On the Complexity of Sacrifice
Friday 08 March 2024
I am surprised that there is not more of an anthropological literature on sacrifice than in fact there is. Sacrifice is such a perennial aspect of human society, and it appears in so many forms, I would expect that would be several well established and familiar theories of sacrifice. While I haven’t done any focused research, I’m not aware of this being the case, unlike, say, everyone is aware that there are several contending theories of state formation, so you know that if you enter into this debate, you have to bring yourself up to date on the major schools of thought.
Another example I could use would be totemism, beginning in the nineteenth century with John Ferguson McLennan’s The Worship of Animals and Plants, who was then criticized by Edward Burnett Tylor and many others, with James Frazer (of The Golden Bough fame) writing a large treatise on totemism. Freud wrote Totem and Taboo, which has sparked debate and criticism for more than a hundred years, and Lévi-Strauss gives us the structuralist reading of totemism. My point is that the literature on totemism is reasonably well known. I guess another way of making this point would be to say that the study of totemism achieved a paradigmatic state in the nineteenth century, while sacrifice remains, in some sense, pre-paradigmatic.
Of course, it isn’t quite right to say that the study of sacrifice is pre-paradigmatic (which is why I put “in some sense” in italics in the previous paragraph); many of the anthropological writers on religion have touched repeatedly on sacrifice, and the literature mentioned above on totemism is among this anthropological literature, which could be called sacrifice-adjacent. Because sacrifice is so pervasive and takes so many forms, one couldn’t realistically study religion and not also study sacrifice. But sacrifice has not been a major theme for anthropology or related social science disciplines.
There is an enormous devotional literature on sacrifice, and here sacrifice is a major theme. Christianity is constructed on a myth of sacrifice, and the central symbol of Christianity, the cross, is a symbol of sacrifice. But while devotional literature can offer insights, it is no substitute for a scientific literature. Even if science gets off on the wrong foot, it can ultimately correct itself if it is not corrupt, though that process of correction may only occur over the longue durée.
I think about problems of sacrifice every so often, but what brought it back to mind recently was listening to Elizabeth Vandiver’s lectures on Herodotus, in which she relates the story of Polycrates, related by Herodotus in Book III of the Histories. Polycrates was the tyrant of Samos in the sixth century BC. The most famous story associated with Polycrates is that of Polycrates’ ring, and this is central to the theme of sacrifice that interests me. Amasis, the king of Egypt, wrote to tell Polycrates that Polycrates was not only fortunate, but that he was too fortunate, and that he had better select the possession that he valued the most and rid himself of it, since the gods are jealous and aren’t likely to look kindly on a all-too-fortunate mortal. Polycrates took this warning seriously, so he chose his favorite signet ring and threw it in the sea with some fanfare (Herodotus says he went in a galley with fifty oars). But a few days later a fisherman presented Polycrates with an especially large and beautiful fish, and, when the fish was being prepared, Polycrates’ ring was found in its belly. So poor Polycrates couldn’t even voluntarily rid himself of his wealth. And he did indeed come to a terrible end, as Amasis had predicted, when he fell victim to a Persian ruse.
Implicit in the story of Polycrates is a theory of sacrifice. Sacrifice restores the moral universe to a proper balance. Most lives consist of their proper portions of ups and downs, rewards and punishments. A man like Polycrates violates that moral order, and to atone for his unusually fortunate life, he must come to an unusually bad end. Poor men offer small sacrifices, and rich men offer proportionately magnificent sacrifices, and this fulfills the moral demands of the universe. We recall that Socrates’ last recorded words were, “I owe a cock to Asclepius,” and asking Crito to pay it. It was a tradition that a poor man cured of an illness offered a cock to Asclepius, while a rich man was expected to offer a sheep (if memory serves).
There is something more in the story of Polycrates, however, and that is that the practices implicitly entailed by the implicit theory of sacrifice are evolutionarily adaptive within a community. If those who have been unusually fortunate regard their good fortune as tempting the gods to punish them in order to make an example of them (divine exemplary justice), and therefore they rid themselves of some of their treasures, effectively redistributing them within the community, this community is going to be more likely to survive and to thrive than a community in which this is not a practice.
