Sacrifice: The Definition of the People

Sacrifice is, literally, either the act of offering an animal, plant, or human life in honor and respect for a deity, or the willing surrender of a personal prize or treasure for the sake of something more pressing in life. All literature contains some reference to a form of sacrifice; this sacrifice is typically directly related to the culture and heritage of the author. In this essay, I intend to expose the influence that the author’s culture has on their work and the cultural meaning behind the sacrifices in the text.

The Mayan civilization was one of the most outstanding, and certainly one of the most notorious, Native American cultures to exist in Mesoamerica. The Mayan empire dominated the entire Yucatan peninsula and south to the Pacific Ocean, an area of over 16,000 square miles, between 900 BCE and 1519 CE. Until the conquest of Hernando Cortez, the Mayan civilization thrived on fear and respect enforced by violence. Kings were prominent, almost legendary warriors; to the Mayans, the more successful a warrior you were, the closer to godliness you became. Warriors who led victorious battles against other tribes and cultures tended to eventually become kings of tribal communities, and occasionally the empire. Most kings were so fearsome that they were viewed as descendants or prophets of the gods themselves and were thus revered both militaristically and spiritually.

Mayans were also superstitious and fearful people. Their depiction of the cosmos was a flat earth between thirteen layers of heaven and nine layers of hell. Their understanding of life was that death is cruel, with most people going to hell and being tortured by the nine Lords of Death for eternity.

The Maya were terrified of death, believing that most ordinary people went to the underworld rather than to the heavens, where only kings and heroes could live. Special rituals to appease the gods were believed to be capable of holding death back, at least for a while, and also of ensuring the community’s prosperity. Rulers and priests led these ceremonies, but ordinary people practiced them too, using their kings as role models. Connections, 107

These rituals included physical mutilation, by puncturing areas of the body and forcing blood to run from the wounds. It was considered to be a personal sacrifice that blessed the individual with happiness, cures, and victories. The most common sacrifices, however, were the murders of prisoners. The Maya believed that by brutally sacrificing some of the captives gained in battle and enslaving the rest, the gods would bless them as a people with victory, long life, and domination, and all other people would learn to fear and hate them. Another purpose for sacrifice was to punish any who opposed the king, and therefore the gods. Disobedience was often treated with gross and crippling, if not fatal, mutilations or death. Being a violent people, it makes sense that they imagine their gods to be just as vicious.

The Mayan creation story, Popol Vuh, embodies all of this violent culture. As with most creation stories, Popol Vuh begins with the master god, “Plumed Serpent” as the translation provides, creating the minor gods. Together, the gods created the earth out of the water. It is a typical approach to a creation story, where the gods contemplate on the source of praise. “‘But there will be no high days and no bright praise for our work, our design, until the rise of the human work, the human design,’ they said” (Norton C, 524). The creation of man, then, was for the purpose of praising the gods and sacrificing lives for them, to sustain them and keep them immortal and celestial. The editor included a footnote that infers that the blood of mortals is the key to their own lives, much like fictional vampires.

The sacrifices begin to occur in the text provided in Part 3. The first set of heroes, Hunahpu One and Hunahpu Seven, have entered the underworld and been placed into the Dark House, the first house of tests. The lords of death have challenged them to a game of native ball if they can complete the test. The instructions were simple: to not use up the torch or cigars. The twins fail.

“Where are my cigars? What of my torch? They were brought to you last night!...This very day, your day is finished, you will die, you will disappear, and we shall break you off. Here you will hide your face: you are to be sacrificed!” said One and Seven Death. Norton C, 527

This coincides with the culture’s remedy for enforcing obedience and fealty. If one were to make the gods – or the king – angry, as Hunahpu One and Seven had done in this section, the punishment would be a cruel death.

