Iphigenia: Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama

Author(s): Gerhard Neumann

Source: The World of Music , 1998, Vol. 40, No. 1, Music, the Arts and Ritual (1998), pp.
101-117
Published by: VWB - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41699181

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the world of music 40(1) - 1998 : 101-117

Iphigenia: Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama

Gerhard Neumann

Das Wort erlöst uns, nicht der Tausch.

[The Word redeems us, not Exchange.]
(Hans Henny Jahnn)
Abstract

Using the example of the Iphigenia myth, two theses are presented here referring to
the ritual sacrifice and its cultural function : the thesis of the origin of Greek tragedy
from the sacrificial ritual and the complementary thesis of the Occidental tragedy as
organ of a casuistic of sacrifice and its function in the development of culture. The
myth of Tantalus and one of its most important derivatives, the story of Agamemnon's
daughter Iphigenia, play a key role in European culture. In Iphigenia 's story, the mo-
tives of the victim and of Anagnorisis converge, thus of a social taming of surplus an-
archic violence on the one hand and of an extraction of nomologie knowledge on the
other. In the development of material from both "Iphigenias" of Euripides to Goethe's
Iphigenia on Tauris, the metamorphosis of human to animal sacrifice in symbolic ac-
tion, and thus in language as medium of communication, follows: as a way from ar-
chaic ritual sacrifice to a utopia of humane understanding.

1. The Sacrificial Ritual in Ancient Times

Victor Turner once pointed out that one could be tempted to trace the origin of ritu
sacrifice and of culture as a whole to a monomyth originating from conflict and
lence (Turner 1987:58). Such a concept is particularly suggested by that mythical
nealogy which- in its numerous offshoots- determines almost the entire themat
repertoire of Greek tragedy. By this is meant the multilayered story of Titan, Atri
and Tantalus, in whose last offshoot the fate of Iphigenia and her confrontation w
the problem of sacrifice on Aulis, as among the Taurer, is narrated. Before turning
this story, I would like to glance at the prerequisites named by Turner as necess
for an understanding of the sacrificial ritual and its function in culture. The first s
position is that the tragedy emerged from ritual sacrifice. There is also an assert
associated with this: that sacrifice has something to do with a conflict between or

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102 • the world of music 40(1)- 1998

and violence and with the ritual overcoming of this conflict, and that right at the be-
ginning of each culture, violence- and the problem of its taming- exist.
The ancient philologist Walter Burkert has attempted to show in his book on
Homo necans (1972; also 1979, 1981), and in several other studies such as those
gathered in the volume Wilder Ursprung (1990), how the Greek tragedy, which actu-
ally emerges like an unexplained miracle within European cultural history, could
have grown out of the sacrificial ritual of archaic societies. He illuminates how
Greek tragedy gained, in addition to its primarily cultic character, a political and aes-
thetic one as well (cf. Meier 1993, 1996). In doing so, Burkert falls back on studies of
Karl Meuli and Gerhard J. Baudy, who make credible the argument that the cultic
sacrifice gradually developed out of the hunt and the subsequent ritual distribution of
its spoils. (Meuli 1946; Baudy 1983). "The ideal hunt becomes the sacrifice," writes
Burkert, and he adds, crossing the aitiology, "The ideal sacrifice becomes the hunt"
(1983:31). Of decisive significance is that the division of meat (and of food in gener-
al) can be regarded as an initial process of cultic and social establishment of order, in
which the "game" of fate and of human powers of order are visible and experience-
able, even "understandable," by those who participate in it. The relations of distribu-
tion of Lebens-Mittel (literally, "means of living," or food)- in the broadest sense of
the word- shows itself to be the one origin of culture. As suggested by the etymolo-
gy of their name, the Moirai, the goddesses of fate, were originally "flesh distribu-
tors," and also the word "demon" belongs in its origin to this context: sacrifices of
humans, animals and food play a decisive role in that cultural field to which the
Homo necan subjects itself. If we follow the suggestion of Burkert, in the chain of
"sacrificies" and their ritualization of culture that began by making the animal the
spoils of the hunt, human sacrifice gains a cultic function. However- as in the story
of Iphigenia in Aulis- this human sacrifice is substituted "in the process of civiliza-
tion" with a sacrified animal.
In the ritual of sacrifice, there is still- in addition to the hunting and food
themes- still another component to consider: that of violence. It was once again
Turner1 who pointed out that the social function of sacrificial customs seems to be
related to the unrestrained violence released by each act of establishing order in a so-
ciety. By limiting this violence to a specific bounded area- that of the sacrificial
place and the sacrificial act-, it can be representatively domesticized and, through
this, the pandemic and uncontrolled growth of violence in a society can be prevented.
Sacrificial rituals- and this is also a thesis of René Girard (1992)- are thus the out-
let for surplus social violence. The cathartic violence of ritual sacrifice prevents that
"impure" violence that would destroy the society.
These findings of ethnology and cultural anthropology concerning sacrifice are
complemented and confirmed by insights of social psychology into the structure of
ritual. Rituals can be understood as those "control points" in the communicative
weave of cultural texts that make possible and control the circulation of social energy
(Greenblatt 1990:7-24). They appear as symbolic-expressive institutionalized ac-
tions and sequences of action which serve the formation of relationships and which

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 Neumann. Iphigenia: Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama • 103

are "more or less" religiously determined (Rauch 1992: 15;33 1). One could also say
that rituals constitute the place- or the process- in which the sacred and the social
come together in a process of establishing and generating significance. Rites thus
serve- it has been so emphasized- three goals: the reduction of insecurity in the so-
cial field, the formation of identity in the society and the "culturization" of the sub-
ject. They are "strategic forms of sozialization" (Bell 1992:98). Catherine Bell has
found the pleasing metaphor that rites open up a window to the dynamic of culture-
and in that, to the power plays of belief, ideology, legitimation and power. This dy-
namic of cultural processes can already be found in tribal societies and affects myth-
ically and religiously governed social formations up to the modern industrial civili-
zation. The most interesting point in this development may thereby be the moment in
which the Relais structure of ritual comes into view (Bell), whereby the sacred refer-
ence of ritual "jumps over" into its secular reference, without the latter making the
former completely disappear. The degree of latitude within which rituals acquire
their function stretches from the conception of their function as one of securing and
stabilizing in the erosion process of social happenings (as Wolfgang Braungart has
sought to describe) to functions of differentiation and displacement (as Catherine
Bell has observed in connection with Bourdieu's pattern of distinction as regulator of
social formations). It remains decisive that rituals serve to structure and present spe-
cific interpretations of social reality in such a way that these "are provided with legit-
imation" (Moore and Myerhoff 1977:3f.): and indeed with legitimation from the per-
formance, not from the legitimation derived from the sacred reference of ritual! This
is clearly the point at which the "universal" homology between ritual and drama pos-
tulated by Victor Turner (1982) becomes comprehensible. Rituals are contributions
to definition, indeed to the construction of social reality (Werlen 1994:80). If one at-
tempted to make differentiations regarding the problem of the connection between
ritual and art, between sacred and aesthetic dispositions in the social field, three di-
verse accentuations would then come into view. First would come the consideration
of a ritual origin of culture, particularly of literature- this point of view was raised
by Walter Burkert in consideration of the Greek drama and its origin in sacrificial rit-
ual but was also taken up again by Wolfgang Braungart (1996) in connection with
the 20th century. Then there is the attempt to create a homology between ritual and
"theater" (in the broadest sense) and to broaden these to the characteristic of a com-
prehensive performance culture; Turner and Richard Schechner have pursued these
issues. Finally, a stricter limitation would be imaginable that undertakes to recon-
struct the ritual itself as argument and generator of literary text occurrences- such as
questioning the function of the guest meal or of duels in narrative or dramatic texts
(Neumann 1996:35-64; 1998). The reflections presented here participate in all three
conceptualizations of ritual, if weighted differently, and seek to make them fruitful in
understanding an exemplary sacrificial drama.
In order to more precisely evaluate the significance of the Euripidean dramas
Iphigenia in Tauris (ca. 412 B.C.) and Iphigenia in Aulis (405 B.C.) in literary histo-
ry in terms of the sacrificial ritual as thematicized therein, it is worthwhile to take a

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104 • the world of music 40(1)- 1998

glance at the cultural-historical background against which these plays evolved. (. Iphi -
genia in Tauris : cf. Euripides 1966; Iphigenia in Aulis : cf. Euripides 1993; referenc-
es to following quotations are provided as line numbers in the text.) The fifth century
B.C. is the era of Pericles (ca. 500-429), of the birth of a new Greek self-confidence
after the victory over the powerful Persians, of the emergence of Athenic democracy,
of the colonial expansion of the Greeks resulting from that democracy's strengthen-
ing, of the invention of the Attic tragedy and, only about seventy years after the death
of the last of the three great tragicians, Euripides, the preparation of a poetology of
tragedy by Aristotle in his Poetics. Due to these singular coincidences, the thesis was
proposed that Athenic democracy needed- as well as used- art in order to experi-
ence to the fullest the new, so turbulently changing cultural reality. In addition, art
was needed to pursue- above all with help of the tragedies, but also of architecture
and sculpture- a casuistry of that nomological knowledge that this democracy need-
ed for its political self-understanding and its orientation in the newly formed world
(Meier 1996). "Nomological knowledge" is what Max Weber called that order of
thinking with whose help cultures contrive a new orientation within a transformed
world. In the Greek world, this order of thinking directs itself for example towards
the approach to issues of justice, of hybris, of sacrifice (for the state), of uncontrolla-
bility of violence or the banishment of acts of blood revenge by Athenic jurisdiction.
Approaches to such topics are found in an exemplary fashion in the Oresteia of Ae-
schylus, but also in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. As found in the Attic
tragedies, ritual plays a particularly important role in this casuistry of cultural order
of knowledge. Rituals occupy- expressed in terms of communication theory- deci-
sive control points in the cultic, social and political web of the Greek polis, and their
discussion promises clarification of that fundamental issue of structuralization and
operability of those topics that are of significance in the intensively and expansively
developing Greek state: law, justice, violence, order, polis and cosmos. If one as-
sumes that the Greek tragedy evolved from the cultic sacrificial ritual, then it is re-
markable and culturally significant that, soon after its "invention," the tragedy appar-
ently made rituals a requirement of cultic, social and political events and actions.
These were made available for the common work on the nomology of the polis, and
indeed, rituals basically participated in their own way in this work of understanding
through the formation of that nomology in their dramatic texts.

2. The "Iphigenias" of Euripides

If read in the context of a nomological understanding and knowledge of the Greek

polis, each of the Iphigenia tragedies by Euripides concentrates in its own way on a
sacrifice and the discussion of its social and political function. One play concentrates
on the ritual human sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis, which is supposed to create a fa-
vorable wind for the Greeks in their campaign on Troja and which is only eased at the
last moment by the goddess Artemis with the substitution of Iphigenia by a female

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 Neumann. Iphigenia : Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama • 105

deer. The other focuses on the human sacrifice demanded by the Tauric king Thoas
which Iphigenia, herself having become a priestess who should make a sacrifice, is to
carry out on her brother Orestes and which she avoids through trickery and flight.
This takes place through self-realization in confrontation with the sibling and
through reaching an understanding with him. But in addition to these sacrifices,
which serve the goal of changing an instance of violence into the taming of violence
and which have a social-strategic function, a second ritual process of great signifi-
cance also appears in the tragedies. This process is not directed towards the way a so-
ciety deals with the violence virulent in it, but rather towards the experience of per-
ception and social recognition. This is namely the ritual of anagnorisis, which plays
an essential role in Aristotle's theory of the structure of drama and which particularly
assumes a key function in Goethe's Iphigenia on T auris ( Iphigenie bei den Taurerň)
in the long recognition sequence between Iphigenia and Orestes.2 Here, in the Tauric
Iphigenia , it already becomes clear that both these above-mentioned performative
events, the sacrifice and anagnorisis (thus, the ritual of experience of violence and
the desire for awareness) are related to one another and seem to define each other no-
mologically as well as poetologically. The "spared" victim Iphigenia and the "desig-
nated" victim Orestes meet each other in barbaric Taurus, and their mutual recogni-
tion is that which entangles and loosens the dramatic plot that is thickened by the
sacrificial ritual. One could claim that, within this interpersonal act of recognition,
the relationship between Greek and barbarian culture, the relationship between blood
relations and law in the polis, and the argumentative position of sacrifice in view of
the functioning of Greek society -all these are raised for discussion and appear to be
casuistically worked out. Sacrifice and anagnorisis show themselves here to be core
rituals that guarantee the functioning of the state: sacrifice as the "taming form" of
the violence that is necessary as well as dangerous for the polis, as the inevitable or-
ganizational model of social aporia.3 Sacrifice makes possible anagnorisis as the per-
formative act of communicative perception, memory and mutual definition of social
subjects. That which first grows out of the tie between sacrifice discourse and anag-
norisis is "nomological knowledge." From here on, attention will be directed towards
both rituals, that of the sacrifice and that of anagnorisis related to sacrifice, as two
forms of social treatment of violence and of recognition of the Other or of an encoun-
tered stranger.
Without doubt, Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides offers a perfect example for that
which one could call a casuistry of nomologie knowledge- that is, the question of
the necessity or absurdity of human sacrifice in (Greek) society. This is set wonder-
fully in its dubiosity at that moment when Agamenmon records on a writing tablet
the order of carrying out the sacrifice of Iphigenia, then hesitantly erases it and once
more writes it down (line 5). The drama shows the subject suffering and frightened
from the necessity of the sacrifice- in the shape of Iphigenia as in that of the sacrifi-
cer Agamemnon. Further, the drama shows as well the struggle- with-oneself of the
sacrificial victim, reaching a higher level of insight. This occurs in the moment when
Iphigenia thinks she recognizes that her sacrifice of life is not for the sake of a "des-

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106 • the world of music 40(1)- 1998

picable wooer" (46), the worthless Helena, but rather for the good of the Greek state
and its colonial superiority over the barbarians: "Then free ... / Should Hellas be and
not subject to barbarians" (48). "To Hellas I gave my body as sacrifice" (53). The
sacrificial discourse takes up a large section of text in the drama4: marriage sacrifice
(29), lifting of the torch in the procession of the bride are all spoken of5 (23), as well
as holy water, salt flour, the flame of atonement and the black, steaming sacrificial
blood of a young cow (43); of the purifying salt flour that makes the embers blaze up
(56); finally, of the "water, presented by father" (57), that waits for the victim and the
"holy water" on the feast altar (59).6 A key place in the argumentation of the drama is
however taken on by the messenger report (58-60) on the substitution of an animal
sacrifice for the human one, which is instigated by the goddess Artemis: the female
deer on the blood altar in Aulis. This drama within a drama, as represented by the
messenger report, makes it unmistakably clear that Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides il-
luminates the issue of ritual under the aspect of the sacrifice that is necessary for the
good of the community to present and to justify, even if only representatively.7
Euripides' second Iphigenia ,8 Iphigenia in Tauris , also does not reveal the sacri-
ficial speech.9 Thus a sacrifice of drink is spoken of, and the details of the custom of
sacrifice, according to which Orestes is to be killed, are examined closely here: He
who knows and accepts the practices of human sacrifice among the barbarians in-
forms himself in detail about the sprinkling of the body with water (29), the fire buri-
al, about oil and honey, but also hair and tears, as grave offerings. Even the godly
meal of Tantalus, who sacrified his own son to the Heavenly Ones as food, is recalled
(17). But step by step, the question of the necessity or absurdity of human sacrifice in
the society, a question which rules over the structure of argumentation of Iphigenia
in Aulis , is replaced by those other questions about the events that Aristotle calls
"anagnorisis." Anagnorisis is the events of cognition and understanding and their rit-
ualization, events which are fundamental for human relations. This develops here be-
tween the spared and the designated victim, between Iphigenia and her brother Orest-
es. The famous stichomythia (20-27), that long recognition scene in which Orestes
first responds to Iphigenia' s desire for recognition with silence and the namelessness
of his own sacrificial body, enters:

Iphigenia: Why do you not name your name? Are you so proud?
Orestes: For the sacrifice you need my body, not my name (21).

But Iphigenia stubbornly pursues her goal of spoken understanding and remem-
bering confirmation: the extolled different signs of recognition in Aristotle's Poetics ,
which are recalled together by the sisters,10 lead in the end to mutual recognition
(38f.). On the contrary, however, no anagnorisis takes place between the Greeks and
the barbarians. Orestes and Pylades here, Thoas there, evade each other, "with cov-
ered faces," going right past each other (60). Thoas is tricked and surrenders as the
defeated one. And a long passage of the chorus is repeatedly effected as discussion of
nomological knowledge: the relationship between oracle, truth, law and order of the
world- and the question of the positions of the ordering powers of Gaia, Themis,
Apollo and Artemis; and finally of Athena, who creates the new order of Attic polis

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 Neumann. Iphigenia : Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama • 107

(62; 67f.). Here as well, as in Medea by Euripides, in the end the demand is issued to
the protagonists to establish a shrine and a sacrificial cult. This circumstance is of the
highest cultural-historical, as well as poetological, significance. The Euripidic trage-
dy, which has made the nomological problem of sacrifice a subject of discussion,
turns itself backwards at the end to its own point of origin, the creation of the tragedy
from the sacrificial cult. This self-reflective gesture reaches a climax in that it is the
protagonist of the drama who receives the task of establishing a shrine as a cultic,
sacrificial site.11 This turning back is not a relapse, however, but rather a simulta-
neous cultural-utopic act of intensification. The victim that is to be offered is no
longer a human or animal sacrifice, but rather only a symbolic sacrifice. For from the
mouth of Athena comes the demand directed to the saved Orestes:

And establish this custom: If one carries out as substitute

For your sacrificial death the feast, so scratches the steel
Of the priestess bloodily only the neck of a man,
So that the holy right of the goddess remains intact (68).

What the "enlightener" Euripides here stages is, one can say, a cultural "jolt" in
the real, performative order of violence, of exhibition and planning of a cultural
change of paradigms, which the tragedy sets before our eyes. It is the installation of a
replacement pattern that pushes to yet another level the suppression of the human
sacrifice by the animal one (as thematicized in Iphigenia in Aulis)- that is in a sacri-
fice that is only a symbolic act, a performative synecdoche.

3. Ritual Sacrifice as Symbolic Action: Goethe's Iphigenie

The ritual sacrifice as symbolic action: it is this question, thrown out by Euripides in
Iphigenia in Tauris ,12 to which Goethe makes a connection in Iphigenie aufTauris.
He as well offers- much like the model of Euripides- a casuistry13 of sacrifice and
its possible social function, and he as well allows this discussion to veer around in a
sequence of situations of anagnorisis. But one can say that Goethe goes one step fur-
ther. That is, he replaces the sacrifice as symbolic action, as Euripides had implied,
with a linguistic game that is interwoven throughout the drama, in which a speech of
siblings develops step by step into a social utopia. This sibling speech is entrusted in
an inventive and transformational dynamic of language and that language's world-
pictoral power. The initiator and bearer of this cultural-dynamic event that, instead of
relying on the sacrificial ritual, opts alone for language as medium of the construc-
tion of a human community, is a woman. If the female figures of the antique trage-
dy-such as a Medea or an Antigone- were at the same time catalyzers of experi-
ences of foreignness between the sexes as well as between cultures,14 then is
Goethe's Iphigenia much more so. She is the inventor and self-creator of a new no-
mologie paradigm of exploration of the strange, indeed, its "propelling force." It is
thus accurate that Goethe "quotes" the casuistic experiment of Euripides and that po-
tential of order of knowledge invested by him in that experiment, but he does this in

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 108 • the world of music 40(1)- 1998

