Ritual murder of children in Sevastopol. The structure of the sacrificial ritual. Sacral characteristics of the victim (based on the work of R. Girard "Violence and the Sacred") Ritual sacrifice

K. Levi-Strauss considers the sacrifice-offering as an exchange between people and supernatural beings: a person's relationship with spirits is built on the principle of the contract “you - me, I - you”. By giving gifts to supernatural beings, people expect generous gifts in return, or at least demand compensation. In case of non-fulfillment of the contract, either party will be punished. Thus, researchers traveling through Siberia noted with surprise that the Samoyeds beat their gods (wooden idols) with whips if they did not fulfill their requests.

Forms of animal behavior

Speaking about the killing of the victim as the basis of the experience of the sacred, the researchers point to the biological roots that go back to the stereotypical forms of animal behavior. Under such conditions, the connection in the human psyche of the sacred experience, the idea of death and rebirth with violence, aggression, suffering and sexuality is taken for granted.

Hunting Phenomenon

Some authors see the origins of the sacrificial act in the phenomenon of hunting: affective states caused by the sight and smell of blood when killing an animal, experiences of danger and good associated with this event create tension (W. Wundt). Then certain actions, red color, noises become stimuli for the re-emergence of the corresponding states. Their rhythm and repetition, the exaggeration of feelings form the actions into a ritual. Delight in killing a predator, when a person turns from a hunting object into a hunter, the discovery of anatomical similarities, accompanied by a sense of guilt, joint murder as proof of loyalty to the collective - these are the initial data for the emergence of sacrifice and the accompanying religious faith.

Awareness of the relationship between death and goodness (food, strength, continuation of life) occurred even in hunting communities, in which survival directly goes back to the killing of a totem animal. One of the meanings of the ritual was to send a killed ancestor to another world, so that he could return the next year, bringing with him many relatives. Later, they do this with people: they send them to creatures that live in other worlds, in the hope of getting something useful in return.

Primitive communities

In primitive hunting communities, hunting itself was probably transformed into a sacred act. It seems that instinctive actions aimed at survival were colored with very strong emotions in order to stay, to gain a foothold in consciousness as something important and necessary. The sacrificial rites of animals are similar all over the world for different peoples. Their antiquity is confirmed by the similarity in the order of action and the general scheme of conduct: killing the beast, begging for forgiveness for the murder, making requests and a collective meal. However, given the identity of cult actions, the rite does not exclude various semantic levels that have appeared over time.

The earliest meaning, in all likelihood, is not too far from instinctive grounds and is associated with the nutritional needs of the ancient hunter. The functional core of practical use is overgrown with a complex of ideas, among which the central one is identification, finding unity with the eaten character. Taking into themselves, absorbing the meat of the killed victim, transforming its body into its own flesh, the participants in the ritual meal join the sacred nature of the animal, acquire its qualities.

Totemism

Further, new ideas appear: in hunting cultures, the sacrifice of the ancestor totem is interpreted as sending the soul of the beast to the heavenly ruler in order to convey the prayers and petitions of people. The killed animal must return the next year and bring with it many relatives, providing the hunters with a successful hunt. It is necessary to pay attention to the duality of the meaning of the rite. On the one hand, the beast is revered as a blood father, on the other, it is killed to provide the tribe with food. This situation itself gives rise to fear and guilt.

Both ethnographic and historical material confirms that the essential moment of the sacrifice ritual is associated with the removal of guilt. An important aspect of sacrificial rites is finding an object on which to place the blame of the entire community. Since the entire tribe participates in the sacrifice rituals, it means that everyone is to blame, but no one separately. The guilt is distributed among all members of the community, thereby reducing it. But it is desirable that it can be eliminated altogether.

Thus, the sacrifice-sacrifice rite has many variations, but its essence is always the same - to remove sins from oneself and get rid of the feeling of guilt. Material from the site

During the Greek festival Buffonius (the ritual slaughter of the bull), the executioner shifted the blame onto the hatchet with which he carried out the killing. The weapon of slaughter was subject to punishment, the hatchet should be executed.
Participants in the "Bear Festival" among the northern peoples, addressing their pleas and apologies to the killed beast, assure him that the murder was not their fault, but the culprit was a gun that was sold to them by a Russian merchant.
In African societies, on the holiday of sacrifice, the ruler should commit various sins. Then, symbolically, the guilt was transferred to the animal, which was intended to be slaughtered. So, together with the killed beast, the sins of the entire tribe, taken upon by the leader of the community, disappear. He is a sacrifice, and by his death he must cleanse society from filth, uncleanness, and sin. The donor transfers his bad qualities to the victim.
A similar semantics is endowed with the Jewish rite, in which the sins and vices of members of the community are transferred to a goat, which is driven into the desert. The atonement is to eliminate the impurity of the person transferred to the ritual sacrificial animal. The feeling of guilt is weakened by the fact that the goat is not killed, but released. Although this means the death of the animal, people do not put it to death with their own hands, as if they are not involved in anything.

Libations.
Animal sacrifices.

In our selection, there are countries where people still believe that ritual killing can help you get rid of disease or drought.

At the moment, human sacrifice is prohibited throughout the world and is considered a criminal offense, but there are still places on our planet where superstition turns out to be stronger than the fear of punishment ...

Despite the fact that about 80% of the country's population are adherents of Christianity, local residents continue to have great respect for traditional African cults.

Now that a severe drought has hit Uganda, ritual killings are on the rise. Sorcerers believe that only human sacrifice can save the country from impending famine.

However, even before the drought, sorcerers did not disdain to use people in their monstrous rituals. For example, one boy was killed just because a wealthy businessman started a construction project and decided to appease the spirits before starting work. This case is not an isolated one: quite often local businessmen turn to sorcerers to help them achieve success in new projects. As a rule, customers are aware that human sacrifice will be required for such purposes.

In Uganda, there is a special police unit created to combat ritual killings. However, it does not work very effectively: the police themselves are afraid of sorcerers and often turn a blind eye to their activities.

Although Liberians are formally Christians, most of them actually practice traditional African religions associated with the voodoo cult. Despite the criminal prosecution, child sacrifices are common in the country. Liberian families living below the poverty line are unable to feed large offspring, which is why parents often view their children as commodities. Any sorcerer can easily acquire a child for a bloody action for a pittance. Moreover, the goals of such rituals can be completely trifling. There are cases when children were sacrificed just to get rid of a toothache.

In Tanzania, as in some other African countries, there is a real hunt for albinos. Their hair, flesh, and organs are believed to have magical powers, and sorcerers use them to make potions. Dried genitals are in great demand: they are believed to be able to save you from AIDS.

The cost of individual organs of albinos reaches thousands of dollars. For Africans, this is a lot of money, and among the illiterate Tanzanian population there are many who want to get rich in such a monstrous way, so the unfortunate albinos are forced to hide. According to statistics, in Tanzania, few of them live to be 30 years old ...

Albino children are accommodated in special guarded boarding schools, but there are cases when the guards themselves participated in the kidnapping of babies for money. It also happens that the unfortunate are attacked by their own relatives. For example, in 2015, several people attacked a six-year-old child and chopped off his hand. The boy's father was also in the group of attackers.