There is a reiteration of the gods’ need for human blood in the next section, with Hunaphu One and Seven’s sons, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. This particular section correlates with Mayan sacrifices for blessings. When Hunahpu and Xbalanque pass the tests and are reborn after their sacrifice, they appear to the lords of death as old men. When they lie to the lord and say they are afraid, the lord tells them to dance to their own sacrifice again. “We want to be entertained. This is our heart’s desire, the reason you had to be sent for, dear vagabonds…Sacrifice my dog, then bring him back to life again…” (Norton C, 529). Here, it is made clear that sacrifice is not only used for punishment, but also to earn the gods’ favor. The gods observe violence as primary entertainment, taking pleasure and health out of spilt blood and pain.

However, the Mayans were not the first culture to thrive on violence. The first known civilization to operate on warfare, to observe kings as gods, and to use sacrifice to appease angry gods and maintain peace, was that of Mesopotamia. Just as the Popol Vuh captures Mayan culture, The Epic of Gilgamesh is our key to understanding Sumerian culture. It would be safe to say that the epic was an exaggerated historical record, considering both the demigod image of Gilgamesh and the factuality of the location. Uruk, the city where the epic takes place, is an actual city, although ruined, that was discovered along the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq. Estimated at having been constructed by 3500 BCE, it was amazingly large in comparison to settlements around the rest of the world. Although considered small to modern times, cities like Uruk, Ur, and Jericho were surrounded by a series of protective stone walls, measured a mile across, and housed nearly 30,000 people (Connections, 23). Although large, these cities still operated on a culture of farming and violence. Most of these cities were their own little capitals, the heart of city-states, with lords, priests, soldiers, artisans, and wealthy nobles supported by and in charge of the farmers and people in the country. Occasionally, city-states went to war against each other, and miniature empires, like the empire of Sumer, emerged.

Sumerian religion is understood because of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Like a trend among developing nations and cultures, religion and authority were closely linked, to the point that the king or queen became a spiritual icon. Sumerian religion was polytheistic and operated on a sacrificial system. Just as the Mayans feared death, the Sumerians feared their gods. “People who pleased the gods by rituals and sacrifices could hope for assistance and good fortune, but those who (like Enkidu) displeased them could expect retribution. The overall outlook was gloomy: humans had to serve unpredictable and spiteful gods in this life…” (Connections, 24). In order to keep the gods’ favor, sacrifices were led by the kings and queens, who were praised as demigods by the priests and priestesses. These sacrifices included bloodletting, the slaughter of both people and animals, and offerings of food, drink, and treasures. By appeasing the gods, the people believed they could postpone the cruelty of the gods, such as floods, diseases, and droughts.

While the sacrifices are not always bloody ones, they are frequent to the gods. On a journey to kill Humbaba, Gilgamesh makes offerings of water and flour to Shamash every time they stop for camp. “Towards sunset they dug a well, they filled their waterskin with water. Gilgamesh went up onto the mountain, he poured out the flour as an offering, saying, O mountain, bring me a propitious dream!” (Norton A, 115). This offering was made four times in our provided text, and all four were answered with dreams of favor. In the end, Shamash was so pleased by Gilgamesh’s sacrifices that he joined him in battle as a “lion-headed monster-bird” (Norton A, 119).

Another key sacrifice comes from tablet six, after the slaughter of the bull of heaven. Gilgamesh, having shown his prowess and beauty as a king, earns the interest of goddess Ishtar. When he refuses her as a lover, the goddess is outraged. This tablet displays the gods as the Sumerian people understood them, to be spiteful and cruel.

[Father,] Gilgamesh has said outrageous things about me, Gilgamesh’s been spouting insults about me, insults and curses against me! …If you don’t give me the Bull of Heaven, I’ll strike […] to its foundation, I’ll raise up the dead to devour the living, the dead shall outnumber the living! …With the Bull of Heaven’s fury, I will kill him! Norton A, 126

This is a vivid instance of the gods and goddesses’ unpredictable and violent temperaments, the very thing that many Mesopotamian people believed in and feared. Enkidu and Gilgamesh were both so godly themselves that they overcame the bull and used its horns to make an offering of oil to Gilgamesh’s god, and father, Lugalbanda, as thanks for granting both men and the city perseverance and strength.

