Ancient Sacrificial Practice

[LostintheCycle]

Almost every ancient civilization I can think of has practiced sacrifice, such as the Greeks, Aztecs, Egyptians, and so forth, and it has made me wonder why this is?
It doesn't make any Darwinian sense why it would work, because the point of sacrifice is to destroy useful things, so why is this so prevalent in ancient societies?
Furthermore, if this is something that is linked to human nature, how does the desire to practice sacrifice express itself today?
I have no answers to these questions myself, but I know Agora is full of history nerds... I invite this group to duke out their ideas in this thread.

 

[Some_porcupine]

Maybe it worked

 

[alCannium27]

We humans understand value in terms of exchange. We understand survival to be of greater value than excess produce. Sacrificing a little bit of today for a greater tomorrow, we have always done this, be it in material sacrfices, our health, our time, our money -- we've probably done this pre-history, our predecessor species might have done this just the same. If sacrfices are understood as humans paying protection money to deities, it's a lot easier to understand. The greater the offering, the greater the expected outcome, just like investments, purchases, relationships, etc. When you are not paying your dues, to your tribal leader, your chieftain, your king, or government, your wife, you are left alone to face their ire.

I suspect all ancient human societies practiced animism and ancestral worship -- monotheism is, after all, a relative new form of worship historically. When you attribute the rain to a god of rain, your only form of getting more rain is to pay for said god with offerings. Maybe you tried sacrificing a goat every once and a while, and you feel like there's more rain (we do tend to see pattern where we expect it), so you attribute the sacrifice to rain. Hence the practice.

Inccidentally, in the case of ancestral worship, it's also a result of attributing human behaviors to the dead. As in the dead still consumes food, drinks normally, and requires the commodities of a living person. Living in China and with relatives who live in the countryside, I know all the sacrifices to the ancestors are related to the concept of consumption. We burn "hell money", we offer wine and tea, and we place food in front of the tombs. And much of the extant family would be there, basically a ritual of family reunion. So sacrifices in this case is no different from "sacrificing" precious food stuff for your family instead of fullfilling your own needs.

Also, I imagine human sacrifice can be a thrill to watch.

 

[Chuffed]

I assume a percentage of it was to keep your own people compliant (fear from within) too, kind of like putting skulls outside of camp to warn outsiders (fear to outsiders).

 

[mesaprotector]

The cycle of renewal, power over life and death. It's not too hard to imagine why that appealed to people who were seeing half their families die from pneumonia and war every generation. Sacrifice doesn't appeal to me especially, but ritual does.

 

[gsyme]

From what I've studied of it, it arises for different reasons in different cultures. And it isn't always "destroying something useful".

In ancient mesopotamia, the tigris and euphrates flood erratically. When they flood, it renews the land, but destroys any crops that are planted currently. Sacrifice there took the form of "sacrificing" grain into the temple system. This was basically a religious granary, though -- when the floods hit, the priests would dole out the stored grain to survive the shortfall after the crops failed.

In egypt, the nile floods so regularly that the men who could predict it declared themselves god-kings and became the pharaohs and priestly caste. Sacrifice was secondary in this society, with magic and ritual being more important, and these ape the methods for predicting the river. Sacrifice in this sort of society was usually retainer sacrifice -- when you kill the servants of a dead ruler and bury them together. This ensures a smooth transition of power between god-kings.

In the levant, the land is watered by periodic rainfall. This is regular enough, but not consistent. Here, the people started practicing child sacrifice to invoke the storm god baal when the rains didn't come. This has the practical effect of lowering the need for food during periods where crop yield is lesser due to low rain.

Herding societies likely developed animal sacrifice as a means to cull herds. Usually, these societies tend to eat the animal sacrifice in a shared meal. This is typical of shashu societies, as well as indo-europeans. When human sacrifice shows up in these societies, it usually takes the form of executing POWs.

 

[RealTomCruise]

I see it as a means to keep larger communities together, the collective will of a people can be expressed and reinforced by some voluntary loss (ie. the will for removal of sin via allowing a scapegoat to be let free). Sacrifices are effective because loss is more visceral then positive forms such as celebrations (ofc the two were often intertwined and to my knowledge had a comedy-tragedy sort of duality). If you want to look at it from a Darwinian sense, our biology is not adapted to large communities so some sort of social mechanism has to be put in place instead to establish stability. I guess small tribes of people (which would be adapted to our biology) also practice sacrifice, so that may discount that social Darwinian idea. Maybe it's a similar social Darwinian mechanism to deal with the burden of some form of a God-Image or higher power while still maintaining its benefits (I don't know enough about either psychology or theology to really go further).

