-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and
Multiple Personality Disorder
Craig Lockwood©1993
CompCare Publishers
3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100
Minneapolis, MN 55441
612.559.4800/800.328.3330
ISBN 0-89638-363-6
255+pps — out-of-print/one edition.
-----
A very interesting and excellent book.
Om
K
--[4]--
Chapter 4
Riutual, SACRIFICE, AND CULTURE
"In a sacrifice the circle of participants is segregated from the outside
world. Complicated social structures find expression in the diverse roles the
participants assume in the course of the ritual."
-Walter Burkett, 1972
Civilization writes a relatively recent chapter in humankind's story. During
the eons before the onset of civilization, it seems likely that developing
human groups evolved a complex series of ritual behaviors that became part of
what we now call culture. Sacrificial rituals may have been important in
bonding early human groups together, and as such had social survival value.
That was then. But why has ritual persisted?
As A. I. Hallowell suggested in a 1926 article in American Anthropologist,
the key is that specific beliefs or practices rarely "represent a direct
psychological response of individuals to some aspect of the outer world" and
that the source of those practices and beliefs is "the historic tradition."
Humans tend to do things the way they've always done things. In times of
social anxiety and stress, we prefer using time-proven methods of dealing
with problems. Ritual sacrifice is a method that has withstood the test of
time.
Rituals of all kinds may be practiced without sacrifice, but sacrifice is
never practiced without ritual.
Not all ritual is sacrificial, and not all sacrificial ritual is blood
sacrifice-animal or human. In its media-linkage to sorcery, Satanism, and
crime, ritual's good name has been tarnished.
Practitioners of the sacrificial killing of animals say that, compared to
assembly-line death in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants, sacrifice may
be more humane-especially if done quickly so the animal doesn't suffer. The
sacrificial sheep that feeds a village during a religious celebration, they
contend, may well die a better death.
In ancient times, people recognized that what they killed gave its life away
to them. Therefore, they gained power from that. The ritualistic slaughtering
of the animal during the ceremony before cooking it for the big feast
incorporated the giving away of the life-spirit so that the clan could live.
Other forms of sacrifice incorporate the use of blood in a nonabusive way.
Some ancient societies may well have used women's menstrual blood, possibly
acknowledging that this was the life-blood.
Ritual shedding of blood is "wounding," a negative shedding of blood. This
should not be confused with menstrual blood, which is given freely every
month.
Most contemporary witches would probably acknowledge that blood sacrifice in
a "black magic" ritual produces a powerful force, because the sacrificer is
taking a life-the life force from a person or animal. This is a "negative" as
opposed to a "positive" form of power. Wiccans neither accept nor practice
"black magic" ritual.
Ritual's Relationship to Culture
Evidence suggests that ritual, including sacrificial ritual, may have played
an important role in the beginning of culture. Ritual may have also been the
language by which humans first attempted to communicate their feelings about
the forces that affected them.
Whatever rituals did, perhaps because of our social nature, the remnants of
ritual's compelling attraction to contemporary humans is widespread.
According to Walter Burkett in Homo Necans, "Sacrificial killing is the basic
experience of the 'sacred."' While the "bliss of encountering divinity," can
be expressed in words, the frightening and mysterious events that
participants in a sacrifice witness are even more intense because they aren't
discussed.
Not everyone would agree with Burkett, who then goes on to talk about the
mysteries of sacrifice at some length. But few who have experienced fear
while hunting animals or killing humans in combat would qualify the hunt or
war as "mysterious." Hunting and war are not only discussed, they form the
basis for much of myth, legend, and literature. Ritual, however, does not.
Egyptian hieroglyphics record ritual sacrifice, as do the art and surviving
written languages of Babylonians, Etruscans, Phoenicians, early Greeks, and
Romans. Ritual with and without sacrifice formed the basis of Europe's
pre-Christian Pagan religions.
Ritual sacrifice is still practiced in Africa, in Peru and Bolivia, in a
Russian-Armenian village (beside the church), in India, Nepal, and throughout
Southeast Asia.
