Ritual of human sacrifice. Ritual killings and human sacrifice

If the people of the past knew that the time would come when the major religions would become monolithic, they probably would not have seen the need for meaningless human sacrifices. However, human sacrifice was common throughout the world, and varied in scope. And the manner in which they were carried out is horrifying.

1. Thugs from India

Bandits in India are commonly referred to as "thugs", a word synonymous with the Indian word "crook". This group was spread throughout India and varied in number from a few to hundreds. The thugs typically posed as tourists, and offered travelers company and protection. They then carefully watched their victims for several days or even weeks, waiting for the moment when the victim was vulnerable to attack.

They performed their sacrifices in the latest “ritual fashion.” They believed that blood should not be shed, so they either strangled or poisoned their victims. It is estimated that over a million people died at the hands of Indian thugs between 1740 and 1840, and several mass graves have also been discovered in which the Thugas are believed to have made ritual sacrifices to their goddess Kali.

2. Victims of The Wicker Man

This type of ritual sacrifice was invented by the Celts, according to Julius Caesar, and involved the mass burning of people and animals in a structure that was shaped like a giant man. The Celts made sacrifices to their pagan gods in order to ensure that the year would be fertile, or to ensure victory in war, or in some other endeavor.

The first thing the Celts did was place animals in the “wicker man.” If there were not enough animals, they placed captive enemies, or even innocent people, there, covered the entire structure with wood and straw, and set it on fire.

Some people believe that the "wicker man" was invented by Caesar in order to portray his enemies as complete barbarians and gain political support. But in any case, the “wicker man” was, and remains, an incredibly frightening form of sacrifice.

3. Mayan sacrifices in sinkholes

© National Geographic

The Mayans are well known for all kinds of ritual sacrifices. Offering living people to the gods was an important part of their religious practice. One such practice was the sacrifice of people in sinkholes where the Mayans jumped. The Mayans believed that such sinkholes were gateways to the underworld, and that by offering sacrifices to local spirits, they could appease them. They believed that if the spirits of the dead did not calm down, they could bring misfortune to the Maya, such as drought, as well as disease or war. For these reasons, they often forced people to jump into sinkholes, and some of them did so of their own free will. Researchers have discovered numerous sinkholes in South America literally littered with human bones, clearly indicating the extent to which the Mayans practiced religious human sacrifice.

4. Victims in buildings

One of the most terrible practices of humanity is the custom of burying people in the foundations of buildings in order to strengthen them. This practice has been adopted in parts of Asia, Europe, and Northern and South America. It was assumed that what bigger house, the more victims there should be. These victims ranged from small animals to hundreds of people. For example, crown prince Tsai in China was sacrificed in order to more reliably strengthen the dam.

5 Aztec Human Sacrifice

The Aztecs believed that human sacrifice was necessary to keep the sun moving across the sky. This means that thousands of people were sacrificed every year. The Aztecs had huge pyramidal structures, with steps leading to the top, on which was a sacrificial table. There people were killed, and their hearts were torn out of their chests and raised to the Sun. The bodies of the people were then thrown down the steps to the cheering crowd. Many bodies were fed to animals, others were hung from trees, and cases of cannibalism were also known. In addition to sacrificing at the pyramids, the Aztecs also burned people, shot them with arrows, or forced them to kill each other, just like gladiators did.

6. Sacrifices of African albinos

The worst thing about African albino sacrifices is that they are still widely practiced in Africa today. Some Africans still believe that albino body parts are powerful occult objects that can be useful in witchcraft. They hunt for various body parts, they are collected due to their high occult value. For example, it is believed that albino hands can bring financial success, a tongue is believed to bring good luck, and genitals can cure impotence. Belief in the magical potential of albino body parts has led to the murder of thousands of people, both adults and children. Many albinos are forced to hide because they fear for their lives.

7. Inca Child Sacrifices

The Incas were a tribe in South America. Their culture was heavily influenced by their religious practices, which heavily involved human sacrifice. Unlike other tribes and cultures that allowed the sacrifice of slaves, captives or enemies, the Incas believed that sacrifices should be valuable. For this reason, the Incas sacrificed the children of high-ranking officials, the children of priests, leaders, and healers. Children began to be prepared several months in advance. They were fattened, washed daily, and were provided with workers who were obliged to fulfill all their whims and desires. When the children were ready, they headed to the Andes. At the top of the mountain there was a temple where children were beheaded and sacrificed.

8. Lafkench tribe

In 1960, the strongest earthquake in history hit Chile. As a result, a devastating tsunami occurred off the Chilean coast, killing thousands of people and destroying huge numbers of homes and property. Today it is known as the Great Chilean Earthquake. It caused widespread fear and various speculations among the Chilean people. The Chileans came to the conclusion that the god of the sea was angry with them, and therefore they decided to make a sacrifice to him. They chose a five year old child and killed him in the most terrible way: they cut off his arms and legs, and put it all on poles, on the beach, overlooking the sea, so that the god of the sea would calm down.

9. Child sacrifices in Carthage

Child sacrifice was very popular in ancient cultures, probably because people believed that children had innocent souls and were therefore the most acceptable sacrifices to the gods. The Carthaginians had a sacrificial pit with fire into which they threw children and their parents. This practice outraged the parents of Carthage, who were tired of their children being killed. As a result, they decided to buy children from neighboring tribes. In times of great disaster, such as drought, famine or war, the priests demanded that even young people be sacrificed. In such times it happened that up to 500 people were sacrificed. The ritual was carried out on a moonlit night, the victims were killed quickly, and their bodies were thrown into a fiery pit, and all this was accompanied by loud singing and dancing.

10. Joshua Milton Blahy: Naked Liberian Cannibal Warlord

Liberia is a country in Africa that has experienced decades of civil war. The country's civil war began due to a number of political reasons, and we have seen the emergence of several rebel groups fighting for their interests. Very often their guerrilla warfare was surrounded by superstition and witchcraft.

One interesting case was that of Joshua Milton Blahey, a warlord who believed that fighting naked could somehow make him invulnerable to bullets.

His madness did not end there.

He practiced many forms of human sacrifice. He was well known as a cannibal, and ate prisoners of war by slowly roasting them over an open fire, or by boiling their meat. Moreover, he believed that eating children's hearts would make him a braver fighter, so when his army raided villages, he stole children from them in order to harvest their hearts.

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Our selection presents countries where people still believe that ritual murder can be used to get rid of disease or drought.

At the moment, human sacrifice is prohibited all over the world and is considered a criminal offense, but there are still places on our planet where superstition is stronger than the fear of punishment...

Despite the fact that about 80% of the country's population are adherents of Christianity, local residents continue to have great respect for traditional African cults.

Now that a severe drought has hit Uganda, cases of ritual killings have become more frequent. The sorcerers believe that only human sacrifices can save the country from impending famine.

However, even before the drought, the sorcerers did not hesitate to use people in their monstrous rituals. For example, one boy was killed only because a wealthy entrepreneur started construction and decided to appease the spirits before starting work. This is not an isolated case: quite often local businessmen turn to sorcerers to help them achieve success in new projects. As a rule, customers are aware that such purposes will require a human sacrifice.

In Uganda, there is a special police unit created to combat ritual killings. However, it is not very effective: the police themselves are afraid of sorcerers and often turn a blind eye to their activities.

