Harvey Whitehouse in New Scientist: Today’s small-scale societies tend to favour infrequent but traumatic rituals that promote intense social cohesion – the kind that is necessary if people are to risk life and limb hunting dangerous animals together. An example would be the agonising initiation rites still carried out in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, involving extensive scarification of the body to resemble the skin of a crocodile, a locally revered species. …
A renowned pianistwith Aztec featuresperforminga piano concertoby Beethoven.My imaginationtakes him backfive hundred yearsatop a Mexican pyramid,performing a sacrificeto the sun. He slits open the chest of the victim and extracts the heartstill beating, and raises itwith both handstowards the sun.The Aztecs, in thousands,around the pyramid clap and roar.Suddenly I'm back in the hallas the pianist with Aztec features stands triumphant and bows to the roaring audience!
That is the ritualization part. For the people inside the cultures the victims were guilty, they believed that even if we don't see the guilt from our current perspective. Reestablishing the rules became more important than punishing the real guilty - that's why it became important to find someone to play the guilty part.
I have another theory on sacrifice (based on Girardian view). I think the roots are in rule enforcement. In primitive societies rule enforcement is costly and in most circumstances not worth it, this leads to a cycle which starts with good rule enforcement but then less and less of it. People don't see rules enforced and they are also less eager to risk their own harm doing it, and on the other side they see it less and less enforced so they break it more and more. This leads to a crisis so bad that lives are threatened. The cost of not enforcing rules becomes the biggest cost any individual can bear making the cost of enforcing rules acceptable. People agree to kill the worst perpetrators and start enforcing rules.
This cycle then becomes ritualized. In the ritual it becomes less important that the victim killed was the worst perpetrator - but the ritual needs to stay scary enough to remind people of what it is about.
Thanks for including modern capital punishment in your analysis. It reminded me that like current capital punishment advocates, many in the societies you mention presumably thought their socieries' killings good and necessary based on some shared story/rationale. Do we know anything about these stories?
The class interpretation of human sacrifice doesn't scan for me. The chiefs-and-shamans comment comes from our most egalitarian period of social organization; Whitehouse doesn't seem to notice that human sacrifice includes things like criminals (allegedly practiced by the Gauls), war captives (the Aztecs), sworn warrior companions (Indo-Europeans, for which see Christopher Beckwith and comitatus), favored members of the court (funerals of the Pharaoh), household slaves (various), and senior members of the family (northern Siberian peoples).
In several of these cases it was ritual self-sacrifice, which doesn't match the terrorize-the-population pattern, and in the Indo-European, Pharaonic Egypt, and Siberian peoples examples the social elite are the sacrifices, which flatly contradicts the emphasis on sacrificing the poor. Since warriors are traditionally towards the top of the social hierarchy, the Aztec example is largely sacrificing the enemy's elite. Even slaves are usually considered distinct from the lower rungs of society.
Finally, while explicitly ritual human sacrifice may have faded during the Axial Age, public execution for crimes against the ruler or the state remained common right up through the 20th century, so we should consider the possibility that at least some political function for human sacrifice endured much longer. The public execution example seems to match the terrorize-the-poor pattern much better, but it did not go away with the development of large empires.
The performance
A renowned pianistwith Aztec featuresperforminga piano concertoby Beethoven.My imaginationtakes him backfive hundred yearsatop a Mexican pyramid,performing a sacrificeto the sun. He slits open the chest of the victim and extracts the heartstill beating, and raises itwith both handstowards the sun.The Aztecs, in thousands,around the pyramid clap and roar.Suddenly I'm back in the hallas the pianist with Aztec features stands triumphant and bows to the roaring audience!
Boghos L. Artinian
Very interesting content. Thank you!
That is the ritualization part. For the people inside the cultures the victims were guilty, they believed that even if we don't see the guilt from our current perspective. Reestablishing the rules became more important than punishing the real guilty - that's why it became important to find someone to play the guilty part.
But its not at all clear these sacrifices were of rule breakers.
I have another theory on sacrifice (based on Girardian view). I think the roots are in rule enforcement. In primitive societies rule enforcement is costly and in most circumstances not worth it, this leads to a cycle which starts with good rule enforcement but then less and less of it. People don't see rules enforced and they are also less eager to risk their own harm doing it, and on the other side they see it less and less enforced so they break it more and more. This leads to a crisis so bad that lives are threatened. The cost of not enforcing rules becomes the biggest cost any individual can bear making the cost of enforcing rules acceptable. People agree to kill the worst perpetrators and start enforcing rules.
This cycle then becomes ritualized. In the ritual it becomes less important that the victim killed was the worst perpetrator - but the ritual needs to stay scary enough to remind people of what it is about.
Thanks for including modern capital punishment in your analysis. It reminded me that like current capital punishment advocates, many in the societies you mention presumably thought their socieries' killings good and necessary based on some shared story/rationale. Do we know anything about these stories?
Well foragers were probably even more egalitarian than this period was, but your other comments seem apt.
The class interpretation of human sacrifice doesn't scan for me. The chiefs-and-shamans comment comes from our most egalitarian period of social organization; Whitehouse doesn't seem to notice that human sacrifice includes things like criminals (allegedly practiced by the Gauls), war captives (the Aztecs), sworn warrior companions (Indo-Europeans, for which see Christopher Beckwith and comitatus), favored members of the court (funerals of the Pharaoh), household slaves (various), and senior members of the family (northern Siberian peoples).
In several of these cases it was ritual self-sacrifice, which doesn't match the terrorize-the-population pattern, and in the Indo-European, Pharaonic Egypt, and Siberian peoples examples the social elite are the sacrifices, which flatly contradicts the emphasis on sacrificing the poor. Since warriors are traditionally towards the top of the social hierarchy, the Aztec example is largely sacrificing the enemy's elite. Even slaves are usually considered distinct from the lower rungs of society.
Finally, while explicitly ritual human sacrifice may have faded during the Axial Age, public execution for crimes against the ruler or the state remained common right up through the 20th century, so we should consider the possibility that at least some political function for human sacrifice endured much longer. The public execution example seems to match the terrorize-the-poor pattern much better, but it did not go away with the development of large empires.