Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?

by Andrew Lawler

  Opinions also vary within the crowd as to what is actually taking place during the kapparot ritual. Epstein says that the bird is not absorbing the sins of the person twirling it over his head. That would make repentance unnecessary. Instead, he sees the purpose as a “wake up” to the coming day of judgment, a reference that echoes the rooster’s ancient role as a spiritual alarm clock. Other rabbis believe that the bird symbolically takes on the sins of the human. The fact that a chicken can’t be “reused” for another person’s kapparot suggests that the chicken is playing more than a symbolic role. Part of the prayer recited in the ritual includes the biblical verse that says God ordered people to be healed.

  Most kapparot critics in the past focused on the pagan origins of the ritual, but animal cruelty is at the center of today’s debate. In 2005, a chicken vendor abandoned more than three hundred birds packed into crates in a vacant lot in Brooklyn, drawing the attention of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “The industrialization of kapparot has made it almost impossible to do the ritual humanely,” PETA investigator Philip Schein told one reporter. “These are massive makeshift slaughterhouses on urban streets with tens of thousands of panicked chickens being trucked in horrible conditions and handled roughly by the public.”

  Lubavitchers like Epstein insist that the chickens are humanely treated, as required by Jewish law. But as I watch these city folk handle the live birds, it is clear that most don’t know how to grasp the ­creatures without causing potential injuries. One teenage girl panics and flees when her chicken flaps its wings vigorously. Later, as I wander through the crowd, a few of the younger men confront me in ­halting English, questioning why I am taking pictures or ordering me not to. There’s hostility in their voices, and I keep moving to avoid their angry stares. Kapparot’s critics now include many orthodox Jews, and Lubavitchers are increasingly isolated in their practice. There is a new app for Yom Kippur atonement, but it uses a digital goat rather than the fowl.

  Across the East River in Manhattan, a billboard showing a young Hasidic man gently holding a plump white chicken in his arms touts the “Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos.” A similar debate is being waged in Israel, as opponents to the practice become more outspoken. “Kapparot is not consistent with Jewish teachings,” former Israeli chief rabbi Shlomo Goren said in 2006. The day before my visit to Crown Heights, the chief rabbinate declared that the use of the chicken was still permitted, but only if unnecessary suffering is avoided. Only later do I hear what took place not far from Crown Heights in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. Hundreds of fowl slated for use in the ritual died from the heat of the October warm spell, New York Daily News reported—“No One Here but Us (Dead) Chickens!” was the eye-catching headline—and many people had to be turned away for lack of live birds.

  Crown Heights’ kapparot may be the last link with ancient traditions that used chicken sacrifice as a form of protective shield for children and a fertility ritual. In medieval times, the Jewish practice was designed primarily for children rather than adults. As recently as a century ago, Muslim villagers in Syria sacrificed chickens to ensure their progeny would survive and thrive, a hen for a daughter and a cock for a son. This tradition even extends to the other side of the world, in the Babar archipelago in eastern Indonesia. James Frazer noted in his 1890 book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion that a Babar woman desiring a child would have a man hold a chicken over a woman’s head and repeat the words: “O Upulero, make use of this fowl; let fall, let descend a child, I beseech you, I entreat you, let a child fall and descend into my hands and onto my lap.” He then holds the bird over the man’s head, says another prayer, and kills the chicken.

  The healing power of chickens in a religious context was common even in nineteenth-century Wales. Frazer notes that epileptics would come to the village church of Llandegla to perform a ritual in which their malady was magically transferred to a rooster or hen, depending on the patient’s sex. Jews in nineteenth-century Galicia believed that epilepsy could be cured using a slaughtered cock. Such traditions may seem bizarre, but they are remnants of a time when the chicken was an elemental part of our spiritual as well as our physical well-­being. One surviving bastion of the bird’s spiritual healing power is in a Miami suburb.

