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Renovation Philosophy
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Religious Sacrifice: A Speculation
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Everywhere there are humans there are politics and religion, and
everywhere there is politics and religion there is some form of
sacrifice - even if it is only daytime fasting during Ramadan or giving
up mochachino for Lent. Over the years, the term 'sacrifice' has come
to mean any sort of renunciation or giving up of something valuable in
order gain something more valuable; you might, for example, sacrifice
short-term pleasures for long-term gain. The performance considered in
this study, however, is a specifically religious project by a
worshipper in which valued objects [oblations] are set apart
[sanctified] and offered to a divine recipient at the expense of the
worshipper.1
Religion is an ideology which, like all ideologies, integrates an
ontology [theory about how the world works] with an ethic [a set of
rules prescribing various human performances as valuable in the light
of the ontology]. In religious ontology there is always some kind of
non-human person(s) or person-like force(s) at work in the world. This
person-like agency or force provides a reason for
what goes on in the world, and our lives, just as human persons provide
the reasons for our works. The religious ethic expresses a basically
political relationship to the supposed person or person-like agency
(the recipient of sacrifice). This relationship involves some kind of worship; that is, some kind of political (implicitly childlike) submission to a supposed deity or animus who/which is, like a parent,
more powerful than us and upon who/which we feel dependent for safety,
justice, success, meaning, and/or significance. Personal and communal
attempts to relate with this parent-deity in word or thought (prayer,
meditation), or by sacrifice (a performance), are required aspects of worship. Attempts to influence or manipulate deities,
through spells and divination, usually follow - we, in effect, try
first to 'get onside' with a parent-like power and only then curry favour from it.
Sacrificial rites are known throughout the history of human religions
and, although they have assumed a multitude of forms and intentions,
the core purpose is always that of producing an efficacious relationship with
'other world' beings and thereby establishing us, our projects, and our
world, in sacred favour.
The Elements of Sacrifice
The Sacrificer. The worshipper who makes a sacrifice, or on whose behalf a sacrifice is
made, may be an individual, family, clan, tribe, cult, nation, or the
whole world.
Although the sacrificer is nearly always human, in some traditions it
is said that gods also made sacrifices. Examples of this are found in
widely separated cultures. The Indian Taittiriya Brahmana asserts ‘By
sacrifice the gods obtained heaven.’ The idea of gods making sacrifice
is also found in the older Samhita [a collection of sacred Vedic hymns
in the Rig Veda] which says ‘With offerings the gods offered up
sacrifice.’ In this context, humans make sacrifices in imitation of a
divine model inaugurated by the gods themselves. Another instance is
the Iranian primordial god Zurvan (Time), who supposedly offered sacrifice for
1,000 years in order to obtain a son to create the world. For
Christians, God sacrifices Himself, as the Son, to Himself, as the
Father, in order to heal the alienation between the human and the
divine that has been brought on by human sin and inauthenticity. In
Norse mythology, Odin sacrificed himself to himself on Yggdrasil [the
World Tree] in order to discover the magic of the runes.
The Manager. Sacrificial rites may involve no performers other than the
individual or collective worshipper(s). More usually, however, an expensive
religious manager of some kind is considered necessary. In many
cases, sacrifice by unauthorized worshippers is expressly forbidden by the managers and
may be punished (e.g., in the book of Leviticus, Korah and his
followers, who usurped the priestly office of offering incense, were
consumed by fire). The manager -
the head of a household, the old
man/woman of a tribe, a shaman, the king, gođi, tohunga, priest or
priestess - supposedly acts as the representative of the
worshipper(s). He or she
is also usually thought to have 'a foot in both camps' (the sacred and
the profane) and to act as an intermediary between the worshippers and
the recipient. Normally the sacrificer and manager both enjoy a
privileged, parent-like, status in a community, the sacrificial victim
endures a lesser, non-parental, status.
The head of the household as manager is a familiar figure in the
Old Testament, particularly in the stories of the patriarchs Abraham
and Jacob. Generally, it was only at a late date that a separate caste of
priests developed. In ancient China, for example, sacrifices were not presided over
by a professional priesthood but by the head of the family or, in the
case of state sacrifices, by the ruler. In Norse sacrifice, the gođi
[godi] seems to have been a noble (jarl or 'earl') who included
priestly duties among his responsibilities (see, for example, the
Hákonar saga gođa). An old man or the elders of the tribe are
in charge of sacrifices among several African peoples. Among the Ila
people of Zambia, for instance, when hunters have no success, the
oldest member of the band leads the others in praying for the god's
aid; when the hunters are successful in killing, the old man leads them
in offering portions of the meat to the god. Similarly, among
aboriginal peoples in Australia the leading role in all sacrificial
acts is filled by the old men as bearers of tradition and authority. In
cases in which there is a matriarchal organization, as in some parts of
West Africa and the Caribbean, the oldest woman of the family acts as
priestess.
