10 Sacrificial Societies Culture History Human Sacrifice
Ten Sacrificial Societies Cultures and History
Top Ten Sacrificial Societies plus the Culture and History of Human Sacrifices.
1. Aztecs – 500 A.D. – 1500 A.D. Sacrifice was an integral part of the religion of this Central Mexican group as well as others in Mesoamerica.
2. Canaanites – 3500 – 1100 B.C. - "Canaanite" is an ancient term for what we now know as Israel, Lebanon, and parts of Syria and Jordan. Children were supposedly sacrificed to the god Moloch.
3. Carthaginians – 300 – 140 B.C. - The Carthaginians of North Africa were disgusted by sacrificing their own children — so they often bought children to sacrifice. However, in times of extreme crisis like war or drought, countless children of wealthy families would be sacrificed.
4. Celts – 800 – 1 B.C. - Celtic sites throughout Europe show bodies with evidence of having been sacrificed. They also burned people alive in structures known as "Wicker Men."
5. Chimu – 1000 A.D.- 1476 A.D. Not much is known about the Chimu civilization, though in 2002 the remains of over 200 fishermen were found — the men had been bound and sacrificed.
6. Etruscans – 800 – 100 B.C. Etruscans belonged to an ancient civilization in Italy between Florence and Rome. Their writings no longer exist, but their artwork shows evidence of human sacrifice.
7. Gauls – 700 – 500 B.C. - In roughly 50 BC, Julius Caesar wrote, in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, that [The Gauls] believe that unless a man’s life is paid for by another man’s, the majesty of the immortal gods cannot be appeased [...].
8. Minoans – 2700 – 1450 B.C. - There has been evidence of human sacrifice in three different sites from this civilization on the island of Crete. In one site, it even looked like a sacrificial moment was interrupted by an earthquake.
9. Romans – 753 – 510 B.C. - A century before Julius Caesar, the Romans sacrificed criminals. Laws were considered handed down from the gods, so anyone who broke them was doomed to death.
10. Scythians – 700 B.C. – A.D. 600 - Ancestors of modern-day Iranians, Scythians were excellent horsemen who, according to Greek historian Heroditus, also ate their enemies’ flesh.
Human sacrifice
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Human sacrifice is the act of killing human beings as part of a religious ritual (ritual killing). Its typology closely parallels the various practices of ritual slaughter of animals (animal sacrifice) and of religious sacrifice in general. Human sacrifice has been practiced in various cultures throughout history. Victims were typically ritually killed in a manner that was supposed to please or appease gods, spirits or the deceased, for example as a propitiatory offering, or as a retainer sacrifice when the King’s servants are killed in order for them to continue to serve their master in the next life. Closely related practices found in some tribal societies are cannibalism and headhunting. By the Iron Age, with the associated developments in religion (the Axial Age), human sacrifice was becoming less common throughout the Old World, and came to be widely looked down upon as barbaric already in pre-modern times (Classical Antiquity). Blood libel is a false charge of ritual killing.
Even if not ostensibly connected with religion, infliction of capital punishment is often highly ritualised and thus difficult to distinguish from human sacrifice. Death by burning historically has aspects of both human sacrifice (Wicker Man, Tophet) and capital punishment (Brazen bull, Tamar, tunica molesta). Detractors of the death penalty may consider all forms of capital punishment as secularized variants of human sacrifice.[1] Similarly, lynching, pogroms and genocides are sometimes interpreted as human sacrifice following Theodor W. Adorno.[2]
In modern times, even the once ubiquitous practice of animal sacrifice has virtually disappeared from all major religions (or has been re-cast in terms of ritual slaughter), and human sacrifice has become extremely rare. Most religions condemn the practice, and present-day secular laws treat it as murder. In the context of a society which condemns human sacrifice, the term ritual murder is used.
