Don't ask me why, but I started thinking in the shower last night about the ubiquity of sacrifice to the gods as a key religious impulse around the world. What do academics think is the motivation for lots of people around the globe having started to believe that gods need or desire sacrificial offerings?
Which led me to review again what Freud thought about this, and I was reminded about his obsession with boys wanting to displace their fathers sexually. (Seriously, has anyone ever psychoanalysed Freud as to why he would think this was a universal feeling? I mean, really: just how many men in this modern era of on-line, public, anonymous, confession ever said they felt this way. Or would Freud say that it's an unconscious desire,
of course most boys and young men don't recognise it?)
Anyway,
I read an essay by someone who pointed out Freud being influenced by a contemporary writer, William Robertson Smith, who wondered a lot about the idea of sacrifice in early societies. Here's a key part of the essay:
In “Totem and Taboo”, Freud followed Smith’s argument closely but
focused more explicitly on the killing of the totem animal, interpreting
this not only as the symbolic murder of the god but as the derivative
of a primal group parricide motivated by the desire of the young males
to gain sexual possession of the females of the clan, who all belonged
to the father (as the dominant male) and who were necessarily their
mothers. Freud was indeed reiterating a principle first articulated by
Smith himself (albeit in a footnote) — that there existed a double taboo
which was breached in the primal sacrificial act: not to kill one’s
fellow clansman and not to commit incest. Smith had written:
“I believe that in early society (and not merely in the very earliest)
we may safely affirm that every offence to which death or outlawry is
attached was primarily viewed as a breach of holiness; e.g. [sic] murder
within the kin, and incest, are breaches of the holiness of tribal
blood, which would be supernaturally avenged if men overlooked them.”
(15)
This principle was to lie at the heart of Freud’s psychoanalytic
theories. The abiding interest lies in its use as by Freud to explain
the origins of morality, culture and religion. The totem meal was
“perhaps mankind’s earliest festival” and was thus “a repetition and a
commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the
beginnings of so many things — of social organisation, of moral
restrictions and of religion” (16). Ambivalence both motivated the
killing of the father and induced remorse:
“…we need only suppose that the tumultuous mob of brothers were filled
with the same contradictory feelings which we can see at work in the
ambivalent father-complexes of our children and of our neurotic
patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable
obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they
loved and admired him too… A sense of guilt made its experience, which
in this case coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The
dead father became stronger than the living one had been… They revoked
their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for
the father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to
the women who had now been set free. They this created out of their
filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for
that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of
the Oedipus complex. Whoever contravened those taboos became guilty of
the only two crimes with which primitive society concerned itself.” (17)
I don't know, Freud may be almost nuttily wrong about the whole Oedipus complex, but before I read this essay (that is, while I was still in the shower), it did occur to me - is part of the unrealised motivation for animal sacrifice to gods an ambivalence about killing animals for food in the first place?
I mean, it would seem that the closer modern urban people get to seeing how the animals we eat are raised and killed, the more they sense guilt about the process. In older societies, slaughter wasn't hidden in the way it is now, and people surely (like us) thought young animals in particular were cute and endearing. Yet people gotta eat, and lamb tastes better than mutton, and so eat animals they did.
Is part of the unconscious motivation behind the idea of sacrificing animals to God or gods that it's a way to deal with the guilt of killing animals to survive? If the gods take part in the meal as well, then who can blame humans for having to do this to survive?
It's an idea, anyway. Perhaps an eccentric modern one, since I don't know that anyone has really detected an ancient sense of regret in killing animals for food. The idea of respect for a wild animal killed, yes. Or maybe people just haven't been looking for it. And I can use the Freudian trump card - it's an unconscious thing, but it was still there!
Reading more broadly on sacrifice, it's interesting to see that anthropological and psychological consideration of this is still a pretty active field. I found two broad surveys of the topic that were pretty good: one, the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry
Theories of the Origin of Sacrifice; and another is a good essay by a Jungian psychoanalyst:
The Psychology of Sacrifice. (I don't find the Jungian comments all that helpful really, but the survey of what others have theorised is very succinct yet comprehensive.)
All grist for the mill for my forthcoming Guide to Life for Aimless Young Adults.
Update: I feel I should give a shout out to Buddhism for being the big religion for which, from the start, animal sacrifice was criticised and banned. According
to one Buddhist website:
One of the central rites of Brahmanism during the Buddha's time was the sacrifice (yà ga) which sometimes included the slaughter of animals. The Vedas
describe in detail how these sacrifices should be conducted if the gods
were to find them acceptable. Some of these rites could be very
elaborate and very expensive. The Tipiñaka records one sacrifice conducted by a brahmin
named Uggatasarãra during which `five hundred bulls, five hundred
steers and numerous heifers, goats and rams were brought to the
sacrificial post for slaughter' (A.IV,41). The Buddha criticized these
bloody rituals as being cruel wasteful and ineffective (A.II,42). He
maintained that those who conduct sacrifices make negative kamma for themselves even before they have set up the sacrificial post, ignited the sacred fire and given instructions for the animals to be slaughtered (A.IV,42). He repudiated the killing of the animals, the felling of trees
to make the sacrificial posts and the threatening and beating of the
slaves as they were driven to do the preparations `with tear-stained
faces' (A.II,207-8). He also made a plea for such sacrifices to be
replaced by charity towards virtuous ascetics and monks (D.I,144).