Likewise, the major gods grew displeased with the men despite Shamash’s involvement to aid them. On tablet seven, the gods decide to doom one of the two to die, as repayment for their sins against the forest of Humbaba and the goddess Ishtar. With Gilgamesh being the king of Uruk, the gods doom Enkidu to death and take his life as atonement. Again, this coincides with the Sumerian belief that the gods were vengeful and dangerous if insulted or defied.

Ancient Greek, however, had a different approach to life that was much less bleak. Greece, named for the Grecian people that inhabit it, is a harsh land, much unlike the tropical forests of Mexico and the lush river valleys of Mesopotamia. The rocky, dry, infertile terrain made the Grecian people into a tough, independent, and self-reliant people. Mostly divided into small valleys and plateaus by mountains, the Greeks were divided into groups that almost constantly battled with the others for provisions and territory, particularly the Spartans of Laconia and the Athenians of Attica.

Culturally, the Greeks were among the most civilized and relatively hospitable of the early civilizations. Emerging around 1450 BCE, the Greeks settled the peninsula and founded several city-states called poleis (singular, polis). Political rule varied across the poleis, just as the local cultures varied.

The Greeks developed several methods for governing a polis, all of which entered the political vocabulary of the Western world. One man-rule was known…as monarchy; rule by a select few, as oligarchy; rule by a class of well-born families, as aristocracy; and rule by the entire body of citizens, as democracy. Connections, 143

Each group of Greeks thrived separately from the others, with their individualized cultural developments, trades, military, and government. For the most part, Greece was the most stable of the early civilizations despite being the most diverse and splintered.

Culturally, the Greeks are the most advanced civilization that I have encountered in my studies. Greek cities, particularly Athens, were built carefully and expressively. The arts were a prized skill and a display of education, civility, and wealth. Athens was built around beautiful marble temples devoted to the gods, such as the Acropolis with its Parthenon, sculptures, and painted pottery. Drama also developed in Greece, first beginning as choruses that praised the kings and the gods and then becoming solo acts with a chorus accompaniment. The arts did not completely revolve around the divines, as was the case with both the Maya and the Sumerian peoples. While most statues may have depicted the gods in human form, pottery tended to capture average scenes of realistic human life, and drama ranged from focusing on conflicts between personal desires and morality, to the dangers of being too prideful in one’s own abilities, and even to comedic and satirical reenactments and ridiculously false predicaments with the famous and powerful (Connections, 150). Naturally, their ideas about life and the world are more educated and realistic and do not revolve around cruel forms of divine intervention.

It is that religious belief system that definitely sets Greek culture aside from the others. The twelve Greek gods and the earth were both understood to be eternal and unchanging, and that the creation of humans came from the gods having sex with mortals and inadvertently producing the heroes that fathered the human race. The gods were also very human characteristically, aside from their divinity. “They could be greedy, generous, lusty, chaste, envious, kind, angry, and affectionate. Generally the gods on Mount Olympus took little direct interest in humans, but from time to time, out of boredom, they sought pleasure in manipulating human affairs…” (Connections, 154). Physical sacrifice is unheard of; perhaps it was even a condemnable act. This sense of high morality and civility would explain why there were no sacrifices of blood or life in Lysistrata, The Odyssey, or in any of Catullus’ poems.

In Lysistrata, the women are in revolt against an Athenian war from lack of attention, especially sex. The men are out fighting, so they are either gone all the time or they are too tired to bother with their wives when they return. Lysistrata, the character for which the play is named after, leads the women in the uprising against their husbands in order to force a peace treaty. In the opening scene, where the women assemble before Lysistrata, the women discuss what they would willingly give up to have their husbands’ love again: one would sacrifice a dress to buy wine for her and her lover, another would cut herself in half to end the war, and the other would climb a mountain and look for ideas of peace from far-off places. Lysistrata’s main scheme almost destroys her revolt. “Yes, ladies. How we force the men to peace. How are we going to do it? We must all hold off – You’re positive you will? From now on, no more penises for you” (Norton A, 829). This refrainment is a metaphorical sacrifice, one of pleasures, appropriate for the honorable Greek culture. After some persuasion, the women finally give in and participate in this sacrifice.

