Sacrifice

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Sacrifice is the ritual offering of something of value to a god, a spirit, or the dead — classically a slain animal, but also grain, wine, incense, or money, and at the extreme a human life. Across the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East it was the central act of public religion, the hinge on which the relation between mortals and gods was thought to turn. The range of victims maps the range of the relation. A poured cup of wine, a pinch of incense on the coals, a measure of grain, a coin, a lamb, a bull, a hecatomb of a hundred oxen — each sized the gift to the gravity of the asking, and each stood in for the giver. To set something irreplaceable on the altar was to make the relation cost something, and so to make it real.

At the far edge of the range stands the human victim. Most of the ancient traditions that practiced it came to recoil from it and to tell stories of its abolition — the ram caught in the thicket set in Isaac’s place, the deer substituted for Iphigenia at the altar, the animal that henceforth stands in for the person. That movement of substitution is itself a key to the whole phenomenon. The victim is a surrogate; what is given is always, at one remove, the giver. The firstborn belongs to the god and is redeemed by a lesser life; the animal carries to the altar what the offerer cannot carry himself. Sacrifice works by letting something die in the place of the relation, so that the relation may live.

The grammar is older than any one cult. To give back to the powers held responsible for life, to mark the weight of a request, to make a killing that fed the community also feed the gods — this logic underwrites a thousand local rites that share no pantheon. It is bound up with libation, the poured drink-offering that is the cheaper and more frequent transaction in the same economy, and with the smoke of incense, the bloodless gift whose rising savor stood in for the whole; with the purification that readied the offerer to approach, since one could not bring an unclean thing or an unclean self before the holy; and with the figure of the priest, who alone might handle what the act made holy and stand at the dangerous seam between the human and the divine. Sacrifice is, in this sense, the keystone of ritual as such: the place where the whole apparatus of approach — washing, procession, prayer, the careful protocol of who may stand where — converges on a single decisive gift.

The Greek table: thysia

In the Greek world the standard rite, thysia, was as much a meal as an oblation. An animal was led to the altar, sprinkled with barley groats and water so that its toss of the head could be read as assent, killed, and burned in part; the gods received the smoke and certain portions — the thigh-bones wrapped in fat, the rising savor — and the worshippers ate the rest. The arrangement encoded a whole theology of the human condition: that mortals and immortals share a table but not a nature. The gods take the inedible, weightless share that ascends; mortals take the meat that sustains a body that will die.

The altar itself drew the line. It stood between the worshipper and the image of the god, and the gift crossed it in one direction only: upward, as fire and smoke, into a region mortals could not follow. The inner organs, the splanchna — heart, liver, lungs — were roasted first on the altar fire and tasted by the inner circle of participants, the binding share that marked who belonged to the rite; the thigh-bones and fat were burned for the gods; the remaining meat was boiled and distributed. Every portion was a statement about who stood where in the order of things.

Hesiod fixed the etiology in the Theogony. At Mekone, where gods and men once feasted together, Prometheus divided a great ox into two portions — the meat and rich entrails hidden in the unappetizing stomach, the bare white bones dressed in glistening fat — and let Zeus choose. Zeus took the fat-covered bones, and ever after mortals burned the white bones to the gods on smoking altars and kept the meat for themselves. The trick that cheated the gods is also the charter of the human condition: it joins men to the immortals at one table and severs them in the same act, the same ambiguity that recurs in the firing of grain and in marriage. Because nearly all meat eaten in a Greek city came from an animal killed this way, to eat flesh was to participate in the civic and divine order at once; to refuse it — as the Pythagoreans and the Orphics did — was to step out of that order. The shared portions of the slain victim are the distant ancestor of every later rite of communion, the meal that binds the eaters to each other and to what they eat. The same grammar governed the great public cults, from the civic festivals to the mystery rites of Eleusis, where the offering opened onto an experience the initiate underwent rather than a doctrine he was taught.

Rome: the calendar and the state

Roman practice ran along similar lines but was bound more tightly to the calendar and the state. Sacrifice there was less a private devotion than an instrument of public order, the means by which the community maintained the pax deorum, the standing peace with the gods on which the city’s fortune depended. The rite was exact and its exactness was the point. The victim’s head was sprinkled with mola salsa, the salted spelt-flour ground by the Vestals — the act of immolatio from which the word immolate descends — wine was poured over it, and only then was it struck down. The entrails, the exta, were drawn and inspected; a malformed liver meant the gods had refused the gift, and the whole rite had to begin again. Light-colored victims went to the gods of the sky, their blood and smoke rising; dark victims went to the powers below, their blood let down into a pit. The pontiffs governed which days were fit for the act and held the precedent that made a sacrifice valid. The logic was frankly contractual — do ut des, I give that you may give — and the contract was the state’s.

Israel: the wholly burned and the shared

In Israel the temple cult, as the priestly books set it out in Leviticus, drew a sharp line between offerings burned whole and offerings shared. The olah, the whole burnt offering, was consumed entirely on the altar, its smoke rising — the root of the name carries the sense of going up — so that nothing returned to the offerer; it was wholly God’s. The zevach shelamim, the offering of well-being or peace, kept only the blood and the fat portions for the altar and returned the flesh to be cooked and eaten before the sanctuary, a meal shared between the offerer, the priests, and God. Around these stood the sin and guilt offerings, whose blood was daubed on the horns of the altar and poured out at its base. Through it all ran a single identification: the life is in the blood, and the blood given upon the altar makes atonement. To shed the blood of the victim was to render the life that the law declared forfeit, and to render it in the one place appointed.

