-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Blood Rites - Origins & History of the Passions of War Barbara Ehrenreich(C)1997 Metropolitan Books Henry Holt & Companty ISBN 0-8050-5077-9 ----- Well-written and thoughtful; when all is said and done, the veneer between passions, expectations, propaganda and thought can be very thin. "And an Ashanti king stated in the mid-nineteenth century that "if I were to abolish human sacrifice, I should deprive myself of one of the most effectual means of keeping the people in subjection (24)" Shades of the JFK killing. Om,K ----- In the familiar grade-school "values clarification" exercise, students must decide which occupant of a hypothetical lifeboat--the homemaker, the banker, the nun, and so forth--should be tossed overboard to lighten the load. In this case, it is the sea which will consume the sacrificial victim, but often we imagine a literal predator. A recent New York Times story was headlined "An Offering to the Wolves: A Shuffling of His Staff Buys Time for Clinton," and began: It is one of the oldest rites of government: when things are not going well, when the leader is in trouble, a member of his retinue must be sacrificed. At least the wolves will be silenced for a while. As Hubert and Mauss, the nineteenth-century historians of sacrifice, pointed out, the meat left by ancient Greek sacrificial rituals was sometimes literally carried off by wolves. Om K --(2)-- Can one be sure of making a distinction between the sacrificer holding a knife and the wolf with gaping jaws reddened with blood?(1) --MARCEL DETIENNE AND JESPER SVENBRO 4 THE FIRST BLOOD SACRIFICE There is no question that the sacrifice of animals reenacts human predation on animal life. Certain forms of sacrifice, however, have a very different dramatic function: that of reenacting the predation of animals on humans. Through the sacrifice of animals as stand-ins for human victims--or the sacrifice of humans themselves--human beings not only celebrated their own status as predators, possessed of the power to kill. They also acknowledged, and thrillingly replayed, their own long, long prehistory as prey. If predation played as significant a role in human prehistory as I have suggested, and if it remained a concern well into historical times, we might expect to find some trace of that horrifying experience in cultural rituals. One obvious place to look is at the category of ritual which is termed apotropaic, referring to actions aimed at warding off evil in the form of enemies, disease, or malevolent spirits. Powerful evil forces must be frightened or appeased, and in some cases these forces are, or once were, literal beasts. In European folk tradition, for example, children run through the town at some point in spring or winter, cracking whips--a custom probably left over from a time when whips were used to drive marauding wolves away.(2) Many forms of sacrifice could also be regarded as apotropaic rituals insofar as the failure to perform them is, in the view of the sacrificers, an invitation to disaster. Here, too, the original danger may have been predation by carnivorous animals. Walter Burkert, who in Homo Necans explained sacrifice as a way of dealing with the guilt occasioned by the hunting and killing of animals, took a very different approach in a later essay. Attempting to imagine the "unritualized, real situation" from which sacrificial ritual might have evolved; he proposes a group surrounded by predators: men chased by wolves, or apes in the presence of leopards. The utmost danger is met with excitement and anxiety. Usually there will be but one way of salvation: one member of the group must fall prey to the hungry carnivores, then the rest will be safe for the time being. An outsider, an invalid, or a young animal will be most liable to become the victim. This situation of pursuit by predators must have played a momentous role in the evolution of civilization, while man, as a hunter, became a predator himself.(3) In general, he suggests, the demons who must be pacified in various apotropaic rituals "cannot but assume the features of predators."(4)* [*Intuitively, Burkert's conjecture has a definite appeal, Situations in which one individual must be sacrificed so that others may live both haunt and intrigue us. In the familiar grade-school "values clarification" exercise, students must decide which occupant of a hypothetical lifeboat--the homemaker, the banker, the nun, and so forth--should be tossed overboard to lighten the load. In this case, it is the sea which will consume the sacrificial victim, but often we imagine a literal predator. A recent New York Times story was headlined "An Offering to the Wolves: A Shuffling of His Staff Buys Time for Clinton," and began: It is one of the oldest rites of government: when things are not going well, when the leader is in trouble, a member of his retinue must be sacrificed. At least the wolves will be silenced for a while. As Hubert and Mauss, the nineteenth-century historians of sacrifice, pointed out, the meat left by ancient Greek sacrificial rituals was sometimes literally carried off by wolves.] If sacrificial ritual was shaped in part by animal predation on humans, we would expect to find evidence of a tradition of human sacrifice in the archaic world. What better way to evoke the horror of predation and the emotions inspired by it than through the ritual killing of actual humans? Unfortunately, though, the archeological record is often ambiguous, and great care must be taken to distinguish between the remains of a ritual sacrifice and those of, say, an execution (as of a criminal) or the burial of a murder victim. Furthermore, we have no reliable eyewitness accounts to turn to. When the Greek geographer Pausanias visited Mount Lykaion in the second century A.D., he heard rumors of the yearly murder, dismemberment, and devouring of a child at the mountaintop sanctuary of Zeus. But he did not investigate. "I could see no pleasure in delving into this sacrifice," he wrote, adding cryptically: "Let it be as it is and as it was from the beginning."