Jeff Russell

I just read your article this evening. (It's September 24, so a little over a week after you published it.) I've got a couple of minor notes and one that's a little larger.

1. I think his surname was actually "Fustel de Coulanges," three words starting with a capital "F" rather than just "de Coulanges." At any rate, that's how the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica alphabetizes him, with the F's. See link here. (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Fustel_de_Coulanges,_Numa_Denis)

2. Apparently his motive in writing the book (or one of his motives) was that Napoleon III kept making speeches about his Empire as a restoration of the Roman Empire, and F de C wanted to make the point, "No, you have no idea what you are talking about." 😃

3. I totally agree with the connection you make between the rule of the dead in F de C and JMG's description of the same thing in his chapter on vampires from Monsters. But you can take the idea a lot farther.

Walter Otto, in his book The Homeric Gods, argues that the Olympian Gods were genuinely new gods, and that we can see the traces of a (largely undocumented) religious revolution in Greek prehistory. He traces vestigial survivals of the older forms of worship, in a variety of sources but most dramatically in Aeschylus's Eumenides. And he insists that the older worship—worship of the Titans and other powers like them—was a worship tied to the earth and to blood, a worship that bound together the living and the dead and the natural powers in a single community. He says that as long as you lived in line with that community it could be very nurturing; but step out of line, and the powers were implacable and terrifying. He also adds, almost as an aside, that "This belief presupposes interment, by which the body returns to the bosom of the earth whence it came." (p.26)

So far, this sounds almost identical to the regime that F de C describes. But Otto goes on to remind us that the Olympians, by contrast, had a horror of the dead and never approached them. Liminal deities like Demeter and Persephone, or Dionysus, might have some connection with the dead. But the primary Olympians—Zeus, Apollo, Athene, and others like them—were clearly the Undying Ones. What is more, Olympian religion involved cremating the dead!

Put these three authors together—I mean F de C, Otto, and JMG—and you get a very clear picture of what might have happened, maybe in the Mycenean period or a little before, and maybe in other times here and there across Europe. The picture starts with a religiosity of earth and blood and the dead, among people who inter their dead in the ground and then worship them. Over time, the air gets thick with predatory spirits, spirits who drink the blood that is poured out (as the Erinyes were said to do) and who harass the living to demand ever more etheric nourishment. Then finally there is a revolution and even a war (remembered in myth as the Titanomachy), in the name of new gods who are disgusted by the dead and who have a very ambivalent reaction even to blood—and the revolutionaries announce their sharp break with the old ways by burning their dead so that the bodies cannot possibly be used as a home for hungry ghosts!

[FOOTNOTE: The picture is not quite complete, because it does not explain why the Olympians were still worshipped with animal sacrifice. But it is possible that Walter Burkert can answer that question when he says that men still needed the permission of the gods to perform butchery even for food, because the awe and terror that they felt instinctively at the act of killing and shedding blood were otherwise so debilitating. In any event, I think this last part is not critical for the rest of it.]

Anyway, I don't know if the story I've told here is correct as history, but I find it a compelling story all the same. I'd love to hear your feedback.

Hosea Tanatu

I wish there were a way I could subscribe to comments, so I'd be notified if you reply. As it is, I'll try to check back from time to time. Also you can find me at hosea DOT tanatu AT gmail DOT com.