On a national level, sacrifice probably best manifests as sending soldiers overseas, depending on the war this either sparks unity or divisiveness as in the eyes of the public it marks either a purposeful sacrifice (WW2) or needless slaughter (Afghanistan war) of the countries own people. Needless slaughter probably describes on a lighter level how culture war bullshit (obsessed with dogmatic purity on either political side) is actually perceived by the general public whether leaning left or right. Purposeful sacrifice is lacking for the most part and we are seeing the consequences of a sense of coherent communities in the west breaking down. Honestly as someone who's not overly religious, I think the downturn of religion and collective sacrifice (let's say the general principle of imitatio christi in forsaking material acquisition) has been disastrous.

 

[no_chill]

Sacrifice of what? Human sacrifice? Not done by those cultures except the Aztec. It is greatly exxaragated today and is often only used by christians to point at pagans or other cultures to say how barbaric and false they are and of course how civilised their own faith is.

Mayans/ Aztec are the few that did sacrifice humans. Only after their culture became degenerated and the original gods left them. They did perform human sacrifices before but Quezalcoatl and Tetluatichan told them that this is not needed and should be stopped.

They did so because they themselves calculated or inherited a calendar (Mayan long count calendar, which interestingly enough is very very similar to the hindu Yuga) that followed the cyclical path of destruction. That every 12k or 6k years a cataclysm destroyed this planet or parts of it. However the most recent cataclysm after the younger dryas did not came at the calculated date. It was too late and so somehow they came up with the idea that by sacrificing humans they can further delay it. Since the cataclysm will take lives, they figured it must be the act of people dying thats the reason. This is from the Mayans own account btw. And they also sacrificed animals too.

Sacrificing of plants, animals and most importantly food however was and is still a regular occurence and it is and was religious in nature, not just to delay a cataclysm. Similar to modern day Hinduism, called prasadam, where gods receive offerings of the devotees favourite food or certain items. To let them eat with you and to remember that the highest enjoyer is your respective god. A form of Karma-Yoga.

In the Bhagavad-Gita C 9 V 26-28 Krsna said:

"If one offers to Me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or even water, I delightfully partake of that item offered with love by My devotee in pure consciousness."

"Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer as oblation to the sacred fire, whatever you bestow as a gift, and whatever austerities you perform, O son of Kunti, do them as an offering to Me."

"By dedicating all your works to Me, you will be freed from the bondage of good and bad results. With your mind attached to Me through renunciation, you will be liberated and will reach Me."

In Mesopotamien it was similar, since it was the spiritual predecessor to the Indus culture.

Important to note that it is not just material things you can sacrifice, but more so importantly you should sacrifice your efforts, thoughts and feelings. By thinking about your god, singing (mantra japa), talking. Material sacrifices only are seen as bad practice and lazy.

 

[LostintheCycle]

Sacrifice of what? Human sacrifice?

No, the general practice of sacrifice. IIRC the Greeks would sacrifice livestock, the Egyptians performed sacrifice of cats, and I am wondering why many societies end up with these practices that look like they'd be, if anything, detrimental to the society.
My thinking being this: if there are two neighboring tribes of similar size, one tribe practices sacrifice and the other doesn't, wouldn't the tribe which does not throw away things become stronger than the tribe that does?
Sorry, it's a simplistic thought, I'm not much of a history buff either

 

[no_chill]

No, the general practice of sacrifice. IIRC the Greeks would sacrifice livestock, the Egyptians performed sacrifice of cats, and I am wondering why many societies end up with these practices that look like they'd be, if anything, detrimental to the society.
My thinking being this: if there are two neighboring tribes of similar size, one tribe practices sacrifice and the other doesn't, wouldn't the tribe which does not throw away things become stronger than the tribe that does?
Sorry, it's a simplistic thought, I'm not much of a history buff either

Its ok

It's purely religious, thats why I quoted the Bhagavad-Gita, it was written around the time of those mentioned cultures and reflects the Zeitgeist of the people.

 

[Ross_Я]

In egypt, the nile floods so regularly that the men who could predict it declared themselves god-kings and became the pharaohs and priestly caste.

