Sacrifice

Sacrifice is an act or offering made to a deity. A sacrifice can serve as propitiation, or a sacrifice can be an offering of praise and thanksgiving.

Evidence of ritual animal sacrifice has been seen at least since ancient Hebrews and Greeks, and possibly existed before that. Evidence of ritual human sacrifice can also be found back to at least pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica as well as in European civilizations. Varieties of ritual non-human sacrifices are practiced by numerous religions today.

The Latin term sacrificium (a sacrifice) derived from Latin sacrificus (performing priestly functions or sacrifices), which combined the concepts sacra (sacred things) and facere (to make, to do). The Latin word sacrificium came to apply to the Christian eucharist in particular, sometimes named a "bloodless sacrifice" to distinguish it from blood sacrifices. In individual non-Christian ethnic religions, terms translated as "sacrifice" include the Indic yajna, the Greek thusia, the Germanic blōtan, the Semitic qorban/qurban, Slavic żertwa, etc.

The term usually implies "doing without something" or "giving something up" (see also self-sacrifice). But the word sacrifice also occurs in metaphorical use to describe doing good for others or taking a short-term loss in return for a greater power gain, such as in a game of chess.

While no scholarly consensus on the origins and function of sacrifice exist, multiple scholars have developed theories on sacrifice.

E.B. Tylor suggested that sacrifice could be understood as a gift to the divine, either valued by the divinity on its own merits, valued as an act of homage, or valued based on the hardship of the sacrifice itself.

William Robertson Smith in The Religion of the Semites argued that the sole function of sacrifice was for humans to achieve communion with the divine. Robertson Smith based his theory on the sacrificial system of the Hebrew Bible, where the eating of burnt offerings by priests brought them closer to God. Robertson Smith linked Ancient Hebrew sacrifice to sacrifices of totem animals, a claim which was rejected by later anthropologists.

Influenced by Robertson Smith, Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life argued that sacrifice served a dual function: social communion and divine communion. Working from ethnographies of the Aboriginal Australians published by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, Durkheim argued that the Aboriginal Australians sacrificed to reinforce communal ties, as sacrifices took place during periods of social gathering. Both the broader functionalist explanations of Durkheim and the accuracy of his ethnographic sources have been questioned by later scholars.