during my second year in graduate school
I almost fainted during class while
watching a video of an animal sacrifice
see I was taking a greco-roman religion
class and my professor was trying to
explain the nitty-gritty details of
animal sacrifice why did the Romans do
this how did the ritual really play out
living in the sanitized world of Boston
Massachusetts
I had never witnessed such a thing and I
really had no idea what an animal
sacrifice might look like so she pulled
up this video the sacrifice of a goat in
a West Bengal town
trigger warning major trigger warning a
goat gets beheaded in this video please
don't watch it if you can't handle that
and she gave us the same trigger
warnings she said she could have found a
lot more brutal gory videos but this one
is pretty tame but if you can't handle
it there's no shame to close your eyes
or look away we'll just discuss the
video afterwards I of course would do no
such thing as a self-respecting future
scholar of ancient religion would watch
the ritual with the objectivity of an
anthropologist as the guy flicked water
on the goat prayed over it and then
chopped his head off
at first this didn't bother me at all as
a future scholar of religion I sat back
and thought about the ritual wow what an
interesting combination of a water
ritual and an incantation to a deity how
fascinating but as i sat there mulling
over the ritual watching the twitching
body of the goat huh the body really
does twitch I started feeling
light-headed the voice of the professor
felt weirdly distant and I realized I
was about to faint
the only PhD student in a roomful of
undergraduates was about to faint
so I stared really hard at my iPad
pretending to take notes until the
feeling passed thank goodness but why
this reaction all of you who live in a
society where the public slaughtering of
animals is a common occurrence are
probably laughing at me but hey give me
a break I live in an American city where
even our meat comes in nicely vacuum
sealed packages but a thousand years ago
2,000 years ago this would have been a
common occurrence in cultures world
Native Americans in the American
Southwest probably sacrificed dogs
ritual burials of dogs appears starting
around 2500 years ago
buried in ceremonial structures Incan
communities in the Andean mountains
sacrificed llamas alpacas and guinea
pigs the Sami people of northern Europe
sacrificed reindeer but yet we read
about these rituals without making any
sense of them and in fact from our
modern perspective these rituals strike
us as inhumane brutal animal cruelty so
what's the deal with animal sacrifice
what are the origins of this ritual and
why did human societies worldwide
practice ritual slaughter for literally
thousands of years animal sacrifice the
ritualized slaughtering of an animal may
be one of humanity's oldest rituals but
how old are we talking as far as the
archaeological evidence goes we can
probably never pinpoint an exact date
when humans started ritually
slaughtering animals but the debate
hinges on before or after the pre
pottery Neolithic B period in the Near
East
basically before or after humans
domesticated animals the evidence for
before this period is pretty sparse but
there are a few scholars who support a
Paleolithic origins of animal sacrifice
a commonly cited case comes from
stellmoor Germany where 12 complete
reindeer skeletons were discovered in an
ancient lake bed large stones were found
inside the chest cavities of these
reindeer which might suggest the
purposeful wading down and sinking of
the carcasses as an offering by early
humans or maybe even the and athel's the
scholar Walter Burkert a historian of
ancient Greece also suggests that a site
in Siberia where they found 27 woolly
mammoth skulls all situated around a
single statue might suggest a mass
ritualized slaughter of woolly mammoths
I'm including a link in the description
below if you want to read his whole
argument but in short he argues that
animal sacrifice originated as an
outgrowth of humanity's early
hunter-gatherer history because these
early humans started to view killing as
something sacred it's supposedly
fostered group identity cooperation and
was
outlet for their killing instinct as
hunters however later scholars are not
convinced the evidence from the
Paleolithic period is just way too
sparse to make such definitive claims
almost all animal sacrifice that we see
throughout history involve domesticated
animals and not wild animals one of the
greatest religious studies scholars Jay
Z Smith is especially skeptical of the
pre domestication theory of sacrifice I
know of no unambiguous instance of
animal sacrifice performed by hunters
animal sacrifice appears to be
universally the ritual killing of
domesticated animals by agrarian or
pastoral societies Jay Z Smith goes on
to say that almost all instances of
animal sacrifice involve some sort of
complex ideologies that we see from more
settled civilizations such as what we
see in the laws of the Hebrew Bible
where sacrifice was tied up with their
notions of ritual purity and impurity or
in greco-roman religions where sacrifice
was seen as a form of exchange to carry
good favor with the gods
Smith concludes that these complex
notions of purity or exchange point to
domestication being a prerequisite for
animal sacrifice and therefore animal
sacrifice must date - after the
Paleolithic period when these
hunter-gatherer societies started to
raise animals and the archaeological
evidence seems to follow in Jordan
archeologists found a complete cow with
an unborn calf buried near a human the
cow was butchered and arranged in such a
way that make archaeologists think it
was a ritualized slaughter but our best
evidence comes from the Neolithic site
chattel hoyuk where they found a human
burial with a young lamb based on how
the lamb was buried it must have been
held up by the legs as the human was
buried so that the Lambs body would not
fall across the human body this suggests
that the lamb might have been
intentionally killed as an offering to
include in this human burial although we
can't be certain this archaeological
evidence seems to point to the Neolithic
period as the origins for animal
sacrifice stay tuned for the next video
and we'll see the theory behind animal
sacrifice
why did humans do this but until then
thanks for watching and I'll
next time