Animal sacrifice is the ritual killing and offering of an animal to appease or maintain favour with a divine agency. Such forms of sacrifice are practised within many religions around the world and have appeared historically in almost all cultures, including those of the Sumerians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Germanics, Celts, Aztecs, and Mayans.
All or only part of a sacrificial animal may be offered, especially in the context of ritual slaughter.
Remnants of ancient animal sacrifice can also found in various contemporary practices, the bullfights of Spain, kapparos and shechita of Judaism, or ḏabīḥah of Islam, for example.
Read more about Animal Sacrifice: Ancient World, Hinduism, Buddhism, Far East, African Traditional Religions
Famous quotes containing the words animal and/or sacrifice:
“The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Prosperity or egalitarianism—you have to choose. I favor freedom—you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.”
—Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936)