The Acceptance of Animal Slaughter in Christian Liturgy

It has long been recognised by scholars that accusations of participating in pagan sacrifices, as recorded in sources from the sixth and seventh centuries, were mainly used to denigrate high-ranking ecclesiastical and secular officials. Large-scale anti-pagan investigations such as Justinian’s purges of pagans and the so-called ‘pagan affair’ of 580 offered an opportunity to denounce enemies and rivals, which could easily have led to accusations being made against ‘pillars of the establishment’. In 580, even the patriarchs Gregory of Antioch and Eutychius of Constantinople were charged with being crypto-pagans. However, despite the improbability of a patriarch being sympathetic towards pagan rituals or pagan sacrifice surviving in an urban context, there is considerable evidence that the slaughter of animals sometimes accompanied liturgy on special occasions in rural regions of the empire throughout the late antique and Byzantine periods. In my paper, I will provide an overview of these instances, focusing primarily on Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium. One of the original reasons for including animal slaughter may have been to allow newly baptised Christians to recognise elements of their former cults and avoid being put off by the different form of Christian worship, centred on the bloodless sacrifice of the Eucharist. An example of this from the mid-sixth century can be found in the Life of the holy man Nicholas of Sion, which records that Nicholas repeatedly permitted animal slaughter to accompany his celebration of the liturgy, particularly during thanksgiving services following the plague. While the text does not suggest that Nicholas was ever accused of supporting or practising pagan cults, it demonstrates that priests could occasionally accept elements of the cult that would have seemed highly suspicious to those active in more urbanised regions, where such practices were swiftly labelled ‘pagan’.