“And the cost?” Prince Pontero asked the guard offering him a tiny vessel of god-touched hope. “The Temple executed my sister when they caught her making it.” “Ah.” He slurped the tincture from its shiny gold embaphium. For the first time in seasons, he stood—and plotted revenge. --- ## ANALYSIS It’s striking how often [priests had practical roles to play in the ancient world](https://eleanorkonik.com/ancient-priests-practical-impact/) %% ( [[2021-06-28 On Priests Practical Impacts of Early Experts]] ) %%. Ancient Mesopotamian priests treated diseases with a combination of medicine and “magic” – prayer and ritual. But they _did_ use methods we’d consider “real” medicine; they performed surgery and had extensive pharmaceutical knowledge. They ordered quarantines and understood contagions. As an aside, my favorite example of a Mesopotamian ritual that makes complete sense from the perspective of modern science has to do with priests getting rid of household [fungus](https://eleanorkonik.com/fungus/) %% ( [[2021-06-21 Fungus]] ) %%; the priest would go to a home, investigate the mold, and perform a different ritual depending on the characteristics of the mold. Just as in the modern day, though, specialist elites in the [religious](https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2018/november/evangelicalism-and-politics/) & [medical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson) fields sometimes crossed over into the realm of politics. It’s unclear whether Prince Potero’s enemies in the priesthood were deliberately preventing him from accessing necessary medical care or merely punishing the maker of this embaphium (a fancy word for a small container of medicine) — just as it’s unclear precisely _how_ certain diviners/advisors in ancient Mesopotamia wound up kings of small-city states in various regions. It was certainly possible for ancient priests to usurp their king, a fact that is no doubt weighing heavily on the mind of Prince Pontero. Yet the Temple that has executed his savior—the sister of his most loyal guard—serves a purpose. One of my favorite things to stumble across during research is a practical reason for a ritual or religious norm to exist. For example, the practice of ritually burning meat as a sacrifice to the gods seemed to me, on the surface, to be a bit silly. Why destroy something as a way to express gratitude for its existence? Yes, there’s a certain logic to treating one’s god as a present being of senior rank, and offering food to them first in the same way that some families feed working men and senior leaders first, but it never quite sat right with me. Traditions this common, across this many cultures, must surely have a practical reason for them to stay alive, right? As I came across more and more examples of this kind of practice being practical and useful for the relevant societies, ritual sacrifices started to make more sense. Leaving surplus food around to rot is a great way to attract dangerous scavengers to your home if you don’t have the [food preservation](https://eleanorkonik.com/food-preservation/) %% ( [[2021-06-28 Food Preservation]] ) %% capacity for it. Inspecting the liver of a ritually slaughtered cow as part of a [divination ritual](https://eleanorkonik.com/divination/) %% ( [[2021-06-14 Divination]] ) %% feels less silly when a foul or diseased liver could result in the assembled, celebratory crowd not eating the rest of the meat… and thus not getting sick. Getting together for a big religious festival and only slaughtering fancy animals when you have enough people around to eat them makes sense. [Cat and Wolf](https://eleanorkonik.com/cat-and-wolf/) featured a folkloric cat known as a ball-tailed cat. During [my research](https://eleanorkonik.com/cat-tales/) %% ( [[2021-05-17 Cat Tales]] ) %%, I came across the story of an anthropologist in my native Baltimore who was brought a sample of a creature that seemed to be part bird, part cat. In the end, it turned out to be a kitten with a congenital deformity. This kind of thing is a pretty common explanation for a lot of folklore. Some people believe that [tales about changeling children were used as a way to explain autism](https://adc.bmj.com/content/90/3/271), for example. Modern scientists believe that [myths about unicorns originated from traveler’s tales about real animals](https://www.wired.com/2015/02/fantastically-wrong-unicorn/), like the antelope or rhinoceros. Narwhals, though, are real. They aren’t a chimera or a portmanteau of whales and swordfish. The platypus is a real creature, and millions of modern-day people sincerely believe in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. There’s danger in this way of thinking, of course. An excess of practicality can lead to cynicism, because as much as I resist falling into the trap of thinking that our ancestors were foolish or ignorant and mired in ridiculous superstitions, I also don’t want to dismiss their devoutly held beliefs as [mere practical outgrowths of sanitary practices](https://eleanorkonik.com/pigs/) %% ( [[2020-11-09 Pigs (DRAFT)]] ) %%. As Iphikrates points out in [this really excellent r/AskHistorians thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ny466j/how_do_we_know_that_the_greeks_actually/h1ie0jy/), nobody devotes a huge portion of their budget to religious infrastructure if they _aren’t_ devout. It is no more fair to assume that people in the ancient world were just telling stories they didn’t believe than to assume that none of the churchgoers in the Bible Belt believe in God. There's nothing stopping me from considering what social pressures lead them to benefit from that belief, though!