02 - Human Sacrifice by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

In this intriguing essay, Lord Acton responds to the exchange of letters between Sir Robert Peel and Lord Macaulay, aiming to challenge the widely held belief that human sacrifice was solely the practice of barbaric and uncivilized societies. Acton argues that in some instances, such rituals may stem from sophisticated theological developments. At the urging of Lord Stanhope, Acton‚s thought-provoking piece was published in the Home and Foreign Review in 1863. Summary by Jeff Allen.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part two of Human Sacrifice. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Jeff Allen. Human Sacrifice by John Emirich Edward Dalberg,

(00:23):
Part two.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
The union of bloodshed and licentiousness had one of its
roots in the physical philosophy of the Old World, which
considered generation and destruction, like night and day, to be
the necessary and mutually produced succession of being caused by
the eccentric motion of the premium mobile in the elliptic.
Thoughra the necessary prelude of all production was used in

(00:49):
two meanings, destruction by death and pollution. The same philosophy
is still exemplified in the Indian rights of Siva Kayley
and Juggernath. The notion of the physical productivity of sacrifice
may be connected with the idea of Empodoqus that flesh
and bone were the simple elements and the universal germs

(01:12):
fund Spanama of earth, water, and air, and this accounts
for the intimate connection between human sacrifice and agriculture. In
another aspect, the passage from the slaughter of the innocent
victim to the ruin of the innocence which gave it
its value. Was strictly logical. As the spelling of blood

(01:33):
was substituted in so many cases for the sacrifice of
the life that was in the blood, so the destruction
of innocence was substituted for the sacrifice of the innocent,
without any original reference to the hatefulness of the means
by which the substitution was made, but simply on the
principle that instead of the victim itself, that which gave

(01:53):
it value might be sacrificed. But there is also an
ethical relationship between the two acts of expressed in the verb.
Leaving the general question to moralists and psychologists, we may
observe that, with whatever indifference men might have sacrificed captives, criminals,
or slaves, they could not cast their children into the

(02:14):
fire without feeling that they were tearing out a fiber,
as it were, of their own selves, or without awakening
an unnatural frenzy which might easily lead them to gloat
over destruction and to invert the right impulses of humanity.
Precisely in the same way as the frenzy of sensuality
does the union of the two frenzies, is shown in

(02:35):
the self mutilating orgists of Sabelle and Adieus. In moral
rights and in human ceremonies are cognate and corresponding caricatures
of the true ideas of worship and of love. Thus,
human sacrifice was the turning point at which paganism passed
from morality to wickedness. The highest possible effort at expiation

(02:57):
became the natural source of unnatural practices and ideas. The
human victim was put to death as a substitute for
the conversion and purification of the sinner, and a door
was opened for the rights, in which all distinction of
virtue and vice was ignored, and sin itself was often
made meritorious cepis ilia religio peperiscalosa at k impia facta.

(03:23):
At this stage, even the indistinct and ignorant worship of
God which had survived in polytheism, was abandoned, and that
of other powers he served its place. It is this
distinction between the pure and more corrupt paganism which accounts
for the opposite views taken of it by Theologians, the Jews,
and early Christians, who saw paganism in its last stage

(03:46):
of degradation, universally believed that its gods were devils. In
the Bible, this identity is not distinctly expressed. Sometimes the
gods are said to have had no real existence, sometimes
to be demons. The same Hebrew word is translated by
the seventy in three ways demons, idols, and vanities. Saint

(04:08):
Paul was careful not to assert the real existence of
the gods, while he says that the devils received the
homage offered to them. The early fathers understood that these
gods were actual devils. Justin Martyr, who with all the
ant Nicene fathers but one interprets Genesis six two of
sinful Angels, holds that their offspring were the demons, who

(04:31):
became heathen gods and actually existed in the form represented
by the idols and perpetrated all the crimes recorded in mythology.
Saint Augustine believed that the gods were real devils who
usurped the place of God in order to enjoy the
homage due to him and intercept the prayers and sacrifices
intended for him. But this opinion, in its sweeping universality,

(04:53):
has not held its ground among Christian philosophers and divines.
Yet the character of certain rights is so distinctly diabolical
as to confirm the belief that in these cases particular
demons both inspired and received the abominable worship. When paganism
had reached this development, all that had mitigated or redeemed
its demoralizing influence at once disappeared. They could no longer

(05:17):
soften manners, uphold the sanctity of law, tame pride and passion,
or inculcate reverence for the past, or care for the future.
All those social and political influences which distinguished the religions
of Greece, Persia, and Rome were lost, and the degraded
worship became the poison of morality and the enemy of civilization.

