The Weird World of Sacrifice, Cannibalism, and Government
*Warning, this post gets grisly, really quickly.*
A significant part of human orders is premised on sacrifice or sacrificial logic. Probably almost all of it in some way or another, as strange as it may sound.
Sacrifice itself is one of those things which when it comes to politics is given almost zero consideration. This is strange when you consider that from the neolithic until the classical period, all settled human orders of any size were centered around temples and governmental (if you can call them this) organizations that conducted animal sacrifice, and in a lot of cases, human sacrifice. I have been reading Plato with this in mind, because he, living as he was in a sacrificial Athens, seems as disregarding of the practice as Hobbes would be of Christianity a couple of thousand years later.
If we stop and think about it, its really strange that it is so disregarded. Human governance grew out of this sacrificial organization. It wasn’t just some extra thing which was done on the sidelines as a hobby or something. People prior to the foundation of city states and other forms of order didn’t just mill around spontaneously in a “state of nature” whatever that is supposed to be. They were bound by, for lack of a better word, “religious” rites. Archaeological sites like Göbekli Tepe are hammering this home. Here we have a major neolithic site that predates agriculture and it is some form of temple complex. Its precise function is still not clear, but it seems to have been some kind of center of organization for a skull cult and sky burial performing people.
It doesn’t look like it was used for animal sacrifice, or there is no conclusive evidence so far, but I wouldn’t discount it being a place of human sacrifice. I believe they found some human skull fragments in the complex, and Çatalhöyük which came later (and appears lined) possibly contains evidence of human sacrifice in the form of foundation burials (the dead were interred under the beds in the houses.)
The is, as yet, no clear cut evidence of animal sacrifice before this neolithic period, but from the neolithic onwards its practically ubiquitous from China all the way to Mesoamerica. It seems that before agriculture animal sacrifice may not have been a thing (hard to capture an animal to then kill it?) Which raises the question of what is going on here. Is animal sacrifice a means of replicating the kill of the hunt and its significance to the human actors? Or, alternatively, is it a replacement for human sacrifice? Or something else? Whatever it is, kings and emperors were the head priests who presided over these sacrifices and obtained their authority from them.
If these sacrifices were simply continuations of religious practices associated with hunting, then things would be fairly straight forward from a genealogical position. That the hunt held significant meaning and was a focus of otherworldly consideration for early humans can be seen from their art. Even as far back as the ice age you can see images of humans dressed as shamanistic characters seemingly imbued with some magical properties.
What you don’t see, as far as I know, is any depiction of sacrifice which would be odd if it was a central part of their world. but then again, you also don’t seem to see depiction of cannibalism despite it also apparently being a fairly widespread phenomena, as grisly as that seems. We know that Neanderthals and many human prehistoric people were practicing cannibalism as far back as almost 2 million years ago from bones that have been cracked open and gnawed on. It seems unlikely this was merely for sustenance because people are awkward to hunt and don’t really give you much food. I have also seen that some genetic evidence seems to point towards humans having developed resistance to Kuru, the CJD cannibalism disease with some hypothesizing that maybe Neanderthals lacked this defense, and hence went extinct while we didn’t.
What exactly was going on with this cannibalism is open to debate. It seems like some of it was some form of funerary rites that is still practiced in some cultures in South America and Papua New Guinea (pretty awful stuff that involves leaving the corpses to “ripen”), some of it maybe hostile consumption of enemies, maybe some of it was some form of sacrifice. If the later, it could possibly support human sacrifice being replaced by animal sacrifice, which has lots of pretty dark implications for humanity.
If anything, cannibalism seems more widespread than animal sacrifice, especially if you consider groups which split off way before the neolithic. The Americas were rife with human sacrifice and cannibalism, its where we get the term “cannibal” from. The Aztecs famously sacrificed people like crazy and had their towers of skulls, their cousins in the north definitely did it, too. I have seen some claims that the name “Mohawk” actually means “flesh eater” in Algonquin. The archived page for human cannibalism on Wikipedia is way more interesting than the current page.
This is also similar to the aboriginals of Australia and Papua New Guinea where it seems like cannibalism was near ubiquitous. The Papua New Guinea most people know about, they were eating people as recently as 1950 and probably still do it up in the highlands. The aboriginals, however, surprised me because it seems details about it are generally hushed up. You can see why, given the politics of the thing. Personally, I know enough about the history of the thing to not judge them harshly. If reports are to be believed (and I think they should) the Australian aboriginals practiced infantile cannibalism along with cannibalism of outside groups (apparently preferring Chinese people to western people on account of saltiness.)
Going back to the Old World, its surprising how widespread human sacrifice and cannibalism was until relatively recently in human history. There are sporadic accounts of it in Greek and Roman history, despite their rejection of it, and in the Middle East as well. There are accounts of Jews sacrificing Greeks, Arabs sacrificing camels and young boys (flaying the camels alive, and, it would be assumed, but not stated, the boys too,) as well as the famous example of Carthage and their child sacrifices. The Celts also famously burned people in a giant wicker man. Africa had/has lots of it, so too did China. Chinese and aboriginal cannibalism on Taiwan was carrying on until the 20th Century, with flesh being sold at markets. Aboriginal Taiwanese tribes people were being made into pills for the usual libido raising concoctions that Chinese love so much.
All the major religious contain major elements of sacrifice of a human nature, too. You have Abraham about to perform a child sacrifice with his son, Isaac. You have Mohammed concluding the Hajj by sacrificing a bunch of camels and the cutting his hair and nails to be given to his followers (symbolically sacrificing and disbursing himself). In Christianity, one of, if the most, anti-sacrifice systems, you have Christ being the sacrifice for all time (and think of the parallels to Mohammed with the Eucharist.) You also have the Jews still hypothetically (like the Muslims) sacrificing animals once the destroyed second temple is rebuilt.
Of course, the modern world hasn’t escaped the logic and world of sacrifice. Etymology gives that away pretty quickly, which is interesting, to say the least.