their
bodies direct access to this deathless order. The use of
the sundered animal body for divinatory rituals is a
nearly universal human method of deciphering the
riddle of finitude, of treading for a moment, in a
speculative spirit, upon the immortal ground of nature.
Lest we presume that divinatory killing is a hopelessly
archaic practice banished from civilized life, we need
40
only peer inside the laboratories of many modern
institutions of learning and commerce. Once inside we
could readily find scores of researchers performing
lethal experiments upon animals, speculating about this
or that biochemical pathway, this or that cluster of
pathological traits, this or that anatomical course of
morbidity—all with the ultimate aim of picking apart
the secrets of the mortal frame. Killing animals in the
laboratory, a practice ensheathed in the patina of
technical discourse and procedure, nevertheless proceeds from the shadow-economic imperative of divining
the causes of death and applying this regenerative
knowledge to human salvation.
Now a fixture of the modern laboratory, killing
animals in the name of speculation is a custom whose
historical and cultural ubiquity is matched only by its
multiplicity. From the turtle plastrons of the diviners of
the Shang Dynasty of China to the ptarmigan sterna of
the diviners of the northern Algonquian Natives of
North America, bones have been a favored object in the
speculative reading of the animal body. With a rock-like
composition and permanence, bones are a bridge
between the transience of the flesh and the perceived
timelessness of terra firma. Internal organs, especially
the liver, are highly sought-after divinatory tools as
well: these concentrations of flesh are the engines of the
body and thereby link the life of the creature to the
fount of natural fecundity. Cicero alludes to the fact
that hepatic divination in the Roman Empire was a
ritual inheritance of Etruscan haruspices, who were
particularly solicitous about the head (caput) of the liver.
The absence of the head of a sacrificial animal’s liver was
41
construed to augur the impending death of Julius
Caesar.2
Diviners the world over, whichever parts or
substances of the animal they use, yearn to answer
questions with a pragmatic bearing on the success of
human life. Typical speculative queries might delve into
the location of game animals, shifting patterns in
weather and climate, the bearing of progeny, the
etiology of illness, or the likelihood of military victory.
While all forms of zoocidal divination impinge upon
matters of life and death, some speculative rituals cut
right to the chase: “The Crow [Natives] used to take
some blood from the shoulder blade of a buffalo, spill
some badger blood over it, and look at themselves in the
mixture, to see how they would meet their death.”3 Who
can doubt that a scientist, peering through a microscope
at a stained sample of an experimental animal, does not
likewise concern himself or herself with the meaning of
mortality?
The early stages of modernity displayed two
dialectical speculative practices: speculation in the
market valuation of securities and commodities, and
speculation in the scientific and medical laboratory.
Today these speculative practices have shown incestuous convergence, but in the 17th and 18th centuries
they tended to occupy opposite ends of the economic
spectrum. Because of the shadow economy, however, a
compelling parallel exists between the rise of the
experimental laboratory and the upward bubbling of
market speculation. Only an examination of the
Jungian shadow can reveal the hidden historical link
between animal experimentation and market hedging.
42
The historical simultaneity of the explosions of
experimental and financial speculation is no accident:
they are divinatory counterweights. Financial speculation is pecuniary divination, a kind of rarefied sortilege
that relies on the tools of artifice to decide the cosmic
scheme of prosperity and privation. Modern financial
speculation, which often involves not physical goods
and services themselves but more abstract margins of
value, is about as close to pure artifice as humans have
been able to get. It poses an especially pressing problem
of natural alienation for the development of capitalism,
a problem “solved” by accelerating the exploitation of
animal life. Experimental divination in the test-animal
laboratory arose as a systemic counterbalance to
pecuniary divination in the marketplace. As Western
society increased its transcendence over nature first a
hundred-fold, then a thousand-fold, the divinatory
plumbing of financial assets demanded an equally
intense divinatory plumbing of the mechanisms of
animal life.
It is worthwhile to cast this historical coevolution in explicitly Jungian terms, by paying homage
to the psycho-symbolic power of alchemy. Jung himself
depicted alchemy as a vast, forbidding domain of
psychic projection, declaring that the alchemist “projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in
order to illuminate it.”4 The irony of alchemical
projection, as with any other type of shadow projection,
is that the aim of illumination of the external world is
perverted by the very process of projection. In its
attempt to unmask the properties of the prima materia,
the protean substance from which natural forms were
believed to emerge, alchemy was above all divinatory. It
43
is hardly an exaggeration to call alchemy the predominant form of divination in the Middle Ages.
Nor is it unreasonable to claim that the protocols
of vivisection in the early modern era borrowed heavily
from the psychological playbook of the alchemists.
Never mind the fact that many empirical experimentalists criticized alchemical techniques. If Jung’s own
analysis of shadow projection has shown us anything, it
is that behind the strongest denunciations of character
lurk the denouncer's identical qualities. Many experimentalists were quite sympathetic to the alchemical
ethos, among them the heroic founder of “rational”
chemistry, Robert Boyle. Like the alchemists who
preceded them, the Enlightenment vivisectionists
sought the secrets of the prima materia, “the celestial
nature of the quintessence . . . the life-giving essence of
heaven.”5 Arising organically from the soil of medieval
alchemy, the techniques of early-modern vivisectionists
explored with unrelenting violence and unmitigated zeal
the plastic designs of nature. These zoocidal empiricists
believed, as had the alchemists, that they could confer
the prerogatives of divinity upon humankind—or at
least upon themselves.
The master financial speculators of the same
era—the architects of the Mississippi Scheme and the
South Sea Bubble—performed their own sort of
alchemy upon margins of value, with no less alacrity and
considerably more cupidity than the dissectors of
animal victims.6 This is why Anita Guerrini, in her
historical study of animal experimentation, mentions
the seemingly incongruous phenomenon of “the new
stock exchanges of London and Paris.”7 The financial
alchemists of post-medieval Europe, by attempting to
44
secure for themselves the blueprints of human fortune,
propelled the Jungian shadow far across the bubbleladen economy ready to burst at any moment.
From the earliest rumblings of colonialism, their
efforts have helped reap the whirlwind of globalization,
so that presently a speculative bubble encircles the
greater portion of the earth. “Speculation is no longer
surplus-value,” Baudrillard avows. “[I]t is the ecstasy of
value, without reference to production or its real
conditions. It is the pure and empty form, the expurgated form of value, which plays now on its own
orbital circulation and revolution alone.”8 The ecosystem of artifice caused by speculation is in perennial
danger of catastrophic collapse from the very scale of
the economic debt from which new margins of value are
generated. Keeping pace with this upward spiral of
speculative excess is the implacable growth of animal
killing. The laboratory researcher and the numbercrunching speculator are the supreme agents of the
obsession, at once financial and corporeal, with “making
a killing.”9
Both alchemists and vivisectionists claim to
vanquish the shadow side of existence, and they are
more than ready to cast aspersions on lesser, benighted
mortals. Yet their subservience to the shadow is in
direct proportion to their claims of superiority to the
shadow. They testify to the shadow’s power of illusion:
night becomes day, lies become truth, and death
becomes life. The shadow shutters its supreme irrationality behind the alchemists’ and vivisectionists’ shield of
rationality. By comparing two quotations—one from a
giant of alchemy and the other from an equally towering
pillar of vivisection—we can see the same spectacular
45
logic of pure denial at work. First come the words of the
august alchemist Sendivogius:
To cause things hidden in the shadow to appear, and
to take away the shadow from them, this is
permitted to the intelligent philosopher by God
through nature . . . all these things happen, and the
eyes of the common men do not see them, but the
eyes of the understanding and of the imagination
perceive them with true and honest vision.10
The shadow side of human nature has taken such deep
root in the mind of Sendivogius that his psychological
projection is a perfect inverting mirror. It’s easy to see
that an alchemist like Sendivogius, up to his eyeballs in
all sorts of nonsensical maxims about nature, would fall
prey to self-delusion. How about someone like Claude
Bernard, a fixture of 19th-century physiology, whose
language is suspiciously similar to that of Sendivogius?
One must be brought up in laboratories and live in
them, to appreciate the full importance of all the
details of procedure in investigation, which are so
often neglected or despised by the false men of
science calling themselves generalizers. Yet we shall
reach really fruitful and luminous generalizations
about vital phenomena only in so far as we
ourselves experiment and, in hospitals, amphitheatres, or laboratories, stir the fetid or throbbing
ground of life. . . . If a comparison were required to
express my idea of the science of life, I should say
that it is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which
may be reached only by passing through a long and
ghastly kitchen.11
46
These are the words of the same man who in the same
work wrote fondly of his lethal experiments on rabbits,
designed to determine if the carrot-nibbling creatures
could be forced to become meat-eaters.12 Bernard was a
mastermind of vivisection for whom no experiment was
too invasive or too bizarre. He was a versatile, articulate
agent of the shadow economy of animal killing who
would sooner have spawned a race of beef-eating
bunnies than admit his ever-increasing indebtedness to
the shadow. For him the ghastly kitchen really was the
terminus of science rather than a waystation on the
path to enlightenment. Bernard is just one example of
the rationality-spouting animal experimentalist
laboring under the delusion of regeneration through
violence, capable of a level of denial that only the most
brilliant minds can muster.
Perhaps in no other figure did the currents of
animal experimentation and alchemy converge more
memorably than in Johann Konrad Dippel Frankensteina. The probable inspiration for the title character of
Mary Shelley's celebrated gothic novel, Dippel was born
at Castle Frankenstein on August 10, 1673; later in life
he appended the name of his birth locale to his family
name.13 Dippel came of age at a pivotal moment in the
history of science, when alchemy ceded its authority to
the experimental practices of the Age of Reason. Having
received his medical degree in 1711 from the University
of Leyden, then an epicenter of European vivisection,
Dippel was thoroughly versed in the latest anatomical
techniques and physiological theories. His dissertation
at Leyden—Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the
Flesh—was a seamless melding of up-to-date medical
47
investigation with the longstanding ambitions of the
alchemists.
An avid dissector of animal (and possibly graverobbed human) bodies, Dippel claimed to have
discovered through his alchemical project of animal
experimentation nothing less than the elixir of life. In
his Leyden dissertation he wrote of the supposedly
miraculous transformation wrought by his animal oil in
an afflicted patient, who had suffered from “unnatural,
horrible movements” and had been “possessed by the
devil”:14
He was refreshed and healthy, with language
restored at the same time; about which all the
doctors who had him in their hands, in addition to
others present, were stupefied and hardly doubted
any longer the truth of the philosopher’s stone and
the universal remedy . . . a true substance, whereby
the majority of debilitating illnesses could be as it
were lifted quickly, safely, agreeably, and all at once.
It is namely a distilled and clarified oil from allanimal components.15
Aside from the usual claims about the purity of
experimental work, Dippel’s language reveals the moral
underpinnings of animal research. The patient’s illness
is the embodiment of unnatural evil and he is literally
possessed by the devil. By implication, the animal elixir
that cures him is the distillation of goodness.
Dippel’s crusade against evil, in which he pawned
the bodies of animals against the devil’s purchase on
human life, is the same moral battle fought every day in
the laboratories of our own era. My point is not that
present-day experimentalists necessarily aim for a
chemical elixir of life in the manner that Dippel did, but
48
rather that they seek to extract from animals a purifying,
sanctifying knowledge greater than death. They make
their speculative marks upon the animal frame, just as
the real-life Dr. Frankenstein did, in order to free the
human frame from the bonds of determinism. Like
Dippel’s fealty to his alchemical craft, their faith in
vivisection comes as much from a mystical belief in the
interchangeability of life and death, of good and evil, as
it does from sound scientific principles. Little wonder
that the efficacy of their pursuit often falls far short of
the grand vision behind it.
Dippel liked to boast that his alchemical-anatomical preparations would extend his lifespan to Biblical
proportions, that he would die a contented 135 yearold; he actually died without warning in 1734, not even
half-way to his goal of longevity, quite possibly from the
toxic side-effects of a “new-and-improved” elixir. The
specter of his science lives on. If the millions of animal
victims who die every year in contemporary laboratories
are any indication, Dippel’s dream of an animal-based
catalyst of immortality is more robust than ever, and
along with it a formidable impediment to the emergence
of experimental science from the shadow.
Moving forward from traditional alchemy to the
“new” science of the organism, we very quickly run into
the discourse of the animal economy. The animal
economy had been a paradigm of physiological and
anatomical studies at least since the 17th century, but
really hit its stride in the mid-18th century. It was a
conceptual darling of European vivisectionists like John
Hunter, who sought with excruciating precision to map
out the functional networks of organismic activity to
which different structures of the body give rise. The
49
main premise of the theory of the animal economy was
that the living animal body possessed a dynamic
equilibrium of organismic functions greater than the
sum of the body's parts. An “invisible hand” controlled
the smooth integration of the disparate roles of these
parts in a manner closely analogous to the invisible
hand that oversaw the efficient interlocking of the
varied and often geographically isolated activities of
capitalism.
In fact, the mature versions of the two
theories—one of the functioning of the animal economy and the other of the functioning of the financial
economy—arose in close historical proximity, as did the
overlapping careers of their two great proponents:
Georges Cuvier and Adam Smith. Not coincidentally do
we see in Cuvier’s famous lecture on the animal
economy a series of rhetorical maneuvers that could
easily have been transposed, with a shift in jargon, from
Smith’s classic economic treatise The Wealth of Nations.16
Cuvier’s animal economy shares with Smith’s market
economy the bustle of coordinated enterprise:
This general and common motion in all the parts of
a living body is so much the essential attribute of
life, that parts, separated from the body, die
speedily, because they contain not within
themselves any principle of motion, and only
participate in the general motion which is produced
by their union into an organized whole.17
A comparably dismal fate would await any segment of
capitalism cut off from the flow of commerce. Beyond
the clear paradigmatic parallel between them, the
animal economy and the financial economy were not at
50
first tightly meshed. Many animal experimentalists of
the early days of capitalism had careers to support, to be
sure, but their speculative pursuit of the animal
economy was distant from the interests of that era’s
financial speculators. It took a while for the rhythms of
the animal body to become part and parcel of the
financial rhythms of modernity, for Adam Smith’s
invisible hand and Georges Cuvier’s invisible hand to
clasp one another firmly. In our world, they are locked
in an inseparable embrace.
The most patent fusion of the two forms of
economy occurs in the commercial laboratory. Here the
financial speculator and the scientific speculator
together lay their claims to the wealth of the animal
body, with the financial speculator the invisible party to
the transaction. To be accurate we should call the
financial speculator the “invisible hand” in the corporate
laboratory, directing the researcher's hand as it injects,
cuts, and measures—as it performs the work of
regenerative violence that makes animal experimentation so exquisitely profitable to the financial speculator.
The invisible hand of the financial speculator
reaches just as inexorably into the other breed of
laboratory, that of academic and governmental institutions, where filthy lucre inscribes itself on animal flesh
behind a veil of truth and objectivity. The academic
researcher tries to pretend that science and lucre reside
in alien universes, as though the infusion of artifice into
experimentation would spoil the researcher’s access to
nature’s secrets. In reality the historical trajectories of
financial and experimental speculation have always
been intertwined. The artificial alchemy of money has
reached such bewildering heights, provoking such a
51
frenzy of lethal experimentation, that the attempts at
denial of the academic researcher are flimsy indeed.
Corporate sponsorship of academic research and the
government’s morganatic marriage with biomedical
industry are merely two of the innumerable symptoms
of the commercial impetus of today’s animal experimentation. Research that is not nakedly pecuniary in
motivation is conceived as utilitarian, which is another
way of saying that it will make money eventually. The
public interest, so far as the lives of laboratory animals
are concerned, is a financial interest.
The invisible hand of the financial speculator
guiding the hand of the scientific speculator is one of
the themes of William Kotzwinkle’s classic satirical
novel Doctor Rat. The anthropomorphic title character is
a schizophrenic lab animal at a research university who
has internalized the system of thought of his human
overseers. His mind poisoned by his victimization,
Doctor Rat is an unabashed champion of the laboratory
arts: “I admit quite humbly to having received the
Claude Bernard Animal Experimentation Award the year
I went mad.”18 He then elaborates upon what he calls
“[o]ne of my favorite experiments,”19 in which a dog’s leg
is placed in a 500-pound pressure clamp and a graduate
assistant slowly raises the level of compression. Doctor
Rat is thrilled with this procedure because its financial
benefits are directly proportional to the force of the
clamp:
The logic of the Pressure Program is irrefutable. It
keeps our university filled with invaluable grants.
It’s good for the economy and it’s good for
humanity. This dog’s crushed leg will serve as a
guideline for future studies of a similar nature,
52
which will ultimately culminate in a magnificent
scientific breakthrough of the bones. It might also
result in a better kind of plastic, or perhaps a new
sort of aspirin. Housing projects will be more
perfectly designed and detergents will improve. The
applications are simply endless.20
The Pressure Program is founded on the wild fantasies
of the financial speculator, in which profit begets profit
in a ceaseless upward spiral. Speculative mania distorts
beyond recognition the utilitarian basis of margins of
value. The mania of the financial speculator can lead in
short order to grotesquely unsound behavior in the
laboratory, displays of gratuitous violence that expose
the experimenters’ pretense of rationality. To see the
consequences of the marionette hand of the scientific
speculator run amok, one need simply acquaint oneself
with the infamous baboon experiments at the University of Pennsylvania’s Head Trauma Research Center,
or the macaque experiments at the Institute for
Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. These
are the most visible and publicly repugnant instances of
a fathomless mass of animal research immersed in the
shadow.
As a real-world homage to Doctor Rat, the lethal
testing upon mice of botulinum toxin, or Botox, could
be called the “Poison Program.”21 Every batch of Botox
in the United States undergoes the “lethal dose 50” test,
whereby a dose of the poison is increased until half of a
group of test animals die. The Botox Poison Program is
fueled by rampant financial speculation, which in turn is
fueled by the irrational pursuit of immortality of the
patients who receive Botox injections. Botox has
become such a lucrative cosmetic product because
53
people cannot tolerate their own finitude. They resort
to all manner of invasive procedures and toxic substances to create the illusion, more psychological than
physical, of timeless youth. Botox is an ideal shadow
substance because of the way in which its virulence is
the key to its regenerative aura, for only the repressive
magic of the shadow can transform toxicity and lethality
into the salve of human mortality. The sheer magnitude
of the Botox Poison Program—several million Botox
injections are administered every year in America
alone—vindicates the decades-old wisdom of Irish
scribe George Bernard Shaw, who insisted in his tract
Doctors’ Delusions that “we are prepared to snatch at any
dirty receipt for immortality rather than face death like
ladies and gentlemen.”22
Aside from Doctor Rat, two narratives stand out
from the crowd of animal-research-themed literature
for their psycho-symbolic depth: John Steinbeck’s “The
Snake” and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. I will
analyze them in reverse chronological order, to circumnavigate my way back toward the historical baseline of
speculation. Steinbeck’s story is a psychological allegory
of the laboratory with a symbolism that is more Jungian
than Freudian. The protagonist of the story, Dr. Phillips,
works in a “little commercial laboratory”23 where he
prepares biological specimens for academic study. Right
away, in the word “commercial,” the hand of the
financial speculator becomes visible. The main thrust of
the story is an uncanny encounter between Dr. Phillips
and a woman who enters his laboratory to purchase a
snake. She does not want to take the snake with her, but
rather intends to keep the creature in the lab and watch
him feed whenever she visits. Dr. Phillips becomes
54
increasingly perturbed as the woman observes her snake
zero in on a rat, for she seems herself to embody the
predatory behavior of the serpent:
The snake was close now. Its head lifted a few inches
from the sand. The head weaved slowly back and
forth, aiming, getting distance, aiming. Dr. Phillips
glanced again at the woman. He turned sick. She
was weaving too, not much, just a suggestion.24
After the snake has devoured the rat, the woman leaves
the laboratory, promising to return. She never does.
Steinbeck’s narrative is a prism of the basic
mechanism of animal killing: compensatory victimization. Through the appearance of the woman, a figment
of his mind, Dr. Phillips becomes dimly acquainted with
the shadow economy of zoocide. Then repression
returns with a vengeance when the woman departs from
the laboratory. Interpreted symbolically, the woman has
strong shadow qualities, including “her dark eyes . . .
veiled with dust”25 and her ability to move around
undetected. She personifies not only the doctor’s
horrifying cognizance of his own mortality—his own
role as a “subjective rat”26—but also his unsettling
suspicion of the real reason he is in the laboratory
killing animals. What had been blithely repressed in the
doctor’s mind, his delusional readiness to pawn the lives
of animals as a means of indemnity against death, has
unexpectedly and nauseatingly sprung to the fore.
The woman’s presence in the laboratory is an
irruption of the shadow into awareness, and Dr. Phillips
glimpses the thanatophobic origins of his lethal
behavior. The moment of the shadow’s partial liberation
from its prison in the unconscious occurs when the
55
doctor gives the woman his undivided attention. “She
seemed to awaken slowly, to come out of some deep
pool of consciousness.”27 His insight into the shadow
does not last for long, however, nor extend far. The fact
that the woman doesn’t return to the lab indicates that
the irruption of the shadow has been a singular event,
that the doctor is never able to understand fully the
intertwined meanings of mortal terror and regenerative
killing.
The figure of the snake is an equally powerful
symbol in the story. It is too simplistic to see the snake
as an unambiguous emblem of evil. The snake is instead
a bivalent symbol of the symbiosis of good and evil, life
and death, healing and killing—the same qualities that
merge in the shadow. The snake as an archetype
features prominently in the medical and alchemical arts,
as evidenced by the staff of Asclepius and the caduceus
of Hermes. The snake of Steinbeck’s story is the
ouroboros of alchemical lore, who derives his preternatural powers from his chthonic habits. Dr. Phillips’s
fondness for snakes as laboratory specimens places him
firmly in the zone of intersection between scientific
medicine and alchemy.
To quote from Jung’s commentary on ophidian
imagery, Dr. Phillips is implicitly drawn to the figure of
the serpent because it “symbolizes the poison that a
doctor can handle—it means his secret knowledge,”28 as
well as “the magic remedies granted by God.”29 Even as
the snake brings benevolence to the world through the
healing arts, he is tainted with the devouring evil of
the grave. The snake is a convenient cipher for the
weaknesses of the flesh and the human capacity for
wickedness, making him the star of the Judeo-Christian
56
story of the Fall. Jung once again: “The snake, like the
devil in Christian theology, represents the shadow, and
one which goes beyond anything personal and could
best be compared to a principle, such as the principle of
evil.”30 The enduring message of the serpentine symbol
is that the human quest for the ultimate goodness goes
hand in hand with the exercise of earthly iniquity.
The snake qua shadow can just as easily turn
good into evil as evil into good because the two moral
categories are conjoined in the unconscious. When the
shadow breaks for a moment into Dr. Phillips’s consciousness, he is aghast at the fleeting awareness of the
evil he has wrought in the laboratory. Before the
woman’s appearance, he had been able to kill animals
without any qualms, convinced of the rectitude of his
speculative cause. “He could kill a thousand animals for
knowledge,” the narrator informs us.31 After he recognizes the manner in which the goodness of the
shadow comes at the cost of evil, he temporarily loses
his stomach for killing: “this desire tonight sickened
him.”32 Dr. Phillips may not come away with lasting
enlightenment from his encounter with the serpentine
shadow, but hopefully the symbolic weight of Steinbeck’s allegory can make an impression on those who
kill animals outside the realm of fiction.
Dr. Phillips is a lightweight in the laboratory
compared to Dr. Moreau, who might even have made
such notorious real-world vivisectors as Hooke and
Magendie blush—though just slightly. A shameless
champion of vivisection, Moreau experiments on
animals with a vision of scientific progress unimpeded
by considerations of cruelty or absurdity. The narrator
of the novel, Prendick, discovers after a series of misad57
ventures that Moreau’s ultimate objective is to
transform animals into flawless humans. Moreau’s real
foe in the laboratory is the “mark of the beast,”33 which
despite his fiercest efforts he cannot eradicate from the
animal frame. Of his monstrous, pain-ridden creations,
he laments—
As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast
begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again . . .
I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and
see nothing there but the souls of beasts, beasts
that perish.34
Like Steinbeck’s story, the tale of Moreau is an allegory
of the thanatophobic foundations of violence against
animals. Moreau’s attempts to excise the mark of the
beast from animals mirror the ideal goal of vivisection:
excising the mark of the beast from people. What truly
goads Moreau is that humans themselves fall prey to
the infirmities of earthly existence. “Pain and pleasure,”
he pontificates to Prendick, “are for us, only so long as
we wriggle in the dust.”35 Moreau’s experimental holy
grail, one he shares with his scientific brethren, is the
god-like prerogative of freedom from mortality. In the
end, his shadow-driven quest is a complete failure, for
himself and for his victims. His Sisyphean project of
death denial—to “conquer yet”36 the stigma of the
perishable animal—culminates in his bloody demise at
the hands of one of his tormented progeny.
Moreau is a throwback to the early days of
vivisection, when the hand of the financial speculator
and that of the scientific speculator worked in largely
separate spheres. Moreau’s island is a refuge of sorts
from the flurry of speculative finance in the world of his
58
era, which still manages to permeate every nook and
cranny of terra cognita. Moreau depends on the
“speculative enterprise”37 of the shipping industry and on
the global animal trade to secure and transport his
victims. At one time a well-regarded English scientist,
Moreau has been exiled from the shores of Albion for
his experimental depravity, a circumstance of isolation
he finds perversely empowering. Away from the hypocritical norms of civilization, Moreau strips all pretense
from vivisection. He revels in the animal-experimental
arts for what they really are, a shadow-conduit to divine
transcendence. In true allegorical form, his Beast Folk
worship him as a god, complete with a mantra of supplication:
His is the House of Pain.
His is the Hand that makes.
His is the Hand that wounds.
His is the Hand that heals.38
Moreau’s House of Pain is a microcosm of the universe
of regenerative violence under the shadow’s sway, the
post-lapsarian universe. In this cosmic scheme, good
must be wrested by force from evil; Moreau embraces
evil as the supreme instrument for bringing the supposed goodness of immortality to fruition. Moreau’s
alienation from civilization belies the fact that his
shocking practices are distilled, intensified versions of
the run-of-the-mill iniquities he has left behind. It
makes sense then that Moreau was hounded out of
England—he was ironically a “victim” of the shadow
projection of his vivisector peers, who were loath to face
the naked reality of their own vocation.