Nonetheless it is still occasionally seen today, with reports from the 2000s from Sub-Saharan Africa (muti killings), but also isolated cases in the immigrant African diaspora in Europe.
The idea of human sacrifice has its roots in deep prehistory,[5] in the evolution of human behaviour. Mythologically, it is closely connected, or even fundamentally identical with animal sacrifice. Walter Burkert has argued for such a fundamental identity of animal and human sacrifice in the connection of a hunting hypothesis which traces the emergence of human religious behaviour to the beginning of behavioral modernity in the Upper Paleolithic (roughly 50,000 years ago).
There has been a lot of debate on the primacy of myth vs. ritual, and the presence of a myth of human sacrifice should not be taken as necessarily implying the historical existence of the actual practice: human sacrifice may be taken as the re-enactment of an older myth, or conversely a myth can be taken as a memory of an earlier practice of human sacrifice. Theistic rationalizations of human sacrifice may involve the idea of offering to deities as payment for favorable interventions in an event of special importance, to forestall unfavorable events, or to purchase disclosures about the physical world.
Human sacrifice has been practiced on a number of different occasions and in many different cultures. The various rationales behind human sacrifice are the same that motivate religious sacrifice in general. Human sacrifice is intended to bring good fortune and to pacify the gods, for example in the context of the dedication of a completed building like a temple or bridge. There is a Chinese legend that there are thousands of people entombed in the Great Wall of China. In ancient Japan, legends talk about Hitobashira ("human pillar"), in which maidens were buried alive at the base or near some constructions as a prayer to ensure the buildings against disasters or enemy attacks.[6] For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they killed about 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days. According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.[7]
Human sacrifice can also have the intention of winning the gods’ favour in warfare. Iphigeneia was to be sacrificed by her father Agamemnon for success in the Trojan War. According to the Bible, Jephthah sacrificed his daughter after making a vow (Judges 11).[8][9] Another motivation for human sacrifice is burial: in some notions of an afterlife, the deceased will benefit from victims killed at his funeral. Mongols, Scythians, early Egyptians and various Mesoamerican chiefs could take most of their household, including servants and concubines, with them to the next world. This is sometimes called a "retainer sacrifice," as the leader’s retainers would be sacrificed along with their master, so that they could continue to serve him in the afterlife.
Another purpose is divination from the body parts of the victim. According to Strabo, Celts stabbed a victim with a sword and divined the future from his death spasms.[10]
Headhunting is the practice of taking the head of a killed adversary, for ceremonial or magical purposes, or for reasons of prestige. It was found in many pre-modern tribal societies.
Human sacrifice may be a ritual practiced in a stable society, and may even be conductive to enhance societal bonds (see sociology of religion), both by creating a bond unifying the sacrificing community, and in combining human sacrifice and capital punishment, by removing individuals that have a negative effect on societal stability (criminals, religious heretics, foreign slaves or prisoners of war). But outside of civil religion, human sacrifice may also result in outbursts of "blood frenzy" and mass killings that destabilize society. Thus, the Thuggee cult that plagued India was devoted to Kali, the goddess of death and destruction.[11][12] According to the Guinness Book of Records the Thuggee cult was responsible for approximately 2,000,000 deaths. The bursts of capital punishment during European witch-hunts, or during the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror show similar sociological patterns (see also moral panic).
Many cultures show traces of prehistoric human sacrifice in their mythologies, but have ceased to practice them before the onset of historical records. The story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22) is an example of a myth explaining the abolition of human sacrifice. Similarly, the Vedic Purushamedha, literally "human sacrifice", is already a purely symbolic act in its earliest attestation. According to Pliny the Elder, human sacrifice in Ancient Rome was abolished by a senatorial decree in 97 BCE, although by this time the practice had already become so rare that the decree was mostly a symbolic act. Human sacrifice once abolished is typically replaced by either animal sacrifice, or by the "mock-sacrifice" of effigies, such as the argei dolls in ancient Rome.
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