Lots of cultures have sacrifices to the gods. I’m wondering if it’s a very, very ancient practice, because the Meso-American civilizations also had the idea of paying off gods in blood, which suggests that the idea was imported by their ancestors when they crossed the Bering Strait.
Or maybe there’s just something about the idea that caused it to be re-invented several times in different cultures.
Does anybody know about the rationale behind sacrifices?
Animals are expensive and they represent a large investment in time and resources, especially in pastoral societies. Most religions require proof of faith. One way to prove your faith is to give up something valuable in the name of your god. Animals fit this role nicely. They aren’t irreplacable, but they are valuable enough to demostrate commitment if you sacrifice one.
In many societies, the sacrifices were also the manner in which the priests got paid. Among the ancient Greeks, for instance, only the entrails and bones were burnt for the gods, while the priest kept the meat. I think that a similar system was in place with the Jews, when they still did sacrifices.
Before consciousness and the concept of timespace had evolved in human thinking, omenology represented one of the early precursors to human consciousness. Syllogistic thinking (If a=b, and b=c, then a=c… as in; All mackerel are fish, all fish live in the sea, therefore all mackerel live in the sea.), as seen in the code of Hammurabi and other preconscious documents, rely on careful observation of external events (i.e., astronomy and zoology) in the attempt to link them together into a perceptually cohesive whole.
One such method of observational linking was performed during animal sacrifice. It is known as sortilege or augury (although my Concise Oxford Dictionary lists these as casting of lots and use of omens, respectively) , or the reading of entrails. Shamans would dispatch the sacrificial animal and then perform a post mortem autopsy in order to discern the placement, shape, size and color of the animal’s organs, glands and tissues. Such information was regarded as being indicative of what to expect in the future.
To a certain extent such “reading” of the entrails does have a distinct degree of validity. If you are a nomadic people who have herds of stock animals (the most likely candidates for inventing animal sacrifice), to periodically investigate the physiological consequences of new pasture, watering and browse for your herd makes a lot of good sense. Internal deformation or pathology of any sort was an indicator that things might turn bad soon. Discovery of a healthy physiognomy gave some justifiable assurance that the future portended more benevolent events.
To the early preconscious mind, incapable of scientific analysis, such primitive investigation was a significant tool in anticipating the sequence of events to come. In such times, there was no concept of randomness or chance, consequently all that occurred was predestined and a direct result of the hand of fate. Any method that was able to reveal some portent of the future was seen as a powerful way of forecasting. Animal sacrifices to the Gods or a given God probably came a lot later in human history. It is quite possible that this method existed long before the human mind was capable of conceiving of the thought of God.
How did animal sacrifices get started? Well, first the priest put on a hat. Then he got a really sharp knife…
The Gods told them to do so.
Prove that They didn’t, go ahead, see if you can…
Zenster: Your answer was precisely what I was looking for. (I do appreciate everybody else’s input, by the way!)
I gather you’ve read “Evolution of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (did I get the title right?). I am very impressed by the clarity with which you connected the nomadic augury with sacrifice. That, to me, is the “missing link” in my understanding.
Admittedly, it’s necessarily all speculative, but it makes a lot more sense than saying, “Yahweh taught the Hebrews, and the Aztec gods taught those guys.”
Thanks, everybody!
But Zenster, you forgot to include the recipes!!
Quite right, it is one of the only coherent theories that I have ever seen of how human consciouness evolved. I’ll even disregard the fact that David Brin has refered to it as “science fiction” in our emails to each other. I’ve read it four times and will read it again, it is one fascinating book.
I am glad to have synthesized part of the connection between animal sacrifice and protointellectual predictive processes for you. It is a real pleasure to see someone else recognize Jaynes’ framework in my argument. I have been considering starting a thread about this book and its theory for quite some time. Maybe I’ll have to get around to it.
As to you Dijon, I like your style.
First I get snorted at by Techchick68 and now this. I’m positively beside myself. If I ever make it to your part of the world, please feel free to feed me to your heart’s content. 
I would definitely be interested in reading a discussion of the evolution of consciousness. If you start one up, drop me a line at sd@tc123.com.
While I have not read the book (let’s call it TEOCITBOTBM or BOBM for short), I expect that one of the negative comments hurled at it is that it is a collection of “just so” stories. While that critique sounds justifiable to some extent, I also know that I was “converted” to the idea just on the basis of reading a two-paragraph description in a science magazine. It was definitely an “aha!” moment for me.
I’ve never managed to find a book store that has a copy and I’m generally too impatient to put a book “on order”. Maybe I’ll head on over to Amazon and see if I can get it there.
Anyway, let me know if you get your discussion group going. Maybe you could set up something using http://www.egroups.com.