59
Nor does it come as a surprise when Moreau
reveals to Prendick the ghastliest of his creations, “a
limbless thing with a horrible face that writhed along
the ground in a serpentine fashion.”39 This creature is a
pure manifestation of Moreau’s shadow side whose
physical horrors reflect the horrors of Moreau’s psyche,
not to mention the horrors of vivisection. Moreau’s
serpentine beast escapes from the laboratory and
wreaks havoc on the surrounding landscape before
eventually being killed. Thereupon the reader glimpses
the raw destructive capability of the shadow. Far from
the ennobling, introspective liberation of the shadow
the reader begins to see in “The Snake,” the escape of
Moreau’s beast is the shadow’s utter consumption of
the conscious self. Unlike Dr. Phillips, who at least
temporarily doubts his rationale for harming animals,
Moreau reacts to his shadow side by redoubling his
sadistic victimization of other creatures. The exposure
of Moreau’s shadow motivates him to repress that
dimension of himself even more profoundly and
insidiously. His behavior is a tragic allegory of the way
in which the civilized world represses the shadow
economy of animal killing beneath layer after layer of
rational justification.
One of Jung’s own experiences with animals
brings closure to my overview of how humankind
speculates with animals’ lives and bodies. We might
recall the boyhood Jung witnessing the slaughter of a
pig, an encounter that began to mold his understanding
of human behavior. Jung later became a medical
student at the University of Basel, where he was taken
aback by the experimental demonstrations in his
physiology class. “I found the subject thoroughly
60
repellent because of vivisection . . . I could never free
myself from the feeling that warm-blooded creatures
were akin to us and not just cerebral automata.”40 We
may never know the extent to which Jung’s sympathy
for the warm-blooded victims of vivisection shaped his
paradigm of the decidedly cold-blooded serpentine
shadow. With the kernel of his theory in mind, however,
we find lurking behind the Cartesian rationality of
experimental science a ritual economy in which animals
are targets because of—not in spite of—the corporeal
bonds they share with people. Our newfound knowledge
in hand, we can pursue Jung’s insights to their authentically rational conclusion and, mirabile dictu, free
ourselves from the zoocidal shadow.
.
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CHAPTER THREE
Incorporation
Through the sacrament of consumption, the
dismembered animal binds the human body to the
social body, symbiotically fortifying both. Nothing
prevents the consumption of animal substances from
being a solipsistic act, but its quintessential purpose is
corporate in the broadest sense. The consuming group
provides for its members a psychological umbrella of
convergent projections, what Becker calls an “unthinking web of support . . . the automatic security of
delegated powers.”1 And few group projections confer as
much immortalizing security as does animal-derived
incorporation, which lends nature’s imprimatur to the
laws of the unconscious.
No matter how solitary, consumption depends
upon the collective shadow for imparting transcendence
to the self, immersing the self in a system of shared
symbols and values which more often than not brings
selves into actual communion. Around a banquet table
or in a fast-food booth, the consumption of animal
products adds yet another level of inversion to the
shadow: transforming the fragmented animal body into
a network of human bodies rendered whole. Meat is the
main catalyst of rites of incorporation within the
shadow economy, the most iconic of comestible animal
products, yet meat occupies a vast spectrum of consumable items from the purely medicinal to the purely
gastronomic. In the unconscious, the entire spectrum
boils down to the same locus: a means of salvation
62
against finitude, against the mortality of the self and
the moribundity of the group.
The Western world has labored to repress the
nature of consumption as sacrament. This repression
wards off the intrusion of irrationality into the
supremely rational Western model of incorporation. Of
all the workings of the shadow economy, the rise of the
corporate dissemination of animal products embodies
the largest-scale bending of economic utility to the
irrational will of the shadow. The fast-food industry
applies Weberian principles of rationality so well that
there’s a super-sized moniker for the spread of the
routinized way of life: “McDonaldization.”2 The consumption of the animal body under the aegis of the
modern multinational corporation has empowered the
shadow economy like never before, giving it a collective
scope and institutional foothold very difficult to
dislodge.
But not impossible. With modernity comes such
a dramatic eruption of artificial incorporation—the
financial and legal relations of the mechanistic society,
the Gesellschaft—that the rationality of the consumption of animal substances becomes precarious.3 No
longer can society afford to embrace the shadow
economy of animal killing as a natural outgrowth of a
sacramental cosmology of consumption, which governs
without serious contradiction the tradition-bound
Gemeinschaft. From the viewpoint of Enlightenment
reason, the body of the animal is always in danger of
becoming “an accursed share,” as Bataille so poetically
puts it,4 one whose consumption lies outside of the
scope of productive enterprise. “Only the gigantic
development of the means of production is capable of
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fully revealing the meaning of production, which is the
nonproductive consumption of wealth.”5 With this logic
of nonproductiveness, the shadow should quickly find
itself relegated to oblivion. Yet the opposite is true. The
incorporation of the animal is nonproductive only in
terms of idealized efficiency, which ignores the unconscious purpose of zoocidal rituals.
The essential, sacramental mechanism of incorporation is dismemberment. With few exceptions the
animal body is divided and parceled out to members of a
group prior to consumption. The act of incorporation
fulfills the compensatory function of the shadow by
consolidating the bodies of the consumers both singly
and collectively. On the level of individual consumption,
each fragment of the animal possesses a synecdochic
potency because it partakes of the regenerative meaning
of the whole. A Chinese gourmand might feel transcendently fortified by a brothy portion of shark fin; an
adherent of haute cuisine might gravitate toward a
savory morsel of foie gras.
In the repressive fog of the modern Western
world, the cosmological significance of each part is
easily lost. The typical devotee of foie gras has little
conscious inkling of the epic stature of the liver as the
seat of the body’s equilibrium, a stature effusively
praised by the Greco-Roman ancients and noted by
anthropologists to be present in cultures around the
world. Nor do most people comprehend the cosmological truth that a blend of animal parts approaches
best of all the holistic efficacy of the consumable body.
Witness the popularity of pemmican among Plains
Indians or hamburgers and hot dogs among the fastfood masses. These mish-mashes of the animal frame
64
embody a kind of egalitarian spirit of the consuming
collective.
The communal consumption of the dismembered
animal bolsters an eclectic range of social-body types,
from the strictly egalitarian to the strictly hierarchical.
Mary Douglas offers an overview of the meaning of
dismemberment that emphasizes the latter type:
The carcass of the animal is a virtual space on which
social distinctions are projected, and more than
that, they are validated by giving the right portions
of meat to the right people. Before the structuralist
explanations of the distribution are finished the
carcass of the animal will have presented a
microcosm of the whole universe . . . a logical
equivalence projected upon the parts of the
organism and the parts of the social world.6
The group ideology of unequal consumption of animal
substances is a means of promoting stratification and
consolidation at the same time. Inclusion and exclusion
along social categories like class and gender, a ubiquitous facet of the psychological dynamics of group life,
extend naturally to the dissemination of the animal
body. Group elites have a long historical track record of
regulating animal-based consumption under the pretense that stratification strengthens the group.
This is a strategy of social control that can
backfire spectacularly. It is difficult to ignore the irony
in an event that ultimately helped precipitate Russia’s
October Revolution: a mutiny aboard the battleship
Potemkin over the provision of rancid meat.7 When
animal products are distributed as widely and democratically as possible, the consolidation of the group
65
proceeds with holy fervor. Shrill critics, Marxist and
otherwise, have time and again foreseen the demise of
the capitalist Gesellschaft on the basis of the alienated
relations among its members, but what these Cassandras forget is that the Gesellschaft is united by the
organic ties of rendered-animal consumption.
The solid evidence supplied historically and
anthropologically for the group function of animal
substances is reinforced by the study of our closest
living relative, the chimpanzee. Meat is one of the most
prized substances in the gustatory repertoire of many
chimpanzee groups, and the distribution of captured
meat facilitates a complex web of social interactions.
Primatologist Craig Stanford, in his essay “The Ape’s
Gift: Meat-eating, Meat-sharing, and Human Evolution,”
concludes that “meat is sought by chimpanzees for
social reasons primarily.”8 Stanford also posits an
evolutionary parallel between the meat consumption
patterns of the chimpanzee and human species, adducing “the undeniable fact that the role of meat in
human society has never been merely nutritional.”9
No scrupulous conclusions about the behavior of
our simian cousins could ignore the pioneering work of
Jane Goodall. She was among the first primate scientists to observe the ritualistic significance of meat in the
social life of chimpanzees, well beyond any nutriment
that could be gleaned from the energetically costly
process of meat acquisition. Goodall’s classic work In the
Shadow of Man, the product of a decade of observation
of chimpanzees on Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Reserve,
underscores the symmetry between the rites of incorporation of chimpanzees and those of people:
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Just as hunting behavior is interesting in that the
chimpanzees show the beginning of cooperative
endeavor—so characteristic of human hunting
societies—the consumption of meat is similarly
fascinating, because normally the possessor of the
carcass is willing to share the meat with others, a
characteristic not recorded for other nonhuman
primate species in the wild.10
The title of Goodall’s book has a Jungian meaning she
perhaps did not consciously intend. The scientific
evidence points toward an evolutionary origin of the
shadow economy of animal killing, from the earliest
days of primate sentience. Our ancestors’ consciousness
of death and experience of predation triggered the
creation of ritual behaviors to offset the bestial fear of
becoming dinner and the existential fear of annihilation
of the self. In the evolutionary dawn of human existence
lies a familiar dialectic between the development of
human difference from the rest of nature—“the
expansion of human cognitive skills . . . and social
intelligence”11—and the accelerating drive to consume
nature’s primal gifts.
This evolutionary trajectory has touched human
groups in myriad ways; animal substances are hardly
consumed to the same degree by everyone. Rather it is
one side of the dialectic, the development of ritual institutions, that makes all the difference in the scale of
incorporation. A central hallmark of civilization is the
building-up of fairly rigid, complex institutions that tie
individuals to the collective. Civilization has little to do
with any particular set of behaviors and everything to
do with the growth of strong institutions.
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To say that groups without strong institutions,
like foraging societies, are bereft of civilization’s
ligamenture is not to cast aspersions upon their
members. These groups frequently possess a level of
egalitarianism unmatched by advanced democracies.
Just as the egalitarianism of various simple huntergatherer groups is high compared to that of civilized
society, their overall meat consumption is relatively low.
The mountain Arapesh people of Papua New Guinea, to
whom Margaret Mead devoted her ethnographic talents,
are a case in point. Mead observed how much the
Arapesh eschewed strict hierarchies of rank. She was
also struck by how much of “Arapesh life is filled with
people waiting for a little meat.”12 Absent strong institutional traditions demanding the intensive pursuit of
animal goods, Arapesh rituals of incorporation are quite
flexible. “The statement is not, ‘We must hold a
ceremony, therefore we must collect meat,’ but rather,
‘When enough meat is found, then we will hold a
ceremony.’”13
Contrary to the claims of ecological anthropology,
resource availability is only part of the equation for
sharers of animal flesh. The presence or absence of
strong ritual institutions can skew meat consumption
either above or below what ecological formulas might
predict. The feasting of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl
Natives) of the north-west Pacific coast, an indigenous
population of “complex hunter-gatherers,”14 showcases
the exorbitant outcome of ritual institutions coupled
with ecological abundance. Franz Boas, who wrote
copiously on the Kwakwaka’wakw, portrayed a “Big Man”
society which is a diametrical counterpart of the
Arapesh group studied by Mead. The Kwakwaka’wakw
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are as hierarchical as the Arapesh are egalitarian, and
exhibit as much profligacy in their rites of incorporation
as the Arapesh exhibit exiguity in theirs. Among the
carnal festivities of the Kwakwaka’wakw is the “feast of
long strips of blubber,” at which dozens of seals are
partitioned and consumed, the choicest morsels going
to the chiefs and the fat to the hoi polloi:
The long strips of blubber are given to the common
people . . . Those who are experts can eat six long
strips of blubber. Then they have enough; and [are]
proud of having eaten so much . . . [T]hose who have
bolted the seal go and wash themselves, for they are
quite covered in oil.15
The persistent theme in Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial
repasts is gut-busting satiety, and Boas points out that
seal feasting often ends with profuse vomiting.16 The
robustness of Kwakwaka’wakw ritual institutions places
a premium on the robustness of the feast-participants’
voracity, as though the bodies of the group’s members
must literally bear the weight of the group’s ritual
traditions.
Once the ritual institutions of civilization enter
the picture, the quantities of flesh at the largest
Kwakwaka’wakw feasts begin to look like a mole-hill
beside a mountain. At the earliest stages of civilization,
the chief culprit for an amplified threshold of incorporation was organized religion. Religious institutions are
the bellwethers of the evolution of the corporate
paradigm. The founding expression of the corporate
worldview was “the rationalism of hierocracy,”17 to
employ Max Weber’s term. The basis of the rationalism
of hierocratic institutions has been their ability to
69
streamline the consumption habits of the people within
their purview. To drive home this point, Weber combines the form and function of his ideas and clothes the
practices of hierocratic institutions in business-speak.
Everywhere hierocracy has sought to monopolize
the administration of religious values. They [sic]
have also sought to bring and to temper the
bestowal of religious goods into the form of
‘sacramental’ or ‘corporate grace.’18
Few spectacles of consumption in the ancient world
were as pregnant with corporate grace as the Greater
Panathenaic hecatomb of the Athenian city-state
(analyzed previously in the chapter on liquidation).
True to its sacramental meaning for the community, the
hecatomb followed liquidation with incorporation, and
the citizenry of Athens celebrated the birthday of their
eponymous goddess with a meat supply of Olympian
proportions. The entire event was managed and funded
by the official Athenian bureaucracy, for which the
callings of government and of religion were interchangeable. So engrained in the festivals of city life was the
corporate grace of the state religion, that only on the
rarest occasion (e.g., the hecatomb of 410/409 BCE)
would the Treasurers of Athena be compelled to
supplement the bureaucratic coffers.19 Thanks to the
exercise of corporate grace, the Athenian city-state was
held together by meat.
The first major step in the sub-division of
civilized feasting is the banquet. The institutional
layering of civilization gives the banquet its synecdochic
meaning. The banquet usually draws its membership
from a sub-division of society, somewhere between the
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nuclear family and the undistinguised masses. The key
ritual purpose of the banquet is maintaining a “trickledown” relationship between part and whole, imposing
on a formal dining experience the ideology of the social
segment from which the diners come or to which they
aspire. The banquet group affirms itself as a part of the
social collective, while each individual affirms himself or
herself as an integral component of the ideological
cohesiveness of the consuming group. An authority on
the sociology of the meal, Georg Simmel, has characterized this latter dimension of the banquet as
the order, which gives to the needs of the individual
that which is coming to the individual as a part of
the structured whole but, in return, does not allow
the individual to encroach beyond his or her limits.20
The elaborate synecdochic symbolism of the banquet
escapes the domain of artifice through the incorporation of the dismembered animal. The reason the carving
of the animal has such a long historical association with
the banquet is that it enacts, via the miracle of ritual
inversion, the synecdochic essence of the meal.
The archetypal banquet is one at which an entire
animal is carved for the diners. This “perfect” dismemberment makes of the repast a microcosm of the ideal
social world of the attendees, elevating a set of ritual
protocols to the level of a “natural symbol.”21 A close
examination of two banquets, one fictional and one
historical, brings into greater relief the banquet’s
peculiar mode of ritual naturalization. Each is taken
seriatim from the twin historical peaks of the Western
banquet, the Roman Empire and Renaissance Europe.
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The first of these archetypal banquets is the
“Dinner with Trimalchio” in Petronius’s picaresque novel
Satyricon (circa 60 AD). The cheeky narrator Encolpius
attends a Lucullan feast thrown by Gaius Pompeius
Trimalchio, a former slave who desperately wants to
surround himself with the trappings of Roman nobility.
The narrative of the meal presents the ritual ingredients
of a model banquet, right down to the absurdly sumptuous hors d’ oeuvres. The banquet is chockablock with
whole animals ready to be dismembered, for which a
servant—ironically named Carver—proffers his services.
Trimalchio, beholden to the highest banqueting
standards, scorns “mincemeat or easy dishes of that sort”
and boasts “my cooks frequently broil calves whole.”22 At
one climactic point in the culinary presentation, a
gargantuan roasted sow is carted before the onlookers,
a freedom cap (typically given to ex-slaves) atop the
animal’s head. A servant makes an incision across the
sow’s belly, and to the crowd’s surprise “the wound
burst open and dozens of thrushes came whirring out.”23
The scene readily lends itself to a shadow-economic
interpretation. The morbid cap of liberation, the
emergence of life from the dead animal, and the
mythological meaning of birds as symbols of spiritual
transcendence all illustrate the diners’ desire for
freedom from their mortal coil.
Trimalchio’s behavior throughout the evening
supports this interpretation. He speaks tongue-in-cheek
of death: “Nothing but bones, that’s what we are,”24 he
insists to the guests after a jointed human skeleton
wrought of solid silver is brought out for their entertainment. It soon becomes apparent that the fear of dying
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haunts Trimalchio’s histrionics. Toward the end of the
meal, the host’s mortal preoccupations get the better
of him. He orders his brass band to play funeral music
while he entreats the astonished diners to “Pretend
I’m dead [and] say something nice about me.”25 Trimalchio throws the banquet as an attempt to achieve selfimmortality through the group; the group strives to
achieve immortality through the institutional consolidation of the banquet. Not far beneath the civilized
veneer of Trimalchio’s dinner lies an implicit contract
between the individual and the collective, a covenant of
incorporation sealed with piece after piece of ritually
carved flesh.
The second model banquet proves the adage that
truth can be stranger than fiction. On June 7, 1473, at
the behest of Pope Sixtus IV, a banquet took place in
Rome honoring the marriage of Eleonora of Aragon and
Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrera. The hosts of the
festivities were Pietro Riario and Giuliano della Rovere,
two prominent cardinals and Sixtus’s nephews. In
accordance with its Renaissance Zeitgeist, the banquet
featured for entertainment a series of Roman-mythological scenes of Elysium. The overall sacramental meaning
of the banquet was Christian—the meal was held a
stone’s throw from the sanctum sanctorum of the Pope—
but the pagan theme of the presentation was the crux
of the banquet’s louche revelry. The key mythological
figure in the spectacle was Orpheus, an icon of dismemberment who complemented the array of animal
carcasses. Ovid’s rendition of the Orphic myth, in which
the hero is torn to pieces and then mystically reformed
in Elysium, served as the subtext of the banquet’s juxtaposition of classical imagery and copious meat.
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According to an account of the banquet penned
by Bernardino Corio and corroborated by Eleonora of
Aragon herself, the dozens of meat dishes plied early in
the meal were a harbinger of grander gifts:
Then came Orpheus with his zither followed by four
peacocks dressed in their feathers with tail-feathers
opened and a peahen and her young all dressed in
their feathers, two pheasants with feathers, two
swans with their feathers, two cranes also with
feathers. A deer, re-dressed in its skin with the
horns on its head. A bear dressed in its fur holding
a stick in its mouth. Another deer, a goat, pigs, and
boars and many other animals—all cooked and put
back into their skins—and all life-size so that they
seemed real.26
The presence of Orpheus gave ritual life to this unlikely
menagerie. He and his music magically bestowed upon
the jumble of bodies a coherent symbolic design. The
same symbolic design unified the hierarchical anatomy
of the social body of which the diners were a fragment,
if only by concealing the illusory nature of the social
relations that kept every part of that body in its proper
place.
Against the implicit backdrop of Orpheus’s
dismemberment and subsequent elevation to eternal
indivisibility in Elysium, the wedding party affirmed its
solidarity at the head of the social order. Everyone
consumed the iconography of perfect wholeness
embodied in each animal member of the banquet’s
Orphic retinue. Heaven and earth moved, and myriad
creatures died, to maintain the diners’ holy pretense. So
worldly was this banquet, so earnestly did it embrace
gluttony and vanity as vehicles for sanctification, that
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only the strangest of symbolic marriages—of the Pope
and Orpheus—could rescue the event from religious
fraud.
On the nuclear level of the social order, the
sacramental family meal brings the morality of the
shadow into alignment with the morality of organized
religion. A cherished celebration in Christian households around the world, the consumption of lamb on
Easter Sunday, flaunts a glaring paradox: How can the
ultimate affirmation of Christian goodness depend
upon the killing of fledgling creatures, a kind of zoocidal
version of the Massacre of the Innocents? The Massacre
of the Innocents, King Herod’s infanticidal rampage, is
featured in the New-Testament Bible as the epitome of
human evil. One must not accuse lambchop-loving
Christians of trying to out-Herod Herod, but one might
expect the wholesale devouring of baby animals to be a
serious moral dilemma for Christians instead of a
prominent ritual protocol.
One cannot explain the paradox with a doctrinal
comparison to the Lamb of God, whose name connotes
moral innocence and mortal vulnerability, qualities
which a good Christian would be loath to defile. The
answer lurks in the shadow economy, by whose laws the
meat of young animals invigorates the consumer more
consummately than that of older animals. Closer to the
moment of parturition, the fledglings’ flesh touches the
hidden foundation of the world.27 Christ the Lamb of
God hearkens back to the totemic role of the lamb as
sacrificial victim. Like his ovine namesake, Christ is
pregnant with restorative vitality, liberated by the
sacred violence of liquidation. At the moment of Christ’s
resurrection, the Easter lamb is “re-born” through the
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magic of incorporation. The therapeutic essence of the
dismembered Christ is the monotheistic reinvention of
the sacramentalism of the dismembered lamb.
The lamb of the table, not the snake of the
garden, is the true shadow version of Christ. The
Christian family in the midst of the Easter meal is at the
height of civilized ritual, embracing the shadow while
denying its stranglehold. The Easter feast is the civilized
model of Jung’s “psychology of totemism,” whereby
“many exemplars of the totem animal are killed and
consumed during the totem meals, and yet it is only the
One who is being eaten.”28 Upon the Easter table, under
the carver’s knife, the One is both Christ and AntiChrist, the conscious incarnation of everything the
Christian community idealizes and the unconscious
incarnation of everything it disavows.
The totemic sleight of hand that can transmute
perfect evil into perfect goodness hinges on the
psychology of the taboo. All the evil in the shadow is
concentrated in taboos. “[I]f you violate them,” Jung
says, “you might find yourself in the devil’s kitchen.”29
Jung’s infernal culinary metaphor is especially apt
where gastronomic taboos are concerned, because the
breaking of such taboos threatens to demote the
offender from consumer to consumed. The taboo, a
ritual expression of denial, channels evil away from
shadow behaviors that depend on repression for their
morally upright performance. The exception (taboo) is
meaningless apart from the rule (shadow ritual).
Better than most credentialed psychologists,
Mohandas Gandhi grasped the rationale of the taboo.
According to the Mahatma, a large swath of his Hindu
peers ventured “to obtain freedom from liability to kill
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any kind of life” by paying lip service to religious interdictions against carnivory. “Generally speaking,” he
added, “we may observe that many Hindus partake of
meat.”30 Gandhi was right about the taboo in a much
broader sense. Freedom from liability for immersion in
the shadow is the psychological underpinning of taboos,
from the bovine taboo of Hinduism to the porcine taboo
of Judaism and Islam. The exact manner in which each
particular taboo arises is a matter of cultural and
historical conditions of bewildering variety, and less
important psychologically than the taboo’s compensatory role.
If we return to the Easter feast, we see this role
very clearly throughout the lion’s share of the history of
Christianity. The dismemberment and consumption of
Christ’s shadow incarnation, the sacrificial lamb, has
necessitated a compensatory taboo period for traditional Christians, the abstinence from meat during Lent.
Lenten meat avoidance is ritual denial in the service of
psychological denial. Christian observers of Lent deny
themselves meat before Easter in order to ignore the
reliance of the Easter meal upon the shadow economy.
As Christianity as a whole has become less ritualistic,
Lent as a formal psycho-symbolic counterweight to
Easter has waned in importance. Far from embracing a
creed of moral vegetarianism, Christianity has abandoned the need to deal with any sort of moral paradox
in the carnivorous practices of the faithful.
The sacramental meaning of the dismembered
animal can also be translated into the technical—but no
less holy—idioms of physiology and dietetics. The
premier animistic conduit to robust human health, the
faunal victim feeds people’s devotion to ameliorating
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the weaknesses of the flesh. Our smugly rational
suspicion of zoological “folk medicine” is typical shadow
projection; beneath the surface of the Western psyche
resonates a strong attraction to the sympathetic magic
of the animal pharmacopoeia. Not only is this modern
Western suspicion alien to the billion-plus practitioners
of traditional Asian medicine, but it would also have
been alien to the forebears of Western modernity with
their theory of the bodily humors.
Our obsession with dietary metrics is a hollowly
empirical version of the longstanding link between the
medical and culinary arts, a therapeutic kingdom in
which the animal body reigns supreme. The dietary
metrics of animal substances rationalize the needs of
the shadow economy, whether it be the health benefits
of milk and eggs or the role of (white) meat as the
centerpiece of a “balanced” diet. Muted dietetic warnings about the nutritional dangers of animal products,
mostly from fringe experts, fail to deter legions of
people from gorging themselves on these products.
Once the animal body is on the table, the precinct of the
dieticians can easily reach an entente cordiale with the
principality of the unconscious.
For both Eastern and Western civilizations, the
therapeutic value of the animal body has a long history
of cultural rationalization, built upon a joint venture of
alchemy and medicine whose “receipts” (recipes) show
the extent of our psychological remittance to the
shadow. Naturalistic medicine is so engrained in Chinese civilization that the classic primer of pharmacology,
the materia medica, is practically a Chinese literary
institution. While herbal remedies abound in traditional
Chinese medicine, animal substances pack an unusually
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concentrated therapeutic wallop. And the line between
gastronomic and medicinal preparations of animal
substances is often blurred. One of the preeminent
dishes in Chinese cooking, the flesh of the golden carp,
hews closely to Jung’s characterization of fish as
“miraculous food . . . the food that bestows (immortal)
life.”31
Numerous eminent authors of Chinese materia
medica, like Chen Tsang-chi and Han Pao-sheng, have
catalogued the salubrious qualities of the golden carp. Li
Shih-chen in particular provides a compendious list of
the fish’s usages, with varying degrees of culinary
emphasis. Here are but a few of the preparations of this
piscine panacea:
Boiled with mung beans the soup is given to reduce
edema; the fat-dripping from broiling is applied to
pruritus vulvae and various ulcers; it is anthelmintic,
analgesic; alum is wrapped up in the gutted fish and
the whole is ashed, powdered, and taken in water
for windy colic and bloody dysentery; ashed to
redheat with sulphur, and ashed with nutgalls it is
given in wine for hemorrhagic stools. The carp filled
with tea leaves and baked is given for diabetes . . .
Ashed with arsenic it is used for galloping canker.
Baked with clean salt and powdered it is rubbed on
osteoma. Roasted black with aconite it is applied
with oil to ringworm and head sores.32
As impressively authoritative as this sounds, the level of
technical detail in Li Shih-chen’s account pales in
comparison to the modern science of traditional Chinese medicine. The advanced study of folk medicine in
21st-century China, the métier of pharmacological
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specialists with fancy laboratory equipment at their
fingertips, has the highest level of institutional support.
