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I'm afraid they'll kill them! We saw horrible things down there -- they had a human sacrifice and they ripped a man's heart out!
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Musings on Sacrifice
Sacrifice is often considered a rather out dated practice, and most seem to treat it as if it was misguided when it was practiced. But I often wonder whether this has more to do with life in the West, where we have sanitized Death and made it a taboo subject, rather than anything else. Let us face some facts. We live by Death, even the vegetarians among us kill to live. The only kill plants? Well plants are alive, they live, breath, grow, reproduce, and have souls; people convince themselves that they don't feel pain, but that may not be true. As botanists are discovering, at least some plants can communicate through pheromones, and they release copious quantities of pheromones when they are being attacked, which cause the nearby plants to change their biochemistry...all of which sounds a lot like being able to feel pain, and being able to "warn" others. Besides which, try telling a Jain that plants have no souls and see how far you get...The rest of us, mere carnivores that we are, can't take any refuge in the idea we don't kill to live at all. That obviously isn't the case and a trip to your freezer will probably convince you of that. Well, although it doesn't look that way when you pick up one of those tightly wrapped, polypacks at the supermarket, those animals suffered and died in pain so you could live. (Don't even get me started about those of you out there who like lobster, and think nothing of going to a restaurant and selecting which live animal you want to be boiled alive!)
We owe not a life, but lives innumerable.
And that brings us to sacrifice. Despite the impression that is given in movies and lurid novels (and equally lurid, sensationalist stories in the media), sacrifice does not involve just grabbing a stray cat off the street, or grabbing a stranger, and doing the dirty deed. A sacrifice is supposed to be the best thing that you possess - the fatted calf, the lamb without blemish, the virgin child, etc. As a result, although many traditional paths acknowledge the reality of sacrifice as an option, very few people who follow those paths have the financial resources to permit sacrifice, either in the past, or today.
The sacrifice of a cat, or among the wealthy a horse, still accompanied the building of a new house until the middle of the last century, when the professionally built house took over as the norm so that, by the time you buy the house, the foundations have long since been erected, if not the whole house, and Mother Earth cannot be appeased for the indignity you do her by the blood you offer. Still, whenever older country houses in Britain are torn down, it is not uncommon to find a mummified cat, or a horse's head somewhere in the structure.
Sacrifices are still going on today, of course. The Muslim religion is built around a yearly sacrifice -Eid al Adha - which is so accepted, so understood, among Muslims that it is not made one of the Five Pillars. Why not? Because the Five Pillars are things one must be reminded to do. The Feast of the Sacrifice is such a normal part of life that the Prophet (BBUH) did not think it was something people needed to be reminded about.
Similarly, Conservative and Orthodox Jews pray constantly for the restoration of the Temple, "So we may offer You sacrifice again", and preparations are being made right now to allow the Temple Sacrifices to be resumed. In fact, these preparations have been going on for 30 years. The current stumbling block preventing the resumption is finding the essential "Red Heiffer" -- but there are plenty of people willing to do the bloody work of the Temple.
For both Jews and Muslims, by the way, the animal sacrifices are a specific substitution for human sacrifice -- the sacrifice of his First Born by Abraham (they both believe the story, they disagree as to whether the First Born was Isaac or Ishmael). That YHWH allowed that animals could be substituted for humans was a huge religious revolution, but people tend to overlook the implications of this, YHWH was properly and originally worshipped with human sacrifice, and there are plenty of indications in the Bible (and the Koran) that this is so.
Most people are unaware that Christianity is built around a human sacrifice. But this is, of course, re-enacted in the "Eucharist" (Greek for "thanksgiving" but also for "to offer willingly" -- i.e. to offer a sacrifice). Protestants like to think of this as some simple commemorative of the Last Supper (complete with grape juice if you are a Baptist, to make the fact they are getting the wrong end of the stick perfectly clear!). But this ignores the key words of the whole rite "This is my body. This is my blood."