Although Liberians are technically Christian, most actually practice traditional African religions associated with the cult of voodoo. Despite criminal prosecution, child sacrifice is common in the country. Liberian families living below the poverty line are unable to support their large offspring, so parents often view their children as commodities. Any sorcerer can easily purchase a child for a song for a bloody performance. Moreover, the goals of such rituals can be completely trivial. There are known cases where children were sacrificed just to get rid of toothache.

In Tanzania, as in some others African countries ah, there is a real hunt for albinos. Their hair, flesh and organs are believed to have magical power, and sorcerers use them in preparing potions. Dried genitals are in particular demand: it is believed that they can save you from AIDS.

The cost of individual albino organs reaches up to a thousand dollars. For Africans, this is a lot of money, and among the illiterate Tanzanian population there are many who want to get rich in such a monstrous way, so the unfortunate albinos are forced to hide. According to statistics, in Tanzania few of them live to be 30 years old...

Albino children are placed in special guarded boarding schools, but there are cases when guards themselves participated in kidnappings of children for money. It also happens that unfortunate people are attacked by their own relatives. So, in 2015, several people attacked a six-year-old child and cut off his hand. The boy's father was also in the group of attackers.

Recently, the death penalty has been introduced for the murder of albinos. To avoid severe punishment, hunters no longer kill their victims, but attack them and cut off their limbs.

Every 5 years, the Gadhimai festival is held in Nepal, during which more than 400,000 domestic animals are sacrificed to the goddess Gadhimai. Human sacrifice is, of course, officially prohibited in the country, but is still practiced.

In 2015, a boy was sacrificed in a small Nepalese village on the border with India. One of the local residents’ son became seriously ill, and he turned to a sorcerer for help. The shaman said that only a human sacrifice could save the child. He lured a 10-year-old boy to a temple on the outskirts of the village, performed a ritual on him and killed him. Subsequently, the customer and perpetrator of the crime were arrested.

India

Human sacrifices are not uncommon in the remote provinces of India. Thus, in the state of Jharkhand there is a sect called “Mudkatva”, whose adherents are representatives of agricultural castes. Cult members kidnap people, behead them, and bury their heads in fields to increase crop yields. Ritual killings are recorded in the state almost every year.

Monstrous and ridiculous crimes are happening in other states of India. In 2013, a man in Uttar Pradesh killed his 8-month-old son to sacrifice him to the goddess Kali. Allegedly, the goddess herself ordered him to take the life of his own child.

In March 2017, in the state of Karnataka, the relatives of a seriously ill man turned to a witch for help. To heal the sick man, the sorcerer kidnapped and sacrificed a 10-year-old girl.

Many people in rural Pakistan practice black magic. Former President Asif Ali Zardari was also a supporter of it. Almost every day a black goat was killed at his residence to save the first person of the state from the evil eye.

Unfortunately, human sacrifices also happen in Pakistan. For example, in 2015, a man studying black magic killed five of his children.

Most of the population of the Caribbean country of Haiti adheres to the Voodoo religion, which practices human sacrifice. Previously, there was a terrible custom here: every family had to give their newborn first child as a sacrifice to sharks in order to appease the dangerous predators. The baby was brought to the sorcerer, who washed the child with decoctions of special herbs and made incisions on his body. The bloodied baby was then placed in a small raft made of palm branches and released into the sea to certain death.

This custom was banned at the beginning of the 19th century, but even now the terrible ritual is still practiced in remote villages...

In African Nigeria, sacrifices occur quite often. In the south of the country, the sale of organs, which are used in various magical rituals, is common. In the city of Lagos, mutilated human corpses with their livers torn out or eyes cut out are often found. Children and albinos are most at risk of becoming victims of witches.

Throughout human history, people have developed many different rituals. Some were associated with holidays, others with hopes of a good harvest, and others with fortune telling. But some peoples also had rather creepy rituals associated with attempts to summon demons and human sacrifices.

1. Khond sacrificial ritual

In the 1840s, Major MacPherson lived among the Khond tribe in the Indian state of Orissa and studied their customs. Over the next few decades, he documented some of the Khond beliefs and practices that proved shocking to people around the world. For example, it was the killing of newborn girls to prevent them from growing up and becoming witches. He also described a sacrificial ritual to the creator god called Bura Pennu, which was performed to ensure bountiful harvests and ward off evil forces from the villages. The victims were abducted from other villages or were "hereditary victims" born into families designated for this purpose many years before.

The ritual itself lasted anywhere from three to five days and began with shaving the victim's head. In this case, the victim took a bath, put on new clothes and was tied to a pole, covered with garlands of flowers, oil and red paint. Before the final killing, the victim was given milk, after which he was killed and cut into pieces, then buried in the fields, which needed to be blessed.

2. Rites of initiation of the Eleusinian Mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries, a tradition that lasted for approximately 2,000 years, disappeared around 500 AD. This cult centered around the myth of Persephone, who was kidnapped by Hades and forced to spend several months each year with Hades in the underworld. The Eleusinian Mysteries were essentially a reflection of Persephone's return from the underworld, similar to how plants bloom each year in the spring. It was a symbol of the resurrection from the dead.

The only requirement for joining the cult was knowledge Greek language and that the person has never committed murder. Even women and slaves could participate in the mysteries. Much of this knowledge has been lost, but today it is known that the dedication ceremony took place in September. When initiates reached the end of their long journey from Athens to Eleusis, they were given a hallucinogenic drink called kykeon, made from barley and pennyroyal.

3. Aztec sacrifices to Tezcatlipoca

The Aztecs were widely known for their human sacrifices, but much of what happened during their sacred rites has been lost. Dominican priest Diego Duran described a huge number of Aztec rituals that he studied. For example, there was a festival dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, who was considered not only the god who gives life, but also its destroyer. During this festival, a person was chosen to be sacrificed to the god. He was chosen from a group of warriors who were captured from neighboring states.

The main criteria were physical beauty, a slender physique and excellent teeth. The selection was very strict; even any blemish on the skin or speech defect was not allowed. This person began to be prepared for the ritual within a year. 20 days before the ritual, he was given four wives with whom he could do whatever he wanted, and his hair was also cut like a warrior.

On the day of the sacrifice, this man was dressed in the traditional costume of Tezcatlipoca, led to the temple, after which four priests grabbed his arms and legs, and the fifth cut out his heart. The body was then thrown down the temple stairs.

Sir James George Frazer was a Scottish anthropologist who studied the evolution of magic in religion. In his work, he described a terrible dark mass that was held in the French province of Gascony. Only a few priests knew this ceremony, and only the pope himself could pardon the person who performed it.

Mass was held in a destroyed or abandoned church from 23-00 to midnight. Instead of wine, the priest and his assistants drank water from the well in which the unbaptized child had been drowned. When the priest made the sign of the cross, he turned it not towards himself, but towards the ground (this was done with his left foot).

According to Fraser, the further ritual cannot even be described, it is so terrible. The Mass was done for a specific purpose - the person to whom it was addressed began to waste away and eventually die. Doctors could not make a diagnosis and could not find a treatment.

According to Maori beliefs, to do new home safe for its inhabitants, it is necessary to carry out a special ceremonial ritual. Since the trees that were cut down to build the house could anger the forest god Tane-Mahuta, people wanted to appease him. For example, sawdust was never blown away during construction, but was carefully brushed away, since human breath could defile the purity of the trees. After the house was finished, a sacred prayer was said over it.

The first person to enter the house was a woman (in order to make the house safe for all other women), and then traditional foods were cooked and water was boiled inside the house to ensure that it was safe to do so. Often, during the consecration of a house, a ritual of child sacrifice was performed (this was the child of the family that moved into the house). The victim was buried in one of the support pillars of the house.