The Chinese government has its own scientificbureaucratic organ, the State Pharmacopoeia Commission of the People’s Republic of China, which
publishes a recurring volume on traditional Chinese
remedies (Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China).
This volume is a masterful blend of scientific and
hermetical thinking that would put the best medieval
alchemists to shame. The Pharmacopoeia’s entry for
bovine gall bladder exemplifies this alchemical amalgam.
The entry’s description of the gall bladder’s efficacy is
straight out of humoral physiology: “To restore consciousness by reducing fire and eliminating phlegm, to
relieve convulsion, and to counteract toxicity.”33 The
assay technique for the preparation, on the other hand,
is about as scientifically cutting edge as it gets:
Weigh accurately 0.2 g of the fine powder, to a
stoppered conical flask, accurately add 50 ml of
methanol, tightly stopper and weigh. Ultrasonicate
for 30 minutes, weigh again, replenish the loss of
the solvent with methanol and filter. Evaporate
exactly 25 ml of the successive filtrate to dryness,
add 10 ml of 20% sodium hydroxide solution to the
residue, heat under reflux for 2 hours, allow to cool,
adjust the pH to acidity with 19 ml of dilute
hydrochloric acid . . . Carry out the method for thin
layer chromatography, using silica gel G as the
coating substance and isooctane-n-butyl acetateglacial acetic acid-formic acid (8:4:2:1) as the mobile
phase.34
Clearly the tools, if not the standards, of scholarly
precision in traditional Chinese medicine have come a
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long way since Li Shih-chen. Within the volumes of the
Pharmacopoeia—which cover both naturalistic and
synthetic preparations—the same scientific resolve and
methodological complexity greet an ancient remedy as
they do a new-fangled drug born in a test tube. The
Pharmacopoeia is a stunningly up-front testament to
how advanced civilization rationalizes the incorporation
of the animal body through technical means.
The Western scientific and medical establishment is rarely as open as China’s Pharmacopoeia
Commission in conveying the hermeticism of its
practices, even when a “magical” product like Evolence comes on the market. Evolence is an injectionadministered, wrinkle-fighting “dermal filler” made
from pig tendons. This porcine nostrum is touted by its
maker as “a breakthrough in treating the effects of
aging.”35 Add to the sacred aura of Evolence the
revelation that it was first developed in Israel, where
porcine products are taboo among the majority of the
population. Perhaps in the cultural paradox of
Evolence’s origins resides the subliminal message of the
product’s therapeutic application. Through the
Promethean miracle of science and medicine, Evolence
seems to promise, people can claim for themselves some
of the divine prerogatives surrounding the taboo—or at
the very least, inject their pig collagen and have it too.36
Our shying away from the alchemy of ingestible
(or injectable) animal products is a fairly recent
abjuration of the West’s psychological and cultural
inheritance. No such reluctance hindered the 16thcentury author of the popular European collection of
alchemical recipes, The Secrets of Alexis. These recipes
rigorously applied hermetical principles to substances
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for sanative incorporation. One of the secrets, an
antidote against “all venom or poison,” employs the
principle of shadow inversion to thwart the workings of
the Lord of the Flies.
Take a quantity of flies and dry them, and make
powder of them, and give it him that is poisoned to
drink in wine, and immediately he shall be cured.37
Flies, the mythical emissaries of Beelzebub and bringers
of the evil of irrevocable death, have become through
dismemberment and incorporation the agents of divine
goodness. Alive and well, flies deserve to be feared—
swarms of flies are the Jungian version of “poison in the
air”38—but absorbed alchemically into the human body,
flies are poison’s worst enemy.
Powdered flies in wine would admittedly not
have ranked very high on the list of early-modern
Europeans’ gastronomic preferences. Instead meat has
been a cherished enemy of ill health within the heritage
of Western dietetics. It takes little effort to trace the
historical arc of meat glorification in the “science” of the
Western diet, from Platina to Brillat-Savarin to Atkins.
The 15th-century champion of humoral dietary precepts,
Platina put meat on a nutritional pedestal when he
penned his tract De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On
Right Pleasure and Good Health). Following his overture
on the first stage of a complete meal, Platina reached a
climactic point in his dietary analysis:
But now it is time to pass on to that course which I
call second and more important, for it concerns
meats, which nourish better and more healthfully
than any other food.39
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Platina made meat the sine qua non of the wholesome
dining experience, a mantle of carnivorous gustation
which, three centuries later, Brillat-Savarin wore with
pride.
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin is remembered for
showering the world with aphorisms like “Tell me what
you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” He was also a
connoisseur of animal flesh who worshipped osmazome,
a carnal elixir he defined in The Physiology of Taste as
“that preeminently sapid part of meat which is soluble in
cold water.”40 Unafraid to embrace the moral as well as
culinary qualities of the object of his jouissance, BrillatSavarin touted the “infallible goodness of osmazome.”41
He struck a distinctly hermetical chord when he
declared without a hint of irony, “The greatest service
rendered by chemistry to alimentary science is the
discovery or even more the exact comprehension of
osmazome.”42 Brillat-Savarin would have felt right at
home with his alchemical forefathers, the gnostic
experts who brought such tomes as The Secrets of Alexis
to the world.
Any overview of the Western culinary love affair
with animals would be incomplete without the popular
dietary system of the late Dr. Robert Atkins. The
zoophagous tenets of his “New Diet Revolution” are
actually as old as the shadow economy itself. One can
imagine the diners at a grand Roman banquet digesting
the teachings of the Atkins manifesto (in the Lucullan
edition) before digging into their sumptuous spread of
animal remains. Trimalchio himself would have been
heartened by this guideline from the Atkins manual of
the New Diet Revolution: “You are permitted to eat
liberal amounts of eggs, meat and fish, including beef,
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pork, chicken, turkey, duck, wild game, shellfish, veal
and lamb.”43 But Trimalchio and his ilk would have been
a bit flabbergasted by the guideline’s meleagrine
reference—the turkey would have been unknown to the
Romans, even fictional ones.
The historical premiere of the Western nationstate and its principal economic organ, the chartered
corporation, set the stage for the “New Shadow
Revolution” of animal incorporation. The nation-state
consists of bureaucratic institutions for government
and ritual institutions for culture, both of which
supplant kinship ties as the musculature of the group
with ties of citizenship. The notion of national citizenship creates an ideal of political egalitarianism; the
notion of corporate consumption creates an ideal of
economic egalitarianism. Historical realities have often
made a mockery of these ideals, but they have persisted
and slowly come to fruition in the Western world.
Like the nation-state it fiscally nourishes, the
corporation is an edifice of advanced institutional
complexity built on primal dreams of eternal life. The
judgment of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall
on the identity of the corporation rings equally true for
the identity of the nation-state: “A corporation is an
artificial being . . . [through which] a perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the
promotion of the particular object, like one immortal
being.”44 The dual roles of the corporatized nation-state,
as artificial being and as immortal being, threaten to
work at cross purposes, a potential for institutional
instability which calls forth the salvific role of the
dismembered animal body. As the nation-state evolved,
its political and economic institutions could not sustain
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themselves on ideals of rationality alone. Alongside
them appeared a set of compensatory institutions—the
institutions of the shadow economy.
The incorporation of the animal body turned
what would otherwise have been a hopelessly abstract,
“imagined” entity into an organic, perceptually real
whole.45 And the corporation permitted the efficient
distribution of animal products to the social body of the
nation-state, products for the performance of organic
rituals of civic belonging. Because it conferred upon the
citizenry the ritual means to transform institutional
fiction into natural fact, one narrow type of corporation—involved in the production and/or allocation of
animal products—propped up the overall corporate
identity of the nation-state.
The partnership between the nation-state and
the corporation has been the driving force behind the
modern explosion of animal incorporation. One of the
founding moments of this partnership occurred on
September 16, 1605, when the meat-peddlers of
London—“the Freemen of the ancient Society or
Mistery of Butchers”—received a charter of incorporation for their business, headquartered on the aptlynamed Stinking Lane.46 A pioneer of corporate meat
distribution, the British polity is particularly enamored
of beef and has a tradition of blue-blooded beefsteak
clubs stretching back to the early days of the British
nation-state. The king of these clubs was the Sublime
Society of Beef Steaks, which ascended to the porterhouse throne in 1735 and finally abdicated in 1867.
In a twist of fast-food irony, the Earl of Sandwich
became a member of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks
in 1761, foreshadowing the rise two centuries later of
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the most hegemonic beef-consuming club of them all,
the hamburger franchise. A stanza from one of the
Society’s beef-touting ditties seals in song the marriage
of the political ideals of the nation-state and rituals of
incorporation.
Throughout the realms where despots reign,
What tracks of glory now remain!
Their people, slaves of power and pride,
Fat Beef and Freedom are denied!
What realm, what state, can happy be,
Wanting our Beef and Liberty?47
The members of the Sublime Society were crooning
(poorly) about the British nation-state as a whole, not
simply about their own upper-crust comrades. These
were men with a vision of British identity based on the
egalitarianism of meat consumption, a vision that
contradicted the class realities of 18th- and 19th-century
Britain. The Earl of Sandwich and his gridiron buddies
lived in a self-delusional bubble of elitism, using meat to
validate their own liberty on the backs of the less
fortunate. Yet in a perverse way they were ahead of
their time. They understood the political economy of
animal flesh at the organic core of the nation state, well
before the golden arches were a gateway to consumer
nirvana.
Across the pond from the shores of Albion, the
rebellious offspring of the British nation-state have
made meat consumption the centerpiece of civic religion.
Despite their revolt against the stale ritualism of the
Old World, Americans can’t seem to get enough of
communal blood rites. Two blood festivals of the
American nation-state stand out for their ceremonial
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dominance: Thanksgiving and Independence Day.
Thanksgiving is the regal sacrament of the
nation side of the nation-state, the side of cultural
kinship. Around the Thanksgiving table, the cultural
relations of the nation merge with the blood relations of
the family. Through the carcass of the sacrificial victim,
the family becomes a microcosm of the nation and the
nation becomes a macrocosm of the family. The size of
the culinary victim is key: the entire turkey can be
dismembered and consumed at a household gathering.
This creates a ritual symmetry between the dimensions
of the victim’s body and the dimensions of the cultural
building block of the family.
The turkey embodies the virginal fertility of the
New World, the nurturing source of American cultural
immortality, set in stark mythic opposition to the
cultural moribundity of the Old World. Unknown
among the indigenous fauna of Europe, the turkey is a
zoological prince of the “new Eden” of North America.
Turkey Day shores up the mythology of folk-belonging
rooted in the fecundity of blood and earth. It has all the
trimmings of an agrarian totem festival, in recent years
complete with a mock-king (the President) who exercises the divine prerogative of taboo (setting a turkey
off limits from sacrifice).48
This sovereign “pardon” of a token animal has
become ritually necessary because the industrialized
scale of Thanksgiving creates a pressing need for
expiation and the shifting of blame from the victimizers
to the victims. Against the holiday’s backdrop of
rampant factory farming, the pardon of the “innocent”
bird scapegoats every other “criminal” turkey for
advanced civilization’s sins against nature.49 “Between
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those victims and the wild creatures they came from,”
Karen Davis points out in compellingly Jungian fashion,
“falls the shadow, the taboo.”50 With each passing year,
the comforting illusions of the Thanksgiving feast, its
New World mythology, conceal less and less the industrialized context of the sacrament. Any serious pretense
of the new Eden is long gone. The bird upon today’s
Thanksgiving table is a bloated, assembly-line caricature
of the wild turkey of the 17th-century American woods.
Of course, even the mythology of the original Thanksgiving of the Plymouth pilgrims was a bright shining lie.
The cagier fowl of yesteryear’s table was the victim of a
ritual protocol of nation-building about as new as the
Old World hills.
The American Independence Day is another
ritual oxymoron of the world’s premier consumer
society. From the earliest folk celebrations of Independence Day around the turn of the 18th century, two
symbolic antipodes have merged, barbecue and Enlightenment philosophy. The guiding political “-isms” of the
American federal state—rationalism, secularism, individualism, progressivism—are a sharp departure from the
bloodline ideology of the aristocratic and monarchic
system. The state side of the American nation-state,
the side of political kinship, is predicated not upon
ancien-régime imperatives of blood, but upon abstract
constitutional principles. Barbecue very much brings the
high and mighty ideals of the Enlightenment down to
earth. There is nothing like grilled meat to put the juice
of life back into the bloodless political precepts of the
Age of Reason.
Barbecue has ancient roots as a meeting ground
between the power of meat and the power of fire, where
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culture pulls itself slowly and delectably from the
cauldron of raw nature. Claude Levi-Strauss, a scholarly
pyromancer of culinary flames, saw in them the ultimate cosmic transcendence, “the celestial fire.”51 The
alchemical fire of barbecue, absorbed into the transformative terrestrial embers, is “mediatory between high
and low, between the sun and the earth.”52
The highest auric fire of Independence Day is not
actual fire at all, but the fantasies of Enlightenment
reason. On the Fourth of July, the American state
proclaims itself the ne plus ultra of political rationalism,
the standard by which all other states must be judged.
The problem is that celestial fire is dangerously unstable
and unmanageable. The American collective psyche is
ridden with the latent fear that America’s transcendent
political institutions are nothing but flights of hubris.
Barbecue banishes this fear to the unconscious. As the
grilling meat goes from raw to cooked (or, in the case of
hot dogs, from pre-cooked to re-cooked), America’s
political ideals move in the opposite direction, from
hollow abstractions to visceral truths. At the JulyFourth barbecue, the archetypal process of shadow
inversion plays itself out. On a conscious level, meat is
the “low,” the vulgar, element of the celebration and
American liberalism is the “high,” the refined. On an
unconscious level, where the shadow is sovereign, meat
is the high and liberalism the low.
And plenty of meat there is. Traditionally, an
entire hog would be cooked at the Independence Day
festivity, conducive to dismemberment and distribution
to a larger, more politically-unified group than the
immediate family. Former U.S. Representative Alexander Boteler (1815-1892) designated this holistic type
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of barbecue “a totum porcum process.”53 Since America
has turned into a highly atomistic society, the meats of
choice for the barbecue have shifted toward the other
end of the spectrum, toward hamburgers and hot dogs.
These super-processed meats are “natural symbols”54 of
the socio-economic identity of modern-day America—a
land of extreme fragmentation and alienation carnally
re-constituted into a polity of lock-step conformity and
mythic togetherness. This miraculous re-constitution
transpires around the Independence Day barbecue,
where celestial fire and terrestrial fire work their magic
on meat.
Despite Americans’ anti-monarchic pretensions,
contemporary America is “a hamburger kingdom, one
cuisine, under God, indivisible,” as the narrator wryly
proclaims in John Updike’s story “How to Love America
and Leave It at the Same Time.”55 The fast-food
franchise is a vehicle for the corporatized nation-state
to disseminate processed, cooked meat as widely and
cheaply as possible. Where else but a fast-food
restaurant could political liberty and economic freedom,
citizenship and consumerism, get mashed together
through ground meat? The standardized fare of the fastfood restaurant, seemingly available everywhere, allows
American consumers to incorporate themselves as an
“indivisible” mass of meat-eating automatons.
The countless iterations of the fast-food
restaurant unify Americans around a common system of
routinized consumption, the mirror image of the system
of routinized production by which animals become
anonymous lumps of value-menu flesh. The fast-food
joint is the shrine of the American Gesellschaft, an
utterly banal architectural space where alienated selves,
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with robotic uniformity, absorb the renderings of sterile
efficiency. Only alchemy could raise the mindless
alienation of the fast-food experience to the unconscious heights of sacramental consumption. This
alchemy runs the gamut from the KFC Colonel Sanders’
“secret recipe” to the terrestrial fire of the “flame-broiled”
Whopper. It has behind it a huge scientific-corporate
apparatus to manipulate not only consumers’ physiology of taste, but psychology of taste as well.56
By far the greatest feat of American fast-food
alchemy is the hamburger itself. This statement may
seem counterintuitive in the extreme, even laughable,
for the lowly hamburger has neither advanced science
nor epicurean charm behind it. Yet within the shadow
the hamburger undergoes an apotheosis. One should be
careful not to accept the iconography of consumerism at
face value; one should rather educate oneself in the
iconography of the shadow before donning the mantle
of consumer.
The hamburger is nothing less than the mandala
of American incorporation. The mandala, a circular
emblem manifesting the order of the cosmos within its
boundaries, is a fixture of spiritual belief systems
around the world. Jung spent most of his career
studying and writing about the mandala, and didn’t
mince words about its psychological importance.
The mandala symbolizes . . . the ultimate unity of all
archetypes as well as of the multiplicity of the
phenomenal world, and is therefore the empirical
equivalent of the metaphysical concept of a unus
mundus.57
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Far from a meaningless hunk of flesh, the hamburger is
a carnal unus mundus of American capitalism and of the
Americanized institutions of global capitalism. This
simple disk of meat mediates the cosmological dualisms
of American consumer identity: mechanization versus
pastoralism, fragmentation versus oneness, routinization versus re-creation, the commodity versus the gift.
Nor is this mediation merely figurative; it is performed
psychologically within the consumer via the rite of incorporation. American capitalism, said to be Godless,
has its own shadow religion after all, one whose
supreme icon is a mandala of ground meat and whose
supreme sacrament is a fast-food meal.
The supreme gateway to the shrine of the fastfood mandala is the golden arches. The golden arches
publicize through their color the celestial fire captured
inside the fast-food shrine, the holy idol of the
alchemists condensed into coins of meat. “In alchemy,”
Jung reminds us, “the sun is the astrological equivalent
of gold.”58 And meat is the organic equivalent of gold,
the receptacle of the sun’s rays distilled into animal
tissue. The mercenary connotation of the golden arches,
their celebration of ravenous materialism, overlies their
shadow-economic truth. The blood-fed gifts of the sun
reach the masses in the heavenly manna of hamburger.
The arches’ shape is pregnant with celestial
symbolism as well. A naturalistic design elevated by the
Romans to a structural motif, the arch is a conduit
between the celestial vault and the earth. Mircea Eliade
labels it “the preeminent means of connection with the
otherworld.”59 The arch is a site of radical galvanization.
A person who passes under the apex of the arch
spiritually absorbs the qualities of the firmament; the
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physical entitlements of the heavens await. The limited
terrestrial span of the arch is deceptive, for the arch is
designed to channel the celestial fire across a vast space,
anchoring the ideology of the heavens firmly in the
earth. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the pièce de
résistance of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, flaunts the profound reach of the arch design. The
Gateway Arch marks the dissemination of the ideology
of American capitalism across the entire West, and
indeed across the entire world.
The arch-anointed individual, who in practical
terms gives the arch its prodigious reach, is fully steeped
in the ideology the arch transmits. The span of the arch
“represents psychic totality,”60 according to Jung, and
fashions the self into a single-minded agent of whatever
belief system inspired the arch’s erection. To look at the
identities of the people traveling back and forth under
the McDonald’s golden arches is to see the psychic
totality the arches signify—an alienated, standardized
consumerism under the mesmerism of meat, one
entrenched ever more firmly in human cultures around
the globe.
But why the double arches? There is certainly
more to this shape than a glorified letter; otherwise it
would never have become so iconic and acquired its
psychological force as a marketing tool. A single arch
always has a counterpart, a shadow, which extends up
from the underworld. Just as the above-ground arch
connects the heavens and the earth, the shadow arch
connects the earth and the underworld, channeling
infernal fire to the surface. The presence of the shadow
arch is renounced in Enlightenment civilization. Not so
in ancient civilization. Norse mythology features both
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counterparts of the arch: the Ás-brú between earth and
heaven, and the Gjallar-brú between earth and the
underworld.61
The golden arches are an attempt to eradicate
the shadow, to pivot the shadow arch from an infernal
orientation to a celestial orientation. This is why the
golden arches have a side-by-side symmetry, instead of
the ovoid symmetry of the conventional single arch and
its underworld counterpart. The gilded shadow of the
double arches purports to announce to the world the
absence of anything sinister, anything infernal, about
the fast-food restaurant and its rites of incorporation.
What the arches really announce—the victory of the
shadow—is the diametrical opposite of their intended
message. Instead of dissipating the shadow by dredging
it up from the unconscious, the golden arches simply
double the shadow’s psychological span. The arches are
a sign of how consumer society reduplicates the shadow
virally, alongside the infectious replication of the fastfood franchise.
An anecdote from Jung’s own life, more
appropos of chicken sandwiches than hamburgers, is a
fitting way to round out this chapter. Early in his autobiography, Jung describes his looming childhood fears
of death, centered around “the vague uncertainties of
the night” and “heaps of brown, upturned earth,”62 the
leavings of the gravedigger. To alleviate his thanatophobia, Jung invoked a Christian prayer his mother had
taught him, a supplication in which Jesus “consumed”
children to protect them from perdition.
Because the prayer zoomorphized children as
fledgling chickens, Jung gave it an inspired gustatory
interpretation: “I understood at once that Satan liked
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chicks and had to be prevented from eating them. So,
although Lord Jesus did not like the taste, he ate them
anyway, so that Satan would not get them.”63 The prayer
ended up being psychologically counterproductive, for it
planted the idea in Jung’s mind of a grasping, voracious
savior. Not long after learning the prayer, Jung recalls,
“I began to distrust Lord Jesus,” a crisis of faith which
“led to my first conscious trauma.”64 Although Jung’s
understanding of this traumatic complex from his
childhood never led him away from meat, the prayer
remains a powerful allegory of animal incorporation
from which we can draw moral sustenance.
The prayer is, in fact, a religious projection of
the shadow economy. People consume the animal body
to indemnify themselves against the straw man of evil,
the Satan of the prayer, who stands for the annihilation
of the self. The problem with this quest for indemnity,
the problem of the “bad taste” in Christ’s mouth, is its
collusion with the evil it seeks to conquer. The prayer’s
underlying message of incorporation, that death is an
evil so insidious it justifies distasteful behavior, demands our unequivocal distrust. Otherwise we will
continue to traumatize ourselves and the creatures
whose lives we pawn—to race along the trail to earthly
perdition we ourselves have blazed.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Fetishism
The animal-body fetish is the shadow frozen into
an external form—the shadow “reified,” to use a term
coined by Georg Lukács.1 Reification (die Verdinglichung)
is a ritual process that condenses a psychological or
social complex into a physical object. Reification can
reveal the complex behind the object (as the religious
fetish reveals a complex of beliefs), or it can disguise the
underlying complex (as the commodity fetish conceals a
complex of economic production). The shadow hides its
true nature in the animal fetish, feigning an autonomous presence in the domain of things (die Dinge).
The reification of the shadow gives the fetish its
strange, unearthly life, greater even than that of the
living. The living are vulnerable to the withering passage
of time and the pathetic frailty of flesh, but the reified
shadow in the fetish perseveres. Far from being a dead
“thing,” the fetish is a deathless artifact in which is
distilled the immortal ground of nature. It is crucial that
the fetish be an artifact, a ritual object, for it reifies the
shadow in a distinctly cultural configuration. The fetish
immerses its users in the shadow’s topography, a world
as Jung proclaims where “nothing moves, life seems to
be extinguished . . . yet everything is making ready for
spring—it is an eternal beginning.”2
I am using the term “fetish” in a broad fashion
capable of conjoining the religious fetish, the sexual
fetish, and the commodity fetish. The fetish fashioned
out of the animal body enjoys a privileged place in the
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pantheon of fetishism; such a fetish exploits the
proximity of the animal body to the same organic
fountainhead from which human life is perceived to
gush forth. The animal fetish is a cultural instrument,
an artifact, but of a very special kind, one that allows its
users to transcend the instrumentality of the mundane,
mortal world. It makes little sense to follow the lead of
some anthropologists and abandon the use of the term
“fetish” for objects in traditional societies that are reified
versions of gods, spirits, and other carriers of the
societies’ cosmologies. We must simply reverse the
connotations of the original use of the term, from those
of derision for “primitive” beliefs to one of critique of
the spurious rationality of civilization. Fetishism looms
larger as a ritual force in civilization than in overtly
animistic societies, because the denizens of civilization
are instruments of ideological systems.
With the artificial purity of institutions in mind,
Baudrillard conveys the essence of the civilized fetish:
. . . this closure, this perfection, this logical mirage
that is the effectiveness of ideology. It is the
abstract coherence, suturing all contradictions and
divisions, that gives ideology its power of
fascination (fetishism).3
The illusion of ideological perfection is maintained
through fetishism. Human life under the control of
ideology has succumbed to instrumentality, creating a
pressing need for fetish objects that can elevate life to
the ultramundane status taken for granted in the
“savage” ethos. Even the paraphilic fetish, the darling of
Freudian sexuality,4 is first and foremost borne of
ideology. The fetish binds its users to a particular
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ideology even as it reassures them that they are much
more than mere instruments of human folly.
Just how far a reach the fetish has had in human
cultural development can be seen in the “Venus of
Hohle Fels,” one of the earliest known examples of
figurative art. Dated to about 35,000 years ago from the
Aurignacian culture of Swabia, this six-centimeter-long
object is carved of mammoth ivory and depicts an
anthropomorphic female with highly, even grotesquely,
exaggerated reproductive features. Nicholas Conard, the
author of a scientific paper on the statuette, drops a
surprising tidbit about its anatomy: “The Venus of
Hohle Fels lacks a head.”5
Most startling about this cephalic lack is the fact
that it’s an intentional sculptural omission. Instead of a
head, the woman bears a carved ring atop her shoulders
and pendulous bosom; apparently she was conceived
from the outset as a headless pendant. The decision to
carve the figurine without a head neatly fits into the
synecdochic meaning of the fetish, its translation of
dismemberment into wholeness. And indeed the Venus,
who lay dormant in the shadowy grounds of the Hohle
Fels Cave for millennia, is the queen of fetishes. She
reifies, with eburnean permanence, a cosmological
system in which human life adheres to the glorified
cycles of nature, rather than the value systems of
artificial institutions. The Venus casts the reproductive
features as the seat of female identity, and by implication as the fundament of individual and cultural
rebirth. This helps explain another of the figurine’s
features which her discoverers found remarkable, her
“small, pointed legs.”6 For the followers of the cosmology
from which the Venus came, body parts like a head and
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legs were symbolically superfluous compared to the
procreative organs.
