Tag Archives: sacrifice

Will Christians Fulfill a Pagan Emperor’s Plan?

Julian “The Philosopher,” Rome’s last Pagan emperor (mid-360s), would get chuckle out of this. (Although to me he comes across as super-serious, he must have found some things funny. I hope.)

While he was force-fed Christian theology by bishops, growing up in a royal Christian household, he later studied ancient Greek philosophy and literature extensively. Yet he was no bookworm: He was also a blood-and-guts Pagan.

He did not just renounce Christianity by saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards, for her arranged a full tauroboium ceremony to wash away the Galilean stink. After becoming emperor, he brought back large public sacrifices as in the previous centuries:

I worship the gods openly, and the whole mass of the troops who are returning with me worship the gods. I sacrifice oxen in public. I have offered to the gods many hecatombs as thank-offerings. The gods command me to restore their worship in its utmost purity, and I obey them, yes, and with a good will. For they promise me great rewards for my labours, if only I am not remiss.

Some of his coins show a bull on the reverse, and numismatists are still asking why.

Another project that he backed financially was rebuilding the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, which Roman troops had destroyed in 70 CE when they smashed a Jewish rebellion in that province.

Polytheist that he was, Julian had no religious issue with the Jews (so long as they did not revolt against Rome), because their religion was very old. While Gentiles could and did convert, Judaism was not actively seeking them. Christianity was new and militantly opposed to all the old learning and the old gods.

Furthermore, rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem would frustrate Christian teachings that Jesus had predicted its destruction (Mark 13:2) and that the Christian church was itself the “new Temple.” Funds were allotted; then a small earthquake interrupted the work, followed by Julian’s own death in battle. End of story — or not.

But now some Christians want to rebuild the temple — and a sacrifice of cattle, although not a a full hecatomb, is essential!

For years, Texas businessman Byron Stinson has dreamed of a world at peace.

Some evangelical Christians like Stinson, as well as some Orthodox and Messianic Jews, believe the red heifer ritual described in the biblical Book of Numbers could pave the way to rebuilding a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. A new temple, which would replace a temple destroyed by the Romans in the first century, would usher in the kingdom of God, ruled by a messianic figure.

A red heifer c is burned on a pyre on a remote hilltop in northern Israel in a practice ritual ceremony, this month (Photo © Boneh Israel via Religion News Serivce)

According to Numbers 19, the sacred ceremony — in which the cow is slaughtered and then burned — must take place on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem with a view of the site of the former temple, said Rabbi Yitzchak Mamo, president of Boneh Israel, an organization that works to build up and revive biblical sites in Israel and oversaw the practice ritual. . . .

Organizers admitted the idea of a red heifer ceremony could be troubling to some. But Stinson said that in the end, it could have powerful effects for the good.

Yes, it will be a little troublesome to thousands of Jewish rabbis, who took over religious leadership from the old Temple priesthood, and also to those Christians who think that what was done is done.

But there is that minority of Christians who believe that the Temple and the nation of Israel must be upheld in order to bring on their version of Jesus’ triumphal return.

Subscribe to this blog to read more on the academic study of Paganism and related Pagan topics.

Animal Sacrifice: Are They Doing It Wrong?

Possible animal sacrifice location
A possible animal sacrifice location in the Howard Beach area. J.C. Rice (New York Post)

The New York Post had two articles recently on apparent animal sacrifice in the Jamaica Bay area of Long Island (politically in both Brooklyn and Queens).

“Animal Sacrifices on the Rise in Queens with Chickens, Pigs being Tortured in ‘Twisted’ Rituals” appeared on September 7, 2024.

Animal sacrifices are surging in Queens, with chickens, pigs and rats being tortured, mutilated or killed in “twisted” religious rituals in parkland surrounding Jamaica Bay, The Post has learned. 

In a little over a month, at least nine wounded animals or carcasses have been discovered in the federally-managed Spring Creek Park in Howard Beach and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Broad Channel — including five live pigs with partially severed ears.

Creatures recovered from the revolting scene also include a near-dead baby rat tied up in a bag with chicken bones; a freshly decapitated chicken head; a live hen in distress; and a dead dog with its neck snapped.

Ethnographically, the article adds, “Jamaica Bay has been a popular religious site among members of the Hindu Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean diaspora living in nearby neighborhoods, including Richmond Hill and Ozone Park..”