6. Liturgy of Mithra

The Liturgy of Mithras is a cross between an incantation, a ritual, and a liturgy. This liturgy was found in the Great Magical Code of Paris, which was supposedly written in the 4th century. The ritual was performed for the purpose of elevating one person through the various levels of heaven to the various gods of the pantheon. (Mithra is at the very end).

The ritual was performed in several stages. After opening prayers and incantations, the spirit passed through various elements (including thunder and lightning), and then appeared before the guardians of the doors to heaven, fate, and Mithras himself. The liturgy also contained instructions for preparing protective amulets.

7. Ritual of Bartzabel

According to the teachings of Aleister Crowley, Barzabel is a demon who embodies the spirit of Mars. Crowley claimed to have summoned and spoken to this demon in 1910. The supernatural being told him that major wars were coming soon, which would begin with Turkey and Germany, and also that these wars would lead to the destruction of entire nations.

Crowley described in detail his ritual for summoning a demon: how to draw a pentagram, what names to write in it, what clothes the participants in the ritual should wear, what sigils to use, how to set up an altar, etc. The whole ritual was an incredibly long set of calls and various actions.

8. Sacrificial Messengers of Unyoro

James Frederick Cunningham was a British explorer who lived in Uganda during the British occupation and documented the local culture. In particular, he spoke about the ritual that was practiced after the death of the king. A hole was dug about 1.5 meters wide and 4 meters deep. The dead king's bodyguards walked into the village and captured the first nine men they encountered. These people were thrown into the pit alive, and then the body of the king, wrapped in bark and cow skin, was placed in the pit. Then a cover made of leather was stretched over the pit and a temple was built on top.

9. Nazca Heads

In the traditional art of the Peruvian Nazca tribe, one thing constantly appeared - severed heads. Archaeologists have found that only two South American cultures performed rites and rituals with the heads of victims - the Nazca and Paracas. After the victim's head was cut off with an obsidian knife, pieces of bone were removed from it and the eyes and brain were removed. A rope was passed through the skull, with which the head was attached to the cloak. The mouth was sealed and the skull was filled with tissue.

10. Capacocha

Capacocha ritual - child sacrifice among the Incas. It was carried out only when there were any threats to the life of the community. A child was chosen for the ritual and led in a solemn procession from the village to Cuzco, the heart of the Inca Empire. There, on a special sacrificial platform, he was killed (sometimes strangled, and in other cases his skull was broken). It is worth noting that for a long time before the sacrifice, the child was stuffed with coca leaves and drunk with alcohol.

The good news, perhaps, is that most of these bloody rituals have sunk into oblivion, just like 10 ancient civilizations that mysteriously disappeared .

Murders as a result of the execution of a ritual of a religious nature aimed at killing a person are called religious-ceremonial, ceremonial, cult, ritual or satanic murders.

Most of these murders are committed by satanic sects, so we will consider murders of this kind in connection with the criminal activities of satanic sects, although we emphasize that the commission of murders of a ritual nature has also been noted in other destructive religious organizations.

Definitions of these murders such as “cult” or “satanic” seem incorrect, since as part of the commission of this crime, several rituals or a whole system of rituals are performed, which generally constitutes a ritual of a religious nature, combining various ritual actions aimed at causing death to a person .

The murders in question are ritual due to the fact that the performance of a ritual aimed at killing a person is determined by a certain creed of a religious nature. Moreover, the ritual is a set of ritual actions enshrined in the vaults religious rules about performing ritual and magical actions, and the criminal is guided by these rules.

Ritual murder is a system of ritual actions aimed at killing a person, the purpose of which is to cause death to a person as part of the performance of a ritual of a religious nature, based on the implementation of certain ritual-magical rules depending on the type of ritual performed.

Before considering the content of ritual murders, it is necessary to resolve the question of whether satanic cults (the cult of Satan) and organizations professing it should be recognized as religious and such murders should be classified as religious crimes.

Satanic cults are based on belief in Satan, or the devil, the lord of evil forces in the Christian worldview, i.e. the object of worship is evil (hence the name - cults of evil) as an integral part of literally all world religions that involve the struggle between good and evil. The worship of Satan occurs through the performance of related rituals that distort Christian rituals (for example, the Black Mass is a distorted Catholic Mass), as well as their own religious rituals; These two systems constitute the whole cult of Satan worship.

However, one cannot say that Satanism is a religion. Rather, it should be considered as a religious cult within the Christian religion.

The murders we are studying occur in the process of performing a religious act called ritual. The performance of religious ritual is a key element of ritual killings. It is in the performance of a religious ritual as a strictly prescribed specific sequence of actions that there are such forensic elements as the method of preparing, committing and concealing the murder, place, time, tools and means, as well as the motive and purpose of the crime. Therefore, one of the main conditions for a successful investigation of ritual murder is knowledge of the essence and content of various religious rituals, the purpose of which is to kill a person.

There are many different religious rituals aimed at committing the act of killing a living being.

At first glance, all such religious rituals can be classified as so-called sacrifices, but this would be wrong, since the killing of a living being as an integral part of the ritual can have different meanings and be performed for different purposes. In this regard, ritual murders need to be studied by type, since the essence and content of the requirements of religious rituals aimed at killing a person can be different, which affects the formation of the trace situation at the crime scene, the choice by the criminal of the method of preparing and committing the crime, place, time , tools and means, as well as a criminal purpose (committing murder as part of a religious ritual always carries a specific purpose).

Let us consider ritual murders based on the classification according to the content and purpose of performing a religious ritual.

1. Ritual murder aimed at committing human sacrifice.

In the dictionary of the Russian language S.I. Ozhegov says about sacrifice: “The ritual of making a sacrifice to a deity.”

The leading role in the sacrifice is given to the victim, since the entire ritual is focused on it as an object with the help of which a certain goal inherent in the essence of the sacrifice will be achieved.

V. I. Dal in Explanatory dictionary The living Great Russian language defines sacrifice as “devoured, destroyed, perishing... An offering from zeal to the deity: animals, fruits or something else, usually with burning...”.

The essence of sacrifice is that “the deity consumes precisely those objects that are sacrificed to him; such consumption occurred either directly (sacrifice to the elements - water, earth, etc.) or through fire (burning of victims), sacred birds, animals. The object of sacrifice can be any valuable thing, but sacrifices that can be eaten or drunk are especially common - bread, grains, drinks and, especially, all kinds of animals and birds, even human sacrifices. According to later ideas, only the substance of the victim, its soul, reaches the deity, and its outer shell is consumed either by the donors themselves or goes to the priests.”

Based on the foregoing, we note that the sacrifice is the central element of the ritual being performed, the complex of actions of which includes the performance of the ritual of sacrifice.

Basically, sacrifice is understood as a ritual in which the performer performs religious rite killing a victim in order to bring a gift to some deity (in the case of a satanic human sacrifice -

Such a gift is the human soul). However, there are types of rituals of human sacrifice where the ritual of killing the victim is performed directly by the victim (self-sacrifice), i.e. suicide occurs. Such self-sacrifice of one’s own life, for example, to Satan is, in religious and magical traditions, the highest form of fulfillment of the ritual of human sacrifice.

