Sacrifice

• 1. Introduction

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  Sacrifice is an act or offering made to a deity, and it has appeared in human cultures on nearly every continent. Some sacrifices seek to appease a god. Others are gestures of gratitude and praise. What drives people across such radically different societies to offer up something precious, whether an animal, a harvest, or a life? How did scholars come to understand it? And what does it mean today, when ancient rituals persist quietly inside modern religious practice? Those questions reach from the burnt offerings described in the book of Leviticus to the Eid al-Adha celebrations observed by Muslims around the world each year. The word itself carries a clue. The Latin sacrificium joins sacra, meaning sacred things, with facere, meaning to make or to do. To sacrifice is to do something sacred. But what counts as sacred, and who decides, is where the story gets complicated.

• 2. Theories in Conflict

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  E.B. Tylor proposed one of the earliest scholarly frameworks, suggesting sacrifice could be understood as a gift to the divine, valued either on its own merits, as homage, or for the hardship it represented. William Robertson Smith took a different view. In The Religion of the Semites, he argued that the sole function of sacrifice was communion with the divine, grounding his theory in the Hebrew Bible's sacrificial system, where priests who ate burnt offerings were drawn closer to God. Robertson Smith also linked ancient Hebrew sacrifice to the killing of totem animals, a claim later anthropologists flatly rejected.

  Emile Durkheim, working from ethnographies of Aboriginal Australians compiled by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, added a social dimension. Durkheim argued in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life that sacrifice served two purposes at once: reinforcing communal ties and achieving divine communion. Sacrifices happened during periods of communal gathering, he noted, and so functioned as social glue. Both his functionalist interpretation and the accuracy of his ethnographic sources have since been questioned.

  Durkheim's nephew Marcel Mauss collaborated with historian Henri Hubert to refine the framework further, arguing that sacrifice is a form of gift exchange, directed at gods with the social expectation that the gods would return a greater gift in time.

  Sigmund Freud brought a psychoanalytic angle. Influenced by Robertson Smith and by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Freud argued in Totem and Taboo that the sacrifice of a totem animal was a symbolic recapitulation of the murder and cannibalization of a primal father. Sacrifice, on his reading, was a neurotic ritual for displacing guilt generated by the repression of the Oedipal Complex.

  Rene Girard rejected Freud's framing outright. Girard argued the victim of sacrifice was not guilty but was instead a surrogate target for collective violence, a scapegoat bearing the displaced aggression produced by mimetic desire, the urge to possess what others have. Nancy Jay offered yet another reading: that sacrifice creates and maintains patrilineal kinship structures, with men's shedding of so-called pure blood in ritual contrasting ideologically with women's shedding of so-called impure blood in childbirth and menstruation.

  Georges Bataille, writing in The Accursed Share, saw something different again. Pre-modern sacrifice, in his view, was a deliberate form of conspicuous consumption, a way of burning through surplus value. No single theory has won the field.

• 3. Animal Sacrifice Across Cultures

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  Animal sacrifice appears in the historical record across an extraordinary range of societies, from ancient Hebrews to the Greeks and Romans, Egyptians, Aztecs, and Yoruba. The purifying Roman ceremony known as Lustratio was one well-documented example. In ancient Egypt, the cult of Apis offers another. Egyptian religion placed restrictions on which animals could be sacrificed, permitting sheep, bulls, calves, male calves, and geese, but no others.

  Some of the complexity of animal sacrifice is visible in how the slaughtered animal's parts were distributed. In many cultures, the edible portions were shared among those attending the ritual. Sacrifice was thus also a communal meal.

  The practice has not faded into history. Muslims observe the Eid al-Adha festival each year by sacrificing a sheep, goat, camel, or cow, provided the animal is healthy and conscious. The Quran is explicit that what reaches God is not the blood but the piety behind the act. The meat is divided into three equal portions: one kept by the person performing the sacrifice, one given to relatives, and one distributed to the poor. The ritual commemorates the prophet Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son at God's command.

