IIRC, there are only about six or seven permanant… I forgot what the term was. Those craters full of magma you see in movies. Right, so there are only a handful of those in the world.
“Classical sources relate how the Carthaginians burned their children as offerings to Ba’al Hammon.”
“As a god worshipped by the Phoenicians, Moloch had associations with a particular kind of propitiatory child sacrifice by parents.”
In both cases by fire.
Also in both cases, there are modern scholars that argue against child sacrifice being commonly practiced.
… Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens.
I don’t catch the reference. The game Inca? Cthulhu?
All right, I found the wiki page. There are four active lava lakes, and three that are “intermittent”. Judging from the pictures provided, a real lava lake doesn’t look like in the cartoons.
The very sophisticated Battlestar Galacticaintro.
Better than sacrificing the sluts! (I loved that Drawn Together episode)
No luck was involved in Frodo’s case. Sauron used Orodruin (Mount Doom, the volcano, for you movie-only types) for his own purposes, so it was only natural that there’d be an entrance.
Mana.
And let me guess, Gandalf’s magic socks protected Frodo from the intense heat, meaning no luck involved there either? 
Could we please not turn this into a Tolkien thread?
It’s not the entrance that I’m saying his was “lucky” about – it was that there existed a sheer drop right into the lava. That wasn’t required for Sauron’s purposes. (And, even if it was, you’d expect that in a few millennia things would change)
What did I say in post 31?
The burning question I have is, How would the volcanoes know?
The volcanoes are perfectly capable of reading post 31. They’ve been literate for a millennia.
Re: other cultures
I would say the myth of Iphegnia at Aulis and possibly others indicate times when the Greeks practiced human sacrifice.
I’ve also read – I can’t remember where – that the Romas sacrificed four people after Cannea.
Re Other Cultures
Some of the peat bog mummies of the UK are definitely human sacrifice. They show signs of ritual killing. They were either royalty or treated like it.
The real question is “What would a volcano do with all of those Star Trek fans anyway?”
My first thought was…so this is what pedophile preists did to keep the kids quiet back before candy. Don’t tell anyone, or you will get selected to appease Vol/pele/whatever.