Ironically, the scene continues onto a more actual sacrifice, although still proper and befitting the culture. After discussion about whether to take part in traditional sacrifices, with sheep and horses on a shield, the women make a vow before Athena and Aphrodite with pure red wine as an offering. Culturally, wine was drunk diluted; by keeping the wine pure, it symbolized the richness of their lust.

There is also Catullus to consider. Catullus was an instantaneous writer. His poems flowed as if directly from the thoughts of his mind, capturing the emotions at the moment that he wrote them down. As the course of his booklet goes, his love with Lesbia pushes him through happiness, anger, heartbreak, and even misery. In poem 76, Catullus writes about spiritual sacrifices twice. The poem opens with one of them, “If a man derives pleasure from recalling his acts of kindness, from the thought that he’s kept good faith, never broken his sworn word, nor in any agreement exploited the gods’ favor to deceive mortals, then many delights still wait for you, Catullus” (Norton A, 958). This may be inferring to a spiritual sacrifice of praise and worship to the gods in exchange for blessings of patience and resilience. His poem 101 revolves around a sacrificial offering of ashes. With a death, Catullus writes about offering “those gifts which by ancestral custom are presented,” soaked in mournful tears with the hopes of obtaining peace from heartbreak. What the items may be is unclear, but the presented line directly relates the sacrifice to his home culture.

Although the text never describes what kind of offering is made, The Odyssey possesses many scenes where the gods cooperate with and protect Odysseus, and his son Telemachus, for the man’s honesty, virtue, and frequent offerings to the gods. Athena pleads with her father Zeus for Odysseus, reminding the gods of the great man’s fate on an island with Calypso. “But it’s Odysseus I’m worried about, that discerning, ill-fated man…Didn’t Odysseus Please you with sacrifices beside the Greek ships At Troy? Why is Odysseus so odious, Zeus?” (Norton A, 333). Although the sacrifices do not prevent violence from the gods, the sacrifices for the sake of religious blessings are still a recurring theme in ancient cultures. In Greece, it was more with the hope of earning the gods’ attentions entirely.

Homer makes Athena more human than the other gods in this epic poem, however. Where her parents have to be given sacrifices before they consider any action of any kind, Athena does take it upon herself to appear to Telemachus and assist him before requesting an offering from him. “No, I really do want to get on with my journey. Whatever gifts you feel moved to make, Give it to me on my way back home, Yes, something quite fine. It will get you as good” (Norton A, 339). While he did offer to treat her with kindness typical of a host toward a guest, this was her way of exposing herself as a god interfering with his life without any payment. As the scene moves on, Telemachus begins making offerings to her to maintain his good fortune with her.

There is one more culture. Japanese culture was one of the last to develop. Located on a series of islands over a hundred miles away from a main continent, the Japanese people thrived independently as a fishing and gathering people. Farming didn’t begin until after 300 BCE, and clans developed around farming communities over the next six hundred years.

The Japanese culture as we know it today is not really Japanese culture, though. Beginning around 593 with Prince Shotoku, the Japanese began to learn and adopt from the Chinese. “Determined to learn from China’s experience and to borrow concepts useful for Japan, he sent several large missions to China for trade and cultural connections. He instituted in Japan a Chinese-style bureaucracy…Buddhism...writing…its literature, poetry, philosophy, art, and architecture” (Connections, 312). The Nara period, dating between 710 and 784 CE, was the largest movement of Chinese influence in Japan. After that, Japan gradually developed its own culture that was a balance between the two.

