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20 hours ago · Ritual killing was a common part of religious sacrifice in the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. For decades, media depictions cast the victims of these acts as young women and adolescent girls.
Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is usually intended to please or appease gods, a human ruler, public or jurisdictional demands for justice by capital punishment, an authoritative/priestly figure or spirits of dead ancestors or as a retainer sacrifice, wherein a monarch's servants are killed in ...
- Rationales For Human Sacrifice
- The Shaky Origins of Sacrificing Humans
- The Disappearance of Sacrifices
The history of human sacrifice is closely connected to the history of religion and superstition. “Prehistoric religion,” writes John Skinner, “originated as a magical sacrament intended to deny the reality of death.” In his text, Ritual Matricide: A Study of the Origins of Sacrifice, Skinner discusses how our fear and curiosity about death manifest...
While history knows no shortage of societies that practiced human sacrifice, experts have yet to agree on where and when it first originated. Because the practice was widely described in antiquity, it’s safe to say that human sacrifice also occurred during prehistory. Unfortunately, the lack of written or verbal recordsprevent us from reconstructin...
In classical antiquity, human sacrifice was already considered a thing of the past by many world cultures. When Rome was still a kingdom, citizens were at times sacrificed to appease the gods. According to historian Pliny the Elder, however, human sacrifices virtually disappeared during the republic and were abolished completely by senatorial decre...
When the going got tough, it was believed sacrificing a virgin to the gods—by throwing them into the sea, burying them alive, or leaving them for hungry monsters—was the best plan. Virgin sacrifice could be done for a number of widely accepted reasons: from winning a war, to appeasing an angry deity, or merely to protect architecture.
Scholars have examined the virgin sacrifices of Athenian tragedy extensively in recent years, exploring the connections between marriage and death, sacrifice and girls' initiations, and sacrifice and the psychology of war.1 There is no agreement about whether the ritual background behind these sacrifices is the
May 25, 2024 · Human sacrifice, the offering of the life of a human being to a deity. The occurrence of human sacrifice can usually be related to the recognition of human blood as the sacred life force. Bloodless forms of killing, however, such as strangulation and drowning, have been used in some cultures.
Virgin sacrifice is a type of ritual killing rather than a proper sacrifice. Identifying virgin sacrifice as a type of ritual killing differentiates it from other kinds of killings, such as executions, murder, or death in battle.
