The Secular Age Fails to Escape Its Roots

“These transformations in understandings of sacrifice culminate in what today we think of as our ‘liberation’ from centuries of naïveté and superstition.”

Ritual sacrifice? What could possibly be more irrelevant to modern society than the study of ancient and arcane books of ritual sacrifice? What do burnt offerings, human and animal sacrifice have to do with us? What could be farther from our modern profane world than the long past sacred world?

Such question have preoccupied author Roberto Calasso for several decades now; the peculiar question of ritual sacrifice rhythmically appears and reappears in his provocative and extremely erudite body of works. Perhaps, as Calasso suggests, we can better understand who we are by gazing into an inverted mirror image of who we are not.

Other than the modern world, all civilizations have recognized powers beyond themselves. Many civilizations subscribed to the idea of a plurality of gods, with gods being names for the conflicting forces displayed in nature. Such societies generate “myths” which describe the relationships of these forces to each other, as well as our human relationship to this greater dynamic. In such “pagan” societies the ritual of sacrifice involves an affirmation of and an identification with these forces. All sacrificial rituals across societies, according to Calasso, embody these two elemental features: Something is destroyed and invisible forces are acknowledged.

The word “sacrifice” is from the Latin words “sacer” and “facere,”—literally “to make sacred.” The sacrificial victim and in effect the whole society is made sacred by accepting and affirming a relationship to the ways of nature, and nature itself embodies a divine order. In sacrificial civilizations the social order is not therefore in defiance of the divine order but in conformity to the divine order: the Greek Logos, Chinese Tao, Hindu Rta etc. The civil order is an analog of the divine order.