Kings have often
played an important rôle as the sacrificing manager, particularly in
those cultures in which he not only has
temporal authority but also fulfills a religious function. This may be
because (a) the most important gods of the state were originally family
gods of the rulers, and, thus, the king is simply continuing the task
of paterfamilias, only now on behalf of the whole community, or (b)
according to the common notion of sacred kingship, the royal office is
sacred and the king set apart from ordinary people is the intercessor
with the supernatural world. These two concepts often go together.
Thus, in ancient Egypt the pharaoh was thought to be divine because he
descended from the sun god Ra (the pharaoh stood in for Horus, the son
of
Ra). Here the concepts of the god as family ancestor and of sacred
kingship were combined. Although worship in ancient Egypt was
controlled by a powerful priesthood, officially all sacrifices were
regarded as made by the pharaoh just as, in England, all executions
were officially carried out by the sheriff [the king's agent in the
shire] even when a professional
hangman was used (which is why there was no post of hangman under
English law).
Most frequently,
the religious manager is a
priest or priestess
- a spiritual 'warrior' and supposed intermediary between the community
and the
recipient. As a rule, not everyone can become a manager; there are
requirements of different kinds to be satisfied. Usually, the would be
manager must ∙ show some sign of ability and/or godly favour, ∙
follow some training, initiation, or testing (which may be long and
severe), and ∙ undergo some form of consecration. Frequently, special
acts
must be performed by both the manager and the sacrificing
worshipper(s) before, and sometimes also after, the sacrifice. In the
Hindu Vedic cult, for instance, the sacrificer and his wife were
required to undergo
a sanctification involving ritual bathing, seclusion, fasting,
and prayer, the purpose of which was to remove them from the 'profane'
world and to purify them for contact with the 'sacred' world. At the
termination of the sacrifice came a rite of desanctification in which
they bathed in order to remove any sacred potencies that might
have attached themselves during the sacrifice.
The Recipient. Sacrifices may be offered to any person-like being(s)
and/or force(s) who/that ∙ are the object of religious worship and ∙ have
a character that can supposedly be influenced or manipulated by human
performances. This recipient is normally an animus, deity, or ancestral spirit (worship of ancestral spirits, which often
includes the offering of sacrifices, occurs in many widely distributed
cultures, and ancestors appear to be the main recipients of
sacrifice in non-Western traditions). An animus is
a manifestation of the supposed cosmic life-force in a particular object, event, or place.2
In animism
(the worship of animus and human proto-religion), sacrifice may be made
to the supposed cosmic life force itself but is more commonly made to a
particular animus. In some
variations on the animist theme, such as animatism and totemism,
certain animi are individualised as a soul or
spirit. This individualisation can lead to the animus becoming a deity.
A 'deity' is usually a god and/or goddess but may be ∙ a 'minor
spirit' or being such as a water sprite or household demon, or ∙ a
personalised animus, such as a totem, rather than a fully-fledged god
as such.3 Religious sacrifice is not made to humans unless they have
first been deified in some way (before or after death).
In some cases sacrifice is made only to an animus;
in others it is made to earthly spirits, ancestral spirits, chthonic ('underworld') deities,
and/or a god, gods, or goddess; in some it is made only to the
spirits and the departed (who are often considered intermediaries
between the deity and humans, as when Catholics ask Mary to chat to
Jesus on their behalf). I have been told that Nkole communities in
Uganda, for example, do not make sacrifices to God, believing that He
does not expect any. They do,
however, make periodic offerings to guardian spirits and at the
shrines of ancestors of
up to three generations back.
The Oblation. The oblation in a sacrifice (i.e, that which is offered
to the recipient) is something or someone of value to the sacrificer.
This 'something or someone' is normally an instrument
being-useful-towards maintaining life (e.g., food or time) or, in blood
sacrifice, a life itself. All religious sacrifice, and especially blood
sacrifice, implies that each life is a manifestation of a life-force that can transfer from one object to
another.4
In a sacrifice, the sanctified life-force of the oblation is
believed to be transferred to the recipient (who/which is often
believed to be its
source) thereby regenerating the recipient's share of life. Although
receiving the life-force is intended to benefit the recipient, it is
the
possibility of increased sacred power being available to the worshipper
that the sacrifice is supposedly being-useful-towards actualising. The
sacrifice is, in effect, meant to stimulate a reciprocal exchange of
life between the sacrificer and the
recipient.
Sacrifice often
involves the destruction of the oblation (frequently by fire, below),
but this
destruction is not itself the sacrifice per se.
The destruction of a food offering in an altar fire, for instance, was
only the means by which the recipient 'ingested' the oblation.
Likewise, the death of a sacrificial victim was the instrument by which
its
sanctified life-force was made available to the recipient. Sacrifice is
the total project of offering and not just the way in which
it is performed.
The Method.
There are numerous kinds of sacrificial rite, but
the basic modes of sacrifice seem to be either some kind of sacrificial
gift and/or a sacramental meal. A gift sacrifice may be either ∙
an oblation
that is offered in homage to a recipient without an overt expectation
of a return or ∙ an oblation that should be followed by a return favour
because of the intimate relationship that gift giving establishes.