Recently, the death penalty has been introduced for the murder of albinos. To avoid severe punishment, hunters no longer kill their victims, but attack them and cut off their limbs.

Every 5 years, Nepal hosts the Gadhimai festival, during which more than 400,000 domestic animals are sacrificed to the goddess Gadhimai. Human sacrifice is of course officially banned in the country, but it is still practiced.

In 2015, a boy was sacrificed in a small Nepalese village on the border with India. One of the local residents had a seriously ill son, and he turned to a sorcerer for help. The shaman said that only human sacrifice can save a child. He lured a 10-year-old boy to a temple on the outskirts of the village, performed a ritual on him and killed him. Subsequently, the customer and the perpetrator of the crime were arrested.

India

Human sacrifice is not uncommon in the remote provinces of India. So, in the state of Jharkhand there is a sect called "mudkatwa", whose adherents are representatives of the agricultural castes. Members of the sect kidnap people, behead them, and bury their heads in the fields to increase yields. Ritual killings are recorded in the state almost every year.

Monstrous and ridiculous crimes are taking place in other states of India as well. In 2013, in Uttar Pradesh, a man killed his 8-month-old son to sacrifice him to the goddess Kali. Allegedly, the goddess herself told him to take the life of his own child.

In March 2017, in Karnataka state, relatives of a seriously ill person turned to a sorcerer for help. To heal the sick, the sorcerer kidnapped and sacrificed a 10-year-old girl.

Many people in rural Pakistan practice black magic. Former President Asif Ali Zardari was also a supporter of it. Almost every day, a black goat was killed in his residence to save the first person of the state from the evil eye.

Unfortunately, human sacrifice also happens in Pakistan. For example, in 2015, a man studying black magic killed five of his children.

Most of the population of the Caribbean country of Haiti adheres to the voodoo religion, which practices human sacrifice. Previously, there was a terrible custom here: each family had to give their newborn firstborn as a sacrifice to sharks in order to appease dangerous predators. The baby was brought to the sorcerer, who washed the child with decoctions of special herbs and made cuts on his body. Then the bloody baby was placed in a small raft of palm branches and released into the sea, to certain death.

This custom was banned at the beginning of the 19th century, however, even now, a terrible ritual is still practiced in remote villages ...

In African Nigeria, sacrifices are common. In the south of the country, the sale of organs is widespread, which are used in a variety of magical rituals. In the city of Lagos, disfigured human corpses with a torn out liver or gouged eyes are often found. Children, as well as albinos, are most at risk of becoming a victim of sorcerers.

Murders as a result of the performance of a ritual of a religious nature aimed at killing a person were called religious-ritual, ritual, cult, ritual or satanic murders.

Most of these murders are committed by satanic sects, so we will consider murders of this kind in connection with the criminal activities of satanic sects, although we emphasize that the commission of murders of a ritual nature was noted in other destructive religious organizations.

Such definitions of these murders as "cultic" or "satanic" seem to be incorrect, since several rituals or a whole system of rituals are performed as part of the commission of this crime, which in general constitutes a ritual of a religious nature, combining various ritual actions aimed at inflicting death on a person ...

The murders in question are ritual due to the fact that the performance of a ritual aimed at killing a person is determined by a certain creed of a religious nature. At the same time, a ritual is a set of ritual actions enshrined in the codes of religious rules on the performance of ritual and magical actions, and the criminal is guided by these rules.

Ritual murder is a system of ritual actions aimed at killing a person, the purpose of which is to inflict death on a person as part of the execution of a ritual of a religious nature, based on the fulfillment of certain ritual and magical rules, depending on the type of ritual being performed.

Before considering the content of ritual murders, it is necessary to decide whether the satanic cults (the cult of Satan) and organizations professing it should be recognized as religious and such murders should be classified as religious crimes.

Satanic cults are based on belief in Satan, or the devil, the ruler of evil forces in the Christian worldview, that is, the object of worship is evil (hence the name - the cults of evil) as an integral part of literally all world religions, which presuppose the struggle between good and evil. Worshiping Satan occurs through the use of related rituals that distort Christian rituals (for example, the black mass is a distorted Catholic mass), as well as their own religious rituals; these two systems make up the whole cult of worship of Satan.

Nevertheless, one cannot say that Satanism is a religion. Rather, it should be seen as a religious cult within the Christian religion.

The murders we are investigating take place in the process of performing a religious act called ritual. Performing a religious ritual is a key element in ritual killings. It is in the performance of a religious ritual as a strictly prescribed definite sequence of actions that such forensic elements as the method of preparing, committing and concealing the murder, place, time, tools and means, as well as the motive and purpose of the crime are present. Therefore, one of the main conditions for a successful investigation of ritual murder is knowledge of the essence and content of various religious rituals, the purpose of which is to kill a person.

There are many different religious rituals aimed at performing the act of killing a living being.

At first glance, all such religious rituals can be attributed to the so-called sacrifices, but this would be wrong, since the killing of a living being as an integral part of the ritual can have different meanings and be performed for different purposes. In this regard, ritual killings must be investigated by type, since the essence and content of the requirements of religious rituals aimed at killing a person may be different, which affects the formation of the trace situation at the crime scene, the choice of the criminal method for preparing and committing a crime, place, time , tools and means, as well as a criminal goal (committing murder as part of a religious ritual always carries a specific goal).

Consider ritual killings based on the classification according to the content and purpose of the religious ritual.

1. Ritual murder aimed at performing human sacrifice.

The dictionary of the Russian language by SI Ozhegov says about sacrifice: "The rite of sacrifice to the deity."

The leading role in the sacrifice is given to the victim, since the entire ritual is focused on her as an object, with the help of which a certain goal will be achieved, inherent in the essence of the sacrifice.

VI Dal in the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language defines a sacrifice as "devoured, destroyed, dying ... An offering from zeal to a deity: animals, fruits, or something else, usually with burning ...".

The essence of the sacrifice lies in the fact that “the deity consumes exactly those objects that are sacrificed to him; such consumption took place either directly (sacrifice to the elements - water, earth, etc.) or through fire (burning of sacrifices), sacred birds, animals. Any valuable thing can be the subject of sacrifice, but sacrifices that can be eaten or drunk are especially common - bread, grains, drinks and, especially, all kinds of animals and birds, up to human sacrifices. According to later ideas, only the substance of the victim, its soul, reaches the deity, and its outer shell is consumed either by the donors themselves, or given to the priests. "

Based on the foregoing, we note that the sacrifice is the central element of the ritual being performed, the complex of actions of which includes the performance of the sacrifice rite.

Basically, sacrifice is understood as a ritual in which the performer performs a religious rite of mortifying the victim in order to bring a gift to some deity (in the case of a satanic human sacrifice,

such a gift is the human soul). However, there are such varieties of rituals of human sacrifice, where the rite of sacrifice is performed directly by the victim (self-sacrifice), that is, suicide occurs. Such self-sacrifice of one's own life, for example, to Satan is in the religious and magical traditions the highest form of performing the ritual of human sacrifice.

