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Historically, it was the intention by human sacrifice to try to make contact
with God or the gods. Our ancestors believed that nature was structured in a
way that leaved room for some concessions to man, that the open
acknowledgement of one's total powerlessness, confronted with such threats
to survival as famine and plague, would exert as least some pressure to
summon the almighty God, provided that it was proved that the prevalent
impotence in society towards the impending collapse was so complete that one
or several of the dearest objects in one's possession was offered to God.

Like political systems, sacrificial systems constitute concepts and
statements about the balance of social reality. During the prehistory and
early history of man, sacrificial systems occupy an absolutely central
position which Meyer Fortes, a Cambridge specialist in the theology and
anthropology of sacrifice ascribes to three different contexts:

1. The biological foundation. There is a conspicuous similarity between
filial
dependence in a family and the submissiveness under an almighty sacrifice-
demanding authority.
2. The psychological origin. The sense of impotence and vulnerability, a
common
human experience (among others), will invariably be reinforced during the
lifetime of a human being through pain, suffering and deprivation.
3. The social expression. The sense of impotence and vulnerability finds a
customary
expression in sacrificial systems in all societies of the earth.

A French anthropologist, Olivier Herrenschmidt criticizes the majority of
his colleagues including Meyer Fortes for putting an undue emphasis on human
weakness illustrated by the human sacrifice in some sacrificial systems and
of taking too little interest in the powerful sacrificer, the person
wielding the knife in human and animal sacrifices.

Most people are inclined to feel sympathy and interest for the weak;
psychiatrists take pains to empathize with mentally disordered persons,
anthropologists investigate the exotic recesses of the human mind in
societies where sacrificial systems prevail, but attempting to understand
the other side, the sacrificer, the murdererer, can hardly result in accept
or resilient empathizing, but rather in confrontation and revolt and will in
the final analysis develop into a need to abolish the sacrificial system
itself.

The Danish historian, Henrik Jensen, shows in a book about the history of
the Twentieth Century which he calls 'Ofrets Århundrede' (the Century of
the Victim) a similar inclination as the majority of the anthropologists to
overemphasise one party in an entire reality system, not in a sacrificial
system but in the political and military power systems of the Twentieth
Century. There was a heartbreaking abundance of victims of war and political
violence in the Twentieth Century, but there were also horrible numbers of
rapists, torturers, and murderers of whom many walk around among us today.
The Twentieth Century was also their century, revolting though it is.

If our civilization is to progress further it must leave age-old orthodox
Christian sheepishness faced with authorities and stop turning the other
cheek to these recurring outbursts of violence. It is exactly necessary to
focus the attention not on the weak, the victims, but on the strong, those
in power accepting that this means uncovering hidden agendas while
confronting the revolting and grim realities of the nuclear era when,
finally, it appears that the days of traditional Macchiavellian power
systems are numbered. Fortunately, the general informational and educational
level is somewhat higher at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century than
some generations ago, a condition called social reflexivity by Anthony
Giddens.

Social reflexivity implies the development of increasingly globally aware,
critical populations alienated from elitist forms of governance and state
displays of force. Further the administrative and technological
possibilities of identifying, retaliating against, controlling and thus
preventing further perpetrations by military intelligence war criminals
(amounting to crowd control - or, if you insist: advanced crowd control),
even where these number of tens or hundreds of thousands have become
potential instruments in the arsenal available to the global civilian
society.

Like revolution, sacrifice (Latin. sacer, holy, and facio, to make) - of
material objects, domestic animals and humans may have an ambiguous
character. Revolution may denote an identifiable reality, a phenomenon, but
it may also signify an idea or an aspiration which protagonists advocate and
opponents contest. The sacrifice may be conceived as a concrete gift which
is presented to God, but it may also be a nuisance you want to get rid of -
e.g. individually in the form of a scape goat and/or in the form of a social
pollutant. In societies where sacrificial systems prevail there are no
revolutions. Sacrifice and revolution are devices in societies at different
developmental stages destined in the first instance to restore and
perpetuate a societal order threatened intermittently by disaster and in the
second case to demolish a definitively undermined and dilapidated society,
subsequently reconfiguring and rebuilding it - if it is a successful
revolution - in a new shape with a comprehensive, new programmatic content.
Human sacrifice takes up a peculiar position in the Christian religion, and
before that in Judaism. Initially, with Abraham's (narrowly escaped)
sacrifice of Isaac, then through the crucifixion of Jesus, and finally
brought to maturity on Doomsday by the cutting of Messiah's throat like a
lamb slaughtered according to the Jewish rite. The transcendence of human
sacrifice is exposed in stages of increasing transparency and evident
relevance to our civilization, the transcending element being substitution
(in the case of Isaac), resurrection (as for Jesus), and collective
rebirth on Doomsday (as regards Messiah and the total population of the
earth).

When Abraham has bound Isaac and laid him on top of the altar on Mount
Moriah - an event for which there are renewed and weighty reasons to assume
that this is the very location, where Solomon later built the (first)
Temple of Jerusalem - a ram lamb turns up, its horns trapped in a thicket.
This narrative, known as the Aquedah in rabbinic lore - the binding of
Isaac being a condensed expression of the Jewish people's 'binding' and
final 'loosening' or redemption by Yahweh / our parent ETI - simultaneously
symbolises concrete historical progress, the abolition of ritual sacrifices
of humans and the transition to animal (and later puppet) substitutes, which
is the normal development for great numbers of peoples all over the world,
where human sacrifices have occurred.