(5) Until a few years ago, scholarly opinion tended to see human sacrifice as an anthropological oddity, if not a figment of overheated imaginations. Modern people's distaste for the practice has often impeded objective investigation. On the one hand, there was no doubt a tendency for Europeans to attribute human sacrifice to subjugated peoples in order to discredit their cultures; one of the nineteenth-century arguments in support of the slave trade was that it at least saved the captured Africans from a worse fate at the hands of their own people.(6) On the other hand, scholars themselves have often been too prone to overcorrect for past imperialist distortions by denying or ignoring the evidence for human sacrifice, in both the ancient as well as the modern world. They have tended to file human sacrifice, along with cannibalism, under the category of sensationalism and intercultural slander. Today, however, the evidence has accumulated to a point where it can no longer be ignored. A consensus is emerging that human sacrifice, far from being an oddity, has been a widespread practice among diverse cultures, from small- scale tribes to mighty urban civilizations such as that of the fifteenth- century Aztecs,(7) and that it has played a role in almost every conceivable form of religious observance. The most clear-cut cases are provided by the large number of skeletons found interred, along with a king or other important personage, in royal tombs--presumably slaves and wives who were intended to accompany their master into the netherworld. Such remains have been found in China, Sudan, and Mesopotamia, dating to the second and third millennia B.C.(8) But human sacrifice has also very likely been employed in one setting or another to ensure the fertility of the earth, to consecrate buildings, to guarantee success in war, and, in all cases, to "feed" or appease the gods. If we have collectively forgotten the practice, this may be because it is so difficult for us to acknowledge that what is morally repulsive to us could once have been deemed morally necessary by people no less human than ourselves. Still, much of the history of human sacrifice remains frustratingly obscure, including the obvious question of its temporal relationship to the far less controversial practice of animal sacrifice. Did animals replace human victims, as many myths imply, or, in some cases, did humans replace animals? In myth, the striking thing is how interchangeable the two types of victim seem to be. Artemis may have been willing to accept a deer instead of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia; Jehovah asks for Isaac but will take a ram. What ultimately concerns the ancient gods is meat or, more commonly in the case of human victims, blood. Where we do find an exclusive concentration on human sacrifice, as among the Aztecs, whose obsession with this ritual is documented by their own records as well as by the Spanish conquerors' accounts, we also find a marked shortage of animals that might have substituted for humans. If the Aztecs had possessed large animals, such as cattle and sheep, these creatures might have nourished the Aztec gods just as well. What does seem clear is that human sacrifice played a role in the ancient religions--Greek, Hebrew, and Hindu--that were also so preoccupied with animal sacrifice. Turning first to the ancient Greeks, we know at least that they believed human sacrifice was an important part of their religious and historical legacy. Mythological references to human sacrifice, in one form or another, are rampant. The cannibalistic Titan Cronus required human victims. The maenads--frenzied female worshippers of Dionysus--were said to tear living victims apart with their hands and eat them on the spot. In the Iliad, twelve captured Trojan youths were sacrificed along with numerous animal victims at the funeral of Patroklus, and according to legend, the funeral of Achilles required the sacrifice of the Trojan princess Polyxena. Finally, in a remarkable feat of archeological sleuthing, the American scholar Joan B. Connelly has recently made the controversial proposal that the giant frieze set high on the Parthenon in fact depicts the preparations of three Athenian princesses, daughters of King Erectheus, for sacrifice: The youngest girl's funerary dress is being unfolded; she will go first. The oldest daughter. . . is in the process of handing down a stool to her mother. The daughter at the far left faces to the front, with a garment [presumably her funerary dress] still folded and carried upon the stool on her head.