For the Vengeance Rising album, see Human Sacrifice (album).
An excavated tzompantli from the Templo Mayor in modern-day Mexico City
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Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is usually intended to please or appease gods, a human ruler, public or jurisdictional demands for justice by capital punishment, an authoritative/priestly figure or spirits of dead ancestors or as a retainer sacrifice, wherein a monarch's servants are killed in order for them to continue to serve their master in the next life. Closely related practices found in some tribal societies are cannibalism and headhunting.[1] Human sacrifice is also known as ritual murder.
Human sacrifice was practiced in many human societies beginning in prehistoric times. By the Iron Age (1st millennium BCE), with the associated developments in religion (the Axial Age), human sacrifice was becoming less common throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia, and came to be looked down upon as barbaric during classical antiquity.[citation needed] In the Americas, however, human sacrifice continued to be practiced, by some, to varying degrees until the European colonization of the Americas. Today, human sacrifice has become extremely rare.
Modern secular laws treat human sacrifices as murder.[2][3] Most major religions in the modern day condemn the practice. For example, the Hebrew Bible prohibits murder and human sacrifice to Moloch.[4]
^Michael Rudolph (2008). Ritual Performances as Authenticating Practices. LIT Verlag Münster. p. 78. ISBN 978-3-8258-0952-2.
^"Boys 'used for human sacrifice'". BBC News. 2005-06-16. Retrieved 2010-05-25.
^"Kenyan arrests for 'witch' deaths". BBC News. 2008-05-22. Retrieved 2010-05-25.
Humansacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is usually intended to please or appease gods, a human ruler, public...
Humansacrifice was common in many parts of Mesoamerica, so the rite was nothing new to the Aztecs when they arrived at the Valley of Mexico, nor was...
During the pre-Columbian era, humansacrifice in Maya culture was the ritual offering of nourishment to the gods and goddesses. Blood was viewed as a...
This is a list of notable humansacrifices and events relating to them. 3500 BC: Three men were sacrificed during a burial, near the town of Shendi in...
The 2022 Elanthoor humansacrifice case refers to a crime in which two women were tortured and murdered as part of two humansacrifice rituals in Elanthoor...
Sacrifice is the offering of material possessions or the lives of animals or humans to a deity as an act of propitiation or worship. Evidence of ritual...
Humansacrifice in the ancient Iberian Peninsula is recorded in classical sources, which give it as a custom of Lusitanians and other Celtic peoples from...
a form of humansacrifice. Child sacrifice is thought to be an extreme extension of the idea that the more important the object of sacrifice, the more...
and sacrifice, not on faith or dogma, although Latin literature preserves learned speculation on the nature of the divine and its relation to human affairs...
refers the consumption of the flesh of victims of humansacrifice, for example among the Aztecs. Human and animal remains excavated in Knossos, Crete, have...
Sacrifice was a religious activity in Maya culture, involving the killing of humans or animals, or bloodletting by members of the community, in rituals...
Late Antiquity, and continue in some cultures or religions today. Humansacrifice, where it existed, was always much rarer. All or only part of a sacrificial...
dance, as well as ceremonial warfare, the Mesoamerican ballgame, and humansacrifice.[better source needed] The cosmology of Aztec religion divides the...
indicate that humansacrifice or execution of criminals took place in Benin in the thirteenth century AD. From the early days, humansacrifices were a part...
stead, as God commends Abraham's pious obedience to offer his son as a humansacrifice. In addition to being addressed by modern scholarship, this biblical...
child sacrifice. A temple at Amman (1400–1250 BC) excavated and reported upon by J.B. Hennessy in 1966, shows the possibility of bestial and human sacrifice...
equivalent of Ares. The later belief that ancient Spartans had offered humansacrifice to Ares may owe more to mythical prehistory, misunderstandings, and...
known instances of the explicit zero in human history. As a part of their religion, the Maya practised humansacrifice. "Maya" is a modern term used to refer...
Ancient Egyptian retainer sacrifice is a type of humansacrifice in which pharaohs and occasionally other high court nobility would have servants killed...
Celtic peoples sacrificed animals, almost always livestock or working animals. There is also some evidence that ancient Celts sacrificedhumans and, though...
writers frequently made reference to the druids as practitioners of humansacrifice. Caesar says those who had been found guilty of theft or other criminal...
killing and humansacrifice continues to take place ... in contravention of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and other human rights instruments...
evidence of humansacrifice ever happening in ancient Egypt. According to Shelby Brown, Carthaginians, descendants of the Phoenicians, sacrificed infants...
honored with a dance and ended in a war exercise. Various methods of humansacrifice were used to honour this god. The flayed skins were often taken from...
myth: the practice of various forms of ritual sacrifice, including humansacrifice and quail sacrifice; paper and rubber as sacrificial offerings; a pantheon...
with a wak'a for advice or assistance. Humansacrifice was part of Incan rituals in which they usually sacrificed a child (qhapaq hucha) or a slave. The...
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