The Motivations behind Human Sacrifice

For people today, the fact that so many peoples throughout history have practiced human sacrifice seems absolutely baffling and horrifying. We tend to think of human sacrifice as the ultimate act of barbarism, an act that epitomizes everything savage and uncivilized about our species. Nonetheless, it is important for us to understand why people have historically engaged in this practice.

Human sacrifice has occurred in virtually every part of the world at some point in time and has occurred in some part of the world during every historical time period. Thus, whether we like it or not, understanding the motivations behind human sacrifice is a part of understanding what it means to be human.

An act of barbarism, but not necessarily done by barbarians

First of all, we need to understand that, while human sacrifice itself may be a barbaric act, many of the peoples who have engaged in it throughout history were far from barbarians. The classic Maya invented the only writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. They built some of the most stunning monuments of the pre-modern world, such as El Castillo at Chichen Itza. They also developed one of the most complex and accurate calendar systems in the pre-modern world. Nevertheless, in spite of all of their accomplishments, they also practiced human sacrifice quite extensively.

Human sacrifice has existed at some point in nearly every civilization. The ancient Egyptians practiced human sacrifice to an extent during the early years of their civilization. So did the Sumerians. So did the ancient Chinese. So did the ancient peoples of the Indian subcontinent. So did the Minoans in the Aegean. Indeed, there is no part of the world in which human sacrifice was never practiced at any point in history.

ABOVE: Medieval Maya ceramic vessel dating to between c. 600 and c. 850 AD depicting a human sacrifice

Human sacrifice is not even an exclusively pagan phenomenon, strictly speaking. In the Book of Genesis 22, Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew nation, demands that the patriarch Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac to him to prove his devotion. Abraham is prepared to sacrifice Isaac in accordance with Yahweh’s demands, but Yahweh spares Isaac at the last moment, giving Abraham a ram to sacrifice instead. In the particular version of the story that has been passed down to us, Isaac is not actually sacrificed, but many scholars suspect that, in an earlier version of the story, the sacrifice was actually carried through.

The Book of Judges 11:29–40 records a less famous story about how the Israelite judge Jephthah sacrificed his own daughter to Yahweh in fulfillment of a promise he had made saying that, if Yahweh granted him victory, he would sacrifice the first living thing he saw upon his return home. In this story, unlike in the story of the binding of Isaac, Jephthah actually carries out the sacrifice and kills his daughter to show his devotion. Here is the passage, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“Then the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh. He passed on to Mizpah of Gilead, and from Mizpah of Gilead he passed on to the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, and said, ‘If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering.’ So Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against them; and the Lord gave them into his hand. He inflicted a massive defeat on them from Aroer to the neighborhood of Minnith, twenty towns, and as far as Abel-keramim. So the Ammonites were subdued before the people of Israel.”

“Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah; and there was his daughter coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dancing. She was his only child; he had no son or daughter except her. When he saw her, he tore his clothes, and said, ‘Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble to me. For I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.’ She said to him, ‘My father, if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, now that the Lord has given you vengeance against your enemies, the Ammonites.’ And she said to her father, ‘Let this thing be done for me: Grant me two months, so that I may go and wander on the mountains, and bewail my virginity, my companions and I.’ ‘Go,’ he said and sent her away for two months. So she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed her virginity on the mountains. At the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to the vow he had made. She had never slept with a man. So there arose an Israelite custom that for four days every year the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite.”

According to this passage, Jephthah promised to give his daughter to Yahweh as a burnt offering and he “did with her according to the vow he had made,” which can only mean that he sacrificed her. This is, however, the only passage in the Bible that describes a human sacrifice to Yahweh as having actually been carried out. It is impossible to say whether this story reflects any kind of historical reality in which people were actually sacrificed to Yahweh, but it does show that human sacrifice has a place in the Abrahamic story.

ABOVE: Painting of the daughter of Jephthah, painted in 1879 by the French Academic painter Alexandre Cabanel

Even in societies where human sacrifice was generally taboo, it sometimes managed to resurface. For instance, the classical Greeks usually shared our revulsion for the idea of human sacrifice, but yet there is evidence that, on some very rare occasions under extreme circumstances, some Greeks may have actually practiced it.

Human sacrifice appears frequently in Greek mythology and in Greek literature, but it is most often portrayed as a horrifying and cruel act. For instance, in the tragedy Agamemnon by the Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 455 BC), which was first performed at the City Dionysia in 458 BC, the chorus gives a vivid and horrifying description of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his own virgin daughter Iphigeneia to the goddess Artemis. Here it is the passage as translated by Sarah Ruden:

“Her pleading, her shrieking for her father,
the girl’s short life—these were worth nothing
to the lovers of battle, her judges.
Her father prayed first, then he told the attendants
to lift her high up, over the altar, like a goat—
though, frantic, she clung to his legs in their robes—
to keep her facing the ground,
and to guard her exquisite mouth,
keeping in sounds
of a curse for his house.”