  The morning after Arkansas governor Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election, Justice Antonin Scalia discussed chicken sacrifice on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court. “You may kill animals for food but not for other purposes?” he asked the lawyer arguing for repeal of a Florida law forbidding the practice. “Not for sport, not for sacrifice, not for anything but food?” The lawyer responded that there might be one exception. “You’d kill an animal in self-defense if you’re being attacked by a bear.”

  This surreal exchange took place during oral arguments in a landmark battle over religious freedom. What brought the case to the attention of the country’s highest court was the ritual slaughter of chickens. The trouble began when Ernesto Pichardo decided to build a church. A priest in a congregation practicing Santeria, an African-­Caribbean religious tradition popular in Cuba, Pichardo sought permits from the city of Hialeah in southern Florida to create a small sanctuary and cultural center in the overwhelmingly Hispanic and Catholic community.

  Starting in the late 1980s, fears of satanic rites conducted in secret in which animals and even children were sacrificed were sweeping the country. “Blood Cults Spread through U.S.,” warned one newspaper headline. Santerian refugees from Cuba were caught up in the panic. Drawing on ancient African practices, Santerians regularly sacrifice chickens and occasionally goats in private rituals to feed primary spirits, called orishas, sometimes equated with Catholic saints. Santeria means “the way of the saints.”

  Many Christians in Hialeah equated Santeria instead with devil worship. City officials reacted with horror, disgust, and outrage to Pichardo’s request. “What can we do to prevent this church from opening?” the president of the city council bluntly asked. What they could and did do was pass laws that made animal sacrifice a crime, unless it was primarily for food consumption. During an emergency public session in 1987, residents and city officials taunted Pichardo when he spoke against the ordinances and cheered when his opponents criticized Santeria. “People were put in jail for practicing this religion” in pre-Castro Cuba, asserted one hostile city council member, to the applause of many in the room.

  Pichardo’s Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye took the case to court, arguing that the laws were unconstitutional. Two lower courts backed the city of Hialeah’s arguments that the community wanted to prevent animal cruelty, limit the spread of disease, and shield children from the trauma of witnessing bloody killings. So in late 1992, Pichardo and his lawyers took the case to the land’s highest court.

  Lukumi is another term for Santeria, the religion brought to the United States from Cuba by refugees like Pichardo in the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. The Mariel boatlift of 1980 brought more than 125,000 Cubans to the United States, most to south Florida. Many practiced Santeria, and a tradition that had existed only on the margins of American life began to raise its profile just as fears of sacrificial cults spiked.

  Most Americans already were familiar with one of the principal orishas of Santeria. “Babalu,” Ricky Ricardo’s theme song in the 1950s television show I Love Lucy, is the earth deity associated with illness and healing, sometimes tied to the Catholic saint Lazarus. White hens and roosters are often sacrificed in his name, while black ones are used to absorb an unwanted spell. “Hens and roosters are sensitive to evil forces,” one Santeria vendor at a stall in Caracas, Vene­zuela, explained to me.

  Santeria’s roots stretch across the Atlantic to what is today Nigeria, which faces the Atlantic coast in West Africa. About AD 1200, a settlement called Ile-Ife emerged as an important artistic, intellectual, and religious center in West Africa for the next two centuries. Even today it is considered
the Jerusalem of the 35 million Yoruba people who make up one of Africa’s largest ethnic groups.

  According to one Yoruba tradition, the earth itself began at Ile-Ife. The creator deity Oduduwa dropped a chain from heaven but found only water below. The god then emptied a basket of earth and placed a five-toed chicken on this little mound. By scratching the soil, the chicken spread around the dirt and made more dry land. “Where the claws dug deep, valleys were formed,” one version relates. “Hills, uplands, and mountains were left behind within the interstices of the claws.” Then Oduduwa planted a palm nut that grew into a sacred tree.

  This is the site of Ile-Ife. The words can be translated as “holy life” or as “earth spreader.” “Such a name for the most ancient Yoruba kingdom suggests that it may have been named for the giant chicken that provided the earthly foundation on which it rests,” writes Daniel McCall, a Boston University anthropologist who did fieldwork across West Africa. Yoruba art is full of wooden sculptures of kneeling individuals offering up large chickens. Often the chickens are in the shape of a bowl for storing palm nuts. McCall suspects that some of these depict Oduduwa and his formidable fowl. Medieval Yoruba priests called babalawos frequently used chickens for divining the future, curing illness, and dispelling evil forces.

