Secret_History

490 The Secret History of the World
accumulating in the data from recent excavations in a number of places. Most of
the archaeological evidence for human sacrifice in the Andes - most clearly among
the Inca and the Moche - has been discovered only recently.
For many people in the modern Western world, making a sacrifice means either
giving without receiving or giving up something valuable for a cause that may
benefit others. What seems to be evident about the process of sacrifice in primitive
belief systems is that sacrifices of animals and humans were done for the greater
good of the group - to appease the anger of the god and prevent disaster. Blood
was the symbol of life, of animation, of nourishment, the most important offering
that could be given to the natural and supernatural beings. It was thought that the
sacrificial nourishing of the “sacred beings” made life possible. It was also thought
that the cosmos “ran” on this “nourishment”. It has been suggested that the
number and violence of the sacrifices increased as the desperate Moche priests
tried to appease the Gods. Unfortunately, such speculations do not fully answer the
question as to why any human being ever thought that the death of another human
being would satisfy the gods in some way.
In artistic depictions, the Moche are seen to cut the throats of prisoners of war
and then drink their blood. Afterwards, the bodies were dismembered. It’s hard to
say what the purpose of these endless sacrifices might be. Perhaps the priests
thought that they obtained power from drinking the blood. We are reminded of the
Biblical injunction that “the blood is the life”, and the Hebrews were forbidden to
drink it or to eat meat that had not been thoroughly bled. Perhaps this was because
the blood - and the life in it - was supposed to be reserved for the god exclusively.
Child sacrifice is a recurrent theme not only in the Andes but also in much of the
world.
Returning now to our problem: Yahweh. It seems that, like the Moche and the
Aztecs, the Jewish priesthood began with terrifying cannibalistic rituals and
sacrifices. Just picture the priest - kohane - standing before the worshippers
spattered with dripping, stringy clots of blood, throwing basins of blood on the
congregation to “cleanse” them, all the while the subliminal message being
conveyed that, “if you don’t obey Yahweh, this is what he will do to you”! This
may have been what was taking place in the great Temple of Solomon which was
very likely a displaced memory of a place so hated, the Temple of Hephaestus -
the labyrinth - in Memphis, and was later transferred to the “labyrinth” at Crete. It
was then brought to Palestine by the refugees from the eruption of Thera, and
combined later with other tales of the cataclysm to produce some of the Old
Testament and the rites of Judaism. We begin to understand why the labyrinth of
Egypt was, according to Pliny, regarded with “extraordinary hatred” and why so
many myths of a human eating Minotaur at the center circulated in the ancient
world.
The idea of the ritual sacrifice of the king instead of thousands of virgins,
children, or warriors, seems to be the result of the mingling of the Southern Sun
god worship with the influence of the Northern Moon worshippers. This seems to
be a distortion of the idea that the king was ruler by virtue of his “marriage” to the
goddess, or her representative, and that this “marriage” involved a shamanic death
in order to be able to transduce the cosmic energies of benevolence and prosperity
to the tribe or to defend the tribe against evil spirits.