Sacrifice
A sacrifice is an offering made to a god or sacred power, often of food, drink, an animal or incense, and sometimes understood more broadly as giving up something valuable. In the ancient world, sacrifice was one of the main ways people expressed their relationship with the divine.[1]
Ancient Mediterranean sacrifice
The historian Susan Ashbrook Harvey describes sacrifice as the mark of the relationship between humans and gods in Greek and Roman culture, so much so that refusing to sacrifice could be called "atheism". Jews had a legal exemption because their Temple worship was recognised.[1]
Ancient thinkers also criticised sacrifice. Harvey notes that many philosophers held that a self-sufficient god needs nothing, so offerings must benefit the worshipper morally rather than the god. This led to the idea of "spiritual sacrifice", common in pagan, Jewish and Christian writing, and to the view that bloodless offerings such as incense were morally superior. The Neoplatonist Porphyry, drawing on Theophrastus, saw animal sacrifice as a sign of decline from a purer past.[1]
Christian reinterpretation
Harvey argues that early Christians were "a sacrificing people" in their language, even though they did not offer animals. The communion meal was described as the church's pure sacrifice, and martyrs were said to give off a pleasing scent like an offering.[2] Writers such as Irenaeus and Athenagoras argued that God needs no blood or incense, and offered "spiritual worship" instead. Origen read the whole burnt offering of the Bible as a picture of giving one's whole self to God.[3]
In Zoroastrianism
Jenny Rose notes that scholars disagree about whether the earliest Zoroastrian hymns, the Gathas, assume a ritual of sacrifice at all; the evidence is "inconclusive". Animal sacrifice is recorded around that period in Indian sources, and later in Iranian ones. The ancient Persian priests known as the magi made libations and offerings, including animals.[4][5] Rose also records offerings of oil and incense to fire and of liquids to water.[6]
Ritual timing
The scholar Robert Yelle reports Godfrey Lienhardt's observation that some Dinka sacrifices and rain rites fall at natural turning points of the year, so the ritual follows the cycle of nature rather than trying to control it.[7]
Sacrifice as a shared meal
In many traditions sacrifice is a meal shared with the gods. In Yoruba religion, according to Afe Adogame, ebo (sacrifice) is thought of as eating with, or feeding, the deities, and "ritual food is offered first to Ogun" before devotees eat with him.[8][9] See Feeding the gods in Yoruba religion. Sacrifice could also mark a landscape: the Nabataean city of Petra had a high place of sacrifice on the Incense Route.[10] In Greek sanctuaries, sacrifice took place at the altar outside the temple (see Greek sacred architecture).
See also
- Feeding the gods in Yoruba religion
- Greek sacred architecture
- Incense
- Altar
- Worship
- Ritual
- Zoroastrianism
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (2006). Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. University of California Press. pp. 21–24.
- ↑ Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (2006). Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. University of California Press. pp. 19–20.
- ↑ Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (2006). Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. University of California Press. pp. 24–28.
- ↑ Rose, Jenny (2014). "Zoroastrians Present and Past". Zoroastrianism: An Introduction. I.B. Tauris.
- ↑ Rose, Jenny (2014). "The Ancient Persians: Truth-Tellers and Paradise-Builders". Zoroastrianism: An Introduction. I.B. Tauris.
- ↑ Rose, Jenny (2014). "A Zoroastrian Presence from Seleucia to Sistan: The Parthian Period". Zoroastrianism: An Introduction. I.B. Tauris.
- ↑ Yelle, Robert A. (2012). "The poetics of ritual performance". Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History. Bloomsbury Academic.
- ↑ Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. p. 212.
- ↑ Adogame, Afe (2026). "Eating: Feasting with the Deities: African Foodscapes and Ritual Imagination". In Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg; Zeller, Benjamin E. (eds.). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Food. Bloomsbury. pp. 212–213.
- ↑ Hancock, James F. (2021). "Land of Punt and the Incense Routes". Spices, Scents and Silk: Catalysts of World Trade. CABI. section "Nabataeans". ISBN 9781789249774.