This was the order of the priest-king Melchizedek’s later inheritors, the sacrificial economy of the Second Temple, and it ended in history, not in theory. With the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE the altar was gone, and with it the only place where the blood could lawfully be given. Rabbinic Judaism reread the whole system into what could survive without it. Yohanan ben Zakkai, who is remembered as having reached the academy at Yavneh as Jerusalem fell, taught that acts of loving-kindness now made the atonement the altar once made; prayer became the avodah she-balev, the service of the heart, the offering of the lips standing in for the offering of bulls; and the study of the sacrificial law itself was counted as the performance of the sacrifice. The cult was not abolished but transposed, its substance carried over into prayer, study, and mercy.

The turn inward

Sacrifice drew criticism from within antiquity itself. Some philosophers found the slaughter unworthy of a god who needs nothing, and asked what an immortal could possibly want with the smoke of burning fat. The Neoplatonist Porphyry — Tyrian, the pupil and editor of Plotinus, who lived from about 234 to about 305 CE — gave the critique its most sustained form in his four books On Abstinence from Killing Animals. The highest god, he argued, is honored not by blood but by a pure mind and a contemplation kept in silence; whatever asks for slaughter is no god but a lower, material power. The philosopher’s right offering is the cleansing and lifting of his own intellect. Porphyry did not deny that the older powers received the older gifts; he ranked the offerings, and set at the summit one that spills nothing. The argument keeps company with the theurgic defense of ritual that his contemporaries mounted in reply — for theurgy too located the decisive work above the level of mere material exchange, in the soul’s ascent through tokens the gods had sown in the world.

The Hermetic writings make the same turn explicit and devotional. The treatise that opens the corpus, in which Hermes Trismegistus receives the vision of Poimandres, closes not on an altar but on a hymn — the offering of words to a God whose name only silence can speak. In G. R. S. Mead’s rendering the worshipper prays, “Accept my reason’s offerings pure, from soul and heart for aye stretched up to Thee, O Thou unutterable, unspeakable, Whose Name naught but the Silence can express” (Corpus Hermeticum I). This is the logikē thysia, the reasonable or rational sacrifice — an offering of thanksgiving and praise rather than of victims, mind given back to Mind. The gnosis the treatise transmits is itself the thing offered.

Early Christianity performed a related move from the other direction. It kept the language of sacrifice in full but relocated it onto a single death, reading the crucifixion as the offering that ends the need for offerings — a victim who is also the priest, given once for all, after which the altar of repeated blood has no more work to do. The slain lamb of the older Passover became the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God whose blood is the true atonement the earlier rites prefigured, and the shared meal of the new cult recast the sacrificial table as communion. Paul then turned the same vocabulary upon the believer’s own life. In the Epistle to the Romans he asks that the body itself be presented as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, and names this the logikē latreia — the reasonable, rational, or spiritual service. The adjective is the same root that the Hermetic prayer applies to its offering of words: two streams of the late-antique Greek-speaking world, independently, reaching for a sacrifice made of mind and life rather than of blood.

What sacrifice is: the scholarship

That interiorization — from the altar to the heart, from the victim to the self — is the thread later traditions most often follow, and it is worth marking as a reading rather than a law of development. Blood rites and inward ones coexisted for centuries; Porphyry wrote while the temples still smoked, the Hermetic hymn was composed in a world of working altars, and the older form never fully disappeared. The transposition was real, but it is a layering, not a clean succession.

The modern study of sacrifice has proposed competing accounts of what the practice fundamentally is, and has largely abandoned the search for a single origin behind so varied a thing. Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (German 1972; English translation by Peter Bing, University of California Press, 1983) reads the rite through ethology: sacrifice as the ritualization of the violence of the hunt, the killing that bound the Palaeolithic band carried forward and managed by ceremony, the communal act of killing as the act that makes a community. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, in The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (French 1979; English translation by Paula Wissing, University of Chicago Press, 1989), read it instead through the meal: thysia as the spilling of blood and burning of bones that authorizes the division and eating of meat, the cut of portions that asserts a social order, the cooked share that makes one a member of the city. Where Burkert finds managed violence, Detienne and Vernant find the politics of the table; the older accounts of Hubert and Mauss had found a gift, a thing made sacred and passed between the human and the divine. Each reading illuminates part of a practice too broad for any one of them to exhaust.

The primary witnesses sit alongside the scholarship. Hesiod’s Mekone narrative in the Theogony is the Greek charter; the priestly legislation of Leviticus sets out the Israelite system offering by offering; Roman antiquarian writers preserve the ritual detail of the state cult, from the mola salsa to the reading of the exta (overview of Roman sacrifice); Porphyry’s On Abstinence (overview, with Thomas Taylor’s public-domain translation) carries the philosophical critique; and the Hermetic Poimandres and Paul’s letter to the Romans record, in the same generations, the offering remade as words and as a life.

What recurs, under every interpretation and across every transposition, is the logic of giving something up so that a relation may hold.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Agnus Dei · Prothesis · Gnosis · Hermes Trismegistus · Libation · Incense · Ritual · Ritual Purification · Communion · Priest · Corpus Hermeticum · Neoplatonism · Theurgy · Mystery Religions · Epistle To The Romans · Melchizedek · Second Temple Judaism · Eleusis · Liturgy