  Followers of Santeria and other traditions derived from Yoruba religion also practice animal sacrifice, using it as a means of curing the sick and giving thanks to the Orisa. In Santeria, such offerings represent only a small fraction of the ritual activities called ebos, which also include prayer and deeds. In some Greek villages, Christians sacrifice animals to Orthodox saints in a practice called kourbania. The practice is publicly condemned but often tolerated.

  In Chinese folk religious settings, pork, chicken, duck, fish, squid, and shrimp appear as sacrificial offerings. Where high deities are believed to be vegetarian, some altars are built on two levels, with vegetarian food on the upper tier and animal sacrifices on the lower tier intended for those deities' soldiers. In Taiwan and among Teochew communities, competitions for raising the heaviest pig for sacrifice are an active tradition.

• 4. Human Sacrifice

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  The north house at Knossos, the great citadel in Crete, contained the bones of children who appeared to have been butchered. This evidence suggests that Pre-Hellenic Minoan culture practiced human sacrifice, a conclusion reinforced by the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which Athens sent seven young men and seven young women to Crete as sacrificial offerings. The archaeological record at multiple Knossos sites shows that most of those sacrificed were young adults or children.

  The Phoenicians of Carthage were widely reported to practice child sacrifice. Ancient authors including Plutarch, writing around 46-120 AD, along with Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus, and Philo, described children being roasted to death on a heated bronze idol while still conscious. Large numbers of children's skeletons buried alongside sacrificial animals have been found archaeologically, though scholars have noted that ancient authors may have exaggerated the scale for political or religious reasons.

  The Aztec practice of human sacrifice is among the most extensively documented. Current scholarly estimates place the annual number of Aztec sacrifices between a few thousand and twenty thousand. Some were performed to help the sun rise, others to bring rains. Some were connected with expanding the great Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. There are also accounts of captured Spanish conquistadores being sacrificed during the wars of the Spanish invasion of Mexico.

  Human sacrifice in Scandinavia is referenced in Norse sagas and by German historians, with the Temple at Uppsala and the ritual known as Blot among the cited examples. Ocasions that appear across multiple cultures include the dedication of a new temple or bridge, the death of a king or high priest, and periods of natural disaster when drought, earthquake, or volcanic eruption was read as evidence of divine anger. Human sacrifice is no longer officially condoned anywhere, and any instance that occurs is treated as murder under law.

• 5. Sacrifice in Judaism

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  Ritual sacrifice in ancient Israel was a highly organized system, with the opening chapters of Leviticus laying out detailed methods for different categories of offerings. Bloodless offerings of grain and wine were permitted, but animal sacrifices held the greatest importance. They were divided into burnt offerings, in which the entire unmaimed animal was consumed by fire; guilt offerings, in which part was burnt and part left for the priest; and peace offerings, in which part was burnt and the rest eaten under ritually pure conditions.

  After the destruction of the Second Temple, ritual sacrifice ceased in Jewish practice, with the Samaritans as the notable exception. The medieval philosopher Maimonides argued in the Guide for the Perplexed that God had always considered prayer and philosophical meditation superior to sacrifice. He read God's permission of sacrifice as a concession to human psychology. The Israelites had grown up surrounded by peoples who sacrificed animals to their gods, and it would have been unreasonable, Maimonides wrote, to demand an immediate leap to purely internal worship. He drew an analogy to his own twelfth century: a prophet commanding people to abandon prayer and fasting and serve God only in thought would be equally incomprehensible.

  Nachmanides, in his Torah commentary on Leviticus 1:9, took the opposite view, arguing that sacrifices were an ideal in Judaism and completely central to it.

  The Hebrew Bible contains accounts of near and actual human sacrifice. Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac is narrated in Genesis 22:1-24. The case of Jephthah's daughter in Judges 11:31-40 is debated, with some reading it as an actual sacrifice and others arguing she was dedicated to lifelong service. The book of Micah records a question about whether a firstborn child should be offered for sin, and answers it with the directive to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Jeremiah's condemnation of child sacrifice, found in Jeremiah 7:30-32, signals the direction the tradition was moving.