What.

when you kill the servants of a dead ruler and bury them together. This ensures a smooth transition of power between god-kings.

What?!
The fuck you people get this nonsense from?! This is a third time I see this bullshit online in the span of the last three years! Where the fuck do you get it from?
Egyptians never - never, not even in the pre-dysnatic times that are known to us - buried the servants with the dead ruler. Or practiced any kind of human sacrifice in general.
Matter of the fact, the servants of the dead in the afterlife were specifically made wSbtj figurines (pronounced ushebti or something like that).

Kindly never post anything about Ancient Egypt ever again.

Sacrifice of what? Human sacrifice? Not done by those cultures except the Aztec.

Kudos to this man.

On topic: I really cannot remember much about egyptian sacrificial tradition. I guess, it was far from prevalent. I remember there was a huge deal about sacrificial bull, but that's pretty much all I can remember about the whole thing.
Aside from sacrifice in the usual meaning of this word, there was a different thing, which you can call... well, business or something. Thing is, mummification was huge in Ancient Egypt - and, in particular, a lot of people were ready to pay for mummies of animals that represented their Gods. Therefore there are known cemeteries (or however you want to call them) with tens of thousands of mummified cats and dogs. To make so much mummies, you obviously need to kill some animals on purpose. In fact, some people propose the idea there were even animal farms, entire purpose of which was to make breed animals to make mummies out of them. Even then though, a lot of mummies held only a part of an actual animal. And some of said mummies were entirely empty.
So I'm not sure if you can call the thing above "sacrifice", but the reason is clear: to make money. Given that some mummies were empty, you may call it ancient scam.

I think, I will read something about sacrifice in Ancient Egypt and then will come back for more. I'm pretty sure Encyclopaedia Of Religion And Ethics should hold a comprehensive paragraph, though it all depends on who wrote it.
Encyclopaedia Of Religion And Ethics describes multiple ancient societies, by the way, not just egyptian. And it is usually quite good, so if you are interested in the question, I do recommend that book.

 

[no_chill]

What?!
The fuck you people get this nonsense from?! This is a third time I see this bullshit online in the span of the last three years! Where the fuck do you get it from?

Modern contemporary thinking applied to ancient traditions, too foreign for us to understand. They had vastly different thought patterns back then. Even if we read their surviving texts and sculptures we can't make proper sense of them.
Backstabbing and political intrigues, cut-throat politics is something exclusively found in modern Democratic (actual Plutocratic) systems. People of tradition all over the world followed a King or Queen that descended from above. Ancient Egyptian kings and queens, same as Mesopotamien once where Gods or their descendants. Children. Annunaki means "of royal blood". In German and English likewise theirs the idiom of someone having "Blue blood" and it refers to royalty. Where this came from or what it means? Forgotten. Same as Annunaki now means everything. And don't even mention Nephilim. This gets the schizos riled up.

Same as with the notion of "I need to satisfy the angry rain god by offering him something". I didn't felt it worth my thought and letters to address it. This is based on native american stories taken out of context. There's no mention of even this concept of a god needed to be satisfied and that gets petty.

This thinking is exclusively made up. To further build a fundament and narrative that the people of ancient were lunatics and psychopaths. That they were idiots, primitives, had no intelligence or reason. And that there is nothing worth to learn from them or dig around in that time.

While in reality the opposite is true. We in the current year are the psychopaths with our system of exploitation and slavery to the elites (jews). We are the idiots, worshipping the body and denouncing the spirit and soul. Completely detached from the world above.

Don't look at what the Sumer did and believed in, thats all just fancy poetry and people being dumb! We have Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, funkopops and SCIENCE now.

 

[A L I X]

What?!
The fuck you people get this nonsense from?! This is a third time I see this bullshit online in the span of the last three years! Where the fuck do you get it from?

 

[Some_porcupine]

Modern contemporary thinking applied to ancient traditions, too foreign for us to understand. They had vastly different thought patterns back then. Even if we read their surviving texts and sculptures we can't make proper sense of them.
Backstabbing and political intrigues, cut-throat politics is something exclusively found in modern Democratic (actual Plutocratic) systems. People of tradition all over the world followed a King or Queen that descended from above. Ancient Egyptian kings and queens, same as Mesopotamien once where Gods or their descendants. Children. Annunaki means "of royal blood". In German and English likewise theirs the idiom of someone having "Blue blood" and it refers to royalty. Where this came from or what it means? Forgotten. Same as Annunaki now means everything. And don't even mention Nephilim. This gets the schizos riled up.

