ABSTRACT
This chapter broadly surveys depictions of food and food-based ritual in an assortment of mythologies from the ancient world. It is contended that these rituals – besides their purpose of attempting to establish a connection with the divine – provided a vehicle through which a sense of communal and individual order, stability, and identity could be established, and thus acted as a means to calm the chaos of existence. Literature discussed in this chapter comprises translated primary sources and academic secondary sources. By necessity, many mythologies have been excluded: this chapter makes no pretence of dealing comprehensively with such a significant topic and can only hope to provide a taster, so to speak. While presenting a generalized overview, this chapter makes specific its examination of a number of individual stories: these have been chosen due to their idiosyncrasies and diversities, on the one hand, or the degree to which they are reflective of wider trends and patterns, on the other. Observed mythologies are mainly drawn from Greek and Roman examples – from Herodotus to Homer, and from the ichthyoid goddess Derketo to the wine-drinking Dionysian cults – but extend beyond the Mediterranean into other parts of the world, and include Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, Hittite, Hebrew, and later Norse traditions. The time period of the cited examples ranges as far back as 4000 BC, tending towards mythologies prior to Anno Domini (AD) eras. Two factors make this overall approach appropriate: the obvious and aforementioned limitation of attempting to treat such a vast and diverse topic in a single chapter; and the analogous vastness and diversity of the ancient world itself. The ancient world not only comprised thousands of individual settlements and cities, but it also accounts for the diverse linguistic, ideological, geographic, political, religious, and, of course, food-based variations that existed in these places and cultures over a period of thousands of years.
