Building Religions 7: Sacrifice

Building Religions 7: Sacrifice

In sword & sorcery fantasy and occult horror, human sacrifice ranks up there with the use of the words "thews" and "squamous," respectively, in terms of popularity. What I want to do with this little essay is consider some theories about the purpose of sacrifice in real-world religions, and see how those might translate into fictional worlds. As usual, I'm not going to cover all the possible approaches -- just the ones that I find interesting.



Anthropologists of religion started with a few theories about sacrifice, the most basic of which was that it was a kind of bribe to divine powers. Do ut des: I do, so that you do. In other words, the person performing the sacrifice gives a gift, with the expectation that the gift will be repaid in some other form. This kind of approach works if you're dealing with societies in which gift-giving and reciprocity are already ingrained as standard patterns of behaviour. Groups that regularly trade with other cultures, and so have a system of exchange set up, are probably the sorts for which this economic version of sacrifice is most applicable.

Another way of looking at sacrifice, one that works with sacrifices of food, is that it's a form of shared meal. The gods eat their portion, while humans eat the rest. Again, there's a kind of bond that's created in doing so, an expectation of obligation based on the ritual of sharing food. The exact nature of the offering could vary: it might be a portion of real food set aside for the gods, or it might be that humans fed on the substantial part of the meal while spirits were given the inedible parts or even just the scent. You can find traces of this even into some 16th-century ideas of the proper offerings for different spirits in magical practice: those closest to the Earth needed blood or flesh, while more celestial ones were satisfied with incense, candlelight, or the sound of prayer.

This latter point leads to another feature of sacrifices: they can be literal or symbolic, depending on the culture and its attitudes. Human or animal sacrifice can, at some point, be considered barbaric even by societies that used to practice both. When that happens, they might move to offering animal products instead of animals (e.g., clarified butter instead of cattle) or create imitations of living beings to offer up. (The Aztecs, even when they still practiced human sacrifice, are also recorded as having created human figures out of dough to use as substitutes. Needless to say, this human/bread image confused the Spanish missionaries who were trying to make sense of the religion.) In my Guidebook to the Wàiguó Líanméng, there's a whole class of artisans who produce artificial versions of grave-goods, which act as their own kind of sacrifice.

If you want to get into the more interesting theories, however, I'd say that there are two places to look: Georges Bataille and René Girard. Both of their ideas should be taken with a substantial grain of salt, but that's part of the fun of writing, isn't it? Seeing what the world would be like if dubious ideas were true.

Bataille's theory is part of his larger theory of religion, and even more broadly, his particular view of economics. He believed that humanity, once it passed the stage of being able to care for its most basic physical needs, suffered from an excess of energy that it had to expend. War, religion, the arts, eroticism -- all of these were ways for humans to rid themselves of excess. Sacrifice, for Bataille, was connected to this: it was a useless act of destruction, one that was only possible when one had more possessions than were necessary. It also, however, had a secondary purpose.

Bataille imagined that human beings, before they developed the trappings of civilization, lived in a closer relationship to the rest of nature. In the act of sacrifice -- the act of personally killing an animal -- the person performing the ritual would momentarily reconnect with that more primal state, sharing with the sacrificial victim an intense and otherwise unreachable bond of life and death. In other words, by killing, humans could regain some sense of their place within the natural order of things that they had lost. Of course, this idea only works where animal (or human) sacrifice is the norm, and where the focus is on the person or class of people performing the sacrifice.

René Girard, who's best known for his work on religion and violence, treated sacrifice as an outlet for humanity's deeply ingrained need for violence. Without some form of sacrifice, people would turn on each other. What interested him the most was who the victim would be. His work focused largely on scapegoating -- on the way that individuals would be chosen out of the masses as the targets for violence -- and from there, he suggested that sacrificial victims were not those people who could be most safely lost from society, but those whose qualities made them the objects of envy by others. (To be more exact, he described it as mimetic rivalry: people envied those who had qualities that they themselves either possessed or wished that they possessed. So long as those ideal people existed, the ones who envied them could never fully be who they wanted to be, so they had to kill or drive the others out.)

So, to sum things up: if you're going to have sacrifice as a feature in your work, you have to ask yourself what it is that the sacrificers (and the larger society) believe that they're gaining from the act. They might not be conscious of what they're doing, but the ritual itself will reflect in some way the needs that drive them. Are they anxious about their world, and trying to bribe the gods? Are they trying to establish a social bond? Are they longing for a connection to their animal past, and re-enacting that bond through violence? Or are they giving their naturally violent instincts a safe and formal outlet?