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The Mystery of Sacrifice

THERE’S A FAMOUS story from the 1960s about the South Pacific. Several Westerners, stranded on an island, were overrun by natives from a nearby island. The natives’ island was home to a volcano, and the volcano was showing signs of waking from its dormancy. The natives, led by King Kaliwani, needed a goddess to worship—specifically, a white goddess—and they demanded a woman from the Westerners. The American women considered the possibilities of being worshipped as a goddess, but it became clear that the goddess’s fate was more dire: she was to be “married” to the volcano and then thrown in as a sacrifice, meant to calm and satisfy the volcano god. At that point, the Westerners dressed one of their men up as a woman and convinced the islanders that he was in fact the ideal candidate to serve as the white goddess.

Okay, this isn’t exactly a “famous story.” It’s the plot of the final episode of the television sitcom, Gilligan’s Island. First aired on April 17, 1967, and shown innumerable times in syndication since, episode 98 of Gilligan’s Island incorporates a meme both ancient and modern—indeed, it’s a trope so recognizable that modern writers, sitcom and otherwise, can utilize it without introduction. It can be found in everything from Woody Woodpecker cartoons to the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie Joe Versus the Volcano to a Far Side comic in which two clueless tourists are being dragged up a volcano by natives, and one says to the other, “They just perked right up when we told them we were Virginians!”

So what does Gilligan’s Island and human sacrifice have to do with Jesus’ death on the cross? Danger stalks us modern people when we try to understand something that happened so long ago and so far away. It’s too easy for us to impose our assumptions and beliefs onto the events and the people whom we are seeking to understand. (That, for example, is why some Christians during the seventies and eighties taught that the cross is really about having good self-esteem.) To truly try to understand an event in its original setting and what it meant to its original audience, we have some work to do. As much as we can, we must explore the ideas, culture, history, and influences that shaped the original event. And Jesus’ death on a cross demands that we go even deeper. Why? Two reasons. Because Christians believe that Jesus was the climax of Israel’s story and so cannot be understood outside the context of Israel’s history, especially its sacrificial system. And to understand that system, we must ask why humans first came up with the idea that we need to offer blood and sacrifice to appease the gods.

Even today, Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster Hunger Games trilogy is based on a sacrificial system. Set in postapocalyptic North America, the country of Panem is made up of twelve districts. Decades earlier, the Capitol District had put down a rebellion, and as recompense, each of the twelve districts must offer one boy and one girl as “tributes” to fight to the death in the annual Hunger Games. The story is rife with both substitution—the heroine Katniss takes the place of her sister Primrose—and bloody vengeance. As evidenced by the millions of copies these books have sold and the accompanying movies, human sacrifice is a theme that still resonates with us in modern times.

Ancient archaeological and documentary evidence suggests that human sacrifice was relatively common in ancient societies. Walter Burkert, eminent scholar of ancient myth and ritual, has posited the beginnings of human religion and human sacrifice in the Upper Paleolithic era, at least fifty thousand years ago.¹ He and others agree that human sacrifice predates animal sacrifice in prehistoric human societies. And human sacrifice is inscribed in the founding myths of human civilization.

In ancient Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the hunt, wildness, childbirth, and virginity. In one myth, a sacred bear whom she loved is killed by some young boys, and as compensation to the goddess, several young girls every year must be sacrificed to her service—the girls must act as her “bear,” as atonement for their brothers’ crime. In an even more famous myth, Agamemnon kills a sacred stag of Artemis and brags that he’s a better hunter than she. Enraged, Artemis calms the wind just as the Greek fleet is about to set sail for the Trojan War. A seer advises Agamemnon that the goddess will only be satisfied if he sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, which he agrees to do. But just as she’s about to be sacrificed, Artemis substitutes a deer in her place and takes Iphigenia to be her immortal companion—a story that has some obvious parallels to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac in the Hebrew book of Genesis.

Tales of human sacrifice in ancient (and not-so-ancient) societies are too numerous to list in detail. The Celts used to run prisoners through with a sword and then have their wise men divine the future from the death spasms of the victims. In 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed tens of thousands of prisoners to mark the consecration of a pyramid. Egyptian pharaohs would have hundreds or thousands of victims slaughtered at their funerals, with the belief that these victims would serve them in the afterlife. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the wandering Thuggee tribe in India killed over a million people in an effort to impress Kali, the Hindu goddess of violence and sexuality; they were the original “thugs,” notorious for their use of the garrote, a chair on which the victim is bound and strangled.

