The term ‘meat’ appears across the depth-psychology corpus not as a trivial dietary reference but as a locus of profound symbolic, ritual, and ontological weight. In its most concentrated treatment, meat functions as the central substance of sacrifice — the material through which human communities enact their relationship with the divine, with death, and with each other. Burkert’s anthropological reading locates meat at the origin of the sacred itself: the slaughtered animal’s flesh, so like human flesh, transforms killing into communion. The I Ching tradition, across multiple translations, deploys meat with extraordinary specificity in Hexagram 21 (Biting Through), where varieties of meat — tender, dried, cured, gristly — serve as graduated metaphors for the degrees of moral and juridical resistance that must be overcome. Hillman presses the issue into its most unsettling contemporary form: the consumption of meat in Western culture enacts a daily ritual affirmation of Cartesian and Christian ontology, the ontic distinction between man and beast commemorated at every meal. Bryant’s Yoga Sutra commentary brings karmic complicity into view — the chain of violence embedded in meat consumption linking purchaser, butcher, and approver. Harrison situates food, and by extension meat, as the primary religious need around which collective ritual coheres. Across these positions, meat is never merely nutrition; it is always already implicated in cosmology, ethics, hierarchy, and the sacred.
The animal as meat belongs to our religious beliefs… ‘The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.’
Hillman argues that meat-eating in Western culture is a theological act, ritually confirming the Cartesian-Christian ontological hierarchy between man and animal three times daily.
, Animal Presences, 2008thesis
purchasing meat that has been killed by someone else is in the second category, and allowing meat consumption to occur in one’s sphere of influence… would come under the third category.
Bryant shows how Patañjali’s yoga ethics, following Manu, distribute karmic guilt for meat consumption across an entire social chain from purchaser to passive approver.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009thesis
the flesh was like flesh, bones like bones, phallus like phallus, and heart like heart, and, most important of all, the warm running blood was the same.
Burkert identifies the structural homology between animal and human flesh as the anthropological foundation of sacrifice, whereby the slaughtered animal becomes a sacred victim precisely because its meat mirrors human physicality.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
Bites on old dried meat And strikes on something poisonous. Slight humiliation. No blame… This old meat is spoiled: by taking up the problem the punisher arouses poisonous hatred against himself.
Wilhelm’s I Ching commentary uses varieties of meat as graduated metaphors for the moral difficulty and resistance encountered in the administration of justice.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950thesis
Bites on old dried meat And strikes on something poisonous… This old meat is spoiled: by taking up the problem the punisher arouses poisonous hatred against himself.
A parallel I Ching commentary confirms that dried, salted, or spoiled meat in Hexagram 21 symbolizes the moral and political obstacles that corrupt legal authority must work through.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
Meat, JU: flesh of animals, pulp of fruit. 21.3a Gnawing seasoned meat. Meeting poison. 21.5a Gnawing parched meat. Acquiring yellow metal.
The Ritsema-Karcher concordance establishes the I Ching’s precise lexical field for meat, linking it directly to the juridical and moral imagery of Hexagram 21’s successive lines.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
‘Dried meat’ signifies toughness; ‘yellow,’ centrality or the Mean; and ‘metal,’ hardness. Here a yin line occupies a yang position… so when such a one bites on another, that other surely will not submit.
Wang Bi’s commentary decodes dried meat symbolically as moral toughness and resistance, showing how the texture of meat carries precise ethical and cosmological meaning in the I Ching.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994supporting
The Yao Text shows a vivid picture, in the form of a story, of this firm resolution to abandon bad conduct, likening it to taking a forceful bite of tender meat, even burying his nose in it.
Huang’s translation reveals the I Ching’s use of tender meat as an image of yielding resistance that must be overcome by determined, forceful engagement.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
This is like biting dried meat. Meat is inside skin: When meat is dried, it is necessary to tear into it to taste the flavor.
The Taoist I Ching commentary uses the physical properties of dried meat — its toughness and resistance — to illustrate the spiritual effort required to penetrate principle beyond surface perception.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
glorious Hermes himself wanted some of the sacred meat: immortal or not, the delicious smells troubled him. His noble heart persuaded him, however, not to let them pass down his own divine gullet.
Kerényi’s reading of the Homeric Hymn uses Hermes’s abstention from sacred meat to reveal the god’s liminal divine status and the theological boundary between mortal eating and divine essence.
, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944supporting
If a man shared a meal with his god he was expressing a conviction that they were of one substance; and he would never share a meal with one whom he regarded as a stranger.
Freud’s totem theory positions the shared sacrificial meal — and hence the consumption of meat — as the foundational act through which kinship, divinity, and communal identity are constituted.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
spitted portions of the sacrificed meat, or sometimes no doubt the spits themselves, were distributed, the natural tendency to standard size… would have been reinforced by the powerful tradition… of equal portions of the sacrificed meat.
Seaford traces the standardization of sacrificial meat portions as a social and economic act, linking the equal distribution of meat to the emergence of monetary equivalence and civic equality.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
The rapture attendant on eating game in the sacrificial meal is no less real now. Moreover, the domestic animal is a possession which must be given away.
Burkert identifies the rapture of meat-eating within the sacrificial meal as a psychologically potent experience, intensified by the sacrifice of a possessed, familiar animal rather than wild game.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
The primary need, more primary, more pressing than any other, is Food. Man focuses attention on it.
Harrison grounds the origins of religion and collective ritual in the primacy of food — and by extension meat — as the irreducible biological and social need around which sacred practice coheres.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
the notions of moira and aisa originated specifically in the distribution of meat, from which it spread to distribution of other things — notably food and land.
Seaford relays the argument that the Greek concepts of fate and portion derive etymologically and conceptually from the practice of distributing sacrificial meat, anchoring cosmological thinking in the material act of apportionment.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
the yangs on the top and bottom symbolize lips, the three yins symbolize teeth, and the yang in the middle represents something in the mouth.
Cleary’s structural analysis of Hexagram 21 describes the anatomical-oral symbolism of the biting-through process, within which meat functions as the unnamed object of masticatory moral effort.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986aside
Sitconski turns into a moose to entice the eagle down. When the eagle eats of the meat, Sitconski kills him.
In this trickster episode, meat serves as bait and instrument of reversal, illustrating the trickster’s characteristic use of animal flesh to deceive and destroy predator figures.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956aside