strict concentration on the medium of communication itself. It is in this medium

alone that the cultural break between Greek and barbarians, the differences between
man and woman, become an event, can become experienceable and malleable. More
precisely, Goethe concentrates on the medium of language and that under the most
conceivably "modern" of conditions. Schiller formulated this perceptively in his let-
ter of 22 January 1802 to Goethe: "... that which could be gotten out of it without
gods and spirits has already been done." The "modern" in the Goethe construction is,
according to Schiller, the climaxing of the entire mythic event exclusively towards
the showplace of the soul, to pure inwardness. Schiller writes in reference to the
scene of Orestes' madness from which he- without memory of the atrocities, the
butchery and human sacrifices of the Atreus dynasty from which he comes- awakes
again in a climate of utopie humanity: "What a fortunate thought, to use the only pos-
sible situation, madness, to insert the more beautiful humanity of our new ways into
a Greek world." It is that which a contemporary of Goethe designated in his review
with the sentence, the poet allowed himself here "to raise us as it were to a higher hu-
manity" (Goethe 1991:59).
In the following I would like to attempt to trace the creative processes by which
Goethe was successful in mutually correlating the performative events of sacrifice
and anagnorisis in a kind of communion as well as in fusing a model of utopie hu-
manity born of Iphigenia's creative language. In this way the drama first deals with
the sacrifice, with that sequence of casuistic experiments in which Goethe shows the
metamorphosis of the discourse of sacrifice into one of atonement, which grows
alone from the language dynamic and its power to be set for stage. In a second pas-
sage I will turn to the consequences of anagnorisis situations in drama. The medium
of such situations is the same discourse over the necessary or non-occurring sacri-
fice. In the process of mutual recognition of siblings, this discourse leads to a new
modeling of the identity of figures: the embedment of a compulsion for repetition is
relieved by the atrocity of the Tantaliden geneology and so to speak newly invents it
as human-autonomous subject.
As carried out in the drama of Goethe, a field of words from the blood victim
stands in the middle of the speech about the victim, marked by the opposites of fire
and water, of flame and blessed wetness.15 This theme of blood sacrifices is brought
in by Orestes. Orestes embodies it sharpsightedly in the archaic tradition of the sacri-
ficial meal, the "meat distribution" between gods and men, of the anthropophagical
atrocity of Tantalus, who serves his son Pelops as a meal to the gods and "On whose
experiene'd words, with wisdom fraught, / As on the language of an oracle, / E'en
gods delighted hung" (312-314). As Iphigenia as well in the "Song of the Parcae"
quoted from her (17 18-1766), 16 he recognizes the sacrificial meal as the location of
exchange and of investigation of nomological knowledge. Orestes argues here exact-
ly as in the drama of Euripides, that is, from the perspective of the victim himself: he
says that he himself, as his father before him, was the sacrificial animal (577), he
speaks of mother blood and the own blood dripping (752), butcher and victim in one
(707). Smoke and steam of the sacrificial fire are mentioned, as well as the ashes of

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 Neumann. Iphigenia : Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama • 109

revenge that are reawakened to a flame by Electra's "fire tongue" (1030). Finally we
hear of a fire of terror, through which Erinyen arises out of the ashes that would de-
rive from him, Orestes, if one touched him: as Kreusa's bridal gown (reminiscent of
the Medea myth), as the Nessus gown of Heracles (1 178). Now speaking in the role
of spared victim, Iphigenia counters this however with a kind of " contre-discours
"the pure Blessed Word of the Sister" (1 166). From her own experience, the sacrifi-
cial animal represents the human, so to say a "bloodless" sacrifice; she wants to be
neither butcher nor victim, but rather one who atones.17 She speaks of holy smoke
and that she brings "fragrant incense in the flame" (1 156). A pure hint of love is spo-
ken of, which successfully cools the "low murmuring" of the "bosom's fiery glow"
(1158). In the end, the image of a "bubbling eternal spring" appears in Iphigenia's
speech which spills "into the valley." "Turned around" to its inverse by Iphigenia,
this sacrifice code of Orestian dialogue prologue is, in the course of the dialogue with
Orestes, received and then "worked out" by him. This occurs first by means of the
fall into madness (made famous by Schiller) and "exhaustion" (1254). In a vision of
the hereafter, in which he and his sister- freed and reconciled with the Tantaliden
family- think they are looking at Hades, they awakening gradually, step-by-step
from their daze (1258-1364). Orestes' awakening is followed by a speech which, in-
stead of sacrificial blood and fire, now refers to thoughts of streaming rain, of sun
mirrored in the droplets of freshly revived leaves and of rainbows that set off the grey
gauze of the last clouds (1353f.). "A refreshing smell steams from the earth," ends
Orestes, "A quick'ning order from earth ascends, inviting me to chase upon its plains
the joys of life and the deeds of high emprise" (1363-1366). With these key words,
however, Orestes then "transferred" the discourse, "turned around" by himself, to
Pylades, the companion. He immediately takes up the word from the wind, "which
fills our sails" (1366)- it is the sails that should lead the Greek ship back to their
home. The fire of revenge that the Erinyes had threatened to kindle from the ashes
becomes for Pylades, repeatedly "turning," the "ashes of the extinguished hearth,"
out of which arise "the beautiful fire of the father gods." Iphigenia should, according
to Pylades, sprinkle for them "fragrant incense" from "golden censers" (1614-1615).
That which occurs in Goethe's drama by means of Iphigenia's linguistic creativity is
the transformation of the sacrificial speech into a speech of understanding. Iphigenia
takes up the double idea of fire and water that determined the antique sacrificial dis-
course and transforms it in patient dialogue with Orestes into a program of atonement
that climaxes in thoughts of incense and holy wetness, of releasing rain (1345ff.) and
bubbling springs (1 197). All figures in the play participate in this metamorphic pro-
cess and begin to "perceive" themselves in a newly created language and world.18
This is the moment during which Iphigenia herself realizes what she has success-
fully accomplished in her game of linguistic transformations that have transmuted
sacrificial discourse into a redeeming word. She begins to contemplate the miracle of
the invention of this new language and its transfer to others; it is a language that dis-
solved the no longer fixable mimesis of the past to which Orestes had been subjected.
From the compulsion of repetition that irrefutably burdened the grandchild of the

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110 • the world of music 40(1)- 1998

family in the Atreus horror, this language drove out the disremembering of blood
sacrifices and the utopia of a new community. In her answer to Pylades, Iphigenia
names the pattern, the rhetoric "figure," that determines her own language behavior
since the unhoped-for encounter with Orestes. This is the figure of a linguistic
change, a "trans"-figuration of that sacrifice discourse which Orestes had instigated
from the compulsory memory of the sacrificial horrors of his family into the con-
struction of a human utopia. It is a linguistic figure which, in an image of nature,
makes mimesis and metaphoricity kindred to one another. This linguistic figure ap-
pears in the topical image of the heliotrope, a flower that turns toward the sun and
follows its course in the sky. In reply to the words of Pylades to Iphigenia that she
would be the one to atone for the curse and who could "decorate with new life blos-
soms " her own curse, Iphigenia answers:
Vernehm ich dich, so wendet sich, o Teurer,
Wie sich die Blume nach der Sonne wendet,
Die Seele, von dem Strahle deiner Worte
Getroffen, sich dem süßen Tröste nach.
Wie köstlich ist des gegenwärt'gen Freundes
Gewisse Rede, deren Himmelskraft
Ein Einsamer entbehrt und still versinkt.
Denn langsam reift, verschlossen in dem Busen,
Gedank' ihm und Entschluß [...] (1619-1627).