Sacrifice as a sacramental meal may involve the idea of the
recipient as a participant in the meal or as identical with the food
consumed; it may also involve the idea of a ritual meal at which either
some primordial event such as creation is repeated or the
sanctification of the world is symbolically renewed (as in the Purusha
sacrifice). In the Christian rite of Communion, believers share a
sacramental meal in remembrance of God sacrificed to His own justice in
order to pay the cost incurred by the sinfulness of His people. In
conservative Roman Catholic communities, the Mass presents the meal
more as a bloodless repetition of
Christ's
crucifixion.
Four main methods of sacrifical gift are common: libation, the
sacrificial spilling of blood, burial, and the burnt offering
[sacrifice by fire].
* In libation an intoxicant (usually mead, wine,
beer, or wine mixed with herbs) is poured out on, or at the foot of,
the recipient's alter. This libation may represent a pseudo-entheogen
(a substance by which the recipient supposedly manifests itself in the
intoxication of the shaman, worshipper or priest)5 or it may symbolise
blood. The spilling of blood on or before an alter probably represents
the gift of life-force to the recipient.
* The burnt sacrifice makes sense
given that discovering how to control fire was one of the earliest, and
most significant, differences between early humans and other animals -
a difference that gave humans a huge advantage. Fire is also 'magic' in
the way that it consumes and purifies. Fire is a scary power that
seems both to be alive and to have a mind of its own. In ancient eastern Mediterranean cultures, burnt or fire offering
was the major sacrificial method. The fact that fire consumes and smoke
rises makes it symbolically appropriate, and it was believed that the
oblation was conveyed to the divine recipient through the medium of the
fire. Both the Ammonites and Carthaginians undertook sacrifice by fire
(see Moloch worship). In ancient Greece the generic term for sacrifice
(thysia) was derived from a root meaning to burn or to smoke. In
Judaism the important sacrifices ('ola and zevah) involved the ritual
burning, either in whole or part, of the oblation, be it animal or
vegetation. For the Babylonians, also, fire was essential to sacrifice,
and all oblations were conveyed to the gods by the fire god
Girru-Nusku, whose presence as intermediary between the gods and men
was indispensable. In the Vedic cult the god of fire, Agni (from whom
we derive the word 'ignition' and its cognates), received the offerings
of men and brought them into the presence of the gods.
* Because fire consumes, and smoke rises, burning is often the
appropriate mode for sacrifice to celestial recipients. Burial,
however, is often the appropriate mode for sacrifice of earth deities.
In Greece, for example, sacrifices to the chthonic ['underworld']
powers were frequently buried or, if burned, burned near the ground or
even in a trench. In Vedic India the blood and entrails of animals
sacrificed on the fire altar to the sky gods were put upon the ground
for the earth deities, including the ghosts and malevolent spirits - a
kind of religious ‘economy of effort’. In West Africa yams and fowls
sacrificed to promote the fertility of the earth are planted in the
soil.
* In sacrifice by burning, burial, and/or the spilling of blood, the
prior death of the human or animal victim is in a sense incidental to
the sacrificial action. There are, however, sacrifices (including live
burial and burning) in which the ritual killing is itself the means by
which the offering is effected. Ancient Greek and Indian cults, for
example, made sacrifices to water gods by drowning the oblations in
sacred lakes or rivers.6 Similarly, the Norse cast human and animal
oblations over cliffs and into wells and waterfalls as offerings to the
supposed divinities living therein. In at least some cases, the early
Maori settlers of New Zealand, when building a significant house or pa
[fort], would dig holes for the main posts - or at least those at
either side of the main entrance - and throw a sacrifice into the hole
before placing the posts. Later Maori pa show the oblation to have been
an animal of valued item, but older pa (such as Tawhiti-nui at Opotiki)
showed the remains of human oblations at the bases of the main posts.
In the Aztec sacrifice of human beings to the creator god Xipe Totec,
the victim was lashed to a scaffold and shot to death with bow and
arrow.
* There are sacrifices that do not involve the death or destruction
of the oblation. Such were the sacrifices in ancient Greece of fruits
and vegetables at the katharos (‘pure’) altar of Apollo at Delos, at
the shrine of Athena at Lindus, and at the altar of Zeus in Athens.
These apura hiera (‘fireless oblations’) were especially appropriate
for the deities of vegetation and fertility: Demeter and
Dionysus. In Egypt, bloodless offerings of food and drink were simply
laid before the idol on mats or a table in a daily ceremony called
‘performing the presentation of the divine oblations.’ In both Greek
and Egyptian cults such oblations were not to be eaten by the
worshippers, but they were probably consumed by the priests or temple
attendants. In ancient Israel, on the other hand, the food offerings of
the ‘table of the shewbread’ (the ‘bread of the presence’ of God) were
regarded as available to the priests and could be given by them to the
laity. In Hinduism the daily offering of cooked rice and vegetable,
after its consecration, is distributed by the priests to the
worshippers as the deity's ‘grace’ (prasada). In some cases the
oblations are put out to be eaten by an animal representative of the
deity. In Benin, for instance, consecrated food oblations are presented
to the trickster deity Eshu (Legba). These offerings are left in the
open shrines and later consumed by wandering dogs on the recipient's
behalf.