Jesus spent the whole Last Supper talking about his imminent Death, anyway, trying to get the thickheaded Apostles to clue into what was going on (and failing miserably). So even if you want to commemorate the Last Supper, you are commemorating Jesus death, at one remove. Roman Catholics of course know the point of the Eucharist, and the Church still teaches that the wine and bread are actually transformed into the blood and flesh of the sacrificed god/man. In Greek Orthodoxy, Easter is still celebrated by the sacrifice of a lamb or kid, and any trip through the Greek section of town in Holy Week will reveal dozens of carcasses of sheep and goats hanging in butcher shop windows, head and hide intact (most North American cities have by-laws against butchering animals within city limits, so the sacrifice is made at one remove (these by-laws are a huge problem for Muslims, who aren't allowed this compromise)).
My final note on Christian sacrifice is to point out that when the Spanish conquered Mexico, the Aztecs told them they thought the idea of sacrificing your god was far more repugnant than actually sacrificing hundreds of mere humans each day. Offering your god to himself (exactly what the Christians are doing) seems blasphemous; humans are going to die anyway, it seems far more pious to let someone meet their inevitable end as an honored, precious offering, than to let them cough out there last breaths, alone, in the dark.
In fact, in nearly every instance we can find of human sacrifice, it is evident that the victims were from the upper classes. Let us start with the ancient Phoenicians. The offerings to Moloch were only taken from the nobility, which we know from the tablets we have found which commemorate the sacrifices made. This was true even in times of stress, such as siege, famine and plague. Similarly, the most famous instance of Greek human sacrifice which is preserved is the Sacrifice of Iphegenia - and she was a princess of Mycenae. Ignoring Roman propaganda, among the Celts we know that it was kings who were sacrificed, and the bog bodies seem to give evidence of this, since it is clear that the victims were in good health, did not do heavy labor, and often had no calluses on either their hands and feet -- all of which are not typical of the bodies of peasant classes in ancient times. Speaking of the Romans, they thought it was perfectly all right to sacrifice slaves and prisoners -- the gladiatorial contests were in fact human sacrifices on a scale to put anyone but the Aztecs to shame. Originally they had sacrificed only patricians, it was an honor to fight and die for your ancestors in the games. Also only patricians could afford the elaborate funeral rites in which gladiatorial contests were originally featured. Under the Empire, one of Caesar's innovations was to allow gladiatorial contests for the long dead (only one gladiatorial match per customer, so to speak, was allowed by the Roman religion), but of course only patricians kept records of their ancestors to allow them to sponsor the contests in honor of their great-great-great-great grandmother, or whoever. (By the way, you could only hold elected office in the Empire if you were rich enough to sponsor the gladiatorial shows which were the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses".)
Actually, among the Romans, it was also the custom to allow prisoners of war to fight to the death. Although we tend to include this combat as a gladiatorial show, the Romans thought of it as something different - POWs never fought slaves or condemned criminals. The lives of these soldiers were already forfeit to the gods of War and Death by virtue of having been defeated. The leaders of opposing armies, and enemy kings, were usually ritually strangled as and offering to the gods, following the celebration of a Triumph. In some cases, they were allowed to starve to death, a rare but not unheard of method of performing sacrifice (the scapegoat of the ancient Jews was also allowed to die of hunger and thirst).
Speaking of prisoners sacrificed to the gods and the ancestors, while the Romans did practice such rites they were also known among the Celts. Among the Vikings too, such rites were known. The dark rite of the blood eagle could only be celebrated using an enemy king, defeated in battle. Several of the Anglo-Saxon kings ended up as victims of this rite -- a point that does not make its way into many textbooks. But the sacrificers of prisoners, par excellence, has to be the Aztecs. Their "flower wars" (wars fought without weapons, specifically to obtain victims for sacrifice) are well known. Similarly, and until very recently, war among the peoples of New Guinea, and among the Indians of the Amazon, was a type of sacrifice, made only under the strictest of rules and conditions. In all probability, this is the religious origin of war.