“With a bit forced in, a power that silenced her.
Now her robes—dyed with saffron—poured to the ground
and each man who offered her up
she pierced with a pitiful gaze—
she was like a painting’s central figure—struggling
to speak to them, since often
in her father’s generous banqueting hall
she’d sung a hymn full of blessing, in the chaste voice of a virgin,
when the father she loved poured out the third libation;
with loving reverence she sung.”

“The rest I didn’t see; I have no tale to tell;
but Calchas’s skills find proof in what’s fulfilled.”

This passage clearly does not portray human sacrifice favorably. Nonetheless, the Greek Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – c. 120 AD), in his The Life of Themistokles, a biography of the Athenian general Themistokles (lived c. 524 – c. 459 BC), describes an incident which allegedly occurred in 480 BC when the Athenians were at war with the Persians in which Themistokles killed three Persian prisoners of war as a human sacrifice to the god Dionysos. Here is what Ploutarchos says, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin for the Loeb Classical Library:

“But Themistocles was sacrificing alongside the admiral’s trireme. There three prisoners of war were brought to him, of visage most beautiful to behold, conspicuously adorned with raiment and with gold. They were said to be the sons of Sandaucé, the King’s sister, and Artaÿctus. When Euphrantides the seer caught sight of them, since at one and the same moment a great and glaring flame shot up from the sacrificial victims and a sneeze gave forth its good omen on the right, he clasped Themistocles by the hand and bade him consecrate the youths, and sacrifice them all to Dionysus Carnivorous, with prayers of supplication; for on this wise would the Hellenes have a saving victory. Themistocles was terrified, feeling that the word of the seer was monstrous and shocking; but the multitude, who, as is wont to be the case in great struggles and severe crises, looked for safety rather from unreasonable than from reasonable measures, invoked the god with one voice, dragged the prisoners to the altar, and compelled the fulfilment of the sacrifice, as the seer commanded. At any rate, this is what Phanias the Lesbian says, and he was a philosopher, and well acquainted with historical literature.”

In other words, at least according to Ploutarchos’s sources, there was at least one occasion on which the democratic, freedom-loving, and unquestionably civilized classical Athenians engaged in human sacrifice.

ABOVE: Attic black-figure amphora dating to c. 570 – 550 BC depicting the mythological scene of the sacrifice of the Trojan princess Polyxena

Not as “ancient” as you probably think

We tend to think of human sacrifice as something that was only practiced by “ancient” civilizations, but highly advanced civilizations were still sacrificing people a lot more recently than some people realize. Human sacrifice is most closely associated with the Aztecs, who are known to have practiced it extensively. Most people think of the Aztecs as an “ancient” civilization, but they were a lot less “ancient” than many people assume.

As I discuss in this article I published in March 2019, the Mexica, the dominant nation of the Aztec Empire, first arrived in central Mexico in around the middle of the thirteenth century AD. They founded their capital of Tenochtitlan in around 1325 or thereabouts and their first tlatoani (“ruler”), Acamapichtli, was crowned in around 1375. The Mexica first became politically dominant in the region in the fifteenth century.

All in all the Aztec Empire straddles the line between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Under no definition could the Aztecs legitimately qualify as “ancient” in the historical sense. Indeed, the University of Oxford, which was founded in the late eleventh century AD, predates the Aztec Empire by several centuries.

The Aztecs were far from the last people to practice human sacrifice, though. There have been several isolated cases of illegal human sacrifices conducted in countries in South America, Central America, Africa, and South Asia in the twenty-first century. Human sacrifice, then, has happened at some point in virtually every part of the world and it has happened in at least some part of the world during every historical time period. It is therefore worth understanding why people conduct human sacrifices.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Aztec Codex Mendoza, dating to between 1529 and 1553, depicting a human sacrifice

Retainer sacrifice

Now, as it happens, there are actually two very different kinds of human sacrifice that have been commonly practiced in various civilizations throughout history. Both kinds of human sacrifice involve ritually murdering people, but they differ because they are conducted with different motivations. The first kind of human sacrifice that I will discuss in this article is retainer sacrifice, which is the form of human sacrifice that was most commonly practiced in early ancient Egypt, early ancient China, and early ancient Mesopotamia.

In many ancient civilizations, it was believed that the afterlife directly mirrored the world of the living and that, when a king died, he would rule over his kingdom in the land of the dead. It was believed that a king needed attendants to serve him in the afterlife. Thus, when a king died, his attendants would be sacrificed and entombed with him.

The idea was that the king would need his attendants in the afterlife and, since he was the king, he couldn’t simply wait until they died naturally. There is evidence that, in many cases, these attendants committed ritual suicide by voluntarily drinking poison. In other cases, though, they were murdered in violent ways, such as by having stakes driven through their heads.