(05:40):
And every pagan religion exhibited such a phase when the
old belief was disintegrated, and when the powers which had
gradually led men away from God seemed finally to have
usurped his place. This phase has not always coincided with
the period of lowest national decline, because in some favored
countries an intellectual reaction and has transformed a perishing religion

(06:02):
or skepticism has delivered men from its thralldom quote quim
at politories dominies at Mino's creduli esa coporant. But wherever
there was no such intellectual revival to produce a conflict
between the awakened reason and the degenerating tradition, and wherever

(06:24):
error pursued its blindfold course, unchecked by great lawgivers like
those of India, Persia, and China, or by culture like
that of the classic world. There the horrors of paganism
developed themselves helplessly till the only remedy was the strong
hand of an imperial administration as in Gaul, the extermination

(06:46):
of the priesthood as in Britain, or the destruction of
the race itself as in Central America. There is no
other natural term. The origies of the Syrian Venus were
revived at fixed intervals in the Lebanon to the nineteenth century.
Greece presents a contrast to the unvarying East, in the
modifications which a people of restless temper and sharp intellect

(07:09):
introduced into the original idea of human sacrifice, and in
the rapidity with which the Rite passed through all phases
of progress and decline. The stubborn consistence and unreflecting conservatism
of the Punic race converted religious earnestness into a demoralizing influence,
while the unstable indifference, the keen vital enjoyment, and the

(07:32):
intellectual liberty of the Greek soon made the rigid ceremonial
of expiation conformed to the feelings of a civilization in
which religion was not the only, and sometimes not the
most powerful of the influencing forces. Without questioning that human
sacrifice was indeed the most efficacious of offerings, the Greek

(07:52):
felt that it was connected with a more earnest religion,
a more cheerless theology, a more mystical philosophy than that
which belonged to the fantastic and poetical world of Greek mythology.
He never lost sight of the foreign and barbarous origin
of the right. It was strange and unhallowed, alien from
Hellenic manners. Heracles, who represents their influence, suppressed it. In Italy,

(08:18):
the chorus in Euripides condemns the sacrifice of Epigenia, and
Herodotus calls the sacrifice of two Egyptian boys by Menelauus
to obtain a fair wind and an holy act. Briga
muc Osion, Escalese and Herodotus are the earliest writers who
mention it, and from the first it is regarded with

(08:40):
fear and aversion. The mythology of Greece knew nothing of
propitiatory human sacrifice, in which the victim is offered up
as a better kind of animal. The myth of Pelops
was referred to Phrygia. Neither legends nor histories, no of
human victims, except an expiation of offenses that had drawn down

(09:00):
public calamities. And even then it was desired that the
act should be the victim's own, and that he who
died for thousands should die cheerfully. And then there was
little need of any religious rite. The centaur Chiron, whom
one authority calls the inventor of sacrifice, was the earliest
mythological personage who gave up his life to ransom another

(09:23):
when he resigned his immortality in favor of Prometheus. The
daughters of Orion volunteered to die when the oracle declared
that a pestilence could only be averted from Anoea by
the voluntary deaths of two maidens, so Macaria and the
daughters of Erechtheus and Cordus and Cretinus in historic times

(09:43):
died for Attica at Thebes, the king's son slew himself
in obedience to the prophecy of Turrisseus. Even the death
of Leonidas was counted among voluntary sacrifices. Now, in all
these cases the responsibility was thrown upon the oracle or
upon the gods. Not one is represented as proceeding from

(10:04):
the customs of the people. The right could not long
subsist in this pure form. The dread of it, which
at first made the Greeks ascribe it to the direct
command of their gods and require the victim to be
a voluntary one, soon led to further changes which pretended
its gradual but sure extinction. For when once the rigid
consistency of the original Moloch worship was abandoned, an opening

(10:28):
was given for the irresistible influence of civilization and humanity,
of religious skepticism, and the sense of men's social and
moral rights. The first amendment was to select the victim
by lot. The idea grew naturally from the democratic institutions
of Athens, but its earliest victim was the daughter of
Aristodemus in the First Messinian War, The next change was

(10:53):
to give the victim a chance to escape. The oracle
had decreed that to expiate the violence offered to Cain
and for a thousand years too, local and virgin should
be annually sent to Troy, where they were sacrificed, unless
they could escape into the Temple of Pallace at Athens.
The rite soon degenerated. Two poor persons were annually sacrificed