The system of rituals of the satanic religious cult also includes the celebration of the so-called black mass. R. E. Guili writes that “there is no single ritual for the Black Mass. Its main idea is to parody the Catholic Holy Mass by presenting it or parts of it backwards, turning the cross upside down, trampling and spitting on it, and other unholy acts... When the Church of Satan was founded in 1966, the Black Mass was not included in its rituals ; According to the founder of the church, Anton Sandor La Vey, the Black Mass is outdated. However, other Satanist organizations perform black masses according to their own variants, which are said to include perverted sexual acts and orgies, necrophilia, cannibalism or sacrifice (including human ones), as well as drinking the blood of victims."

However, to say that today the rituals of the Black Mass are performed would be a great exaggeration, since its celebration requires a very complex preparation process, but individual elements of the Black Mass can still be observed in the performance of the ritual of sacrifice.

2. Ritual murder aimed at committing a religious ritual of revenge. This kind of ritual murder is found in various sects. Committing murder through a religious ritual of revenge is a kind of “inevitable” punishment for the transgression of a follower of a religious cult. A person who was a member of a sect and decided to leave it can be subjected to ritual murder based on a ritual of revenge. When entering a sect of this kind, a follower (adept) takes an oath, where he undertakes to atone for all his offenses with blood; leaving the sect is possible only through physical death.

This group should also include murders committed in the so-called religious wars between satanic sects.

3. Committing a ritual murder as a necessary test for joining a sect, or murder as part of a rite of passage to become a member of a sect.

4. Ritual murder committed for the purpose of exploitation human organs and fabrics for ritual and magical purposes.

Since ancient times, when performing various kinds of religious rituals, it was practiced to use various organs and tissues of the victim for magical purposes. Almost all rituals associated with the killing of a victim use blood.

In addition, the heart, liver, genitals, fat, etc. can be used for ritual magical purposes.

5. Committing ritual murder with the aim of acquiring the subject of the commission ritual actions any "magical abilities". This type of ritual murder may be associated with the performance of a ritual as a necessary test for obtaining a higher position in the sect, that is, for advancement up the hierarchical ladder, as well as with the use of the victim’s organs and tissues.

6. Committing ritual murder, where the religious ritual of killing the victim is aimed at the so-called summoning of demons. In this case, the ritual is similar to the ritual of human sacrifice.

7. Committing ritual murder motivated by religious hatred. This type of killing can be performed as a sacrificial ritual.

As an example, let us recall the case of the murder of two monks and a hieromonk in Optina Pustyn by the satanist N. Averin in 1993.

8. Performing a ritual of self-sacrifice, i.e. driving to suicide with signs of performing a ritual of a religious nature. This can be a ritual suicide, the method of committing which is the ritual of sacrificing oneself, say, to Satan, or suicide, which is highest degree dedication.

More on topic 1.1. Concept, content and classification of ritual murders:

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It is clear that ritual murders and human sacrifices, known to us primarily from history and the sacred books of different nations, sharply contradict modern morality and culture. But such a contradiction should not interfere with understanding the natural origin of this tragic custom.

According to the researcher of primitive culture Edward Tylor, sacrifice originates in the same animistic system as prayer. Just as prayer is an appeal to the deity as if it were a person, so sacrifice is the offering of gifts to the deity as a person. Everyday types of both forms - prayers and sacrifices - can be observed in public life and until now. However, sacrifice, which in ancient times was as understandable as prayer, subsequently changed - both in its ritual aspect and in relation to the underlying motives. And of course, the practice of sacrificing a person in our time is very rare and is not legalized in any country in the world. A textbook example is the Old Testament story of Jacob, who expressed his readiness to sacrifice his son to God. However, in Old Testament There are many such examples.

The king of the Moabites, seeing that victory was not leaning on his side, sacrificed his eldest son on the city wall. According to the Bible, Yahweh requires that all the firstborn of Israel be dedicated to him (Ex. 34:20; Num. 3:12-13, 40-50). According to a number of researchers, this means that once in ancient times these firstborns were actually sacrificed to God - that is, they were killed.

In general, ancient peoples often sacrificed children, taking advantage of their physical and mental helplessness. Children served as a kind of exchange coin in bargaining with the gods. When an Inca fell ill in Peru, he sacrificed one of his sons to the deity, begging him to accept this sacrifice in his place. The Greeks, however, found it sufficient to use criminals or prisoners for this. The pagan tribes did the same Northern Europe, to whom Christian merchants are said to have sold slaves for this purpose. But the practice of purchasing people for ritual murders developed long before Christianity. One of the most typical facts of this kind dates back to the time of the Punic Wars (264-146 BC). The Carthaginians, having failed in the war and being pressed by Agathocles, attributed their defeat to the wrath of the gods. In former times, their god Kronos received the chosen children of his people as sacrifices, but later they began to buy and fatten other people’s children for this purpose. Now they felt that the deity was taking revenge on them for using false victims. It was decided to compensate for the deception. Two hundred children from the most noble families of the country were sacrificed to the idol. “For they had a copper statue of Kronos with its arms inclined in such a way that a child placed on them rolled into a deep pit filled with fire.”

Something similar happened in Syria and Phenicia. The cult of the god Hadad demanded cruel bloody sacrifices, and above all newborn children. This is evidenced not only historical sources, but also archaeological discoveries - huge accumulations of children’s bones were found near the remains of altars in the temples of Hadad. And the name of the Phoenician god Moloch even became a common noun for a ferocious god, a devourer of human lives. It is believed that the name Moloch itself comes from the word “molk”, meaning the sacrifice of children. Another bloodthirsty pagan deity is Baal, whom researchers for some time identified with Moloch. Human sacrifices to Baal are spoken of, for example, in the book of the prophet Jeremiah 19.5.

The Phoenicians, in order to appease Baal and other gods, sacrificed their most beloved children. They increased the value of the victim by choosing him from noble families, believing that the favor of the victim was measured by the severity of the loss. Heliogabalus transferred this Asian custom to Italy, choosing boys from the most noble families of the country as victims to his solar deity.

Other countries and peoples did not reach such a scale in the extermination of infants (with the exception of the African Yaga tribe, but that is a separate discussion), but still used them in their cults. Thus, some peoples of the Munda group (pre-Aryan India) practiced sacrificing boys to the goddess of the earth. In Virginia, Indians killed children, believing that an oki (spirit) was sucking the blood from their left breast.

Ritual killings associated with war occupy a special place in the history of sacrifices. The Iroquois sacrificed people to the god of war, saying the following prayer: “For you, O spirit of Aries, we kill this sacrifice so that you can be satisfied with its meat and send us good luck and victory over our enemies!” During the war, the Aztecs turned with a prayer to Tezcatlipoca-Yautl: “Lord of battles, everyone knows that a great war is being plotted, prescribed and organized. The god of war opens his mouth, eager to absorb the blood of many who must fall in this war. The sun and the god of the earth Tlaltecuhtli , apparently, are going to have fun and intend to send food and drink to the gods of heaven and hell, arranging for them a feast of meat in the blood of people who will fall in the war."

The ruler of the Maya (Mexico), calling warriors to battle, made incisions on the body and dedicated drops of his blood to the gods. His wife also tormented her flesh to gain the favor of the deities. If the battle ended in victory, the gods thirsted for the blood of the vanquished. Captured enemies were subjected to ritual torture, which ended in death. Noble people wore laces with knots on their wrists: as many knots as there were, so many lives were sacrificed. The ritual ball game also ended in death for the prisoners. Like Roman gladiators, captives fought to the death on large fields.