(9) The Hebrews, too, saw human sacrifice as a relic of the not-so-distant past. Psalms 106: 37-38 says clearly of the early Israelites: Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan. According to Bergmann, the prophets "waged a relentless war against the ritual murder of children," and associated it with the worship of pagan gods such as Chmosh and Moloch. Micah 6: 7, for example, inveighs against both human and animal sacrifice, barely bothering to distinguish between them: Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Circumcision may well be a remnant of a tradition of human sacrifice, with the foreskin serving as a substitute for a whole human victim. Some historians speculate that an archaic version of the deity, quite possibly a goddess, demanded human sacrifices and later came to accept the destruction of the male genitals as a sufficient substitute for the whole man; castration may, in fact, have been a prerequisite for the priesthood in the archaic age, when the chief deity was herself female and accustomed to being represented by priestesses. Later even this requirement was softened, and the foreskin allowed to substitute for the genitals as well as the man.(10) At least one ancient city, Carthage, left what has been interpreted as direct archeological evidence of human sacrifice. Thousands of burial urns containing the charred remains of infants and young children have been unearthed in the Tophet, or sacred precinct, of that North African city, which had been founded about 3,000 years ago by settlers from Asia Minor. Two facts suggest this was no ordinary cemetery: Inscriptions on the commemorative markers sometimes mention vows made to the deities--the goddess Tanit (Astarte in Asia Minor) and her consort Baal Hammon--implying that the children were offerings made in exchange for some divinely granted boon;. and many of the urns contain the cremated remains of more common, animal offerings. These findings would seem to bear out the accusation, made by the prophet Jeremiah, that the worshippers of Baal "consigned their sons and daughters to the fire."(11) For the Indian subcontinent, we have not only references to human sacrifice in ancient religious texts, but descriptions of practices encountered by the British in modern times. The Vedas refer to human sacrifice and offer special incantations and instructions for it.(12) Texts from around 900 B.C. mention human sacrifices to Rudra, a wild version of the mainstream Vedic god Shiva, who in the Rig-Veda "kills those who walk on two feet as well as those who walk on four feet. "(13) The British claimed to have found and attempted to outlaw a variety of forms of human sacrifice still being practiced in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: widows burned to death on their husbands' funeral pyres in the practice of suttee; random victims being offered to Kali by members of the cult from whose name we derive the word "thug"; children and sometimes adult victims being sacrificed by the tribal mountain peoples known generically as Kondhs.(14) Thus the records of literate ancient peoples are at least strongly suggestive of archaic traditions of human sacrifice. As for nonliterate peoples, we have again only the word of the conquerors. The Romans reported human sacrifice among the Carthaginians, the Scythians, and the tribes of Britain, who were, according to Tacitus, accustomed "to drench their altars in the blood of prisoners and consult their god by means of human sacrifice."(15) Some of these allegations may be slanderous, but the Romans attributed human sacrifice to the Celtic peoples of northern Europe and, indeed, as Patrick Tierny, author of The Highest Altar: Unveiling the Mystery of Human Sacrifice, reports, archeologists have found the remains of sacrificial victims under Celtic holy sites: A man shot to death by arrows lies buried at the main entrance of Stonehenge; the Greek geographer Strabo wrote that Druids performed human sacrifice by arrow shooting. And within two miles of Stonehenge there is another circle, built of wooden posts, called Woodhenge. In the center of Woodhenge excavators found a three-and-a-half-year-old girl whose skull had been split "before burial" with an ax.... Forensic analysis of [cremated] bones at fifty Scottish stone circles revealed that there were too few individuals for family burials, and that a disproportionate number were children.(16) The most dramatic and large-scale cases of alleged human sacrifice come not from the ancient world but from quite recent times: fifteenth-century Mexico and nineteenth-century western Africa. At the opening of the great temple of Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs are said to have sacrificed well over ten thousand people, prisoners of recent wars.(17) Each killing must have been a gripping, if not terrifying, sight, conducted at the top of a pyramid within easy view of the assembled populace below. First the victim mounted the steps of the pyramid upon which the sacrifice was to take place: He was awaited at the top by the satraps or priests who were to kill him, and these now grabbed him and threw him onto the stone block, and, holding him by feet, hands and head, thrown on his back, the priest who had the stone knife buried it with a mighty thrust in the victim's breast and, after drawing it out, thrust one hand into the opening and tore out the heart, which he at once offered to the sun.