(11:15):
for the people. The same usage prevailed in other places,
but instead of the spotless and voluntary victim, first a
slave or a captive, and afterwards an animal was slaughtered
with the consent of the god, or blood was drawn
without destruction of life, or the victim was slain in epigy. Yet,
in spite of the horror which devised all these modes

(11:37):
of evading the right, we find traces of it throughout
almost the whole Hellenic world, and the cultis of almost
every god, and in all periods of their independent history.
There is no nation sis La Saul of which more
numerous or more various sacrifices of human victims are recorded.
Gerard is classified the instances geographically and a sign them

(12:00):
to their respective myths. In the middle of the fourth
century BC, Plato speaks of the right as a common custom,
and is not entirely abolished even at the beginning of
the Christian era. Yet the Greek religion could never be
thoroughly harmonized with making the present life unhappy to secure
enjoyment in the next, and with atoning for all evil

(12:21):
actions by voluntary suffering, which is the natural development of
the doctrine of expiation by sacrifice. A system, then, which
enacts bloody sacrifices without providing for the lower grades, by
inculcating self imposed penance, moral discipline, and self denial, is
mutilated and inconsistent. The idea of expiation requires more than

(12:45):
a substituted victim. It is but a superficial theology which
would exempt the sinner from any effort beyond that of
providing a vicarious sufferer. But the Greek idea, at least
in historic times, was never properly theological, for the victim
did not wash away the guilt of the individual, but
only warded off the consequences of sin from the community,

(13:07):
and these consequences remained after the guilt was washed away. Orestes,
though purified of his mother's blood, was still pursued by
the furies. It was not the conscience of guilt, but
the terror of its consequences, which overcame the humanity of
the Greeks, where this terror found no place. There, Instead

(13:28):
of the human victims which other nations offered, they contented
themselves with hedicombes of animals and with the mysteries, which
unquestionably satisfied those religious cravings that in other places could
only be appeased by human sacrifice. But in Rome, where
religion was more real, the awe of the gods greater,

(13:48):
the view of life more earnest and gloomy, and morals
more severe, human sacrifice was less hateful to the popular mind.
There was no horror of bloodshed in the national character,
and no provision for substituting an easier atonement for human
victims in the religious ritual. The deification of the state
made every sacrifice which it exacted seem as nothing in

(14:12):
comparison with the fortune of Rome and the perils which
for centuries menaced it. From Carthage or gaul, Epirus or Pontus, Parthia,
Spain or Germany, each demanded its human victims. There are
but few records of the sentiments of the earlier Romans.
The bulk of their literature belongs to the age of

(14:33):
universal Empire, when the people dwelt securely in the capital
of the world, thinking only of distant conquest, and when
their religion had lost its local and national character, as
Prudentius says, roma antiqua sibi non costat versa per avon
at mutata sacres or natu legibus armies molta colpe que

(14:58):
noncolyte si coorino institute quidam melius nonnulla refuge it at
morem veriare sitom non dacint et que predim condiederate jura
in contreria vertit quidmihi t rito solitos romane senetor objectas

(15:19):
comsquito petrum populic frequent instabilis positi sententia flexa novarit. When
the fullness of time was at hand, the energy of
the old belief was broken, and the decomposition of the
national religion was first manifested in its effects on that

(15:40):
rite which was its highest and most forcible expression. Those
substitutions were adopted, which became to after ages, the proof
of the earlier prevalence of human sacrifice while the Etruscan
influence was strong, resemblances, as Servius says, were taken for realities.
The name was held to be as good as the thing.

(16:02):
Dolls were flung into the typer instead of men, and
it was pretended that the animals which were sacrificed were
human beings transformed. Human sacrifices were first prohibited in the
Republic BC ninety five and quote. For some time, says Planning,
the open celebration of the monstrous right was unheard of

(16:23):
on a quote, But as Celigue says on the passage,
planning can only have meant that human sacrifice for magical
purposes ceased, as he must have known that men continued
to be publicly offered for other causes down to his
own times. The few traces that remain proved that the
magical right was still practiced, though in secret and with shame,

(16:46):
whilst human victims continued to be publicly immolated for other
ends till they also were prescribed by the law. Augustus
interdicted all Roman citizens from partaking in the inhuman rights
of the druids, whose sacrific vices were suppressed by Claudius
in Gaul and by Seutonius in Britain, in the Sentences

(17:06):
of Julius Paullus, written in the beginning of the third century,
we find a law making it a capital offense to
offer a human sacrifice, either secretly or in a temple.
This must be drawn from the Edict of Hadrian, to
which many later writers attribute the extinction of the practice,
But the belief in the magical or atoning efficacy of

