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:
“Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“The English, besides being “good haters,” are dogged and downright, and have no salvos for their self-love. Their vanity does not heal the wounds made in their pride. The French, on the contrary, are soon reconciled to fate, and so enamoured of their own idea, that nothing can put them out of conceit with it. Whatever their attachment to their country, to liberty or glory, they are not so affected by the loss of these as to make any desperate effort or sacrifice to recover them.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)