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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE

In the spring of 2001, I began sorting through information I had been collecting on the practice of sacrifice in the early hunting and agrarian religions. I had read there was a difference in their practices and I wanted to describe the dichotomy. My interest was academic and intellectual. Then the events of September 11, 2001 graphically brought the word "sacrifice" to our ears each day as newscasters described the various ways people from all over the world had given their lives in the drama of the World Trade Center. In October, I had an archetypal sacrifice dream harkening back to the Bronze Age. My curiosity was now grounded in profound emotional experience and had shifted to the much larger topic of the nature of human sacrifice in general. I longed to know why individuals and cultures engage in sacrifice, why there are so many forms of sacrifice, and where in the human psyche the desire to sacrifice originates. This paper documents an exploration into theories of the origins --what might be called the phylogeny of sacrifice, explores the additions to consciousness of several religions and cultures÷what might be called the ontogeny of sacrifice, and proposes the psychic processes that may be at work as humans sacrifice.

THEORIES OF SACRIFICE

According to E.O. James, the history of ritual is the history of religion, and the importance of sacrifice to the human psyche is evidenced by its ability to survive even when it is reinterpreted into metaphysical and ethical concepts. [i] James held that in order to understand a practice as fundamental as sacrifice, one had to approach it anthropologically, historically and psychologically. He believed, as many others do, that in the broadest sense, mankind performed sacrifice as a purifying and life-giving process to remove the taint of evil and assure a desired outcome. Ancient practitioners ritually removed or wiped away pollution contracted involuntarily and unwittingly. [ii]

To the primitive mind, good and evil, life and death are in the nature of materialistic qualities capable of transference or expulsion by quasi-mechanical operations. Misfortune and disaster demand concrete atonement in order to remove evil and restore right order between man and the natural order. Failure of crops, calamities, plagues and diseases are attributed to ritual defilement that is removable by life-giving substances such as blood and water. Sacrifice then is the normal means of transferring life and power to mortal deities to keep them vigorous and beneficent. [iii]

The word “sacrifice” and the word “sacred” both derive from the Latin, “sacrificium” meaning “to set apart from the profane, to make sacred” although in colloquial usage, it has come to have many different connotations.  Sacrificial acts are highly differentiated-- there are many motivations for and forms of sacrifice, although it always entails offering life in one form or another. [iv] Most theories of sacrifice focus on a conscious action behind an original rite, a kind of “if-then” causal thinking. If the community sacrifices, so the thinking goes, then the gods will respond. Here is how some anthropologists have described approaching the numinosum via sacrifice. (Emphasis mine.)

FORMS OF SACRIFICE

A survey of the literature reveals that sacrifice takes on many forms depending on the cultural application and that the process varies as well. What follows is a summary of the forms of sacrifice:

Robertson Smith hypothesized that sacrifice functions to commune between members of a group and between the group and their god. Two forms of sacrifice have emerged over time:

• Expiatory ö piaculum to re-establish a broken covenant
• Gift- honorary[vi]

James, however examined the way the word “sacrifice” is used and identified six meanings in common usage:

• Maintain sacred order- gods fulfill beneficent functions on earth.
• Gifts as presents or tributes paid by creatures to Creator, an honorarium.
• Atone for wrongdoing-piacular offering of life in expiation for sin.
• Voluntary self-destruction or surrender-self-sacrifice.
• Philanthropic endeavor involving loss.
• Disposal of an article at a greatly reduced value.[vii]

The Biblical book of Leviticus reduces all sacrifices to four elemental forms that were interwoven in practice:

• Olah- offerings to the divinity
• Hattat-expiation of sins committed in ignorance of the Lordâs commandments
• Shelamin-communion, thanksgiving, vows of alliance
• Minha- presentation of vegetable matter[viii]

Hubert and Mauss reviewed German culture and identify three overlapping reasons for sacrifice:

• Expiatory (Schnopfer)
• Thanksgiving (Dankopfer)
• Requests (Bittopfer)[ix]
  

Hindu texts differentiate sacrifices by their frequency:

• Regular- periodical (nityani), daily, new and full moons, seasonal and pastoral festivals, first fruits.
• Occasional- sacramental (samskara), domestic, rites of passage, solemn, anointing a king, religious and civil events, and votives.

When Hubert and Mauss examined what happened to the substance of the sacrifice, they described two forms. Sacrifice is reserved for the latter form:

• A votive, whose nature does not change as it is assigned to the service of the god, e.g. first fruits left at the temple.
• A living thing that is destroyed in the offering up process, e.g. a victim that is killed or grains that are crushed. [x]

Herbert and Mauss describe sacrifices as a request, personal, or objective, -or a combination of these elements.