The Post was back on September 14th with “Feds, City to Crack Down on Animal Sacrifices in NYC’s Jamaica Bay after Dog-Carcass with Snapped Neck, Wounded Pigs Found. Mobile lights were to be installed to thwart the evil cultists operating under cover of darkness! I wonder how that worked out.

“Feds, City” should talk to their colleagues in South Florida about this problem. It was there, after all, that a legal case arose that led to the Supreme Court’s verdict in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. For a good backgrounder on the case, listen to Heather Freeman’s Magic in the United States podcast episode on the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye. (A print transcript is also available at that link.)

In essence, per the Court, animal sacrifice for religious purposes is not illegal in the United States under the First Amendment.

Animal sacrifice pops up repeatedly in the Bible. Many Muslims partake in qurban (animal sacrifice) at the feast of Eid al-Adha. Some Orthodox Jews have a practice of waving a live chicken overhead while praying on Yom Kippur Eve, then slaughtering it for a meal according to the kosher rules. And Christians describe Jesus as the Supreme Sacrifice, some descibing themselves as “washed in the blood of the [sacrificial] Lamb.“

A. J. Jacobs, a non-religious Jewish writer in NYC, devotes a semi-humorous section of his book A Year of Living Bibically to attempting to join Hasidic Jews iin this ritual.1

Pagan studies scholars have tended to skirt sacrifice in the Afro-Diasporic religiions, which is why Heather Freeman’s podcast was an exception. There has been some writing on blót in Asatru, which may include sacrifice, starting with Michael Strmiska’s 2007 article “Putting the Blood back into Blót: The Revival of Animal Sacrifice in Modern Nordic Paganism.”

Animal sacrifice was a key religious practice of the pre-Christian peoples of Germanic Northern Europe. It is now being revived by some modern Pagans who reconstruct pre-Christian Germanic religious traditions, drawing on medieval Icelandic literature as well as Anglo-Saxon literature and other related sources (155).

Jefferson Calico’s 2018 book Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America devotes an entire chapter to the topic, examining its social, religious, and ethical contexts, noting that “Eating the sacrifice2 becomes a sacred as well as a dissenting act that calls into quesion and occasions a critique of secular, mainstream American eating practices” (314).

Sacrifice means to make something sacred by connecting it to the divine, yet when it comes to the Jamaica Bay incidents, I have so many questions. Were all these animal remain the product of sacrificial rituals?

The Asatru would have eaten the “blotted” pig — were the ones found abandoned by some urban homesteader? A dead dog? Killed in ritual or killed to cause pain to its owner? Baby rat? (Mom made him get rid of it?). Cops3 operate with simple categories. What happens when you make a collar and end up in court being grilled4 by a First Amendment lawyer? Is it easier just to put up some lights than sort out the perpetrators, when some are criminals and others part of a protected class?

  1. Subtitled “One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,” the book describes his attempt to follow all the Hebrew Bible’s rules while living in New York City — with a very patient wife. [↩]
  2. As is normally done in most cultures. [↩]
  3. Like vegans. [↩]
  4. Pun intended. [↩]

Siberian Shamans Hold Camel Sacrifice — It’s Traditional, They Say

Watch this powerful video, which is also embedded in this article in the Moscow Times online: “Siberian Shamans Revive Ancient Camel-Burning Rite ‘to Help Russia.’”  The location is given merely as “the Irkutsk region” but elsewhere there are references to Tuva, a Central Asian republic that is part of the Russian Federation.

The shaman quoted, Artur Tsybikov, says that the sacrifice is traditional but has not been performed for thee hundred years.  I am guessing that he means in a time before the area came under imperial Russian rule and before Orthodox Christian missionaries arrived with imperial backing.

Tysbikov is also involved with political efforts to boost the prestige of traditional shamanism and animism, including this shamanic congress.

Let’s face it, all traditional (that word again) polytheisms involved sacrifice, usually of animals. You give to the gods, they give to you, right? There was even carryover into the Middle Eastern monotheisms — Kapparot for some Jews,  sacrifices of sheep or cattle at Eid al-Adha, and of course Jesus as the “lamb of God” who is the supreme sacrifice. Some people sacrifice their sanity—less blood that way.

When Gods Sacrifice to Themselves

Almost all traditional Pagan cultures have one religious practice in common that contemporary Pagans for the most part avoid: Sacrifice, which means literally “to make sacred.”

