animal sacrifice

Practice common in early religions and still practised today in some parts of the world. Through the offering of an appropriate animal, cleansed and purified, the gods could be pacified or appeased and thus human life would be protected.

In the Hindu Vedic hymns, sacrifice is a means of limiting and sanctifying the taking of life. In some cultures, sheep and goats or birds were the predominant animals of sacrifice – as in many cultures of the Middle East in the pre-Christian era. In Hinduism, the horse was a major sacrificial animal in the earliest days of Vedic culture, while in ancient Greece, the ox or bull was most favoured. Sacrificed animals were sometimes used to help divination, as when the entrails of a sheep were examined by priests in ancient Greece to determine the likely fortunes of a war or action. At the festival of Eid ul Adha, Muslims sacrifice sheep to recall how God prevented Ibraham from sacrificing his son Isma'ail by providing a ram instead, thus showing that God forbade human sacrifice. (A parallel story appears in the Bible, but with Isaac as the intended victim.)