The system of rituals of the satanic religious cult also includes the administration of the so-called black mass. R. E. Guili writes that “there is no single ritual of the Black Mass. Its main idea is to parody the Catholic Holy Mass, presenting it or parts of it back to front, turning the cross over, trampling and spitting on it and committing other unholy acts ... When the Church of Satan was founded in 1966, the Black Mass was not included in its rituals ; according to the founder of the church, Anton Sandor La Vey, the black mass is outdated. However, other organizations of Satanists serve black masses according to their own versions, which are said to include perverted intercourse and orgies, necrophilia, cannibalism or sacrifice (including human), and drinking the blood of victims. "

However, to say that the rituals of the Black Mass are being performed today would be a great exaggeration, since its administration requires a very complex preparation process, but still some elements of the Black Mass can be observed in the performance of the sacrifice ritual.

2. Ritual murder aimed at performing a religious ritual of revenge. This kind of ritual killings are found in various sects. Committing murder by performing a religious ritual of revenge is a kind of "inevitable" punishment for the fault of a follower of a religious cult. A person who was a member of a sect and decided to leave it can be subjected to ritual murder based on the performance of a ritual of revenge. Entering this kind of sect, a follower (adept) takes an oath, where he undertakes to atone for all his faults with blood, leaving the sect is possible only through physical death.

This group should also include the murders committed in the so-called religious wars between satanic sects.

3. Execution of ritual murder as a necessary test for joining a sect, or murder as part of a ritual of initiation into a sect.

4. Ritual murder committed with the aim of using human organs and tissues for ritual and magical purposes.

Since ancient times, when performing various kinds of religious rituals, the use of various organs and tissues of the victim for magical purposes has been practiced. In almost all rituals associated with the killing of a victim, blood is used.

In addition, the heart, liver, genitals, fat, etc. can be used for ritual and magical purposes.

5. Committing ritual murder in order to acquire any "magical abilities" by the subject of performing ritual actions. This type of ritual murder can be associated with the performance of the ritual as a necessary test for obtaining a higher position in the sect, that is, for moving up the hierarchical ladder, as well as using the organs and tissues of the victim.

6. Committing ritual murder, where the religious ritual of the sacrifice is aimed at the so-called evocation of demons. In this case, the ritual is similar to the ritual of human sacrifice.

7. Committing ritual murder motivated by religious hatred. This kind of murder can be performed as a ritual of sacrifice.

As an example, let us recall the case of the murder of two monks and a hieromonk in Optina Hermitage by the Satanist N. Averin in 1993.

8. Performing a ritual of self-sacrifice, that is, driving to suicide with signs of a ritual of a religious nature. It can be ritual suicide, the method of which is the ritual of sacrificing oneself, for example, to Satan, or suicide, which is the highest degree of dedication.

1. Khond sacrificial ritual

In the 1840s, Major MacPherson lived among the Khond tribes in the Indian state of Orissa and studied their customs. Over the next several decades, he documented some of the Khond beliefs and practices that were shocking to people around the world. For example, these were the murders of newborn girls to prevent them from growing up and turning into witches. He also described a sacrificial ritual to the creator god called Bura Pennu, which was performed to ensure abundant harvests and ward off evil forces from the villages. The victims were abducted from other villages or they were "hereditary victims" born in families designated for this many years before.

The ritual itself lasted anywhere from three to five days and began with shaving the victim's head. The victim took a bath, put on new clothes and tied her to a pole, covered with garlands of flowers, oil and red paint. Before the final sacrifice, the victim was given milk, after which she was killed and cut into pieces, then buried in the fields that needed to be blessed.

2. Rites of initiation of the Eleusinian mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries, traditions that have existed for about 2,000 years, disappeared around 500 AD. At the center of this cult was the myth of Persephone, who was kidnapped by Hades, and who was forced to spend several months each year with Hades in the underworld. The Eleusinian mysteries were essentially a reflection of the return of Persephone from the underworld, by analogy with how plants bloom every year in spring. It was a symbol of the resurrection of the dead.

The only requirement for joining the cult was knowledge of the Greek language and the fact that a person never committed murder. Even women and slaves could participate in the mysteries. Much of this knowledge has been lost, but today it is known that the initiation ceremony took place in September. When the initiates reached the end of their long journey from Athens to Eleusis, they were given a hallucinogenic drink called kykeon made from barley and mint mint.

3. Sacrifices of the Aztecs Tezcatlipoca

The Aztecs were widely known for their human sacrifice, but much that happened during their sacred rites was lost. Dominican priest Diego Durand described a vast number of Aztec rituals that he studied. For example, there was a festival dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, who was considered not only the god of life, but also its destroyer. During this festival, a person was chosen as a sacrifice, who was sacrificed to God. He was chosen from a group of soldiers who were captured from neighboring states.

The main criteria were physical beauty, a slim physique and perfect teeth. The selection was very strict, they did not even allow any stain on the skin or a speech defect. This person began to be prepared for the ritual within a year. 20 days before the ritual, he was given four wives with whom he could do whatever he wanted, and his hair was also cut like a warrior.

On the day of the sacrifice, this man was dressed in the traditional costume of Tezcatlipoca, led to the temple, after which four priests grabbed his arms and legs, and the fifth cut out his heart. The body was then thrown down the stairs of the temple.

Sir James George Fraser was a Scottish anthropologist who studied the evolution of magic in religion. In his work, he described a terrible dark mass that was held in the French province of Gascony. Only a few priests knew this ceremony, and only the Pope himself could have mercy on the person who performed it.

Mass was held in a ruined or abandoned church from 23-00 to midnight. Instead of wine, the priest and his assistants drank water from a well in which an unbaptized child was drowned. When the priest made the sign of the cross, he turned it not to himself, but to the ground (this was done with his left foot).

According to Fraser, the further ritual cannot even be described, it is so terrible. The Mass was done for a specific purpose - the person to whom it was addressed began to wither and eventually died. At the same time, doctors could not make a diagnosis and could not find a treatment.

According to Maori beliefs, in order to make a new home safe for its residents, a special ceremonial ritual must be performed. Since the trees that were cut down for the construction of the house could anger the god of the forest Tane-Makhut, people wanted to appease him. For example, sawdust was never blown off during construction, but it was carefully brushed off, since human breath could desecrate the purity of trees. After the house was finished, a sacred prayer was said over it.

The first person to enter the house was a woman (in order to make the house safe for all other women), and then traditional food was prepared inside the house and water was boiled to make sure it was safe to do so. Often, during the consecration of a house, a ritual of sacrificing children was performed (this was a child of a family that moved into the house). The victim was buried in one of the support pillars of the house.

6. Liturgy of Mithras

The Liturgy of Mithra is a cross between an incantation, ritual and liturgy. This liturgy was found in the Grand Parisian Magical Code, which was supposedly written in the 4th century. The ritual was carried out with the aim of raising one person through different levels of the heavens to the different gods of the pantheon. (at the very end is Mithra).

The ritual was performed in several stages. After the opening prayers and incantations, the spirit passed through various elements (including thunder and lightning), and then appeared before the guards of the doors to heaven, fate and before Mithra himself. The liturgy also contained instructions for preparing protective amulets.

7. Barzabel's ritual

According to Aleister Crowley's teachings, Barzabel is a demon that embodies the spirit of Mars. Crowley claimed to have summoned and spoke to this demon in 1910. A supernatural creature told him that large wars were coming soon, which would begin with Turkey and Germany, and also that these wars would lead to the destruction of entire nations.

