Human Sacrifice

Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more human beings as part of a religious ritual (ritual killing). Its typology closely parallels the various practices of ritual slaughter of animals and of religious sacrifice in general. Human sacrifice has been practised in various cultures throughout history. Victims were typically ritually killed in a manner that was supposed to please or appease gods, spirits or the deceased, for example as a propitiatory offering, or as a retainer sacrifice when the King'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. By the Iron Age, with the associated developments in religion (the Axial Age), human sacrifice was becoming less common throughout the Old World, and came to be looked down upon as barbaric in pre-modern times (Classical Antiquity). Blood libel is a false charge of ritual killing.

Capital punishment has been described by an advocate as a 'thinly disguised manifestation of the ritualized killing of people'. Death by burning historically has aspects of both human sacrifice (Wicker Man, Tophet) and capital punishment (Brazen bull, tunica molesta). Detractors of the death penalty may consider all forms of capital punishment as secular variants of human sacrifice. Similarly, lynching, pogroms and genocides are sometimes interpreted as human sacrifice following Theodor W. Adorno. In modern times, even the practice of animal sacrifice has virtually disappeared from all major religions (or has been re-cast in terms of ritual slaughter), and human sacrifice has become extremely rare. Most religions condemn the practice, and present-day secular laws treat it as murder. In a society which condemns human sacrifice, the term ritual murder is used. In India, Sati, the immolation of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre, continued well into the 19th century, but is now very rare.