On the road from the naturalistic cosmology of
the Aurignacians to the imperial ideology of the Romans,
we should pause briefly at the myth of Pygmalion’s ivory
bride. Ovid’s rendition of the story shows a strong
patriarchal ideology at work, one that objectifies women
in a more insidious manner than does the Aurignacian
Venus. In the Venus, the life of the object and human
life occupy the same cosmological plane. But in the story
of Pygmalion, the hallmark of the ideological fetish—
the elevation of fetishized life over authentic life—rears
its head:
Pygmalion had seen these women spend
Their days in wickedness [and was] horrified
At all the countless vices nature gives
To womankind. . .7
As his answer to what he considered the festering evil of
real women, Pygmalion “carved his snow-white ivory”
into “perfect shape, more beautiful/Than ever woman
born.”8 To Pygmalion, women were nothing more than
instruments of male desire, and his ivory bride reified
the patriarchal value system to which actual women
conformed imperfectly. Even when Venus later breathed
life into the ivory bride, the fetish became little more
than a patriarchal automaton who “saw the world and
him”9 as though Pygmalion and the world were one and
the same.
Pygmalion sought to transform both himself and
his bride into perfect instruments of patriarchal ideology. It may be odd to think of Pygmalion as an
instrument of patriarchy alongside his bride, but both
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of them played their ideological roles to the hilt.
Pygmalion’s fetish counteracted not only the evil of
mortality, but the evil of a human world in which real
people fall short of ideological norms. Like the Freudian
sexual fetish of which the ivory bride is a prototype,
Pygmalion’s creation allowed him to make himself an
artifact of the cultural ideals of his era. The male fear of
castration, the lynchpin of the Freudian theory of
fetishism, only makes sense in a patriarchal system in
which men anxiously aspire to play the ideological role
prescribed for them, to become body and soul the
“perfect instrument.”
Another tale, the legend of Cleopatra and her
pearl libation, illustrates the ideological dilemma of
women who try to transcend the patriarchal fetish.
According to Pliny the Elder, she sought to surpass Marc
Antony’s royal esteem by dissolving one of her two
record-setting pearls in a cup, and then quaffing the
mixture. She defied the subservient role assigned to
women of her era—“headstrong woman as she was”10—
but she was doomed to Pyrrhic success. Ironically, by
incorporating the dissolved fetish, Cleopatra transformed herself into a living fetish. Her intent was to
nullify the power of the fetish and to mock the narrow
feminine role it signified. In actuality, her feat of incorporation nullified her intention and made her an even
greater dupe of the patriarchal powers-that-be. Her selfsubversive act of defiance foreshadowed the tragic
denouement of her tale—becoming a military prize of
Roman Emperor Octavian and then committing suicide
to avoid being paraded through Rome as a prisoner of
war. As the story goes, after Cleopatra’s demise, “the
second pearl was cut in two so that half a dinner might
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adorn each ear of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at
Rome.”11 The Romans’ partitioning of Cleopatra’s pearl
has a significance beyond the immediate goal of reifying
their own religious ideology while mocking that of the
Egyptians. It highlights the synecdochic function of the
fetish in general, of the part doubling the whole, and
more specifically the historical process to which Cleopatra fell victim, the dismemberment of the Egyptian
state and its re-integration into the Roman Empire.
The co-stars of Cleopatra’s story were her pearls.
The pearl’s perfect roundness captures the “abstract
coherence” (Baudrillard) of the patriarchal worldview
reified in the fetish. The pearl is the ideal fetish for the
patriarchal anima, the feminine principle of fertility and
organic unity; the red-haired Cleopatra could very well
have been the personification of an archetypal dream
image in Jung’s study of the anima.
A black-clad ‘countess’ kneels in a dark chapel. Her
dress is hung with costly pearls. She has red hair,
and there is something uncanny about her.
Moreover, she is surrounded by the spirits of the
dead.12
The meaning of this dream archetype hardly requires
elaborate oneirocriticism. The pearl fetishes integrate
the anima into the shadow economy. The tropes of the
dream—the shrouded self, the tenebrous mood, the
chapel, the spirits of the dead—all point to the quest for
death transcendence that impels people to fetishize
parts of the animal body.
The holiest fetish material of them all is one that
the Aurignacians knew well: ivory. Another state that
became part of the Roman Empire, that of the Greeks,
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had a myth about ivory fetishism centered around the
sun-king Tantalus. Tantalus hosted a heavenly banquet
at which he committed a ghastly taboo, serving the flesh
of his son Pelops, whom he had sacrificed and dismembered for the occasion, to the assembled gods and
goddesses. Those in attendance were careful to avoid
incorporating human flesh into their own amaranthine
selves, save Demeter, who happened to eat the shoulder
of Pelops. To rectify the wrongdoing Tantalus had set in
motion, the deities brought Pelops back to life, complete
with an ivory shoulder to replace the one Demeter had
consumed.
The myth of the Tantalean banquet fits Freud’s
theory of the fetish so well that Jung himself could not
resist a Freudian interpretation. “The shoulder has an
indirect phallic meaning, for it is the part which is
wanting in Pelops.”13 The ivory piece conferred upon
Pelops does indeed augur the Freudian bêtes noires of
the castrating father and the devouring mother. At the
same time, the fetish has retained its chthonic origins.
Demeter is no ordinary devouring mother. She is the
goddess of nature’s cycles, and had eaten the shoulder
of Pelops because she was preoccupied by her daughter
Persephone’s imprisonment in the underworld. Shrouded in the shadow-world to which Hades had absconded
with her daughter, Demeter was pre-disposed to the
genesis of the fetish. Pelops’ death at the hands of
Tantalus was a precursor to his induction into the
shadow economy, where putrefaction (i.e., consumption
by Demeter) is rendered moot through the fetish’s
resurrecting office. Pelops’ ivory shoulder vitrifies the
chthonic “myth of the eternal return”14 coiled within the
patriarchal myth of the maternal phallus.
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From Pygmalion to Pelops, the hardness and
luster of ivory make it an ideal medium in which to
disguise the projection of the shadow. Ivory’s amenability to carving also makes it well-suited to the
preservation of grand cultural visions. Inscribing
patriarchal visions in ivory is one of many fetishistic
manifestations of the ideology of power. The diptychs
of the fourth through sixth centuries, both secular and
Christian, testify to the ideological fervor of that era.
Roman consuls had the privilege of issuing ivory
diptychs with representations of their exalted office—
for instance, being seated on the curule chair, the sella
curulis, which was itself commonly inlaid with ivory
panels.15 As if to beat the Romans at their own game,
early Christians began a tradition of ivory diptychs
stocked with such religious tropes as the Garden of
Eden and the life of Saint Paul. Nor were Christians to
be outdone by the sella curulis. The Archbishop of
Ravenna had a throne with a multitude of ivory panels,
an artifact called for good reason “the most remarkable
sixth-century ivory.”16
Christian ivory iconography has had a very
durable heritage, ranging from an early 14th-century
triptych of the life of the Virgin to an 18th-century
statue of Saint Teresa. One noteworthy outburst of
Christian iconographic fetishism was the profusion of
ivory crucifixes in the Baroque Period. These objects,
which “had hitherto been rare but now acquired a
widespread popularity,”17 solidified the unifying symbol
of Christianity at a time of considerable ideological
tumult, during the rapid transformation of the Christian Church and the growth of commodity culture. The
flooding of society with ivory crucifixes blurred the line
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to the point of disappearance between religious ideology
and capitalist ideology. The broken body of the dismembered animal victim became the vehicle of choice for the
marketing of Christ broken upon the cross.
The availability and versatility of ivory are
nothing compared to those of animal skin. Because it is
the frontier of the body, the skin evokes profound
psychological reactions. A person who feels vulnerable
in his or her own skin, shielded from a multitude of
dangers by the merest membrane, can easily enhance
his or her sense of mortal indemnity with the skins of
animals. Wrapping oneself in a skin provides an immediate sense of womb-like transcendence, the eviction
from the self of the body’s ephemerality.
And nothing quite seems to match the deathtranscendence of putting one’s body upon an animal’s
skin. Skins have long played a crucial role in the yogic
traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, where they
undergird meditative practices. A sacred contemplative
text, the Gandharva Tantra, regales the practitioner with
detailed prescriptions: “when a seat of black antelope
skin is used, it gives mukti (liberation); a tiger skin gives
both mukti and wealth to the sādhaka [disciple].”18 The
Hindu yogic disciple must be wary of the taboos of the
Asana-bheda (seating variations): “A householder without initiation from a Guru should never sit on seats of
lion-skin, tiger-skin and black deer-skin.”19
Even Gurus are not immune to the hollow
reasoning about animal victimization so entrenched in
the Western world. Observe this exchange between Sri
Nisargadatta Maharaj and an interviewer:
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Q: Surely all avoidable violence should be avoided.
And yet in India every holy man has his tiger, lion,
leopard or antelope skin to sit on.
M: Maybe because no plastics were available in
ancient times and a skin was best to keep the damp
away. Rheumatism has no charm, even for a saint!
Thus the tradition arose that for lengthy
meditations a skin is needed.
Q: But the animal had to be killed.
M: I have never heard of a Yogi killing a tiger for his
hide. The killers are not Yogis and the Yogis are not
killers.20
The silver lining of the Guru’s sophistry is that yogism’s
demand for animal victims is relatively tame as far as
the ideology of power goes. The guru semi-prostrate
upon a tiger skin has visions of mastery of self, not of
the type of dominion that transforms people and
animals into blunt instruments.
Someone like Montezuma, the Great Speaker of
the Aztecs, was a different story. The leader of a land in
which almost everyone was an appurtenance of empire,
Montezuma oversaw his subjects upon “a great throne,
a high-backed cushion-seat of jaguar skin.”21 Ensconced
on his throne, Montezuma was still dwarfed by European royalty for sheer lust for the animal-skin fetish.
England’s Prince Edward, a son of Edward III who lived
a century before the Great Speaker, tore through staggering mounds of skins. Labeled the Black Prince for his
sable-hued armor, Edward’s obsession with warfare was
exceeded only by his doraphilia. Official court records
indicate that in one shipment, the Black Prince received
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the following for his personal use—and this is only part
of the list.
Four furs of miniver, each of 300 bellies.
Four timbers of ermines.
Two furs of ‘grys,’ each of 300 backs.
A ‘pane’ of 1240 bellies of pured miniver.
Twelve lambs’ furs.22
Prince Edward’s entire family had a fixation on fur and
other animal-derived frippery. To the funeral of her
fifth son William, Queen Philippa wore a garment
decorated with 400 large pearls and lined with almost
2,000 bellies of miniver.23 King Edward himself had a
cloak of 369 skins of ermine he wore at the Round
Table.24
Most damning about this mind-blowing decadence was Edward’s sponsorship of the sumptuary laws
restricting the use of the fur to the nobility. King
Edward thought of fur as a way of rising above the
abjection to which the vast majority of society was
condemned. While the lion’s share of the English polity
was reduced to pawns of regal authority, Edward and his
peers were blessed with divinely-ordained autonomy
embodied in their mountains of fur. Their sumptuous
lifestyle was nevertheless a psychological charade. The
nobility’s voracious appetite for animal fetishes exposes
their fear of the realization that they were ultimately no
better than their servile followers, consigned to the
same grave.
Closer to our own times, the ideology of the
commodity has reshaped the cultural landscape of
animal fetishism, progressively for the worse. This
ideology elevates the products of human labor above the
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labor that produced them, not to mention above life as a
whole. The commodity, in short, becomes a fetish, a fact
that inspired Marx to conjure the “necromancy that
surrounds the products of labour.”25 The ideology of the
commodity brings its object from death to life, a process
that simultaneously drains organic existence of its
plenitude and autonomy. The élan vital of the commodity supersedes the desiccated existence of biological
matter.
The ideology of the commodity is a system of
deadening rationality that hinges on the will-to-power
of the shadow. The animal fetish—seen everywhere in
leather fashion accessories, leather furniture, fur garments, and the like—is a product that promises to allow
its users to rise above the life-atrophy of commodification. A falser promise could hardly be imagined. Slavoj
Žižek, the prophet of the post-modern, articulates the
necrophilic effects of the animal fetish in his notion of
the “dialectic of mortification.”26
For a human being to be ‘dead while alive’ is to be
colonized by the ‘dead’ symbolic order; to be ‘alive
while dead’ is to give body to the remainder of LifeSubstance which has escaped the symbolic
colonization.27
Because human life has been completely colonized by
the ideology of the commodity, the animal fetish has
taken on new importance as a source of “life within
death.” The zoomorphic extraction of the shadow
ensures that it can be controlled psychologically and
exploited commercially. Participants in capitalist economies, to suppress the lifelessness of their instrumental
lives, feel a pressing need to populate their world with
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the gaudery of animal skins. They indulge the impulse
to place their own micro-managed bodies upon the skins
of animals, to bring physical transcendence into alignment with psychological transcendence. The number of
homes in America must be few indeed that lack at least
one piece of leather-upholstered furniture; the same
could be said for the number of cars that lack leather
seating.
Awash in the renderings of animal victims, the
consumerist masses close their eyes to the fraud of their
economic system. Cheap access to animal commodities
is the secret of the fetish’s success in propping up the
plutocratic institutions of capitalism. As if to flaunt
their own fraudulent dominance before the purblind
masses, the leaders of these institutions indulge in the
fetishistic excesses of antiquity. Senator Simpson of
Pennsylvania, a character in Theodore Dreiser’s novel
The Financier, is a venal political operative whose home
is a Romanesque den:
In his reception hall were replicas of Caligula, Nero,
and other Roman emperors . . . Handsome tiger and
leopard skin rugs, the fur of a musk-ox for his divan,
and tanned and brown-stained goat and kid skins
for his tables, gave a sense of elegance and reserved
profusion.28
At least the Senator has no interest in Nero’s reported
antics of playing the part of a Berserker, dressing in
animal skins and attacking human victims.29 The
average reader of The Financier is still bound to react to
the Senator’s taste in furnishings with sanctimonious
outrage as he or she enjoys the novel firmly ensconced
in a leather chair or sofa.
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A real-world financier with doraphilic tastes, one
whose fraud would put to shame the shysters and shills
of Dreiser’s novel, is Bernard Madoff. On a table in the
study of Madoff’s tony Manhattan penthouse (later
forfeited to federal authorities) stood the animalization
of his scam. “The centerpiece of the room [was] a
leather bull symbolic of the long gone time when
investors thought Madoff would make them a fortune.”30 This sham bovine facsimile, this crude taxidermic simulacrum, was the perfect fetish for a swindler
who needed an unstinting bull market to cover his
malfeasance. Madoff must have favored leather, instead
of say bronze, as the material for his voodoo toro
because like any respectable sorcerer he tried to conjure
good from evil, the benisons of the stock exchange from
the deviltry of Ponzi scheming.
Past the narrow yet devastating confines of
Madoff’s fraud is the infernal compass of the market
system itself—a system that conjures commodities
from animal bodies in a cascading sequence, a pyramid
scheme, of violence.31 The leather bull, as much as its
former owner, is a monument to capitalism’s forte for
victimization. Madoff’s fetish, literally and figuratively
at the center of the worst economic racket of modern
American history, confesses mutely to the ease with
which Homo economicus, the “rational economic agent,”
is defrauded by the zoocidal demons of the unconscious.
In the rogues’ race to the bottom, Madoff has
plenty of competitors out in front. A plutocrat closer in
tastes to Nero and Caligula was the late Mobutu Sese
Seko, the notorious dictator of the African state formerly known as Zaire. An iconic photograph of Mobutu in
Ali Mazrui’s book The Africans memorializes the dictator
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upon a majestic throne, his feet upon a leopard-skin rug
complete with contoured head, mouth frozen in a
gaping pose.32 Mobutu “the Leopard” broadcasts his own
fierce style of governance in the mold of a traditional
Baganda or Ashanti king, who would likewise have
placed himself upon the skin of an African apex
predator.33 But Mobutu is worlds apart from the theriolatrous sensibilities of the Baganda and Ashanti kings.
For Zaire’s rapacious ruler, everyone and everything in
the country was a tool to be exploited for his own
economic and political gain. Mobutu directed the
colonial legacy of his people inward, to its self-destructive
end of national implosion.
The anatomical converse of planting oneself
upon an animal skin is perching an animal fetish atop
one’s head. Donning fetishistic headgear elevates the
human body, with its vertical bearing, into an unmistakable statement of supremacy over the debased world.
For good reason does such headgear figure prominently
in the iconography of ideological power. Indeed Mobutu
exemplified his fearsome pardine nickname by sporting
a leopard-skin cap in the style of the French bonnet de
police.34
During important sessions of state back in the
European colonial heartland, the first point of contact
between the British imperial state crown and the
monarch’s head is a rim of white ermine fur “powdered”35
with regularly-spaced black fur spots. King Edward III
made the powdering of ermine-trimmed costumery a
matter of legal decree when he proscribed its use
beyond the upper echelon of the ruling class. The
imperial state crown premiered during the reign of
Queen Victoria, under whose sway the global reach of
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the British isles expanded astronomically. The design of
the British imperial crown is pregnant with tropes of
international omnipotence. The all-encompassing
dominion of the sovereign over his or her global
subjects is translated into the crown’s circular form.
And the powdered pattern of the ermine band connotes
the ability of the sovereign to unify and overcome all
opposing forces in the realm. Powdered ermine is to the
monarchy what the cross is to Christianity: an icon of
the victory of exalted power over worldly antitheses.
Even so, the propagandistic value of the imperial
crown is overshadowed by that of the towering bearskin
hats of the Grenadier Guards. The inspiration for the
use of these hats came at a crucial juncture in British
history, the victory of the First Guards over Napoleon’s
Grenadiers at the Battle of Waterloo. Its fears of
collective dismemberment neutralized, the British
leadership promptly fashioned for its Guards the same
type of bearskin headgear as the vanquished French had
worn.36 The British Grenadier cap thereafter became an
advertisement for the troops’ transcendence of their
role as cannon fodder for the state military apparatus. It
also betokened the invulnerability of the British people
against any and all threats to the national body.
Nearly a decade into the new millennium, the
British government has shown a nostalgic balkiness
about replacing the beloved bearskin of the Grenadier
caps with a synthetic substitute. The Group Captain of
the Guard, Susan Gray, had this to say when asked
about the viability of faux materials for the caps: “Yes,
indeed, they were trialed, and unfortunately they didn’t
match up to the real fur, I’m afraid.”37 They didn’t
“match up,” of course, not for any legitimate practical
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reasons, but because faux fur would be devoid of the
desired fetishistic effects.
Across the pond from the pomp and circumstance of the Grenadier Guards, fetishistic headgear has
earned a place in the annals of American political
iconography, courtesy of Abraham Lincoln’s top-hat.
Over the course of his legal and political career, Lincoln
owned a number of imposing hats made of beaver-pelt
and of silk, the ancient animal textile of the Mandate of
Heaven.38 An example of Lincoln’s haberdashery resides
in the Taper Collection, a “beaver pelt stovepipe hat”
that adorned the presidential dome at climactic
moments of the Civil War.39 His hat is virtually synonymous with Lincoln’s nation-saving leadership. He wore
one to functions with Union generals; he wore one on
April 4, 1865, during the “Father Abraham” procession
in Richmond, when he was greeted with a hail of cheers
from emancipated slaves.40
The symbolism of Lincoln’s hat reaches far
beyond its indisputable phallicism, a product of the
patriarchal origins of the hat’s design and the patriarchal overtones of the Civil War. Lincoln’s hat is a focal
point of Americans’ remembrance of his salvific role in
healing the internal dismemberment that rent the
national body for four long bloody years. His sartorial
fetish has loomed so large in the popular imagination
of Lincoln that it has even spawned its own myths,
including the apocryphal story that Lincoln wrote the
Gettysburg Address using the top of his hat as a table.41
Lincoln’s iconic hat also brings into focus the
President’s eviction from the nation of the deadening
culture of the slave-holding states, where the commodification of human life ran rampant. It sends the message
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that the military instrumentality of the Civil War—
which saw hundreds of thousands of people become
battle fodder and the citizenry fall under the control of
martial law—was ultimately an ennobling process
necessary to cleanse the polity of the vile institution of
slavery.
Thankfully, the commercialization of human life
in today’s advanced economies is not nearly as allencompassing as it was in the Antebellum South. This
hasn’t stopped demand for the animal fetish from
reaching unprecedented proportions. Denizens of commodity culture who need release from the tedium of
everyday life often turn to the ritual enjoyment of mock
warfare, the Kriegspiel of ball-games. To appreciate the
ball-centered fetishism of these games, we need only lift
the veil of the colonial conquest of the New World and
peer into the Native American tradition of lacrosse.
Lacrosse was understood by the Native groups who
played it—the Menominee, the Creek, the Cherokee,
and the Potawatomi, to name a few—as a source of
potent “medicine.” Games were held as much for
communication with the spirit world as for kinesthetic
training and playing with the aggressions of warfare. An
anthropological authority on the Native sport declares,
“The sacred nature of lacrosse explains the paramount
role of medicine men in nearly all of its ritual aspects.”42
At the heart of the ritual aspects of Southeastern Native
lacrosse was a hide-bound ball whose medicine could be
enhanced with special talismans. The “chief ball” of the
Creek Indians, for example, was invested with an inchworm to promote the ball’s invisibility to opponents.43
The ancient Greeks infused their ball play with
fetishistic ritualism as well. In Book Eight of the Odyssey,
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King Alcinous of the Phaeacians asks his sons Laodamas
and Halius to toss a ball for Odysseus’s amusement.
Homer’s language registers the subtleties of their
saltatory play:
The two men picked up a lovely purple ball,
which clever Polybus had made for them.
Then, leaning back, one of them would throw it high,
towards the shadowy clouds, and then the other,
before his feet touched ground, would catch it easily.
Once they’d shown their skill in tossing it straight up,
they threw it back and forth, as they kept dancing
on the life-sustaining earth, while more young men
stood at the edge of the arena, beating time.44
These few lines contain the entire phenomenological
universe of ball play. The frolicking of Laodamas and
Halius is an exercise in male patriarchal bonding, as ball
sports have historically been. The overarching theme of
the passage is human transcendence of the boundaries
of temporal existence—from throwing and leaping
toward the firmament, to masterful communion with
the Antaean earth and time itself. But the passage, in
equating the firmament with “the shadowy clouds,”
enunciates the illusory, inverted nature of this transcendence. The exaltation mediated by the dermal fetish
actually comes the psychological depths. The purple ball,
fashioned of leather as was the classical custom,45 draws
its heaven-seeking buoyancy from the death-denying
unconscious.
And where would American capitalism, the
greatest socioeconomic system on earth, be without the
spectacle of ball games? The “big three” American
professional sports—basketball, football, and baseball—
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all revolve around mastery over a leather ball, a moneymaking fetish like none other.46 The popular demand for
these games is in direct proportion to the banality of the
fans’ routine lives. The basketball arena, the baseball or
football stadium, is an emotionally liberating, psychologically cathartic public sphere, in stark opposition to the
sere public domains of the Gesellschaft. The fans of the
victorious team can bask in the emotional glow of their
team’s metaphysical triumph beyond the tainted logic of
money. Never mind how many millions of dollars have
gone into the team’s coffers and the players’ bank
accounts. The monolithic illusion of modern professional
sports is their immersion in the very economic system
whose soul-numbing realities they are designed to
countervail. The irony of ball-game venues with names
like “Lincoln Financial Field” barely registers with fans,
so enthralled are they with the mysticism of the leather
athletic grail.47
The fanaticism of the ball-players about the
fetishism of their sport can rival if not eclipse that of
the fans. The players were behind the furor in 2006 over
the attempt, spearheaded by the administration of the
National Basketball Association, to replace the traditional leather ball with a synthetic one. A number of the
league’s athletes vociferously and successfully protested
the switch from their beloved leather basketball. Shaquille O’Neal, then a star player for the Miami Heat,
dismissively remarked of the new ball: “It feels like one
of those cheap balls you buy at the toy store.”48 O’Neal’s
rhetoric of authentic value was his way of rationalizing
his resistance to a less-fetishistic material. He completely missed the perceptual and psychological fakery
of the leather ball’s esteem. His “mature” yet unsound
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defense of the shadow economy vindicated the “childish”
yet undeluded mentality of the animal-rights activists
who had pushed for the NBA’s adoption of the synthetic
ball.
For sheer aesthetic charm, no ball game can
capture the “dialectic of mortification” (Žižek) as well as
that classic cinematic allegory of the fetish, King Kong
(1933).49 Unlike the typical taxidermic creation “frozen
in a moment of supreme life,”50 King Kong is a skincovered talisman with a mobility and personality all his
own. Marcel Delgado, the designer of the Kong stopmotion models, used two types of fur for his monster:
rabbit fur to cover the 18-inch model, and the “pruned
skins of 40 bears” for the close-up bust of Kong.51
Delgado’s beast is a taxidermic conjuration within a film
whose subtext is the civilized character of fetishism.
That Kong is meant as an animated fetish within
the film’s narrative is made obvious by the villagers on
Kong’s island, who pay sacrificial homage to the simian
demi-god. The wall separating Kong from the villagers, a
metaphor for the repression of the atavistic meaning of
the fetish, was built in the distant past by a “higher civilization.” The villagers themselves, eager to wed female
victims to the divine object, are a primitive projection of
the movie’s patriarchal theme. From the outset of King
Kong, Ann Darrow is cast as little more than a conduit of
male schemes for wealth and power. Carl Denham, the
movie director who hires Darrow, has the crassest of
interest in a female lead character: “Because the public,
bless ’em, must have a pretty face to look at.” On their
maritime excursion to seek out Kong, Denham gives
Darrow direction about the dire fate she is expected to
perform: “There’s no chance for you, Ann, no escape.”
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Brutishly possessive of his beautiful prize, Kong
dramatizes the objectification of the female body. His
behavior wraps patriarchal ideology in the illusion of
archetypal truth as only the fetish can. Darrow herself is
the archetype of “the golden woman,” the native chieftain’s rhapsodic name for her. The thematic climax of
the film, when fetishism and patriarchy collide, is the
evening of Kong’s Broadway premiere. Darrow attends
the premiere in a luxurious fur stole, whereupon
Denham snidely remarks, “I’m glad I dressed you up for
this show.” Darrow is dressed in fur just as Kong is; for
a densely symbolic moment, they have both been
fashioned as perfect commodities.
Kong is of the same fetishistic species as the
garment Darrow wears to the premiere. Delgado’s
sculpture is a fur coat brought to life, locked in a
suffocating paternalistic embrace with its dazzling
female wearer. In one of King Kong’s most famous lines,
Denham announces to the crowd waiting to see the
fabulous beast: “He was a king and a god in the world
he knew, but now he comes to civilization, merely a
captive.” The allegory of Kong is now almost complete—
once a divine idol, he has been brought under the
repressive control of commercialism, ultimately no
different from any other piece of mundane merchandise.