War in ancient times was used as a way of making sacrifice, or obtaining sacrifice. The priests of old blessed the armies because they knew these young men were going to be sacrifices to the gods. Even today, the custom among Muslim people is for the young man leaving to go to War to pass beneath the Koran. And of course, it is well known that any young man who does so (even if the war is not, specifically, a jihad) goes straightway to paradise - a pagan belief if ever there was one! Of course, as recently as the Great War (or WWI, if you prefer), troops were regularly blessed before being sent off to battle here in the West, too, and it was not unheard of for bishops to promise plenary indulgence (or the equivalent among Protestants) for those who died unshriven. Why was this done? Because these young men were held to have sacrificed themselves - and such sacrifice is an understood part of the Christian religion. "Greater love hath no man but that he lay down his life for another"; I suggest that there are few more explicit enticements to voluntary human sacrifice in any religion. And of course, once again the "reward" for this is that one enters Heaven immediately upon death, just as the Aztec sacrificial victims believed.
The best and the brightest are sent off to war. The best and the noblest are selected as victims for sacrifice. Some may believe this to be coincidence. I do not. There is no logic in our sending only the best of our young men to die in combat, particularly in modern times; a feeble, old man can pull a trigger or push a button as well as a strong young one. But the young, the strong, the noble and the beautiful have always been selected for sacrifice.
Every Rememberance Day (Nov. 11), we commemorate those who, in the words of the official service, "sacrificed themselves upon the altar of War." Although many people don't think much about what these words mean, I suggest they should be read literally. Why are these deaths publicly ennobled? Because these young men died for the rest of us. The few were sacrificed for many. "It is meet that one man die for the whole people", those words in the mouth of Caiaphas are often (quite falsely) taken as condemning the speaker. In fact, any theologian worth his/her salt would be able to tell you that is EXACTLY the point of the sacrifice, and it is exactly the point of war.
Logic tells us that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, therefore, war = sacrifice.
Today we also feel it is perfectly good to sacrifice our youth upon the altar of Peace. When peacekeepers are sent unarmed between two hostile forces, those who send them do so knowing that these lives will be lost. But, once again, "It is meet that one man die for the whole people." Peace and War are the two faces of the same god -- the Romans at least knew this. The the Jews and Christians who pray to YHWH for victory in war, pray to that same god for peace. And the lives lost are offerings to preserve the lives of those left behind. Leonard Cohen understood the connection.
But is "religious" human sacrifice (as opposed to the military sacrifice) still practiced today?
Ignoring the hissing of the sensationalist media about Matamoros and other such lurid tales, I would have to answer yes, it is. I recently heard an interview with a Peruvian governor who stated that a number of deaths had occurred in his district which were consistent with the rituals of human sacrifice. He blamed them on certain "rich businessmen" in his community, but it struck me as strange that he should be so well acquainted with the rituals of sacrifice that he, and his poorly educated police, could instantly recognize them. Likewise, the local priest confirmed that these were sacrifices, but as a religious professional he is likely to recognize ritual when he sees it.
I have also heard accounts (second hand, but fairly reliable) of human sacrifice coming from some districts of Mexico (not Matamoros).
Likewise I have heard very reliable reports that condemned prisoners are regularly sacrificed in American jails. Oh, it is given the sanitary name "execution", but it is sacrifice nonetheless. "A life for a life" is the formula that proponents of capital punishment always repeat, but it is also the formula for human sacrifice. As I said above, things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. It is certainly not done in the interests of deterring crime (statistics prove it does not), nor is it done for reasons of justice (statistics indicate that about 30% of all those convicted are convicted falsely). But as a blood offering to appease the dead, it makes perfect sense. Is it a coincidence that these sacrifices are most common in "Bible-belt" states? I think not. To repeat myself, Christianity is a religion built on notions of human sacrifice.
Now, all of these things in Western society (war, execution) have "outer" appearance and explanations which seem to belie the fundamentally religious nature of the rite. This is not surprising to the student of religion. Most rites are cloaked with secrecy, there are "hidden prayers" etc., which mark even the most public of religious celebrations. Sacrifices were often made out of the sight of the public, even in ancient times. You cannot see the altars of sacrifice on the top of the Aztec pyramids; Inca's sacrificed humans only on the peaks of mountains, far away from the communities the sacrifices served; when Iphegenia was sacrificed the Greek leaders sang and clashed their weapons so that her cries would be drowned out and the armies could not hear them; the druids performed their sacrifices in the heart of forbidden groves, or in the centre of bogs far away from the people. And the fate of the victims was often disguised in stories for popular consumption, for instance the sacrifice of Marcus Curtius.