Crowley described in detail his ritual for summoning a demon: how to draw a pentagram, what names to write into it, what clothes the participants of the ritual should wear, what sigils to use, how to set up the altar, etc. The whole ritual was an incredibly long set of invocations and various actions.

8. Sacrificial messengers of Unoro

James Frederick Cunningham was a British explorer who lived in Uganda during the British occupation and documented the local culture. In particular, he spoke about the ritual that was practiced after the death of the king. A hole was pulled out about 1.5 meters wide and 4 meters deep. The dead king's bodyguards walked into the village and grabbed the first nine men they met. These people were thrown into the pit alive, and then the body of the king, wrapped in bark and cowhide, was placed in the pit. Then a cover made of leather was pulled over the pit and a temple was built on top.

9. Nazca heads

In the traditional art of the Peruvian Nazca tribe, one thing was constantly encountered - severed heads. Archaeologists have established that only two South American cultures - Nazca and Paracas - performed ceremonies and rituals with the heads of victims. After the victim's head was cut off with an obsidian knife, pieces of bone were removed from it and the eyes and brain were removed. A rope was passed through the skull, with which the head was attached to the cloak. The mouth was sealed and the skull was filled with tissue.

10. Capacocha

The capacoca ritual is the sacrifice of children among the Incas. It was held only when there were any threats to the life of the community. For the ritual, a child was chosen, who was carried out in a solemn procession from the village to Cuzco, the heart of the Inca empire. There, on a special sacrificial platform, they killed him (sometimes they strangled him, and in other cases they broke his skull). It is worth noting that for a long time before the sacrifice, the child was stuffed with coca leaves and drunk with alcohol.

The good news, perhaps, is that most of these bloody rituals have sunk into oblivion, like 10 ancient civilizations that mysteriously disappeared .

It is clear that ritual killings, human sacrifices, known to us primarily from the history and sacred books of different peoples, sharply contradict modern morality and culture. But such a contradiction should not interfere with the understanding of the natural origin of this tragic custom.

According to the researcher of primitive culture Edward Tylor, sacrifice originates in the same animistic system as prayer. Just as prayer is such an appeal to the deity as if it were a man, so sacrifice is an offering of gifts to the deity as a man. The everyday types of both forms - prayer and sacrifice - can be observed in public life to this day. However, sacrifice, in ancient times as understandable as prayer is understandable, subsequently changed - both in its ritual side and in relation to the underlying motives. And of course, the practice of sacrificing a person in our time is very rare and is not legalized in any country in the world. A textbook example is the Old Testament story of Jacob, who expressed his readiness to sacrifice his son to God. However, there are many such examples in the Old Testament.

The king of the Moabites, seeing that victory was not on his side, sacrificed his eldest son on the city wall. According to the Bible, Yahweh requires that all the firstborn of Israel be dedicated to him (Ex. 34:20; Num. 3: 12-13, 40-50). According to a number of researchers, this means that sometime in ancient times these first-borns were actually sacrificed to God - that is, they were killed.

In general, the ancient peoples often sacrificed children, using their physical and mental helplessness. Children served as a kind of bargaining chip in bargaining with the gods. When an Inca fell ill in Peru, he sacrificed one of his sons to the deity, begging him to accept this sacrifice in his place. The Greeks, however, found it sufficient to use criminals or prisoners for this. So did the pagan tribes of Northern Europe, to whom Christian merchants are said to have sold slaves for this purpose. But the practice of buying people for ritual murders dates back to long before Christianity. One of the most typical facts of this kind refers to the time of the Punic Wars (264-146 BC). The Carthaginians, who had failed in the war and were pressed by Agathocles, attributed their defeat to the wrath of the gods. In former times, their god Kronos received as a sacrifice the chosen children of his people, but later they began to buy and fatten other people's children for this purpose. Now they felt that the deity was taking revenge on them for using dummy sacrifices. It was decided to compensate for the deception. Two hundred children from the country's most distinguished families were sacrificed to an idol. "For they had a copper statue of Kronos with arms bent so that the child, laid on top of them, rolled into a deep pit filled with fire."

Something similar happened in Syria and Phenicia. The cult of the god Hadad demanded cruel bloody sacrifices, and above all newborn children. This is evidenced not only by historical sources, but also by archaeological discoveries - huge accumulations of children's bones were found near the remains of the altars in the temples of Hadad. And the name of the Phoenician god Moloch even became a household name for a fierce god, a devourer of human lives. It is believed that the very name Moloch comes from the word "molk", meaning the sacrifice of children. Another bloodthirsty pagan deity is Baal, whom researchers have identified for some time with Moloch. Human sacrifices to Baal are mentioned, for example, in the book of the prophet Jeremiah 19.5.

The Phoenicians sacrificed their most beloved children to appease Baal and other gods. They increased the value of the sacrifice by choosing it from noble families, believing that the gratification of the victim was measured by the severity of the loss. Heliogabalus brought this Asiatic custom to Italy, choosing boys from the noblest families of the country as sacrifices to his solar deity.

Other countries and peoples did not reach such a scale in the extermination of babies (with the exception of the African Yaga tribe, but there is a special conversation about it), but they still used them in their cults. So, some peoples of the Munda group (pre-Aryan India) practiced sacrificing boys to the goddess of the earth. In Virginia, the Indians killed children, believing that the oki (spirit) sucked blood from their left chest.

Ritual killings associated with the war occupy a special place in the history of sacrifices. The Iroquois sacrificed people to the god of war, while pronouncing the following prayer: "For you, O spirit Arieskoy, we kill this sacrifice so that you can get enough of her meat and send us luck and victory over enemies!" During the war, the Aztecs turned with prayer to Tezcatlipoca-Yautl: "Lord of the battles, everyone knows what is planned, prescribed and organized a great war. The God of War opens his mouth, eager to swallow the blood of many who must fall in this war. The sun and the god of the earth Tlaltecuutli , apparently, are going to have fun and intend to send food and drink to the gods of heaven and hell, having arranged for them a feast of flesh in the blood of people who will fall in war. "

The Mayan ruler (Mexico), calling the warriors to battle, made incisions on the body and dedicated drops of his blood to the gods. His wife also tortured her flesh in order to gain the favor of the deities. If the battle ended in victory, the gods craved the blood of the conquered. The captured enemies were subjected to ritual torture, which ended in death. Noble people wore laces with knots on their wrists: how many knots, so many sacrificed lives. Death ended for the captives and the ritual ball game. Like the Roman gladiators, the captives waged a life-and-death struggle on large fields.

Blood was an integral part of many Mayan rituals, but there was also a bloodless method of sacrifice. In the ruins of the once mighty city of Chichen Itza (Yucatan Peninsula) is the so-called "Sacred Well" ("Well of victims"). The first mention of it dates back to the XII century; In the 16th century, the Spanish priest Diego de Lenda wrote: “They (the Yucatec Indians, one of the Mayan ethnic groups) had a custom before and more recently to throw living people into this well as a sacrifice to the gods during a drought ...