But this is not the end of the story. Kong’s store
of projected numen transgresses the limits of the
commodity. Kong’s escape from his bonds, his “rescue”
of Darrow from the profit-mongering gaze of the
paparazzi, thrusts into civilized consciousness the truth
of the animal fetish’s psychopathology. Horror-struck
New Yorkers recoil at the unconscious incarnation of
the fetish gone berserk, unrepressed. To their cathartic
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relief, Kong is vanquished in the most patriarchal
manner possible, atop a giant phallic edifice. Thereafter
we can assume that Darrow is free to wear fur garments,
basking in the limelight of male desire, without any
jarring repercussions.
The sexual dimension of King Kong is muted yet
undeniable. Early in the narrative, Darrow seems
suspicious of Denham’s motives in recruiting her for his
film-within-a-film. The director deflects her concerns
with the assurance, “This is strictly business.” Hardly.
One need not be steeped in Freudian psychology to see
that Darrow, in Kong’s doraphilic embrace, is a sex
object. Due in no small measure to Freud and his
followers, the sexual meaning of the fetish has come to
monopolize the popular imagination. And lurking
behind the perverse sexual effects of fetishism is
Western civilization, the historical milieu of Freud’s
studies. When human life atrophies next to the life of
the civilized good, the most deathless of all goods—the
animal derivative—appears again and again as a “perversion” in the domain of biological relations.
The case study of K.S., included in Medard Boss’s
Meaning and Content of Sexual Perversions, is a graphic
illustration of the origins of the sexualized animal
talisman. K.S. possessed an overpowering erotic fixation
on women’s fur and leather garments; conversely, he
was sexually disgusted by women bereft of these
accessories. What follows is a series of K.S.’s own characterizations of his carnal philosophy:
[T]he dreary, lonely and unsuccessful everyday,
then suddenly drifts away from me, and light and
glamour radiate from the leather to me . . . An
incredible power, Mana, emanates from these
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gloves, furs, and boots, and completely enchants me
. . . The woman’s fur gloves or coat or fur boots to me
are the sacral vessel of love . . . only with a glove or
a boot do I succeed in leading God Eros far from
Heaven, close to earth . . . leather or fur which a
woman puts on extinguishes the narrow, repulsive
contour of her body . . . a piece of meat in a butcher
shop.52
These are uniquely modern, ultra-civilized depictions of
the withered value of humanity against the backdrop of
the numinous products of animal victimization. Both
K.S. and his fantasized partner are lifeless without the
fetish, he the victim of his “unsuccessful everyday” and
she nothing but “a piece of meat in a butcher shop.” Like
Kong bursting free from his role as a lucrative spectacle,
K.S.’s leather and fur fetishes explode beyond their roles
as commercial products. K.S.’s perversions have given
him insight into the office of the fetish, “the sphere
where superhuman and subhuman blend into universal
godliness.”53 Subhuman in its natural state, the animal’s
body becomes superhuman through its dismemberment
and preservation in the perfect commodity—and the
fetish-worshipping human becomes divine.
The “Mana” of the animal fetish galvanizes the
rituals of sadomasochism. The sadist wields the fetish as
a scepter of hegemony over his or her subjects, but is
never as god-like as he or she would like to think, for the
sadist is in the thrall of a smothering ideology. For the
father of sadism, the Marquis de Sade, that ideology was
Christianity. His fetishism was the opposite of a violent
adherence to the Christian worldview. Sade tried in vain
to purge himself of the grip of Christian dogma; he felt
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an overpowering compulsion to model himself after the
Anti-Christ.
On October 19, 1763, a call girl named Jeanne
Testard filed a police report against Sade, alleging that
during the previous night he had performed grotesque
acts of Christian heresy. After having hired her for her
services, Testard testified, Sade took her to a special
chamber of his petite maison [townhouse], which ended
up being closer to an abattoir than a boudoir. The police
report covers the preliminaries of the case and then
delves into the sordid details:
[Testard] was shocked to see four switches and five
types of whips, of which three were of cord, one of
brass wire, and one of iron wire, which were
hanging on the wall, and three ivory statues of
Christ on the cross . . . [Sade] took down two of the
ivory statues of Christ, one of which he trampled
underfoot, and upon the other masturbated
himself; and, remarking the evident shock and
horror shown by the witness, he told her that she
had to trample on the crucifix, pointing out to her
two pistols on a table and putting his hand upon his
sword, ready to draw it from its scabbard, and
threatening to run her through; the witness, out of
fear for her life, suffered the misfortune of being
forced to trample on the crucifix.54
The ivory fetish is the centerpiece of Sade’s enactment
of the identity of the Anti-Christ. The crucifix is the
object of his sexual desire to a much greater extent than
the flesh-and-blood woman before him. Sade’s rejection
of the fetish is a ruse: he needs it to transform himself
into a misogynistic god, for whom the female body
really is “a piece of meat in a butcher shop,” and he the
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wielder of the tools of butchery. Fortunately for Testard,
on this particular evening Sade the would-be butcher
was “all talk,” though another female escort later
accused Sade of stabbing her in the buttocks.55 This
latter woman’s wounds were a perversion of the
stigmata of the crucified Christ—the work of an
aspiring Anti-Christ who twisted the traditional Christian themes of paternalism and redemptive pain into a
campaign of sexual gratification.
Sadism can be purely ideological, without a
sexual agenda. Such was the case with Nazism. The
animal fetishism of “the Movement” (die Bewegung),
with leather at its heart, was part and parcel of fascist
ideology. Nazi ideology was concentrated in the leather
paraphernalia of its agents, the soldiers and party functionaries who imposed the writ of Nazism in blood.
Among other accessories, leather belts and boots—not
to mention leather whips—fortified the Nazis with the
belief in the impregnable truth of their doctrine.
Leather elevated the individual, all-too-human body of
the Nazi to an immutable superhuman plane. At the
same time it was a naturally-sanctioned tool for the
savage alienation and degradation of the Movement’s
victims.
Hitler himself had a leather fixation. He made
comments to that effect in his innumerable “table talks”
with other party leaders, including one in August of
1942 in which he ludicrously linked leather to personal
sacrifice. He shared with his Berlin cabal the strength of
his devotion to leather shorts when, while still a budding politician, he had lived in Bavaria:
Even with a temperature of ten below zero I used to
go about in leather shorts. The feeling of freedom
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they give you is wonderful. Abandoning my shorts
was one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make. I
only did it for the sake of North Germany . . . In the
future I shall have an SS Highland Brigade in leather
shorts!56
Leather was an essential material in the aesthetics of
the Nazi uniform. The premier Nazi propaganda film,
Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, publicizes the
marriage of Nazi ideology and leather fetishism.57 Early
in the film, as Hitler is about to enter the Hotel
Deutscher Hof to prepare for the 1934 Nuremberg party
rallies, we see the first of several fetishistic shots of Nazi
leather. The camera pans across a row of Hitler’s SS
Bodyguard Regiment (Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler),
each of whom is holding the leather belts of the adjacent
guards in a crossed-arm, cruciform pattern. The circular
form of the belt imposes a secure ideological hold on the
body of each SS member, while the inter-locking of the
regiment’s members via their belts binds them to their
common mission.
The leather belt reappears at another key
moment in the film, this time as part of Hitler’s own
aesthetic of quasi-divine leadership. The setting is the
gigantic Night Rally of Political Leaders, where upwards
of 200,000 slavish Nazis have assembled to worship
their Führer. After Hitler has finished his fateful
speech—“the Movement lives,” he screeches, “and it is
grounded hard and fast”—the film shows him reviewing
several torch- and flag-bearing units as they march in
formation below him. The viewer’s gaze is twice taken
to the feet-level of the marchers and forced to absorb
the martial rhythm of their tall black-leather boots. The
climax of the scene is the shot of Hitler himself, his left
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hand grasping his belt and his right hand in a Sieg-Heil
salute to the fawning multitudes. Through his leather
belt, the upraised Hitler has secured his identity as the
deific embodiment of Nazi ideology; through their
leather boots, the grounded marchers have embraced
the sacred duty of translating their Führer’s ideology
into the vernacular of earthly violence.
The leather fetishism of Nazi paraphernalia was
liable to have the desired effect on the Nazis’ human
prey, emblazoning in victims’ minds the godlike aura of
their persecutors. One woman imprisoned at Auschwitz,
E. Meitneróva, recalled decades later the psychological
repercussions of falling under the sadistic sway of the
Nazis:
There was one day in Auschwitz where I just
couldn’t take it in any longer . . . it just felt like a
Fata Morgana in my mind: I saw two SS officers
passing, kicking out at us as they walked along
without even noticing that some of us were close to
a delirium. And behind them, God was walking, tall,
upright. Black leather boots on his feet and the
death’s head written on his forehead.58
Ms. Meitneróva has approached the limit point of
human abjection, where God himself has become a
member of the SS and she has become flotsam for him
to crush beneath his leather boots.
So great a social gulf existed between the Nazis
and their victims that the latter could internalize the
hate to which they were incessantly subjected. Psychologist Loretta Walder has recorded an extreme case of
this masochistic process, a young Jewish man who
developed an erotic attachment to the leather pants of
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the Hitler Youth.59 The teenager’s family was fortunate
enough to leave Germany immediately prior to the Final
Solution, but still “bore the brunt of the social persecutions” of the German Volk. The masochistic teen
“accepted, at least in part, the theory that Jews were
inferior and admired the Hitler Youth tremendously.”
Walder began treating the victim when he was almost 40,
at which point his leather fetishism—“directly connected with the wish to identify himself with the Hitler
Youth”—had begun to rend his mind asunder.
Obsessed with the magical garb of Hitler’s
minions, the man could not escape the over-riding
desire (as he put it) “to be in their britches.” He was just
as powerless to escape his own sense of debasement:
“For the pants to excite him it was essential that they be
dirty, that is smell of feces.” What excited him, in other
words, was the cathartic ritual of disposing of the “filth”
of his self-reviled Jewish heritage, outside the protective
armor of Nazi leather. He had lost himself in an abyss of
masochistic purity, where he could enact the Nazis’
fantasy of striding victorious and leather-clad through
the “fecal world” of their victims.
Someone like Walder’s patient is a pure masochist (in this case, a pure self-sadist), because he lies at
the nadir of the hierarchy of power. The converse
tendency of sadists to display masochistic tendencies is
a matter of their willing subservience to the control of
ideology, which they eagerly write in pain upon the
bodies of their victims. The sadism of the members of
the SS toward their victims was in proportion to their
masochism toward the Nazi movement. To receive the
mantle of fascistic sadism, they swore a groveling oath
to their Führer: “I vow to thee, and to the superiors
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whom thou shall appoint, obedience unto death, so help
me God.”60
For his own part, the Marquis de Sade shuddered
giddily at the thought of forcing women to abuse him
sadistically. He ordered Jeanne Testard “to flog him
with the iron-wire whip” in his chamber of horrors
“after having it heated red-hot in the fire.”61 She refused
and Sade moved on to the ivory crucifixes. Sade’s
immersion in a male-centered Weltanschauung inspired
him to demonize women to such an extent that he
yearned for them to behave demonically.
The namesake of masochism, Leopold von SacherMasoch, was exactly the same character type, a sadist
whose demonization of women led him toward the
ritual celebration of the devouring female eidolon. To
understand this sadomasochistic convergence, it is
much better to look within the pages of Sacher-Masoch’s
own life than within the pages of his “masterpiece”
Venus in Furs. His novel merely masks the narrator’s
sadistic personality behind misogynistic caricature.
Leopold compulsively pressured his wife Wanda—who
had gone so far as to change her birth name (Angelika)
in order to morph herself into the female protagonist of
Venus in Furs—to fulfill his fantasies of the fetish-clad
succubus. He actually got her to sign a chattel contract
in which she agreed to be his slave-driver. “In my hands,”
she stipulated to her husband, “you are a blind instrument.”62
In the pages of Wanda’s autobiography The
Confessions, a clear portrait of sadism emerges around
her mock-masochist husband.63 A short time after
Wanda had given birth to their son Demetrius, Leopold
insisted she travel to meet a man named Teitelbaum for
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a sexual liaison. The tryst, her husband declared, would
allow her to live up to the ideal of her double in Venus in
Furs, whose sexual frivolity draws her away from her
marriage toward a paragon of brawn known as “the
Greek.” Despite his wife’s dangerously weakened postpartum condition, Leopold dressed her in “fur highboots,” a “great Astrakhan cap,” and an “extremely
heavy” fur cloak.64 But he was not quite done with his
fetishistic game, in which Wanda was a hapless player:
As a final touch Leopold, in addition to the boots,
the fur and the hat, gave me a huge dog-whip. With
me in this get-up, he accompanied me to the station.
There, the people who knew I had just given birth
regarded us with surprise. Up until the very last
moment my husband gave me advice on how I
should conduct myself with Teitelbaum. Finally the
train left. Hardly had it left the station when I threw
the whip out of the window, and would gladly have
thrown out the fur and the hat, had I not needed
them to protect me from the cold.65
Leopold’s sadistic treatment of his wife, on this occasion
and many others like it, unsurprisingly left Wanda
“filled with anguish.”66 She nevertheless retained a remarkable (one might say masochistic) openness toward
her husband’s abusive antics, and knew the warp and
woof of her husband’s pathological condition better
than he himself did. Leopold’s fixation on the archetype
of the fur-armored demoness, as Wanda realized all too
well, was “a counterweight to his apprehensions and to
his fears of death.”67
Jung himself could not have put it much better,
especially since he succumbed to his own brand of
animal-skin fetishism. His fetish of choice was the leather126
bound book, which he promoted to a personal archetype.
In his pre-alchemical studies period, Jung had a dream
about his future scholarly accomplishments, the centerpiece of which was an alchemical library bursting at the
seams with “large, fat folio volumes, bound in pigskin.”
“Some fifteen years later,” Jung continues in his autobiography, “I had assembled a library very like the one in
the dream.”68
Jung further dreamt of his minister father pontificating on an Old Testament passage, with a rather
peculiar Bible in his hands. “The Bible my father held
was bound in shiny fishskin.”69 Jung understood his
father to be a stand-in for his latent, demiurgic self.70
The symbolic identification between the fishskin and
the integument of Christ makes clear the messianic
meaning of Jung’s leather fetish. Jung subconsciously
conceived of his scholarly preoccupations as a vehicle
for the psychological salvation of humankind, a New
Testament for the civilized mind. Jung’s scientific
standards would not allow him to embrace his Christ
complex on a conscious level, so the complex became
sublimated into his doraphilia.
Jung’s fetishistic Holy Writs were the Black
Books and the Red Book. These were leather-bound
notebooks in which he recorded his most private
ruminations on mystical experience. The mandala-rich
Red Book was the culmination of Jung’s fugue phase,
the “esthetic elaboration”71 of the Black Books from
which its text was derived. The respective colors of the
bindings symbolize the books’ relationship to one
another. Jung intended the Red Book to be a purifying
exsanguination, into the textual receptacle of medieval
alchemy, of the Black Books’ shrouded corpus. His aim
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in creating these manuscripts was to give his conscious
self emancipatory access to “the dungeons of the
daimons,”72 to cross the psychological Rubicon into “the
primitive shadow.”73 He never made it. The books’
leather bindings are the strongest evidence of Jung’s
failure to overcome the shadow’s repression. He tried to
use his formidable intellectual and introspective faculties to unbind the shadow, but through the leather
coverings of his Bibles of the self, the shadow bound
itself around him.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Appropriation
The final mode of the shadow economy is
appropriation, the taking of animal life as property.
“Property” need not have its modern connotations of
exclusive legal ownership, and in fact a “ritual contract”
existed between an archaic hunter and his appropriated
prey. This ritual contract was designed to create a spirit
of reciprocity in the extraction of animal life from its
natural niche, something entirely lost in the era of
property rights.
What differentiates appropriation from liquidation is the victim’s domestication, or lack thereof.
Liquidation is the siphoning of life that has already been
brought, through domestication, under the rubric of
property; the victim therefore does not need the
designation of property conferred through violent
means. The classic expressions of appropriation are
hunting and fishing, both of which depend on the
violent extraction of vitality from the surrounding
environment.1 Modern society has taken appropriation
a step further, consummating a marriage between
scientific and economic appropriation. Scientists can be
hunters too, as Darwin was in his youth and into the
peak of his professional career, the trigger-happiness of
his boyhood replaced in adulthood with the zeal of
research. By far the most common expression of
civilized appropriation, though, is the extermination of
animal pests, who by their very presence threaten the
sanctity of real estate.
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Every one of these “rational” forms of appropriation belies the deep-seated conviction that only as
predator can the human creature avoid becoming prey.
Appropriation is compensatory predation, the victim
a cathartic surrogate for the human in flight from
mortality. The crypto-fascist philosopher Oswald
Spengler could not have expressed better the shadowrationale of appropriation:
The beast of prey is the highest form of mobile life.
It has the maximum of freedom from others and for
itself, the maximum independence, the maximum
of solitude, and the maximum need to assert itself,
fighting, conquering, and destroying. The human
species ranks high because man is a beast of prey.2
No wonder people as a rule derive visceral pleasure from
dramatic depictions of animal predation—such
depictions confirm and heighten the intuition that
nature vouchsafes predatory killing as a victory over
death.
Spengler’s philosophy of the beast of prey is a
jaundiced pre-cursor of the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis, which in the 1960’s became a cause célèbre of the
anthropological community. The fatal fallacy of the
hypothesis lies not so much in its assertion of the
pivotal socioeconomic role of hunting in human history,
but rather in its elevation of biology above psychology.
Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster, champions of
the theory, committed this error when they tried to
show how “the biological bases for killing have been
incorporated into human psychology.”3 The most
illustrious scientific minds have a poor track record
against the inverted hierarchy of the unconscious,
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whose contingent processes pose as the immutable
realities of nature. The truth of “Man the Hunter” is
much closer to the opposite of Washburn and Lancaster’s
mechanism—the foibles of psychology are writ large
onto biological behavior. The psychological law of the
shadow, which humankind will hopefully rescind in the
not-too-distant future, was first inscribed through the
trials and tribulations of the “Man [and Woman] the
Hunted.”
Yet it would be equally absurd to deny that we
humans, deep into our ancestry, have evinced a fondness for killing. From the first inkling of sentience, the
preyed-upon hominid has sought the compensatory
relief of appropriation. Upon the wall of the Lascaux
Cave in southern France is a stunning tableau of the
roots of appropriation: The Man in the Well.4 The core
figures of this carefully balanced scene, painted in Early
Magdalenian times (14-15,000 BCE), are an eviscerated
bison with a spear across his flank and a bird-masked
man sporting an erect phallus. Beneath them are a
smaller spear-like implement and a bird perched on a
staff.5
Questions about the Man in the Well abound.
Is the bird-man dead?6 If so, was he killed by the painmaddened bison? How could the bison’s guts have
spilled out from a spear’s puncture wound? The list of
interpretive vagaries goes on and on. We need not settle
these questions once and for all to realize that we are
seeing a representation of a ritual contact between the
human predator and his prey. The overall arrangement
of the tableau’s figures is circular, evoking the reciprocity of killing—corporeal reciprocity between the
predator and prey, as well as mythic reciprocity between
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mortality and regeneration. The bird figures are
shamanistic emblems of the afterlife. And phallic symbolism has such a rich history that it hardly behooves us
to elaborate upon its meaning. The profusion of guts
protruding from the bison has a Jungian symbolism as
the seat of the creature’s anima or spirit, which cultures
since time immemorial have located in the viscera.
It makes perfect sense, psychologically speaking,
that the womb-like darkness of the Lascaux Cave would
harbor such an archetypal inscription of the shadow
contract of zoocide. The bird-man has appropriated the
life-force of the bison as a guarantee against terrestrial
oblivion. In addition, he has ensured through the
circular logic of ritual—replete with signs of phallic
generativity—that the bison will defy mortality. This
pact between man and animal is a far cry indeed from
the unilateral appropriation of civilized humanity, with
its callous and casual regard for the lives of animals as
pieces of property. From long before the Man in the
Well was a gleam in the Lascaux painter’s eye, all the way
to the present, a ritual contract has been enforced
between animistic peoples and their animal prey. Only
the society of the “megamachine”7 displays a markedly
contrary tendency—and not in a good way either.
The society of the megamachine has a strong
preoccupation with the appropriation of marine prey,
thanks to the massive domestication of terrestrial prey
(who are victims of liquidation). The term “hunting”
nevertheless still carries the anthropological bias toward
the type of predation naturally expected of a bipedal
killer, for whom the aquatic world is an alien one.
Bronislaw Malinowski was one of the few anthropologists
to buck this tendentious trend. From his ethnographic
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work among the Trobriand Islanders, we can glean the
ritual foundations of modern commercial “mega-fishing,”
which warps the pelagic environment into what Farley
Mowat rightly labeled the “sea of slaughter.”8
On Boyowa, one of the Trobriand Islands, the
residents of the village of Labai have a tradition of kalala
(mullet) fishing under the terms of a sacred ritual
contract. Malinowski went to great pains to unravel its
stipulations. The islanders pay obeisance to the kalala
through the ritual techniques of the ancient hero
Tudava, who was born of the same mother as the fish
themselves. This matrilineal kinship between humans
and fish has given rise to a procreative symbiosis
between the two groups. As the human ancestry of
Tudava extends itself through the fishing rites, the fish
population returns in force with the waxing of the full
moon, a maternal archetype with a sympathetic kinship
to Tudava’s mother. In kalala fishing, the very ancestry,
the regenerative seed, of the entire village is at stake in
one grand predatory undertaking. Simply put, the
ritualism of kalala fishing contains an entire native
cosmology. “In fact,” Malinowski declares at the end of
his ethnographic overview of Trobriand fishing
practices, “the kalala fishing in Labai is surrounded with
more numerous and more stringent taboos, and is more
bound up with tradition and ceremonial [lore] than any
other social activity in the Trobriands.”9
The philosophical type of modern hunter—and
philosophy is in extremely short supply in hunting, like
probity in politics—has the same sacred impression of
his undertaking. He pursues his prey with the selfassurance of José Ortega y Gasset in Meditations on
Hunting, who espoused “the principle . . . of artificially
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perpetuating, as a possibility for man, a situation which
is archaic in the highest degree.”10 The key word here is
“artificially.” The hunter merely thinks he follows the
bilateral protocols of the Man in the Well. Lacking the
comprehensive mythology of his traditional counterpart,
the modern hunter confuses unilateral appropriation
with ritual reciprocity. In spite of the painful quixoticism of Ortega y Gasset’s ideology of hunting, his work
at least has the virtue of recognizing the archaic basis of
the cynegetic arts.
In one of his “Gulf Stream Letters” to Esquire
magazine about his fishing exploits, Ernest Hemingway
offered his own “artificial” truths about appropriation:
[T]here is great pleasure in being on the sea, in the
unknown wild suddenness of a great fish; in his life
and death which he lives for you in an hour while
your strength is harnessed to his; and there is
satisfaction in conquering this thing which rules the
sea it lives in.11
Hemingway is just as opposed as his Spanish comradein-arms to conquering the obscurantism of his deathly
philosophy. Both authors are in the grip of “the unknown wild suddenness” of the shadow under threat, its
extreme resistance to dissipation and its tireless defense
of animal victimization. The shadow has answered a
superficial questioning of repression with a deluge of
romanticism. Thanks to their expressive sensibilities,
the likes of Hemingway and Ortega y Gasset have begun
to challenge the mindlessness of modern animal killing.
But rather than face the stark psychological and physical
futility of that killing, rather than face the realities of
human mortality itself, they quickly resort to pablum
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about the “timeless” verities of nature and the “code” of
killing. Spurning the coldness and cruelty of the modern
way of life, they have only penetrated halfway into the
recesses of the shadow and have replaced a banal form
of false consciousness with an enchanting one. They
abandon the glimmer of hope that rationality offers
when it is freed from its psychological moorings in the
unconscious.
The bullfight, one of Hemingway’s favorite
rituals and the subject of his book Death in the Afternoon,12 appears at first blush to offer a rare modern
holdover of the ritual contract of appropriation. Yet the
feral temperament of the toro de lidia glosses over
millennia of domestication. In a matter of minutes, the
bullfight recreates the long process of pastoral domestication, of bringing animals under human management
to ready them all the more efficiently for the coup de
grâce of slaughter. Already a piece of property, the bull
undergoes the sham formality of appropriation in order
to prove by trial of blood the rightness (if not the
righteousness) of domestication. The irony for those
who adjudicate this tauromachic trial of blood, legendary bullfighters like Conchita Cintrón, is that their
philosophical fervor for the sport is matched only by
their predatory fondness for the arena of the corrida de
toros.
As would any true philosopher, Cintrón resorts
to paradox in trying to explain the sport:
The torero promenades with eternity. To the music
of a pasodoble, he smiles at it, caresses it, talks to it,
and then scornfully turns his back on its shiny black
horns. At that moment the torero electrifies the
spectators by the intensity with which he is living.
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And the drama is as intense, consuming,
illuminating as fire, for the bull is there to remind
all present of the ephemerality of life.13
Cintrón’s Memoirs of a Bullfighter compete with
Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon for sheer rhetorical
beauty and philosophical heft. Like Hemingway’s as well,
her reasoning runs headlong in the wrong direction. The
bull is there to galvanize the torero, and to an even
greater extent the spectators, against the ephemerality
of life—to suffuse them with the psychological
assurance of eternity. Despite its aesthetic bells and
whistles, the bullfight is a raw mis-en-scène of the ritual
construction of the belief in human eternity. Cintrón’s
words paint a pleasant fiction of a group of aficionados
who have come to terms with mortality, whose tragic
love of animal death straddles the pinnacle of human
intellectual and emotional maturity. In reality, the
psychological essence of the bullfight is the thanatophobic tension finally, cathartically, released as the bull
collapses in a squalid heap from the uninhibited thrust
of the sword.
The wild double of the bullfight, hunting has a
long history on a global scale as the vehicle par excellence
for the socioeconomic appropriation of nature.
Civilization after civilization has depended on hunting
to stake a claim to territorial rights in the most primal
sense—the real estate, and everything animate and
inanimate upon it, which sates civilization’s developmental cravings. From the outset of the evolution of
civilization, the ideological need grew for a ritual
process that could moor abstract claims of property,
juridical claims to territory and its contents, in the
perceived tooth-and-claw groundwork of nature.
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Hunting, an appropriative transaction sealed with blood,
fit the bill almost perfectly.