But I see that
animal sacrifice still happens in Tibet, due to the co-existence of old Shamanism with Buddhism:
The issue of animal sacrifice – the “red offering” (dmar mchod)
performed in some Buddhist communities across the Tibetan cultural area
in the Himalaya – has received considerable critical attention. Surveys
such as that conducted by Torri (2016) have shown that, according to
common belief, local deities prefer red offerings such as blood and meat1.
In Sikkim – a former Buddhist kingdom and now an Indian state in the
southern foothills of the Himalaya – nearly every mountain, hilltop,
lake and river is said to be populated with supernatural beings. They
play an important role in daily life, and need to be worshipped. Some of
these entities were tamed and converted to Buddhism by Tibetan masters
(Balikci-Denjongpa 2002 and Balikci 2008, p. 85). However, of course the
taming of supernatural entities has not only been a feature undertaken
by Buddhist masters who came to this region, but is also an important
task of village religion itself. Village people often consult a Buddhist
master and a shamanic expert simultaneously.
As Balikci notes: “The Sikkimese shamans are the ritual specialists in
charge of keeping good relations with the households’ and the lineages’
ancestral gods”
And it seems that one of most excessive animal sacrifice festivals (not counting Eid, I suppose)
happens in Nepal, but as a Hindu thing:
Despite outcry from animal rights
groups, a festival widely considered to be the largest mass-slaughter of
animals on Earth happened in Nepal this week, according to the Guardian. The two-day Gadhimai festival
has been held every five years for the last 260 years in the village of
Bariyarpur, about 100 miles (160 km) south of Kathmandu, where it
attracts thousands of Hindu worshippers from Nepal and neighboring
India. Amid tight security, the festival opened on Tuesday with the
ritual slaughter of a goat, rat, chicken, pig, and a pigeon, as a local
shaman also offered blood taken from five points on his body. After this
initial killing, around 200 butchers brandishing sharpened swords and
knives entered the festival arena, a walled area larger than a football
field, leading in several thousand buffalo. In the days prior, Indian
authorities and volunteers seized dozens of animals at the border from
unlicensed traders and pilgrims, but this effort failed to stop the
massive flow of animals to the festival.
Update 2: Maybe I read this before, and perhaps even posted a link to it?, but
Haaretz in 2016 gave an explanation of how Judaism came to stop doing Passover animal sacrifice after the destruction of the Second Temple, which was the site for
a lot of ritual killing:
Jewish families made their way to Jerusalem from throughout Judea and
beyond. Once they arrived, they purchased their sacrifice from one of
the city’s many baby goat/sheep vendors and waited for Passover. On
Passover eve, a representative from each family took their purchase to
the Temple. At the appointed time, the gates would open and the
representatives – each with bleating sacrifice in hand – filed in and
lined up in front of one of the many priests, who themselves were lined
up in rows in the Temple courtyard. Once the courtyard was full, the
gates were closed and the mass slaughter began.
Each representative handed his goat or sheep to a priest who killed the
animal, carefully collecting its blood into a bowl. Once the bowl was
full, it was transferred to the priest beside him. From him it went to
the one beside him, until, like a conveyor belt, it reached another
priest who doused the altar with its bloody contents. After the blood
has been completely collected, the priest handed the now-dead animal to
the representative, who took it and hung it on a hook. Levites came over
and removed the skin and innards, which were taken to the altar and
burned. Once this was done, the representatives each took their dead
goat or sheep and left the Temple compound to find their families. Then
each family roasted the meat on a pomegranate branch and ate it in a
festive night barbecue.
Since the Temple compound – about the size of 15 football fields –
wasn’t large enough to fit all the pilgrims in at once, this process was
repeated three times....
The task of adapting Judaism to its new
Temple-less reality fell to Rabban Gamaliel II, head of the Jewish
Assembly – the Sanhedrin. With regard to the Passover sacrifice,
Gamaliel decreed that the sacrifice should continue in family homes,
with each family sacrificing its own goat or sheep.
However, other rabbis believed that the
Passover sacrifice, like all the other sacrifices, could only be
conducted by the priests in the Temple and that, like the other
sacrifices, should not be conducted until the Messiah comes and the
Temple is rebuilt.
Some Jews followed Gamaliel and continued
to sacrifice goats and sheep in their homes on Passover; others didn’t
and saw the practice as apostasy.
Within about two generations, the practice ceased when the
anti-sacrifice camp assumed control and threatened to excommunicate
those who practiced it. So, sometime in the second century C.E., Jews
stopped the practice of sacrificing baby goats and sheep on Passover.
Until recently, that is.
