Omophagia
OMOPHAGIA is an ancient Greek term (ōmophagia, "eating raw [flesh]") for a ritual in the ecstatic worship of Dionysos.
The Raw and the Cooked
All human groups, including the so-called primitives, are aware of their cultural identity by contrast to other, "uncivilized" forms of life. That the opposition of civilization to nature, of human to animal, is most drastically experienced in the dietary code, in the use of cooked food as against "raw-eating" animals, has become popular knowledge in the wake of The Raw and the Cooked (1969), the seminal first volume of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques. This presupposes the conquest of fire, which has been decisive in the evolution of humankind and which still looms large in mythology; knowledge of fire goes together with the special importance of the hunt in early and primitive societies. A constant point of reference in human and even prehuman experience are the big carnivores, especially the leopard and the wolf, that are abhorred as well as imitated. Model hunters, at the same time dreadfully dangerous and admirably powerful, the carnivores are the paradigmatic "raw-eaters." They are human-eaters, too: When the problems of civilization and dietary codes are articulated in ritual or myth, the motif of cannibalism usually makes its appearance.
