Transubstantiation transmogrifications remove metaphor for literal magic

bread=community

I was watching the youtube channel Religion for Breakfast on more recent scholarship on what the Eucharist was, or represented, when remembering the Last Supper. The TL;DR or didn't-watch for this is that shared meals were a very common activity, which in the Greco-Roman world might be called a deipnon in the Hellenised eastern Mediterranean (at about 24 minutes in the video The Greco-Roman Origins of the Eucharist.)

The deipnon is an evening meal, or supper, which is a shared meal among a fellowship who in sharing a meal share their concerns. Think of all those clubs or associations of ancient Rome. Some had very arcane rituals, others were quick to bring on the wine in order to hold a symposium. The difference between a club and an esoteric sect could be very slight.

While the video does spend a little time on the rituals used in Catholic and Orthodox use of the shared food in a mass setting, it spends much more on the likely prior form of people sharing a meal, and using the bread to metonymically represent this shared meal where the bread is broken, where the body is then then gathering of people breaking that bread together. (And much less likely to be drawn from Jewish passover rituals. Perhaps that is a later gloss to cover over the rug-pull that is later used by the Imperial version of it in the Catholic and Orthodox masses.)

Religion for breakfast skips over this change saying no one knows why it changed from collegiality to imperial diktat (about 24:54 ditto). As if the state had nothing to do with it.

Well, I can give it a good guess.

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The reason is the original metaphor where the bread represents the shared meal of believers, (and that this activity of the shared meal is the body of the church) is just too democratic in its devotion to Jesus, for an Imperial government department which Christianity became [see To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church for more about that attitude], a department whose main job was to inculcate obedience to the Imperial cult, because Emperor. Because empires tend to one oneness, and your devotions must also be one with it now we have discovered we have individual consciences.

Basically the ritual later used by the Imperial-Government-endorsed-Christianity ignores the metaphor— the poetry —of the bread=shared-meal=fellowship=church and instead takes the phrase ‘this is my body’ literally: bread=body-of-christ. The Imperial cult removes the poetry and literally replaces the shared experience of the collegial meal with a literal piece of literal “identity”.

This allowed the transfer of Roman religious elements into Christianity as a Roman Imperial cult established as the only religion:

1. by removing the shared meal of a more domestic or collegiate environment, replacing it with an institutional monument (basilica, temples), this downplays the shared community of like-minded souls;

2. this allows the rebranding of old weekly polis-centric obligatory attendance for the population, into masses under the Imperial Cult guidance and not the local gods; in the new churches this physically and spatially replaces the local identity-religions with site-attendance obligations, and thus ritualised obedience to Imperial claims over the local, which also subsumes any direct devotional relationship the like-minded souls might have with their Christ figure; and,

3. at the cost of creating a magical statement bread=body, which hints at cannibalism, but at least this gave the old Roman priests something to do with their magical powers in their old temples now become churches, not a domestic or collegial environment where simply sharing a meal means you belong.

BTW The pope or patriarchs dress like transgression shamanic female impersonators because that is what Roman temples priests look like.

Christianity did not convert the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire converted Christianity.

Transubstantiation

After the Catholic Church formed its rogue-like independence from the imperial center, the issue of this de-metaphored bread=body magic heated up in disputes, the doctrine of transubstantiation was the result. Reformers and later Protestants never like the pagan kludge that was the official doctrine of Transubstantiation.

This says that when an ordained priest magically transforms the bread (now a wafer of starch as thin as your eyelid) into the body of Christ (not a metaphor) the bread is the body of christ even though it has, to all appearances, not changed at all.

All to get rid of any poetic (we are the bread, we are the body) collegial democratic tendency in the Imperially converted Christianity.

Basically transubstantiation transmuted a democratic, or at least community-minded worlding, into a worldbuilding tool of imperial government, by removing the metaphor and replacing it with rituals of literal magic.

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The Greco-Roman Origins of the Eucharist. Religion for Breakfast 2025.

Watson, Robert N. 2006. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press.

See linkpost page on more world-building monstrosities.

Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com