>>1357394 (#1702)
Human Sacrifice [1/2]
In ancient, antediluvian times archeological records give witness that ALL ancient societies practiced human sacrifice; and, considering the fallen nature of humanity [without Remedy], it has been said "In the beginning there was blood.",.. And, not wanting to know about [remember] human sacrifice is a dominant motif in modern religious history.
When the Greek historian Pausanius visited the sanctuary of Zeus atop Mount Lykaion in Arcadia in the second century AD, he learned of secret rituals performed at the site in ancient history, by a people the Greeks described as "older than the moon"; the "unspeakable sacrifice" - the yearly murder, dismemberment, and communal eating of a child at the mountaintop. Pausanius stated "I could see no pleasure in delving further into this sacrifice. Let it be as it is and as it was from the beginning."
Comparing the words of Pausanius with the Roman Catholic celebration of the Godhead "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end," Pausanius' liturgical statement ascribes eternity to a gruesome blood ritual, and from an anthropological perspective, he is correct. Blood sacrifice is the oldest and most universal act of piety. The offering of animals, including the human animal, dates back at least twenty thousand years, and arguably back to the earliest appearance of humanity…
A man shot to death by arrows, lies close at hand- and underfoot at Stonehenge; the Greek geographer Strabo wrote that Druids performed human sacrifice by arrow shooting.
Within two miles of Stonehenge, there is another circle, built of wooden posts, called Woodhenge. In the center of Woodhenge excavators found a three and a half year old girl whose skull had been split "before burial" by an axe. She was killed 4000 years ago, about the time the giant standing stones at Stonehenge were erected. Apparently she served as a 'foundation sacrifice' for Woodhenge, making her the 'guardian spirit' of the place….
One of the common features of British stone circles, including Stonehenge, is the presence of cremated human bones. Forensic analysis of bones at fifty Scottish stone circles revealed that there are too few individuals for family burials, and that a disproportionate number were children… "There is a smell of ritual death about all of this," concluded archaeologist Aubrey Burl in an article for Scientific American. Folk tales about children being burned to death inside these stone circles have survived until modern times, along with the custom of having children leap over bonfires at the harvest, a rite linked to real sacrifices in antiquity.
"Stonehenge was not an academy for research into the stars and the nature of the universe," Burl states in his 1987 book, The Stonehenge People. "It was a place of death, built by people whose needs and fears were very different from our own."
Ritual human sacrifice constituted the primitive core for the ancient Panhellenic celebrations at Mount Olympus, Bronze Age ceremonies at Stonehenge, Jewish holidays at the Great Temple on Mount Moriah, and the dynastic offerings atop the Mayan pyramids.
"The only prehistoric and historic groups obviously able to assert themselves were those held together by the ritual power to kill," wrote Walter Burkhart in his book Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. "Through solidarity and cooperative organization, and by establishing an inviolable order, the sacrificial ritual gave society its form.
In the ancient Holy Land, the tradition of child sacrifice was an ancient rite. The Pontifical Museum of Jerusalem contains the skeletons of two infants whose heads were violently severed from their bodies some five thousand years ago, before they were buried in jars underneath houses near the Dead Sea. The caption below the exhibit reads: "The necropolis at Ghassul has not yet been excavated, but a few dozen infant burials have been found in the town area [such as these two]. They were invariably under house floors and were quite possibly foundation sacrifices as encountered elsewhere in the ancient Near East.