  Chickens came late to sub-Saharan Africa. The first mention of the bird in this vast region comes from the Arab adventurer and pilgrim Ibn Battutah, who traveled in what is Mali in 1353, trading with village women for live fowl. There was no archaeological evidence for earlier African chickens until 1991, when the British archaeologist Kevin MacDonald found a bone in Mali dating to five centuries before Battutah’s visit. Researchers are now trying to piece together the story of the bird’s spread in this region, which coincided with the rise of sub-Sahara’s first complex societies. In a 2011 Ethiopian dig, excavators found a fourth-century BC bone, suggesting that chickens first arrived from Egypt or by boat across the narrow strait separating the Horn of Africa from south Arabia, perhaps accompanying a cargo of aromatic frankincense and myrrh. Later imports were part of the bustling Indian Ocean trade in early medieval times, when Arab, Indian, and Indonesian merchants plied the waters of Africa’s east coast. Genetic analysis of Nigerian chickens links them to distant Southeast Asian rather than Mediterranean varieties.

  Facing stiff local competition, however, the bird was slow to spread in sub-Saharan Africa. Pigeons and francolin were abundant, and at least one variety of guinea fowl was already domesticated. Chickens don’t thrive in open grassland or stony desert and they are vulnerable to predators in the jungle, so they were of marginal importance to the peoples who live on Africa’s savannahs or in dense forests. But the birds were tailor-made for the farming communities and towns that began to flourish in West Africa in early medieval times. They ate noxious insects, provided abundant eggs and meat, and had a social nature that fit in well with barnyard life.

  The chicken’s arrival in West Africa was nothing less than revolutionary, at least in Kirikongo. Stephen Dueppen, a professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene, has been working since 2004 at this site in the savannah of Burkina Faso, between the Sahara Desert to the north and the dense jungles of Ghana to the south. A lean ­thirtysomething with a Los Angeles accent, Dueppen is exploring a rare and remarkable time capsule of an ancient African village that grew from a single homestead around AD 100 into a small settlement abandoned in the seventeenth century.

  He excavated a chicken bone dating to AD 650, the oldest yet found in West Africa. By that date, the cattle-herding Kirikongons had a growing elite, and by AD 1000 the leading family buried its children with luxury goods like cowrie shells brought from the distant ocean. It’s the familiar story of civilization—elites develop in small villages, long-distance trade takes off, towns appear with political and religious leaders, and then cities, kings, and empires emerge. But about AD 1200, the villagers of Kirikongo abruptly strayed off message.

  “It’s a pretty dramatic change,” says Dueppen. He’s invited me to visit his excavation, but unrest in neighboring Mali and a rash of kidnappings near its border force him to cancel the season. Suddenly, people are pounding their grain in public spaces rather than in isolated compounds, villagers have paved over the cemetery, and all the cattle are gone. In a region where cattle are still considered a primary source of wealth and prestige, this last decision was momentous. The large animals carry religious power. Even today across much of the savannah, a man’s standing in the community—and his marriage ­opportunities—often hinge on his herd size. Cattle require large grazing areas and a high level of organization. Just as Mongolian herders like Genghis Khan expanded their range, empires in this part of Africa grew out of a culture of large livestock. Since there is no evidence of sudden climate change or a devastating cattle disease, the people of Kirikongo appear to have made a conscious decision to create a different sort of society.

  As these changes were taking place, the village built a ritual complex, possibly with an attached communal granary. The floor of the entire structure is paved in brick, but there is one small, unpaved section. Here, Dueppen’s team uncovered the remains of at least four chickens, a goat, and a stone for sharpening knives. “You want the blood of the sacrifice to drip into the dirt, as a donation to the ancestors,” he explains. This is, at least, the current tradition, and what he found in the ancient mound is similar to the altars one might find in a nearby village even now.