My point, and I do have one, is that Human sacrifice has always been part of religious ritual, and remains one to this day.
***
Now, what about animal sacrifice. First off, let us make clear that, all animal deaths were once sacrifices. Today only Jews and Muslims still make it clear that the animals they consume are sacrificial, and the Rabbi or Imam who ensures that Kosher or Hallal rules are followed sanctifies each animal slain as an offering to their god. In ancient times this was also true, in Rome for example, the meat in the butcher shops came from the sacrifices offered in the temples. This is why the Christians (and also the Jews) were accused of being anti-social; they literally couldn't sit down to eat with their pagan neighbors because the couldn't eat meat from sacrifices offered to other gods.
Most people are aware that Native North Americans who hunt consider this to be a sacred activity, and sacrifice to the Animal Spirit whenever they make a kill. Such beliefs were once fairly general, and a part of each kill was usually set aside for the spirits/ancestors/gods.
In Europe, the full Moon of October/November is still called the "Blood Moon", and many people realize that it was so called because, until quite recently, excess animals were slaughtered at this time of year. What many people do not realize however, is that the animals slaughtered were also sacrificed to the gods of field and herd; bounty having been granted, bounty was returned to the gods; the Zoroastrian Ayathrima or Feast of Homecoming was very much a feast of sacrifice. But since the gods were placated by either a token from each offering, or by the act itself, the meat was left for consumption by the village. The nature of these offerings is still somewhat preserved in County Fairs, Harvest Home, and Thanksgiving.
Now, when Christianity reached a point where it could suppress other religious traditions, this meant that the ritual nature of consuming meat was lost. The animals were no longer sacrificed by priests, but by professional butchers; the connection between eating meat and making an offering to the gods was lost. Only the tradition of "grace before meals" makes any connection between what is eaten and what is raised and grown - and that is a fairly perfunctory connection (and dying away quickly as society becomes more and more secular).
Now, not every animal sacrificed was eaten, of course. It was always a custom among those who could afford it, or where the religion required it, to offer the entire animal to your god - the holocaust offering. In these the entire animal was burned, and nothing was available for poorer people to buy. Sometimes these offerings reached prodigious proportions. The hecatomb is a good example; this great public sacrifice involved at least 100 oxen. In some well documented cases 100 oxen, 100 calves, 100 sheep, 100 lambs, 100 goats, 100 kids, 100 pigs and 100 piglets were sacrificed. The wealth of those who made such offerings can easily be estimated when it is remembered that a ox was considered to be worth, on average, three slaves in ancient times; a wether (castrated ram) was worth one slave.
Of even vaster dimensions was the "Horse Sacrifice" of the ancient Hindus. In this a flawless white stallion was set at large for a year. It was allowed to roam where it would, protected by a whole army who followed after it. The army was necessary since wherever the stallion roamed would be annexed to the king's domain; needless to say the king's neighbors were not enthused by this and would attempt to slay the horse. At then end of the year, the stallion would be ritually mated to the queen and then would be the centerpiece of huge orgy of sacrifice. Only the wealthiest kings could afford the financial commitment (and risk) such a sacrifice represented.
Now, some animals such as dogs, horses and cats were sacrificed also, but rarely, and for special reasons. These were often seen as animals of great innate power, and nobility. Also, since they had particular relationships with humans - in a way that a ox or lamb did not - sacrificing them was a greater offering, and not to be undertaken lightly. Most ancient people would sacrifice these animals on one occasion or another; horses had a royal connection and were favored by kings. Cats were often sacrificed by women approaching term.
