Here’s a word that conjures up a host of images from the divine to the profane – from luminous act to diabolic ritual.
I’ve often wondered what the human fascination with sacrifice is all about! Throughout our history humans have sacrificed and been sacrificed. This act has been perceived as an essential role in the human experience, without sacrifice (from stone-age culture to iron age civilization) society believed their tenuous hold on existence would be severed, the elemental gods, who seemed to carry human destiny in their hands, would be angered by the slight and cut off their sustenance. Harvests would fail, floods would sweep humanity away and plague would decimate the survivors.
Sacrifice was the insurance policy of the old world and, as is sadly the case today, became a central theme that ran through all aspects of society. Religious festivals, political cycles, military engagements, harvesting of food, all were punctuated with sacrifice and sometimes determined by it; the Spartans, military obsessionists that they were, would never begin a battle without consulting their oracles and obtaining favourable responses first, and they never made it to the battle of Marathon at all (the first and most famous of the Greek defeat of the Persian empire) because they couldn’t leave Sparta until their sacred games/festivities were concluded. For the same reason, Leonidas was unable to take a Spartan army to Thermopylae to hold the most easily defended pass that would have prevented the Persian advance into Greece; instead he took only 300 in a suicide mission (they would be facing 100s of thousands) and, in a strange irony, became a sacrifice to his people’s need to continue performing their sacrifices.
This desire/compulsion to perform sacrifice was, from the dawn of humanity as we know it, central to all aspects of life and central to the human psyches’ understanding of order in the universe.
Thus it became an aspect of communal life to which great importance was attached, and those who performed sacrifice for the community, became the all powerful priest-hoods of the ancient, and not so ancient world.
To become a priest one had to sacrifice one’s worldly existence. Thus the lure of psychological power was balanced by such pre-requisites, though this did not necessarily balance the use and abuse of that power, rather it twisted it into ever more corruption until, in the West at least, the role of the priest (and the religious institution that spawned them) became so synonymous with abuse that society rebelled against it, eventually reducing it to the crumbling edifice that it is today. However, society still wanted guarantee of security against life’s calamities so set up insurance companies to replace the moribund church, and these companies gladly stepped into the power vacuum thus created, and happily perpetrated similar abuses.
Throughout our history, we can trace, in every civilization, an obsession with sacrifice and its regular performance, and a deification of those who willingly sacrifice themselves for some greater purpose; the life and teachings of a prophet, mystic or political leader are brought into sharp focus if they can also sacrifice themselves in the process of sharing their wisdom or executing their tasks. If Jesus had not died on the cross, we would know nothing of him. If Leonidas had been a success in battle rather than a failure, and held the pass, he would have gone down as one of histories’ greatest commanders, but he would not have attained the God-like aura that has since been attributed to him.
It seems then, that in the human mind, sacrifice is a pre-requisite for connection with the divine and the human mind never acts in an arbitrary way; there is always a primal cause for human thought and action, however disassociated those thoughts appear to be from their source. By primal I mean that seeding, causative moment in human existence from which all other behaviour emerges. Thus primal is divine, it is our moment of absolute `natural state’ and it is this moment which binds us all together as one.
My questions to myself have often been – `Why do we sacrifice?’ What is it about performing and partaking in sacrifice that has so delighted and obsessed humanity from its inception? How can we inflict such acts of horror and cruelty on other beings (that would otherwise be construed as sadistic torture) and yet perceive this as acting in the light of divine truth and necessity?
These same questions were asked by 19th and 20th century anthropologists who recorded some of the most gruesome rites performed by stone-age culture across the globe. They were members of a society which was in the process of transferring its `sacrifice for divine protection’ racket from religion to commerciality and so couldn’t comprehend the connection on a religious level. To them, these were savage rites exercised by savage people who loved to engage in savagery for savagery’s sake.
But these ancient cultures were acting from the primal urge to sacrifice, because sacrifice is the ultimate truth for humanity. In our perception, we cannot offer up more than our lives, and a willing sacrifice of our life therefore appears to be our ultimate act of fulfillment of our experience and our purpose. For this reason, humanity has obsessed with sacrificial death since time immemorial, and yet, death of the body is not the ultimate offering we can make, in fact, our ultimate offering does not require death at all, it requires surrender.
This surrender is of our `self’, our ego, and because our ego is so convinced there is no existence without it, surrender is interpreted as death. Yet nothing is killed, no great dramatic episode of historic, egoic sacrifice is required or provoked by surrender – surrender is merely the giving up of the fight, the end of the resistance, with no hint of self-annihilation intrinsic within it. When the ego declares itself ready to die and cries to its God, come slay me
`for it is me you have come to hunt. [God] says laughingly, I am not here to hunt you but to save you’
For millennia we have been running from vengeful gods who are out to destroy us, and all this time they have been waiting for us to tire of our running and give up the futile fight so that they can save us from ourselves.
Surrender of the self, interpreted as death of the ego, played out as physical death in rites and rituals, is the sweet process of allowing the self to be exalted to the place of no-self. That is, no thought or deed for the self; all consciousness devoted to the divine. Only when the self becomes the no-self, can it step out of the illusion of `itself’ and into the reality of its own existence.
We deify sacrifice because it gives us a sense of intimate connection with divine energy, and we feel that that connection will bring us to a place of peace; but once again our motivation is misdirected
`We long for Peace so our troubles will go away [but] we are never given for our self, but always for others’
Our sacrifices have long been ways in which humanity has felt it can manipulate and control its reality, but the path to no-self lies in surrendering that very desire and embracing the reality as it is.
Jonathan