  Dueppen believes that the rejection of cattle and hierarchy hinged on the availability of the chicken. Come the revolution, the fowl provided a viable alternative to the cow. Chicken bones quickly replace those from cattle. Cattle are traditionally a male domain, whether in Britain or Burma, while chickens are typically under female control in pre-industrial cultures. Dueppen suspects that women may have played a key role in overturning Kirikongo’s nascent elite.

  When the villagers broke the power of the elite they also made it possible for more people to participate in sacrifices. Until then, these rituals revolved around expensive cattle owned by a few. This shift increased the demand for chickens, or the availability of chickens increased the opportunities for sacrifice. Among the local Bwa people who inhabit the area today, the bird is used on virtually any impor­tant occasion. Chickens, the archaeologist explains, enable prayer. Any ritual involving ancestors, politics, divination, judicial proceedings, as well as births, marriages, and deaths all involve sacrificing the bird. In the past, even iron could not be smelted without a proper chicken offering. Among neighboring Mali Sudanese, “to sacrifice this bird is to sacrifice a substitute for the world.”

  The bird made it possible to make offerings without straining a family’s budget. In his 2010 paper in American Antiquity, Dueppen writes “chickens provided a means to maintain the rich spiritual life within a consciously reinvented egalitarian society without creating wealth differentials.” In other words, you didn’t need to be a rich cattle baron to maintain your connection with the gods. Kirikongo’s past, he maintains, is a unique case study of “the reinvention of equality in the creation of a novel society.”

  The chicken revolution still reverberates in the region. Men can marry without selling off their land or animals and women can divorce their husbands with a freedom not found in many other West African societies. The egalitarian nature of the modern people living in this area extends to gender. If your goal is to build a more egalitarian society, then chickens are the perfect livestock. “People forget about chickens because they are so common,” Dueppen says. “But they have a bunch of advantages that other animals do not. They are low cost and quickly reproduce. They are omnipresent. They are just so flexible. And they work in any political system.”

  The bird assumed a pivotal role in many African religious traditions. In the Congo basin, a female shaman among the Lulua tribe undergoes a rigorous ordeal of death and rebirth, but is not considered properly initiated until a hen is placed around her ne
ck with the power to “lure the souls of dead mediums” back to the earth. In Sierra Leone, on the Atlantic coast, the chicken is a truth teller. If it pecks at the grain in the hand of an estranged relative or friend, then the dispute is resolved. Among the Ndembu in central Africa, a chicken determines the guilt of a person accused of committing a crime. Poison is placed in a chicken’s mouth. If it survives, a dose is given to another chicken. If that bird lives, poison is administered to a third bird. Only then, if the third lives, is the accused found not guilty.

  Among the farming and town-dwelling Yoruba, south of Burkina Faso’s Kirikongo, the foreign chicken eventually displaced the indigenous pigeon as the center of their creation mythology. Yoruba proverbs are liberally sprinkled with references to chickens—“Were the hawk to die, the owner of chickens would not shed a tear.” The traditional Yoruba universe is made up of a heaven crowded with ancestors and hundreds of orishas, and an earth below filled with people and animals. As in so many other disparate cultures—­American Hasidim and Hindu Balinese, for example—the chicken serves as a tool or a medium to connect us to heavenly healing. Its blood seals that connection. Many Yoruba deities require its sacrifice. Births, weddings, illnesses, and deaths were, and often still are, accompanied by chicken sacrifices.

  It is worth recalling that chicken sacrifice and divination were widely practiced among Persians, Greeks, Celts, and Germanic tribes in the West, and Southeast Asians and Chinese in the East. But no society brought chicken divination to the level of organization, complexity, and importance than did the ancient Romans. Today’s Santerian practices could have been conducted in ancient Rome without provoking comment, much less legal action. Chicken sacrifice and divination was not only expected, it was critical for public policy. No major decision about war or peace was made without such rites.