Why Some Civilizations Practiced Child Sacrifice

76: this is the number of remains of children sacrificed recently discovered near the Peruvian city of Huanchaco. Several hundred bones of the same nature had already been unearthed on this archaeological site, where the pre-Columbian civilization lived Chimu. But why sacrifice children?

The existence of child sacrifice in ancient societies is a proven reality. We find traces of it in particular in America, in pre-Columbian civilizations. George Bataille refers to these practices in The cursed part (1949) : “The Mexicans sacrificed children who were chosen from among their own. But one had to envisage severe penalties against those who moved away from their cortege, when they went to the furnace bridges. The sacrifice is made of a mixture of anguish and frenzy. » We also find traces of it among the peoples of the Middle East, in the form of rituals dedicated to the god Molochsentenced in Leviticus : “Thou shalt not hand over any of thy children to pass over to Moloch” (Le 18:21).

These practices are associated by the Bible with the Canaanites, but they were current, at a remote time, among many tribes of the region: Moabites, Israelites, etc. The Carthaginians also practiced molkthe sacrifice of newborns, to honor the deity Ba’al Hammon during public holocausts which will be replaced, with the Roman domination, by animal sacrifices (even if the sacrifices of children will continue to take place in private). the molk Punic, studied by the historian Marcel Le Glay in African Saturn (1961-66), is featured in the novel salammbô (1862) by Flaubert.

For now, human sacrifices on European soil are not clearly attested but the debate remains open. And to close this somewhat morbid panorama, and although this terrifying practice has largely disappeared, certain human groups continue to indulge in it, as in Uganda, where children are sometimes targeted through witchcraft practices.

The value of innocence

Why, exactly, sacrifice children? The various lines of interpretation all assume a return to the meaning of the sacrifice itself. In his natural history of religion (1757), Hume writing : “A sacrifice is considered as a present: however, to give a thing to God, it must be destroyed for man. » Sacrifice is a gift made to the gods. The more expensive it is for men, the more valuable the offering is for the deities – and the more great benefits can be expected from them. What could be more costly for a parent than to immolate his child? Isn’t that the ultimate sacrifice – as the Bible itself assumes with the sacrifice of isaacdemanded of Abraham as an act of faith and then voluntarily interrupted – so the one that has the most effect on the gods?

The very innocence of the sacrificed, whose holocaust is completely arbitrary, without reason, further exacerbates this difficulty of putting a child to death. The British Esoteric Thinker Aleister Crowley says it in his own way Magick in Theory and Practice : “For the highest spiritual work, you must always choose a victim with the greatest and purest strength. The most suitable and satisfying object, in this case, is the very child of perfect innocence and intelligence. »

excess energy

One could object that this interpretation is biased by a very modern vision, which gives the child a considerable value that he did not necessarily have in the past. But how, then, to understand the sacrifice of his offspring? Allusively, Bataille approaches the subject from the point of view of a general energy saving companies. According to him, life is characterized by an excess of energy, which constantly threatens societies with collapse. This superabundance must imperatively be consumed, squandered. This is the meaning of sacrificial rituals in general. But why that of children in particular?

Perhaps precisely because children, births, reproduction are all facets expressing the overabundance of energy. It is moreover by the partial renunciation of begetting that a society like the Tibetan has managed to “to give the problem of surplus a solution which seals its explosive violence from within: an internal construction so perfect, so free from counter-costs so contrary to accumulation, that one cannot envisage the slightest increase in the system. The celibacy of the mass of monks even introduced a threat of depopulation. […] The income of the monasteries ensured the consumption of wealth, keeping alive a mass of sterile consumers. »

The marginality of the child

Moreover, the child, insofar as he mixes the features of his mother and his father, evokes a certain lack of distinction between the sexes, which makes him a privileged victim of sacrificial crises, which are always for Rene Girard crises of indifferentiation, of confusion. When a human community is under threat, this threat awakens the buried violence underlying the social order. It must then be expelled, warded off, by concentrating it on a “sacrificial victim” whose death, it is hoped, will drive away evil. The victim, of course, has no real responsibility in the case. It is strictly arbitrary. But his choice meets certain criteria, as Girard points out in Violence and the Sacred (1972):

“Society seeks to divert towards a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificable’ victim, a violence that threatens to strike its own members, those it intends to protect at all costs. […] We now understand why ritual victims are almost always borrowed from the categories […] marginalized, slaves, children, cattle, etc. We have seen above that this marginality allows the sacrifice to exercise its function. For the victim to be able to polarize the aggressive tendencies, for the transference to take place, […] the victim must be neither too much nor too little foreign to this same community”

Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred

From this point of view, “the weakest and most helpless beings, especially young children” make suitable victims: not because they would have a particularly high value, but because they are not yet counted as men within the human community.

Mystical Frenzy

The child is of course not the only one to claim such marginality. The ruler or the ruling class may on occasion become sacrificial victims. The criteria can actually be combined, and tend to be in times of intense crisis. “The more acute the crisis, the more precious the victim must be. » This is what happens in salammbôduring the siege of Carthage. “The choice had to fall exclusively on large families”on General Hamilcar’s child in particular (whom his father tries to save by substituting another child for him).

The heirs of the powerful are doubly suited victims because they combine two forms of marginality. “They are not men, but oxen”, launch the priests by immolant them. While peace allows a moderation of the sacrificial logic, and in a transfer of this logic on ever less human objects (animals, drinks, etc.), the crisis provokes a tension and an outburst. “As the priests hurried, the frenzy of the people increased. » The people are taken by a “mystical voluptuousness”. The sacralization of the ritual, supposed to channel violence, becomes the vector of its exacerbation in the event of crises – in situations of war or, as is perhaps the case with the Chimù peoplefamine.