Sacrifice would seem to be a paradigm case of maladaptive behavior — how can it ever be an evolutionary advantage to divest oneself of one’s assets? — and I think that we sometimes do think of sacrifice as a bizarre and unaccountable survival from the deep past, with its roots in the irrational side of human nature. That seems to make sacrifice comprehensible to us in a superficial way, but it really depends upon who divests themselves of what, and under what circumstances. And, again, sacrifice takes a great many forms. Clearly there would be an evolutionary advantage for a given society, like the Aztecs, to sacrifice captives of war and members of subject peoples, although equally clearly there is something more going on in the spectacular human sacrifices of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
Another sacrifice can be found in Chapter XII of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, in an episode that resembles Polycrates’ sacrifice of his ring. Rebecca conceives the idea of, “some mild form of self-punishment to be applied on occasions when she was fully convinced in her own mind that it would be salutary.” This leads to the following episode:
“Self -punishment, then, to be adequate and proper, must begin, like charity, at home, and unlike charity should end there too. Rebecca looked about the room vaguely as she sat by the window. She must give up something, and truth to tell she possessed little to give, hardly anything but — yes, that would do, the beloved pink parasol. She could not hide it in the attic, for in some moment of weakness she would be sure to take it out again. She feared she had not the moral energy to break it into bits. Her eyes moved from the parasol to the apple-trees in the side yard, and then fell to the well curb. That would do; she would fling her dearest possession into the depths of the water. Action followed quickly upon decision, as usual. She slipped down in the darkness, stole out the front door, approached the place of sacrifice, lifted the cover of the well, gave one unresigned shudder, and flung the parasol downward with all her force. At the crucial instant of renunciation she was greatly helped by the reflection that she closely resembled the heathen mothers who cast their babes to the crocodiles in the Ganges.”
Most mortifying of all, Rebecca is discovered when the parasol becomes entangled in the well machinery, is extracted, and she is found out and has to confess. I have to wonder if Kate Douglas Wiggin was thinking of Polycrates’ ring when she wrote this. But while the justification of Polycrates’ sacrifice takes place in a pre-Christian context, Rebecca’s sacrifice occurs in a Christian context, and evokes several Christian concepts. This incident is explained as a form of martyrdom, and martyrdom is a form of self-sacrifice.
One could simply conclude that Rebecca is a masochist, and that she derives a perverse joy from suffering, so that she must at times be the agent of her own suffering if she is to experience that joy. Given that the book allows for, “the tortuous mental processes that led [her] into throwing [her] beloved pink parasol into Miranda Sawyer’s well,” we need not entirely rule out an element of masochism in this episode (nor need we rule out the possibility that Rebecca is on a path to hybristophilia, itself a complex and polysemous phenomenon), but it isn’t merely masochism; there is a great deal more going on here, and Wiggin makes this plain. I am reminded of what Nietzsche wrote of the will in Beyond Good and Evil, section 19:
“Philosophers tend to talk about the will as if it were the most familiar thing in the world. In fact, Schopenhauer would have us believe that the will is the only thing that is really familiar, familiar through and through, familiar without pluses or minuses. But I have always thought that, here too, Schopenhauer was only doing what philosophers always tend to do: adopting and exaggerating a popular prejudice. Willing strikes me as, above all, something complicated, something unified only in a word — and this single word contains the popular prejudice that has overruled whatever minimal precautions philosophers might take.”
In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche follows up this skepticism on a larger scale in regard to the idea of punishment, which takes up most of the second essay in the book, with section 13 of the second essay laying out eleven different meanings of punishment.
In this same spirit, I would say that sacrifice is above all something complicated, something unified only in a word. Moreover, punishment can be a form of sacrifice, so it would be possible to read Nietzsche’s second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals through the lens of sacrifice, and I expect that much could be learned from this effort. Whether one is casting a signet ring or a pink parasol into the depths, no one theory, such as we might find in a paradigmatic scientific literature, is going to be able to capture all that is happening in this act, but I still feel the want of such a body of knowledge.
