Science and Spiritual Practices by Rupert Sheldrake

Author:Rupert Sheldrake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Ritual Sacrifice

Until recently, some traditional societies practiced human sacrifice, which is now banned by law everywhere. But it still happens, and is now called ritual murder. In 2006, in the Khurja region of Uttar Pradesh, India, about eighty-five kilometers from Delhi, there were dozens of child sacrifices to the goddess Kali, according to the local police.16 In 2008, a rebel commander in Liberia’s civil war admitted to taking part in human sacrifices as part of traditional ceremonies intended to ensure victory in battle. He said the sacrifices “included the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart, which was divided in pieces for us to eat.”17

In many cases, animal sacrifice is explicitly recognized as a substitute for human sacrifice, as in the Old Testament story of Abraham and his son Isaac. Abraham, believing that God required him to sacrifice Isaac, was about to do so when an angel of God stopped him, and he sacrificed a ram instead (Genesis 22:2–8).

In the Jewish Passover story, when God was about to unleash the final and most dreadful of his ten curses on the Egyptians, killing their first-born sons and the first-born of their cattle (Exodus 11:4–6), the Jewish people were passed over because they did as Moses had told them: Each household slaughtered a male lamb and sprinkled or smeared its blood on the doorposts and above the door. The slaughter of the lamb acted as a substitute for the death of Jewish young men and cattle. The Jewish people also had a ceremony in which all the sins of the community were laid upon a goat, which was then driven to its death in the wilderness, taking away their sins with it. This was the original scapegoat (Leviticus 16:8).

From a modern, secular perspective, the idea that a person or an animal should be sacrificed to save others makes no sense. But in evolutionary terms, it is a deep-seated pattern. When predators such as lions attack a herd of animals, they identify one member of the group that seems especially vulnerable because it is young, old, or lame, and kill it. When they have done so and their appetite is satisfied, the other members of the herd relax; they are safe for a while. The death of one member of the group has saved the others.18 The same theme underlies stories of dragons that threaten whole communities, and that can be appeased by being offered a child, often a virgin girl, as a victim. She dies for the sake of the others; she saves them by her death.

In her book Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich argues persuasively that for most of human history, humans were more like scavengers than hunters and lived in continual fear of predation:

Humans, and before them, hominids, could not always have been the self-confident predators depicted in the standard museum diorama. The savannah that our hominid ancestors strode (or, more likely, crept warily) into was populated not only by edible ungulates, but by a host of deadly

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