This well has survived to our time, although the city itself has long been abandoned and destroyed. "Even now, after eight centuries ... you feel an involuntary thrill, standing on the edge of a giant pool with its yellowish-white sheer walls covered with green creeping plants," says the historian V. Gulyaev, who visited Chichen Itza in 1980.-The Eye of the Round funnels with a diameter of over 60 meters fascinates, attracts to itself. Rugged layers of limestone steeply sink down to the dark green water, hiding in its depths the secrets of the past centuries. From the edge of the well to the surface of the water over twenty meters. And its depth, as I was told , more than half of that. Is it any wonder that the gloomy beauty of the cenote and its relative inaccessibility caused an almost superstitious horror among the ancient Mayans, and, apparently, that is why they have long chosen this place for sacrifices in honor of their gods. "

Since people were needed for the constant sacrifice, the neighboring states of Mexico often concluded an agreement among themselves on ... the periodic resumption of the war with the sole purpose of capturing prisoners. The Aztecs pre-fattened many of the captives, putting them in wooden cages, and then used them "for their intended purpose."

During the conquest of Mexico, Cortez and his companions, examining one of the large Aztec temples, "found themselves in front of a large jasper stone, on which sacrifices were performed; they were killed with knives made of obsidian - volcanic glass - and saw a statue of the god Huitzilopochtli ... Body this ugly god - the god of war of the Aztecs - was girded with a snake made of pearls and precious stones. Bernal Diaz ... looked away; and then he saw something even more terrible: all the walls of this vast room were covered with blood. - he wrote later, - was stronger than at the massacre in Castile. "He glanced at the altar: there were three hearts, which, as it seemed to him, were still trembling and smoking.

Going down the countless steps down, the Spaniards noticed a large building that stood on a hill. Entering it, they saw that it was filled to the ceiling with neatly folded skulls: those were the skulls of countless victims. One of the soldiers began to count them and came to the conclusion that there must be at least 136 thousand of them here. "

The cults of many gods among the Aztecs were associated with the killing of people. So, at the festival in honor of Tlasolteotl, the goddess of the earth, fertility, sexual sins and repentance, a girl was sacrificed, from whose skin a jacket was then made for a priest who personified the goddess.

The ritual of the spring sacrifice in honor of the great god Tepkatlipoka was especially chic. As a sacrifice to him in advance (a year before the holiday), they chose the most beautiful of the captives, without physical defects. Such a chosen one was considered the embodiment of God on earth. They surrounded him with luxury and honors, fulfilled his whims and whims, fed him delicious food, and dressed him in the best clothes. But, of course, at the same time they strictly looked after him so that he did not run away. When there were 20 days left before the holiday, the chosen one received four beautiful girls as servant wives; they, too, were worshiped as goddesses. Payback for the "high" came on the day of the holiday: the divine captive was led to the temple, laid with his chest up on the stone altar, and the high priest cut open his chest in order to extract from it a still quivering, bloody heart and offer it to the sun god.

Also, captives in Ancient Egypt became the subject of an offering (albeit already heartless) to the sun god Amon-Ra. After returning from military campaigns, high-ranking prisoners were hanged (often in front of the walls of temples) or killed with a club in front of a large crowd of people.

Obviously, in ancient times, a rare people did not resort to sacrificial killings during wars and during the performance of burial rituals. Our Slavic ancestors did the same. I will refer to the testimony of the battles of the Scythian tribes with the Romans of the Byzantine historian Leo the Deacon (X century): "And so, when night fell and the full circle of the moon shone, the Scythians went out onto the plain and began to pick up their dead. They piled them up in front of the wall, made many fires and they burned them, killing many captives, men and women, according to the custom of the Ancestors. Having made this bloody sacrifice, they strangled [several] breastfeeding babies and roosters, drowning them in the waters of Istria. "

Human sacrifice was widely practiced among the ancient Celts; This was partly due to the rite of fortune-telling. In India, on the basis of the worship of the god Shiva, orgaistic fanatical cults have developed, associated with the images of the deities of love and death. Adherents of one of the most savage sects - thugi (stranglers) - as a sacrifice to Durga (Shiva's wife) strangled random travelers on the road.

Tacitus reports on the tradition of sacrifice among the Suebi, who occupied most of Germany in his time: "On the set day, representatives of all peoples associated with them by blood gather in the forest, which they reckon as sacred, because in it their ancestors were given divinations and from ancient times it has inspired them with a pious trembling, and, starting with the sacrifice of human sacrifice, on behalf of the entire tribe solemnly send the terrible mysteries of their barbaric rite. "

But what about the exemplary states of antiquity - Rome and Greece? Really? .. Alas, and they.

Many modern historians believe that in the ancient world, human sacrifices were of a single nature (the sacrifice of three Persians before the Battle of Salamis, the burial of four Gauls and Greeks alive in 228 and 216 BC in Rome), but there is a lot of evidence about their massive use, both among the Romans and the Greeks. Although in some ancient cults (for example, the Lyceum Zeus) the offering of human sacrifices was based on the belief that the deity finds pleasure in eating human meat, most of the sacrifice was brought from "ideological" considerations - in order to show submission to God and turn away his anger from everything people. The Romans had a custom of killing people in order to appease the underground gods. According to the ancient law of Romulus, some criminals (for example, those guilty of treason) were dedicated to them. Sacrificed a criminal during the feast of lupiter Latiaris. Ritual murders of children were carried out at the compitalia holidays of Mania (since the time of Julius Brutus, babies, fortunately, have been guessed to be replaced with heads of poppy or garlic). In the consulate of Cornelius Lentulus and Licinius Crassus (97 BC), human sacrifice was prohibited by a decree of the Senate. True, as always, practice lagged behind theory.

The custom of cleansing human sacrifices, dating back to the early period of the history of Ancient Greece, was borrowed by the Greeks from neighboring peoples and gradually disappeared during the development of statehood. In extreme cases, the sacrifice was carried out symbolically - replacing people with animals (an echo of this can be seen in the myth of Iphigenia) or inanimate objects. Sometimes they were content only with the shedding of human blood (for example, they whipped Spartan boys at the altar of Artemis). There was another way out - criminals were sacrificed to the gods, who were already condemned to death by the court. So to speak, they combined business with pleasure, and useful with necessary. In a similar way, the criminal was sacrificed annually to Apollo in Leukada, throwing him off a cliff. Human sacrifices during burial were intended by the Greeks not to the gods themselves, but to the shadows of the dead to satisfy the anger or feelings of revenge of the deceased.

For many peoples of the world, when rulers and leaders were buried, people who were killed (or committed suicide) were buried with them in the grave, especially to accompany the deceased. The southern and western Slavs, when burying noble people, killed a horse, and sometimes a slave and the wife of the deceased. During excavations in southern Mesopotamia, in the underground crypt of a noble woman named Puabi (reading the name in ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions is conditional), guards and women with musical instruments in their hands were found. None of the victims in Puabi's burial showed evidence of violence. Probably, they were all poisoned (put to sleep), or maybe they went to their death voluntarily - according to their ideas about the duty that obliged them to accompany their mistress in the afterlife. But this (voluntarily) was not always the case. During excavations of the burial place of the Babylonian king Ur (3500 BC), archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered 59 people buried with him; in other royal tombs, there were also enough accompanying dead. “It seemed,” K. Keram describes what the researchers saw, “monstrous massacres were taking place in these tombs. the remains of nine ladies of the court in headdresses, which they probably wore when going to the funeral.At the entrance to the tomb stood two heavy carriages, with skeletons of charioteers in them; in front, next to the skeletons of oxen harnessed to carriages, lay the skeletons of servants.

