Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In 1975 the British archaeologist Peter Warren excavated a small building that formed part of the Knossos complex in Crete. Knossos was the main site of the Minoan, bull-worshipping civilisation, dating to 2000 BC, which was discovered by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. The building excavated by Warren had at some stage been the victim of an earthquake, making it more difficult than usual to ‘read’ the rubble. Despite this, he soon came across the scattered bones of four children aged between eight and twelve. Many of the bone fragments bore the tell-tale knife marks that resulted from de-fleshing of the bones. More children’s bones were found in an adjoining room, ‘one of them a vertebra bearing a knife-cut pathologists associate with slitting of the throat’.¹ Warren concluded that the remains were those of children who had been sacrificed to avert a great disaster – perhaps the very earthquake that was so soon upon them.

Of all the beliefs and practices in ancient religion, sacrifice – both animal and human, and even of kings – is the most striking, certainly from a modern standpoint. In our examination of the origins of religion, among the Palaeolithic painted caves and Venus figurines, and around the time that worship of the Great Goddess and the Bull began, we find no traces of sacrifice. However, by the time of the first great civilisations – in Sumer, Egypt, Mohenjo-Daro and China – it was widely practised and proved very durable: human sacrifice was abolished in parts of India only in the nineteenth century AD.^{4 2} Surveys of ancient texts, decorations on temple and palace walls, on pottery and mosaics, together with anthropological surveys among nineteenth- and twentieth-century tribes across the world, have confirmed the widespread variety of sacrificial practices (the difference between religious sacrifice and magical sacrifice is discussed in the notes). In Mexico children were sacrificed so that their tears would encourage rain.³ In other cultures people with physical abnormalities were selected for sacrifice. A not-uncommon form of sacrifice is for a pig to be slaughtered. This sends a message to the gods, who are deemed to have replied according to the state of the pig’s liver. (The liver is the bloodiest organ and blood was often identified with the life force.)

If we can say that the ideas of the Great Goddess, the Bull and sacred stones are the earliest core ideas of many religions, they were followed by a second constellation of beliefs that were all in place before the great faiths that are still dominant today were conceived. Sacrifice was the most striking of this second set of ideas.

A sacrifice is, at its most basic, two things. It is a gift and it is the link between man and the spiritual world. It is an attempt either to coerce the gods, so they will behave as we wish them to behave, or to propitiate them, to defuse their anger, to get, get rid of, to atone. This much is easy to understand. What requires a fuller explanation is the actual form that sacrifice takes, and has taken in the past. Why must animals or humans be killed? Why is it that blood must be shed? How did such an ostensibly cruel practice take root and become widespread? Did ancient people see sacrifice as cruel?

Sacrifice originated at a time when ancient man regarded all that he experienced – even the rocks, rivers and mountains – as a form of life. In India hair was sacred because it continued to grow after a person’s death and so was judged to have a life of its own.⁴ Vedic Aryans regarded the actual leaping fire as a living thing, swallowing oblations.⁵ Most important, perhaps, sacrifice dates from an era when the rhythms of the world were observed but not understood. It was these rhythms, the very notion of periodicity, that were the basis of religion: such patterns were the expression of mysterious forces.