Same as with the notion of "I need to satisfy the angry rain god by offering him something". I didn't felt it worth my thought and letters to address it. This is based on native american stories taken out of context. There's no mention of even this concept of a god needed to be satisfied and that gets petty.

This thinking is exclusively made up. To further build a fundament and narrative that the people of ancient were lunatics and psychopaths. That they were idiots, primitives, had no intelligence or reason. And that there is nothing worth to learn from them or dig around in that time.

While in reality the opposite is true. We in the current year are the psychopaths with our system of exploitation and slavery to the elites (jews). We are the idiots, worshipping the body and denouncing the spirit and soul. Completely detached from the world above.

Don't look at what the Sumer did and believed in, thats all just fancy poetry and people being dumb! We have Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, funkopops and SCIENCE now.

hm why you blame jos when you preach self-reliance?

 

[Ross_Я]

I think, I will read something about sacrifice in Ancient Egypt and then will come back for more. I'm pretty sure Encyclopaedia Of Religion And Ethics should hold a comprehensive paragraph, though it all depends on who wrote it.

Unfortunately, sacrifice in Ancient Egypt was such a footnote, it was jammed into the article of Sacrifice (Semitic) in the Encyclopaedia Of Religion And Ethics. Unfortunately again, Egypt was rather independent of other semitic cultures, and therefore the article barely holds anything in value related to Ancient Egypt. In fact, I only found two notes related directly to Egypt:

In Egypt part of the daily temple services consisted in clothing and decorating a figure of the deity, and then setting before it an offering of food — bread, geese, beef, wine, and water. These, after standing a while before the god, were most probably appropriated by the priests.

In Egypt, the king began his reign with a sacrifice to Min, the god of fertility, in the presence of the statues of his ancestors. 'A priest presents him with the royal sickle, with which he cuts a sheaf of corn ; he then strews it before the white bull, symbolizing the offering of the first-fruits of his reign. He then offers incense before the statue of the god, while the priest recites from the mysterious books of the "dances of Min."

The last quote is... well, dubious. It might've been a valid ritual at some point of ancient egyptian history, but it definitely did not hold throughout the whole time of Ancient Egypt. In fact, the previous note should be applied to pretty much everything when Ancient Egypt is discussed: people tend to forget that Ancient Egypt existed for more than 3000 years, and that is more than our current christian civilisation lasts, and over the course of several millenias culture and people change a lot.

Anyway, I do not think this anyhow provides any light onto the issue. I still feel it would be correct to provide a link to the book:

Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics : Hastings, James, 1852-1922 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Vols. 6-12 edited by James Hastings, with the assistance of John A. Selbie and Louis H. Gray.

archive.org

Sacrifice is the very first article in it, so you should not have any troubles finding it. Though reading through the Semetic article, I think the author only bothers to describe customs and traditions of cultures in great detail, but really doesn't bother to ask why it was done in the first place. You still might want to skim through it - article about every culture has its own author, and other authors might be more inquisitive, plus the whole thing is not that long and offers a glance at number of cultures, including Celtic, Greek and others.

A more interesting discussion has been found in another volume of Encyclopaedia, under the title Human Sacrifice (Semitic). However, it mostly discusses all the evidence for and against human sacrifice in Ancient Egypt. It mostly boils down to "Ancient Egyptians were semitic, so they must've had human sacrifice at least at some point of their history, even if they developed it independently", which is a dubious notion, yet the author of this particular article seem to feel it is true. Despite that, he rather fairly introduces everything about the topic, both for and against it. And it once again confirms that we do not have any concrete evidence about existence of human sacrifice from ancient egyptian documents - all the notions in favor of human sacrifice come from late period roman and greek tourists, which is obviously unreliable. The author says that "in general, the native is not so likely to record facts and practices which for him are commonplaces as is the foreigner to they are less familiar", but it is a wishful thinking at best: we have a lot of ancient egyptian documents from all eras, a lot of which mention sacrifices of all kinds, and some of which describe the animal sacrifice in great detail, but there's not even a word about human sacrifice in any of said documents.
In general, it is nowadays accepted that even if human sacrifice was ever a thing in Egypt, by the times known to us all actual human sacrifices were already substituted with something symbolic, like the aforementioned ushebti.
The continuation of the article about other semitic cultures where the evidence is undeniable might be of interest to you though, because the author writes in the premise: "The discussion of this subject falls naturally into two parts: a marshalling of the evidence for the existence of the rite, and an attempt to deduce the purposes and ideas underlying it". Unfortunately, I do not have the time to read it, so I will leave you a link:

Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics : Hastings, James, 1852-1922 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Vols. 6-12: edited by James Hastings, with the assistance of John A. Selbie and Louis H. Gray.

archive.org

Page 862 for Human Sacrifice (Semitic), page 840 for Human Sacrifice in general.

