Human Sacrifice Occured Worldwide – Independently?
The practice of human sacrifice is recorded in China’s earliest writings, dating back as far as the Shang dynasty 4,000 years ago, experts say.
Warrior-kings at the time relied on diviners to communicate with ancestors and presented animal or human offerings to plead for victories in battle or for rains to end drought.
…But around the time the Jiangxi tomb was being built, the philosopher Confucius began denouncing human sacrifice and called for the practice to be banned, Xu said.
…Adrienne Mayor, a scholar on mythology and history at Stanford University, said human sacrifice has been praticed widely by various civilizations but became less common in many cultures at around the same time.
“Many cultures around the world practiced human sacrifice for many different purposes in antiquity, including txhe Chinese, Aztecs, Romans, Egyptians, Mongols, and Mayans,” she said.
Following history’s “axial age,” when sages including Confucius in China, Buddha in India, and Socrates in Greece “spoke out against the practice, human sacrifice became rare,” she said.
“Most cultures eventually replaced living sacrificial victims with symbolic rituals.”
Such a practise must have been taught, leading me to believe that either the mysterious elders that introduced lots of good things around the globe were not as perfect as I may have thought, or there are/were different groups of elders with different teachings and ideals.
“Such a practise must have been taught”
Why?
If the exodus out of Africa was motivated by competition, then it’s credible that this migration could have continued, over millennia, until there was nowhere left to migrate to. If human sacrifice were somehow linked to over-population (just saying if, I don’t know it is), then it could begin to occur spontaneously in different areas long after there ceased to be any contact between the lineages living there. I don’t know if any of this is so, but I’m not convinced that it must have been taught.
The link between beliefs and behaviors is not nearly as clear and concrete as it seems to most of us. Examples of people opting to believe things because it’s convenient for their interests are all around us.