The Purpose of the Sacrificial Project.
The ultimate purpose of all religious sacrifice is to
supposedly being-useful-towards establishing a beneficial relationship with the recipient and thereby to
make the supposed life-force present and efficacious. The immediate purpose of the project can,
however, take a number of specific forms, more than one of which may be
expressed in any one sacrificial rite.
Propitiation and expiation - Throughout history, and across the globe,
humans have believed that illness, drought, pestilence,
epidemic, famine, and other contingent misfortune and calamity, are
brought about by supernatural forces. Sometimes these forces were
thought to be malevolent [evil spirits], and sometimes the disasters
were understood as the effects of deliberate or unintentional offenses
against the sacred order committed by human individuals or communities.
In the former case it was often considered necessary to make sacrifice
to enlist divine aid against the evil spirit(s). In the latter case,
offenses against the divine order were believed to ∙ violate the
relationship of humans and an animus, deity, or deities, and/or ∙
impede the flow of life-force or divine favour. In these cases sacrifice
was made to propitiate [placate, make peace with] the recipient, wipe out
offenses (or at least neutralize their effects), and restore the
relationship (see atonement).
In many religions there were and/or are specific healing deities to whom
sacrifices were made. Among the rural Yoruba of West Africa, blood sacrifice
is made to earth deities who are regarded as the divine punisher's of sin. In pre-colonial days, the principal
oblation was human; nowadays the oblation for an individual may be a fowl or a goat; for a
large community it may be hundreds of animals. Once sanctified [made sacred] and ritually slain,
the oblations are buried, burnt, or left exposed, but not eaten by
the sacrificer(s) - which must be tough in times of food shartages.
At the end of
Phaedo, as Socrates is about to die by order of the State, he
ironically asks his friend, Crito, to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius
(the Greek version of Aesculapius, a south European god of healing) for
'curing' him of life.
In ancient Judaism the sin offering was an important ritual for
the expiation [blotting out] of certain, especially unwittingly
committed, defilements (e.g., Leviticus 4:2-12). Such sacrifices are
called 'piacular' (from the Latin word piare 'to appease'). In these
rites, the guilty laid their hands upon the head of an unblemished bullock or goat, thereby making it their
representative (but not their substitute because their sins were not
transferred to the victim). After the priest killed the animal, blood
was sprinkled upon the altar and elsewhere in the sacred precincts. The
point of this ritual was to purify the guilty and to re-establish the
holy bond with God through the blood of the consecrated victim.
It is as an expiatory sacrifice that Christians
regard the life and death of Christ. By the shedding of His blood,
the sin of humankind was wiped out and a new relationship was effected
between God and humanity. Like the innocent and ‘spotless’ victim of
the sin-offering, Christ died for humans (i.e., on behalf of but not in
place of them). Also, like the sin-offering, the point of his death was
not the appeasement of divine wrath but the shedding of his blood for
the wiping out [expiation] of sin. The major differences between the
sacrifice of Christ and that of the sin-offering animal are that ∙
Christ's was regarded as a voluntary and effective sacrifice for all
humans and ∙ his was considered the perfect sacrifice, made once in
time and space but perpetuated in eternity by the risen Lord.
There are sacrifices in which the victim does serve as a
substitute for the guilty. In some West African cults a person believed
to be under death penalty by the gods offers an animal substitute to
which he transfers his sins. The animal, which is then ritually killed,
is buried with complete funeral rites as though it were the human
person. Thus the guilty person is dead, and it is an 'innocent' man who
is free to begin a new life.
Finally, some propitiatory sacrifices are clearly intended to avert
possible misfortune and calamity, and as such they are really bribes
offered to the recipient. Thus, in West Africa libations and animal and
food offerings are frequently made to a variety of Earth spirits to
ensure their good favour in preventing any adversity from befalling the
one making the offering.
Atonement. Propitiation and expiation are both ways of making an
atonement as the means by which the worshipper reestablishes her or his
relationship with the recipient. This atonement often integrates
sacrifice with ritual cleanness, moral purity, and religious
acceptability.
Atonement (literally ‘at-one-ment,’) is a recurring theme in the history of religion and
theology. It is used
in English translations of the Bible to convey the idea of reconciliation and
expiation, and it has been a favourite way for Christians to speak
about the significance attributed to the death of Jesus Christ
on the cross. In Christian belief, the sins of humans are said to have
alienated God's creation from its creator. The sacrifice made by Christ
is said to be satisfaction [the settling of a debt to justice] for the
sins of humans (in Christian tradition there is no remission of sin
without the shedding of blood, see Hebrews 9:26). This sacrifice
brought about a reconciliation [atonement] between the Creator and his
sin-estranged people.