Finally, I found that bit about sacrifice of the bull which I've mentioned earlier, though turns out it wasn't quite about sacrifice either - the bull was sacred, not sacrificial; my memory just got a bit mixed up. The whole article is on russian, so I think providing a document will be useless, but I'll translate the bit I find interesting:
"Killing the sacred animal was a crime against its whole kind and against the king of said kind - Apis, Mnevis, et cetera. It was equal to killing a God and called for tragedies upon the whole country ... To placate a God, sacrifices have been made to a sacred animal that was about to be killed. A pompous funeral was arranged. If an animal was eaten, its bones were to be buried. Otherwise, it was embalmed, wrapped in bandages and gilded cartonage; amulets were given to it and its tomb has been made as if a human was buried in it. Either a special tomb was built for it, or a human tomb without a mummy in it was used. There were also collective tombs for sacred animals".
Pardon for the hasty translation - I'm kind of in a hurry, but I hope it is understandable. In two words: the reasons are purely religious in this case.

Hope I was able to help at least somehow, though I feel that in general I didn't anyhow answer the question at hand. Sorry.

 

[grap]

I don't know much about the historical realities of sacrificial practices, but I do know that there's a basic issue with the historical record: once you have an historical record in the first place, you already have at least enough non-magical stuff -- exchange economies, urban centers, a literate caste, a political system, organized imperialism -- that the purely Darwinian question no longer applies. Whatever their value, those developments have the ability to keep a "society" afloat even if it's profoundly wasteful.

They also contribute to the process of secularization -- even in cultures loathe to admit they are secularizing -- and they bring societies into contact with very distant ones. The net effect is that many accounts of sacrificial practices are written "by the victors," so to speak, even as the meanings of their own sacrificial practices go un- or at least under-theorized. So you get Caesar saying the Celts do human sacrifices all the time, unlike us, the enlightened ones. Or better, you get weird stories like the one about Elijah and the prophets of Baal, in which Baal's prophets aren't just wrong because they picked the wrong god, but also because their sacrificial rites involve cutting themselves, which you'd have to be fucked up to buy, right? Or lol Jesus, who is a better sacrifice than a lamb for some reason, and now you'll never have to sacrifice anything again (???).

Really good historians with the right methodologies can probably reconstruct, with a relatively high degree of confidence, what "actually happened." But the truth is that most accounts of sacrifice ought to be treated with a healthy degree of skepticism.

That's my preamble to my real point, which is that sacrifice is a uniquely modern phenomenon, which may or may not have had a greater or lesser degree of prevalence at some arbitrary point in the past, but that prevalence is irrelevant because the function of sacrifice is not to appease the gods, but to convince ourselves that people used to believe the gods needed appeasing (and that now we don't, or we do it better).

That is, OP, your question is the exact one you're supposed to ask: Why did "they used to do something I can see is wasteful"? That question is the meaning of sacrifice, and there is no other.

Here are some examples I approve of.

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share. The real world impresses human life above all with the mandates of necessity and utility. You work in order to eat; this has the obvious risk of making food a thing, an arbitrary object whose getting takes place only to keep you alive and repeat the cycle. That's why destroying something in sacrifice removes it from the real world and places it in the spiritual one: it is removed from the bare utility of subsistence. Bataille's book has the dual (but bizarre) advantage of offering a marxiological account of sacrifice via close readings of the (Spanish interpretations of) the Aztecs' human sacrificial practices.

Freud, Totem and Taboo. By consecrating an animal, making it sacred, it becomes a crime to kill it because it belongs to god. However, if everyone in the tribe/social group commits the crime together, then they share equally in the guilt and no one can be punished. Therefore the sacrifice is a bonding exercise, binding the entire social group together on the basis of a collective sin against god. Therefore again: the modern continuation of sacrifice is a collective sense of anxiety stemming from guilt, or that guilt and anxiety about how wasteful we are is what makes our coexistence possible in the first place.