(17:27):
human blood grew under the influence of Oriental priests with
the increasing stringency of the law that forbade it, and
human victims perished long after the decree of the year
ninety seven BC, and in defiance even of the Edict
of Hadrian. In the year sixty three BC, Cataline and
his accompasses sacrificed a boy and ratified the oath they

(17:51):
had taken over his bleeding body by eating his flesh.
Seven years later, Cicero publicly accused Valentinius of offering up
human victims to the gods. Juvenile speaks of similar practices
under the Flavian Caesars and Justin Martyr under the Antonines.
In the times of Marcus Aurelius Aristides, the rhetorician who

(18:13):
had been for many years afflicted with an incurable disease,
and as a priest of Escolapius was used to receive
in his sleep directions from the God through which he
had hoped for a cure. Learned one day when he
felt himself better, that his foster brother Hermius had just
sacrificed his own life to save him. A sister, Philomenia, remained,

(18:36):
to whom he was affectionately attached, but he was warned
by the God that unless she died, he could not live.
Casaubon understands Aristites to say that she also was sacrificed.
He for whom they died, published the facts to the
world in his sacred Orations. While the Roman people were
restrained by the law and by a horror still more

(18:58):
effective wastice by their rulers without fear or disguise. In
every generation of the four centuries from the fall of
the Republic to the establishment of Christianity, human victims were
sacrificed by the emperors. In the year forty six BC,
Julius Caesar, after suppressing a mutiny, caused one soldier to

(19:19):
be executed, while at the same time two others were
sacrificed by the flamen of Mars on the altar and
the campus. Marcius. The historian is careful to distinguish the
religious right from the military execution, and there are many
reasons against supposing that the priest could have been a
common executioner. Five years later, when Perugia was taken, Octavian

(19:41):
sacrificed three hundred senators and knights to his deified predecessor,
and the altars of Perugia became a proverb. In the
same age, Sextus Pompeius flung captives into the sea as
a sacrifice to his father Neptune. Augustus sacrificed a maiden
named Gregoria and buried her beneath the walls of Ancira.

(20:03):
Another antigony was sacrificed by Tiberius when he built the
Theater of Antioch. When Germanicus died, his house was found
to be lined with charms, images and bones of men
whom Tiberius had sacrificed to the infernal gods to hasten
his end. Augustus had refused to let a senator offer
his life to prolong the days of the emperor, but

(20:26):
Caligula compelled one to die, who, having thus devoted himself,
shrank at the last moment from consummating the sacrifice. Nero,
by the advice of the astrologers, put many nobles to
death to avert from himself the evils with which a
comet threatened him. Trajan, when he rebuilt Antioch, sacrificed the

(20:47):
beautiful Calliope and placed her statue in the theater. In
the next reign, Antenninus offered himself up for Hadrian commodists,
sacrificed a man to mithro Didius Julianus offered sacrifices of children,
and Caracalla sacrificed human victims. In the Temple of Serapis,

(21:08):
Helegalibus sacrificed children. According to the Syrian Rites, and Valerian,
in obedience to an Egyptian magician, Aurelian, when the frontiers
were threatened by the Macromani, ordered the sacred books to
be opened and declared that from every nation victims must
be supplied for the altars. At the beginning of the

(21:28):
fourth century, Maccentius divined the future by sacrificing infants and
opening the bodies of pregnant women. The same rights were
practiced by Julian the Apostate. After his death, the body
of a woman was found hanging by the hare in
a temple at Carey. He had inspected her entrails to
divine the issue of his campaign, and his palace at

(21:50):
Antioch was filled with the corpses of human victims. In
the year three seventy one, the tribune Polinantius confessed that
he had sacrificed a woman to the infernal gods in
the hope of compassing the destruction of Valans. The instances
recur with a uniformity, which proved the practice to have
been habitual. The UnRoman rite of burying the live a

(22:13):
man and woman of the nation with which Rome was
at war, described by Livy, survived to the days of
the elder Pliny. Children were publicly sacrificed to Molik in
Africa until the middle of the second century. The Romans
had crucified the priests on the trees around the temple,
but the rite was not extinct in the time of Tertullian.