In Judaism, atonement is expiation for the
worshipper's own sin in order to
attain God's forgiveness. She or he may achieve atonement in various
ways,
including repentance, payment for a wrong action, good works,
suffering, and prayer. Repentance and changed conduct are usually
stressed as the most important aspects of Judaic atonement. The ten
‘days of awe,’ culminating in the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), are
centred on repentance. |
Fertility - For most human communities, throughout most of history, the
fertility of mothers, fields, and/or hunting grounds, has been
immediately and directly essential for the survival of the community.
Fertility rites, often involving sacrifice - and often to specific
fertility deities such as Demeter (Greek), Cernunnos (Celtic), Aset
(Egyptian), or Freya (Norse) - have traditionally been a normal human
means of trying to secure fertility. Such rites often, if not usually, involve some form of blood
sacrifice - in former days especially human sacrifice (e.g., the Celtic
'Wicker Man'
rite, which involved burning living plant and animal
oblations as well as a live human victim). In some human sacrifices the
victim represented a creator deity who in the beginning was, or
allowed himself to be, killed so that from his body foods
might grow. In these cases, the ritual slaying of the human victim
iterated the primordial project of creation and thus a renewal of
vegetable life. The hymn of Prajapati, for example, prescribes the Purusha sacrifice. In the Rig Veda, Purusha is both
the supreme being and the cosmos; as such he is sacrificed primordially as
the very act of creation. His creative act by self-immolation becomes a
prototype (Rig Veda X, 121): all sacrifices are repetitions, reconstructing
the victim, altar, and consequences of that primeval sacrifice. In
ancient Egypt, similarly, sacrifices were made both to, and in
imitation of, Osiris - a legendary ruler who was murdered by his
brother Set and subsequently became the god of fertility.
In other human sacrifices the oblation represented a vegetation
animus or seasonal spirit that/who died at harvest time so that it might be
reborn in a new crop. In still other sacrifices at planting
time, or in time of famine, the blood of the animal or human oblation
was spilled on the ground and its flesh buried in the soil to fertilize
the earth and recharge its life-force.
Thank offerings - Even humans who disavow deity will say 'thank God' following escape from a crisis. One of the
oldest, and most common, forms of the thank offering is the sacrifice
of the first-fruits
in which part of a harvest, or hunted animal, is offered to a recipient
before any of it is eaten by the people. Pre-European Maori, for
instance, threw the first fish
caught back into the sea as a sacrifice to
Tangaroa (the animus of the sea). As well as being a thank offering, one purpose of a first-fruits
offering was to replenish the life-force of the
earth animus, depleted by hunting or harvest, and to thereby ensure the
continued generation of foodstuffs. As such, it was often one of the many
sacrificial rites that had as their intention the seasonal renewal and
reactivation of the fertility of the earth (see Fertility, above). In agricultural societies, the harvest was often considered sacred (taboo or
tapu) and not to be used as food until the first fruits were presented with homage and thanks (and often
with animal sacrifices) to the animus or deity of the harvest (sometimes regarded
as embodied in the crop). In these cases, the first-fruits sacrifice had the
effect of de-sanctifying the harvest and so making it available for
human consumption. Such sacrifices imply that the harvest is not only
dependent on deity for its increase but is actually the property of
deity (in many such instances, it was believed that the life-force of the deity, that
animated the growth of plants, was being given to humans by the deity by
means of the harvest).
Gift sacrifices - Although all sacrifice involves the giving of
something, there are some sacrificial rites in which the oblation is
regarded as a gift made to a recipient either ∙ in expectation of a
favour or ∙ as the result of a promise upon the fulfilment of a
requested favour. In many societies, past and present, sacrifices were
vowed to God, gods, or 'fate', in return for victory - or even just
survival - in battle. This instinct survives in the way supposed
unbelievers will ‘strike a deal’ with God to change their behaviour if they or a
loved one survive a crisis. The solemnity of the votive [fulfilling a
vow] offering in old times is seen in the Old Testament account of the
judge Jephthah's sacrifice of his only child in fulfilment of a vow to
God (Judges 11).
Building sacrifices - Numerous instances are known of animal and human
sacrifices made in the course of the construction of houses, shrines,
and other buildings, and in the laying out of villages and towns. The
ritual mixing of a new-born's blood with the mortar of a new building
was common in Celtic/Druidic custom. According to the Historia Regum Britanniae
(History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth, for example, King Vortigern decided to have a fortress built in what is
now Wales. Everyday builders would build part of a wall which would
collapse the next day. His elders advised him to find a boy without a
father (they actually had Merlin in mind), kill him and mix the boy's
blood mixed with mortar so the building would not crumble again.The ancient Aztecs are believed to
have torn the still-beating hearts out of up to 20,000 victims in
consecration of some especially important buildings. The purpose of
these sacrifices has been to put the building under the ownership,
protection, or mana, of a deity and/or to repel or disempower supposed
demoniacal powers. On the one hand, building sacrifice would be made to
the earth deities and the supernatural powers of the place - the real
owners - so that the human owners could take possession and be ensured
against malevolent interference with the construction of the building
and its later occupation and use. On the other hand, the sacrifice was
offered to the recipient to establish its benevolent presence in the
building. During the building of early Maori pa [fortresses], for example, a slave
or captive would be thrown into the hole prepared to take the gate
posts (and sometimes corner posts), the posts would then be rammed in
on top to the accompaniment of karakia [prayer chants] - killing the
victim and supposedly buying a form of supernatural ‘Home and Contents’
insurance for the pa.
