The Origin of Blood Sacrifice

I've been listening to John Dr. John R. Hale's "Exploring The Roots Of Religion" and been reminded of a question I've asked myself for years, ever since I was a child: What is the origin of blood sacrifice?

"You've got to be kidding," you're saying.

No, I'm not. It's always bothered me, ever since I was a kid. What possesses someone to think that by killing another living creature they are making God happy?

(I was probably drawn there by the account of Abraham and Isaac, which must have had a visceral impact on the ancients, but can only be understood as a barbaric metaphor to modern readers.)

I've asked myself that question and others over the years and never encountered good answers:

• How did the practice of circumcision arise? (I presume it was a hygiene issue )
• How did ancient peoples come to realize that the sun would always rise or set a certain way throughout the year and that you could schedule other things around it?
• How did our moral/ethical sense evolve, if it did?
• How much must A look like B before their similarities obviate their differences?
• Wouldn't it be more astonishing if Christian distinctives didn't have parallels in other ancient religions?

 

But back to the sacrifice issue, I think I do have a plausible answer, though no one will ever know if it's the right one (or among a set of right ones).

Let's say you are at place in history where humans are becoming spiritually aware. You cook meat, bury your dead, paint on cave walls, carve talismans, etc.

The idea: Might it not occur to you, if you believed an unseen guest was present, that, after cooking a meal for you and your clan, you wondered if you should offer it a little food?

At some time in unrecorded past, humans made a connection between food and gods, and after that between types of food and how it was offered and how the gods responded.

The steps to elaborate ritual are small and trivial after that. Add layers of fortune and misfortune over what and when and how you served your unseen guest, and it's not unreasonable to see even human sacrifice develop.

(Our brains order random stimuli and try to extract information. It's why the moon has a face. It's why, out of the millions of sounds a gazelle might hear in tall grass, it can tell which ones might be made by a lion. And it's why humans can become addicted to gambling. The same capacity that says "that sound might be dangerous" says "that sound might reward me," and if the pattern is reinforced sufficiently, we trust it.)

Back to one of my points above, however, "How much must A look like B before their similarities obviate their differences?"

They could be indistinguishable and be distinct. A placebo is not a narcotic no matter how much each acts like the other.

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Started: 2012-11-19