Blood was an integral part of many Mayan rituals, but there was also a bloodless method of making sacrifices. In the ruins of the once powerful city of Chichen Itza (Yucatan Peninsula) there is the so-called “Sacred Well” (“Well of Victims”). The first mentions of it date back to the 12th century; in the 16th century, the Spanish priest Diego de Lenda wrote: “They (the Yucatecan Indians, one of the Mayan ethnic groups) had a custom before and recently to throw living people into this well as a sacrifice to the gods during droughts...

This well has survived to this day, although the city itself has long been abandoned and destroyed. “Even now, eight centuries later... you experience an involuntary thrill, standing on the edge of a giant pool with its yellowish-white steep walls covered with the greenery of creeping plants,” says historian V. Gulyaev, who visited Chichen Itza in 1980. - The Eye of the Round the funnels with a diameter of more than 60 meters are fascinating, attracting to you. The rugged layers of limestone descend steeply to the dark green water, hiding in its depths the secrets of bygone centuries. From the edge of the well to the surface of the water, its depth, as I was told. , more than half of that. Is it any wonder that the gloomy beauty of the cenote and its relative inaccessibility caused almost superstitious horror among the ancient Mayans, and, apparently, that is why they chose this place for sacrifices in honor of their gods for a long time.”

Since people were needed to constantly make sacrifices, states neighboring Mexico often entered into an agreement among themselves to... periodically resume the war for the sole purpose of capturing prisoners. The Aztecs pre-fed many of the captives, putting them in wooden cages, and then used them “for their intended purpose.”

During the conquest of Mexico, Cortes and his companions, visiting one of the large Aztec temples, "found themselves in front of big stone from jasper, on which victims were slaughtered; they were killed with knives made of obsidian - volcanic glass - and they saw a statue of the god Huitzilopochtli... The body of this ugly god - the Aztec god of war - was girded with a snake made of pearls and precious stones. Bernal Diaz... looked away; and then he saw something even more terrible: all the walls of this vast room were covered in blood. “The stench,” he later wrote, “was stronger than the slaughterhouse in Castile.” He glanced at the altar: there lay three hearts, which, as it seemed to him, were still trembling and smoking.

Having gone down countless steps, the Spaniards noticed a large building standing on a hill. Entering it, they saw that it was filled to the ceiling with neatly stacked skulls: they were the skulls of countless victims. One of the soldiers began to count them and came to the conclusion that there must be at least 136 thousand of them here."

The cults of many gods among the Aztecs were associated with the killing of people. Thus, at a festival in honor of Tlazolteotl, the goddess of the earth, fertility, sexual sins and repentance, a girl was sacrificed, from whose skin a jacket was then made for the priest who personified the goddess.

The ritual of the spring sacrifice in honor of the great god Tepcatlipok was particularly chic. The most beautiful of the captives, without physical defects, was chosen as a sacrifice to him in advance (a year before the holiday). Such a chosen one was considered the incarnation of God on earth. He was surrounded with luxury and honors, his whims and caprices were fulfilled, he was fed with the most exquisite food, and dressed in the best clothes. But, naturally, they kept a strict eye on him so that he would not run away. When 20 days remained before the holiday, the chosen one received four servant wives beautiful girls; they too were revered as goddesses. Payback for the “high” came on the day of the holiday: the divine captive was led to the temple, laid with his chest up on a stone altar, and the high priest cut his chest to remove the still trembling, bloody heart and offer it to the sun god.

Also, captives in the Ancient Egypt. After returning from military campaigns, high-ranking captives were hanged (often in front of the walls of temples) or killed with a club in front of a large crowd of people.

Obviously, in ancient times it was a rare people who did not resort to sacrificial killings during wars and when performing burial rituals. Our Slavic ancestors did the same. I will refer to the evidence of the battles of the Scythian tribes with the Romans by the Byzantine historian Leo the Deacon (10th century): “And so, when night fell and the full circle of the moon shone, the Scythians went out onto the plain and began to pick up their dead. They piled them up in front of the wall, made many fires and burned them, slaughtering, according to the custom of the Ancestors, many captives, men and women. Having made this bloody sacrifice, they strangled [several] infants and roosters, drowning them in the waters of the Istra."

Human sacrifice was widely practiced by the ancient Celts; This was partly due to the ritual of fortune telling. In India, based on the veneration of the god Shiva, orgaistic savage cults associated with the images of deities of love and death arose. Adherents of one of the most savage sects - thugas (stranglers) - strangled random travelers on the road as a sacrifice to Durga (Shiva's wife).

Tacitus reports on the tradition of sacrifice among the Suebi, who occupied in his time most of Germany: “On a set day, representatives of all nationalities related to them by blood converge in the forest, which they consider sacred, since in it their ancestors were given prophecies and since ancient times it has inspired them with pious awe, and, starting with the slaughter of a human sacrifice, on behalf of the entire tribe solemnly celebrate the terrible sacraments of their barbaric rite."

Well, what was the situation with the exemplary states of antiquity - Rome and Greece? Really?.. Alas, so are they.

Many modern historians believe that in the ancient world human sacrifices were isolated in nature (the sacrifice of three Persians before the Battle of Salamis, the burial alive of a couple of Gauls and Greeks in 228 and 216 BC in Rome), but there is quite a lot of evidence about their widespread use, both among the Romans and the Greeks. Although in some ancient cults (for example, the Lycean Zeus) the making of human sacrifices was based on the belief that the deity finds pleasure in eating human flesh, for the most part the sacrifice was made for “ideological” reasons - in order to show humility to the god and turn away his wrath from everything people. The Romans had a custom of killing people to appease the underground gods. According to the ancient law of Romulus, certain criminals (for example, those guilty of treason) were dedicated to them. A criminal was sacrificed during the festival of Lupiter Latiaris. Ritual murders of children were carried out at the festivals of compitalia Mania (from the time of Julius Brutus, fortunately, they thought of replacing babies with heads of poppy or garlic). During the consulate of Cornelius Lentulus and Licinius Crassus (97 BC), human sacrifices were prohibited by a decree of the Senate. True, as always, practice lagged behind theory.

The custom of purifying human sacrifices, dating back to the early period of the history of Ancient Greece, was borrowed by the Greeks from neighboring peoples and gradually faded away during the development of statehood. In extreme cases, the sacrifice was carried out symbolically - replacing people with animals (an echo of this is visible in the myth of Iphigenia) or inanimate objects. Sometimes they were content with only shedding human blood (for example, they flogged Spartan boys at the altar of Artemis). There was another way out - criminals were sacrificed to the gods, who were already sentenced by the court to death penalty. So to speak, they combined business with pleasure, and the useful with the necessary. In a similar manner, a criminal was annually sacrificed to Apollo at Leucas by throwing him off a cliff. The Greeks intended human sacrifices during burial not for the gods, but for the shadows of the dead to satisfy the anger or feelings of revenge of the deceased.

In many nations of the world, when burying rulers and leaders, people who were killed (or committed suicide) were buried in the grave with them, specifically to accompany the deceased. Southern and Western Slavs, when burying noble people, killed a horse, and sometimes a slave and the wife of the deceased. During excavations in Southern Mesopotamia, in the underground crypt of a noble woman named Puabi (the reading of the name in ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions is conventional), guard soldiers and women with musical instruments in their hands were discovered. No signs of violence were found on any of the victims in Puabi's burial. Probably all of them were poisoned (euthanized), or perhaps they went to their deaths voluntarily - in accordance with their ideas about duty, obliging them to accompany their mistress in the afterlife. But this (voluntarily) did not always happen. While excavating the burial site of the Babylonian king Ur (3500 BC), archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered 59 people buried with him; in other royal tombs there were also plenty of accompanying dead. “It seemed,” K. Keram describes what the researchers saw, “monstrous massacres were taking place in these tombs. In one of them, Woolley found several guards: next to their corpses, spears that had fallen from their hands and helmets that had rolled off their heads remained lying. In the corner of another they lay the remains of nine court ladies in the headdresses that they probably put on when going to the funeral. At the entrance to the tomb there were two heavy carriages, and in them were the skeletons of charioteers in front, next to the skeletons of oxen harnessed to the carriages, lay the skeletons of servants.