The eye-catching simplicity (Genesis 22:13-18) in this setting of the
abolition of human sacrifice on the foundation site of Solomon's Temple
brings out the contrast to the gigantic cataclysm of Doomsday.

Abraham's abstaining from sacrificing Isaac is a token, on that very day, of
the foundation of the nation of Israel, and of the central position and
mission of the Jewish people in our civilization. Beyond representing the
transition from human sacrifice to substitute sacrifices, Abraham also
embodies the later departure from the river civilizations having grown up in
the city of Ur on the Euphrates, later migrating to Egypt along the Nile and
finally leaving Egypt to settle down in the land of Canaan where he founded
Israel at 'the great river' as the Mediterranean came to be regarded many
centuries later.

On a mediaeval copy of a late Roman map, the Peutinger Table, the
Mediterranean Sea is grossly elongated and gulfs, rivers and sea are shown
as varying extensions of the same medium. Thus there is an understandable
resistance in Antiquity against realising sharp differences between river
and sea, but it is even more interesting that a major recent work on
Mediterranean history appearing in 2000 finds it difficult, apart from the
environmental issue, to apply a unifying concept to the Mediterranean
region.

I suggest this unifying concept could be to consider the entire
Mediterranean region the second, major stage - in a three- or four-stage
concept - of the development of the global civilization. We find the shapes
of nature repeated at different levels, the vortex occurs for instance in
the whirlpool, in the depression approaching from the West and in the
structure of our own spiral galaxy, but the analogy between the development
of a human being and the development of a 'global individual' does not
suggest itself so easily until we have the framework of an answer to a
series of questions concerning the frequency, ubiquity and typical
development of global civilizations. If you consider the physical and
psychical development of a human being, there are a small number of clearly
definable stages which the individual must pass through successfully before
he or she becomes a mentally sane and physically healthy grown-up person.

The process appears analogous when it concerns the development of a global
civilization. After the river civilizations comes the Mediterranean stage
succeeded by the ocean stage, the age of the voyages of discovery. It is
true that there is a lot in between, but these are clearly definable steps
in the development of a global civilization and the descendants of Abraham
and Isaac played important roles at each stage contributing immensely,
sometimes paradoxically, against their will, to the forceful, goal-directed
self-realisation of our civilization. The first Christians were Jewish and
Christianity, which together with the ideas and values of ancient Greece
constitute the prime substance of Western civilization, is a descendant of
judaism.

The pseudosacrifice of Isaac suggesting the transcendence of human
sacrifice, the position of the victim as the first in a line of human
pseudosacrifices and the literal meaning of the name of Abraham being 'the
father of a multitude (of nations)', clearly indicates that the message is
addressed to the entire global civilization.

The crucifixion of Jesus on Golgotha just beyond the town walls was regarded
as the execution of a criminal by his adversaries and as a human sacrifice
by his proselytes, testifying to an unredeemed, profound antagonism in the
Jewish society at that time between an educated elite, e.g. the Pharisees
and the Sadducees - and the lay citizenry. Here the sacrifice-transcending
element was resurrection, not only spiritual, but also carnal resurrection.

In contradistinction to what was the case at the pseudo-sacrifice of Isaac,
several spectators were present at Jesus' death - and a restricted number of
persons witnessed his physical presence after his resurrection, fantastic
to such a degree that Thomas the Doubter had to touch his resurrected body,
and mystic to the extent that it has remained an unsolvable enigma for
almost two thousand years. It was a mystery in which you might have faith,
but for which nobody was able to give a detailed, scientifically reasoned
account, before the launch of the NATO COSMIC-classified 'Apocalypse'
project around 1964 and the dawning understanding of the physics of FTL
(faster-than-light) travels and time reversal.

Finally, human sacrifice is transcended in its individual form by Messiah's
openly displayed threefold resurrection on Doomsday.

We find the above-mentioned tripartite pattern reiterated both in the
sacrificial triad, Isaac - Jesus - Messiah and in the personal death of
Messiah, who actually dies three times on Doomsday, each time in a different
way.

"The pattern is found in myths and legends of various Indo-European peoples
in two main forms. The first of these is a series or grouping of three
deaths, each by a different means. The second is a single death by three
different means simultaneously."

In the sacrificial context, this tripartition means that the sacrifice is
'khalil', total, i.e. that the entire meaning potential of the sacrificial
system has been exhausted. So when we have both forms of the tripartite
sacrificial pattern, with the vital reservation that Isaac actually doesn't
die, that Jesus resurrects from death, and that Messiah survives being
killed even three times, it is hereby signified that we have transgressed
the border to a new world, the sacrificial system and sacrificial reality
itself having been used up and transcended completely.

The tripartition of sacrifice alludes to the three elements, earth, air, and
water or the underworld and to methods of execution belonging to each
element. The Scandinavian Germanic peoples, from which the richest evidence
for this pattern comes, had three means of human sacrifice as well as
criminal execution: by hanging (corresponding to the air), by drowning or
its equivalent, living interment (corresponding to water or the underworld)
or by a weapon. The latter means suggests that this death form is
associated with the War god and, consequently, with the warrior function.

Steen Hjortsø