(18) To the modern reader, as to the Spanish conquerors who encountered and destroyed Aztec culture in the sixteenth century, the practice of human sacrifice is profoundly disturbing. But to the Aztecs themselves, ritual murder was the ultimate act of piety, serving to keep the universe functioning in an orderly and predictable manner. Without its meals of human blood, the sun would die and the world would be plunged into darkness. Hence the need for perpetual war to provide the captives whose blood would feed the sun: Convinced that in order to avoid the final cataclysm it was necessary to fortify the sun, they undertook for themselves the mission of furnishing it with the vital energy found only in the precious liquid which keeps man alive. Sacrifice and ceremonial warfare, which was the principal manner of obtaining victims for all sacrificial rites, were their central activities and the very core of their personal, social, military, religious, and national life.(19) It was war that allowed human sacrifice to achieve a truly spectacular scale. Certainly, the sacrifice of a single well-loved child within a tribal group would be a compelling spectacle in itself, but with war the process could be magnified to hundreds or thousands of deaths at a time. Like the Aztecs, the nineteenth-century African kingdom of Dahomey waged war for the stated purpose of collecting victims for sacrificial rites. In these rites, the king sat on a platform among his dignitaries while the people stood below in a dense throng. At a sign from the king the executioners set to work. The heads of the murdered prisoners were thrown onto a heap; several such heaps were to be seen. There were processions through streets lined with the naked corpses of executed enemies hanging from gallows; to spare the modesty of the king's innumerable wives these had been mutilated.... People fought for the corpses; it was said that in their frenzy they ate them. Everyone wanted to get a piece of the enemy dead; it might be called a communion of triumph. Human beings were followed by animals, but the chief thing was the enemy.(20) Clearly there were simpler ways to dispose of excess prisoners, but spectacles of slaughter served a function of their own. Whatever the spectators may have felt--horror or religious awe--human sacrifice compelled them to witness the power of their own leaders, their priests and kings, over individual life and death. At some point in prehistory, historian Lewis Mumford writes, "the exhibition of armed might became one of the most important attributes of kingship." Egyptian and Mesopotamian monarchs boasted on their monuments and tablets of "their personal feats in mutilating, torturing, and killing with their own hands their chief captives.(21) Apparently the mass human sacrifices of precolonial Mesoamerica and western Africa were also intended, in part, to intimidate. According to the Spanish chronicler Diego Duran, Aztec sacrifices had the desired effect on their witnesses, who often included, as invited guests, the leaders of areas subjugated by the Aztecs: The lords and principals who were called to the feast and sacrifice were horrified, beside themselves, on seeing the killing and sacrificing of so many men, so terrified that they dared not speak.(22) Studies of Mayan glyphs and iconography suggest a similar role for human sacrifice in the Classic Maya period: The true Maya lord expressed his political dominance through the taking of captives but achieved the sacralization of that dominance only by the sacrificing of those captives.(23) And an Ashanti king stated in the mid-nineteenth century that "if I were to abolish human sacrifice, I should deprive myself of one of the most effectual means of keeping the people in subjection (24) Chapter 4 1. Detienne and Svenbro, "The Feast of the Wolves," p. 162. 2. Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, p. 51. 3. Ibid., p. 71. 4. Ibid., p. 72. 5. Quoted in Tierny, The Highest Altar, p. 10. 6. Law, "Human Sacrifice in Pre-Colonial West Africa." 7. Davies, Nigel, "Human Sacrifice in the Old World and the New: Some Similarities and Differences," in Boone, Ritual Human Sacrifice in Mesoamerica, pp. 211-26. 8. Saggs, Civilization Before Greece and Rome, p. 287. 9. Wilford, John Noble, "New Analysis of the Parthenon's Frieze Finds It Depicts a Horrifying Legend," New York Times, July 4, 1995, p. 19. 10. Bergmann, In the Shadow of Moloch, p. 103. 11. Stager and Wolff, "Child Sacrifice at Carthage," pp. 31-51. 12. Davies, p. 217. 13. Bergmann, p. 24. 14. Lewis, A Goddess in the Stones, pp. 226-27. 15. Davidson, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe, p. 64. 16. Tierny, pp. 14-15. 17. Clendinnen, Aztecs, p. 91. 18. Bernardino de Sahagun, quoted in Bataille, Theory of Religion, p. 50. 19. Miguel Leon Portilla, quoted in Demarest, Arthur, "Overview: Mesoamerican Human Sacrifice in Evolutionary Perspective," in Boone, pp. 227-47. 20. Canetti, Crowds and Power, p. 139. 21. Mumford, The City in History, p. 44 22. Ingham, "Human Sacrifice at Tenochtitlan." p. 395. 23. Demarest, p. 228. 24. Quoted in Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, p. 66. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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