Mortuary sacrifice - Throughout the history of human religion, the dead
have been the objects of oblations from the living. In ancient Greece
an entire group of offerings (enagismata) was consecrated to the dead;
these were libations of milk, honey, water, wine, and oil poured onto
the grave. In Hindu tradition, a man's widow was burnt on his funeral
pyre in sutti (a practice suppressed by the English during colonial
occupation). In India water and balls of cooked rice were, and probably
still are, sacrificed to the spirits of the departed. In the tenth
century, an Arab diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, wrote a detailed
description of the Rus, who were Viking traders living on the River
Volga in what is now Russia. In it he describes the funeral of one of
the Rus leaders:
| When the man of whom I have spoken died, his girl slaves were asked,
"Who will die with him?" One answered, "I."....Then they laid her at
the side of her master; the old woman known as the Angel of Death
re-entered and looped a cord around her neck and gave the crossed ends
to the two men for them to pull. Then she approached her with a
broad-bladed dagger, which she plunged between her ribs repeatedly, and
the men strangled her with the cord until she was dead. |
Another Arab, ibn Rustah, described a form of
mortuary sacrifice among the Rus in which the king's favourite wife was
sealed alive in his burial chamber. In rural West Africa, offerings of cooked
yams, grain, and animals are still made to the ancestral spirits supposedly
residing in the Earth. The point of such offerings is not that the dead
get hungry and thirsty, nor are they merely propitiatory offerings
(although preventing the dead from troubling the living has always been
a human issue). Their intention is to increase the life-force of the
departed. The dead, who have lost their own animus, partake of the
life of the gods (usually, although not always, the chthonic or
'underworld' deities), and sacrifices to the dead are in effect
sacrifices to the gods who bestow life. In Hittite funeral
rites, for example, sacrifices were made to the sun god and other
celestial deities - transcendent sources of the life-force - as well as to the
divinities of Earth.
Communion sacrifices - Communion [an intimate bond between the worshipper and the
sacred power] is fundamental to all sacrifice. This communion is
normally expressed in prayer, worship, and/or self-induced trance
states; it is also often cemented by means of a shared sacramental
meal. The meal may be one in which the sacrificial oblation is simply
shared by the deity and the worshippers. Of this sort were the Greek
thysia and the Jewish zevah sacrifices in which one portion of the
oblation was burned upon the altar and the remainder eaten by the
worshippers. The Norse Hákonar saga gođa tells of an ancient Icelandic
custom in which all the farmers of a district would come to the local
temple bringing provisions for a feast with them. At this feast, all
sorts of animals were killed. The hlaut (sacrificial blood) of these
animals was used to redden the altar, the walls of the temple inside
and out, and also sprinkled upon the feasters; the flesh of the animals
was then cooked and eaten with great amounts of mead and wine. Among
the African Yoruba special meals are offered to the deity; if the deity
accepts the oblation (as disclosed by divination), a portion of the
food is placed before his shrine while the remainder is eaten as a
sacred communion by the worshippers. The communion sacrifice may be one
in which the deity somehow indwells the oblation so that the
worshippers actually consume the divine; e.g., the Hindu soma ritual.
The Aztecs twice yearly made dough images of the sun god
Huitzilopitchli that were consecrated to the god and thereby
transubstantiated into his flesh to be eaten with fear and reverence by
the worshippers. Echoes of this kind of sacrifice are found in the
Roman Catholic Mass which takes the metaphors of the New Testament
literally (see The Gospel according to Matthew 26:26-28).
The Logic of Sacrifice
Sacrifice is parentocentric, and thereby political, on two levels:
- Just as a human parent has significant power for good and evil
over a child, so the recipient of sacrifice is believed to have
significant power for good and evil over the worshipper. Worship
assumes an appeasing and submissive [childlike] posture before this
power.