Retainer sacrifice quickly fell out of practice in many of the areas where it was practiced originally. Instead of sacrificing living people and entombing them with the king, people began making artificial representations of human beings and entombing them with the king. Thus, in Egypt, during the Old Kingdom (lasted c. 2600 – c. 2100 BC), the custom of making ushabtis—human figures that were believed to come to life and serve the person they were buried with in the afterlife—arose. Ushabtis were a replacement for the earlier retainer sacrifices that fell out of fashion.

A similar situation arose in China. Kings and emperors would be buried with artificial representations of people, which acted as stand-ins for retainer sacrifices. For instance, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty of China, Qin Shi Huang (lived 259 – 210 BC), was famously buried in a tumulus at Xi’an with an entire army of terra-cotta warriors buried near his tomb. These warriors were intended to serve the emperor in the afterlife. They were a replacement for the place of the attendants who would have, in earlier times, been sacrificed and buried with the emperor to serve him.

ABOVE: Ancient Egyptian ushabti of Pharaoh Ramesses IV, dating to around the mid-twelfth century BC

ABOVE: Photograph of one portion of the terra-cotta army of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang

Propitiatory human sacrifice

Thus, retainer sacrifice mostly died out early on in most of the places where it was practiced and did not survive long into the civilized period. Another form of human sacrifice, however, survived in some civilizations until much more recently. This other form of human sacrifice is propitiatory human sacrifice, which is the main form of human sacrifice that was practiced by, for instance, the Maya and the Aztecs. It is also the form of human sacrifice that appears in the Bible and in works of ancient Greek and Roman literature.

A propitiatory human sacrifice is when a human being is ritually sacrificed to a specific deity in order to curry favor with that deity—either to appease the deity’s wrath or to win the deity’s support for a specific endeavor. In order to understand the reasoning behind propitiatory human sacrifice, we are going to have to first come to understand some basic information about how ancient polytheistic peoples thought about their deities and about the reasoning behind animal sacrifice.

Ancient polytheistic peoples did not think about their deities in the same way that Abrahamic monotheists usually think about their God today. Ancient peoples did not regard the gods as being omnibenevolent, omniscient, all-loving, or even all-powerful. Instead, the gods were seen as capricious otherworldly beings who could be helpful or dangerous depending on how they felt and how they were approached.

Today, Christians pray to their God to ask for things all the time and they expect God to give them things just because He loves them. In ancient times, though, people did not think that way. Instead, people believed that the gods would only help you if you gave them something in return. The relationship between humans and deities, therefore, was seen as a transactional relationship, a relationship of quid pro quo (“something for something”).

ABOVE: Praying Hands, sketch by the German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer. Christians today believe that God gives people what they ask for without them having to give God any kind of sacrifice in return; people in ancient times, though, believed that, if you wanted something from a deity, you had to offer the deity something in return.

The main way that a person could win a deity’s favor was through offerings and sacrifices. Thus, if you wanted a deity to give you something, you would pray to them and ask them to give it to you, promising that, if they gave it to you, you would give them an offering in return. If the deity gave you what you asked for, then you needed to give them what you had promised them. If the deity did not give you what you asked for, then the deal was off and you were not obligated to give the deity anything.

It was believed that certain kinds of offerings were more valuable and that the more valuable the offering you promised was, the more likely the deity was to give you what you asked for. For instance, in ancient Greece, a bull or ox was considered the most effective animal sacrifice because a bull or ox was the most expensive animal. Next, in descending order of effectiveness, came a cow, a sheep, a goat, a pig, and, lastly, a chicken.

As I discuss in this article I published in September 2019, animal sacrifice was an absolutely integral part of everyday life in the ancient Mediterranean world. It was something people did all the time and were totally accustomed to. In fact, generally speaking, in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, pretty much the only time most people ate meat was after conducting a ritual sacrifice of some kind.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 510 – c. 500 BC, depicting two men ritually sacrificing a pig to Demeter

Now that we understand why people conducted propitiatory animal sacrifices, it is easy to understand the reasoning behind propitiatory human sacrifice. If you needed animal sacrifices to curry favor with the gods and the effectiveness of an animal sacrifice was dependent on the inherent value of the animal, then a human sacrifice was the ultimate sacrifice, the absolute “gold standard” of sacrifices, an offering so rich that, if you made one, the gods would be bound to show you favor for it.

In pre-Columbian central America, the people chosen for ritual sacrifice were usually the ones deemed most valuable: usually young, healthy, physically attractive men and women. The fitter and better-looking the sacrificial victims were, the better; only the best were suitable offerings for the gods.

Conclusion

This is the reason why so many civilizations throughout history have practiced propitiatory human sacrifice. It is because human sacrifice has, at various times and in various places, been seen as a way to win the gods’ ultimate favor. Even in societies where human sacrifice was largely taboo, such as in ancient Greece and Rome, it occupied a sort of strange, uncomfortable position within the public mindset because, even though it was taboo, it would have seemed to many people like the logical extension of animal sacrifice, which everyone was already doing.