Personal sacrifices:

• Begin and end with the sacrificer-revolve around the sacrificer.
• Regenerate the sacrificer-eradicate evil, regain state of grace, transfer divine power, grant salvation, infuse the god, transform personality, proffer rebirth.
• May extend into the future- result in a change of name, transfer the forces of immortality to the soul.[xi]

Objective sacrifices:

• Benefit something other than the sacrificer-revolve around another object and only secondarily affect the sacrificer.
• Focus more on the creation of spirit, e.g. guardian spirit.
• Modify the sacrifice itself so that the attributes of the sacrifice (such as color) may be transferred to the object.[xii]

Sacrifices of request:

• Bring about certain special effects defined by the rite.
• May release the promiser.
• May bind the god by a contract.
• Dictate the importance of the sacrificial victim.[xiii]

Sacrifices may combine elements of all the above in complex rituals.  An agrarian sacrifice can involve confession, purification, death of the victim, communion with the divine, and a resurrection as it:

• Reawakens the life principle in a field dormant after winter.
• Fertilizes the field.
• Allows the life principle to enter what will be grown there.
• Preserves the life force in the field after the harvest.
• Desacrilizes the harvest so that it may be eaten.
• Redeems those who have worked in the field, their offspring, and those who have made the sacrifice.[xiv]

Many social customs are linked to sacrifice:

• Contracts
• Redemption
• Penalties
• Gifts
• Abnegation (to deny, renounce oneself)
• Immortality
• Morality[xv]

Therefore it may be said that the central conception underlying the institution of sacrifice is the giving of life to promote and conserve life. Offering life to preserve life is the beginning of substitution and propitiation, which in many of the higher religions has evolved into a lofty ethical significance. [xvi]  A description of one sacrifice parallels the core elements of all sacrifices:

The victim is brought to the place of sacrifice and there are performed in succession the four acts which compose the sacrificial drama: presentation, consecration, invocation, and immolation. [xvii]

• Originally, men and animals were perceived (archaic consciousness) in kinship with each other. A totem animal was sacrificed, distributed and eaten. The totem animal’s blood contained the holy life force shared by man.
• When animals were domesticated and the kinship between man and animal was forgotten (went into the unconscious) a domestic animal became the routine sacrifice. When the totem or piaculum was sacrificed non-routinely, it was perceived as so sacred that it was either completely destroyed or only offered to the priests to eat.

EVOLUTION OF SACRIFICE

In Totem and Taboo, Freud added to what the anthropologists had learned about the conscious act of sacrifice.  Freud saw in the sacrifice of a totem animal an unconscious repetition of a primeval crime-a repetition and commemoration, or at least an unconscious desire for parricide that each individual has inherited. Freudâs work on totems suggests that behind every act of sacrifice are both conscious and unconscious aspects. In 1956, in a letter to Mrs. Kotschnig, Jung noted that “the religious spirit of the West is characterized by a change of God’s image in the course of ages.” [xviii]  Jung made another important contribution to understanding the nature of sacrifice when he noted that the nature of sacrifice may have evolved along with God’s image.

In early hunting societies comprised of small groups of people, the hunted animal was the sacrifice. Life, death, and blood were consecrated in the act of killing one animal at a time, incrementally. The next sacrifice was as near as the next hunt. In agricultural societies, members performed sacrifices to assure the progression of the seasons and the growth of crops. If blood could keep man and animal alive, then it had life-giving qualities that could be brought to bear on the weather and the soil. Human blood in particular represented human vitality or life essence.  If kings were perceived as something more than human-either extra-human or divine-then the blood of kings contained still more life essence.  Sacrificing a king at the peak of vitality maximized the life-quality of the blood offering. Later as cultures adopted solar religions, members of the community were sacrificed instead of the king.[xix]  In agrarian societies, a sacrifice covered an entire growing season or reign and extended to a larger number of settled people. The stakes were higher and the sacrifice was often dearer-a human life.

Even though pure totemism exists in only a few remaining cultures, Robertson Smith postulated totemic sacrifice as an evolution of conscious and unconscious elements reaffirming the relationship between god and man: Robertson Smith claimed that the basic rite in ancient and primitive religions is the sacrificium.[xx] (My parens.):

• Eventually, rare human sacrifice replaced animal sacrifice. Humans became the only way to exchange common blood between man and god, the piaculum sacrifice.  Animals had been demoted to the level of gift sacrifice from the individual owner to the god. At the end of the ritual, just as a scapegoat, the sacrificial animal carried away the impurities of its owner.[xxi]

E.B. Tylor also formulated an origin and progression for all forms of sacrifice. Although his theory does not address the means of sacrifice, it did focus on the importance of sacrifice to the self.

• Originally sacrifice was a gift made by the primitive to supernatural beings with whom he needed to ingratiate himself.
• Then the gods grew greater and more removed. Sacrificial rites developed to spiritualize objects that would reach the spiritualized gods.
• Eventually, the sacrificer expected no return, just paid homage.
• Later, the sacrificial rite involved abnegation and renunciation-the symbolic sacrifice of ones self. [xxii]

In the following chart, I have attempted to summarize the contributions to consciousness-the ontongeny-- that have evolved with the practice of sacrifice by of each religion or culture. I propose that different levels of consciousness may coexist on the globe at any one period in history, including our own.