Ritual blood flows behind a Dade County tract house, in a hounfour (compound)
near Port-au-Prince, in the basement of a certain Connecticut estate, in a
crowded apartment in Los Angeles's Pico-Union district, in a drug smuggler's
outbuilding on a ranch near Matamoros, Mexico. The victims are usually
animals, but on occasion they're human.
Each civilization has developed its own sacrificial rituals and ritual style.
Some are passed on when one civilization or culture contacts, invades, or
conquers another. Thus when the ancient empires of Egypt, Persia, Athens,
Macedonia, and Rome conquered and succeeded each other, elements of the
earlier civilization's spiritual styles were appended to the conqueror's
beliefs.
Beliefs considered the most outlandish by the victor were then designated as
"heresy" and rejected—often going underground. Civilization A's
priest/priestess became Civilization B's witch. This apparently occurred in
medieval Europe when Christianity encountered indigenous Pagan religions, as
when St. Patrick encountered the earth-centered Druid religion in Celtic
Ireland.
It still goes on today as Christian missionaries encounter tribes in the
Amazon basin.
Yesterday's state-of-the-art spiritual beliefs thus become today's barbaric
savagery. Commonplace human sacrificial elements of sixteenth-century Aztec
society's officially sanctioned religion would rate the death penalty in
Mexico today.
Even contemporary capital punishment, according to death-sentence opponents
such as Amnesty International, is little more than an elaborate retributory
human sacrificial ritual—an atavistic, barbaric throwback, serving no
deterrent or significant social purpose.
Proponents retort that the solemn, ordered application of law and justice
differentiates the act from the brutal murder it is designed to punish. The
ritualized nature of legal execution, with its series of statute-prescribed
steps, offers closure to the victim's family and society as a whole.
Another group of proponents assert that though execution is strongly redolent
of ritual, it lacks the social impact of ritual because it is not made
public. If it were, they claim, it would serve a far more profound purpose:
deter-ring crime.
While ritual exists without civilization, no civilization exists without
ritual.
Ritual as Technology
Shamanic practices, witchcraft, and sorcery, all ritual-centered activities,
are humankind's prototechnology, protoreligion, protomedicine, and
protopsychology. They may have been our original effort to control the world
of terrifying random forcesour earliest attempts at harnessing those forces
we could not see or understand.
Ritual in the beginning probably allowed us to express awe and gratitude and
to give form to our spiritual nature.
How did it first happen? Nobody will ever know. Somehow, though, an
association was made between something someone did and something that
happened soon thereafter. Developing human capacity for memory eventually
helped the individual or individuals recall acts and placements.
Over millennia, humans developed language. Language provided the ability to
give greater expression to memories. Now words could be linked to the
existing ritual tradition of repetitive acts and movements.
At some point in human prehistory, ritual was perceived as having a potential
effect on external forces or events. This became the precursor of magical
ritual.
Ritual and ceremony, the symbolic repetitive "language" of ritual, may have
also become the way in which memory, which was needed for ritual, and the
concept of "magical power" were linked. With "magical power" one had control.
While language undergoes radical and frequent change, the component physical
elements of spiritual and magical ritual-circles, fire, attar surfaces,
specific vessels, power objects, secrecy, special spoken words and
sounds—have undergone far less change, generation after human generation.
Today, when Wiccans, for example, consecrate a ritual designed to heal, they
may use words and phrases of some antiquity. On their altars lie items that a
ninth-century priestess would have no trouble recognizing.
Yet today's Wiccan may drive an automobile and operate a computer, and is a
product of an advanced technology and its educational processes.
For many Wiccans, ritual is an evolving spiritual technology. They would
point out that Wiccan rituals will subtly reflect and deal with the advances
society and culture have made.
Conventional magic has become more sophisticated. Today, Wiccans believe that
they create both their "magick" and their reality. Magic doesn't mean what it
used to mean.
Contemporary practitioners of magical traditions prefer to conventionalize
their ritual or ceremonial forms as "magick," adding the "k" to set them
apart from stage-magic, or illusions. Their wish has been honored in this
text.
Thinking of magical ritual as a technology is useful. As with all
technologies, change occurs with time and the introduction of new ideas from
people in other cultures.
Spirituality and Ritual Sacrifice
Magical ritual sacrifice for a variety of spiritual/religious motives has
occurred in every culture, clime, and century.
