Human Sacrifice - Peter Leeson

4 Testing the Theory of Human Sacri…ce
The theory of human sacri…ce developed in Section 2 predicts that human sacri…ce should exhibit
speci…c features. Evidence from the Konds allow me to test several of these predictions.
The evidence supports them.
1. Human sacri…ce destroys valuable property.
According to Kond belief, “To be acceptable to Tari a victim had to be purchased”by a
sacri…cing community (Maltby 1882: 79). 20
As Macpherson put it, “in all cases, it must be
bought with a price— an unbought life being an abomination to the deity”(C.R. 1846a: 61).
“This condition,”Campbell (1861: 26-27) emphasized, “is essential”(see also, Elwin 1944:
54).
Kond communities made these purchases by trading wealth— land, agricultural output,
work animals and tools used to produce that output, and goods, such as metal ornaments
and vessels, obtained with that output— for meriahs. In slaughtering meriahs, communities
destroyed the valuable property they exchanged for them.
Konds’unit of account was an article of such property they called a “life”(or gonti). A
life consisted of property such as “a bullock, a bu¤alo, goat, a pig or fowl, a bag of grain,
or a set of brass pots . . . A hundred lives, on average . . . consist[ing] of ten bullocks,
ten bu¤aloes, ten sacks of corn, ten sets of brass pots, twenty sheep, ten pigs, and thirty
fowls”(Macpherson 1865: 64). Meriah prices were rendered in these units. And their prices
were considerable (Padel 2000:134). According to Campbell (1861: 28), a single meriah cost
a purchasing community “from ten to sixty” lives. This constituted a “very great expense
attendant upon procuring the victims”for sacri…ce (Campbell 1964: 268).
The importance Konds attached to the necessity of expending large sums to procure
meriahs, and as I discuss below, publicizing those expenditures, is evidenced in the ritual
dialogue between a sacri…cing community’s priest, or jani, the presiding chief, and the meriah
(via proxy) that Konds acted out at immolation festivals. This lengthy dialogue publicly
20 An acceptable meriah could also be one that was “born a victim, that is, the son of a [purchased] victim
father; or if he was devoted as a child to the gods by his father or natural guardian”(Macpherson 1865: 115).
Born victims were often allowed to live and work within the Kond community that owned them, sometimes
reaching adulthood before eventually being sacri…ced.
18