Not all Japanese people appreciated the Chinese, however. Some thought that borrowing from Chinese learning was disgraceful and unoriginal, that the Japanese needed to be an independent culture that was all their own. This is around the same time that Sei Shonagon and Murusaki Shikibu were both composing their own works, and both ladies show the rift that existed between the people throughout this time. Shikibu often wrote about Shonagon in her diary, calling her “dreadfully conceited” and that she “littered her writing with Chinese characters” (Norton B, 1127). Their rivalry was intense, and defined by style. Shikibu reflected Japanese culture in her fictional novel, while Shoganon used Chinese culture as a focal point in her diary-like masterpiece.

Shonagon captures a representation of the Chinese culture in her work. Part 22 begins a collection of writings that refer to the Japanese religious system, called Shinto. Just as the Mayans and Sumerians were superstitious, the Japanese believed in sacred things of every type, from gods and goddesses of the skies and earth to the spirits of ancestors, animals, rocks, and trees. In the Kammu period, 781-806 CE, Emperor Kammu merged Buddhism with Shinto. At the beginning of part 22, Shonagon describes the feeling of being completely alone and helpless in a strange area. “A household that doesn’t treat you hospitably, though you’re there because of a directional taboo – this is particularly dispiriting if it happens to be at one of the season changes” (Norton B, 1139). A taboo is explained as a ban on movement so as to not disturb the gods. At the end of 22, there is another instance of this Shinto practice. “The purificatory hot bath that you have to get up to take on New Year’s Eve is not merely dispiriting, it’s downright irritating” (Norton B, 1141). Shinto practices seem to be consistent of abstentions and long periods of thorough, focused worship. Although they are not necessarily sacrifices of the body or physical world, they could be considered spiritual offerings and temporary sacrifices of pleasure and comfort in order to please the gods and spirits.

In 82, however, she describes a situation of prolonged ceremony that involves the offerings of food to the Buddha.

…a Continuous Sutra Reading took place in the western aisle. A scroll of the Buddha’s image was set up, and of course the monks were seated as usual. Two days into the ceremony, we heard below the veranda a queer voice saying ‘Would there be any distribution of the offerings for me?’ and a monk was heard to reply, ‘Come come, what can you be thinking? The ceremony’s not over yet’…At this, she replied herself in a carefully affected tone, ‘I am a disciple of the Buddha, come to ask for the altar offerings, and these monks are refusing to give them to me.’ Norton B, 1144

Here, a sacrifice is understood, although the situation is far from spiritual. This is also not pure Japanese culture. It is the culture of the Chinese, which Shonagon had adopted willingly just as many others had done by guidance of their most recent emperors. She was practicing her blended culture willingly, unlike her rival Shikibu.

Cultures have an effect on the people that are exposed to and live by it. The aspects of their culture can be discovered and understood because of ancient writings. The Sumerians and Mayans lived in a violent world of warring tribes, so their beliefs understood angry gods that were pacified only with blood and agonized life. Sacrifice was a major feature of their culture, as they believed that it protected them, provided them with wealth, and maintained their status as the most powerful tribe in the region. The Greeks were much more civil and independent, had a culture that is considered one of the most valuable and intelligent cultures of ancient times, and occasionally warred with their neighbors; their gods were believed to be very human, much like themselves, who only interfered in the people’s lives if they were bored or had close favor for them. The Japanese culture, although not purely Japanese, was a melting pot of spirituality that marked the world as thoroughly inhabited by sacred influential beings. Both the Greeks and the Japanese practiced sacrifices, but of the offertory type. These offerings were more of a spiritual homage that praised the gods and cleansed your spirit so that you could one day die and pass into heaven to be with the gods.

Works Cited

Akbari, Denecke, & others. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Volume A. Third Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2012.

Akbari, Denecke, & others. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Volume B. Third Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2012.

Akbari, Denecke, & others. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Volume C. Third Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2012.

Judge, Langdon. Connections: A World History. Custom Edition for Troy University. Chapters 5, 18; 2; 7; 14. Pearson Education, New Jersey. 2012.