• 6. Sacrifice in Christianity and Islam

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  Christian theology built its understanding of sacrifice on the concept that God became incarnate as Jesus, offering his son to reconcile humanity, which had separated itself from God through sin. A view that shaped Western theology from early in the second millennium held that God's justice demanded an atonement humanity itself could not supply, and so God created a covenant with Abraham that was fulfilled when Jesus became the sacrifice for the broken covenant. Christ the Lamb of God replaced the animal sacrifice of the ancient Korban Todah, including the Passover of Mosaic law.

  Denominations diverge sharply on how to understand the Eucharist in relation to this sacrifice. The Roman Catholic Church holds that the Mass is not a separate sacrifice but the same sacrifice offered on the cross, made present again without Christ dying again. Catholic theology describes this as a re-presentation of the once-for-all sacrifice of Calvary by the risen Christ. The Lutheran and Orthodox traditions agree that in the Eucharist it is Christ, not the celebrant priest, who offers and is offered, that Christ's sacrifice of atonement was made once for all, and that the Eucharist distributes its benefits sacramentally each time it is celebrated. Both also treat the Eucharist as a sacrifice of thanksgiving.

  Anglican liturgical texts make the offering explicit. The 1789 Book of Common Prayer includes words offering gifts directly to God. The 1976 Book of Common Prayer Prayer D states, "presenting to you from the gifts you have given us we offer you these gifts." The United Methodist Church's Eucharistic liturgy contains the words "Let us offer ourselves and our gifts to God," and the church officially teaches that Holy Communion re-presents, rather than repeats, the sacrifice of the cross.

  Pope John Paul II addressed the question of human suffering and its relationship to Christ's sacrifice in his Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris, issued on the 11th of February 1984. He wrote that Christ's redemptive suffering raised human suffering itself to the level of the redemption, inviting each person to become a sharer in it.

  Some Protestant denominations reject the sacrificial interpretation of the Eucharist entirely, preferring to see it as a holy meal. Evangelical Protestantism places emphasis instead on the individual's conscious decision to accept Christ's sacrifice on the cross as atonement for personal sin, described as accepting Christ as one's personal Lord and Savior.

  In Islamic theology, the Arabic term dabiha refers specifically to an animal sacrifice offered at Eid ul-Adha. The sacrificial animal, whether a sheep, goat, camel, or cow, must be healthy and conscious. The Quran states directly that it is not the blood that reaches God but the piety of the person performing the act. The ritual is described as following the Sunnah of the prophet Ibrahim, and the meat is distributed in three equal parts among the performer, relatives, and the poor.

• 7. Sacrifice in Asia

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  During the Shang and Zhou dynasties in ancient China, the ruling class maintained a complex and hierarchical sacrificial system. Sacrificing to ancestors was a formal obligation for nobles, and an emperor could hold hunts, start wars, and summon royal family members specifically to gather the resources needed for sacrificial ceremonies. Archaeologist Kwang-chih Chang, writing in his 1983 book Art, Myth and Ritual: the Path to Political Authority in Ancient China, argued that this sacrificial system strengthened the authority of the ruling class and promoted production, including through the casting of ritual bronzes.

  Confucius supported restoring the Zhou sacrificial system, but specifically the version that excluded human sacrifice. His goal was social order and the enlightenment of people. The Mohist school took a different stance, considering any form of sacrifice too extravagant for society.

  In Hinduism, animal sacrifices appear in ancient Vedic scriptures, including the Yajurveda, which references the use of mantras in goat sacrifices. Those mantras were understood as a mechanism for replacing human sacrifice with animal sacrifice. Contemporary Hindus generally hold that both animals and humans have souls and may not be sacrificed, a principle connected to ahimsa, the law of non-injury. Some Puranas explicitly forbid animal sacrifice, though modern practice associated with Shaktism and certain folk Hindu traditions continues to include animal sacrifice in some regions.