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I am a Roman Catholic Seminarian For the Archdiocese of St. Louis. I also have a BS in computer engineering so I sorta know how this internet thingy works.
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Pagan Deities love fat kids
Pagan Deities love to eat fat kids, or something like that.
As Diogenes at Off the Record at Catholic World News reports scientists looking at the remains of the mummies of child sacrificial victims in Peru have found based on hair samples that the kids were fattened up for a whole year before being clubbed to death on a high mountain for the greater glory of some deity.
Sacrifice
I have an interest in the primitive theology of sacrifice, every religion before Islam was sacrificial, and Islam is only asacrificial out of a confused emulation of Christianity. (Of course Palestinian suicide bombers are quite similar to human sacrifice with the exception that the demand of the deity is passive and the action does not cause the deity to act. Allah's absolute power and capricious will makes him beyond the influence of sacrifice. The Chrisitian God is absolutely good, and then powerful in as much as the excercise of that power is consistent with the good. In Christianity God himself provides the one acceptable sacrifice, who is presented to the Father on behalf of all creation which is recapitulated, re-headed, in Him in the Liturgy, both the eternal Liturgy and in time in the Mass.) Those not influenced by Christian metaphysics in the Americas moved in two different directions with regard to sacrifice during the Christian era. The migrant peoples developed systems focused more on spiritual sacrifice, physical pain inflicted on the self, and ritual merriment. These are often seen as directed to a sort of pantheistic self annihilation or union with nature. (Personally I think the use of Eastern categories is totally foreign to the religions in the pre-Columbian era, but is a revisionist redaction of those who seek to reject Christian influence.) The urban civilizations developed complex mythologies of personal deities, and a complex fixed sacrificial system that focused on human sacrifice. Both groups drifted to human victims, because livestock was rare in the Americas. But also because ideally there is no better victim than a human. Sacrifice is a gift, and there is no better gift than the self, and no better replacement for the self than another human. Human sacrifice has always been something that seems to have captivated and horrified men.
Back to the fat kids
So why were they fattened? Well, they were likely treated well as either sacred to the gods, or possibly as the god's themselves. Or it was not uncommon in the ancient near East (ANE) to treat a sacrificial victim like a king so that the deity would take them in the place of the king. Still it was not uncommon to the early ANE or even to the Aztecs to understand the deities as eating the sacrificial victim. (Why else would one think that burning flesh in a sweet odor?)
So next time you notice yourself getting a little rotund, think about the hungry Incan gods.
posted by: nictitator at 00:53 |
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