[As doth the flower revolve to meet the sun,

Once more my spirit to sweet comfort turns,
Struck by thy words' invigorating ray.
How dear the counsel of a present friend,
Lacking whose godlike power, the lonely one
In silence droops! for, lock'd within his breast,
Slowly are ripen'd purpose and resolve ...]

The heliotrope spoken of here is marked by "transfer," by "following-the-move-

ment-of-the-sun" and by "carrying over." It is the notion of the transformation of lan-
guage in resolution and act through dialogue, from the birth of social utopia from
"metaphor." For heliotrope is, as Jacques Derrida has so aptly remarked, nothing
more than the figure of metaphor itself: "Métaphore veut donc dire héliotrope; à la
fois mouvement tourné vers le soleil et mouvement tournant du soleil" (1972:251). It
is the turning point from discourse of sacrifice to that of atonement, which here is
marked by Iphigenia poetologically- through the metaphor of metaphors. But not
only that: the Christian concept of "atonement," which incidentally Goethe first
clearly brings out only in the last version of his Iphigenie (1969; 2138), makes con-
nections simultaneously to the Christian notion of sacrifice which indeed returns
again to the human sacrifice in the highly conflictive phenomenon of the eucharist in
a silent, even taboo-laden way.19 This occurs in light of a completely personal sym-
bolic concept which moves between corporality, real presence, uniqueness of the
sacrifice of the son of man. It is represented in the eucharistie sacrifice and leaves un-

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 Neumann. Iphigenia: Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama • 111

marked, in a strange and indecisive way, the difference between soma and sema.20
But Goethe's drama does not work out this nuance of "turning," which remains hid-
den in the heliotrope figure of Iphigenia and in dark ways makes connections to the
archaic sacrifice of ancient times. Instead, he leaves this nuance- so to say, in be-
tween archaic sacrifice and an enlightened utopia of understanding- simply to exist
on its own. After a moment of indecisiveness, the argumentation of Iphigenia returns
in the "drama of humanity" to that shift of discourse from one of sacrifice to one of
atonement. This change, literally the "peripetia" of the drama, is fulfilled in the trans-
formation of the literalness of bloody human sacrifice into the "sweet incense" and
"relieving wetness" of language itself and its symbolic order. Goethe inserts here
with great confidence the old concept of odeur de sainteté , which settles on the bor-
der between the material and the spiritual and which itself marks a key place, a
"shift" as well in the metaphoric texture of Goethe's Iphigenia drama. This is the
transformation of the notions of sacrificial smoke and the smell of fire that Orestes
had developed so threateningly from the perspective of the human sacrifice and the
Tantaliden curse into the images of incense and sweet incense that Iphigenia installs
in their place. It is the transformation of blood to aroma, of the material to essence, of
"hellish sulphur" (1154) to the "scent of holiness." How exactly Goethe justified to
himself this occurence in the process of his drama is evidenced by his writing from
the Italian Journey of 1 October 1787 in which he reports, as he reads an Italian ver-
sion of Iphigenie to a group of friends in Rome:

These young men ... were expecting something in the manner of Berlichingen and at
first could not reconcile themselves to the calm flow of the lines ... Tischbein, who
also has little taste for such emotional restraint, expressed this in a charming allegory
or symbol. He compared my work to a burnt offering, the smoke of which is prevented
from rising by a gentle air current and creeps along the ground, while its flame at-
tempts to rise upward. His drawing, which I enclose, has both charm and point, I think
(Goethe 1991 :50f.; English translation: 1982:98).

Related in a complementary way to the discourse of sacrifice and its dissolution

in Goethe's drama are those anagnorisis situations in which the figures of the play-
Iphigenia, Orestes and Thoas- attempt to find and assert their position in the nomo-
logie casuistry that is found in the play.
Already the beginning of the drama is determined by the theme of sacrifice. Iphi-
genia reveals herself to Thoas as the "spared" sacrifice from Aulis. As she refuses the
mild-mannered Thoas, who has sought her attention, he threatens her with the réin-
troduction of human sacrifices, which had been given up until then (506-508). The
principles of "spared" and of "designated" sacrifices were played out for the first
time in a situative manner.21 The second marked situation of recognition in the dra-
ma is that between Iphigenia and Pylades, who reveals himself to be a Cretan- that
means however in the "antiquated" custom of the play's language, a liar. This situa-
tion as well is marked by the sacrifice in Aulis and is understood as a test of the par-
ticipants' knowledge of political order. Without recognizing Iphigenia, Pylades re-
ports on the bloody sacrifice of the daughter of Agamemnon and its function in the

