Sacrifice is the word most often used against the left-hand path, and one of the words the path itself uses most carelessly. Its opponents have accused it, for as long as it has had a name, of killing animals and worse. Its practitioners deny it, almost to a person, and then go on to speak of sacrifice as a central part of their practice, meaning something else, and not always saying what.
This page sets out what the word has meant, what practitioners mean by it now, and the principle on which the Order's position rests. The Order's Statements of Position give that position in two sentences: its practice involves no sacrifice of any kind, and no working requires harm to any living thing.
The Word
The English word comes from the Latin sacrificium, from sacer, sacred, and facere, to make. To sacrifice was to make a thing sacred by giving it up: setting it apart from ordinary use and handing it over to a god.
Practitioners who think carefully about the subject distinguish three kinds of giving that the one word tends to blur.
- An offering is given freely, to honor, with nothing expected in return.
- A sacrifice is given at a cost to the giver, and its value lies in the cost. A rich man's coin is not a sacrifice. A poor woman's may be.
- A donation is given from surplus, and costs the giver nothing they will miss.
The distinction matters because the arguments about sacrifice are nearly always arguments about cost: who pays it, and whether it is paid at all.
Ancient Altars
The sacrifice of animals was very nearly universal in the ancient world. Greeks, Romans, the peoples of the Vedic hymns, and the peoples of the ancient Near East all offered animals to their gods, and the temple in Jerusalem did so until its destruction in the first century. In most of these religions the god received a portion, often the smoke, and the worshippers ate the rest. Sacrifice was a meal shared with the divine, and it was also, in most cities, how ordinary people came to eat meat at all.
Human sacrifice is attested in some places and times, and is less common than legend makes it. In central Mexico the victims were for the most part captives taken in war. At Carthage and in other Phoenician settlements, burial grounds of infants have been found whose meaning scholars still dispute. The northern peoples are said to have offered human victims, though nearly everything known of it was written by outsiders and enemies.
Moloch
The Hebrew scriptures condemn those who made their children "pass through the fire to Molech." Whether Molech was the name of a god or the name of a kind of offering is debated. The familiar picture of a bronze idol with a bull's head and heated arms comes from much later commentary. The valley outside Jerusalem where the practice was said to take place, the valley of Hinnom, gave its name, as Gehenna, to hell itself. An English epic of 1667 made Moloch a fallen angel, "besmeared with blood," and poets of the industrial age made him the emblem of any system that devours the young.
Moloch is not a figure of the adversary in the sense used on the page Faces of the Adversary. He stood against no order and gave nothing away. The left-hand path has a use for him only as a warning: he is the image of a value that demands that others be destroyed for it.
The Scapegoat
In the ancient rite of atonement as the scriptures describe it, the scapegoat was not offered on the altar. It was sent into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people. A twentieth-century theory holds that communities have always held together by expelling or destroying a victim on whom their own violence is placed, and that sacrifice is the ritual form of that expulsion. Whether or not the theory is right in general, it describes the history on the next part of this page with uncomfortable accuracy.
The Accusation
The charge of ritual murder is very old, and it has been made against nearly every despised minority in the history of Europe. Pagan Romans accused the early Christians of eating flesh and drinking blood at their secret meals. Medieval Christians accused the Jews of murdering children for their blood, a lie that cost countless lives over centuries. The same charge was made against heretics, and then against accused witches. In the 1980s it returned, in several countries at once, as the belief that secret networks were committing ritual crimes. No such networks were ever found, and the people accused were the ones who suffered.
The accusation was waiting for the left-hand path long before the path had a name. When practitioners say that the stories of animal sacrifice were invented by their opponents, they simplify a long and shifting history, but the history is largely on their side. The accusation has always told more about the accusers than about the accused.
Sacrifice on the Path Today
When practitioners of the left-hand path speak of sacrifice now, they mean a range of things.
- Nothing that harms an animal. Nearly every current rejects the killing of animals in ritual, and some groups expel anyone who does it. The most common argument is the one given in the next section.
- Things given up. Fasting, abstinence, sleep, comfort, a habit, an evening, a possession of real value. Some practitioners call this a votive sacrifice: promised before a working, and fulfilled through it.
- Personal tokens. Hair, nail clippings, written words, or objects burned or buried as part of a working.
- Time. Many devotional practitioners say that the truest offering is the hours spent in practice.
- Blood. Some practitioners offer a few drops of their own blood as a proof of seriousness. Some group rites use more.
- Money. Given, in some groups, to the god by way of a teacher. A later section considers it.
- Harm by proxy. Some practitioners speak of a sacrifice by proxy, in which an object stands for a person who is to be harmed. This is a curse under another name.
A very few groups at the fringe have spoken of more than this. Where they have acted on it they have committed crimes, and the rest of the path disowns them.
The Cost Principle
Across the currents, practitioners who reject the killing of animals most often give the same reason, and it is a good one. A sacrifice must cost the one who gives it. A practitioner who kills an animal gives up nothing of their own. The animal pays. By the logic of sacrifice itself, the act is not a sacrifice at all. It is a taking dressed as a giving.
The same reasoning applies, with the same force, to the curse by proxy. Its cost falls on the target, not on the one who works it, and whatever it is, it is not an offering. The Order's texts contain no curses, and its reasons are set out on the page On Magic.
When the Offering Is Money
The logic of sacrifice turns very easily into a collection plate. Some teachers on the path say that nothing is free, that one must give in order to receive, that spending on teachers is not optional, that money given to them is a sacred exchange that strengthens the flow of power, and that those who stop giving, or leave, will lose their protection and suffer for it. Several of the teachers who say this also condemn the churches for raising money by guilt and keeping members by fear, without noticing the resemblance.
The test is simple. Who receives the offering? If the answer is a person, then the offering is a payment, whatever it is called. If teaching, advancement, or recognition depends on it, it is a toll, in the sense the page Working With Others describes. And a threat of misfortune attached to it is one of the plainest signs that it is time to leave.
Blood
The Order's rule that no working requires harm to any living thing counts the practitioner among the living things. It asks for no blood, the practitioner's own included, and it advises against it on practical grounds as well. Anything used to draw blood can carry disease from one person to another. A cut can become infected. And the distance between a ritual cut and self-harm is shorter than it looks from the outside. A practitioner who finds that they want the cut more than the working, or need more blood each time, is showing two of the signs of poisoning listed in Venom and Remedy: compulsion and escalation. Anyone who is harming themselves should talk to someone qualified to help, and should do so now rather than after the next working.
Fasting
Fasting is the form of self-denial most often recommended on the path, and the one with the longest history in every religion. It is also not safe for everyone. It is not suitable for anyone with diabetes, anyone who is pregnant, anyone with a history of disordered eating, or anyone taking medicine that depends on food. A practitioner who is unsure should ask a doctor first. One who chooses to fast should keep it short, break it gently, write down what it did, and never treat it as required. No practice of the Order requires it.
The Order's Position
The Order's practice involves no sacrifice of any kind. It asks for no offering, accepts no money, and requires no harm to any living thing, animal, human, or the practitioner.
If anything in its practice answers to the old word, it is found in two places. The first is the third coil, the Shedding, in which the practitioner gives up beliefs they were given and did not choose, and which really does cost something. The second is the seventh tenet, What Is Gained Is Given Back. The Order's form of giving is not addressed to a god or paid to a teacher. It is addressed to other people, and it is free. The serpent does not mourn the skin it leaves on the stone, and it does not ask anyone to pay for the next one.