In Egypt cats were sacrificed in thousands. This seems strange to the modern mind. We all know that cats were sacred in Egypt, and this is very true, they were even protected by law. But being sacred made them more, not less, suitable for sacrifice. It is well known that those things which are taboo, are often the most suitable sacrifices for the gods. It is their high sacredness that means they cannot be killed for normal purposes. For example, the goose, the swan and the hare were all sacred to the Britons; but the goose was the main sacrifice at midwinter, and after it's sacrifice served as the main course at the feast (which it did until quite recently). The swan was a royal bird, and to this day can only be killed and served at royal tables. I doubt that has happened in a long time, but swans in Britain still belong either to the Crown, or to Cambridge and Oxford (which were granted the royal privilege in medieval times).
But to return to cats and Egypt. We find many mummified cats in temples dedicated to Bast - tens of thousands in some crypts. Far more than could have been supported on the temple grounds in a thousand years. Archaeologists wondered about this and did a survey of mummies, x-raying them to see if they could determine how they had died. In the vast majority the discovered that the cats' necks had been broken - in fact wrung. It eventually became clear that there was an entire industry in Egypt which involved raising the sacred Mau cat, killing them, and embalming the corpses so that worshippers could purchase them as pious offerings to Bast. I think the theology here is weak, but this practice dated, in the main, from late in Egypt's history - and Egyptian religion had fundamentally died during the Years of the Jackal several centuries before, and never really recovered.
As a cat lover, I can't imagine doing such a thing. Yet, if I lived in a world where my life was unlikely to last past 35, where my wife had a one in three chance of dying in childbirth, where my children might be carried off in misery by simple vitamin deficiencies, and only one in five of them would live beyond childhood, I think I would sacrifice my cat. I think that, even today, if people believed that by sacrificing a cat they could save a loved one from AIDS, they would do so in a shot. I would, if faced with that dire choice. (If it was simply a case of dying, perhaps not. In my Tradition we believe that death is but the middle, not the end. But I would relieve suffering, if I could). The point is, it was the very fact that cats were precious in Egypt that made them a worthy sacrifice. (The Egyptians also sacrificed the Sacred Ibis by thousands as well, by the way.)
Some say, and it is quite true, that the cat, or horse or lamb cannot consent to be a sacrifice. That is very true, but perhaps irrelevant. Animals cannot consent to many of the uses we put them to. If you have ever watched a horse being broken by traditional methods you can have no doubt that being ridden is the farthest thing from the animal's desire. I am sure that cows do not consent to becoming hamburger either. But I think, at the same time, that PETA supporters miss the point as well. If we did not use dogs for hunting and fighting and herding, dogs would be as rare as wolves. If we did not eat cattle, cattle would be as extinct as the megatherium. Humans do not share their planet willingly with anything they cannot use, to the grief of the gods and those who understand Dallethys (which I am not going to explain now, because I do want to get to the end of this, eventually). You cannot consent to death, either, for that matter, any more than you can consent to being born. And your cat cannot consent to those things either. They are facts of life. Every living thing owes a death, a cat as well as a prince. Is it better or worse to die as an honored sacrifice or as a decrepit and sick old animal, from whom the joys of stalking and pouncing have long been stripped away??
In the West we have isolated ourselves from the grim realities of the world for a long time. We have lost contact with the old ways. Some say that we have "outgrown them"; I think it more likely we have allowed false sophistication to persuade us that such things are outmoded. But it may not be so. We are increasingly squeamish about real life. But real life has a way of intruding. There are those who think that the World is turning against us - that the floods, fires, earthquakes, eruptions etc., are all warning signs that we are on the wrong path. (Yes, I am quite aware that this may just be that we are more aware of things occurring in distant parts of the globe than we were in the past. But not everyone agrees with that interpretation - climatologists for example.) Within my Tradition we do believe that this is because people are abandoning the Old Ways, including sacrifice when sacrifice is necessary.
