Behind my engagement in recent years with the subject of luck stands a certain phenomenological-historical working assumption. My working assumption is that modern man, as far as the realm of thought is concerned, is no longer capable of understanding the domain of luck as an integral part of the world in which he lives. For now, we'll leave this as a working assumption I'm working with that has no justification in itself. However, as I've worked with this assumption, I've discovered that entire fields that seem to me to be completely impenetrable to modern understanding as long as the role of luck is not properly understood within their framework. One such field is the domain of impurity and purity, and it is certainly not the only one. My indication is quite simple. If you read anthropological research or religious studies, and beyond the momentary sympathy that the more talented writers in these fields can certainly evoke, you cannot find a good reason—that is, a rational one—why you would adopt for yourself the ancient practice being studied—let's set aside for now that there are endless reasons why not to adopt something—it's a sign that the research hasn't done its work faithfully. This is a rule of thumb, but I find it quite useful.

As mentioned, one of the most complicated fields that in my opinion doesn't receive enough understanding is the subject of impurity and purity. Recently I completed in my mind a move that I believe delineates a certain understanding of these subjects, even if very specific and lacking, apparently, the possibility of generalization in its current form. The test I would like to be applied, by the reader, to the piece of interpretation I'm going to offer is the same test I set earlier as a rule of thumb for anthropological investigations and those of religious studies.

The story for which I wish to offer an interpretation that I hope will extract at least a remnant of understanding comes from Herodotus. With your permission, I'll offer a paraphrase:

Croesus, king of Lydia, dreamed at night a dream according to which his more successful son, Atys, was destined to die by means of an iron weapon. When he awoke, he forced his son to marry, and no longer allowed him to accompany him on military campaigns. All iron weapons were removed from the house—including those on the walls. By chance, as Croesus was preparing for the wedding, there arrived in Sardis a man lacking luck/prone to disasters with a bloodstain upon him. He had grown up as a Phrygian noble. He presented himself to Croesus's court and begged to undergo purification according to local customs. Croesus granted his request, performed the purification rites for him, and asked him about his origins and whom he had killed that he required purification procedures. The man introduced himself as Adrastus, son of King Midas, who had accidentally killed his brother and was exiled from Phrygia. Due to the friendship ties between the Phrygians and Lydians, Croesus received him into the palace and provided for him as long as he was there. Shortly after the wedding, a group of people arrived from Mysia. They told the king about a monstrous boar that roamed the mountains near them and took lives every time they went out to eliminate it. They asked Croesus to send his young men with them to kill the beast. Croesus refused to send his son on the pretext that he had just married, and promised to send a group of young men who would deal with the boar.
The Mysians were appeased, but Atys, who had heard the conversation, approached Croesus and said he didn't understand what was happening. Previously he had accompanied him on hunting expeditions and battles, but now Croesus had stopped sending him to both. A particularly embarrassing situation had been created for a young man like himself, who couldn't walk about openly in public. He knew that Croesus didn't consider him a coward or lacking in spirit, so why was he preventing him from going out and killing the boar? Croesus was forced to confess to his son about the dream he had dreamed that he would die young by an iron weapon—this was the reason he had stopped taking him on his expeditions, and why he had married him off in such haste. Atys argued against Croesus that he didn't blame him for what had been done so far following such a terrible dream, but if he was interpreting the dream incorrectly, it was he who meanwhile bore the shame associated with avoiding activities befitting a man of his status and age. Besides, Atys reminded him, a boar has no hands with which to hold weapons, so perhaps the dream doesn't prevent him at all from going out and helping the Mysians along with the other young men.
Croesus admitted that his son's interpretation of the dream was more probable than his own, and allowed him to go hunt the boar. However, Croesus called for Adrastus. He asked him, due to the generosity he had shown him thus far, to go with his son and watch over him from bandits on the way. Adrastus replied that for his part, had the king not requested this of him, he would have preferred to avoid going on this hunt. In his opinion, it wasn't fitting for an ill-fated man like himself to associate with happy people. However, since the king had asked, of course he would join the hunt—and he would watch over his son to return him safely as much as a guardian's care allows.
When they arrived at Olympus, they found the boar and surrounded it in a circle. They waved their weapons at it, when Adrastus, who according to Herodotus had been purified of blood, launched his weapon toward the boar, missed it, and struck Atys with a fatal blow. A messenger was immediately sent to Sardis to inform Croesus of what had transpired. The news of his son's death struck Croesus hard, and was only intensified by the fact that the one who killed his son was actually the one he himself had purified of blood. In the violence of the injustice, he called to Zeus Catharsios [the Purifier?] to see what had happened despite the purification. Then he called to Zeus by his name Epistius [the Domestic?] to see what had happened with the man he had saved in his own house, and then by his name Hetaereus [of Companionship?], to see how his son's companion had become his most bitter enemy.
When Adrastus returned with Atys's body to Croesus's court, he positioned himself over the corpse and called for Croesus to kill him over his son's body—as retribution for the second terrible deed he had committed. Croesus, who pitied Adrastus, told him there was no need for that; the very fact that he had sentenced himself to death was enough. Besides, added Croesus, while Adrastus was indeed the one who unwittingly killed Atys, in truth this act originated from a god, and he himself had been warned in advance that it would happen. After the honorable funeral for Atys, when all was quiet, Adrastus, who considered himself the most luckless man he had ever encountered, killed himself on Atys's grave.