- Within the rite itself, the sacrificing worshipper, and any
religious manager, is always a parent or parent-like figure (an
adult, king, paterfamilias, or priest) whose fears, hopes, or prestige,
is at stake while the oblation, who pays the ultimate price for that
fear, hope or prestige is always a non-parent figure (an animal, child,
virgin, prisoner or other non-parent-like victim)
This logic, which is basically fear driven, involves the
violation of significant integrities (in many cases, children) in
exchange for the promise of a benefit or benefits. The recipient
of sacrifice is a parent-bully ∙ personified as the focus of the
people's otherwise ordinary fears, insecurities, anxieties and hopes,
and ∙ appeased by violation precisely in an attempt to assuage those
fears and insecurities. In the sacrificial rite, the fears of a
worshipper or worshippers are assuaged - and/or their hopes are
expressed in the face of fear - by violence against something or
someone else who is made into a victim simply by being violatable. In
analogous performances, a social, economic, political, religious,
military or other parent-like figure appeases her or his own anxiety,
and/or secures an illusory power, prestige or whatever, by sacrificing
(violating) his or her social, economic, religious, military or other
'child' or children. This might be hard on the parents, who
nevertheless seem to bear the burden of their sacrifice with remarkable
fortitude, but it is a lot harder on the children.
Worship by
sacrifice quickly becomes a self-reinforcing justification of continual
violence; what begins as a means of dealing with nebulous fears,
anxieties and so on, itself becomes the main object of fear (the
recipient is feared more than the threats which he, she, or it, is
meant to divert when appeased). Thus the fear which drives the violent
performance is sustained by the very mythology of sacrifice which is
the vehicle for supposedly assuaging the fear. In a modern, secular,
version of this logic, the powerful folk of our society (i.e., the
rich) fear the economic servant which has become our master. Whenever
such folk get together to 'improve' an economic situation, the first
(and oftentimes only) question they ask concerns what the poor can be
made to sacrifice. If overpaid managers, for example, mismanage a
company then they fire their workers and/or cheat their investors. This
routinely happens from international to local level (at this very
moment, for instance, wealthy leaders of both the European Union and
the City Counsel of Hamilton - the tiny, little, city where I live -
are instituting ways in which the poor and middle classes can be made
to pay for the irresponsible greed of the rich).
Why Make Sacrifice?
Why have human religions, throughout history and across all cultures,
embraced the idea of giving up something we value in order to make the
world safe and/or get an advantage in our projects? Obviously animism,
which seems to be the foundation of all human religions, has something
to do with it. The origins of animism are lost in pre-history, but it
is entirely plausible that the first homo sapiens, aware of themselves
as living beings, would suspect that other objects in the world (and
especially other living or life-like objects) were also aware. It is
not, after all, a huge step from assuming that other living humans are
persons to assuming that other animals and/or life-like natural forces
(e.g., thunder, the ocean, wind, the seasons, and so on) are also
persons, at least of a kind. If you associate personhood with a kind of
self-aware life-force [animius], that is shared by things other than humans, then
you have exactly the animism that seems to have permeated human
religious beliefs and performances into the historical period. Objects
and forces in the world are relevant to human survival either as assets
or liabilities. If these objects and forces are persons (and, like
human persons, capable of benign or malignant intentions) then
obviously humans are going to negotiate safety and advantage with them.
But why would this negotiation take the form of sacrifice? To answer
this question, imagine what life must have been for our earliest
ancestors. We know that early humans learned cooperative violence and
that learning this lesson significantly improved their rates of survival and
success. Cooperative violence enabled groups of human hunters to ∙ to bring down large
animals which, when cooked, were considerably more nutritious than the
foods available to any other animals and ∙ defend their family groups
against competitors (including wild animals and other groups of
humans). Sharing a common purpose, and the experience of shared dangers
that went with it, almost certainly led to a sense of 'blood
brotherhood' among hunters such as is pictured in William Golding's
Lord of the Flies. The
mutual allegiances and rituals of hunters would set them apart from
non-hunter members of their group
(i.e., mothers, children, and old folk), while their skills in weapons
and killing would have given them political power within the group.
This would
give the hunters considerable influence over the hunter-gatherer groups
which founded the basic forms of human community. Among these
communities, the most value would have been put on the basic
instruments of
survival: i.e., food, shelter, healing, and fertility. For all of these
instruments they would have been in fierce competition not only with
wild animals and natural contingency but also with other humans. If a
predator wants your kill then one way of surviving that situation
is to sacrifice part of your kill to it; perhaps taking what you can
and leaving the rest behind. It is not hard to imagine such
self-defensive performances leading, first, to 'sacrificing' part of
every kill to other predators, simply to keep them off your back so to
speak, and then to whatever animus that you suspect controls hunting
success. Even within human community, if someone more powerful than you
threatens you with harm unless you surrender something you value, which
he or she covets, then it makes sense to sacrifice the valued item to
your survival.7 Currying favour with another human person, who has the power
to help or harm you, is normally accompanied by some gift of something
you value which you hope the recipient will also value enough to be
kindly disposed towards you (for millennia, human women have survived
by 'willingly' giving their sexual favours to the bully who would
otherwise have probably raped them and killed their children anyway).
If you believe that some non-human 'spirit' has the power to harm or
help you, then much the same kind of 'bribing the bully' could be
expected. Because supposedly spiritual beings and forces don't actually
exist, they cannot physically take your gift off you. The gift,
therefore, needs to be taken off you in some symbolic way - killed,
burnt, or publicly consumed by priests and/or other members of your
community who act as witnesses of your bribe. As farming began to
supplement, and then replace, hunting and gathering as the mainstay of
human survival, sacrificing to the supposed animus for success during
the hunt (and for having been successful during a hunt) would
effortlessly slide into sacrificing to the deity before and after a successful
harvest.
