Grave Pawns: Civilization's Animal Victims

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.

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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

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“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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 63

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 68

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 70

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. 71

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. 73

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 74

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 75

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 76

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 77

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 78

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 80

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 81

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 82

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, 83

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 84

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 85

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 86

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 87

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 88

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 89

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, 90

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 92

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 93

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 94

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 96

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 97

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 98

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 99

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 100

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, 101

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. 102

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 103

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 105

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 106

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 107

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. 108

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 109

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 110

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 111

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 112

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, 113

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— 114

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 115

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.” 116

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 117

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 118

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 120

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 121

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 122

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 123

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 124

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 125

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 127

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. 129

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, 130

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 131

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 132

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 133

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 134

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. 135

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. 136

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. 137

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 139

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 140

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, 141

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: 142

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 143

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 145

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 147

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. 148

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 149

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 150

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, 151

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 152

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.

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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

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(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.

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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.

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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.

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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;

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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

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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

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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

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