This story is fascinating from several perspectives. The first time I read it, I was impressed by what seemed to me the first causal link that shows, at least on its face, what the consequences are of impurity that hasn't properly dissipated in a purification ceremony. Herodotus, as is his custom, doesn't explain the stories he presents, but simply presents them in what he understands as the most faithful manner to those who told them to him. Of course, one cannot understand the story without certain metaphysical assumptions about the possible nature of the world and how luck functions in it—but fortunately, this is something I deal with elsewhere.

Recently I've been reading a book that I think can serve as an interpretive key between what I understand from this story and its literary dimension. I'm referring to Walter Burkert's excellent book Homo Necans ("Man the Killer"). Burkert is probably one of the most famous classicists who dealt with Greek religion, and in this specific book, with Greek ritual. Although Burkert himself is a classicist, the theoretical and interpretive discussions in this book are often included in the list of classics that religious studies scholars recommend reading on the subject of rituals, along with Turner and Radcliffe-Brown. The reason is that although Burkert is a classicist, in this specific book he tries to approach Greek religion from within the conceptual framework of anthropology. In a certain sense, the discussion of Greek religion, which he knows intimately, becomes secondary in this book. What interests Burkert is understanding ritual as such.

In any case, one of Burkert's fascinating theses in this book is that ritual actually developed from the practice of hunting. One of the unique things that characterizes Burkert's analysis of ritual is the repeated emphasis on the fact that in ritual in the ancient world, an animal was sacrificed. Emphasis on the fact that first and foremost the act of ritual is an act of killing. As trivial as this sounds, in classical anthropology the fact that the center of ritual in the ancient world was usually the killing of a particular animal didn't occupy a central place. The main discussions around ritual move between its social, sexual, traditional, and educational dimensions. However, Burkert uses the handle of killing to understand the awe-inspiring similarity between ritual ceremonies and those associated with hunting in the ancient world, and of course, specifically among the Greeks.

While it's hard to catch Burkert advancing a simple evolutionary thesis—he has a methodological allergy to dealing with the 'origins' of things—he does advance an interesting and seemingly not unreasonable developmental story. According to his method, in the beginning were the hunting ceremonies that emerged precisely from the complex relationship between man and his hunting object (which could often be man himself). The ceremonies allowed for demarcating the killing activity of hunting from the more civilized laws that were customary within the community where man raised his children. To allocate hunting, in other words, as a space with its own laws.

According to Burkert, rituals were built at their base upon hunting ceremonies. He brings many examples from Egypt, Greece, and contemporary tribes that unfortunately this isn't the place to go into. The act of killing that occurs in sacrificial ceremonies is also actually explained through the more ancient inheritance of hunting ceremonies. One of the interesting objections that Burkert brings to the understanding of the ceremonial arrangement of animal bones hunted in the late Paleolithic period is that some scholars objected to this thesis (which arose in the 1960s) on principle: hunting is a practical activity whose results are subject to fate, and should not be confused with ritual ceremonies. I find this objection interesting precisely because it's telling—a ceremony, for me, cannot be understood as something that should be done if it constitutes only an end in itself, or as something whose motivation to perform it emerges only from broad social and anthropological frameworks that had no chance of being part of the practical considerations that guided the actual participants. In fact, it's precisely the deep analogy with hunting that seems to me to serve a deeper understanding of the fact that in performing the ceremony, participants sought to achieve something much more complex and elusive than deer in the forest—and therefore the protocols of ceremonies in agricultural societies present a higher and more interesting level of complexity. If I may quote Nietzsche, who as usual hit upon something precise in this matter:

Until now, great men have always bowed in reverence before the holy, as the riddle of self-subjection and deliberate final privation: why did they bow thus? They suspected in it—as it were, behind the fragile and wretched appearance of its question mark—a superior force seeking to test itself through such subjugations, a strength of will, a power in which they recognized and knew how to honor their own strength and lust for dominion: they honored something in themselves when they honored the holy. In addition, the sight of the holy aroused their suspicion: such an enormous negation directed against nature would not come to be for nothing, so they would say and ask themselves. Perhaps there is some additional reason, some great danger, about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret counselors and critics, wished to be better informed? Enough, the powerful of the world learned from him a new fear, they sensed a new power, a foreign enemy not yet subdued:—it was the "will to power" that obliged them to stop before the holy, they had to ask him—(The Will to Power, 51)

(Rubens, The Death of Adonis)

As usual, Nietzsche's questions are better than his answers. The very question that Nietzsche raises regarding the ascetic, who in many ways constitutes an internalization of ritual discipline toward the self, can and should be asked regarding ritual discipline in general. Even if we've established, following Burkert, that the origin of ceremonies lies in the discipline and group coordination required for hunting, and that ceremonies were meant to demarcate hunting as a sacred activity in which the anxiety about killing that characterizes human society in its civilized and normal state is soothed in favor of a space designed to obtain food for the community, the more advanced ceremonies, which even if shaped around hunting ceremonies were already disconnected from this practice by hundreds of years—and it seems the need for discipline, protocols, and ceremonies only intensified—apparently expressed more far-reaching practical aspirations.

Back to Herodotus. The internal logic of his story responds amazingly to Burkert's analysis. The sacred space of hunting constitutes threat and danger, as well as potential gain. The threat and danger stem from the soothing of anxiety about killing, which is natural to the civilized sphere required for raising children. And indeed, we find that in many places—not in Greece—often the victims in ceremonies were human beings. In Herodotus's story there is, it seems to me, an interesting demonstration of these principles. First, Adrastus accidentally killed a man in his homeland. This is about a mistaken release of the power to kill, but as such he bears responsibility for it no less. When he arrives at Croesus's court, he undergoes a purification ceremony supposedly meant to redirect the power within him so that it can dwell peacefully in the civilized sphere. What's dangerous about Adrastus himself was marked in the story as his being unlucky in a way that tends toward disasters occurring around him. The purification ceremony was supposed to contain and redirect this impurity, which seems to me here identical with disasters occurring around him.

The additional interesting part of the story is of course that the ceremony didn't work. Specifically, the fact that it didn't work is expressed in that during the hunting expedition he accidentally struck Croesus's son. While hunting isn't perceived as a ceremony in itself, it's clear that it's a dangerous activity, both from the danger posed by the boar and, it turns out, precisely from those same forces that the participants in the hunt utilize to hunt it. The missing of the mark (hamartia, sin) actually expresses precisely the fact that Adrastus was still impure, which is expressed in the story by Croesus crying out first and foremost, in complaint, the name of Zeus the Purifier.

I think this interpretation contains the beginning of a good interpretation of this specific story from Herodotus, and perhaps a first ray of light for understanding why ceremonies of impurity and purity were something that had such a dominant presence in the ancient world. If I return to one of my initial objections, I'll say that we ourselves won't be able to understand why we would want to perform such ceremonies, if we don't first understand the metaphysical assumptions about the place of luck in the world that, as mentioned, stand in the background of stories of this type. In this sense I think that on one hand this interpretation advances a true understanding of these practices, even if most of the important work that would enable the deepening of this understanding hasn't been done in it. I hope that one day I'll get to complete the missing background, since meanwhile I'm mainly studying drafts that touch upon it.

Impurity and Purity in Homo Necans