In the tomb of Queen Shub-at, the murdered ladies of the court lay in two rows. There was also a musician-harpist. His hands were still on the instrument, covered with precious inlay, which he was obviously playing at the moment when he was overtaken by the fatal blow. And even on the stretcher, where the coffin of the queen was placed, the skeletons of two people lay in the position in which death caught them ... their masters by no means voluntarily ... "

In China, since ancient times, prisoners have been ruthlessly killed during the burial ritual. Human sacrifices are especially numerous in Chinese burials during the Qin kingdom. 66 people buried with the Qin ruler Wu-gong, 177 people buried with the ruler Mu-gong, etc. - these are flowers compared to the number of people killed to accompany Qin Shi-huang to the next world. More than 700 thousand people worked on the construction of the tomb for him for 10 years. The tomb was a palace with hundreds of halls filled with jewels; there were made artificial reservoirs and channels along which rivers flowed from mercury. On the ceilings, artists depicted celestial phenomena, and on the floor - the flora and fauna of the earth. It is clear that a corresponding number of people were required for a tomb of this scale. That is why Emperor Er Shi ordered all the beauties from 270 surrounding palaces who had no children to accompany Qin Shih Huang to the next world. According to experts, their number was at least 3 thousand! In addition, Er Shi, fearing that the builders would reveal the secret of the location of the treasures, buried alive all the people who worked inside the tomb itself.

In a number of countries, the custom of the funeral sacrifice is still preserved. So, some castes of Northern India constantly practice sati (sutti) - the self-immolation of a widow on the funeral pyre of her husband, which is mentioned in the sacred book of the priests of the Aryan tribes in the Rig Veda. This means that the custom is at least 3 thousand years old.

“Once sati was considered a kind of privilege of the elite,” writes I. Karavanov, who studied this issue in detail. “It was performed only by the widows of rulers and military leaders. Three thousand of his wives and concubines were simultaneously killed in the giant funeral pyre of Maharaja Vijayanagar. His two wives were burned to death by the Rajas of Tanjora, their charred bones were ground into powder, mixed with boiled rice and eaten by 12 priests of one of the temples to atone for the sins of the dead. but also loyalty to his master after death. "

Russian traveler Prince A. D. Saltykov, who visited India in the middle of the 19th century, reports in one of his letters: “The Madras governor, Lord Elfinston, once showed me on the seashore a place intended for burning corpses. on the fire of the rich - sandalwood ... They say that when the wind blows from the sea, from the funeral pyre you can smell of fried lamb cutlets, as if from the kitchen. It would be good if only the dead were burned, otherwise they sometimes fry the living here. Mother of my new acquaintance - the Pudukot Rajah - a very smart and very kind woman, loves her children without memory, and when her husband died, she certainly wanted to go to the fire; they forcibly dissuaded her from this intention in the name of the children.

But after the death of the Taijorskiy Rajah, the matter was not so simple: his wife was burned with amazing composure. They barely persuaded her not to go up on the fire where the corpse of her husband lay, and preferred death over a high fire. She agreed and threw herself into a pit with flaming brushwood, where she burnt to ashes in an instant. Before her death, she said goodbye to her family and to the ministers to whom she entrusted her children. "

It happened that a whole crowd of the living ascended to the funeral pyre of the deceased. So, in 1833, along with the body of Raja Idar, his seven wives, two concubines, four maids and a servant were burned. The British, who colonized India, banned sati as early as 1829, however, even today, several thousand Indian widows pay tribute to the barbaric custom every year. In 1987, India criminalized incitement to sati and even for committing it (if, of course, the woman survives), but the number of victims is not decreasing. In principle, a widow voluntarily goes to self-immolation, but this voluntariness is often imaginary, for she is pushed to sati by the fanaticism of men and "the condemning gaze of calm tanned women," as Akhmatova would say.

What is savage in the eyes of Europeans is, for many Hindus, a spiritual elevation, a feat, a reliable way to atone for sins, or at least improve karma in order to suffer less in the next incarnation.

Sacrifice among the ancient peoples was associated not only with war and burial, but also with ordinary peaceful affairs - getting a good harvest, laying the foundation of a house, etc. In New Zealand, there was a rite called "feeding the wind", it included an offering as a sacrifice to the local deity of people and livestock. Many peoples of Oceania had something similar. The victims were usually the poor or slaves of no "social value". The sacrifice was killed in advance and only then was delivered to the sanctuary and performed the rite of offering to the gods. For some nationalities (morai), the burial places of the tribal nobility served as sanctuaries.

In ancient Egypt, there was once a custom, when the Nile floods, to throw a young girl in a magnificent dress (bride) into the river, in order to get a full-flowing flood.

During the drought years, the Aztecs sacrificed a man to the goddess Tlasolteotl. He was tied to a post and darts were thrown at it. The blood that dripped from the wounds represented rain.

In the pantheon of the Zapotecs, who lived on the territory of one of the centers of South America - Monte Alban, the god of rain and lightning Kosiho-Pitao occupied an important place. Since, according to the beliefs of the Zapotecs, the fertility of the earth depended on him, Kosiho-Pitao had to please with human victims of infancy.

A common reason for ritual murder among many peoples of Europe and the East was the loss by the king (leader) or the high priest of the tribe of the "miraculous" power, which made it possible to command the phenomena of nature. Researchers in Africa also talk about such a practice, noting that at later stages this custom was often used by the nobility to eliminate unwanted rulers. The most striking example is the ritual suicide of the Alafins by the Yoruba after receiving the symbol of the verdict of the council of the nobility - a parrot egg or an empty calabash.

The Kayans of Borneo used to make human sacrifices when some very important boss moved into a newly rebuilt house. E. Taylor cites a case when already in a relatively new time, around 1847, a Malay slave girl was bought for this purpose and she was killed by bleeding. The pillars and foundations of the house were sprinkled with this blood, and the corpse was thrown into the river. In Africa, in Galam, in front of the gates of a new fortified settlement, as a rule, a boy and a girl were buried alive to make the fortification impregnable. In Great Bassam and Yarrib, such sacrifices were made when laying the foundation of a house or village. In Polynesia, the central column of one of the temples of Mava is erected over the body of a human victim. On the island of Borneo, among the Milanausian dayaks, a medieval traveler witnessed how, during the construction of a large house, they dug a deep hole for the first pillar and hung it over the hole with ropes. The intentions lowered the slave girl there and cut the ropes. A huge bar fell into the pit and crushed the unfortunate to death.

In 1463 in Nogat (Europe), when it was necessary to repair a collapsed dam, the peasants made a beggar drunk drunk and buried him there, following the advice to lay a living person in a dam "for a fortress".