Even in Britain the Old Ways have only been abandoned wholesale in this past century. In some districts pagan sacrifices were still being offered into the early years of the Twentieth Century, quietly, and without much fanfare, but they still happened. (The wonderful thing about sacrificing a heifer, it can be made to look like a regular part of country life, if you need to.) It was, I suspect, the Great War that killed off the last sacrifices, although they had been dwindling all through the previous century, as people left their homelands and drifted to the cities. (Is it a coincidence that an organization like PETA evolved among city dwellers, who don't actually live among animals?) Left alone, the Guardians withdrew, and their power diminished. Only by the old rites (not only sacrifice, but the old prayers, the old customs) had the bond between human and Guardian been maintained. They are not dead, but by our own indifference we have built a wall between us and them. Only the old rites can tear it down.
This said, let me point out that I don't know anyone who sacrifices as part of their religion (other than some Muslims, anyway). I have no great desire to sacrifice anything, human or animal. From time to time, I have found the remnants of sacrifice, and I have read of ritual killings in the media. I think only a fraction of these are performed by those following the Old Ways. If you have seen a few you quickly learn which are, and which are not. I think many of them are performed by sick and confused individuals - the kind of people who believe the "Necronomicon" is real. But taking someone else's cat and killing it is not a sacrifice, really. It is animal cruelty. It certainly does not meet the criteria I have outlined above for sacrifice.
As I write this, I am watching Annie, my cat, covering here eyes with her paw as she sleeps on my sweater - I rustled some papers and disturbed her. I cannot imagine sacrificing her; I certainly would never want to. Each life has value, and value is so very different from mere monetary concerns.
One of the reasons animal sacrifice has died out is that it is incompatible with capitalism. To the capitalist, animals are chattel (quite literally) and to dispose of your chattels for any reason other than monetary gain is quite at odds with the spirit of capitalism. If I had a time machine and sent Milton Freedman (sp?) back to Ancient Rome, so that he could observe a hecatomb being offered, I am sure he would weep copiously, not for the loss of animal life, but for the massive waste of resources. Gods, after all, do not pay in a coin which you can deposit in the bank.
In case you don't think that capitalism has any influence over social or religious practice, consider this. Under Brehon law, each member of a clan, and the dependents on a clan, all had a claim on the produce of the clan lands. The old, the young and the infirm all were supported by the clan. Such legal customs persisted in all the Celtic countries, even in England, until Tudor times. But such concepts were foreign to emerging capitalism. Land was something to be possessed and exploited by an individual, not held in common by a clan. The fields were enclosed; the common lands divided amongst those who could pay for them. The dependents were cast out of their cottages, and forced onto the roads, harried from place to place.
The birthright each person had enjoyed to a share of the commonwealth of the clan was overturned. The parish workhouse replaced the dependent's share. Each person was legally forced to work for a living, or to enter the workhouse in the parish where she/he was born, where menial labor and harsh discipline replaced dignity. Families were divided. Those who would not enter the workhouse, and had no employment, were made lawbreakers and could be imprisoned.
How does this relate to sacrifice? Well, if capitalism cannot stand grandma having a right to a chicken, how can it stand the gods having a right to a sheep? Charity is far from a capitalist's soul ("Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" to quote that poster boy of capitalism, E. Scrooge), but it animates the spirit of so many religions. Gratitude, for what we have from our ancestors and our gods, is no virtue to the capitalist, with his eye ever on the bottom line.
Buy a pig for the family barbecue and nobody says a word. Buy a pig to sacrifice to the gods when you are building your new house and you can be sure there will be outraged editorials in your local newspaper. Why? In either case the pig dies, and it dies for human benefit. You cannot, logically, argue that it suffers less because it is being eaten, than it does if it is offered to the gods. In fact, the reverse is probably the case.
The slaughterhouse is not a nice place. The people who work there often have to kill 100 or more animals before lunch - their only desire is to get the bloody work over with as quickly as possible. If you have known anyone who has worked in an abbatoire, or have seen any film of it, you know that the animals are in terror. Yes, the workers are supposed to stun the animal before slaughtering it, but frequently this does not happen for one reason or another. In most sacrifices, a single animal is reverently killed. I am not saying it does not fear what is happening (although, within some religions animals are drugged before being sacrifice, often by giving them large quantities of beer). But it does not hear and smell the deaths of others of its kind.
