The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets

by Richard B. Westbrook

“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” This seems to be very farfetched indeed—an afterthought. It did not satisfy some of his disciples, for “from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.”

From this simple idea of securing faithfulness by the transfusion of the blood of two persons seems to have come the idea of propitiating the gods by offering them bloody sacrifices. In primitive times, among barbarous and uncivilized peoples, the conception was universal that the gods were very much like themselves, and that therefore they would be pleased with presents. When offended they could be conciliated, and when some crime had been committed they could be induced to forgive the transgressor by some valuable offering, such as the first-fruits of the soil or the most immaculate animals of the flock. This idea of obtaining favors from the invisible powers was carried to such extremes that for the honor of humanity we should feel inclined to doubt the monstrous stories were they not so well attested. The offering of these sacrifices became so degraded and disgusting by superstition that it ended in the belief that the deity's anger could be appeased, his revenge satisfied, his vanity flattered, and that he could be made generally pleased, by holocausts of human beings; so that the more costly the sacrifice, the more certain was the deity to smile upon the donor. The Moloch-worship, the mother placing the babe in the arms of the monstrous idol and seeing it burned before her own eyes, seems to exhaust the horrors of human ingenuity. We have only space to state that these abominations prevailed over most of the heathen world when the Old-Testament rites and ceremonies came into use among the Jews. We find the custom of offering sacrifices in the early pages of Genesis, when it led to the first murder. Cain’s sacrifice, sacerdotal-ists tell us, was not accepted by Jehovah because there was no blood in it, as there was in the offering of Abel. Abraham was about to slay his own son when the blood of a ram was provided instead; and, in fact, all the Bible patriarchs sacrificed, and the exodus from Egypt itself was brought about under the pretence that the people had to go to the desert to offer their accustomed sacrifice.

The Jews borrowed their idea of sacrifice from the heathen, and sometimes were more heathenish than the heathens themselves. Thousands and thousands of innocent animals were cruelly butchered for sacrifice, as the Jews were full of Egyptian reminiscences on one hand and of Canaanitish modes of worship on the other. It is said that Jehovah allowed these abominations because of the ignorance of these people and their hardness of heart, lest they might despise a naked religion and be dazzled by the imposing ceremonies by which they were surrounded. The whole system of bloody sacrifices was based upon anthropomorphic conceptions of their Jehovah, to whom the “agreeable smell” of the blood was a sweet satisfaction. The Jews adopted the very worst features of paganism in regard to these bloody sacrifices, which they offered on all occasions—so much so that their prophets cried out against them and Jehovah himself denounced them.

The life or blood of the animal was distinctly said to make “the atonement for the soul.” This notion of a representative victim is one that belonged to the whole ancient world, as can be seen by reference to any of the great cyclopaedias. It was adopted by the Jews, not revealed to them by Jehovah. The scape-goat (Lev. 16) and many other cases of seemingly expiatory sacrifices are embodiments of this idea, which was adopted by Christianity directly from Judaism, whose priests had adopted it from other people.

The practice of bloody offerings was common to Hindoos, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Greeks, and Northmen. There is a Hindoo ritual for human as well as for brute animals set forth in Asiatic Researches. In Fragments of Sanchoniathon, Kronos sacrifices his “only son” to his father Ouranos, his “father in heaven.” Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, Iphigeneia,

before going to Troy, and Polyxena, daughter of Priam, was immolated on the tomb of Achilles to his manes. Repeatedly in the Punic wars children of noble families were burned alive to Æsculapius, god of medicine. Burning at the stake and hanging upon a gibbet were sacrifices to appease the divine justice. In short, all bloody sacrifices were propitiatory, to appease the rage of hunger in a famished god. Blood was excellent, because its aroma was the vehicle of life, and so afforded support to life.

In Homer's Odyssey, Ulysses slays animals before the ghosts of Hades, and these run up to be nourished by the blood. He draws his sword, rushes upon them, and drives them away. Then, selecting one with whom he wishes to talk, he feeds him with the invigorating vapor, and the ghost is then made strong enough to talk.

But none of these sacrifices were strictly vicarious. The old gods were angry at neglect, but never had the kind of justice that a sheep or goat or cow could not appease. The Jews were not unfamiliar with human sacrifices (Lev. 27:28,29; Judg. 11:30-39), and even the early Christians are said to have offered bloody sacrifices of human beings. The deification of Jesus to correspond with the apotheosis of other personages required a divine parentage. This idea was not gotten up until the second Christian century. Justin made Jesus a second god. But the earlier Fathers did not connect the notion of the vicarious atonement with that of original sin and total depravity. Basilides maintained that penal suffering or suffering for purposes of justice of necessity implies personal criminality in the sufferer, and therefore cannot be endured by an innocent person as a substitute.

Prof. Robertson Smith, LL.D., in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in his learned article on “Sacrifice," says part: “Where we find a practice of sacrificing honorific gifts to the gods, we usually find also certain other sacrifices which resemble those already characterized, to be consumed in sacred ceremony, but differ from them, inasmuch as the sacrifice—usually a living victim—is not regarded as a tribute of honor to the god, but has a special or mystic significance. The most familiar case of this second species of sacrifice is that which the Romans distinguished from the hostia honoraria by the name of hostia piacularis. In the former case the deity accepts a gift; in the latter, he demands a life. The former kind of sacrifice is offered by the worshipper on the basis of an established relation of friendly dependence on his divine lord; the latter is directed to appease the divine anger or to conciliate the favor of a deity on whom the worshipper has no right to count” (vol. xxi. p.. 132).

Piamlar Sacrifices.—“The idea of substitution is widespread among all early religions, and is found in honorific as well as piacular rites. In all such cases the idea is that the substitute shall imitate as closely as is possible or convenient the victim whose place it supplies; and so in piacular ceremonies the god may indeed accept one life for another, or certain select lives to atone for the guilt of a whole community; but these lives ought to be of the guilty kin, just as in blood-revenge the death of any kinsman of the manslayer satisfies justice. Hence such rites as the Semitic sacrifices of children by their fathers [Moloch], the sacrifice of Iphigeneia and similar cases among the Greeks, inasmuch as something is given up by the worshippers nor the offering up of boys to the goddess Mania at Rome....