heliotropic charms

“Standard sacrificial ritual was organized around a practice of erotics, signified by charis (“grace,” “response-inducing delight”). The participants (who could include women, usually in subordinate positions) sought to create charis for the god by enacting a complicated presentation as both lovers and beloveds. Through procession, music, song, dance, costume, male nudity in athletic competition, they offered a bodily display of beauty, opulence, or athleticism, privileging the outside of the body as an object of pleasure for the god. At the same time, they brought gifts: the “perfect” animal, the odor of cooking foods, sometimes a robe or statue or other “delight” (agalma). Thus humans collectively both seduced and solicited the god. In keeping with its insistence of beautiful surfaces, sacrificial ritual required participants to observe euphemia (“speech of good omen”) […] The sensuous atmosphere could give rise to a feel of communities in which the crowd projected the god as spectating from near at hand, located above or behind the altar or present in the form of a statue, but separated from the human participants. This is a visual and sensuous economy in which humans seek to experience the god’s desire for the them and constitute themselves as objects of the god’s gaze in order to win the god’s favor in exchange of charis.”