Why offer gifts to gods? Anthropologists have argued about it for 150 years
Offering something up to a deity is among humanity's oldest religious acts, found from ancient Greece to the Aztecs and the Yoruba. Explaining it has proved harder. Thinkers have seen sacrifice as a gift, a shared meal with the divine, a way to bond a community, a release of hidden rivalry, and even a prop for male inheritance.
The Latin sacrificium joins sacra, holy things, with facere, to make. Other languages have their own terms, including the Indic yajna, Greek thusia and Semitic qorban. In Christianity the word came to cover the Eucharist, sometimes called a bloodless sacrifice. Everyday speech stretched it to any giving-up, whether helping others or losing a chess piece for a better position.
Early theorists split over purpose. E. B. Tylor saw a gift, prized for itself, as homage, or for what it cost the giver. William Robertson Smith, studying the Hebrew Bible, argued the point was communion with God, though later anthropologists rejected his link to totem animals. Emile Durkheim added a social dimension, using ethnographies of Aboriginal Australians to argue sacrifice strengthened community bonds; both his sources and his functionalism have since been questioned. His nephew Marcel Mauss, with Henri Hubert, framed it as an exchange in which gods were expected to repay more later.
Later ideas grew bolder. Sigmund Freud, in Totem and Taboo, read it as a guilt-laden replay of a primal crime against the father. Rene Girard countered that the victim is not guilty but a scapegoat, absorbing the rivalry that arises when people want what others have. Nancy Jay noted that men almost always performed the rites and argued they bolstered inheritance through the male line, contrasting ritual bloodshed with childbirth. Georges Bataille described sacrifice as the lavish spending of a society's surplus.
Animal offerings remain part of religious life. Muslims perform them each year at Eid al-Adha, and followers of Santeria make them to thank the orisha or seek healing, though such offerings form only a tiny part of the wider practice of ebo, which includes prayer and good deeds. Ancient Egypt, by contrast, restricted acceptable animals to a short list that included sheep, bulls and geese.
Source: Sacrifice
