Animal sacrifice
As animal sacrifice is called the killing of an animal for ritual or religious reasons. Animal sacrifices have been carried out in many cultures and religions around the world for different reasons. Sometimes the customs arose from old hunting rituals and ritual slaughter , in other cases they replaced human sacrifices previously practiced .
Sacrificial animals are consecrated to a deity or a force of nature and given symbolically. In some cultures, the carcasses of the sacrificed animals were left behind to weather and were spurned. In other cultures, the sacrificial animals were consumed afterwards. The strongly ritualized sacrifice in cultures that mummified the animals after the sacrifice and made them durable was of particular importance .
Animal sacrifice in history
Animal sacrifices were already practiced in prehistory. It is already mentioned in Homer . In the Greek and Roman art, there are numerous pictures in which sacrifice scenes can be seen by animals. For example, the Bukranion or Aigikranion is one of them. The sacrifice of the bull , which enjoyed cultic veneration, is particularly common , but also that of the sheep, ram or goat . The sacrifice of an animal to God or the gods is part of a religious act.
Entrails of sacrificed animals are also used for hieroscopy (also hieromancy), a method of divination from offerings.
A special form of animal sacrifice is the construction sacrifice deposited in the underground of a building to be built , with which misfortune should be kept away from the future residents.
Animal sacrifice today
Numerous cultures still practice animal sacrifices or maintain traditions with a sacrificial character. However, no world religion today still sacrifices animals in the original sense, in which the animal is completely consecrated to the deity and has no other meaning.
In Buddhism , animal sacrifices are generally rejected and are replaced by symbolic acts. Likewise in Hinduism , which has exceptions such as goat sacrifices in the Kali temple in Kolkata and buffalo offerings in Nepal on the festival of the goddess Durga .
Today animal sacrifices are predominantly rejected in Christianity , only in the Armenian Church , with the Matagh (originally Easter lamb), an early Christian sacrifice practice has been preserved. The Eucharist can be interpreted as a historical rudiment of an act of sacrifice, but has not had this function canonically since the end of antiquity.
The Judaism does not sacrifice animals, but provides for the slaughter of religious rules, without which the meat loses symbolic value. In this tradition, too, the sacrificial character of slaughter is only rudimentary. The Old Testament Abraham sacrificed a ram instead of the Isaac required by God, which today can be interpreted as the contemporary description of the transition from human to animal sacrifice.
See also: Sacrificial animals in the Bible
In Islam , sheep, goats, cattle or camels are slaughtered on ritual occasions to this day - on a large scale in the Id ul-Adha festival of sacrifice , with the meat often being traded afterwards or distributed free of charge to those in need. These slaughterings are based on the history of religion or local traditions and are carried out in very different forms depending on the faith.
See also
literature
- Christina von Braun, Christoph Wulf (ed.): Myths of the blood. Campus, Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3593383491 .
- Maria-Zoe Petropoulou: Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism, and Christianity, 100 BC – AD 200. (Oxford Classical Monographs) Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, ISBN 978-0199218547 .
