It is an old cliche. The nutty natives must yearly find themselves a virgin and toss her in to appease the gods.
Is this true?
If so, how often and where?
When did it stop?
[ul][li]Yes, it is true.[/li][li]During religious ceremonies and when a virgin could be found.[/li]When virgins became an endangered species.[/ul]
According to this PBS special, only men could be sacrificed in the Hawaiian 'Aikapu religion. (I have a vague memory that men were sacrificed, and placed beneath the foundations of various important buildings to secure the blessings of the gods, not thrown into volcanoes, but I am still looking for a citation.)
Robert Graves has speculated that most of the tales of virgin sacrifice in many cultures is a misinterpretation of older tales of slaying monsters in which on the death of the monster, a beautiful woman is revealed. (I don’t recall the interpretation he put on that story.)
Most of the sacrifices of women that I recall from historical records involve providing a deceased man with female comfort in the afterlife. Indian suttee had that sort of theme and an Arabic or Persian writer who traveled among the Rus claimed that the Vikings did something similar.
It is beginning to seem as though it was simply a Victorian way of characterizing a group as horribly barbaric (and doing it in a very titillating manner).
Not thrown in, but the mummified remains of an Inca girl (12-13 yo) were found on a cliff/mountain. She had been struck on the temple with a blunt instrument, and, by the clothing was identified as a member of the upper classes.
The folks interviewed the PBS special (re. mummys) concluded that she had been sacrificed to some deity.
In Ireland, the “bog mummys” were of sacrificed males - throats slit, dumped in peat bogs as a fertility rite.
The 9th-century Arab traveler who described the Viking Rus funeral ceremony was Ibn Fadlan. His tales formed the basis of Michael Crichton’s proto-Beowulf novel Eaters of the Dead, the basis for the film The 13th Warrior. The film showed part of the Viking funeral ceremony, but not all of it. When the dead Viking was placed in his funeral ship, they took one of his concubines and lifted her up in front of it three times, as she recited a ceremonial declaration. Then (the part they didn’t show in the film) all of his friends gang-banged her before they ritually executed her and put her body on the ship and torched the ship. There was a Norwegian chap who had a traditional Viking funeral last month in Minnesota, with the ship and the cremation and all that, but again they omitted the gang-bang and woman sacrifice part.
In the 1960s, I remember a TV commercial for some brand of sugary puffed rice cereal. It parodied the theme of sacrifice to the Hawaiian volcano gods. The Hawaiians climed to the rim of the crater and tossed in sheaves of rice and bunches of sugar cane. Then the volcano deity accepted the sacrifice, and the volcano erupted, showering the Hawaiians with puffed rice breakfast cereal.
Yes it’s true! Just look, Joe, next thing you’re going to ask whether there is such a thing as a brain cloud!
Is this related in any way to “Up a creek without a paddle”? 