The Serbs have an amazing legend about how three brothers agreed to build the Skadru (Skutari) fortress, but everything that 300 masons built during the day was ravaged by a mermaid endowed with magical powers at night. I had to appease her with a sacrifice. To do this, they decided to choose the first of the brothers' three wives, who would carry food to the workers. At the same time, it was agreed not to tell the wives about such an agreement. But the older brothers, taking pity on their wives, gave them a secret. The younger brother's wife, not suspecting anything, came to the building, and they laid her in the wall. But she begged to leave a hole there so she could breastfeed her baby until he was one year old.

Other peoples of Europe have similar legends associated with the real practice of sacrifices. In North America, it is relatively rare, but there were cases when the Indians sacrificed to natural phenomena - the sun, stars, wind - not only material values, but also living people. The countries of Oceania, despite their isolation from the mainland centers of civilization, did not lag behind them in ritual murders. The sailors of the expedition of James Cook, who visited the Polynesian island of Tahiti in 1777, happened to be present at the ceremony of human sacrifice to the god Oro.

Cannibalism was often accompanied by such rituals here, but it is difficult to say what was the root cause of the rite - faith or hunger, most likely, they supported each other, especially in difficult years for agriculture and fishing. Well, on the other hand, it turned out to be the natural naivety of the native thinking, not spoiled by civilization: if the enemy was killed, why should the body be lost!

In a number of African states, the cult of deceased leaders demanded enormous human sacrifices - not only during funerals, but also at commemorations celebrated on the anniversary of the leader's death. The victims were slaves or convicted criminals, less often members of the tribe (in Benin, when the king was buried in the grave, his servants and the closest court dignitaries were sent after him, but this is rather the exception than the rule). At the commemoration of the leaders, the number of victims sometimes reached 400-500 people at a time! If for this there were not enough criminals condemned to death, then they often grabbed free, innocent people. Among some peoples of West Africa, people sacrificed at the commemoration were considered diplomatic couriers to the kingdom of the dead, who must report to the deceased leader that things are going well in his earthly kingdom.

Remnants of ritual killings still exist in a number of African countries. So, in the Akwapim community, located near the capital of Ghana, Accra, the funeral of the leader, according to an old tradition, should be accompanied by a ritual human sacrifice. In 1979, a four-year-old boy was kidnapped for this purpose, but luckily the police were able to prevent the crime. However, in another case - in Liberia - it was not possible to prevent the ritual murder, because its participant was ... the Minister of Internal Affairs of the country! In June 1989, for participation in a ritual sacrifice (the victim was beheaded and the heart was ripped out), the minister was convicted ...

One more case. In 1989, the bodies of two maimed girls were found in Zimbabwe. Their genitals, tongues and parts of intestines were taken out for sale as amulets that bring happiness.

In Nepal, there is a cult of the goddess Kali, who, according to legend, hundreds of years ago, on one black moonless night, slain 108 demons and, intoxicated with blood, danced a wild dance of tandavu on their corpses. It was she, this bloodthirsty deity, who "created the world, protects it and eternally eats it." Among the rituals performed by people from the lower caste of the Tacho, who worship the goddess Kali, is the annual sacrifice of 108 buffaloes, with which they chop off their heads and then drink blood directly from the throats of slain animals. Locals say that the tacho, once every 12 years, lay a child to sacrifice it on the altar of their goddess.

However, civilized Europe should not be proud of Africa and Asia. In the Old World, there are also terrible perversions. The French writer Jean-Paul Bourret describes, for example, one of the "Luciferin" sects, called "Gypsy-cakes". The adherents of this sect perform their main rituals, which they call full initiation, at night in the vicinity of major European cities. Members of the sect, by the light of torches, lay a ritual table on which they lay out the objects of their monstrous liturgy: a knife with six blades for sacrifice and a small altar decorated with the image of green dragons. The next stage is the kidnapping of a person, preferably a child, in the nearest town and the carrying out of the ritual itself.

“When the Gypsies-clowns,” writes Burre, “return from the hunt for people, they are an unusual procession that sings monotonous songs. signs (the most common of them - a swastika) on a living body In conclusion, the sectarians, before proceeding to the liturgical banquet, sing cannibal hymns, and then eat the heart and other organs of the victim.

These events shed light on recent events in Spain. In Torrelodones and El Escorial, towns near Madrid, graves were desecrated and human bones were found. A police report on the sect operating in El Escorial emphasizes that "there is almost complete confidence that they sacrificed a child." A certain Maria Mieres reported that she witnessed a satanic ritual in which "a child of about two years of age was killed in fulfillment of the demands of black magic."

According to information from sources associated with Interpol, and during 1989 and the first months of 1990 in Western Europe, the United States and Canada, more than one hundred murders were committed in sects associated with the cult of Satan. It is possible that some of these deaths have natural causes - for example, a blockage of blood vessels or a heart attack during the "spell of the devil", but there is also direct evidence of premeditated murders with cruel torture.

Devil worship with sacrifice has a long history in Christendom. In the Middle Ages in Europe, there were more than once processes involving babies killed during the so-called "black masses". I will mention, for example, the trial of Gilles de Rais, who allegedly used an unbaptized infant to obtain alchemical gold from the devil, and of the priest Urbain Grandier (who was persecuted at the direction of the all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu), who was accused of killing a baby at a Sabbath in Orloans in 1631. But if the accusations against de Ré and Grandier cause great skepticism among historians, then in the case of the wife of the Parisian jeweler Marguerite Monvoisin, née Deseyer, the evidence seems indisputable. Indeed, in the garden of her home in Saint-Germain, investigating officials found the remains of two and a half thousand slaughtered children and undeveloped embryos.

Madame Monvoisin was the main defendant in the "poison case", which involved many noble people, including the favorite of Louis XIV, the Marquis de Montespan. This case began in 1077 with the arrest of several "witches". In the course of the investigation, it turned out that Monvoisin and her accomplices not only performed clandestine abortions, poisoned their husbands by order of noble ladies, but also organized black masses under the leadership of the Abbot Guibour. The black magician Gibourg worshiped the devil for two decades, using the abandoned church of Saint-Marseille for this. In the rite of service to the devil, imitation of the Catholic Mass and elements of ancient pagan cults, witchcraft and sexual orgies were combined.

During the black masses, Gibour repeatedly killed children. He baked their blood in the host, sprinkled it on the participants of the ceremony. The abbot did not steal babies, but bought from the inhabitants of the beggarly quarters of Paris for 5-6 livres. Sometimes black masses were served "just like that", sometimes there was a specific reason. For example, when the Marquis de Montespan suspected that the king had a new mistress, the Marquise de Fontan. "Three times she made her way into an abandoned church to lie in what her mother gave birth to on the cold stone tabletop (of the sacrificial table). Cutting the throat of another baby in honor of Asmodeus and Astaroth, Gibourg filled the witch's cup with blood three times, which, according to the ritual of black magic, he put between his legs royal mistress ... "

J. Fraser in The Golden Branch says that black masses, magic and sacrifices were widespread among the uneducated French peasantry even in the 19th century. “The Gascon peasants also believe,” Frazer notes, “that in order to take revenge on our enemies, evil people sometimes persuade the priest to serve a mass called the Mass of Saint Sekarius. Very few know this mass, and three-quarters of them never Only an unkind priest would dare to perform this disgusting rite, and you can be sure that at the Last Judgment he will pay dearly for it ... where bats fly silently in the twilight, where gypsies stop for the night at night, and where toads lurk under the desecrated altar.