In the tomb of Queen Shub-at, the murdered court ladies lay in two rows. There was also a harpist lying there. His hands were still on the instrument covered with precious inlay, which he was apparently playing at the moment when the fatal blow overtook him. And even on the stretcher where the queen’s coffin was placed, lay the skeletons of two people in the position in which death found them... The positions of the skeletons, as well as a number of other circumstances, allowed us to come to the conclusion that all these courtiers, soldiers and servants followed by their masters not at all voluntarily..."

In China, since ancient times, captives have been mercilessly killed during burial rituals. Human sacrifices are especially numerous in Chinese burials dating back to the Qin kingdom. 66 people buried with the Qin ruler Wu-gong, 177 people buried with the ruler Mu-gong, etc., are nothing compared to the number of people killed to accompany Qin Shi-huang to the next world. More than 700 thousand people worked on the construction of his tomb for 10 years. The tomb was a palace with hundreds of halls filled with jewelry; artificial reservoirs and channels were made there, along which rivers of mercury flowed. The artists depicted celestial phenomena on the ceilings, and the flora and fauna of the earth on the floor. It is clear that a tomb of this scale required an appropriate number of people. That is why Emperor Er Shi ordered all the beauties from the 270 surrounding palaces who did not have children to accompany Qin Shi Huang to the next world. According to experts, their number was at least 3 thousand! In addition, Er Shi, fearing that the builders would reveal the secret of the location of the treasures, buried alive all the people who worked inside the tomb itself.

In a number of countries, the custom of funeral sacrifice is still preserved. Thus, some castes of Northern India constantly practice sati (sutti) - the self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, which is mentioned in the sacred book of the priests of the Aryan tribes, the Rigveda. This means that the custom is at least 3 thousand years old.

“Once upon a time, sati was considered a kind of privilege of the elite,” writes I. Karavanov, who studied this issue in detail. “It was performed only by the widows of rulers and military leaders. In the giant funeral pyre of the Maharaja of Vijayanagara, three thousand of his wives and concubines simultaneously died. With the body of the latter The Rajah of Tanjore burned his two wives. Their charred bones were ground into powder, mixed with boiled rice and eaten by 12 priests of one of the temples to atone for the sins of the dead. Gradually, self-immolations spread to representatives of the upper castes and began to mean not only an expression of devoted love and marital duty, but also loyalty to one’s master after death.”

The Russian traveler Prince A.D. Saltykov, who visited India in the middle of the 19th century, writes in one of his letters: “The Governor of Madras, Lord Elphinstone, once showed me on the seashore a place intended for burning corpses. Cow dung goes to the fire of the poor, at the stake of the rich - sandalwood... They say that when the wind blows from the sea, the smell of fried lamb cutlets comes from the funeral pyre, as if from the kitchen. It would be good if only the dead were burned, otherwise sometimes the living are roasted here. The mother of my new acquaintance, the Pudukot Raja, is a very smart and very kind woman, she loves her children madly, and when her husband died, she certainly wanted to go to the stake; They forcibly dissuaded her from this intention in the name of the children.

But after the death of the Taijor Raja, things were not so simple: his wife was burned with amazing composure. They barely persuaded her not to sit on the fire where her husband’s corpse lay, and preferred to die on a large fire. She agreed and threw herself into a pit with flaming brushwood, where she was incinerated in an instant. Before her death, she said goodbye to her family and ministers, to whom she entrusted her children."

It happened that a whole crowd of the living would ascend to the funeral pyre of the deceased. So, in 1833, along with the body of Raja Idar, his seven wives, two concubines, four maids and a servant were burned. The British who colonized India banned sati back in 1829, but even today several thousand Indian widows pay tribute to the barbaric custom every year. In 1987, India established criminal liability for incitement to sati and even its commission (if, of course, the woman survives), but the number of victims does not decrease. In principle, a widow voluntarily sets herself on fire, but this voluntariness is often imaginary, because she is pushed towards sati by the fanaticism of men and the “judgmental gaze of calm tanned women,” as Akhmatova would say.

What in the eyes of Europeans is savagery, for many Indians is spiritual exaltation, a feat, reliable way to atone for sins or at least improve karma in order to suffer less in the next incarnation.

Sacrifice among ancient peoples was associated not only with war and burial, but also with ordinary peaceful matters - getting a good harvest, laying the foundation of a house, etc. In New Zealand there was a ritual called “feeding the wind”, which included an offering to sacrifice people and livestock to the local deity. Many peoples of Oceania had something similar. The victims were usually poor people or slaves who were not of “social value.” The victim was killed in advance and only then taken to the sanctuary and the ritual of offering to the gods was performed. Among some nationalities (Morai), sanctuaries served as burial places for tribal nobility.

In Ancient Egypt, there was once a custom when the Nile flooded to throw a young girl in a magnificent dress (bride) into the river in order to create a full flood.

During years of drought, the Aztecs sacrificed a man to the goddess Tlazolteotl. They tied him to a post and threw darts at him. The blood that dripped from the wounds represented rain.

In the pantheon of the Zapotecs, who lived on the territory of one of the centers of South America - Monte Albana, the god of rain and lightning, Cocijo-Pitao, occupied an important place. Since, according to Zapotec beliefs, the fertility of the land depended on him, Cocijo-Pitao had to be appeased with human sacrifices of infancy.

A common reason for ritual murder among many peoples of Europe and the East was the loss by the king (leader) or high priest of the tribe of a “miraculous” power that allowed him to command natural phenomena. African researchers also talk about a similar practice, noting that in later stages this custom was often used by the nobility to eliminate unwanted rulers. The most striking example is the ritual suicide of the Alafin among the Yoruba after receiving the symbol of the verdict of the council of the nobility - a parrot's egg or an empty calabash.

The Kayans of Borneo were in the habit of making human sacrifices when some very important chief moved into a newly built house. E. Taylor cites a case where already in relatively modern times, around 1847, a Malay slave girl was bought for this purpose and she was killed by bleeding. This blood was sprinkled on the pillars and foundation of the house, and the corpse was thrown into the river. In Africa, in Galama, in front of the gates of a new fortified settlement, as a rule, a boy and a girl were buried alive - to make the fortification impregnable. In Grand Bassam and Yarrib such sacrifices were made when founding a house or village. In Polynesia, the central column of one of the temples of Mawa is erected over the body of a human sacrifice. On the island of Borneo, among the Milanau Dayaks, one medieval traveler witnessed how, during the construction big house They dug a deep hole for the first post and hung it over the hole on ropes. The idea was to lower the slave girl there and cut the ropes. A huge beam fell into the hole and crushed the unfortunate woman to death.

In 1463, in Nogata (Europe), when it was necessary to repair a collapsed dam, the peasants got a beggar tramp drunk and buried him there, following the advice to put a living person in the dam “for strength.”