The expansion of a civilization as impregnable as
China’s can be traced to the royal hunting expeditions
of the Shang Dynasty, a Bronze Age antecedent of the
Chinese imperial state. A central mechanism of the
establishment of the Chinese empire was the hunting
activity of the Shang kings, whose excursions into the
hinterlands of the realm paved the way for the absorption of those areas into the administrative apparatus of
the state. Anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjö lays out and
corroborates this mechanism in his monograph “Rising
from Blood-Stained Fields: Royal Hunting and State
Formation in Shang China.” According to Fiskesjö, the
monarchic hunting parties facilitated “[t]he domestication of the wild and the birth of empire.”14
This venary mechanism was so pivotal to Chinese
state development that even after the wilderness of the
North China Plain had been by and large appropriated,
the emperors of the Qin and Han Dynasties maintained
royal hunting preserves. These tracts allowed the
leaders to perpetuate, albeit in a highly controlled and
artificial manner, the zoocidal foundation of imperial
legitimacy. Fiskesjö admits how reasonable it is to
question “why these pitiful parks were brought into
being,” but at the same time he vouches for their “role
as symbolic remnants of the wilderness, providing for a
sterilized ritual hunt carried out in a microcosm after
the macrocosm was already conquered.”15 Once the
territorially and culturally expansionist policies of the
Shang kings had been vindicated by their successful
expeditions, hunting itself became a centralized,
bureaucratic affair of the immovable Chinese empire.
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So far as the Roman emperors were concerned,
the canned royal hunts of the Qin and Han Dynasties
would literally have been a walk in the park. The Roman
titans dropped all pretense of naturalistic integrity, not
to mention any hint of moderation, in the pursuit of
their zoocidal passions. The modi operandi of Roman
state power were gigantic canned “hunts” (venationes) in
the imperial stadia, at which legions of animals were
dispatched as bloodily as possible in front of thousands
of spectators held captive by the resplendent gore. For a
burgeoning empire obsessed with converting as much of
the world as it could into property—through outlays of
real estate, the centralized flow of goods, the conquest
of organic and inorganic resources, and of course the
slave trade—the venationes were an unequivocal
statement of the natural fiat of the Roman system over
its far-flung territories.16
But also of its inherent instability and insecurity.
The deaths of the countless animal victims of the
venationes were needed as a bulwark against the hollow
decadence of the Roman bureaucracy, its Procrustean
blindness toward the cultural and geographic sensitivities of the disparate locales it controlled. One of the
fullest accounts of Roman zoocidal extravaganzas is
provided in Dio’s Roman History, where the author
breaks down noteworthy gorefests by imperial reign:
Augustus: “six hundred wild beasts from Africa were
slain.”17
Gaius: “four hundred bears [were] slain on the
present occasion together with an equal number of
wild beasts from Libya.”18
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Nero: “the knights who served as Nero’s bodyguard
brought down with their javelins four hundred
bears and three hundred lions.”19
Titus: “animals both tame and wild were slain to the
number of nine thousand.”20
Trajan: “he gave spectacles on one hundred and
twenty-three days, in the course of which some
eleven thousand animals, both wild and tame, were
slain.”21
As the figureheads of the Roman bureaucracy, the
emperors themselves were usually content to preside
deity-like over the vast spectacles of appropriation,
while their minions, free or slave, perpetrated the
bloodshed. Some, though, had too strong a bloodlust, or
self-identification with state-sanctioned violence, to sit
idly by at the venationes. Commodus personally killed
bears, hippopotami, elephants, giraffes, and leopards—
to name but a few of his victims.22 Long before General
Philip Sheridan’s oft-attributed equation of a good Indian
with a dead one, potentates like Commodus predicated
the hegemony of the Empire on the simple yet grisly
maxim that the only good animal was a slain one.
Which brings us, conveniently enough, not to
General Sheridan, but to Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark. On their westward “voyage of discovery” in 18041806, Lewis and Clark were trailblazers of appropriation
for the tidal wave of pioneer settlement and development on the not-so-distant horizon. They were the
standard-bearers of manifest destiny, ushering in the
industrious Pax Americana, the “new and improved”
version of the louche Pax Romana. If their military
affiliation didn't make this obvious, then their proclivity
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for killing, or trying their darndest to kill, the fauna
along their path extinguished any remaining doubt
about the imperial significance of their mission.
Lewis and Clark’s penchant for zoocide far
outdistanced the pragmatic reasoning which they
employed again and again in their journal entries. The
multi-volume Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition are
chockablock with episodes of animal appropriation of
staggering variety. It is difficult to read more than a
couple pages without encountering a description of this
or that animal being laid low. Lewis and Clark had a
truly democratic spirit toward their victims; they
refused to discriminate on the grounds of size, species,
or any other attribute for that matter. In one entry
(August 5, 1804), Captain Lewis provided a characteristic (if unevenly spelled) portrayal of the trigger-happy
mentality of the expedition’s members: “I have
frequently observed an acquatic bird [Sterna antillarum]
. . . this day I was so fortunate as to kill two of them.”23
Later (May 31, 1805) he shared with the reader his
peculiar way of showing his appreciation for Western
wildlife: “I saw near [some] bluffs the most beautifull
fox that I ever beheld . . . I endevoured to kill this
anamal.”24
His partner-in-arms was far from immune to the
charms of killing, as Captain Clark made clear when he
riddled a bear with lead on May 5, 1805. “[I]n the
evening we Saw a Brown or Grisley beare on a Sand
beech, I went out with one man . . . & killed the bear,
which was verry large and a turrible looking animal . . .
we Shot ten Balls into him before we killed him.”25
Amazed at the tenacity with which their ursine victims
resisted their overtures, Lewis added on May 11, “these
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bear being so hard to die reather intimedates us all; I
must confess that I do not like the gentlemen and had
reather fight two Indians than one bear.”26 And to think
the bears failed to behave like “gentlemen” when shot!
Aside from its false candor—Lewis almost never
shied away from killing formidable prey—this comment
portends the vast scope of the violence of manifest
destiny, the genocidal shunting-aside of the Native
occupiers of the new American real estate. The prototype for the psychology of Westward expansion, Lewis
and Clark’s paternalistic, acquisitive attitude toward the
land and its indigenous inhabitants hinged on their
zoocidal zeal. No matter what other tasks pre-occupied
them or how full their supply coffers already were,
Lewis and Clark seldom missed an opportunity to
introduce themselves, lethally if possible, to the animal
“ladies and gentlemen” of the Western hinterlands.
Before long, millions of animals got a fatal taste of
American imperial civility.
The imperial violence of the Lewis and Clark
expedition, while it might have been considered an
“internal” matter of the American republic, had the same
ethos as state-sponsored colonialism. Of all the pernicious episodes of the European powers laying claim
and then laying waste to the “undeveloped” regions of
the globe, none was more rapacious than the Belgian
conquest of the Congo. Masquerading as a marvel of
European industriousness, this grossly inefficient and
unapologetically cruel colonial project—to borrow one
of Joseph Conrad’s literary monikers—was Europe’s
indelible “heart of darkness.”27
The project’s tireless agent, whose imperial style
was more adventurous bureaucrat than evil mastermind,
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was Henry Morton Stanley. Years before he went to
work for Belgium’s King Leopold in purloining as much
ivory as possible from Congo’s elephant population,
Stanley became famous for finding the “lost” Scottish
missionary David Livingstone. Those who knew Stanley
for the civilized sangfroid of his greeting to the object of
his quest—“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”—might not
have realized that he also had a knack for animal appropriation. On the way to his meeting with Livingstone on
the northeastern edge of Lake Tanganyika, as Stanley
wrote in a newspaper account of the expedition, he and
his party stopped for some killing.
The glorious park land spreading out north and
south of the southern Gombe is a hunter’s paradise.
. . . I halted here three days to shoot, and there is no
occasion to boast of what I shot, considering the
myriads of game I saw at every step I took. Not half
the animals shot here by myself and men were made
use of.28
When Stanley moved his base of operations to the
Congo, he oversaw a massive apparatus of appropriation.
This project occupied so much of his time and energy
that he went months in the Congo before he could boast
to his Belgian military liaison, “Yesterday I shot my first
elephant.”29
King Leopold cared little for Stanley’s own
hunting pursuits and pushed his intrepid stooge to suck
the Congo dry of ivory and other valuable resources. In
February of 1882, the King became sufficiently concerned about Stanley’s progress that he contacted the
same military point-man (Colonel Strauch) with an
urgent request:
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In your next letter to Stanley you must congratulate
him . . . and question him about the steamers he will
need and the men. We should like to organise a little
fort for him, which would make him more powerful
than the chiefs and the Portuguese . . . [Military
transport] would mean an outlay of 1,500,000
francs, but it would stop the Portuguese outright.
We shall have to put this question of men and boats
clearly to Stanley and ask him to organise caravans
of ivory and the upkeep of trade when ivory is
exhausted, so as to cover our expenses.30
These are the key words of Leopold’s reductio ad
absurdum of appropriation—“when ivory is exhausted.”
Not if, but when. Unburdened with a conservationist
spirit, Leopold gave free reign to the pulsations of his
heart of darkness. He intuitively embraced the shadow’s
law of property, by which the writ of territorial possession consummates itself through the despoliation of
animal life. For Leopold, the shadow economy took
precedence over the financial economy. Notwithstanding the lip service he gave to the “upkeep of trade,” he
had no scruples about saddling the Belgian government
with crushing debt in order to satisfy his infatuation
with Congolese ivory.
As staggering as was (and still is) the human and
animal toll of imperialism, a system Lenin rightly
ascribed to the global spread of capitalism, nothing
intrinsic to capitalism makes it the worst of all possible
worlds for animals. Late industrial capitalism is
certainly much closer to the worst of all worlds for
animals than to the best. Still, we mustn’t assume that
the disappearance of capitalism will cause the shadow
economy to vanish into the light. Aside from the sheer
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scale of animal killing enabled by Fordist methods,
capitalism cannot be blamed for the success of the
shadow economy; nor could the failure of capitalism
ever by itself bring about the failure of the shadow
economy. Capitalism is a means to an end for the
zoocidal shadow, which can and will adapt in a heartbeat to other forms of economic organization.
One look at Mao’s China (1949-1976) makes this
grievously obvious. Mao had an absolutist utopian
vision for China that translated into a grotesque
dystopia for many of the country’s animal species. He
had an obsession with “pests,” of both the human and
animal variety, endangering China’s welfare. He saw
himself as a proletarian savior with a mandate to
neutralize this threat of infestation. What threatened to
make Mao’s version of communism even worse than
capitalism for so-called vermin was Mao’s centralized,
top-down approach to the extermination of “counterrevolutionary” animals. As he declared in a speech
before the Supreme State Conference on January 28,
1958, on the eve of the catastrophically misnamed
Great Leap Forward:
In ancient times there was a man who wrote an
article calling for the eradication of rats. Now we
want to wipe out the four pests [sparrows, flies, rats,
and mosquitoes]. Over the past several thousand
years, not even Confucius called for wiping out the
four pests. Hangchow is now planning to wipe out
the four pests in four years, and some places have
planned to do so in two, three or five years. There is
therefore great hope for developing this nation of
ours.31
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With his “Four Pests Campaign,” Mao distinguished
himself from other 20th-century totalitarian leaders by
making the killing of animal enemies, not just human
ones, an explicit and indispensable part of the new
world order. He vied with the maddest of his unhinged
fascist peers when he openly fantasized about killing
every single fly, mosquito, sparrow, and rat in a
gargantuan country. Predictably yet tragically, Mao’s
lunatic ambitions for the Four Pests Campaign—like
those for the rest of his grand schemes—imploded in a
Sisyphean nightmare, helping to bring the Chinese
economy to its knees during the Great Leap Forward.
Those who might mock Mao’s Four Pests
Campaign as an absurd anomaly, the work of a powercrazed ideologue, should think first of the War of
Annihilation against pests taking place in the typical
suburban home. Mao was different by degree instead
of by kind from the run-of-the-mill, radically unrevolutionary homeowner, who recoils with disgust and
even horror at mice, spiders, cockroaches, and the like.
These unwanted animal guests intrude into consecrated
domesticated spaces, the hallowed grounds of real
estate, where people have tried to shield themselves
from the vicissitudes of natural existence. The officious
creepy-crawlies scurrying helter-skelter through the
domesticated zones of the human world remind people
of the lie of their immortality wish-fulfillment. Nothing
can jar people out of their death-denying complacency
like the speck of a spider on a bedroom wall.
The only sufficient explanation for people’s
revulsion toward pests in the tidy bourgeois home is the
rupture these creatures cause in the repressive psychological barrier against thanatophobia. Sometimes the
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rupture is the merest hairline fracture, a mingled hint of
alarm and disgust, but very often it is a gaping schism
from which gushes forth paralyzing fear. For most of his
life, writer Al Alvarez knew this latter type of psychological rupture in the presence of his nemesis, the itsy-bitsy
spider.
My terror of spiders was phobic—overwhelming
and unreasoning . . . Spiders seemed to me creatures
that embodied, in their scurrying way, everything
that was evil and venomous and impossible to
escape. They were emanations of darkness itself and
I was well into middle age before my phobia
modified into qualified unease.32
The process of shadow projection allows the physically
diminutive spider to achieve enormous psychological
stature for the arachnophobe. The arachnophobe projects onto the spider all of his or her latent suppositions
about the fearsome, pitiless violence of terrestrial life.
This projection transforms the spider into a crawling
emissary of the horrors of nature-cum-graveyard, and
thereby arouses the strongest panic of mortal vulnerability. The spider is a cipher for the psychological traits
of “Man the Hunted.” Except in extremely rare cases,
spiders pose no physical threat to human life or limb;
nor did they in distant human evolutionary history. It is
wrong to claim, as a number of empirically-minded
psychologists and psychiatrists have done, that humans
have in their collective unconscious some dim recollection of the mortal danger of spiders that has carried
over, like a phantom of irrationality, into humankind’s
post-natural sensibility.33 Alvarez’s language is on the
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right track—the fear of spiders is an emanation of
darkness, namely of the psychological shadow.
The glimpse of a spider in a domesticated space,
of an uncontrolled (and apparently uncontrollable)
predatory animal where alpha-predator humans presume to reign, is horrifying because the spider disrupts
the human illusion of immortality via environmental
conquest. The spider’s tiny body casts into doubt the
entire shadow-economic premise of appropriation.
(Predatory animals like dogs or cats rarely evoke a
thanatophobic response and in fact serve the opposite
purpose, for their subservience as pets reinforces
humans’ biological supremacy). A spider, a predatory
usurper in the most structured and controlled of human
niches, can trigger the terrifying and inescapable
premonition that death cannot be vanquished after
all—that death, not people with their delusions of invulnerability, reigns supreme. Given the psychological
stakes of exposing the fraudulence of the shadow, the
modus operandi of the average person who encounters a
spider, or a less predatory but no less hapless pest, is to
kill the animal by any means necessary. Then the
shadow is appeased and the person can return to his or
her default state of death-denying hubris.
Pest extermination doesn’t seek to transfer the
animal victim into the domain of human property, but
rather to purify property of the animal victim. The pestkiller claims the life of the victim in order to affirm his
or her own exclusive proprietorship over the infested
real estate. Like every other type of appropriation, the
killing of pests fixes the notion of property in nature’s
predatory template, a fact easy to miss because human
hegemony over the environment has to be extensive
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before the label of “pest” can even arise. Since the
domesticated niche into which the pest intrudes is so
indelibly marked with the “goodness” of human design,
the pest is imagined as an evil presence who wrecks the
sanctity of property. The human masters of civilized
spaces tend to slip into the mindset of holy crusaders
when confronted with pests’ apparent iniquity.
In his short story “The Crows of Mephistopheles,”
the Irish author George Fitzmaurice weaves the
crusader mentality of the main characters Michael and
Ellen, husband-and-wife farmers, after a murder of
crows (the ironic name for a group of the birds) descends upon their leased property. The flustered farmers
complain to their landlord, who comes with his rifle to
wreak havoc on the birds. The narrator captures the
aftermath of the carnage with the gravity of a parable:
[Michael] went into the garden, and lo! he beheld
crows stark dead in several directions. He gathered
them into a heap, and, uttering the strangest of
cries, he rushed to the corner of the garden and
shouted frantically for Ellen. Solemnly did he lead
her by the hand to the heap of dead crows, and by
one accord they threw themselves into one
another’s arms, and wept tears of surging joy over
the bodies of their fallen persecutors.34
In their own minds, Michael and Ellen have been the
victims of a Biblical plague, albeit one of the Devil’s
design instead of the handiwork of the Old Testament
God. They are just simple, pious people trying to make
an honest living, and then to be tormented by these vile
creatures! Any sense of the imperfection of life, of their
own fallibility, is furthest from their consciousness.
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Their very future, their livelihood and their legacy, has
been beleaguered by the nattering birds, many of whom
now lie dead. The catharsis of this scene is almost
palpable; Michael’s otherworldly cry is evidence enough
of that. The shadow—the safeguard of the righteousness of violence against animals—has ensured that the
farmers, paragons of virtue, have been rid of their evil
foes. The true brilliance of the scene is its equally
palpable irony. The religious tone of the language is the
narrator’s way of mocking the farmers’ fulsome
response to the crows’ demise. In these climactic lines,
the weight of sinfulness, of moral blame, shifts sharply
from the avian world to the human one.
Pests can’t seem to catch a break from environmentalists either. To take nothing away from the merits
and successes of environmentalism, the movement has
a powerful undercurrent of reactionary Romanticism
aimed more at attacking modernity than at dispelling
the delusional bases of animal victimization. Zoocide
and environmentalism are not necessarily mutually
exclusive. Environmentalists are often the standardbearers of one particular type of animal victimization:
cleansing wild environments of non-native “pests” in
order to restore those environments to their prelapsarian (i.e., pre-modern) Edenic glory.35 American
environmentalism in particular commonly paints an
image of technology as the “machine in the garden,”36
without appreciating the implications for pests of
idealizing the natural world as a garden.
This neo-Edenic trend has a clear lineage in
American environmentalism all the way from Henry
David Thoreau to Rachel Carson. Thoreau’s sojourn at
Walden Pond was essentially an exercise in glorified
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gardening, during which he gave vent to murderous
outrage against pests. “[O]nce I went so far as to
slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean-field—
effect his transmigration, as a Tartar would say.”37
Although Thoreau can be commended for the rarity of
such violent outbursts, he still faults the woodchuck
(the ravager) for bringing about his own demise. And
Thoreau’s flippant aside about transmigration is his
romanticized way of dispatching his guilt.
Rachel Carson was likewise no stalwart enemy of
lethal pest control. Her main concern was the selectivity
of the pesticidal measures. In a speech to The Garden
Club of America, the perfect venue for her to promote
her views on pest control, Carson told the audience, “We
differ from the promoters of biocides chiefly in the
means we advocate, rather than the end to be attained.”38
She furthermore devoted space in Silent Spring to the
advocacy of “male annihilation” as a means of fruit-fly
control.39 Carson’s solicitude about the lives of scuttering, fluttering pest species was erratic at best, in
contrast to her steadfast advocacy for the lives of
animals higher up the food chain—above all, her
beloved birds and the crucial selling point of Silent
Spring, human beings. Carson might never have raised
her pen in ire had it not been for the threatened loss of
bird species to pesticides and the ensuing springtime
mornings “strangely silent where once they were filled
with the beauty of bird song.”40
For a modern scientific mind, Carson was
unorthodox in her holistic, relatively animal-friendly
approach to pest control. The Age of Reason has had a
brutal track record of loosing the juggernaut of science
against stigmatized animals. Carson’s scientific foil in
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the dominant Enlightenment paradigm would have to
be Eleanor Ormerod, a 19th-century pioneer in the field
of “economic entomology,” the chief goal of which was
(and is) eradicating the six-legged foes of economic
progress. A rare woman in a field of masculine calculation, Ormerod was a curious enough specimen that
Virginia Woolf devoted a wry life study to the lady entomologist. The ever-sapient Woolf observed in Ormerod’s
persona “a touch of acidity natural to one whose investigations have all tended to the discredit of the insect
race.”41
Ormerod didn’t exclusively discriminate against
insects. What made her the perfect foil to Rachel Carson
was the special place in her pest-averse heart for house
sparrows. Her conviction that sparrows were inveterate
pests inspired her to flout the birds’ hallowed image in
English domestic iconography; she tried to turn this
iconography on its head through appeals to English
patriotic and patriarchal sensibilities. She borrowed a
familiar mantra for the crusade against sparrows’
“depredations”: “I quite think that the farmers’ motto
should be that of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo —
‘Up, lads, and at ’em!’”42 Ironically enough, had Ormerod
been born on the home soil of Wellington’s adversary,
she could just as convincingly have fashioned herself the
Joan d’Arc of pest control.
Ormerod wasn’t merely upset about being typecast as a weak-minded female scientist; she was also
indignant that many entomologists looked down upon
her nakedly economic agenda. As we saw in the chapter
on speculation, her indignation was warranted, even if
her obloquies against animals were not. Natural science
has hoisted itself upon a foundation of economic utility,
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while heaping scorn upon the applied research of
“mercenary” scientists. Knowledge is power, and the
knowledge of natural science translates into the power
of capital enterprise. The truth of the equation between
scientific knowledge and capital enterprise is borne out
in the readiness with which the pioneers of natural
science have killed animals—not just in the laboratory,
but in the creatures’ native habitats. Scientific appropriation of animal life is a classic Faustian bargain made by
field researchers, save for one crucial imbalance: in this
bargain, the scientists get their fill of knowledge and the
animals get the devil’s due.
John James Audubon was one such Faustian
wheeler-dealer. He loved to draw and study birds, but
on numerous occasions he also loved to kill them. Lest
the reader of The Birds of America be lulled into thinking
that its author was motivated to kill animals by scientific expediency alone, Audubon offers up a passage like
this one where he describes his visit to an island puffin
colony:
[O]n every crag or stone stood a Puffin, at the
entrance of each hole [burrow] another, and yet the
sea was covered and the air filled by them. I had two
double-barrelled guns and two sailors to assist me;
and I shot for one hour by my watch, always firing
at a single bird on wing. How many Puffins I killed
in that time I take the liberty of leaving you to
guess.43
Note the similarity between Audubon’s rhetoric and
that of Henry Morton Stanley, the colonial agent of
Africa’s “heart of darkness,” who coyly boasted that he
had “no occasion to boast” of all the game he killed on a
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hunting spree. Audubon comes across in this excerpt
not as a meticulous chronicler of avian life, but as a
blood-crazed nimrod. He is an agent of environmental
imperialism whose trigger finger gets itchier and itchier
the more puffins he sees. In short order he caves to his
acquisitive impulse to carve out his own colonial mark
on the puffins’ breeding colony, unsatisfied until he has
fatally breached the pulullating activity of the island
with his own scientific crusade.
On the same grounds of scientific imperialism,
Charles Darwin had a vulpine connection to Meriwether
Lewis—namely, a memorable encounter with a fox.
While bivouacking around the Chiloé archipelago off the
Chilean coast, a part of his voyage with the survey
officers of the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin alighted on the
island of San Pedro. There he spied a vulpine “gentleman” whom he hastened to acquaint with inter-species
hospitality:
A fox (Canis fulvipes), of a kind said to be peculiar to
the island, and very rare in it, and which is a new
species, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently
absorbed in watching the work of the officers, that
I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock
him on the head with my geological hammer. This
fox, more curious or more scientific, but less wise,
than the generality of his brethren, is now mounted
in the museum of the Zoological Society.44
Darwin had been nicknamed “that damned flycatcher”
by the Beagle’s droll first lieutenant,45 and the flycatcher
apparently was no slouch at catching foxes either. By
bludgeoning the fox with brio, Darwin made it clear
whose evolutionary fitness was more durable and whose
153
survival more deserving. He even had the nerve to mock
the fox’s fitness for survival by the genus’s own
benchmark, which from his tone presumably lay well
below that of humankind to begin with. Someone with
the faintest glimmer of conservationist spirit might
suppose the rarity of the fox to have militated against
Darwin’s zoocidal act. That someone would be sadly
mistaken. Darwin was on a fervent mission of scientific
appropriation which he knew would change the world.
That said, Darwin’s lethal methods against the
animal kingdom underscored how his theory of evolution was not entirely a revolutionary break with the
past, either paradigmatically or personally. As a young
man, Darwin had been an avid hunter, of birds in
particular. He vividly recalled in his autobiography,
“How I did enjoy shooting!”46 As a mature scientist, he
applied the same enthusiasm for appropriation to
collecting zoological specimens. The father of evolutionary theory built his ultra-modern paradigm on the same
“will to predation,” the same biological Lex talionis, that
has served for eons as the unwritten law of human
evolutionary development. The indisputable scientific
legitimacy of Darwinism is not the issue here. The issue
is that the biological fact of evolution, in the infancy of
its discovery, became an accessory to the psychological
fiction of regeneration through violence.
Were Darwin a filmmaker in today’s edutainment business, he would probably make nature documentaries with all the stylings of predation porn, the
sensational depictions of nature red in fang and claw.
Viewers are drawn (“sutured,” to use a film-studies
term) to shots of predation porn because these shots
tighten the unconscious ligature between the com154
pensatory drives of the human beast of prey (Man the
Hunter) and our basal fears of fleshly weakness (Man
the Hunted).47 There is a lot more going on psychologically with predation porn than inter-species Schadenfreude. It is a vehicle for promoting the “truth” of the
shadow economy against the backdrop of nature’s
evolutionary battlefield. Despite its explicit focus on the
animal kingdom, predation porn makes human zoocidal
behavior an existential necessity, an automatic choice
in a universe of kill or be killed. To cast a critical eye on
predation porn is not to propose that the camera
somehow lies, but to expose the anthropocentric symbolism of the genre’s productions. The whole aim of
predation porn is to reassure the spectator that the
precept of regenerative killing—the holiest law of the
shadow—is sunk into the immortal ground of nature.
The most successful nature documentaries, like
the joint Disney/BBC blockbuster “earth” [sic],48 use
segments of predation porn to appeal to the viewers’
shadow side. These segments turn acts of killing into
holy affairs. Right before one of the pivotal scenes in
“earth,” a cheetah running down a Thompson’s gazelle,
narrator James Earl Jones gravely intones, “Every day
on wide open plains the world over, a timeless ritual
plays itself out: the drama of hunter and hunted.” The
film proceeds to open up the temple of nature before
our eyes and ears, inviting us to mingle in the sacred
ritual of predation, all the while pretending that this
ritual cradles a truth lost to civilization. A camera shot
of a cheetah morphs into the rainbow arc of a (synthetic) lens flare, before the entire screen is filled with
blinding white light. The viewer has vaulted straight
across the spectral threshold into nature’s temple,
155
where the purity of heaven and the bloodshed of earth
have become one. Now the viewer is ready, psychologically and emotionally cleansed, to join the chase. As the
cheetah closes in on his stumbling prey in exacting slow
motion, a woman’s ethereal voice accompanies him with
a lilting tonal incantation, a wordless religious chant.
Finally, the cheetah clamps his jaws onto the gazelle’s
neck, and the parable has drawn to a poignant close.
