HUMAN SACRIFICE

the offering of the life of a human being to a deity. The occurrence of human sacrifice can usually be related to the recognition of blood as the sacred life-force in humans. Bloodless forms of killing, however, such as strangulation and drowning, have been used in some cultures. The killing of a human being, or the substitution of an animal for a person, has often been part of an attempt to effect communion with a god and participation in his divine life. The offering of human life, as the most valuable material for sacrifice, in an attempt at expiation, has also occurred. Human sacrifices have been offered in return for victory in war. The killing of prisoners of war was once a common custom. The relation of human sacrifice to the promotion of the earth's fertility may explain why the phenomenon has been most widely adopted by agricultural rather than by hunting or pastoral peoples. In particular, sacral kings (considered to embody gods of vegetation) were sacrificed when their vigour declined, in order to prevent corresponding effects on soil fertility; or sometimes a substitute was assigned divine status for a period of time and then put to death. In various places in Africa, where human sacrifice was connected with ancestor worship, some of the slaves of the deceased were buried alive with him, or they were killed and laid beneath him in his grave. The Dahomey made especially elaborate sacrifices at the death of a king. Among the Ashanti, the victims sacrificed as first-fruit offerings during the Festival of New Yams were usually criminals, though slaves also were killed. In what is now Mexico the belief that the Sun needed human nourishment led to sacrifices in which thousands of victims perished annually in the Aztec and Nahua calendrical maize (corn) ritual. The Incas confined such wholesale sacrifices to the accession of a ruler. Excavations in Egypt and elsewhere in the ancient Middle East have revealed that numerous servants were at times interred with the rest of the funerary equipment of a member of the royal family in order to provide that person with a retinue in the next life. The burning of children seems to have occurred in Assyrian and Canaanite religions and at various times among the Israelites. Human sacrifice, practiced in Vedic India, was continued later by the followers of the goddess Kali, to whom a male child was sacrificed every Friday evening. In Japan human sacrifice was abandoned about the 5th or 6th century AD, and the Chinese practice of burying the emperor's retinue with him continued intermittently until the 17th century. Rites among the ancient Greeks and Romans that involved the killing of animals may have originally involved human victims. Some early Christians were falsely accused of consuming sacrificial victims at nocturnal feasts, a misunderstanding probably due to the secrecy surrounding the Eucharistic rite and the use of the words body and blood. From the Middle Ages until quite recently, Jews were often maliciously accused of having sacrificed Christian children at the Passover.