As recently as 1926, American explorer Armstrong Sperry posted a dispatch in World Magazine of a trip he made to the Solomon Islands. Rife with racist phrases like “great black savages,” Sperry’s dispatch reported that he convinced a couple dozen of the Islanders to take him and his crew to the top of their active volcano. They did, and atop the volcano, Sperry wrote,

           Not a hundred feet below us lay a lake of living fire, a pit of hell, where waves of glowing lava writhed and twisted and dashed upon the rocky walls, just as the waves of the sea were beating the cliffs of Boukai. It drew you with a strange fascination, glowing with every devilish color of the spectrum, terrifying and alluring. You wanted to run, and you wanted to jump in.²

According to Sperry, his guides began by throwing pigs into the lava. But then their frenzy increased: They cut themselves with knives and shells, hoping their blood would appease the volcano god. “And then all pandemonium broke loose,” Sperry reported, and they grabbed a man from another tribe. As Sperry watched in horror, “With one convulsive heave the cannibals shot the struggling victim out into the air. In horror I saw the poor screaming wretch descend into the fiery furnace and the livid, hissing lava closed over him.”

Remember: this happened less than one hundred years ago.

Other examples of human sacrifice happen to this very day, though usually in similarly remote corners of the world. So-called honor killings sometimes make the news, in which a woman is killed by her own family for marrying a man other than the one they’d chosen for her. These girls and women are sacrificed to redeem their families’ honor.

Frenzy and Pain

Some sacrifices are still made to get the attention of the gods.

In the late summer of 2012, I flew to the other side of the world with half a dozen bloggers. We were sent by World Vision to observe their charitable work in Sri Lanka, a bewitching, troubled country that hangs like an earring off the southern tip of India. Sri Lanka is a majority Buddhist country, but it also has significant populations of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. On our first day there, after orientation and some shopping, our host asked if we’d like to see a Hindu festival nearby. We jumped at the chance, and not much later we were disembarking from our van amid throngs of Hindu Sri Lankans.

We were the only white people among thousands of people at the Munneswaram temple, celebrating the eponymous festival, a twenty-seven-day affair celebrated every August at the temple site in Chilaw, not far from Colombo. Foreign as we obviously were, everyone in our group was diffident, save Matthew Paul Turner, who had organized the trip and was serving as our photographer. With a combination of unabashed hand motions and a big Nikon that made him look like a journalist, Matthew gained access inside a rope barricade, and he beckoned us to follow him. A policeman waved us in. What followed was one of the oddest, most intense experiences of my life.

Once inside the cordoned-off area, we saw a pit dug into the sandy earth. Six feet wide and twenty feet long, the pit was full of huge logs and stumps, all on fire and being tended by several men. The men wore only sarongs; they stirred the fire with long, wooden poles, and they were sweating profusely. Occasionally, younger men would dump buckets of water over their heads. Even fifty feet away, the fire was uncomfortably hot on my face. The air temperature must have been over two hundred degrees near where the fire stirrers were standing.

Over the next hour, the fire tenders removed the larger stumps, leaving a pulsating bed of red hot coals. Dusk settled. A bull with long, sharp horns meandered through the crowd, brushing past us. His neck was decorated with flowers. He caused near panic among some in our group, yet he merited not even a sidelong glance from the Sri Lankans.

Then others were allowed into the inner sanctum with us. They were the family members of those who were about to walk the fire. Moments later the fire walking began. The entire scene became a complete frenzy, and the formerly ubiquitous policemen were now nowhere to be found. Men and boys and men carrying boys began walking and running across the coals. Someone yelled at us, and we all squatted or sat so that those behind us could see. The stream of men and boys continued, each walking briskly across the coals, and people yelled and screamed, and the temple’s PA system blasted Hindu music so loud that the speakers crackled with distortion.

We found someone who spoke English. Our new bilingual friend told us that many of the men walked the coals because they’d made a vow to the god Shiva. Those who carried their sons over the fire had vowed that if they were given a son, they’d walk the fire in gratitude. Others were making sacrifice to Shiva in hopes of getting a blessing. Some carried pots of milk, a common Hindu symbol of atonement; others had massive pins piercing their cheeks, lips, and ears, meant to show Shiva extra devotion.