Back in his or her own world of leather and meat, the
viewer can feel a little more self-righteous.
Then there is the sub-genre of predation porn
that drops any pretense of moral neutrality: hunting
porn. With its gut-churning, blood-spatter-loving
sensationalism, hunting porn is unafraid to embrace the
shadow side of human behavior and the role of animals
as “grave pawns.” Hunting porn doesn’t try to disguise
its savage purpose behind the usual euphemistic justifications of zoocide. If the killing of innocuous prey
animals like deer and rabbits is too blasé, which it often
is for hunting porn aficionados, then a menagerie of
fearsome critters awaits on the screen. The blurb for the
TV show “Dangerous Game” spells out the classic
scenario of the sub-genre:
Enter a world where the hunter becomes the hunted
. . . a place where the only life insurance worth a
damn is a hunter’s ability to place a bullet into the
boiler room of danger when it comes calling.49
This metaphor-challenged blurb is a miniature manifesto of the psychological roots of zoocide. Hunting
porn offers a basic blueprint of the appropriation of
animal life, of humans killing animals to abjure mortal
peril. But what makes hunting porn toxic to moral and
156
intellectual value is its brutal flight from the irrationality of its unconscious sources. Reveling in tooth-andclaw verismo, hunting porn violently denies the
possibility that its origins are psychological. Shows like
“Dangerous Game” spew across the screen the purified,
glorified projection of the shadow onto the natural
world—of a deadly human madness declaring itself the
soul of nature.
Nature documentaries with the widest vision
feature both predatory modes in equal measure, animalon-animal and human-on-animal. This approach does a
better prima-facie job of validating human predation
than hunting porn does, because it folds the anthropocentrism of hunting porn into the texture of scientific
naturalism. Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s film The Silent
World (1956), which won the Academy Award for Best
Documentary, is a masterpiece of this inclusive
methodology.50 The movie is a compendium of the
exploits of the crew of the “research” vessel Calypso
(research seems to be of distinctly less importance for
the crew than tormenting pelagic life). Two scenes in
the film stand out for their juxtaposition of death transcendence and animal victimization. In the first, a diver
named Laban has been hunting lobsters in the nooks
and crannies of an undersea cliff, yanking them antennaefirst from their hiding places, when he begins to suffer
from the rapture of the deep. He rises too quickly to the
surface and the bends set in. Back aboard the Calypso,
Laban is placed in a hyperbaric chamber he mordantly
calls his “coffin.” While he lies supine in his coffin, the
rest of the crew gorge themselves on the lobsters in the
Calypso’s messroom. A kind of carnal nepenthe, the
flesh of their crustacean prey has made the other crew
157
members oblivious to the life-threatening danger Laban
has just encountered, danger they all encounter on a
regular basis. Even the doctor assigned to watch Laban
cannot resist the spoils of appropriation: he perches
atop Laban’s hyperbaric coffin with a plate of lobster on
his lap.
The second scene is by far the film’s most
notorious, in which the Calypso’s crew “accidentally”—
if the fulfillment of a secret wish can be called an
accident—runs over a baby sperm whale. The boat’s
propellers carve deep gashes in the flesh of the
miniature Moby-Dick, whom the crew proceeds to
harpoon and finish off with a rifle. Much to the crew’s
feigned dismay, a large number of sharks appear in
order to feast upon the dead whale’s body. Cousteau
narrates his crewmates’ response to this outrage upon
their hypocritical sense of fair play:
For us divers, sharks are mortal enemies . . . After
what we have seen [of the sharks’ feasting], the
divers can’t be held back. They grab gaffes, hooks,
anything they can, to avenge the whale.
The divers embark on a no-holds-barred shark killing
frenzy, their arrogance so blinding they ignore the
affront to the whale of being run over, harpooned, and
shot. By dispatching their squaloid enemies, they also
assert their invulnerable, death-denying position at the
top of the predatory hierarchy. The Calypso’s crew
proves that the title of the movie is indeed an apt one.
The only perspectives, the only voices, that carry any
moral value in The Silent World are those of the human
victimizers.
158
An avid bug killer, the adolescent Carl Jung
heeded his own Calypso-call of animal victimization. He
considered the flora of his Swiss canton his personal
Edenic territory, and couldn’t bear the sight of bugs
menacing his verdant paradise. Jung thus became a selfstyled avenger of botanical life, wreaking havoc on the
myriad insects who “busied themselves preying on
plants.”51 With the retributive justice of a monotheistic
god, he was a law-giver and a life-taker for the tiny
animals who munched on his prized greenery: “Because
of this unlawful activity they were condemned to mass
executions, June bugs and caterpillars being the especial
targets of such punitive expeditions.”52
Later in life, on a meditative expedition to Africa,
Jung re-discovered his heart of darkness. One morning
on a train to Nairobi, he awoke to see above the tracks a
native hunter with an imposing spear. The experience
was a jolt to Jung’s consciousness:
I was enchanted by this sight—it was a picture of
something utterly alien and outside my experience,
but on the other hand a most intense sentiment du
déjà vu. . . . I could not guess what string within
myself was plucked at the sight of that solitary dark
hunter. I knew only that his world had been mine
for countless millennia.53
The string plucked within Jung was his individual strand
of the collective shadow. Which begs the question: Why
couldn’t Jung, as far as animal victimization was concerned, open his gimlet eyes to his servility to the
collective shadow? The short answer: Because his
psychological resistance was too strong. He relied
enormously in his everyday life on the victimization of
159
animals, from his beloved leather-bound books to his
culinary preferences. A case in point—the “excellent
mutton chops”54 he ate in Uganda on the same African
expedition. If Jung had such an overpowering,
pathological resistance to even recognizing his shadow
side, to say nothing of overcoming it, then poor indeed
are the chances for the rest of us. This book is my
attempt to improve those odds, for our sake and for the
animals’ sake.
160
REFERENCES
Epigraph
1. Jung, Carl, The Red Book: Liber Novus (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2009), Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, Translated by
Mark Kyburz, p. 266.
Introduction
1. For a compelling paradigm of ritual-economic behavior, see
McAnany, Patricia and Wells, E. Christian, “Toward a
Theory of Ritual Economy,” pp. 1-16 in Dimensions of Ritual
Economy (Bingley, UK: Emerald/JAI, 2008), Edited by
Patricia McAnany and E. Christian Wells.
2. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.
Volume 9, Part II, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), Translated
by R.F.C. Hull, p. 8.
3. Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press,
1975), p. 26.
4. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Volume
9, Part I, Collected Works, p. 284.
5. Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays
1959-1987 (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007), p. 48.
6. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy. Volume 12, Collected Works,
p. 234.
7. Jung, Aion, p. 9.
8. James, Wendy, The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of
Anthropology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
p. 235.
9. Shukin, Nicole, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical
Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
10. Becker, Escape from Evil (New York: Free Press, 1975),
p. 106.
11. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings
161
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Edited by
Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, Translated by Ronald
Speirs, p. 100.
12. Christman, Jared, “The Gilgamesh Complex: The Quest for
Death Transcendence and the Killing of Animals.” Society &
Animals, 2008, 16(4): 297-315.
13. Jacobi, Jolande, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology
of C.G. Jung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959),
Translated by Ralph Manheim, p. 149. The operative
chapter is “The Dream of the Bad Animal,” pp. 139-189.
14. See Evans-Pritchard, E.E., “The Sacrificial Role of Cattle
among the Nuer.” Africa: Journal of the International African
Institute, 1953, 23(3): 181-198.
15. Fromm, Erich, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil
(New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 33.
16. This is an allusion to Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Edited by C.
Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, Translated by Sylvia Walsh.
17. Shakespeare, William, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series:
King Lear (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons,
1997), Edited by R.A. Foakes, p. 306.
18. Bloch, Maurice, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious
Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
p. 101.
19. An exemplary statement of this model is Hart, Donna and
Sussman, Robert, Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and
Human Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009).
20. Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient
Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983), Translated by Peter Bing, p. 18.
21. See Bloch, Prey into Hunter, pp. 1-7.
22. The main conceptualization of the latter identity resides in
Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in
Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
23. Hodgson, Bryan, “Reindeer Harvest: Ritual of Love and
Death on the Tundra.” National Geographic, 1994, 185(4):
62-67.
162
24. Turner, Victor, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu
Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967). Turner
discusses chishing’a-related rites on pp. 284-298.
25. Shepard, Paul, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998), p. 219.
26. Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), Translated by David Wills, p. 45.
Chapter One
1. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Notebooks for an Ethics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), Translated by David
Pellauer, p. 175.
2. A comprehensive source for this and other Athenian
zoocidal rites is Rosivach, Vincent, The System of Public
Sacrifice in Fourth-Century Athens (Atlanta: Scholars Press,
1994).
3. Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977), Translated by Patrick
Gregory.
4. Talbot, Percy, Some Nigerian Fertility Cults (London: Frank
Cass and Company, 1967), p. 99.
5. Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1988), Edited by Mark Poster, p. 120.
6. For a study of the historical and cultural context of the
latter, see Marinatos, Nanno, Minoan Sacrificial Ritual: Cult
Practice and Symbolism (Philadelphia: Coronet Books, 1986).
7. Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York:
Signet Classic, 1998), Edited by Helen Vendler, p. 60.
8. Campbell, Joseph, The Masks of God (New York: Penguin,
1991), p. 175.
9. Konagaya, Yuki, “The Mongolian Perspective on Animal
Resources: Analyzing the Ritual of Slaughter,” pp. 273-278
in Circumpolar Animism and Shamanism (Sapporo: Hokkaido
University Press, 1997), Edited by T. Yamada and T. Irimoto,
p. 275.
163
10. Camporesi, Piero, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic
Significance of Blood (New York: Continuum, 1995),
Translated by Robert Barr, p. 107.
11. Ibid., p. 102.
12. Winter, Edward, “The Slaughter of a Bull: A Study of
Cosmology and Ritual,” pp. 101-110 in Process and Pattern
in Culture: Essays in Honor of Julian H. Steward (Chicago:
Aldine, 1964), Edited by Robert Manners.
13. Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 19271939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985),
Translated and edited by Alan Stoekl, p. 123. The most
pertinent chapter for the ritualism of the slaughterhouse is
“The Notion of Expenditure,” pp. 116-129.
14. Evans-Pritchard, “The Sacrificial Role of Cattle among the
Nuer,” p. 192. (See note #12 of Introduction).
15. Girard, René, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), Translated
by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, pp. 69, 70.
16. Smith, Jonathan, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of
Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 149.
17. Bataille, “Slaughterhouse,” pp. 72-73 in Encyclopaedia
Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related
Texts (London: Atlas Press, 1995), Edited by Georges
Bataille, Translated by Iain White, p. 73.
18. Agee, James, “A Mother’s Tale,” pp. 221-243 in The Collected
Short Prose of James Agee (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972),
Edited by Robert Fitzgerald, pp. 234-235.
19. Blood of the Beasts, Directed by Georges Franju.
Supplemental feature on Eyes without a Face (Criterion,
2004, DVD). A superb disquisition on the film’s imagery is
Sloniowski, Jeannette, “‘It Was an Atrocious Film’: Georges
Franju’s Blood of the Beasts,” pp. 171-187 in Documenting the
Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), Edited by
Barry Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski.
20. Dreiser, “Our Red Slayer,” pp. 132-137 in The Color of a
Great City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996),
p. 135.
164
21. Fabre-Vassas, Claudine, The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians,
and the Pig (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999),
p. 143.
22. As quoted in Gitlis, Baruch, Cinema of Hate: Nazi Film in the
War against the Jews (Bnei-Brak, Israel: Alfa Communication,
1996), p. 184.
23. O’Brien, David, Animal Sacrifice and Religious Freedom:
Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2004), p. 166.
24. Jung, Carl, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York:
Vintage, 1989), Edited by Aniela Jaffé, Translated by
Richard and Clara Winston, p. 15.
Chapter Two
1. Cicero, Marcus Tullius, On Old Age/On Friendship/On
Divination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1959), Translated by William Falconer, p. 223. Cicero’s
treatise is a staunchly skeptical, even fleering, treatment of
its subject.
2. Ibid., p. 353.
3. Cooper, John, “Scapulimancy,” pp. 29-43 in Essays in Anthropology: Presented to A.L. Kroeber in Celebration of his Sixtieth
Birthday, June 11, 1936 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1936), Edited by Robert Lowie, p. 31.
4. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 233.
5. Ibid., p. 327.
6. A top-notch study of the genealogy of financial speculation,
which broaches its chiliastic dimensions, is Chancellor,
Edward, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial
Speculation (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2000).
7. Guerrini, Anita, Experimenting with Humans and Animals:
From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003), p. 51.
8. Baudrillard, Jean, Screened Out (London: Verso, 2002),
Translated by Chris Turner, p. 25.
9. Beyond the cliché, I am referring here to the claims of Bob
Torres’ book Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal
165
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Rights (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007). For the book’s
commentary on vivisection, see pp. 49-56.
Quoted in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 239.
Bernard, Claude, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental
Medicine (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1957),
Translated by Henry Greene, p. 15.
Ibid., pp. 152-153.
In his book In Search of Frankenstein (Boston: New York
Graphic Society, 1975), Radu Florescu has written an
intriguing study of Dippel’s life story: “Castle Frankenstein
and the Alchemist Dippel,” pp. 65-93.
Dippel, Johann Konrad, Maladies and Remedies of the Life of
the Flesh [Kranckheit und Artzney des animalischen Lebens]
(Frankfurt: Verlegts Johann Leopold Montag, 1736),
pp. 195, 196. Many thanks to Ryan Montcalm and Carol
Mueller for their assistance with the translation of the
Dippel material in German.
Ibid., pp. 196-197.
The intertwined texts are Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976), Edited by Edwin
Cannan; and Cuvier, Georges, An Introduction to the Study of
the Animal Economy (Edinburgh: Ross and Blackwood &
Longman and Rees, 1801), Translated by John Allen.
Cuvier, An Introduction to the Study of the Animal Economy,
p. 6.
Kotzwinkle, William, Doctor Rat (New York: Knopf, 1976),
p. 35.
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid., p. 37.
An overview of the Botox animal-testing issue can be found
in a Humane Society of the United States article: “Dark Side
of Beauty: BOTOX Kills Animals” (5 May 2008, http://www.
hsus.org/animals_in_research/animal_testing/hsusprojects/the_beauty_myth_botox_kills_animals). The
Washington Post has also covered the controversy: Gaul,
Gilbert, “In U.S., Few Alternatives to Testing on Animals”
(12 April 2008: A01).
166
22. The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, Volume 22: Doctors’
Delusions/Crude Criminology/Sham Education (New York:
W.H. Wise & Company, 1932), p. 141.
23. Steinbeck, John, “The Snake,” pp. 73-86 in The Long Valley
(New York: Viking Press, 1938), p. 73.
24. Ibid., p. 83.
25. Ibid., p. 78.
26. Ibid., p. 81.
27. Ibid., p. 78.
28. Jung, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), Edited
by Claire Douglas, p. 268.
29. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation
and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. Volume 14,
Collected Works, p. 228.
30. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 322.
31. Steinbeck, “The Snake,” p. 80.
32. Ibid., p. 81.
33. Wells, H.G., The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Barnes &
Noble, 2004), p. 68.
34. Ibid., p. 72.
35. Ibid., p. 68.
36. Ibid., p. 72.
37. Ibid., p. 11.
38. Ibid., p. 53.
39. Ibid., p. 71.
40. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 101.
Chapter Three
1. Becker, The Denial of Death, p. 89.
2. The meanings, implications, and applications of this term
are explored in Ritzer, George, The McDonaldization of
Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of
Contemporary Social Life (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge
Press, 1993).
3. Here and elsewhere, I am using the terms Gesellschaft and
Gemeinschaft in the sociological manner inspired by Tönnies,
167
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Ferdinand, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), Translated by Jose
Harris and Margaret Hollis.
See especially Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on
General Economy, Volume I—Consumption (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), Translated by Robert Hurley.
Bataille, Theory of Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1989),
Translated by Robert Hurley, p. 94.
Douglas, Mary, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 25.
Perry, John and Pleshakov, Constantine, The Flight of the
Romanovs: A Family Saga (New York: Basic Books, 1999),
p. 94. The meat-sparked insurrection aboard the ship and
its larger revolutionary-symbolic ramifications are a crucial
element of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin
(Kino International, 2007, DVD).
Stanford, “The Ape’s Gift,” pp. 95-118 in Tree of Origin:
What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social
Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002),
Edited by Frans de Waal, p. 110. Italics are the author’s.
Ibid., p. 109.
Goodall, Jane, In the Shadow of Man (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1988), p. 205.
Stanford, “The Ape’s Gift,” pp. 116, 117.
Mead, Margaret, The Mountain Arapesh (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 2002), p. 82.
Ibid.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Edited by
Richard Lee and Richard Daly, p. 7.
Boas, Franz, “Ethnology of the Kwakiutl.” Annual Report of
the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1913/1914 (1921),
35(Part I): 41-794, pp. 458, 459.
Ibid., p. 461.
Weber, Max, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,”
pp. 267-301 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New
York: Routledge, 2007), Edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills, p. 282.
168
18. Ibid.
19. Rosivach, The System of Public Sacrifice in Fourth-Century
Athens, p. 117. (See note #2 of Chapter One).
20. Simmel, Georg, “Sociology of the Meal,” pp. 130-136 in
Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (London: Sage, 1997),
Edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, p. 133.
21. Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology
(London: Pelican Books, 1973). Nick Fiddes has applied
Douglas’ paradigm to the institutions and practices of
human carnivory in Meat: A Natural Symbol (London:
Routledge, 1991).
22. Petronius, The Satyricon (New York: Meridian, 1994),
Translated by William Arrowsmith, p. 56.
23. Ibid., p. 49.
24. Ibid., p. 45.
25. Ibid., p. 84.
26. Quoted in Licht, Meg, “Elysium: A Prelude to Renaissance
Theater.” Renaissance Quarterly, 1996, 49(1): 1-29, p. 25.
27. This is an allusion to Girard, Things Hidden Since the
Foundation of the World.
28. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 128.
29. Jung, Visions, p. 628.
30. Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 1:
Civilization, Politics, and Religion (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), Edited by Raghavan Iyer, p. 225.
31. Jung, Aion, p. 152.
32. As referenced in Read, Bernard, Chinese Materia Medica:
Insect Drugs/Dragon and Snake Drugs/Fish Drugs (Taipei:
Southern Materials Center, 1977), p. 39.
33. Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China: English
Edition, Volume I (Beijing: Chemical Industry Press, 2000),
p. 14.
34. Ibid.
35. http://www.evolence.com/us/about-evolence-us.jsp.
36. A trenchant article on Evolence that suggests the paradox of
its origins is Bryan, Meredith, “Trayf Chic! Pig-Derived
‘Evolence’ Freshens City Faces.” New York Observer, 10
March 2009 (http://www.observer.com/2009/style/
169
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
trayf-chic-pig-derived-‘evolence’-freshens-city-faces).
Ruscelli, Girolamo, The Secrets of Alexis: Newly Corrected and
Amended (London: William Stansby, 1615), p. 144.
Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in
1934-1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1988), Edited by James Jarrett, p. 607.
Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health (Tempe, AZ:
Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998), Translated
by Mary Ella Milham, p. 229.
Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme, The Physiology of Taste; or,
Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (New York:
Heritage Press, 1949), Translated by M.F.K. Fisher, p. 67.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 67.
Atkins, Robert, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (New York:
HarperCollins, 2002), p. 228.
Marshall, John, “Trustees of Dartmouth College v.
Woodward (Majority Opinion),” pp. 87-105 in American
Economic Policy from the Revolution to the New Deal (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007), Edited by William
Letwin, pp. 94-95.
The incorporation of the animal victim adds a carnal twist
to the thesis of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1991).
Jones, Philip, The Butchers of London: A History of the
Worshipful Company of Butchers of the City of London
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), p. 33.
Quoted in Arnold, Walter, The Life and Death of the Sublime
Society of Beef Steaks (London: Bradbury, Evans, & Co.,
1871), p. 45.
The presidential pardon of the Thanksgiving turkey is an
inverted version of a very common ritual in traditional royal
societies, the kingship sacrifice. Compare the pardon, for
example, with the “firstfruits” sacrifice of the Hawaiian king,
as discussed in Valeri, Valerio, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual
and Society in Ancient Hawaii (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1985), Translated by Paula Wissing. Valeri
170
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
reveals how animal victims “are made available for material
use after they have been freed of their symbolic content by
firstfruits rites” (p. 75).
The pardon therefore performs the same basic function as
the scapegoating sacrifice theorized by Girard in Violence
and the Sacred, although instead of one special victim being
scapegoated, every animal except for one special non-victim is
scapegoated.
Davis, Karen, More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth,
Ritual, and Reality (New York: Lantern Books, 2001), p. 148.
Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Raw and the Cooked (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1983), Translated by John and
Doreen Weightman, p. 293.
Ibid., p. 312.
Boteler, Alexander, My Ride to the Barbecue; or, Revolutionary
Reminiscences of the Old Dominion (New York: S.A. Rollo,
1860), p. 19.
See note #20, above.
Updike, John, The Early Stories, 1953-1975 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 414. The story in question is on
pp. 411-415.
Eric Schlosser broaches this phenomenon in Fast Food
Nation (New York: Harper, 2002). Chapter Five, “Why the
Fries Taste Good” (pp. 111-132), gives copious and rather
disturbing details about industrialized alchemy in the fastfood business.
Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 463.
Jung, Visions, p. 244.
Eliade, Mircea, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From
the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1981), Translated by Willard
Trask, p. 26.
Jung, Letters, Volume 2: 1951-1961 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1973), Edited by Gerhard Adler,
Translated by R.F.C. Hull, p. 166, footnote #11. Jung is
speaking in general here of the bridge motif, of which the
arch is an especially sacred form.
171
61. Lindow, John, Handbook of Norse Mythology (Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001), pp. 80-81, 142-143.
62. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 9.
63. Ibid., p. 10.
64. Ibid.
Chapter Four
1. Lukács, “The Phenomenon of Reification,” pp. 83-110 in
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972), Translated by
Rodney Livingstone.
2. Jung, Visions, p. 1278.
3. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
(St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), Translated by Charles
Levin, p. 101.
4. Freud, Sigmund, “Fetishism,” pp. 204-209 in Sexuality and
the Psychology of Love (New York: Touchstone, 1997),
Translated by Joan Riviere.
5. Conard, Nicholas, “A Female Figurine from the Basal
Aurignacian of Hohle Fells Cave in Southwestern Germany.”
Nature, 14 May 2009, 459: 248-252, p. 250.
6. Ibid.
7. Ovid, Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), Translated by A.D. Melville, p. 232.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 234.
10. Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection (London:
Penguin, 2004), Translated by John Healy, p. 137.
11. Ibid.
12. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 201.
13. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. A Contribution to the
History of the Evolution of Thought. Supplement B of The
Collected Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001), Translated by Beatrice Hinkle, p. 387.
172
14. Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005),
Translated by Willard Trask.
15. Wanscher, Ole, Sella Curulis, the Folding Stool: An Ancient
Symbol of Dignity (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1980),
p. 138.
16. Honour, Hugh, “European Ivory Carvings,” pp. 129-139 in
The Concise Encyclopedia of Antiques, Volume Four (New York:
Hawthorn Books, 1959), Edited by L.G.G. Ramsey,
p. 131.
17. Ibid., p. 136.
18. Quoted in Bharati, Agehananda, The Tantric Tradition
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 249.
19. Encyclopaedia of the Hindu World (New Delhi: Concept
Publishing, 1992), Edited by Ganga Ram Garg, Volume III,
p. 683.
20. I am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta (Durham, NC: Acorn
Press, 1992), Edited by Sudhaker Dikshit, Translated by
Maurice Frydman, pp. 149-150.
21. Burland, C.A., Montezuma: Lord of the Aztecs (New York:
Putnam, 1973), p. 174.
22. Register of Edward the Black Prince, Preserved in the Public
Record Office, Prepared under the Superintendence of the
Deputy Keeper of the Records, Part IV (London: His Majesty’s
Stationery Office, 1933), pp. 324-325. Explanation of
obscure terms: A timber of fur is 40 skins; grys refers to the
grey squirrel; a pane is a rectangular preparation of fur
consisting of individual skins stitched together; pured skins
have had any off-color portions pared away.
23. Newton, Stella Mary, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A
Study of the Years 1340-1365 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1980), p. 34.
24. Ibid., p. 19.
25. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New
York: Vintage Books, 1977), Translated by Ben Fowkes,
p. 169.
26. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 87.
27. Ibid., p. 89.
173
28. Dreiser, Theodore, The Financier (New York: Signet, 1981),
pp. 225-226.
29. Rothman, G., The Riddle of Cruelty (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1971), p. 121.
30. Mangan, Dan, “Lap of Larceny: Inside Bernie’s $7 Million
Digs.” New York Post, 9 September 2009 (http://www.
nypost.com/p/news/regional/lap_of_larceny_
AN9TpaE2tJP0LrfPkxundJ).
31. In “A Pyramid of Skulls,” the final chapter (pp. 517-565) of
his book Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the
American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2000), Richard Slotkin implies this idea of
a pyramid scheme of bloody victimization.
32. Mazrui, Ali Al’Amin, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1986), p. 89.
33. For further details on the enthroning arrangements of the
Baganda kings, consult pp. 97-98 in Kagwa, Apolo, The
Customs of the Baganda (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1934), Edited by May Edel, Translated by Ernest
Kalibala; for additional information on those of the Ashanti,
see “Stools, Skins, and Chairs,” pp. 11-28 in Kyerematen,
A.A.Y., Panoply of Ghana (London: Longmans, 1964).
34. Arnoldi, Mary Jo and Kreamer, Christine, Crowning Achievements: African Arts of Dressing the Head (Los Angeles: Fowler
Museum of Cultural History at the University of California,
1995), p. 17.
35. According to the entry “Ermine” in Cunnington, C. Willett,
Cunnington, Phillis, and Beard, Charles, A Dictionary of
English Costume (Philadelphia: Dufour Editions, 1960),
p. 254, “Powdering of ermine (the spots made from the
animal’s tail to distinguish royal from ordinary ermine)
began in the second half of [the] 14th c.”
36. Further details about the pedigree of the Grenadier hat can
be found in Keegan, John, “Inventing Military Traditions,”
pp. 58-75 in Warfare, Diplomacy, and Politics: Essays in Honor
of A.J.P. Taylor (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), Edited
by Chris Wrigley, pp. 71-72.
37. BBC Radio interview, 2 September 2008 (http://news.bbc.
174
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7593000/7593403.stm).
Vollmer, John, Silks for Thrones and Altars: Chinese Costumes
and Textiles (Paris: Myrna Myers, 2003), p. 113.