 

[赤い男]

 

[A L I X]

View attachment 94554

Hard af.

 

[Ross_Я]

Well, now that I'm not in a rush, I looked further down the last russian document I have, and it has some more about the topic. So I'll continue the translation:

"Killing the sacred animal was a crime against its whole kind and against the king of said kind - Apis, Mnevis, et cetera. It was equal to killing a God and called for tragedies upon the whole country ... To placate a God, sacrifices have been made to a sacred animal that was about to be killed. A pompous funeral was arranged. If an animal was eaten, its bones were to be buried. Otherwise, it was embalmed, wrapped in bandages and gilded cartonage; amulets were given to it and its tomb has been made as if a human was buried in it. Either a special tomb was built for it, or a human tomb without a mummy in it was used. There were also collective tombs for sacred animals".

"...it happened with other sacred animals, especially bulls. Flinders Petrie says the following about this topic: "There was a custom to eat the sacred theban ram and memphian Apis, and it's skull and bones were always buried with utmost triumph, which shows how ritualistic feast combined in the ancient times with the thoroughout veneration and reverence".
Other sources note that the skull was not always buried. Since the most ancient times, skulls served as sacred amulets and therefore had various important uses: for example, they could've been put into the foundation of the building, thus calling for its longevity".
This second bit is especially interesting, because it is also briefly mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Of Religion And Ethics about human sacrifice, once again proving that actual human sacrifice - if it was ever there in the first place - has been substituted with other kind of sacrifices. But I digress. Pardon me, I just love Ancient Egypt.

I've been thinking about the whole theme during the day though, and here's what I came to:

It doesn't make any Darwinian sense why it would work, because the point of sacrifice is to destroy useful things, so why is this so prevalent in ancient societies?

As you can see above, the animal sacrifices were consumed, I guess, rather often, so in case of Egypt you cannot really call it a "destruction of useful things" any more than you "destroy" a cow to make a steak. I guess it is somewhat logical, since they lived in a desert and relied on a capricious whims on a river - even in the best of times no one could really predict when the Nile floods would be poor and would lead to famine (there are some texts about pharaohs and their close nobles dealing with this kind of catastrophe). As a matter of fact, it seems like the most sacrificed animals were the edible ones - and the edible animals in Egypt back then were pretty much the same ones we consider edible nowadays, surprisingly or not. Anyway, I guess you can see the reason behind such sacrifices: it was pretty often just a pompous feast.
And if you take the example with mass-mummyfying of the animals which I provided above - well, the reason there is just making a quick buck, but with an arguably ugly flavor of a religion that was prevalent at that region at that point of time. It was much like people selling each other crosses these days around. Would you consider spending precious metals on a religious symbol wasteful? I guess, it can be seen as sacrifice as well.
The more interesting question though: would you call all the funerary rituals for a sacred animal wasteful? Would you consider spending all the effort to build a tomb and mummify an animal just like a human wasteful?
Matter of fact, is it wasteful to even spend your time burying humans? Wouldn't it be much more efficient to just burn'em without any ceremonies?
It's not quite a direct parallel, but I guess I can see something between these current rituals and sacrifices of the old. Heck, as a matter of fact, some people still leave food offerings at the graves. Some cultures still encourage such offerings. Which moves us to...

Furthermore, if this is something that is linked to human nature, how does the desire to practice sacrifice express itself today?

Apart from what I've said above, if you approve of calling a sheaf of corn offered to white bull a sacrifice, you may stretch that to a lot of things, up to people giving treats to their dogs. I feel like it is a long stretch though, longer than a parallel I've tried to draw with the burial ceremonies of today.
Still though, perhaps there's something in the human nature... Maybe it's the very same process that made us offer food to animals hell knows when, the thing that domesticated dogs in the first place. At some point it transformed into sacrifice, now it is simply helping stray cats, but perhaps the base beneath all these actions is the same? I don't know, but I think it's the best I can come up with.

 

[McGovern '72!]

All human societies, past and present, have practiced human sacrifice. It's always been a form of economic reflex on the part of the powers that be. Human sacrifice has always been necessary to maintain social control and economic stability. The modern form of it consists of routine mass murder in order to attempt to fix the falling rate of profit by widening the amount of economic opportunities for a loyal, lobotomized populace. That's what every mass murder in Europe has been, why a bunch of faggots immediately soyjak on ethnic minorities when things get slightly rough.