At exactly eleven o'clock, he begins to mutter the mass backwards and ends it as soon as the clock ominously strikes midnight. The priest is assisted by his beloved. The Host he blesses is black and triangular in shape. Instead of taking the communion with consecrated wine, he drinks water from a well into which the body of an unbaptized baby was thrown. "

Although Buddhism is very peaceful in nature, cases of human sacrifice have also been recorded in its midst. At the beginning of the 20th century, Ja-Lama (Dambizhantsan), who led the struggle of the Mongols against Chinese rule, called the killing of enemies a great sacrifice to the Buddhist gods. The historian A. V. Burdukov, who personally knew Ja-Lama, writes about one of the episodes of his military activity dating back to 1912: about how a captive Chinese man was sacrificed to the banner, to whom, however, the inexperienced executioner did not manage to cut off his heads, so he had to turn to a more experienced one. "

Only 100-200 years ago, pagan superstitions led to human sacrifice in the Russian Empire. However, as V. Chalidze rightly notes, ritual murders in Russia "did not constitute a regularly performed rite. Only a serious social tragedy, such as a severe epidemic or long-term drought, revived in the people's memory this ancient way of averting the punishment of heaven."

The Russian historian of the 19th century V. Antonovich tells about a case in the village of Humenets in Podolia, when a pestilence plague spread here in 1738. One of the nights, the residents staged a procession to "ward off" the disease from the village. They walked with a cross and prayers through the surrounding fields and during the procession ran into a resident of the neighboring village Mikhail Matkovsky, who was looking for his missing horses. To the superstitious participants in the procession, the unknown, wandering through the fields at night with a bridle in his hands, seemed the personification of a pestilence. At first, they confined themselves to beating, and Matkovsky, half-dead, barely crawled to his house. But the next day, the inhabitants of Gumenets showed up in a neighboring village, dragged Matkovsky out into the street and severely beat him again. “Then the priest appeared and, confessing Matkovsky, declared:“ My business is to take care of the soul, and yours about the body. Burn quickly. "They made a fire and burned the unfortunate man."

V. Chalidze in his book "Criminal Russia" gives similar examples from the 19th century. "In 1855, in the Novogrudok district, during a severe cholera epidemic, the peasants, on the advice of paramedic Kozakevich, lured old woman Lucia Mankova to the cemetery, pushed her alive into a prepared grave and covered her with earth ..." There is information about attempts of similar sacrifices in the same district during epidemics in 1831 and 1871.

Yakushkin, a researcher of Russian customary law, mentions a case when in the Turukhansk Territory, in order to save himself and his family from the rampant disease that raged in 1861, a peasant sacrificed his relative, a girl, by burying her alive in the ground.

Similar sacrifices sometimes took place during the so-called plowing rite. It was carried out by peasant women in order to stop the widespread disease of livestock, and was often accompanied by the sacrifice of an animal. At the same time, if a procession of peasant women during the ceremony met a man, then he was considered "death" against which the ceremony was performed, and therefore he was beaten without pity with anything: "Everyone, seeing the procession, tried to either run or hide for fear of being killed" ...

Even at the beginning of the 20th century, there were murders of "sorcerers" in Russia, since the peasants sincerely believed that "sorcerers" had the ability to "spoil" cattle. Surprisingly, in judicial practice there have been cases of acquittals of murderers - especially when the lawyer skillfully highlighted the "darkness and backwardness of the Russian countryside" in the forefront of the defense. Even when the peasants themselves confessed to the murder of the "sorcerer", the jury's verdict exempted them from criminal liability.

But there were also the opposite cases - when innocent people were accused of ritual murders. In pre-revolutionary Russia, there were two scandalous trials in the case of allegedly committed human sacrifices. In the first case, this is the case of a group of Udmurt peasants (in those days they were called "votyaks") who lived in the village of Stary Multan. The Multan Votyaks were accused of the murder of beggar Matyunin on May 4, 1892, who, according to the official accusation, was drunk, hung up drunk and got his entrails and blood out of him for a common victim elsewhere and, perhaps, "to take this blood inside." The decapitated corpse of Matyunin was found on May 6 on a walking path through a swampy swamp three miles from Old Multan. Autopsy revealed that someone had removed the heart and lungs from the chest cavity, for which the bases of the ribs had been cut at the neck and back.

There were many strange circumstances and controversial issues in the case of the Multan Votyaks. The public in Russia, and above all the well-known humanist and human rights activist writer V. G. Korolenko, perceived this case as a police falsification, a monstrous provocation. Three times the Votyak case was considered in different courts. The first two trials ended in convictions, and only the third time the court acquitted the accused.

The Beilis case (Kiev, 1913) ended with an acquittal. It was a continuation of a number of processes (Grodno case, Saratov case, etc.), in which Jews were accused of killing Christian children in order to use their blood for ritual purposes.

Similar accusations of Jews come from the early Middle Ages (the myth of ritual infanticide was recorded by historians from about the middle of the 12th century), but they are connected not with real facts, but with religious fanaticism and, to a large extent, with the fact that the financial situation of Jewish merchants and artisans was, generally better than their indigenous counterparts.

The terrible Jewish pogroms of 1298 in Franconia and the Upper Rhine thundered all over Europe. And although the motivation for them was fictitious crimes against Christians and Christianity, even the most fanatical contemporaries (for example, Rudolf Schlettshtadskiy in Memorable Stories) did not hide that the result (and perhaps the original purpose) of the pogroms was the seizure and looting of the property of the victims. In justification of such actions, Rudolf Schlettshtadsky cites a number of stories. In one place he writes about a Jewish woman who fled from her relatives who were about to kill her. She argued that the descendants of the Jews who shouted at the crucifixion of Christ: "His blood be on us and on our children," for several months a year suffer from bleeding, and only the blood of Christians can bring them healing. Immediately after this, the author tells the story of a seven-year-old boy kidnapped and killed by the Jews. Another "example" tells of the killing of a Christian furrier by the Jews, from whose body they pumped blood, and the body secretly drowned in the Rhine, but a certain possessed woman exposed their evil deed, and the demon with her lips cried out: "Good poor, avenge the blood of your God and Lord Christ, who is daily put to death by treacherous Jews in their members, that is, in Christians, "etc. This anti-Semite devil devoted to the cause of Christians continued, addressing certain masters:" O you, gentlemen, who received a lot of silver in order to save the Jews from death, you grievely insult God, and eternal destruction will overtake you according to your merit. "

So, through the entire history of civilization, the institution of human sacrifice runs like a bloody line. Perhaps, in addition to religious, ethnic and social motives, the "death drive" (the term of Z. Freud) plays an important role here. For a very long time, mankind gets rid of its superstitions. Unfortunately, and from those for which you have to pay with human lives.

By and large, the mass murders in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, half-Potov Cambodia, Idi-Amin's Uganda, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, etc., etc., are, to a certain extent, echoes of ritual sacrifices. Only the terminology has changed; now people are sacrificed not to a deity, but to an idea. And, in fairness, I must say that the ancient gods were much less bloodthirsty.

Translated from Sanskrit "devoted wife"