Earlier this month, in fact, at a Pagan camp-out one of the elders was discoursing on the uselessness of sacrifice. If g/God were a carpenter working in his shop, sacrifice would be like bringing a hammer with the handle cut off and saying, “Here, I offer this to you.” Everyone thought that was profound.

In the entry on sacrifice in the HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (edited by Jonathan Z. Smith, but individual entries are not signed), we read that “Naive and academic explanations of sacrifice abound. Sacrifice has been characterized as a gift (an offering)” [1], a means of communication between the profane and the sacred, an attempt to establish reciprocity between the human and the divine realms (most often expressed by the formula, “I give in order to get”), an expiation, a substitution, and a reenactment of primordial events.”

Theophrastus, a philosospher and student of Aristotle, wrote, “there are three reasons one ought to sacrifice to the gods: either on account of honor or on account of gratitude or an account of a want of things. . . . . We honor the gods either because we seek to deflect evils or to acquire goods for ourselves, or because we first have been treated well or simply to do great honor to their good character” [2]“.

Libation of Artemis and Apollo at the omphalos. Master of Shuvalov (?), ca. 440 BC. Pushkin Museum. ? Wikipedia user Shakko 2009

This is an “insider” perspective, what Smith’s dictionary would characterize as a “naive” explanation.  So we think that we know what sacrifice means both in religion and in other areas of life: a killing (to Christians, Jesus’ bloody death was  the one big, final,  expiating sacrifice of human history), a giving up of pleasures (“She sacrificed her childhood to become a ballerina.”) or of life itself  in service to society (“Military members who gave ultimate sacrifice remembered at WWII Museum”).

Then I see this headline at the Tropaion blog: “Gods Sacrificing: Iconography and Divine Ritual Praxis.” It’s a  review of  Religion of the Gods; Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity :

The book examines the numerous iconographic depictions of Gods and Goddesses performing a libation or acting towards performing a sacrifice. One example is the attached picture: a libation of both Artemis and Apollo at the omphalos. In this red-figure lekythos, the poured liquid is visible from the Apollo’s phiale. It is logical that looking closely at those pictorial evidences makes you wonder and immediately questions arise. One of the questions is the following: what these depictions mean?

The review is worth reading, for it addresses the question, if sacrifice is addressed to a “higher” Other, than who is higher than the gods?

There are always surprises in the old Paganism.

 

1. If “sacrifice” and “offering” can be used simultaneously, what about “libation,” as illustrated on the vase painting? Some would say so; others want life in their sacrifice.

2. Quoted in Jan N. Brenner, “Greek Normative Animal Sacrifice,” in A Companion to Greek Religion, ed. Daniel Ogden (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 139.

 

Giving Animal Sacrifice a Bad Name

You know that I am all for polytheism, and I say “All honor to Durga,” but isn’t this a bit much?

The Los Angeles Times reports that more than 40,000 people, many of whom were inebriated, took their sacrificial goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to pray to the goddess Durga on the last day of the Navratri festival.

“People were vying with each other to get their goats sacrificed first, and they had a verbal duel with the butcher,” Banka district spokesman Gupdeshwar Kumar told the paper.

In the ancient Greco-Roman world, people—at least urban people—often ate red meat only in the context of a religious ritual. James Davidson discussed this matter in Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens.

What is important is that the omission of fish [from the Iliad] helped to construct an opposition between the meat of pigs, sheep and cattle, all of which had to be sacrificed before it could be eaten, and fish, which was quite free of such structures, an item for private, secular consumption, as and when desired. In an important sense, fish-consumption was simply not taken as seriously as other kinds of carnivorousness.

Wikipedia’s entry on hecatomb (sacrifice of one hundred animals) quotes the Homeric passage about what sounds like one big cookout.

Sacrificing sheep in Jerusalem

Cambridge University classics professor Mary Beard recently suggested that today’s Hellenic Pagans were inauthentic because they did not sacrifice animals.

Set aside the Pagans for a moment. What about Jews?

A small but controversial movement in Israel wants to revive Temple-based religion, including sacrifice.

The present-day Sanhedrin Court decided Tuesday to purchase a herd of sheep for ritual sacrifice at the site of the Temple on the eve of Passover, conditions on the Temple Mount permitting.

The comments on the article pretty well represent a spectrum of Jewish religious squabbling, from the ultra-orthodox who think that the state of Israel is an affront to their god, to those who think that sacrifice is “cruelty to animals” and those who think that it is not, to those who just want to kick the Muslims off the Temple Mount. Oy vey!

Via Mirabilis.