“Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Abraham awoke in the early morning. He remembered his dream and he knew immediately what had befallen him. He arose, saddled his donkey, and took alone with him his son Isaac as he set out into the wilderness.

Riding his donkey, holding his son, he traveled for three days and nights. They did not stop or make camp, and Abraham ate sparingly, though he kept Isaac well-fed. On the third day, the donkey collapsed. They walked the rest of the way. And then they climbed together a mountain in the desert. The child had no sense of what was to come, but he had faith in his father.

Isaac at his side, Abraham built the fire that he would use to immolate Isaac’s corpse. He knew what would be roasted in its heat, and was not at all sorry for it, because he knew that he would, in that act, become the very will of God, and thus intimate to the divine order of the cosmos.

He set a stone by the fire. With his left hand, Abraham held the child at the neck against the stone. With the right, he pressed the knife against his throat. Isaac twisted his head and looked up at his father in terror, and Abraham spoke: “Dawn is the head of the sacrificial child. The sun is the eye of the sacrificial child, the wind his breath, the fire that is in all men his open mouth, the year his body. The sky is his back, middle-air his belly, earth his flanks, the directions his two sides, the intermediate directions his ribs, the seasons his two limbs, the months and half-months his joints, the days and nights his feet, the constellations his bones, the clouds his flesh. The food in his stomach is the sands; the rivers are his bowels, liver and lungs; the mountains, plants and trees are his hairs; the rising sun is his front half, the setting sun his rear half; when he yawns, it lightens; when he shakes himself, it thunders; when he urinates, it rains; speech is his voice.”

Isaac did not understand. His father seem transformed, alien. The clouds circling above his head became a gate to another world, and Abraham seemed to Isaac more of that world than of this one.

“I call you back to the intimacy of the divine world, of the profound immanence of all that is.” He drew the knife across Isaac’s throat and his blood spilled out onto the stone.

OM

This is full; that is full;

When fullness is taken from fullness,

Fullness remains.

OM

Peace, Peace, Peace

The foregoing is adapted, in large part, from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (the Great Forest Teaching) as translated by Valerie J. Roebuck, from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as translated by Alastair Hannay, and from Bataille’s Theory of Religion as translated by Robert Hurley.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is an ancient Hindu text. It is one of the oldest texts of Hinduism, a religion — or, more properly, a family of religions — in which sacrifice has played a central role, as it seems to have in many religions, and in a substantially different way than it does in modern religion. The text is probably at least 2500 years old, but its exact dating and authorship are unknown. The Upanishads are texts sacred to various branches of Hinduism, and this one in particular is a beautiful and remarkable explication of Hindu metaphysics and the nature of the soul. The above passage, which opens the opens the text, concerns the sacred rite of Ashvamedha, the Horse Sacrifice. The Teaching expresses an alignment between the world and the entire cosmos, between macrocosm and microcosm.

Ashvamedha is performed at the end of a year in which the horse is allowed to roam free, followed around by an army. Those into whose territory the horse wanders may challenge the army and thus the authority of the king over that region. If the horse returns, the king is affirmed as sovereign and the horse is sacrificed in an elaborate ritual in which the Rigveda — the highest of Hinduism’s many sacred texts — is read, thus aligning the world with the cosmos. Ashvamedha was performed as recently as 1716, by Jai Singh II.

Hinduism has always fascinated me. I have to first point out that the word “Hinduism” is a colonial (etic) template laid over an indigenous (emic) foundation in which that word doesn’t quite translate to any one word in English. The word “religion” as it is understood in the West is understood by those whom we call Hindus only in the modern context of Western influence. Sanātana dharma is what they call it, and this roughly translates as “eternal truth,” but also “eternal duty.” Perhaps I understand the least about if of any major religious group, but I see in this dharma a hope for the best of what religion can be. This is not to say that I endorse the literal sacrificial slaughter of animals, but I believe that there may be great value in the underlying structures of thought, enough that I see questions of sacrifice as being ones that are worth exploring deeply.

Sacrificial rituals like Ashvamedha may seem strange and even savage and barbaric to Westerners, but sacrifices of this nature were certainly once central to the Abrahamic tradition as well. In the biblical Book of Leviticus, whose title might be translated as The Book of the Law of the Priests, God instructs Moses in how sacrifices are to be made to Them. There are 27 chapters in the Book, containing 859 verses in total, largely concerning how offerings are to be made to God. The first chapter explains the most significant, the Burnt Offering, the animal sacrifice, which Noah offered to God after the flood had subsided, and which God commanded Abraham to offer to Them with Abraham’s own son as the offering. And there are chapters as well, lengthy ones, on the sacrifice of grain, on other categories of sacrifice and the various offerings that can be made, on various rites involving sacrifice, and as well some details on ritual cleanliness that do not involve sacrifice except in that all matters of ritual cleanliness are related to sacrifice.

