Sacrificer

“ The use as a sacrifice to the dead of a gift dedicated to a god, clearly indicates that the two forms of sacrifice possessed an identical significance. The deceased takes with him into the underworld part of the person of the sacrificer. ”

“ Each victim must be without blemish and healthy, and it must not be weakened and desecrated by labour. Before the animal was killed the sacrificer laid his hand on its head for a time; then he who offered the sacrifice, whether priest or layman, slew the victim, but only the priest could receive the warm blood in the sacrificial vessel. ”

“ Thus Agni became not merely an agent at the sacrifice, a mystic sacrificial priest, but, since the sacrificial gifts simply contained him in material form, a sacrificer, who offered his own body in sacrifice.2 While man sacrificed God, God at the same time sacrificed himself. ”

“ The victim itself stands with its forefeet shackled together; the sacrificer stands behind the beast, and throws it down by plucking the end of the rope; as the victim falls, he invokes whatever god it is to whom he sacrifices. ”

“ The place of sacrifice is an enclosure with a little house or shrine in which the relics are kept; it is new or old according as the man whose ghost is worshipped died lately or long ago. When a public sacrifice is performed, the people assemble near but not in the sacred place; boys but not women may be present. The sacrificer alone enters the shrine, but he takes with him his son or other person whom he has instructed in the ritual. Muttering an incantation he kindles a fire of sticks, but may not blow on the holy flame. ”

“ The blood of the victim may be drunk by the priest as a means of inducing inspiration, its entrails may be employed in divination, its flesh consumed in a common meal, exposed to the birds and beasts of prey or buried in the earth.
It is equally impossible to give a general survey of the purposes of sacrifice; not only are they too numerous but it is rare to find any but mixed forms; the scapegoat, for example, is also a messenger to the dead, and its flesh is eaten by the sacrificers. ”

“ This they did by sacrificing a victim and effecting communion with the god by the application of its blood to the altar; or, more directly, by the sacrifice of the animal-god and the contact of the sacrificer with its blood.
(e) Dr Westermarck takes the view that human sacrifice is as a rule an act of substitution, in that men offer a victimiin the hope of saving themselves; but he also recognizes funeral sacrifices of various kinds. Certain sacrifices of animals he explains as intended to transfer a conditional curse. ”

“ Yet more: the immense importance of sacrifice in the inferior religions raises the mere rite itself to a position of unrivalled efficacy as gauged by the childlike notions that have given it birth, so that at last it acquires an intrinsic and magical virtue in the eyes of the sacrificers. ”

“ Deliver me from blood, O God, Thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall extol Thy justice.
O Lord, Thou wilt open my lips: and my mouth shall declare Thy praise.
For if Thou hadst desired sacrifice, I would indeed have given it: with burnt offerings Thou wilt not be delighted.
A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit: a contrite and humble heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.
Deal favourably, O Lord, in Thy good will with Sion: that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up. ”

“ If you suppose that you can offer sacrifice, God Himself thus speaks of you as most abandoned sinners: ‘The wicked man,’ He says, ‘that sacrificeth a calf is as if he cut off a dog’s neck; and he that offereth an oblation, as if he offered swine’s blood.’ [1] Recognize herein your sacrifice, who have already poured out human blood. ”

“ In fact, those who burnt a lamb or a bull, or refused to enable a drowning man to escape, or who buried an animal under a foundation stone, had no notion whatever as to any Being to whom the offering was made. I have spoken with those who have been engaged in such rites, and have assured myself that they have believed only in the sacrifice being remedial, but have had no thought of it as an oblation to any deity or devil. ”

“ I do not bring the sacrifice of blood, nor yet burnt offerings for sin.
15. The sacrifices I would bring to thee, O God, are purity in life, a contrite heart, a spirit full of faith and love, and these thou wilt receive.
16. And when he had thus read, he gave the book back to the keeper of the books, and then he said,
17. Upon these ends of earth these messages of God have come.
18. Our people have exalted sacrificial rites and have neglected mercy, justice and the rights of men.
19. You Pharisees, you priests, you scribes, your God surfeited with blood; God does not heed your prayers ”

“ All things depend on his beneficent, nay divine activity, from the heaven above to the earth beneath, from the greatest god to the meanest worm, from the sun and moon to the humblest blade of grass and the minutest particle of dust. Happily this grandiose theory of sacrifice as a process essential to the salvation of the world does not oblige the priest to imitate his glorious prototype by dismembering his own body and shedding his blood on the altar ”

“ Afterwards he is brought forth at the sacrifice performed in honour of the goddess, and is anointed with fragrant ointment and sacrificed together with other victims. The sacrifice is performed in the following manner. A person, having in his hand a sacred lance, with which it is the custom to sacrifice human victims, advances out of the crowd and pierces the heart through the side, which he does from experience in this office. When the man has fallen, certain prognostications are indicated by the manner of the fall, and these are publicly declared. ”

“ And on the ordinarily accepted view of the origin of sacrifice—which regards it as a gift to propitiate a superior being—this can be easily understood as the avoidance of the worshipper of taking what belongs especially to the god, the essence of the victim’s life, the blood. ”

“ The origin and meaning of sacrifices constitute a central problem of ancient religion. It links indeed the stronghold of orthodox Christianity—its doctrine of the Atonement—with the most barbarous customs of primitive savages. When we hear of the Lamb slain for sinners, the very phrase takes us back to the time when sins were formally placed upon the heads of unconscious animals that they might be held accursed instead of man; and to the yet older notion of human sacrifice as a most acceptable offering to the gods. ”