(22:34):
Eusebius indeed believed that the Edict of Hadrian had effected
its purpose. But Porphyry speaks as if human sacrifices lasted
until the close of the third century, but it is
unnecessary to prove the Romans practice so circumstantially, when in
fact the combats of gladiators were a form of the
rite in which the religious ideas still survived beneath the

(22:57):
secularity of the spectacle. At first, these shows were celebrated
for the souls of the dead, like the games which
Achilles united with the sacrifice of prisoners at the funeral
of Patrocles. At the death of Junius Brutus, the victims
furnished by the Gentes were so numerous that they were
made to fight together and kill each other, thus converting

(23:20):
the right into a spectacle. The gods in whose honor
these games were held was the same who devoured his
children in two places. Combat's distinctly religious in characters, survived
to a very late period. Under Marcus Auroulius, the candidates
for the priesthood of Diana at Archaea fought at her
temple and the survivor obtained it, and on the same

(23:43):
album mount a gladiator was annually sacrificed to Jupiter Lattieris
until the time of Constantine, But though the Romans were
not too civilized to endure the spectacle of wholesale massacre,
in which the memory of a religious origin was dim
by the splendor of the unholy festivity. Yet they retained

(24:04):
too little of the old spirit to tolerate an inhuman right,
the object of which was simply religious. Yet a people
in whom unbelief was counterbalanced by superstition, and who were
familiar with bloodshed, required no more than the example of
their emperors, and the incentives of magic and of the
Phoenician and Celtic worship to confirm them in a taste

(24:26):
for sacrifices for which slavery supplied the victims and secured impunity.
The practice defied the laws of the empire, and ceased
only with the downfall of paganism among the barbarians. It
survived still longer, and resisted even the preaching of the
Christian faith. The human sacrifices of the Druids may have

(24:48):
begun in cannibalism. Strabo says that the Celts of Gaul
and Spain were taught by famine to eat human flesh,
and he cites a rumor that it was the ordinary
practice in Ireland. Diodorus confirms the report, and Saint Jerome
in the middle of the fourth century was an eye
witness of the cannibalism of the British people, who picked

(25:09):
out the choicest morsels with gluttonous relish. Salinus shows the
connection between this unnatural custom and the religious rite when
he speaks of the Irish drinking the blood of their victims.
There are indications of the progress and druidism from an
earlier period when such barbarous customs were widely spread in
the race, to its high development in the age of Caesar.

(25:33):
The intermediate phase is shown in a practice out of
harmony with the latest form, which had died out not
long before the conquest of Gaul, that of burning declines
and slaves of the deceased, together with all that had
been most useful to him, that is funeral. Two centuries
before Caesar, the Gauls strove to atone for their offenses

(25:55):
against the gods by the sacrifice of innocent human victims.
In their wars against Antigonus, they offered up their wives
and children to expiate the menaces of the adverse omens,
and Cicero says that any fear led them to offer
human sacrifices to avert the peril on this idea, the

(26:17):
later Druidic sacrifices, which so horrified the skeptical Romans, were
founded first the notion that each man brought himself off
by substituting another, and criminals were kept in prison to
be thus immolated. For private persons had no right to
sacrifice the innocent, but in the public sacrifices, when the

(26:39):
supply of criminals was insufficient, then in the interests of all,
the innocent might be slain. And when the occasion was exceptional,
as when the plague visited Marseilles, the atoning victim was
not chosen from amongst the criminals, but some poor and
harmless man voluntarily offered his life and on to his head.

(27:00):
After he had been maintained for a year at the
public expense, the woes of the city were solemnly transferred,
and he was thrown into the sea. For the ordinary
quinquineal sacrifices, however, enemies and criminals were reckoned sufficient They
were massacred in various ways. Some were crucified, some pierced

(27:21):
with arrows, and large numbers burned in one heap with
the firstlings of various kinds. These were not expiatory sacrifices,
but propitiatory thank offerings of the earliest and simplest type,
and men were offered as the best victims, not in
kind but in degree. The divination sometimes connected with the right,

(27:43):
was not its primary object. The Druids inspected the victims
to augur how the gods had accepted him. Great authorities
have concluded from Lucian's lines et Quibius emitis placator zeguinae
diro hutetes dorensgay feris altaribus haesus et Tyrannus Scythekeae non

(28:07):
metior Eradiene, that men were sacrificed to all the principal
Celtic gods. This, however, would have been inconsistent with the
refining subtlety of the Druidic theology, and we have not
sufficient warrant in the classics for the notion. Tertullian and
Nucius Felix know of human sacrifices only of their chief

(28:28):
god Mercury. To theets. Zeus argues that men must have
been sacrificed to Mars Jesus if they were offered to Apollo,
but Diodorus does not mention it in his account of
the cultus of Apollo and Caesar omits men from his
catalog of the offerings made to Mars. Perhaps, however, the

(28:48):
victims slain before battle were offered to Mars, to whom,
as well as Mercury, Lectantius says that men were sacrificed,
and of Part two six