Imagine no religion

[TheMisfortuneTeller]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Pitch ... It might be seen as too "liberal" for Tolkien's own faith, but I think that the central tenet for him was his experience of the Mass, when he believed he partook of the divine ...

I wondered when the subject of necrophilia and ritual cannibalism would come up in connection with Tolkien's own private magical and/or animist practices. I cannot speak to Tolkien's posthumously published writings (which I have not read) but I have scoured The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for any evidence of hobbits, dwarves, elves, or men eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a renegade ancestor murdered thousands of years previously for his animist unorthodoxy. Thankfully, I could find no such references.

The gruesome practice of necrophiliac cannibalism, does, though, have an ancient history, far predating its absorption into the animist orthodoxy of Tolkien's own sectarian tradition. As Sir James George Frazer wrote in the concluding paragraph of Chapter 51, "Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet" (http://www.bartleby.com/196/123.html):

“It is now easy to understand why a savage should desire to partake of the flesh of an animal or man whom he regards as divine. By eating the body of the god he shares in the god’s attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry, it is a solemn sacrament. Yet a time comes when reasonable men find it hard to understand how any one in his senses can suppose that by eating bread or drinking wine he consumes the body or blood of a deity . 'When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus,' says Cicero, 'we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?' "[emphasis added] -- The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, p. 578

I love that quote from Cicero, which indicates that even the Roman pagans found some of nascent Christianity's practices disgusting and uncivilized. Worse things awaited mankind, however, as William Butler Yeats said in The Second Coming:

... The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

From what I have read of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (over many decades) it does not appear to me that Professor Tolkien thought it advisable to alienate millions of potential readers by inflicting his own sectarian animist beliefs and practices upon them. Speaking personally, at the first mention of a "Pope" in some Middle-earth version of "Vatican City," I would surely have thrown down the book in question and found something more interesting and entertaining to read.