The crowd’s fever grew, and there was no longer any barrier between us and the entire throng. Thousands of devotees pressed in toward the fire, and members of our group shouted above the din to stay together. With wild eyes, we scanned the crowd for one another. I linked arms with a couple of people, and we forced ourselves to the outskirts of the horde. Others did the same; we reunited as a group and headed for the van.

For the rest of the week, we processed what had happened, what we’d seen, and how we understood it—the sacrifice, the danger, the religious devotion, the frenzy. It was as far from your average Lutheran or Presbyterian worship service as you could imagine.

The Munneswaram festival didn’t end with the fire walking ceremony. It continued with other calm and frantic activities, culminating in a massive animal sacrifice. On the final day of the festival every year, hundreds of goats and thousands of chickens are sacrificed, beheaded on a concrete slab. The chief priest of the temple asserts that this is not conventional Hindu practice, but he allows the tradition to proceed. The Sri Lankan government, however, does not. In 2011, a government minister arrived on the eve of the sacrifice and loaded every animal he could find onto a truck, calling the mass sacrifice an act of animal cruelty.³

In Nepal, animal rights activists have succeeded in reducing the number of animals sacrificed at the annual Gadhimai festival from over two hundred thousand in 2009 to about half of that in 2014. “I really look forward to this,” said forty-four-year-old Joginder Patel, who kills over two hundred water buffaloes at the festival each year. “God will bless me for it. It is as easy as cutting vegetables.”⁴

Holy Violence to Fight Violence

Sacrifice, both animal and human, has been a part of religious practice as long as there’s been religion, as far back as 50,000 BCE and maybe even earlier. As twenty-first-century Westerners, we tend to find such things primitive and barbaric. How did our human ancestors convince themselves that the death of an animal or, worse, a fellow human would appease an angry deity? And why did they seem to think that the bloodier the death the better? For that matter, why did they think that the gods were mad at them?

No one has provided a better answer to the first of these three questions than René Girard. We will consider Girard’s work more extensively in a later chapter, but here it is in brief: As human societies developed, tribes formed. With more people living together, rivalries increased, as did violence. Primitive religions—we might call them protoreligions—sought to deal with ever-increasing violence by setting up a pressure-release valve in society: violence would be perpetrated on an innocent victim in the form of a bloody sacrifice, and everyone would feel better, at least temporarily. In a somewhat ironic twist, the sacrificial victim in this process becomes sacred—maybe even divine—because he or she seems to have a magical power to quell violence in the community. Girard calls this the “scapegoat mechanism.”

Among other interesting and challenging claims, Girard accuses most scholars of ancient myth as being mistaken about how literally these stories were acted out in a community’s life. For example, the Babylonian creation myth tells the story of the god Marduk defeating the goddess Tiamat, splitting her body, and laying one half over the sky and the other under the earth. He then kills Tiamat’s lover, Kingu, and creates humankind out of Kingu’s blood. It’s a fantastical myth, to be sure, but Girard insists that the Babylonians used this myth to justify a real murder.⁵ Their creation story takes real violence and covers it with the patina of sacredness.

While I didn’t witness a sacrifice involving death in Sri Lanka, the fire walking ritual was definitely sacrificial. Every year, participants are injured and sometimes killed. And it takes no stretch of the imagination for me to consider that same festival killing scores of animals days later. In Hinduism, Shiva is both a fearful destroyer holding a three-bladed weapon and a kind benefactor looking after those who please him. In the Hindu pantheon, he is one of the primary forms of god and considered to be a supreme manifestation of the divine. As such, he demands sacrifice from his followers. He demands that they show their commitment to him by enduring pain and by shedding animal blood.

Sacrifice runs deep in our evolutionary past. And while as Western Christians we may not practice it in the way that Sri Lankan Hindus do, we still value it highly. A football player who’s injured on the field has made a “sacrifice for the team,” and a soldier who’s killed in battle has made the “ultimate sacrifice.” Every Sunday, millions of Christians around the world echo this call-and-response with their priest as the priest holds the eucharistic bread and wine aloft:

Priest: “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.”

Congregation: “Therefore let us keep the feast.”⁶

But just how that sacrifice works is more difficult to figure out. The uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice is what we claim sets Christianity apart from other belief systems. But the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross did not happen ex novo. Instead, it came out of the story of Jesus’ people, the Jews. And they had a long history of sacrifices to God, recorded in the portion of the Bible that we share, the Hebrew Bible.