Magical ritual generates a subtle form of human energy. Proponents claim it
can be materialized, manipulated, and used for a variety of purposes, serving
either positive or negative ends. A search of the scientific literature to
verify this remarkable assertion is inconclusive. Magical literature,
however, offers copious and sometimes quite colorful accounts.
Sacrificial ritual, with or without blood, remains a symbolic component of
many established religions. In Protestant and Catholic Christianity, there is
the Eucharist. During the required Islamic Haj, each Moslem participant must
sacrifice an animal. Hindus offer nonblood sacrifices of food and flowers.
Buddhist canonical tradition doesn't require or specify sacrifice. Certain
sects, however, have developed symbolic sacrificial ritual. Only Judaism, of
all the major religions, no longer uses sacrifice in any form[1]; unless
circumcision is considered a sacrifical act.
Ritual sacrifice may be increasing in Western societynobody keeps per capita
statistics. More important, however, is what we think about it.
Sacrificing an animal to ensure the outcome of a love affair, business deal,
or the acquisition of a new car? While it may seem superstitious at best or
bordering on savage to those who don't use such practices, sacrificial
rituals today are conducted with some frequency.
In 1987, residents of Hialeah, Florida, protested the planned opening of a
Santeria church after reports of animal sacrifice had been brought before the
Hialeah City Council. The city enacted an ordinance making "public
ritualistic animal sacrifice" a crime.
Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye immediately filed a lawsuit, charging the
ordinance violated their First Amendment rights. Church lawyers noted that in
south Florida animals are legally killed by hunters or anglers. Commercially,
animals are slaughtered for food. Rodents are killed in pest control. Stray
cats and dogs are routinely killed.
Animals, in short, could be killed for any reason but religious sacrifice.
Church of Lukumi's appeal was rejected by Atlanta's United States District
Court. The case was taken to Washington.
As reported by the Associated Press, June 11, 1993, the Supreme Court ruled
in favor of the Santeros: "Suppression of the central element of the Santeria
worship was the object of the ordinances," Justice Kennedy's twenty-six-page
opinion stated. "Hialeah could enforce laws ensuring proper care of the
animals," and hygienic disposal of their carcasses, but it cannot "suppress
Santeria religious worship or criminalize ritual killing."
Migene Gonzalez-Whippler's book Santeria states that around 100 million
practitioners of Santeria in Latin America and the United States, mostly
Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Dominicans, Colombians, and other people
of Latin American extraction, participate in Santeria, a religion that calls
for the sacrifice of animals. Experts estimate that the numbers of black and
white Americans practicing Santeria are increasing.
No statistics exist for the other Afro-Caribbean sacrificial
religions such as Haitian Vodoun, Umbanda, Candomble, Lucumi, Macumba,
or the more sinister Palo Mayombe. All are widely practiced in Cuba,
Venezuela, Panama, Puerto Rico, and
throughout the Caribbean and Brazil. These religions are also being practiced
with increasing frequency in the United States
What do facts like this represent? Some contend they are the vital infusion
of diverse multicultural spiritual values and traditions into a once
predominantly white Protestant Christian society. Others claim they are the
tip of an occultic criminal iceberg—portending the religious degeneration of
the greatest free society the world has ever known.
More likely these occurrences represent an example of how very different
people respond spiritually to universal human experience and perception. This
perception starts at birth and intrudes during many of our waking hours. Even
when dreaming, a nightmare and its accompanying anxiety reinforce this
perception. We may not often voice it, but the anxiety surfaces when things
go awry.
Sociological explanations for the increasing membership in occult groups,
including sacrificial cults and religions, are various. In the United States,
legal and illegal immigration of persons with backgrounds of occult and
sacrificial belief is thought to play a significant part.
Economic and social anxiety are also considered important factors, the
assumption being that when people experience anxiety or see the survival
stakes as high, relying on familiar cultural traditions seems to play a
greater role in behavior. Theories abound, but the simplest explanation is
that ritual and magic are part of human nature.
We remain superstitious creatures and fond of magic in certain fundamental
ways.
pps. 43-51
--[notes]--
Chapter 4
1. H. Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of
Guilt. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982).
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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