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.