“ My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice—the blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled, through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are bent to destroy, for purposes so grievous, that they cry to heaven. ”

“ Then, again, when it came to the offering of the sacrifice, I must needs wait for the space of an hour whilst others were offering up their sacrifices; and the Levites and priests seemed all in haste, and did their work rather as an handicraft than as worship; and many others were sacrificing at the same time, and the cries and struggles of the victims, and the smoke and reek of the fat, and the blood flowing on all sides, caused the place to seem rather like a butcher’s shambles than like the House of the Lord. Now all this I had known and seen aforetime, yet had I never taken it to heart. ”

“ O God, thou wilt not despise—Psalm li. 16, 17.
I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord.—Psalm cxvi. 17.
For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.
Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice, and offering thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared me.—Hebrews, x. 4, 5.
See where man’s voluntary sacrifice
Bows His meek head, the God eternal dies!
Fixed to the Cross His bleeding arms are bound,
While copious Mercy streams from every wound. ”

“ For, however absurd it may seem to us, it is a very widespread custom to sacrifice to a divinity his living representative or incarnation, whether in animal or human form. It is believed in such cases that the victim's spirit, released by sacrifice, forthwith finds a home in another body. ”

“ From the seasonal sacrifices the poet passes to the sacrifice to God at the border altar in the spring,--no doubt the same which is referred to in the last ode of the first decade of the Sacrificial Odes of Kâu.
3. The subject of the seasonal sacrifices is resumed.
4. A piece of wood was fixed across the horns of the victim-bulls, to prevent their injuring them by pushing or rubbing against any hard substance. An animal injured in any way was not fit to be used in sacrifice.
5. In sacrificing to the duke of Kâu, a white bull was used by way of distinction. ”

“ Dipping and smoking customs, originally magical, grow to be regarded as modes of sacrificial death. Other such waifs of the past become the inheritance of play. As the old conception of sacrifice passed into the new one, the subsidiary rites, through which the sacramental influence had of old been distributed over the worshippers and their fields, although by no means disused, lost their primitive meaning. Similarly, when human sacrifice was abolished, that too left traces of itself, only imperfectly intelligible, in mock or symbolical deaths, or in the election of the temporary king. ”

“ A man who took a captive in war gave him to the priest to be sacrificed, and he might not eat of the flesh, "since the victim was in a sense his son," that is, took the place of his son as a vicarious sacrifice for himself. They also sacrificed their own infants.1958 Child sacrifice expresses the deepest horror and suffering produced by experience of the human lot. Men must do it. Their interests demanded it, however much it might pain them. Human sacrifices may be said to have been universal. ”

“ Many a man who had found the endless formulæ and the showy ceremonial of the sacrifice a serious hindrance to real religion, sought refuge from the noise and distraction of the popular cult in the lonely silence of forest or desert. To run over the sacrifice in one’s own mind, they reasoned, was as acceptable to the gods as to kill the horse or to pour the ghee upon the altar fire. But they soon reached the further position, that for the man who has attained TRUE KNOWLEDGE sacrifice is altogether unnecessary. ”

“ In a Sacrifice there is something offered to God and destroyed, thus signifying that God is the Author of Life and Death, our Creator, our Ruler, our Supreme Judge. The excellence of the Christian Sacrifice—the Sacrifice of the Mass—consists in this, that the victim offered is a living, reasonable, Divine Victim, even the Son of God Incarnate, Who by His Life and Death rendered most worthy homage to the Divine Majesty, and still in every Mass, continually, offers it anew. ”

“ First the sacrifice must be slain by the priest, and die, then cut in pieces and salted, and then laid upon the fire. Unless the priest first slays the lamb, so that it dies, it is neither salted nor brought to the Lord for a burnt offering. ”

“ It is, however, noticeable, that in the majority of these stories, although not in all, the dragon or monster slain has his dwelling in water, and this leads to the consideration of yet another sophistication of the primitive notion of sacrifice. According to this notion sacrifice was necessarily bloody; in the shedding of blood and in the sacrament of blood partaken of by the worshippers, lay the whole gist of the rite: a bloodless sacrifice would have no raison d’être. ”

“ But of primitive sacrifice generally we may affirm that it consists of such food and drink as men themselves partake of. Whether it be the fruit of the field or the firstling of the flock that is offered at the sacred stone, whether the offering is burnt before the god or set down and left near him, or whether he is summoned to come down from the sky or to travel from the far country to which he may have gone, it is of the materials of a meal that the sacrifice consists. ”

“ Surely it is clear that it will be, by our doing good to our enemies.
“And gave Himself up for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odor of a sweet smell.”
Seest thou that to suffer for one’s enemies is “a sweet-smelling savor,” and an “acceptable sacrifice”? And if thou shalt die, then wilt thou be indeed a sacrifice. This it is to “imitate God.”
Ver. 3. “But fornication, and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as becometh saints.” ”

“ Acceptable unto God - Ευαρεστον· The sacrifice being perfect in its kind, and the intention of the offerer being such that both can be acceptable and well pleasing to God, who searches the heart. All these phrases are sacrificial, and show that there must be a complete surrender of the person - the body, the whole man, mind and flesh, to be given to God; and that he is to consider himself no more his own, but the entire property of his Maker. ”

“ When the stern, savage Druids warred, they called for a human victim, as a sacrifice to their gods{191}—as an offering and atonement for their sins—as a sacrifice worthy to propitiate their gods to grant them victory. ”

“ Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.... To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand? (Is. 1 : 13, 11, 12.)
God Forbids Human Sacrifice. ”