Sacrificial Crumbs

After Golgotha, the victim was set loose from the sacrificial post. Christian concern for living creatures would demand only an immolation per figuras. But the miasma of the sacrificial victim had to be removed: such an agglomeration of nature, power, vulnerability, malediction, and healing virtue was no longer permissible. It had to migrate far away, leave the cities, roam the oceans, unknown lands, among wild beasts and composite beings. Every so often, it reappeared in the villages as the Wild Man. Pieter Brueghel paints him in one of his backgrounds with his hesitant paws and green pelt, as he advances toward a deceitful woman who tempts him with the offer of a ring. Behind him, an anonymous man points his crossbow to kill him—and the emperor holds up his sword. In the next scene, never portrayed by Brueghel or anyone else, the Wild Man is fatally wounded by the crossbow, with villagers surrounding him. A story invented by Boccaccio suggests that, in Venice, “a hunt is held in St. Mark’s Square,” where the prey is “a wild man,” who appears “smeared all over with honey and covered with down feathers,” with “a chain around his neck and a mask on his head,” while bluebottles and gadflies swarm about him, attracted by the honey.⁴¹⁶ And thus sacrifice, though banished from society, was distilled into metaphor or moved back once more toward its origin: hunting. Now it would be evoked by the hiss of a deadly harpoon on the Ocean. It was left to wave-tossed ships to encounter the contagion of sacrifice. Generally one had to cross the line of the Equator and sail into the inverted world of the southern hemisphere. A gleaming white albatross took off from the emerald light of the ice, a messenger of that place that was going to receive and capture the Ancient Mariner (“The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around”).⁴¹⁷ The powers of sacrifice are concentrated in the mass of ice and they send off the albatross, for it to be received on the ship according to the laws of hospitality, a last vestige of sacrifice. But with the shot from the Ancient Mariner’s crossbow that kills the albatross for no apparent reason, a reverse sacrifice takes place: Iphigenia had to be sacrificed to raise the wind, whereas here the killing of the albatross brings the air to a standstill. The ship stops and becomes spectral, captured by the immutability of literature, “as idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.”⁴¹⁸ The sea itself rots from its very depths. What had given dignity to the Ancient Mariner’s gestures was his total whim. He was obeying neither a ritual nor even a cruel folk custom destined for the footnotes of a local scholar. Even the justification of the other sailors, who approve what he has done, since the albatross is said to be the harbinger of fog, is found to be ex post. The Ancient Mariner’s gesture is the sudden murderous response to the flapping of the albatross’s vast wings. In his automatic act, he cancels every past—and the past will return to haunt him, first as a curse, then as a gradual assimilation of the Ancient Mariner with the albatross, which he has now hung around his neck: and here memory returns to the origin, to the image of sacrifice as self-sacrifice, and thus of the killer as his own victim. The unexpected, unexplained shot from the Ancient Mariner’s crossbow is the first absolute image of evil that would accompany a century of Satanism for ladies.