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112 • the world of music 40(1)- 1998

history of the royal house of Atreus (891-917). A key scene of Goethe's drama-
naturally with reference to the Euripidean concept- is formed then by the encounter
between Iphigenia and Orestes. In contrast to Pylades, Orestes decides to be open:
"Between us twain be truth! I am Orestes!" (1080f.). Both image fields of the dis-
course of sacrifice stand at the center of the recognition speech between the siblings,
one image field of fire and one, in contrast to it, of water and of cooling winds. The
great theme of memory and forgetting appears embedded in these fields, of blind de-
terioration in the past or the knowing emancipation from it. In Orestes' s madness
monologue, which names the drink of forgetting in Hades, this critical point between
regressive fantasy and utopish potential is precisely marked. The solution model of
Iphigenia, that then brings her to speak in the second anagnorisis between her and
Orestes, is developed from the idea of siblingness. "Celestial pair," it is said here, the
conspiracy averted into the rhetorical figure of Kyklos, "... save a mortal pair!"
(1317-1320). And Iphigenia summons, with Apollo and Artemis, the godly sibling
pair as counterpart to her own sibling constellation, as well as both the heavenly stars
of brightness of day and night, the sun and moon. "Recognizing-oneself ' and "recog-
nizing-the-world" reveal themselves correspondingly in the "human" pattern of sib-
lingness. It is the rule of relatedness of a sibling configuration which "runs through"
the rule of family in the polis- and that is, in the sense of an aesthetic "politic." It is
quite extraordinary in Goethe's conception that he creates a scene of the birth of a
discourse founded by a community, of sibling dialogue, from the extinguishing of
the sacrificial speech. Further, the drama of the speech takes its beginning from the
creative linguistic play between sister and brother- not from lovers and not from
politicians. One could call this the fabrication of an aesthetic state of humanity and
its performance through the sibling's speech. The recognition scene as well between
Orestes and Thoas in the sixth scene of the fifth act reveals itself upon closer exami-
nation as determined by the sacrifice, by the ritual commitment of the own body: it
accepts the consequences of the political recognition of the two siblings. The scene
of attestation of Orestes' s identity begins with the attempted use of a new ritual, the
"duel," a duel as "means of information concerning honor" (Fürbringer 1988; Fre-
vert 1991), which should take the place of the slaughter of strangers: "Then from us /
Commence the novel custom!" (2046f.). Then however the protagonists serve them-
selves again, as already in the dialogue between the siblings, to the classic recogni-
tion ritual of recollection through body signals. It is Iphigenia who prevents the
looming duel with the objection, "No, no! Such bloody proofs are not requir'd ...
king!" (2064f.). She takes up the means of identification through body signs: "See
here, the mark on his right hand impress' d / As of three stars, which on his natal day
/ Were by the priest declar'd to indicate / Some dreadful deed therewith to be per-
form'd" (2082-2086). But this recognition scene is also in the end transcended: in
the "atonement" discourse of sacrifice, Iphigenia turns around the image field of fire
and water and their possible balancing through the "sweet incense of language":

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 Neumann. Iphigenia: Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama • 113

Thoas: As fire opposes water and doth seek

With hissing rage to overcome its foe,
So doth my anger strive against thy words.

Iphigenia: Let mercy, like the consecrated flame

Of silent sacrifice, encircled round
With songs of gratitude, and joy, and praise,
Above the tumult gently rise to heaven. (1979-1985)

The rejection that Thoas delivers in the end to the reinvestiture of human sacrifice
proves itself to be a ritual of recognition that is requested, that must be talked-into
and- as Adorno aptly remarked- finally as a "deviously reached" ritual of anagno-
risis: "Then go!" (2151); "Fare thee well!" (2174).
Goethe's Iphigenia drama creates a chain of anagnorisis situations, refused and
granted, related to each other in restraint and accelerando. Such anagnorisis situa-
tions are first directed toward a "re"-cognition of the horrors of the past, a recogni-
tion of the long chain of family atrocities: the crimes in the Tantaliden genealogy, the
crime of Orestes and the almost-carried-out human sacrifice of Iphigenia. It is a dis-
course that is performed on the factum brutum, the scandal of human sacrifices as
requisite for state order. The structure that marks Goethe's drama is based on this
model from Euripides. But the linguistic game that- as already with Euripides- is
spun out in stichomythia and hypotyposis, in artful metaphoric games and metamor-
phoses, is played out differently by Goethe. The gods ex machina, who in Euripides'
work intervene like spirits from prehistoric times and who are to be understood as
well as allegories of a newly created political life form, are lacking in Goethe's dra-
matic world. This world must, as Schiller remarked, make do "without gods and spir-
its." The metamorphic power of language of the title figure of Goethe's drama is that
which releases from itself a Utopian game of recognition and of understanding. The
invention of a new language of humanity, not brought forth from the requirements of
a traumatized geneology, but rather from a fortunate coincidence of "schizoid siblin-
99
gry. A new "nomologie knowledge" originates then with the narrative of acts of
the father (680-696). Py lades calls this process of transformation "the endless ...
projects which the soul burns to accomplish" (680): the "sister word" that is set
against the "mother blood" (1 166). It is the principle of a transliteration, a transfigu-
ration of the bloody sacrifice in a performative game or- expressed more cautious-
ly- in a collective phantasma that has stabilized itself for a moment. To conclude, I
would like to place the event, about which Goethe's singular drama attempts to an-
chor in the area of conflict between themes of sacrifice and of scenic anagnorisis, un-
der a motto that is borrowed from Hans Henny Jahnn's Medea drama: "The Word re-
deems us, not Exchange" (Jahnn 1966:12).
Both Jahnn's Medea as well as Kleist' s Penthesilea are written against the "un-
fulfilled sacrifice" that Goethe's Iphigenie pushes in the limelight for a suspended
moment- in a brotherly exchange with Euripides, the enlightener among the three
great Greek tragedians.

