I sit with Gods at their celestial feast."
[Virgil, Aneid, Book 1, line 76]

Was Christianity new?  Was Christiantiy unique? Let's talk about the venerable Pagan sacrament of the sacred meal shared with the Gods.

The Mysteries Mithras' faithful celebrated a sacred meal. So did followers of Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and other Pagan Gods of the Mystery Religions. New members of the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris completed their initiation with a sacramental meal.

Here's how the Catholic Encyclopedia describes the Pagan Eucharists of the Mystery Religions

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The Romans' Lectisternia
It wasn't just the mystery religions whose believers ate sacred meals in communion with the God. The notion that worshipers eating together would be joined by their God was widely diffused throughout the ancient world hundreds of years before Jesus. In Rome the rite even had it's own name, "lectisternia."

A lectisternia was a sacred meal in which an icon of the God was actually brought to the table with the celebrants. In Rome the whole Senate celebrated a sacred meal, with a statue of Jupiter lying on a cushion, and the two goddess Juno and Minerva in chairs beside him.

Yes, it does sound ridiculous. But is wasn't to the ancients, and in fact the rite was common to many ancient Gods. The Christian apologist Arnobius describes the process:

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"The lectisternium of Ceres will be on the next Ides, for the gods have couches; and that they may be able to lie on softer cushions, the pillows are shaken up when they have been pressed down." [3d century AD, Against the Heathen , Book 7.32]

Aelius Aristides wrote about a Pagan Eucharist in which the faithful of Serapis summoned the God to a sacred meal, where they

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Dating lectisternia
The Roman ritual, copied from the earlier Greek theoxenia, was first described in Rome by the Sibylline Books in B.C. 399.

From the start of the third century B.C. the banquet was regularly given to the three Capitoline divinities, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on November 13th. During the Empire, the date changed to September13th.

Which Gods?
Devotes of Hercules celebrated sacred meals this way, as did those of:

The Greeks' Theoxenia
You probably won't be surprised to learn that the Romans' lectisternia was copied from the Greeks. The Greeks entertained the Gods in a sacred meal they called the theoxenia. At Delphi, in Greece, the festival of Theoxinia was an especially big deal -- it even gave it's name to the month.

The Romans got the idea for their lectisternia from the theoxenia at Delphi. Ancient carvings of the ritual show a meal spread out on the a banquet table, with the Gods attending.

But if he is one of the immortals come down from heaven, then is this some new thing which the gods are planning; for ever heretofore have they been wont to appear to us in manifest form, when we sacrifice to them glorious hecatombs, and they feast among us, sitting even where we sit. [Homer, Odyssey, Book 7, line 198]

Eating the Flesh of the God
The notion that the meal involved eating the God's flesh was not new with Christianity.. Of the Roman God Liber (aka Dionysus, or Baccus) Christian father Firmicus Maternus writes that

his followers believe >

"he was intercepted and killed," and his murderers, "chopped his members up into pieces and...devoured them." An event which his worshipers celebrate in "recurring sacred rites celebrated every two years," in which, "They tear a live bull with their teeth, representing the cruel banquet [ at which the God was eaten.]" [Firmicus Maternus, The Error of the Pagan Religions, Ch 6.2]