Why blood sacrifice?

[Angrboda]

I think it's important to keep in mind that ancient people viewed blood as the essence of life. Blood sacrifice was most probably viewed as sacrificing that which is most sacred.

I'm not sure you're correct about this. I'd have to do some serious research, but a couple of points, granting I could be wrong. The early Jews associated the breath with life, not the blood. If I recall correctly, there is no Hebrew word for soul in the Old Testament, and any analogous references to it are with words referring to the breath (in Genesis for example, God 'breathed' life into Adam). It's possible that there was a less than fully explicit understanding of the matter, as I'm sure that people of the time could well associate blood with death, if the Hebrew language and first millennia medicine are any indication, it was not thought of as the life giving substance.

An even more fundamental explanation, I think, is tenable. I was recently watching a film about the Kumari, young girls in Nepal who are worshipped as incarnations of a Hindu goddess. (Nevermind that the bulk are Buddhists.) One important festival involved the sacrifice of 108 goats and sheep, decapitated with a very sharp piece of steel. There is one scene where the recently decapitated animal is carried around a truck, blood spurting on the truck to purify and bless it. This of course reminded me of Yahweh and the blood sacrifices, the scapegoat of Jewish legend, Christ, and even the story of Abraham's commandment to sacrifice his son Isaac, in some ways prefiguring the Christ narrative.

What struck me is that blood sacrifice is a pristine example of 'ritual magic'. You perform some action which, on the surface, would not seem to be causally effective in bringing about the result, and yet, because the ritual is performed, the result occurs, magically. You'll note that every time that the God of the bible wants to accomplish a miracle, there is either some ritual involved, or some mechanism involved (the flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah). In one of the gospels, Jesus' healing of a man is preceded by such things as spitting on the affected organs and the like. Why would a god need to use his own bodily fluids to effect a cure? He should just be able to will it to occur. And other events in the Jesus narrative also smell of traditional, ritual magic; his inability to perform when in a hostile/unbelieving town (what in parapsychology is termed "the shyness effect"). And it didn't end with the first century. The obsession with religious relics, the true cross, body parts of Jesus, saints, and martyrs, for example; that objects, by association with their prior owner, are imbued with power. The phenomena of prayer is a classic example of ritual magic; performing an ineffective action in the hopes that, through intermediary powers, it will be effected (and note that Christian prayers are directed to other things than their god).

It's worth pointing out that, probably one reason blood sacrifice is an important element of ritual magic in any religion's repertoire has to do with the human brain. We have evolved to have powerful emotional and cognitive responses to blood and death. It isn't so much that the person is sadistic so much as the blood sacrifice is a powerful and reliable way of bringing about an altered state of consciousness whose content and primacy, can be linked to the more mundane and less obvious aspects of the religious belief and tradition. (This is a common theme in the psychology of religion; the co-opting of natural cognitive and emotional responses to reinforce and create a meaningful religious experience.)

I think it was only later that elements of Platonic philosophy, and ages long battles to pound the rough metal of the Christian stories into a coherent and smooth narrative, along with a general trend toward becoming less violent, that drained the more horrific and ritualistic elements out of Christianity. It's worth noting that it took a long time and multiple attempts for Christian theology to work out not just that the sacrifice of Jesus was effective, but how it achieved that effect; well into the middle ages, a completely different theory of the effect of Jesus' "sacrifice" was believed than that preached as dogma today. And I think it all comes back to who we are as humans. We need a causal story to believe that person X caused B. It isn't enough for the person X to will that B, and then B occurs; something that X does ('A') must be instrumental in bringing about B. Otherwise, it's not as effective a narrative. (I'm reminded of an African tribe studied by anthropologist Pascal Boyer. According to people in this tribe, the cause of bad things is malevolent magic practiced by a witch against people whose interests are contrary to theirs. Thus, when a hut's roof collapses, the search for explanations is constrained, but not eliminated. The villagers know that roofs collapse, it's not rocket science. But they want to explain, not why it happened at all, but why it happened when it did. Again, we're always trying to use causality to connect intentions with effect; pure magic of the Harry Potter variety may be a somewhat late invention.)


(Regards the connection between blood and life, it's helpful to understand Galen's work and his effect on tradition. However, there were clever Greeks prior to this who likely had other understandings, though it's possible the implications weren't self-consciously known.)