Concept

Human sacrifice

Overview

Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is typically intended to please or appease gods, a human ruler, public or jurisdictional demands for justice by capital punishment, an authoritative/priestly figure, spirits of dead ancestors, or as a retainer sacrifice, wherein a monarch's servants are killed in order for them to continue to serve their master in the next life. Closely related practices found in some tribal societies are cannibalism and headhunting. Human sacrifice is also known as ritual murder.

Human sacrifice was practiced in many societies, beginning in prehistoric times. By the Iron Age (1st millennium BCE), with the associated developments in religion (the Axial Age), human sacrifice was becoming less common throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia. During classical antiquity, it came to be looked down upon as barbaric. In the Americas, however, human sacrifice continued to be practiced, by some, to varying degrees until the European colonization of the Americas. Today, human sacrifice has become extremely rare.

Modern secular laws treat human sacrifices as murder. Most major religions in the modern day condemn the practice.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Nay, he is so favorable to the barbarians, that, acquitting Busiris of those human sacrifices and that slaughter of his guests for which he is accused, and attributing by his testimony to the Egyptians much religion and justice, he endeavors to cast that abominable wickedness and those impious murders on the Grecians. For in his Second Book he says, that Menelaus, having received Helen from Proteus and having been…
Plutarch, Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3
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Or what other expiations would they require? The queen of King Xerxes, Amestris, buried twelve men alive, as a sacrifice to Pluto to prolong her own life; and yet Plato saith, This God is called in Greek Hades, because he is placid, wise, and wealthy, and retains the souls of men by persuasion and oratory. That great naturalist Xenophanes, seeing the Egyptians beating their breasts and lamenting at the solemn times…
Plutarch, Plutarch's essays and miscellanies, Vol. 1
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12. _What death God intended, when He threatened our first parents with death if they should disobey His commandment._ When, therefore, it is asked what death it was with which God threatened our first parents if they should transgress the commandment they had received from Him, and should fail to preserve their obedience,--whether it was the death of soul, or of body, or of the whole man, or that which is called…
of Hippo Augustine, The City of God, Volume I
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Modernism.

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