Slaughter festival

The celebratory collective slaughter of an animal, which is often followed by a feast , was and is called a slaughter festival .

history

The communal cutting up and eating of killed animals can be proven by ash and bone finds as far back as the Paleolithic . First, the killing of an animal through the hunt was celebrated with a solemn ceremony, with domestication the custom increasingly shifted to the celebration of the slaughter of an elaborately fattened animal, usually for the whole village or clan community - or even just a family was something special. The animal to be slaughtered was richly adorned before slaughter and often blessed by a religious dignitary before it was killed in order to reinforce the peculiarity of the moment, out of primal feuds and / or to keep evil spirits away from the meat and thus from those who later eat it. Parallels can be drawn to the religious festival of sacrifices or ritual sacrifices , even if the acquisition of food was and is rather secondary.

In ancient Greece, the bones and fat of the animal were burned during slaughter and sacrifices to please the gods or to provide them with food (anchored in their faith). Thus, in the Iliad of Homer mentioned several times that Odysseus cattle slaughter can, but not explicitly only to pure sacrifice. The overlap between the feast of slaughter and the festival of sacrifice becomes visible, as he only burns some pieces of meat in honor of the gods, but shares the rest of the meat with his men. In the blessing one can possibly still see animistic remains of a hunting spell or the taming and evocation of the animal spirit, which still occurs in some ethnic religions . Through the blessing, the animal is also asked to excuse the fact that it must now give up its own life in order to obtain food. The slaughter festival can therefore also be seen as a funeral feast in honor of the animal. In Stone Age caves such as the Lascaux cave , extensive wall paintings and rock carvings can be seen, the origin of which is probably to be sought in this dichotomy, on the one hand to have to kill the animal in order to survive its own species, on the other hand the desire to strengthen the animal by consuming the meat to accept or to make the spirit of the beast merciful so as not to turn the spirit world against it.

The American barbecue tradition developed from slaughter festivals.

present

Slaughter plate in the village inn (1863).

In some areas of Germany, e.g. B. in Bavaria , Franconia and parts of the Palatinate , the home slaughter of a self-reared pig or a pig bought for slaughter by a private household or an inn was and is a festival called slaughter festival. A slaughter festival in the Palatinate includes sausage soup , Palatinate liver sausage , black pudding , bratwurst , liver dumplings , pork pepper , kettle meat and sauerkraut . When slaughtering at home, it was common for butcher soup to be given away to the neighbors, who often picked it up with milk cans. The neighbors often bought some of the fresh sausages. Wine is drunk in the Palatinate . The house slaughter of an inn is also called a slaughter festival. Everyone in the village knew what was going on; non-residents could recognize the slaughter festival by an inflated pig bladder hung outside. In some villages this is still practiced today.

Designing home slaughter and giving away butcher soup and sausages to family members and neighbors was and is still common practice in German-speaking countries today.

In Austria a slaughter festival is usually referred to as a Sautanz .

Web links

Wiktionary: Slaughter Festival - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations