English Poets, Egyptian Onions, and the Protestant View of the Eucharist

Abstract

The Roman satirist's attack is directed against supersition and the cruelty and barbarism that result from it. The occasion for this outburst was a recent event in Egypt involving cannibalism. The Ombites were celebrating a religious festival when their neighbors, the Tentyrites, surprised them and, being victorious, cut to pieces and ate raw the only one of the enemy who fell into their hands. Juvenal's mordant comment is that while the Egyptians eat men, they would never be so uncivilized and impious as to eat onions and leeks, vegetable deities which they grow in their gardens.2 Religion for one group has always been superstition for another, and Juvenal's Egyptian onions became a symbol for cannibalism in a religious context, to strike first at Catholic Rome, and later, at Protestant Canterbury. The background for this turn of events was the acceptance of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, the evolution of the sacraments out of ancient pagan rites, and the adaptation of various texts to form the liturgy-all of which in combination produced a form of worship that may be dubbed Christian cannibalism.