Material Objects in Cosmological Worlds: An Introduction

In the Republic of Georgia, official Georgian Orthodox rituals blend into a series of lay practices that are sometimes ignored, sometimes tolerated, and sometimes incorporated into church rituals, often at the whim of the individual local priest. One such practice is animal sacrifice. Animal sacrifice is never allowed within the church proper, but within a church’s courtyard it is sometimes accepted. To the extent that the priest participates in such lay rituals, it is usually a simple ritual involving blessing the sacrificial ani mal with a candle; the priest will not actually perform the sacrifice. But a priest who does choose to participate in this way may well be motivated by desire for material gain: in return for this religious service of rather dubious orthodoxy, the priest may expect or demand some of the meat, and perhaps some wine, too. Once, apparently, some Georgians brought a sheep to a church for sacrifice, along a rough road in the trunk of their car, where, importantly, they also had a couple of loosely sealed cans of gasoline. In the church’s courtyard, the priest offered to bless the sheep prior to sacrifice in the usual way. The priest began to make the sign of the cross with a lit candle over the sheep which had been soaked with gasoline while traversing the bumpy road. The sheep explodes. The story is popular with Georgians for several reasons, especially because the seemingly opposed categories of high-minded religious ritual and grotesque materiality are brought into conjuncture in a bit of folk anti-clericism.