Rhodehamel, John and Schwartz, Thomas, The Last Best
Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America—
Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Huntington Library, October
1993 to August 1994 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library,
1993), p. 18.
Donald, David Herbert, Lincoln (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1995), pp. 318, 576.
Henry Burrage debunks this myth in Gettysburg and Lincoln:
The Battle, the Cemetery, and the National Park (New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), pp. 99-100.
Vennum, Thomas, American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of
War (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008), p. 35.
Ibid., p. 38.
Homer, The Odyssey (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2007), Translated by Ian Johnston, p. 155. Harold
Arthur Harris quotes and discusses this excerpt (from
another translation of The Odyssey) in Sport in Greece and
Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 82.
Chapter III of his book, “Ball Games” (pp. 75-111), is one of
the best resources for the study of the phenomenological
meaning of the subject.
Some helpful information from the entry “ball” in Cuddon,
J.A., The International Dictionary of Sports and Games (New
York: Schocken Books, 1980), p. 80: Greek hand-balls “were
made by compressing hair or feathers into a covering of
skin. The covering or case consisted of panels called ‘leaves.’
According to Plato these were sometimes painted different
colours.” Homer’s poetry corroborates this chromatic
reference.
Without mentioning the deeper psychological and
ideological significance of leather, Paul Johnson intimates
the fetishism of the American sports trifecta, exemplified in
the talismans of Mark McGwire’s 1998 home-run
coronation: “The Fetish and McGwire’s Balls,” pp. 77-98 in
175
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Macon,
GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), Edited by Joseph Price.
Lincoln Financial Field is the home of the National Football
League’s Philadelphia Eagles.
Quoted in “Players 1, Cows 0.” Chicago Tribune, 14
December 2006 (http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2006/
dec/14/news/chi-0612140018dec14).
Cooper, Merian and Schoedsack, Ernest, King Kong—Two
Disc Special Edition (RKO Pictures/Turner Entertainment,
2005, DVD).
Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature
in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989),
p. 30.
Von Gunden, Kenneth, Flights of Fancy: The Great Fantasy
Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1989), p. 114.
Boss, Medard, Meaning and Content of Sexual Perversions: A
Daseinsanalytic Approach to the Psychopathology of the
Phenomenon of Love (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1949),
Translated by Liese Lewis Abell, pp. 41, 42, 44. Some
overlapping material from Boss’s study is also quoted in
Becker, The Denial of Death, pp. 235-236.
Ibid., p. 42.
Quoted in Schaeffer, Neil, The Marquis de Sade: A Life
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 57.
Ibid., pp. 58, 60.
Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations
(New York: Enigma Books, 2008), Edited by H.R. TrevorRoper, Translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens,
p. 475.
Riefenstahl, Leni, Triumph of the Will (Synapse Films, 2001,
DVD).
Fröchtling, Andrea, Exiled God and Exiled Peoples: Memoria
Passionis and the Perception of God during and after Apartheid
and Shoah (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002),
p. 230.
Walder, Loretta, “A Leather Pants Fetish.” Corrective
176
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
Psychiatry and Journal of Social Therapy, 1965, 11(1): 44-47.
All quotes are from page 46.
Williamson, Gordon, The SS: Hitler’s Instrument of Terror (St.
Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004), p. 32.
Schaeffer, The Marquis de Sade: A Life, p. 57.
“Contract between Wanda and Sacher-Masoch,” pp. 278279 (appended document) in Von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold
and Deleuze, Gilles, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty &
Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1991), Translated by
Jean McNeil, p. 278.
The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch (San Francisco,
CA: Re/Search Publications, 1990), Translated by Marian
Phillips, Laura Anders, Caroline Hebert, and Vivian Vale.
Some of her contemporaries attempted to cast aspersions
on the veracity of Sacher-Masoch’s Confessions. They did so
out of a misogynistic defense of her husband’s reputation
and of patriarchal institutions in general, thereby
perpetuating some of the trashy male-chauvinist imagery of
Venus in Furs. The drama of authorship and critical
reception surrounding the Confessions is explored in “‘But I
Wanted to Write an Honest Book’: The Confessions of Wanda
von Sacher-Masoch” (Chapter Four), pp. 140-174 in Gerstenberger, Katharina, Truth to Tell: German Women’s Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2000).
The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, p. 37.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 43.
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 202.
Ibid., p. 217.
Ibid., p. 219.
Ibid., p. 188.
Jung, “Hell,” pp. 288-290 in The Red Book: Liber Novus,
p. 289. (See Note of Epigraph).
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 181.
177
Chapter Five
1. A solid anthropological study of traditional appropriation
(primarily hunting) is Ingold, Tim, The Appropriation of
Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1987).
2. Spengler, Otto, Aphorisms (Chicago: Henry Regnery
Company, 1967), Translated by Gisela Koch-Weser O’Brien,
p. 34.
3. Washburn, Sherwood and Lancaster, Chet, “The Evolution
of Hunting,” pp. 293-303 in Man the Hunter: The First
Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human
Development—Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life
(Chicago: Aldine, 1968), Edited by Richard Lee and Irven
Devore, p. 300.
4. A dazzlingly large (folio-size) photograph of the Well scene
is in Aujoulat, Norbert, The Splendour of Lascaux: Rediscovering the Greatest Treasure of Prehistoric Art (London:
Thames & Hudson, 2005), Translated by Martin Street,
p. 161.
5. A rhinoceros also stands off to one side of the other figures;
I have decided not to analyze the rhino’s meaning because
he does not seem central to the significance of the main
circular cluster, and may in fact have been painted by a
different artist.
6. The conventional wisdom—that the man has shed his
mortal coil—is conveyed in a moniker for the part of the
cave in which the scene resides, The Shaft of the Dead Man.
7. This term is developed by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the
Machine, Volume One—Technics and Human Development
(New York: Harvest Books, 1971) and Volume Two—The
Pentagon of Power (New York: Harvest Books, 1974).
8. Mowat, Farley, Sea of Slaughter (Boston, MA: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1984).
9. Malinowski, Bronislaw, “Fishing in the Trobriand Islands.”
Man, 1918, 18: 87-92, p. 92.
10. Ortega y Gasset, José, Meditations on Hunting (New York:
Scribner, 1972), Translated by Howard Wescott, p. 129.
178
11. Hemingway, Ernest, Hemingway on Fishing (New York:
Lyons Press, 2000), Edited by Nick Lyons, p. 133.
12. Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Jonathan Cape,
1956).
13. Cintrón, Conchita, Memoirs of a Bullfighter (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1968), p. xiv.
14. Fiskesjö, Magnus, “Rising from Blood-Stained Fields: Royal
Hunting and State Formation in Shang China.” Bulletin of
the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 2001, 73: 48-191,
p. 160.
15. Ibid., p. 162.
16. For further information on the venationes, consult Kyle,
Donald, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), especially the section “Hunts and Beasts:
Conquests and Games,” pp. 264-269. Another superb source
is Toynbee, J.M.C., Animals in Roman Life and Art (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 15-23.
17. Cassius Dio Cocceianus, Lucius Claudius, Dio’s Roman
History, Volume VI (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917),
Translated by Earnest Cary, Book LIV, p. 351.
18. Ibid., Volume VII (1924), Book LIX, p. 279.
19. Ibid., Volume VIII (1925), Epitome of Book LXI, p. 53.
20. Ibid., Epitome of Book LXVI, p. 311.
21. Ibid., Epitome of Book LXVIII, p. 389.
22. Toynbee, Animals in Roman Life and Art, p. 22.
23. The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Volume 2: August
30, 1803-August 24, 1804 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1983), Edited by Gary Moulton and Thomas Dunlay,
p. 450.
24. Ibid., Volume 4: April 7-July 27, 1805, p. 227.
25. Ibid., pp. 114-115.
26. Ibid., p. 141.
27. Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (New York: Heritage
Press, 1969).
28. Stanley, Henry Morton, Stanley’s Despatches to the New York
Herald, 1871-1872, 1874-1877 (Boston: Boston University
Press, 1970), Edited by Norman Bennett, p. 68.
179
29. H.M. Stanley: Unpublished Letters (London: W. & R.
Chambers, 1957), Edited by Albert Maurice, p. 82.
30. Ibid., p. 93, footnote #3.
31. Tse-tung, Mao, “Speech Delivered at the Supreme State
Conference (Excerpts).” Selections from China Mainland
Magazines (Supplement), 2 April 1968, 21: 2-4, p. 2.
32. Alvarez, Al, Night: An Exploration of Night Life, Night
Language, Sleep and Dreams (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1996), p. 32.
33. For an example of this “limbic” theory, see Stevens,
Anthony and Price, John, Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New
Beginning (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 99-103.
34. Fitzmaurice, George, “The Crows of Mephistopheles,”
pp. 133-148 in The Crows of Mephistopheles and Other Stories
(Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970), Edited by Robert Hogan,
p. 148.
35. The Alaskan “Stop the Rats” campaign of an environmental
group consortium—including the Defenders of Wildlife, the
World Wildlife Fund, the Audubon Society, and the Nature
Conservancy—is a typical instance of this anti-pest impetus.
The most dire of the campaign’s rhetoric panders to the
basest human fears: “Stop Rats Before They Stop You!”
WWF’s Kamchatka/Bering Sea Ecoregion News, Winter 20062007, p. 17.
36. Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the
Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1964).
37. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden: 150th Anniversary Edition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), Edited by J.
Lyndon Shanley, p. 59.
38. Carson, Rachel, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel
Carson (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998), Edited by Linda
Lear, p. 213.
39. Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1962),
p. 252.
40. Ibid., p. 97.
41. Woolf, Virginia, “Lives of the Obscure: Miss Ormerod,”
180
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
pp. 122-133 in The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Edited by Andrew McNeillie,
p. 130.
Ormerod, Eleanor, “The House Sparrow,” pp. 47-57 in
Ornithology in Relation to Agriculture and Horticulture
(London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1893), Edited by John Watson,
p. 57.
The Complete Audubon, Volume IV: Birds of America &
Quadrupeds of North America (Kent, OH: Volair
Books/National Audubon Society, 1979), p. 239.
Darwin, Charles, The Voyage of the Beagle (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1962), p. 281.
Thomson, Keith Stewart, The Young Charles Darwin (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 143.
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882: With
Original Omissions Restored (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1958), Edited by Nora Barlow, p. 55.
Barbara Ehrenreich briefly delves into the sordid world of
predation porn on pp. 93-94 of Blood Rites: Origins and
History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
Fothergill, Alastair and Linfield, Mark, earth (Disneynature/
BBC, 2009, DVD).
http://www.versuscountry.com/hunting-and-fishing-tvshows/federal-premium-dangerous-game.aspx
Cousteau, Jacques, The Silent World [Le Monde du Silence/De
Stille Wereld] (Documentary Plus, 2004, DVD).
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 83.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 254, 255.
Ibid., p. 258.
181
INDEX
Accursed share (Georges
Bataille term), 63-64
Alchemy, 43-61, 78-84, 91-92
Algonquian (ethnic group), 41
Alvarez, Al (writer), 146-147
Anima, Jung’s theory of, 101
Animal capital (Nicole Shukin
term), 6
Animal economy, theory of,
49-51
Animal skins, 104-128 passim
Antaeus, as metaphor for
regenerative nature, 114
Anti-Semitism, shadow projection as basis of, 36-37
Arachnophobia, 145-147
Arapesh (ethnic group), 68-69
Archbishop of Ravenna, 103
Asclepius, staff of, 56
Atkins, Robert (diet guru),
83-84
Attis and Cybele, Roman cult
of, 29
Audubon, John James, 152-153
Auschwitz (Nazi death camp),
123
Ball games, as fetish rituals,
113-116
Banquet, as rite of incorporation, 70-75
Barbecue, 88-90
Bataille, Georges (philosopher),
see Accursed share; and
meaning of slaughterhouses,
33; and theory of expenditure, 30
182
Baudrillard, Jean (philosopher),
and idea of mythic reversibility, 24; and theory of
fetishism, 97, 101; and
theory of speculation, 45
Becker, Ernest (cultural
anthropologist), and theory
of death denial, 2-3, 8, 62;
and theory of evil, 10-11
Bernard, Claude (scientist),
46-47, 52
Bible, imagery and symbolism
of, 75, 127-128
Birds of America, The (John
James Audubon book),
152-153
Blood, symbolism of, 20-39
passim
Blood of the Beasts (Georges
Franju film), 34-35
Boas, Franz (anthropologist),
68-69
Bonnet de police (French style
of headwear), 110
Books, leather-bound, 126-128
Boss, Medard (psychiatrist),
118-119
Botox, 53-54
Boyle, Robert (scientist), and
relation to alchemy, 44
Boyowan (ethnic group), 133
Brillat-Savarin, JeanAnthelme (gastronomic
philosopher), 83
Bullfighting, 135-136
Camporesi, Piero (cultural
historian), 27-28
Capitalism, and animal
slaughter, 21-32 passim,
37-38; and animal-body
fetishism, 103-109, 114118; and guidelines of
animal victimization, 14;
and issue of exceptionalism as system of animal
victimization, 6-7, 143144; and rituals of animalbody consumption, 90-94;
and scientific victimization
of animals, 42-53 passim,
152-154
Carson, Rachel, ideas about
pest control, 150-151
Catharsis, 22, 25, 30, 115,
117-118, 124, 130, 136,
149
Chimpanzees, rites of incorporation of, 66-67
Chinese medicine, traditional,
78-81
Christ, symbolism of, 34, 36,
75-77, 94-95, 103-104,
119-121, 127-128
Christianity, and Jung’s
relationship to, 94-95,
127-128, 159; and ivory
fetishism, 103-104; and
Marquis de Sade, 119-121;
and rituals of animal-body
consumption, 73-77; and
role of shadow projection
in, 36; and serpent imagery,
56-57
Cicero, commentary on
divination, 40-42
Cintrón, Conchita (bullfighter),
135-136
Civil War (U.S.), 112-113
Cleopatra, as icon of fetishism,
100-101
Confessions of Wanda von
Sacher-Masoch, The, 125-126
Congo, colonization of, 141143
Conrad, Joseph, and real-life
version of Heart of Darkness,
141
Corporations, ritual significance of, 84-94
Creek (ethnic group), 113
Crow (ethnic group), 42
“Crows of Mephistopheles,
The” (George Fitzmaurice
story), 148-149
Crucifix, symbolism of, 103104, 111, 120-121
Cuvier, Georges (scientist),
and theory of the animal
economy, 50-51
“Dangerous Game” (TV hunting show), 156-157
Darwin, Charles, 129, 153154
Das Gift (German word), and
thematic pun with, 17-18
Death, fear of, 1-18 passim,
55, 58, 94-95, 136, 145147
Demeter, symbolism of, 102
Dietetics, 77-84
183
Dismemberment, of animal
victims, 64-65, 71-77, 82,
89-90, 119
Divination, zoocidal, 20, 40-44
Domestication, of animals,
30-33, 129, 132, 135-136
Douglas, Mary (anthropologist),
65
Dr. Rat (William Kotzwinkle
novel), 52-53
Dreiser, Theodore (author),
and views on slaughterhouses, 35-36; and use of
imagery of animal-skin
fetishism, 108-109
Earl of Sandwich, 85-86
earth (Disney film), 155-156
Easter, ritual celebration of,
75-77
Eden, Garden of, 87-88, 103,
149-150, 159
Edward, the Black Prince (son
of King Edward III), 105-106
Eliade, Mircea (religiousstudies scholar), and arch
symbolism, 92; and myth
of eternal return, 102
Eliot, T.S., and poem “The
Hollow Men,” 25
Elysium, symbolism of, 73-75
Enlightenment (historical
period), and barbecue,
88-90; and Golden Arches,
93-94; and scientific pest
control, 150-152; and vivisection, 44, 47
Entomology, and pest control,
151
184
Environmentalism, and pest
control, 149-150
Evil, and functions of ideological systems, 99-100;
and functions of ritual
zoocide, 10-11, 13; and
gift of death, 17-18; and
notion of scientific progress
through animal victimization, 48-49, 56-60; and
religious symbolism, 56-60,
75-76, 82, 95; spiders as
embodiment of, 146
Evolence (cosmetic product), 81
Evolution, theory of, 153-155
Fast food, 35, 62-63, 85-86,
90-94
Faust, symbolism of, 152
Feast of Long Strips of Blubber
(traditional Kwakwaka’wakw rite), 69
Fetishes, composed of animal
parts, 96-128 passim
Financier, The (Theodore
Dreiser novel), 108-109
Foie gras, 64
Fordism (industrial paradigm),
29, 143-144
Frankenstein (Doctor), reallife, 47-49
Fraud, and zoocide, 11, 75,
108-109, 147
Freud, Sigmund, and theory
of fetishism, 97, 100, 102,
118
Fur, see Animal skins
Gandhi, Mohandas, commentary on taboos, 76-77
Gateway Arch (St. Louis monument), 93
Gemeinschaft, 63
Gesellschaft, 63, 66, 90-91, 115
Gettysburg Address, 112
Gift of death, 16-18
Gilgamesh complex, 8-9
Girard, Rene, and theory of
domestication of animals,
31; and theory of scapegoating, 22-23
Goodall, Jane, 66-67
Great Leap Forward (Chinese
Communist program), and
Four Pests Campaign, 144145
Greeks, ancient, and fetishism, 101-102, 113-114;
and sacrificial ritual, 7, 2122, 70
Grenadier Guards, bearskin
caps of, 111-112
Guilt, zoocidal, 13-16, 20, 150
Hainuwele myth, 25-27
Hamburgers, see Fast food
Headwear, fetishistic, 110-113
Hecatomb (ancient Greek
ritual), 7, 21-22, 70
Hemingway, Ernest, and
views on killing animals for
sport, 134-136
Hermes, caduceus of, 56
Hierocracy, 69-70
Hitler, Adolf, leather fetishism of, 121-123
Hohle Fels Cave (Germany),
and prehistoric ivory figurine found within, 98-99
Homo economicus, 109
Homo ludens (Johan Huizinga
term), 13
Homo necans (Walter Burkert
term), 12-13
Hooke, Robert (scientist), 57
Hot dogs, 64, 89-90
House of the Sacrificed Oxen
(ancient Minoan edifice),
24-25
“How to Love America and
Leave It at the Same Time”
(John Updike story), 90
Humors, theory of, as part of
traditional medicine and
dietetics, 80-82
Hunter, John (medical
researcher), 49
Hunting and fishing, 129-160
passim; as tool of imperialism, 136-143
Immortality, quest for, see
Death, fear of
Independence Day, ritual
meaning of, 88-90
Invisible hand, concept of,
50-54
Iraqw (ethnic group), 29
Island of Dr. Moreau, The (H.G.
Wells novel), 57-60
Ivory, and conquest of Congo,
141-143; as fetish material,
98-104
Jung, Carl, and alchemy, 4344, 92; and bridge/arch
symbolism, 93; and fish
symbolism, 79; and general
animal symbolism, 9-10;
185
and interpretation of myth
of Tantalus, 102; and mandala symbolism, 91-92;
and personal allegory of
consumption of animals,
94-95; and personal experience of animal slaughter,
38-39; and personal experience of fetishism, 126-128;
and personal experience of
predation, 159-160; and
personal experience of vivisection, 60-61; and serpent
symbolism, 56-57; and
symbolism of flies, 82; and
theory of anima, 101; and
theory of shadow, 1-5, 96;
and totem and taboo, 76
Jungle, The (Upton Sinclair
novel), 33
Kierkegaard, Søren (philosopher), and concept of fear
and trembling, 11
King Kong (1933 film), 116-118
King Lear, 12
Koryak (ethnic group), 14
Kwakwaka’wakw (ethnic
group), 68-69
La Villette (former Parisian
slaughterhouse complex), 24
Lacrosse, 113
Lambs, religious overtones of
victimization of, 36, 75-77
Lascaux Cave (France), and
prehistoric painting within,
131-132
Leather, see Animal skins
Lent, ritual significance of, 77
Leopold II, King, 142-143
Levi-Strauss, Claude (anthropologist), 89
Lewis and Clark Expedition,
139-141
Lincoln, Abraham, stovepipe
hats of, 112-113
Lord of the Flies (William Golding novel), 9
Lukács, Georg (philosopher),
and concept of reification,
96
Madoff, Bernard (financier),
109
Magendie, François (medical
researcher), 57
Malinowski, Bronislaw
(anthropologist), 132-133
“Man the Hunted,” 12-13, 131,
146, 155
“Man the Hunter,” 130-131, 155
Mandala symbolism, 91-92
Mandate of Heaven (T’ienming), and role of silk in, 112
Marshall, John (U.S. Supreme
Court Justice), 84
Marx, Karl, and theory of
commodity fetishism, 107
McDonald’s, 63, 86, 92-94
Mead, Margaret (anthropologist), 68-69
Meals, sacramental, 75-77
Meat, as shadow substance,
62-95 passim
Megamachine (Lewis Mumford term), 132-133
Mississippi Scheme, 44
186
Mobutu (African dictator),
fetishism of leadership
style, 109-110
Montezuma, animal-skin
fetishism of, 105
“Mother’s Tale, A” (James Agee
story), 33-34
Napoleon Bonaparte, 111
National Basketball Association,
115-116
Nation-state, rites of incorporation of, 84-94
Natural symbol (Mary Douglas
term), 71, 90, 169
Nazism, 36-37, 121-125
Ndembu (ethnic group), 14
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8
Nisargadatta, Sri (Hindu sage),
104-105
Norse mythology, arch symbolism in, 93-94
Nuer (ethnic group), 10-11, 31
Odyssey, The (Homeric poem),
113-114
Ormerod, Eleanor (entomologist), 150-151
Orpheus, as symbol of dismemberment and regeneration,
73-75
Ortega y Gasset, José (philosopher), and book Meditations on Hunting, 133-135
Ovid (Roman poet), 73, 99
Pao-sheng, Han (Chinese
materia medica author), 79
Patriarchy, as ideological system
of victimization, 99-158
passim, 177
Pearls, as fetishes, 100-101, 106
Pemmican, 64
“Pests,” extermination of, 144151
Pharmacopoeia of the People’s
Republic of China, 80-81
Platina (Renaissance author),
82-83
Pliny the Elder, and story of
Cleopatra’s pearl libation,
100-101
Potemkin (Russian battleship),
and role of meat in mutiny
aboard, 65
Powdered ermine (style of fur
preparation for royal garments), 110-111
Predation porn, 154-158
Prima materia (alchemy
term), 43-44
Projection (psychological
term), of shadow, and
animal slaughter, 30, 3539; and animal victimization in general, 4-5, 10-11,
16-18; and arachnophobia,
146; and fetishism, 103;
and folk medicine, 78; and
hunting porn, 157; and
relationship between alchemy and vivisection, 4346; and religion, 94-95
Pygmalion, myth of, 99-100
Rebounding violence (Maurice Bloch term), 12-13
Reification, as basis of
animal-body fetishism, 96102
187
Religion, see Attis and Cybele,
Roman cult of; Christ, symbolism of; Christianity;
Evil; Hecatomb; Hierocracy;
Mandala symbolism; Norse
mythology; Satan, symbolism of; Shadow, relation
to religion
Repression (psychological
term), in Carl Jung’s life,
128; and fear of “pests,”
145; and general role in
animal victimization, 1-18
passim; and industrial killing of animals, 25, 30; and
justifications of zoocide, 60,
134-135; and sacramental
nature of animal-body
consumption, 63-64; and
scientific killing of animals,
54-60; and shadow projection, 36-38; and symbolism
of King Kong, 116-117; and
taboos, 76
Roman Empire, and arch motif,
92; and banquet ritual, 7273; and divination, 41-42;
and fetishism, 99-101, 103,
108; and imperial killing of
animals, 138-139; and sacrificial ritual, 29
Roman History (Cassius Dio
compendium), 138-139
Sacrifice, as shadow ritual,
19-39 passim; and Thanksgiving, 87-88
Sade, Marquis de, 119-121,
125
188
Sadomasochism, 119-126
Santería (religion), 37-38
Sartre, Jean-Paul, and theory
of violence, 20
Satan, symbolism of, 48-49,
56-57, 76, 82, 94-95, 148149, 152
Satyricon (Petronius novel),
72-73
Scapegoating, of animal
victims, 22-23, 87-88, 171
Secrets of Alexis, The (Renaissance book), 81-82
Sella curulis (Roman chair), 103
Sendivogius (alchemist), 46
Serpent, figure of, 56-57, 60-61
Shadow (Jungian term), and
collective dimensions of,
8-9, 62-63, 159; and liberation of, 3, 39, 55-56, 60,
128; and “morality” of, 1011, 75; and relation to
religion, 59, 75-77, 92-95,
103-104; and repression of,
1-18 passim, 25, 30, 55, 76,
128, 134
Shang Dynasty (China), 41, 137
Shark fin soup, 64
Shaw, George Bernard, 54
Sheridan, Philip (U.S. Army
General), 139
Shih-chen, Li (Chinese materia
medica author), 79
Silent Spring (Rachel Carson
book), 150
Silent World, The (JacquesYves Cousteau documentary),
157-158
Slaughter and slaughterhouses,
19-39 passim
Smith, Adam, and theory of
the invisible hand, 50-51
Smithfield Market (London
livestock exchange), 32
“Snake, The” (John Steinbeck
story), 54-57
South Sea Bubble, 44
Speculation (financial and
scientific), 40-61 passim
Spengler, Oswald (philosopher
of history), 130
SS (Nazi organization Schutzstaffel), 122, 124-125
Stanley, Henry Morton
(colonial explorer), 141143, 152-153
Stock (animal and financial),
30-33
Sublime Society of Beef Steaks,
85-86
Sumptuary laws, 106, 110
Synecdoche, ritual expression
of, 64, 70-71, 98, 101
Taboos, 14, 76-77, 81, 87-88,
102, 104, 133
Tantalus, myth of, 102
Taurobolium (bull’s blood
ablution), 29
Thanatophobia, see Death,
fear of
Thanksgiving, ritual meaning
of, 87-88, 170-171
Thoreau, Henry David, and
pest control, 149-150
Totemism, 75-76, 87
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl film), 122-123
Tsang-chi, Chen (Chinese
materia medica author), 79
Tse-Tung, Mao, and pest control policies, 144-145
Uriankhai (ethnic group), 26
Venationes (Roman staged
hunts), 138-139
Venus (Roman goddess),
fetishistic symbolism of,
98-101, 125-126
Venus in Furs (Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch novel), 125
Victoria, Queen, 110-111
Vivisection, 40-61 passim
Waterloo, Battle of, 111, 151
Weber, Max (sociologist), 63,
69-70
Woolf, Virginia, 151
Yoga, role of animal skins in
meditative practices of,
104-105
Žižek, Slavoj (philosopher),
107, 116
189