Now, does sacrificing a cat, or horse or pig, bind its spirit within the house? I cannot speak for other traditions on this point. Within my Tradition, this is not the case for two reasons: A) we believe spirits cannot be bound (a technical reason); b) souls can be bound, but to do so is fundamentally unethical (in fact, we believe that only workers of evil would do such a thing, but once again that is a complicated issue, so I will leave it be). To place the dead body of the cat or the horses head within the walls of the house is only a method of making the offering complete.
You may feel that it is cruel nonetheless. I do not argue with you. I am merely trying to understand the mindset of people who do such things. As I have said previously, I have no desire to sacrifice either animal or human. I would point out, however, that much of what we do in regard to animals is cruel. It is cruel to dock the ears and tails of puppies for reasons of human vanity and (dubious) aesthetics; it is cruel to drown excess kittens and puppies; it is cruel to abandon a family pet on a country roadside merely because it has become inconvenient; it is cruel to abandon Rover or Fluffy at the pound, where they will die without a friend near them; it is cruel to wantonly run down a possum, or armadillo, or raccoon, or squirrel , or turtle. I cannot find sacrifice to be more cruel than any of these things.
Why would the gods require sacrifice? I am not a god; I cannot answer. But I do think that, if I am going to kill and eat this cow or sheep anyway (directly or indirectly), then it is better that I do so reverently, and offer the life to the gods, than for it to be slaughtered in an abatoire, by underpaid and uninterested men. I owe a life; I cannot repay it with the life of another. But by showing that I revere life, even in taking it, I at least acknowledge what I owe, in a way that simply buying a plastipac boneless and skinless chicken breast cannot do. (BTW, I live in an apartment, and I do not kill my own meat. But I do buy Hallal and Kosher meat when I can, for exactly this reason.)
Has religion outgrown sacrifice? Some people think so, and while I respect their opinion, I hasten to point out that most of the people who have this opinion tend to be of Christian background, and to be fairly urban. Their opinion may reflect sophisticated, Westernized sensibilities rather than any theological certainty.
Some people point to Hinduism as an example of a religion which outgrew it's need for sacrifice. In the period of the Mahabharata, sacrifice certainly played a role in religious practice (it is a moot point whether the religion here was Hinduism or Vedism). But they point to the development of notions of ahimsa, and the predominantly vegetarian offerings which are made today as evidence of this transition. It is certainly true that offerings of flowers and ghee and milk are the only ones made in many upper-caste temples. But the upper castes are only a fraction of all Hindus. Westerners have a terrible tendency to oversimplify very complicated things. Blood offerings are still made by many, and many gods/goddesses can only be properly worshipped with blood offerings - Kali springs to mind. So, while it may be true that for some groups within the Hindu religious complex sacrifice has been repudiated, it may not be true for all.
Modern Judaism, of course, does not incorporate sacrifice in its rituals. But of course they were a feature of Judaism in the past. Does this mean that Judaism has outgrown its sacrificial cult? No. As was mentioned earlier Jews pray to this day for the restoration of the Temple so that the sacrifices of old can be resumed. Some groups (Reform Judaism), it is true, no longer pray for this, having changed the formula to indicate that sacrifice is clearly in the past. But these groups are less influential in contemporary Judaism than they were 20 years ago, and seem likely to become even more influential as time goes on. Jews, at least, look to the restoration of sacrifice.
But why should sacrifice ever be called for?
The connection between sacrifice and metal seems strained, but I think that we can understand the one by reference to the other. To our ancestors, the earth itself was a living thing, not radically different from an immense animal. That is the reason that we speak of "veins" of ore - the gold and silver, copper and tin that the ancients mined from the Earth they though were similar to the veins that ran through the flesh of a living being. Hence to the old habit of closing mines periodically to allow the metal to return - this is remarkably similar to ancient medical practices like bloodletting. In such treatment one must pause periodically to allow the volume of blood to return.
Until very recently, this periodic closing of the mines was still practices in some areas, such as Bolivia. The miners still practiced an ancient pagan faith, barely contaminated by Christianity. The made regular sacrifices to the spirits of the mine - offerings of food and alcohol primarily. But in some cases a living thing was offered, usually after one or other of the miners broke one of the taboos which governed their lives.