The Serbs have an amazing legend about how three brothers agreed to build the Skadru (Scutari) fortress, but everything that 300 masons built during the day was destroyed at night by a mermaid endowed with magical powers. I had to appease her with a sacrifice. To do this, they decided to choose the first of the brothers’ three wives, who would bring food to the workers. At the same time, it was agreed not to tell the wives about such an agreement. But the older brothers, feeling sorry for their wives, told them the secret. Wife younger brother, not suspecting anything, came to the construction site, and they put her in the wall. But she begged for an opening to be left there so she could breastfeed her baby until he was one year old.

Other peoples of Europe also have similar legends associated with the actual practice of sacrifice. In North America, it is relatively rare, but there were cases when Indians sacrificed not only material values, but also living people to natural phenomena - the sun, stars, wind. The countries of Oceania, despite their isolation from the mainland centers of civilization, did not lag behind them in ritual murders. The sailors of James Cook's expedition, who visited the Polynesian island of Tahiti in 1777, happened to be present at the ritual of human sacrifice to the god Oro.

Such rituals here were often accompanied by cannibalism, but it is difficult to say what was the root cause of the ritual - faith or hunger; most likely, they supported each other, especially in difficult years for farming and fishing. Well, on the other hand, there was the natural naivety of native thinking, uncorrupted by civilization: if they killed the enemy, why should the body waste away!

In a number of African states, huge human sacrifices were required by the cult of deceased leaders - not only during funerals, but also during wakes celebrated on the anniversary of the leader's death. The victims were slaves or convicted criminals, less often - members of the tribe (in Benin, when the king was buried, his servants and closest court dignitaries were sent to his grave, but this is rather the exception than the rule). At wakes for leaders, the number of victims sometimes reached 400-500 people at a time! If there were not enough criminals sentenced to death for this, then free, innocent people were often captured. Some peoples West Africa people sacrificed at the funeral were considered diplomatic couriers to the kingdom of the dead, who must report to the deceased leader that things were going well in his earthly kingdom.

Relics associated with ritual killings still exist in a number of African countries. Thus, in the Akwapim community, located near the capital of Ghana, Accra, according to ancient tradition, the funeral of a leader must be accompanied by a ritual human sacrifice. In 1979, a four-year-old boy was kidnapped for this purpose, but, fortunately, the police were able to prevent the crime. However, in another case - in Liberia - it was not possible to prevent a ritual murder, because its participant was... the country's Minister of Internal Affairs! In June 1989, the minister was convicted for participating in a ritual sacrifice (the victim was beheaded and his heart was torn out...

Another case. In 1989, the bodies of two mutilated girls were discovered in Zimbabwe. Their genitals, tongues and parts of their entrails were removed to be sold as amulets to bring good luck.

In Nepal, there is a cult of the goddess Kali, who, according to legend, hundreds of years ago, on one black moonless night, killed 108 demons and, intoxicated with blood, danced a wild tandava dance on their corpses. It was she, this bloodthirsty deity, who “created the world, protects it and eats it forever.” Among the rituals performed by the lower Tacho caste people who worship the goddess Kali is the annual sacrifice of 108 buffaloes, whose heads are cut off and then the blood is drunk directly from the throats of the killed animals. Local residents say that the Tachos pawn a child once every 12 years to sacrifice him on the altar of their goddess.

However, civilized Europe should not boast about Africa and Asia. Horrible perversions also occur in the Old World. The French writer Jean Paul Bourret describes, for example, one of the “Luciferin” sects, called “Gypsy Clowns”. Adherents of this sect perform their main rituals, which they call full initiation, at night in the vicinity of large European cities. Members of the sect, by the light of torches, set a ritual table on which they lay out the objects of their monstrous liturgy: a knife with six blades for sacrifice and a small altar decorated with images of green dragons. The next stage is to kidnap a person, preferably a child, in the nearest city and carry out the ritual itself.

“When the “Gypsy Clowns,” writes Bourret, “return from hunting people, they present an unusual procession that sings monotonous songs. Then the victim is tied to a table painted red, and the priest subjects him to monstrous tortures, cutting out magical marks (the most common of which is the swastika) on a living body. Finally, the cultists, before moving on to the liturgical banquet, sing cannibal hymns and then eat the heart and other organs of the victim.

These events shed light on recent events in Spain. In Torrelodones and El Escorial, towns near Madrid, graves were desecrated and human bones were discovered. The police report on the cult operating in El Escorial emphasizes that “it is almost certain that they sacrificed a child.” A certain Maria Mieres reported that she observed a satanic ritual in which “a child of about two years of age was killed in fulfillment of the demands of black magic.”

According to information from sources associated with Interpol, during 1989 and the first months of 1990, more than a hundred murders were committed in Western Europe, the USA and Canada in sects associated with the cult of Satan. Perhaps some of these deaths have natural causes - for example, blockage of blood vessels or a heart attack during the "devil's spell", but there is also direct evidence of deliberate killings with cruel torture.

Devil worship with sacrifices has a long history in the Christian world. In the Middle Ages, trials took place more than once in Europe in which babies killed during the so-called “black masses” appeared. I will mention, for example, the trial of Gilles de Rais, who allegedly used an unbaptized baby to obtain alchemical gold from the devil, and of the priest Urbain Grandier (prosecuted at the direction of the all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu), who was accused of murdering a baby at the Sabbath in Orloans in 1631. But if the accusations against de Rais and Grandier cause great skepticism among historians, then in the case of the wife of a Parisian jeweler, Marguerite Monvoisin, née Deseuillers, the evidence seems indisputable. After all, in the garden of her house in Saint-Germain, investigative officials found the remains of two and a half thousand slaughtered children and undeveloped embryos.

Madame Monvoisin was the main accused in the "poison case", in which many noble people were involved, including the favorite Louis XIV Marquise de Montespan. This case began in 1077 with the arrest of several “witches.” During the investigation, it turned out that Monvoisin and her accomplices not only performed clandestine abortions, poisoned their husbands on orders from noble ladies, but also organized black masses under the leadership of Abbot Guibourg. The black magician Guibourg worshiped the devil for two decades, using the abandoned church of Saint-Marcel for this purpose. The ritual of serving the devil combined imitation of the Catholic mass and elements of ancient pagan cults, witchcraft and sexual orgies.

During black masses, Guibourg repeatedly killed children. He baked their blood in the host and sprinkled it on the ritual participants. The abbot did not steal babies, but bought them from the inhabitants of the beggarly quarters of Paris for 5-6 livres. Sometimes black masses were celebrated “just because,” sometimes there was a specific reason. For example, when the Marquise de Montespan suspected that the king had a new mistress, the Marquise de Fontanes. "Three times she snuck into an abandoned church to lie down in what her mother gave birth to in the cold stone countertop(sacrificial table). Having cut the throat of another baby for the glory of Asmodeus and Astaroth, Gibur three times filled the witch's cup with blood, which, according to the ritual of black magic, he placed between the legs of the royal mistress..."

J. Frazer in The Golden Bough says that black masses, magic and sacrifices were common among the uneducated environment of the French peasantry even in the 19th century. “The Gascon peasants also believe,” notes Frazer, “that in order to take revenge on their enemies, evil people sometimes persuade the priest to celebrate a mass called the mass of St. Secarius. Very few know this mass, and three-quarters of them would never would agree to serve it. Only an unkind priest would dare to perform this disgusting rite, and you can be sure that at the Last Judgment he will pay dearly for it... It is possible to serve the mass of St. Secarius only in a ruined and neglected church, where indifferent owls hoot about everything, where bats fly silently at dusk, where gypsies stop for the night at night and where toads lurk under the desecrated altar. This is where the unkind priest comes at night with his beloved.