By the way, I went out and bought a copy of “The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” today. I nearly ran out of breath asking the clerk if they had it in stock.
Good for you!
The opening chapter where Jaynes shows how consciousness is not needed for action, thought, memory and so many of those cherished functions we lord over the rest of the food chain is sufficient to guarantee finishing the rest of the book.
Read carefully when you get to the metaphier and metaphrand or the paraphier and paraphrand parts. It gets a little tricky, but when you’re done reading this and then listen to someone like Joe Campbell, you can instantly see that many neo-anthropologists are imposing intellectual mentation onto segments of history that were almost certainly prior to human consciousness.
Jaynes’ interpretation of the Homeric works really brings them into a new light. And, more than almost any document, the Bible suddenly becomes a veritible revelation (what a pun!) in terms of how visible the dividing line is between proto-intellectual man and his conscious descendants.
Let’s face it, we didn’t just swing down from a tree branch and pick up pen and paper to begin writing our memoirs. There was a vast period of human history where there were fully formed hominoids that were bereft of much more than a dog’s intellect and a handy-dandy opposing digit.
I’m not directly familiar with the book you are referring to but I have occasionally heard this hypothesis that ancient, pre or proto-literate peoples had a fundamentally different mental take on the world, so different in fact that they could not be called “self aware” in the same sense we employ it in modernity.
I will get the book. I’m just trying to get a handle on the “difference” you are referring to in this thread so that I can more readily comprehend what the crux of this difference is that you are referring to. How are you defining this “difference” in consciousness in the context of pre-vs post conscious(ness) cultures?
The fundamental difference between non-mentative and concious cultures was that individuals did not possess an internal, narrative “I”. Without wishing to give up much of the book’s plot (for it does indeed culminate in a fairly grand and sweeping summation) and its implications about everything from religion to UFO’s, the ability of humans to analogize is one of the hallmarks of consciousness. Jaynes chronicles the evolution of the mind-brain from nonconscious bicameral (literally “two houses”), or seperated lobe type perception over to our modern dual-lobe processing of input.
Julian Jaynes instantly became le enfant terrible cum persona non grata in the psychological community with his publication of this work. Not only does he gore every sacred cow in the stable of psychology’s pet concepts but he goes on to be the first to demonstrate a plausible theory as to why we find the greatest abundance of fertility figurines in the areas where they are least needed (equatorial regions). He goes on to explain everything from whirling Dervishes to the aoidi or “Book People” (as in Farenheight 451) of ancient Greece.
To me, the trump card is played when Jaynes poses highly plausible explanations for those two inexplicable bugbears of the human mind, namely hypnotism and schizophrenia. Modern psychological theory has yet to explain either of these mental anomalies satisfactorily. Jaynes pins both of these elusive subjects with his one theory quite elagantly. His reasoning is cogent and when he relies on less than best evidence, he openly admits it.
As one last tantalizing tidbit, I’ll mention that the compilation of work Jaynes presents on people who have undergone a commisurotomy (a sometimes complete bisecting of the corpus callosum), which severs the connection between the brain’s hemispheres offers some absolutely fascinating peeks into the mind’s machinations. This last-resort treatment for gran mal epileptic seizures yields patients with an astonishingly altered perception of the world.
All of this might have reason to do with why there are hundreds of web pages devoted to the theories of Julian Jaynes. This book is so dense it took me over a year to read the very first time. Never has such a complex tome become such a total page-turner upon rereading (four times). It can be very difficult to put down at points. I salute any of you brave enough to wade through the entire book. As a reward, your perception of all human history will be permanently altered.
PS: Try to find the reprint that carries an appended afterward by the author. Jaynes puts in a few last words on his favorite topic. The author has since died.
Oh no I didn’t!
Okay, now you’ve done it. I’m going to have to hit the grocery store and ask for a pound or two of chicken hearts. Do you have any idea what that will do to my reputation in the community???
Damn your eyes, Zenster.
Now I have yet another book in the “to be read” pile.
OK, I get the idea. How well accepted is Jaynes’s work among the academic community? Obviously psychologists don’t like him, but what about anthropologists, neurologists, and evolutionary biologists?
(Placing my trust in the peer review system.)
Fair question. When you upset the applecart, you are rarely popular. At the very least, the Velikovsky Effect alone (i.e., the outright dismissal of too controversial an idea), probably slowed the uptake of his work. I do not know how well received he was. The people who gave me the book had needed it as a text for a University of California at Berkeley science class, so it has obviously seen some recognition.
All I know is that it explains a whole lot of stuff that makes others start to go, “homina… homina… homina…”, when you prod them for an answer.