But the miners were also unwilling to search for victims of cave-ins. For a long time the few westerners who ventured into the mining regions assumed that this was because they were afraid that digging would cause further cave-ins (the safety records of South American employers not being much to write home about). Of course, this calumny ignores that the men were not afraid to dig in primitive conditions with little regard for safety most of the time. It also disregards pagan Bolivia's long history of human sacrifice.
On the tops of the Andes, scholars frequently find the remains of youths, maidens and children -- well dressed, cared for, with many small ritual offerings, they were left on the mountain tops to freeze to death as offerings to the Sun, and the gods of the mountains. Of course, these are "special" sacrifices, but I suspect that, among the lower classes of mountaineers, if a person was lots to avalanche, or rockslide or by falling over a precipice, if any effort was, made to save the victim. The mountain god had chosen his own victim, would it not be obvious that one should leave the sacrifice?
Flip over to Europe, one of the reasons monks established monasteries in remote areas such as the mountains was to exorcise the "demons" (read old gods and goddesses) from those places. When the monks of Great Saint Bernard's went out to rescue travelers caught in avalanches or lost in blizzards, they were seen to be doing something unusual. Is it not possible that the same thought process pertained there -- that the victims were seen by the old mountaineers to be sacrifices?
Until very recently (the early 60s), the Inuit people (Eskimos) did not search for hunters who were lost in the snows of the arctic. When missionaries and government agents asked why, they were told that the Spirit of the Great Bear had taken them. There was no point in searching for the ones the Spirit had chosen.
Similarly, Chinese sailors (who, after the mid-Ming Dynasty were largely restricted to China's rivers) did not make any efforts to save people who fell overboard. They believed that the River Dragons had chosen the victim and to retrieve him/her would endanger them all. The Dragon would be angered by the loss of the sacrifice. Of course, the practice in ancient times of sailors selecting a victim from among the passengers and crew to offer to the gods of sea and storm when a ship was in peril is well known. It is even documented in the New Testament. Very likely the sailors of the Greek and Roman worlds shared this form of offering with the Chinese sailors -- ancient authors do comment how odd it was that sailors in their day could not swim. Truly, that makes sense only if you know that your shipmates will not, in any event, make any attempt to rescue you should you fall overboard.
Where does all this lead? There are hints that the ancient and Chinese sailors practiced this form of involuntary sacrifice because having taken life from the sea (as directly as fishermen or indirectly), life was owed back to the sea. Similarly for the miners, working in the "bowels of the Earth" (note again the biological metaphoric usage which is hallowed by time), must render life for the life they take from Earth (its gold and silver and copper "life's blood").
Exchanges with natural resources were, of old, not one way - every debt needed to be paid in blood. Frazer of course documents the symbolic sacrificial rituals of harvest in many cultures. Although his work is out of fashion today, there is no reason to disregard his observations. So it is not surprising that human sacrifice was widespread.
Among the upper classes, who were not in such intimate contact with the Earth and the Sea and the Forests and the Mountains, such sacrifices were deliberate -- the best offering available: one's own child. Among the working classes, where life was often brutal and short, the gods were allowed to chose for themselves who would be taken.
Around the beginning of the first millennium BC (earlier in some spots), it became theologically acceptable to sacrifice an animal to the gods and spirits as a substitute for a human life. As urbanization proceeded, and vast numbers of people lost there intimate connection with the forces of nature, such substitutions eventually became seen as the norm. Eventually, only the poorest and lowest caste people (sailors and miners, for example) kept to the old ways.
In addition, since only a tithe of the sacrificial animal was seen as a necessary gift (quite frequently the hide, gonads and fat - Roman authors joked about how the gods got the leftovers), nearly all of the animal was available for use as meat.
But with Christianity, which had as its centerpiece that ultimate sacrifice -- offering YHWH his own firstborn -- the need for sacrifice was obviated. And the reverence which had governed the taking of life was eliminated. Like human sacrifice itself, animal sacrifice became seen as a barbaric hangover from the past.
-- © Eolas Pellor, 2001, 2003
