Carrying on from last week's post reading A History of Religious Ideas Volume 1 by Mircea Eliade. This week was chapters 5-8. However, there is a lot to digest, so these high level musings don't even scratch the surface or do it justice.

TLDR: The concept of sacrifice is a super interesting emergent idea in the development of human religious thought and it seems like we've taken a looooong time to settle on the incomplete understanding we have of it now.

The collective fascination with Death continues after ancient Egypt throughout Europe through the mysterious megalithic structures like Stonehenge. There was widespread worship of the Great Goddess, and these structures likely had associations to tombs as well as wombs, connecting death to sexuality and new life. In Crete, worship was performed in sacred caves. Caves also resemble the Goddess and the descent into them was an ordeal of initiation and the performance of rituals. The idea was continued with the construction of labyrinths. Both represented a descent into Hades, the underworld. Simultaneously, people were just figuring out how to work with metals and alloys, so metallurgy becomes a sort of sacred craft and a precursor to alchemy.

In the middle east of the Caananites, worship of the Feminine continues, but as Aryan invaders sweep into the area, they bring a colorful mythology of the Baal, the storm god, doing battle with a primordial dragon. A version of this story is in many different cultures at this time. His victory in the battle over the symbolic forces of chaos seems to be representative of a new emergent order. Perhaps conscious man is starting to feel more "in control" of his environment?

This is followed by the emergence of the Israelites and the birth of a sense of monotheism. Of particular interest, I find the changing relationship to the concept of sacrifice very important. Other gods are demanding exterior sacrifices of animals and such, while the Israelites are called to make behavioral sacrifices by living with morality, in accordance with the laws of the 10 commandments. This story is kicked off dramatically when the founder Abraham is called to sacrifice his son, Isaac, but it's called off a the last moment. It continues up to the time of Jesus, where God sacrifices his own son for the people, up to today where we talk about time preference in Bitcoin :)

Lastly, a similar idea is emerging in India through the Vedic texts. Karma, the law of "cause and effect" was "discovered". Apparently some of that writing is detailing religious rituals to perform various sacrifices. So perhaps sacrifices a way of planting a good cause in hopes of a positive effect? As people investigate this, the idea emerges that the highest form of sacrifice is that of consecrating one's own life energy through tapas, or spiritual practice. A cosmic mythology emerges that Purusa, the One Being, essentially created the cosmos by generating a ton of heat and sacrificing himself. It sounds like the belief was that by performing sacrifices, practitioners were slowly putting the pieces of him back together, toward a complete cosmos. A world view detailing the human experience as an unending cycle of ignorance -> good/bad actions -> good/bad next life. With the Upanishads, the experiential discovery of certain mystics that man contains an aspect of the Universal Nature inside himself through meditation, brings the emphasis on knowledge or wisdom of this fact for each individual.

So much more interesting stuff about sacrifice. I also remember that the story of Odin was briefly mentioned, where he decided to try and perform the "ultimate sacrifice" where he hung himself from a sacred tree and dedicated the sacrifice to... HIMSELF. It's crazy to me that the parallels and extremely moving examples of collective humanity exploring this concept can be found in many cultures all over the world.

Looking forward to Buddhism and the Greeks next week.