What was it like to live in a culture where blood sacrifice was a part of everyday life? Sacrifice was ubiquitous across all human cultures until very recently, but we have lost that visceral knowledge of how it felt and what it meant and as a result have a gap in our models of how people in the past experienced the world. Why were people in the ancient world cutting the throats of bulls, digging into their guts, catching their blood? Nobody sacrifices fish or dogs - it’s always a domestic animal, a cow, an ox or a goat, bonus points for it being a magnificent specimen in its prime. You wash it, decorate it then lead it to the altar in a procession. The altar is in front of the temple, whose doors are open so the god can see. There will be a priest, perhaps a flute player, some burly attendants who maneuver the animal, a butcher and perhaps an augur. You throw some grains over the head of the animal, cut some hair from its head and throw it on the fire. Finally, you need the beast’s consent, so you pour some water over its head so it nods. Then you’re ready. An attendant bashes it over the head, a priest removes a small knife from its hiding place in a bushel of wheat, and he cuts the victim’s throat the women in attendance ululate. The blood is caught in a bowl, some is thrown on the fire along with the entrails and the thigh bones smeared with fat - the god’s share. The meat is boiled, and shared among all those present. We don’t do this anymore, but it is interesting that the word “sacrifice” comes up quite often in the contemporary discourse beyond the weaker meaning of “giving up something now in return for a future benefit”. When we talk about the sacrifice made by the young during the COVID lockdowns, or the ultimate sacrifice made by so many young men during the Great War, when something is serious, extreme, we consciously or unconsciously find ourselves tying it back to the tradition of blood sacrifice. They died so that we might live. The central insight of all mystical traditions is that life is death and death is life, and the ritual that represents this insight into the true nature of reality is sacrifice. It allows you to experience the union of life and death, and without experience, without embodied knowledge, your understanding of anything is no better than if you had taken a correspondence course. “We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something.” So writes Roberto Calasso in the Ruin of Kasch. What you destroy in a blood sacrifice is life itself. You are sacrificing the cow, but the cow is you - representing the surplus that sustains your life. Through his crucifixion, the willing sacrifice of literally a God, Christ completed the sacrifice quest for mankind. With focused intellectual engagement, the ritual of the Eucharist takes the congregation through the ritual of blood sacrifice. But Christianity’s grip on Western culture has been loosened, and for those not going to church regularly there is a sacrifice-shaped hole in their psyche. That visceral understanding that life is death has been lost, and without it we are flapping in the wind. We refer to the Stalingrad Madonna - see it here, it’s worth a minute of your time.
