Human Sacrifice

Advisory: This post is not for the squeamish!

Human Sacrifice

When you change your story, you change your life.  –Freddy Martini

This is a meditation on religion and how it relates to human sacrifice.

The Enemy

If you have normal levels of testosterone, you have wanted to kill someone.  Perhaps some time ago, or perhaps yesterday.  In fact, society has a desire to kill someone.  We all want a scapegoat.  Human nature is designed for warfare.  Factions develop naturally.  When there is peace, this means that the other side has been exterminated, and factions have not risen yet because not enough time has passed.  After one faction exterminates another group, there is a temporary calm and peace after the shock of violence, killing, and sacrifice of the victim. 

Rene Girard has spent a lifetime developing this line of inquiry. 

Factions

We see it every day.  Political factions develop.  Initially, the disagreements are benevolent.  Then they become increasingly bitter, and then eventually turn violent.  Both sides see the other as the cause of their misery, and if they could just kill off the bad guys, all would be well in the world.  Or, so they think. 

Repeating the Story Forever and Ever

The French Revolutionaries thought that killing the King and the nobility would solve all their problems.  The King, you know, was the root of all their misery and those evil nobles took all the money, and the church controlled everyone because they wanted power, and all that.  So, they killed off the nobility, they had their Reign of Terror, chopping off the heads of perhaps 30, 000 people, we are told.  But, of course, we know the rest of the story.  After this, a strongman took over France and increased the violence to a point where France would not recover for over 50 years.  Yes, and then there was the Franco-Prussian War, The Great War, and then the War against Hitler, then the Cold War, then the War on Terror, etc.  History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. 

Emergence of a Tribe

Some argue from an evolutionary perspective that the creation of factions in human nature is the emergence of a separate tribe.  Since we can only know and deal with about 150 people, beyond this point, factions will develop, and eventually war, and then the survivors, if any, will form two new tribes. 

Placing the Blame

Everyone has problems.  We all face death, and we have to struggle to achieve the things we want.  The easy way out – everyone wants to have an easy life, right? – is to blame our problems on someone else.  It is just too easy.  We screw up, we sin, we fail, and we get frustrated with this state of affairs.  It becomes easy to say, “This bad dude is causing all kinds of trouble!  We need to stop him!”  Thus, it all begins.  One faction organizes to fight off the bad guy, whom they have identified as the cause of all their troubles.  Small skirmishes begin.  People begin to kill others.  The bitterness rises as the body count stacks up.  Eventually everyone is so enraged with the enemy who has killed so many of their family and tribesmen, that there is no hope in reconciliation – there is only extermination as the answer since they cannot live with the enemy.  Thus, the drama continues until absolute victory of one side or another.  Then the victors are calm again – for some time.  The violence has shocked them in to a state of numbness. 

The First Solution

Men began the ritual sacrifice of humans to alleviate this pattern of human nature.  If the tribe gathers around the campfire, sings and dances, and emerges into a fury and trance.  Then the young virgin appears.  The men bind the virgin in ropes –they tie her hands and feet.  They place her in the middle of the tribe.  She begs for her life, but the tribe is in a frenzy of sound and dance.  They scream in ecstasy.  The priest places the virgin on the altar.  He raises his sharp knife above her chest.  He holds still for a while as the tribe focuses on the knife and the victim on the altar.  Everyone is beginning to experience the horror and screams of violence at sacrificing such an innocent victim.  The blade comes down, pierces her heart.  She screams and blood flows.  Women and children moan, wail, and weep at the horror of the sacrificial killing.  The family of the virgin is in shock.  The music becomes louder to drown out the pain of the horrific event.  Everyone begins to shout louder and louder in frenzy around the fire.  Many faint.  Some vomit.  After 3 hours, everyone is tired.  They settle down in shock, horror, and numbness from the horrible sacrifice and the frenzy of music dancing and shouting.  

The horror placates their lust for violence for perhaps one year or six months until the next ritual human sacrifice.

The Second Solution

Abraham and his buddies sacrificed the finest animals they could find.  A burnt offering was the ritual cooking of a beast.  The violence of stabbing a beast to death on an altar perhaps alleviated some of the extremes of human sacrifice.  The scapegoat took on all of our sins for one year, until another sacrifice was required.

One can imagine that hunters are already accustomed to the agony of an animal being killed.  One wonders what great leap the offering of the animal would provide for improvements in religions – perhaps the women and children were now exposed to such violence in ritual fashion?  Perhaps the men who did not hunt and kill needed to be reminded too.  Apparently it provided some reprieve for the lust for violence instead of finding some enemy to kill or sacrifice.  One imagines that it would take a lot more killing of animals to equal the horror or one human sacrifice. 

The Christian Solution

The next evolution in providing for a ritual for man to receive forgiveness and grace for sin, and to replace a human scapegoat with something non-human was the sacrifice of God himself for all the sins of Man. 

The Church evolved to the point where bloody images of Christ were everywhere to see.  The full horror of human sacrifice of Christ was encapsulated in the entire liturgy of the Church.  Confession of Sins, Absolution of Sins from the priest, the ritual dedication of the pieces of flesh and blood from the human sacrifice above the altar in a recreation of the Crucifixion, the absolute horror of consumption of human sacrifice with Holy Communion “Take this all of you and eat it – this is my body to be given up for you” – all this met a deep need in humanity for the forgiveness and absolution of sin in addition to human sacrifice for such sins.  If one thinks deeply about the meaning of this ritual and the horrible and magnificent words, “This is the Blood of the New and Everlasting Covenant!” 

The ultimate form of human sacrifice: the sacrifice of God himself on the bloody altar.  Not only this, but the story does not end in the death of god as the sacrifice for sins, and the death of a god as a scapegoat.  The death of God happens, and then God comes back to life in the Resurrection.  One can imagine why Christianity was a scandal to the pagan world.  Christianity basically claimed that the solution to the sinfulness of man was the sacrifice and killing of God himself, and the death was not really death, because he came back to life!  It is kind of a New Story that says, “We have found a happy ending!”  Everyone “knew” that there is no happy ending, but Christianity made this bold and scandalous claim. 

Of course modern Christianity perhaps no longer scares the crap out of us as it was intended to do, along with the happy ending.  Protestantism in particular has lost the complete sensation of ritual with the classic liturgy with art, incense, sound, and imagery to recreate as much as possible the sensation of a ritual human sacrifice.  Some of the traditional churches have retained some of the sensuous intent like the Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, the Lutherans, and the Anglicans. 

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It seems that for Christianity to work, it has to be scandalous and shocking.  It has to recreate the horror of human sacrifice with the liturgy.  It is not just a matter of “doctrine” or “belief” in a list of crap someone wrote on a Catechism pamphlet.  It must recall the reason the God of the universe had himself killed on a bloody altar.  People must perceive the horror of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a human sacrifice.  People must understand why the “Happy Ending” of the Resurrection is so scandalous and insane to a normal understanding of human nature.

Then, the Phoenix may rise from the ashes, and we can remember what we have forgotten.

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Freddy Martini