One chapter describes the sacrifice made by Aaron to inaugurate him into the priesthood:

Aaron drew near to the altar, and slaughtered the calf of the sin offering, which was for himself. The sons of Aaron presented the blood to him, and he dipped his finger in the blood and put it on the horns of the altar, and the rest of the blood he poured out at the base of the altar. But the fat, the kidneys, and the appendage of the liver from the sin offering he turned into smoke on the altar, as the Lord commanded Moses; and the flesh and the skin he burned with fire outside the camp. Then he slaughtered the burnt offering. Aaron’s sons brought him the blood, and he dashed it against all sides of the altar. And they brought him the burnt offering piece by piece, and the head, which he turned into smoke on the altar. He washed the entrails and the legs and, with the burnt offering, turned them into smoke on the altar. Leviticus 9: 8-14, NRSV

Six verses, of 859 in the entire book, many of which are of much the same character. Not all chapters concern offerings made in sacrifice, but many of them do, and most of them reference it in some fashion. It is, in total, a book of sacrifice and ritual. In several places throughout the Bible where sacrifice to God is mentioned (such as Genesis 8:21, Numbers 29:2, and numerous places throughout Leviticus), the text also states that the odor of the burnt sacrifice is “pleasing to the Lord.” The Abrahamic God, YHWH, seems to have originated in belief in a warrior god of the same name (Yahweh, spelled out with vowels as the name was not then considered too sacred to pronounce). Some biblical literature, such as Exodus 15, still strongly reflects the “divine warrior” conception of God, and this may explain why They might be pleased by the smell of burning flesh.

Jesus, a Jew living in a time when these sacrifices were still being performed, said nothing by way of abrogating the practice of sacrifice. Paul, on the other hand, in his letter to the church in Rome, seemed to imply that the nature of sacrifice had changed in the wake of Jesus’ death:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:1-2, NRSV

I wonder how many Christians subscribe to the idea that Christ Jesus was the last and final offering made in sacrifice to God. What does this then say of the God of Abraham?

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” This aligns with what Kierkegaard and Bataille have said: Kierkegaard in that the mind is transformed by sacrifice from the rational, discursive world into the world of faith, and Bataille in that the mind is renewed into perfect and infinitely-continuous intimacy with the divine world.

I was first struck by the conspicuous difference between ancient and modern conceptions of sacrifice when I wrote my stories on Cain and Abel and on The Great Flood. The Bible doesn’t explain why it is that God wants offerings made to Them; it seems to be something that the authors took as being self-evident. And indeed, we can find the practice of sacrifice extending far back into our history, wherever we look. Why is it no longer a part of our religions? Or, to such a degree as it remains an extant religious practice, why have its form and frequency changed so drastically from their ancient roots? The texts haven’t changed; the Upanishads and the Torah that are read today are the same ones that were read by our ancestors 2500 years ago. But we as a people have changed remarkably over that span of time. Have we lost or gained anything in this transition away from sacrifice as our ancestors understood it? May there yet be something of value in the ancient practice that we can re-introduce to our lives by whatever means?

What should be the role of sacrifice in the life of the Satanist? Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, said of sacrifice:

The supposed purpose in performing the ritual of sacrifice is to throw the energy provided by the blood of the freshly slaughtered victim into the atmosphere of the magical working, thereby intensifying the magician’s chances of success. The Satanic Bible, 1969

This seems to be a very different understanding of the purpose and nature of sacrifice than was held by the ancients. I will not go so far here as to say that LaVey’s understanding is invalid, but it is clear that, at the least, what he means by “sacrifice” and what I mean are two different things. To avoid ambiguity, I will be referring to the LaVeyan concept of sacrifice, which LaVey does not endorse in terms of it being any literal act of killing, as symbolic ritual killing.

Sacrifice may seem wasteful; it may indeed be very wasteful. But Bataille’s theory of sacrifice concerns what we do with our excess and how we can extract ourselves from the subject-object world of utility and rejoin the world of the divine. I wonder whether there is something within the framework of Sacrifice and of Bataille’s theory that may be of use and meaning for the Satanist. On its face, the notion of the phenomenal dissolution of the subject-object experience may seem fundamentally un-Satanic, at least as far as the more objectivist side of LaVeyan Satanism is concerned, but I mean to explore whether that is actually the case.

And what is the relationship between faith and sacrifice? The modern conception of faith seems to be belief in the absence of evidence, or belief in the presence of contradictory evidence, but that can’t be what is meant when Abraham is called the Father of Faith because of his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. The 20th century German theologian Paul Tillich described faith as a state of “ultimate concern,” something held even by secular humanists (as described in Tillich’s brilliant 1957 book, The Dynamics of Faith). And this seems to reflect what William James said when gave his working definition of “religion” in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902):

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

Given these stipulative definitions of religion and faith, and even given more conventional definitions in which religion and faith are belief in certain supernatural entities, it is clear that faith and sacrifice lie at the heart of the religion. As such, questions concerning them are nuanced and complex. I’ll be exploring the questions that I have posed individually and collectively over the course of future installments of Faith and Sacrifice. Next up will be a closer look at faith and sacrifice, and faith in particular, as they were understood by the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich.