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114 • the world of music 40(1)- 1998

Notes

1 Turner states (1987:58): "In this paper I do no more than suggest that most human symbolic
performances are directly or indirectly concerned with harnassing the power of energies
released in conflict in the service of meaning, and hence of making chaos the fire and fuel of
the art of order, Caliban tamed by Prospero."

2 Aristotle, Poetics , Chapter 16. The issue of anagnorisis is also discussed in Chapter 10.

3 I have borrowed this concept from Lévi-Strauss 1967.

4 There are about twenty individual places within the text where sacrifices are spoken of.

5 An idea, found in the Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides (29) as well as in his Medea , which fas-
cinated Hans Henny Jahnn, making it his key metaphor in his own Medea drama.

6 This index of motives is of great significance in Goethe's argumentation in Iphigenie. The ele-
ments are melted together there.

7 There is no intention here to argument in a "developmental-sociological" way. Euripides'

Iphigenia in Tauris , whose model of sacrifice seems more "advanced" in the sense of progress
of civilization, was created before his Iphigenia in Aulis. My argumentation, however,
assumes a "casuistic" structure of tragedie argumentation, not a cultural-dynamic model.

8 She originated, as already mentioned, before the Aulic Iphigenia.

9 Sacrifice is spoken of in twenty-five different passages within the text.

10 This involves the cloth with the golden lamb woven by Iphigenia; the carpet, also woven by
her, with the flight of the sun god; the memory of the water that the mother gives to take to the
bath in Aulis; the locks of hair that were sent back; the spear of Pelops in the father's house
(38f.).

11 At the end of his Medea , Grillparzer takes up this argument once more. Cf. Neumann 1997.
Incidentally, in the first scene of Der Gastfreund , Grillparzer stages perspicaciously the theme
of development of sacrifice from the hunt. Cf. Medea , also Burkert 1990: 13-30.

12 Goethe 1993; references to quotations are from here on provided as line numbers in the text.
English translations derive from Goethe 1885.

13 This is a concept that Schiller used in view of Goethe's Iphigenie. Cf. his letter of 22 January
1802.

14 Contrary to male figures, the competence to experience the unknown is already lent to female
figures in the dramas of antiquity: they suffer from the unknown (as Iphigenia and Medea), but
they experience this at the same time much more markedly as a "culture shock." The man
"knows," says Goethe, "how to help himself among strangers" (26).

15 Goethe takes up here Euripidian ideas of sprinkling the victim's body with holy wetness and
creamating it in holy fire (Euripides 1996:29).

16 In the "Song of the Parcae," the company at the meal, including gods and humans, is intro-
duced as a pattern of fate; this is reminiscent of the theme of "sacrificial smells" as the "half-
stifled breath of the Titans" (1750-1753), which Iphigenia then transforms in her atonement
speech into a human utopia. Seen this way, Iphigenia is a true Tantalide in so far as she uses
the creative linguistic power of her ancestors for the good of humans and the gods.

17 Pylades: "The curse atone, and all thy kindred grace / With the fresh bloom of renovated life"
(1617-1618).

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 Neumann. Iphigenia : Sacrifice and Ritual in Drama • 115

18 This is even done by the absent Electra, whose "tongue of fire" is correlated with the "releas-
ing sisterly word" of Iphigenia; this is still done by Thoas in his comparison between "fire and
water" (1979) and Iphigenia's reply of the "consecrated flame of silent sacrifice" (1982-
1983).
19 This ambivalence shows itself already in Goethe's very first poem, "Das ist mein Leib ..." in
the "Güldnen Schatzkästlein" of the mother (Horisch 1992:144-67).

20 Goethe himself voices himself in a conflicting manner on this subject. Iphigenia exclaims in a
distressful situation: "So hofft' ich denn vergebens, hier verwahrt, / Von meines Hauses
Schicksal abgeschieden, / Dereinst mit reiner Hand und reinem Herzen / Die schwer befleckte
Wohnung zu entsühnen!" [And have I vainly hop'd that, guarded here / Secluded from the for-
tunes of my race, / 1, with pure heart and hands, some future day / Might cleanse the deep
defilement of our house?] (1699-1702). And Goethe does support this in his Italian diary in a
letter (from Bologna) to Frau von Stein dated 19 October 1786: "[In the Ranuzzi Palast] I have
found a St. Agatha [by Raphael] ... I have this picture firmly printed on my mind. To her, in
my spirit, I shall read my Iphigenie , and I shall not allow my heroine to say anthing this saint
would not like to say" (Goethe 1982:98). On the other hand is the famous sentence: "Here the
drama does not at all want to go forwards, it is cursed, the King of Tauris should speak as
though no Strumpfwiirker in Apolde were going hungry" (to Frau von Stein, from Apolda on
March 3, 1779). Cf. the word of "stealthy reconciliation" that Adorno (1974:26) has marked.

21 Cf. this basic pattern (taken over from Euripides) in Goethe's Iphigenie , verses 1219-1221
and 1846-1857.

22 I take this concept from Deleuze and Guattari 1976.

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