At exactly eleven o'clock he begins muttering the mass backwards and ends it as soon as the clock ominously strikes midnight. The priest is helped by his beloved. The Host he blesses is black and shaped like a triangle. Instead of receiving communion with consecrated wine, he drinks water from the well into which the body of the unbaptized baby was thrown."

Although Buddhism is very peaceful in nature, cases of human sacrifice have also been noted in its midst. At the beginning of the 20th century, Ja Lama (Dambizhantsan), who led the Mongol struggle against Chinese rule, called the killing of enemies a great sacrifice to the Buddhist gods. Historian A.V. Burdukov, who personally knew Ja-Lama, writes about one of his episodes military activities, dating back to 1912: “Pointing to a shiny brocade cloth that shimmered beautifully in the sun, Dambizhantsan’s entourage talked about the just-passed celebration of the consecration of the banner, about how a captive Chinese was sacrificed to the banner, whom, however, the inexperienced executioner was unable to cut off head, so I had to turn to a more experienced one."

Just 100-200 years ago, pagan superstitions led to human casualties in the Russian Empire. However, as V. Chalidze rightly notes, ritual murders in Russia “did not constitute a regularly performed rite. Only a serious social tragedy, such as a severe epidemic or a long-term drought, resurrected this ancient method of averting heavenly punishment in the people’s memory.”

Russian historian of the 19th century V. Antonovich talks about an incident in the village of Gumenets in Podolia, when a pestilence spread here in 1738. One night, residents staged a religious procession to “ward off” the disease from the village. They walked with a cross and prayers through the surrounding fields and during the procession they came across a resident of the neighboring village, Mikhail Matkovsky, who was looking for his missing horses. To the superstitious participants in the religious procession, the unknown man wandering through the fields at night with a bridle in his hands seemed to be the personification of the pestilence. At first they limited themselves to beating, and Matkovsky, half-dead, barely crawled to his house. But the next day, residents of Guments showed up in the neighboring village, dragged Matkovsky out into the street and brutally beat him a second time. “Then the priest appeared and, having confessed Matkovsky, said: “It’s my job to take care of the soul, but it’s yours to take care of the body. Burn quickly." They made a fire and burned the unfortunate man."

V. Chalidze in his book “Criminal Russia” gives similar examples from the 19th century. “In 1855, in the Novogrudok district, during a severe cholera epidemic, peasants, on the advice of paramedic Kozakevich, lured the old woman Lucia Mankova to the cemetery, pushed her alive into a prepared grave and covered her with earth...” There is information about attempts at similar sacrifices in the same district during epidemics in 1831 and 1871.

A researcher of Russian customary law, Yakushkin, mentions a case when in the Turukhansk region one peasant, in order to save himself and his family from the epidemic disease that raged in 1861, sacrificed his relative, a girl, burying her alive in the ground.

Similar sacrifices sometimes took place during the so-called plowing ritual. It was carried out by peasant women in order to stop the epidemic of livestock disease, and was often accompanied by an animal sacrifice. Moreover, if a procession of peasant women met a man during the ritual, then he was considered “death” against whom the ritual was performed, and therefore he was beaten without pity with anything: “Everyone, seeing the procession, tried to either run or hide for fear of being killed.” .

Even at the beginning of the 20th century, murders of “sorcerers” occurred in Russia, because peasants sincerely believed that “sorcerers” had the ability to “spoil” livestock. Surprisingly, in judicial practice there were cases of acquittal of murderers - especially when the lawyer skillfully brought to the forefront of the defense the “darkness and backwardness of the Russian village.” Even when the peasants themselves admitted to killing the “sorcerer,” the jury’s verdict freed them from criminal liability.

But there were also the opposite cases - when innocent people were accused of ritual murders. In pre-revolutionary Russia, there were two scandalous trials involving alleged human sacrifices. In the first case, this was the case of a group of Udmurt peasants (in those days they were called “votyaks”) who lived in the village of Old Multan. The Multan votyaks were accused of murdering the beggar Matyunin on May 4, 1892, who, according to the official charge, was given a drink, hung up drunk and his entrails and blood extracted from him for a common sacrifice in another place and, perhaps, “for taking this blood inside.” Matyunin’s headless corpse was found on May 6 on a walking path through a marshy swamp three miles from Old Multan. When the body was opened, it turned out that someone had taken out the heart and lungs from the chest cavity, for which the bases of the ribs were cut off at the neck and back.

In the case of the Multan Votyaks there were many strange circumstances and controversial issues. The Russian public, and above all the famous humanist and human rights activist writer V. G. Korolenko, perceived this case as a police falsification, a monstrous provocation. The Votyak case was considered three times in different courts. The first two trials ended in guilty verdicts, and only the third time the court acquitted the accused.

The Beilis case also ended in acquittal (Kyiv, 1913). It was a continuation of a number of trials (Grodno case, Saratov case, etc.), in which Jews were accused of killing Christian children in order to consume their blood for ritual purposes.

Similar accusations against Jews come from the early Middle Ages (the myth of ritual infanticide was recorded by historians around the middle of the 12th century), but they are not connected with real facts, but with religious fanaticism and to a large extent with the fact that financial situation Jewish merchants and artisans were generally better off than their native counterparts.

The terrible Jewish pogroms of 1298 in Franconia and the Upper Rhine thundered throughout Europe. And although they were motivated by fictitious crimes against Christians and Christianity, even the most fanatical contemporaries (for example, Rudolf of Schlettstadt in Memorable Histories) did not hide that the result (and perhaps the original goal) of the pogroms was the seizure and plunder of the property of the victims. Rudolf of Schlettstadt cites a number of stories to justify such actions. In one place he writes about a Jewish woman who fled from her relatives who were going to kill her. She argued that the descendants of the Jews, who shouted at the crucifixion of Christ: “His blood be on us and on our children,” suffer bleeding for several months a year, and only the blood of Christians can bring them healing. Immediately following this, the author tells the story of a seven-year-old boy who was kidnapped and killed by the Jews. Another “example” tells of the murder of a Christian furrier by the Jews, from whose body they drained the blood, and secretly drowned the body in the Rhine, but a certain possessed woman exposed their crime, and the demon through her mouth screamed: “Good poor people, avenge the blood of your God and Lord Christ, who is daily killed by the insidious Jews in their members, that is, in Christians,” etc. This anti-Semitic demon, devoted to the cause of Christians, continued, addressing certain gentlemen: “O you, gentlemen, who have received a lot of silver in order to save the Jews from the shameful death, you gravely offend God, and according to your deserts, eternal destruction will befall you.”

So, the institution of human sacrifice runs like a bloody line through the entire history of civilization. Perhaps, in addition to religious, ethnic and social motives, the “death drive” (S. Freud’s term) plays a big role here. Humanity has been getting rid of its superstitions for a very long time. Unfortunately, also from those for which you have to pay with human lives.

By by and large and mass political murders in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Pol-Pot's Cambodia, Idi-Amin's Uganda, Saddam-Hussein's Iraq, etc., etc., are to a certain extent echoes of ritual sacrifices. Only the terminology has changed; Now people are sacrificed not to a deity, but to an idea. And, in fairness, it must be said that the ancient gods were much less bloodthirsty.

Translated from Sanskrit "devoted wife"