The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [136]
The religion was unremarkable in many ways, but offering up the first born was required (good thing they weren’t requiring that in England, since Brian, Mick, and Keith would have had to go to the gods). Sacrificing the first-born was seen as an act of humility: one gives one’s best and what one loves most, to one’s god, and as a result, all of those alive in that society are second-born, or later. The practical reason to approve such a practice is that it curbs our over-weaning “pride of place.” If everyone is second-born, or lower, no one has sole inheritance, and all the other problems that go with letting the first born live. The story of Abraham and Isaac shows how a substitution method called “redemption” could be used to replace the traditional way, so that pride is curbed and the first-born can be allowed to live.
So, things did eventually change. Not just the Hebrews, but the Egyptians and the Greeks also moved “beyond” human sacrifice, independently of the Hebrews, and long before Abraham in the case of the Egyptians. But it took hundreds if not thousands of years to squash the rite, and it still lingers today, associated with the Black Mass and enacted only an infrequent teenage rebellion, as an invigorating idea among the most forbidden of the outcast fringe groups. The Stones have played on that forbidden feeling, but mainly for its shock value, I think. They are devotees of the goddess, not of the dark prince.
It’s hard for people today to grasp that sacrificing the first-born was once what ordinary people did from religious piety, and that the animal sacrifices in voodoo ought to be seen as a step away from that. Is animal sacrifice barbarous? It’s hard to understand why people are troubled by the ritual sacrifice of a chicken but don’t mind eating at KFC. Which of those two, in a just world, would really be more inhumane? I mean, be rational about this. Treating animals as if their lives had no value at all as against treating them as individually valuable enough for sacrifice to the gods? Maybe we haven’t altogether improved our practical, moral sensibilities in the last couple of centuries.
I think Shirley Jackson’s eerie short story “The Lottery” (maybe you had to read it in high school like I did) helps us grasp the idea of human sacrifice as it might be if it existed in the present. But in her version, the sacrificial victim is chosen by chance and is reluctant. There is evidence that among the Druid’s the “victim” volunteered, and it was a privilege to be so sacrificed. The stories of the early Christian martyrs have a lot of that same energy—read the unnerving diary of Perpetua if you doubt me.
Anyway, it is amazing what sorts of activities can be “normalized” with humans, and that includes human sacrifice. If Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann lived back in that time, before Abraham, they’d be defending the sacrifices, because their type of conservative sensibility, about the importance of keeping traditions, along with their piety (which I think is genuine), has the same quality as the conventional worshipers in any age. Those gals would pretty much embrace, I’m confident, whatever the prevailing traditional norms were whenever they lived, and they would give up their own first born and condemn those who didn’t if that was what their religion said. No mother wants to give up her child. But where the expectations and the practices of millennia demand it, it is done.
If Palin and Bachmann had grown up in the fertility cults of the Ba’als, even after Abraham’s time, they’d also be doing the nasty with all the men at festival time just like good girls did back then. And it was very tough on young women who tried to choose between the traditional ways of the ancient Semitic races and the new and more modest ways of the Hebrews. If you aren’t