For thousands of years, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, various religious traditions throughout the world have incorporated ceremonies in which participants make offerings. These offerings are often material things, such as pots, swords, coins, and so on. For example, when a traditional Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) would get into a canoe, they would put a small piece of copper (today we use a small coin) into the water as an offering to the Underwater Panther as a request for safe passage. During the Bronze Age in Denmark, people would often leave offerings in the bogs: offerings which ranged from gold arm rings to entire chariots.
Not all offerings, however, are material: in some instances, the offering involves human flesh. In many Native American traditions, for example, it is common to give a flesh offering (a small piece of skin which has been cut from the arm or chest); in some Christian traditions, followers flagellate themselves until the blood flows freely; and in the Muslim Ashura ritual many participants beat their heads with knives. In his book In Gods We Trust, Scott Atran reports:
“Religious sacrifices are not only designed to be materially costly, they also aim to be emotionally arousing. Blood, especially human blood, is optimal for sacrifice on both accounts.”
Many of the ancient Mesoamerican cultures, such as those of the Aztec and the Maya, included ritual bloodletting as a part of their religious practices. For the Maya, bloodletting was an act of piety which was used in all rituals from the birth of a child to the burying of the dead. Bloodletting could range from the shedding of a few drops of blood to mutilation which generated a copious flow of blood. While blood could be drawn from any part of the body, the most sacred sources of blood were the tongue for both males and females and the penis for males. Among men, the penis would be pierced several times with an obsidian razor and then long strands of bark paper pulled through the wounds. After piercing the penis, men would whirl in a dance to draw the blood out onto the long streamers tied to their members.
The ultimate offering involves human sacrifice, the ritual killing of a human being. Human sacrifice has been a part of cultures throughout the world. In her book A History of God: The 4,000-year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Karen Armstrong writes:
“Human sacrifice was common in the pagan world. It was cruel but had a logic and rationale. The first child was often believed to be the offspring of a god, who had impregnated the mother in an act of droit de seigneur. In begetting the child, the god’s energy had been depleted, so to replenish this and ensure the circulation of all the available mana, the firstborn was returned to its divine parent.”
At the Chinese site of Zaghunluq, archaeologist He Dexiu uncovered possible human sacrifices. In the tomb of one woman the archaeologists found a child probably over a year old which had been inserted face down and which had traces of tears and mucus on the cheeks. J.P. Mallory and Victor Mair, in their book The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West report:
“The open mouth and tears prompted the excavator to suggest that the baby had been inserted head first into the tomb of an older woman when he was still alive.”
Human sacrifice on a much larger scale has been found at the royal cemetery in Yinxu, China, a Yang Dynasty (1250 BCE to 1046 BCE) city. In an article in American Scientist, Christina Cheung reports:
“The site’s royal cemetery has yielded some of the world’s most exquisite bronze and jade artifacts. It also holds evidence of massive sacrificial ceremonies, where often 50, or even up to 300, human victims were killed at one time as ritual offerings to various gods and ancestors. It is estimated that during the roughly 200 years that Yinxu was occupied, more than 13,000 humans, and many more animals, were sacrificed.”
While it was commonly believed that most of those sacrificed at Yinxu were war captives, analysis of their bones shows that while they were not local, they had lived in the area for several years prior to being sacrificed, suggesting that they had initially been war captives, then worked as slaves prior to being sacrificed.
In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, one form of human sacrifice is martyrdom: giving one’s life for one’s religion. In many religious traditions, martyrs are considered holy and martyrdom is the highest order of sacrifice to religious ideals. There are many stories praising this type of human sacrifice and, in the Christian tradition, martyrs can become supernatural beings known as saints. In his book In Gods We Trust, Scott Atran writes:
“The religious path of martyrdom is a cultural path that is deeply grooved, psychologically and socially. It is usually accompanied by a profound sense of injustice whose reversal requires violent death in this life to realize the promise of peace and justice in afterlife. In and along this path, personal and religious identities may have completely fused—often in the social camaraderie of adolescence, when unsettled identities become stabilized—and institutionally detonated in a way that propels those who bear the costs of ultimate vengeance to the end of the garden path in paradise.”
Christianity is founded upon an act of human sacrifice and martyrdom: the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The beheading of John the Baptist is another example of martyrdom. As Christianity developed, death as a result of sectarian persecution became viewed as a form of martyrdom, an act of human sacrifice in honor of religious beliefs.
With regard to Christianity in the Roman Empire, Karen Armstrong, in her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, writes:
“Martyrdom would always be the protest of a minority, yet the violent deaths of the martyrs became a graphic demonstration of the structural violence and cruelty of the state. Martyrdom was and would always be a political as well as a religious choice. Targeted as enemies of the empire and in a relationship of starkly asymmetrical power with the authorities, these Christians’ deaths were a defiant assertion of a different allegiance.”
In Islam, to die while conducting jihad is considered an act of martyrdom. In recent times, suicide bombers believe they are engaging in a form of human sacrifice which leads to martyrdom.
The concept of martyrdom is not restricted to the Abrahamic religions but is also found in some other religious traditions. For example, there are many Sikh martyrs, including Guru Arjan, the fifth leader of Sikhism and Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth guru of Sikhism.
Religion 101/201
Religion 101/201 is a series of essays on various aspects of religion in which the concept of religion is not confined to the Abrahamic religions nor to religions which are based on the worship of gods. Religion 201 is an expansion of an earlier essay. More from this series:
Religion 101: The Meaning of Ghosts
Religion 201: Reincarnation
Religion 101: God-Given Morality
Religion 101: Theism, Pantheism, Panentheism
Religion 101: Hidden Blasphemy
Religion 201: Heresy
Religion 201: Apostasy
Religion 201: Deism