Why Blood Sacrifice? Of especial relevance to any study of sacrifice
are the blood sacrifices in which animals and/or humans are killed.
Humans seem to have always regarded the blood sacrifice as the most
powerful way to please the various recipient(s). Like sacrifice in
general, the origins of blood sacrifice are lost in prehistory.
Nevertheless, archaeology,8 and practices that continued into the
historical period, provide good evidence that blood sacrifice has
been common throughout history and has played an important rôle in many
human societies. Bulls were sacred to Egyptians more than 5,000 years
ago and, for the Egyptians, the sacrifice of a bull was the gift of a demigod to
the gods. Abel was favoured by God over Cain (who offered the 'fruits of the
field') when he sacrificed the firstborn of his herds to God (Genesis
4:3-5).
The primary reason for this favour seems to have been the association of blood
with the life-force. For example, Noah is instructed, in the Holy Bible,
Every moving thing that lives shall be meat for you; even as the green
herb have I given you all things. But the flesh with the life thereof,
which is the blood, shall you not eat
Genesis 9:4 (my italics) |
The association of blood with life, and the spilling of blood with
death, is plausible for any people who have seen animals and humans die
of wounds (and think, for example, of how often blood is described as
'lifeblood'). This association is reinforced throughout the Torah.9
On the other side of the world, remains of human sacrifices have been
dated in Peru from 7000 years ago to the sixteenth century (and it is
believed that they probably continued for some time after that).
Tenochtitlan, in
what is now Mexico City, is known to have been a site of human
sacrifices
for the Aztecs long before the Spaniards arrived to witness these
events firsthand and find huge collections of skulls already on
display. These human sacrifices seem to have been a unifying event and
an
intense demonstration of religious beliefs for both the Peruvian Inca
and
the Mexican Aztecs. In keeping with 'old world' animism, the Aztecs
believed that the 'vital energies' of one person could be transferred
to another person through drinking the blood and eating the flesh.10 The
gods also craved flesh and blood, presumably to nourish their life-force,
so human sacrifice was thought (erroneously) to benefit both the people
and their deities. Sacrifice was, in other words, an integral part of a
worldview in which the ever-present reality of death has to be countered
by extreme and relentless measures that somehow magically
transform death into life.
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Notes
1. The English term 'sacrifice' derives from the Latin sacrificium - a combination of sacer, meaning something set apart from the secular or profane for the use of supernatural powers, and facere, meaning ‘to make’.
2.
In the mid 20th century, this supposed life-force made a scientific
appearance in evolutionary theory as the 'elan vital' of Henri Bergson.
3. It is probable that deities evolved from
various animi, and this evolution may well have been via totemism. In
Amerindian religions (from which we derive our main understanding of
totemism), a totem seems
very much to be a kind of local animus that has been deified to an
extent but is not yet enough to count as a deity such as the sky god.
4. In animistic beliefs, for example, the
life-force is often pictured as a vapour or shadow going from
one body to another (cf. the 'ectoplasm'
of spiritualists). This life force is believed to pass not only between
human and non-human beings but into plants and inanimate objects as
well.
5. The politically correct term term 'entheogen'
is used to sanctify the distorting of human awareness by ingesting
intoxicants or hallucinogens. It means 'to engender the god within' -
which suggests that (a) there is a god-thing within us, and (b) this
god-thing is awakened or revealed by or in certain chemically-induced
states. It is because neither of these claims are true that I add the
suffix 'pseudo.'
6. The nastiest method of which I have heard
comes from a Tamil culture in Southern India. To ensure the fertility
of their crops, the tribal managers killed a child by forcing sticks
up his or her nose and into the brain. The longer the child took to
die, the better the crop was going to be (I cannot find, and have
forgotten the title of, the article that describes this rite. If anyone
can help me relocate it, please do).
7. This kind of economy prevails not only in
cases of 'your money or your life' but in ordinary negotiation in which
parties try to sacrifice as little as they can for as much gain as they
can.
8. Although it should be noted here that ritual
burial may not always signify sacrifice. Bodies dating from the first
and second centuries B.C., for example, that have been recovered from
bogs in Europe, have often been considered sacrificial victims when the
bodies showed signs of having been subjected to ritualistic treatment.
Further examination of the remains suggests, however, that, although
many of the bodies had been accorded high honours, some at least did
not die by sacrifice or punishment.
9. The Biblical book of Leviticus prescribes numerous detailed sacrifices of birds (typically doves), bullocks, and lambs.
10. There is considerable evidence that this
belief still holds among most tribal groups, and some urban cults,
throughout the Americas. A symbolic remnant of this belief endures in the Roman Catholic mass.
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Steven Foulds - Text last modified 11 November 2011
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