Child sacrifice is not something new and even makes its historical presence known in religious texts including the Bible. The Topheths used by the Canaanite-Phoenician religion is said to have been the site of many child sacrifices archeologists finding urns filled with the bones of small children and urns of later date with bones of small animals said to have taken the place of child sacrifices after they were outlawed. It still remains unclear the purpose of child sacrifice and educated guesses point to appeasing the god(s).

Being somewhat of a mystic anthropologist I find human behavior extraordinarily fascinating; especially ancient behavior. I am curious what everyone else thinks of child sacrifice in ancient times... do you think that it was the ultimate sacrifice made by people who revered children? Or do you think it was an act by people who regarded children as lesser citizines & expendable?

I'm very curious to find out what you all think because while either answer could be the correct one the answers themselves bespeak their thought process and their perception of civilization.

I am not a learned scholar or a student of ancient history. However, my feeling is that the child was considered the Ultimate sacrifice in the sense that to be willing to give up your own flesh and blood was the ultimate belief in your God and the religion that you practice.

I never really understood why there are so many nutcases in the world. I'm sure there are some entities that enjoy influencing and watching our own madness from anger to guilt to grief.

But I have heard people would kidnap kids in third world country to capture their spirit. A child spirit is least likely going to seek revenge. And the living child is easiest to capture and lure than an adult. So is it the ultamite? Perhaps in their eyes. I'm sure they make up some demented reasoning that the child is the purest spirit they can attain for their lack of strength in capturing an adult.

A lot of magick is about association so you can get into a state of mind to manifest. Like colors are psychological associations. Color alone does nothing. So the child probably represents an ultamite sacrifice to them. Because if you can kill something so cute you've proved to yourself you are a dark evil bastard afterall.

Human sacrifice in any form is always appearing late in a culture and not at the beginning. It seems that tribal thinking goes into a planned and organized form of human Bloodletting when that culture for either exterior or interior reasons is collapsing....The number of young men and women killed in Vietnam and the 2 Iraq wars and now Afghanistan are examples of Youth Sacrifice....

Caiyros

I am going to go with children being the ultimate sacrifice as being the more powerful of the two choices.Just like sacrificing virgins and any youth...over an adult or elderly person.

Caiyros, is right in pointing out that we still offer our young in wars, to get slaughtered in the name of politics, rulers, causes, religions, and dictators..P.S. Babies and children are still being sacrificed nowadays..Only difference, is the secretiveness in it all and it's not for a God or God's..

The more things change, the more the stay the same. :grouphug:

I would have to disagree. I would think that they would think of children as expendable. They (probably) have no form of birth control so an abundance of children and probably an abundance of those children dying from disease. The probably didn't see them as hanging around for that long. Depending of the older civilization the poorer of people lost their children first and maybe even gotten monies or wares or favors from the gods for them. That is just what I would feel.

We as American's who send our young off to fight war on foreign lands is to me inexcusable we've done this before, we know how the story ends, we are intelligent humans, we know better to offer up our young to fight battles that are not theirs to fight. I hope this world hurry's with its enlightenment..but with some of the people you meet and some of the attitudes they express its really hard to see them ever grasping anything other then thier own crotch. My father lost his humanity in WWII. :offtopic: :deadly:: Sorry I went a little off topic there.

But I vote for an expendable :oops:

This is a tough one (not just because I'm a bit sensitive when it comes to children). Logically, it really seems to me as a little bit of both. If they were looking for the ultimate sacrifice, it would probably have been strapping young men between the ages of 16 and 20; because they would have been highly valued to the family and at the peek of their productive output. If they wanted an expendable sacrifice (however, most deities I would assume prefer quality over convenience), they probably would have sacrificed the ill, old, and/or infirm as they would not have contributed much to the society. However, severely limiting your genetic stock by sacrificing the most valuable would be very counterproductive. So they probably found a compromise by sacrificing children as they have the potential to be quite valuable; while being relatively easy to replace (compared to a young adult in whom you've already been invested a lot of effort and resources). Loosing a mature male offspring (or young father) would cripple a common family, but loosing a young child would have been less financially devastating. Purity of the sacrifice may have also played a role, so I would perhaps lean a little bit more toward highly valued; just not quite ultimate. It's really hard to say, and DEFINITELY depends on the society's other religious practices, what virtues are valued, their economic structure, government, class system, even leisure activities and diet could possibly play a role in whether a child sacrifice was "expendable" or "ultimate". Not all societies who practiced this used the same approach, so their reasons could have been completely different.

Energy..... everything in the universe is vibrating with energy. Spirits are closest in manipulating and transforming energy than we as we are in the basic sense 'of the earth'.

Now think of when you interact with Spirits, Djinns, Vamps etc etc. It is always, well not always, u do this for me and I (here i mean us) will give u some of my energy; this may be sexual energy, love energy, fear energy, creative energy, etc etc , ultimately, 'life force' energy.

Consider the etheric energy/ life force energy in the womb or a young child, very high. this is why they need it.

How else did u think they lived for 1000s of years. all these energies are real and they look like the different colours of a spectrum, to use a crude analogy.

anyway, this is one of the reasons. there are also other valid ones, i won't go into like, eg. using the energy for magick work. think big like mega-rituals. those with insight will know.

I feel - ultimate sacrifice - because a younger (purer?), newly incarnated spirit may be of more value than a more mature one which has more self-awareness and can put up defences (on a deeper level, e.g. spirits temporarily connected to a child).

In the modern world, western civilsation or not, psychological sacrifice is continuing and not just socially - preventing an indivdual achieving their destiny in order to hijack it for personal gain.

there is something alluring about the soul of the innocent. i say this because so many pregnant women have been found in different african countries with their belly cut open and the fetus/baby missing. seriously some ancient rituals require some sort of sacrifice and to show how important and badly you want whatever you are asking for you need to be ready to give up that which is your most prized possession in the world.
i have heard true stories about money ritualist killing pregnant women, joining a cult and then the cult demanding the one human they love the mod of all persons on earth and usually what happens is this, they keep the person until late at night and ask the person to leave when it is already late and people in that house will find it hard to leave their beds. and the agreement is that whomever opens the door dies guess what? who is more likely to be sitting up and waiting for that individual if not the one that he has a love relationship with? or who leaves their bed to go tend to the person at that time of the day? usually and most often such person so guess what yup. The purer the better to the people that do these things a virgin will yield more money than a non virgin. i have heated horror stories. being that now that we are grown up we used to be aware of a time when my father's business was beginning to crumble in so many ways like earthquake swallowing his factory in china and other horrible things, he got approached to join one of those. last december i summoned the courage to ask him why he didn't join knowing fully well he was gonna be destroyed by them if he did and he answered " who amongst you my children can i easily give up or sacrifice?" that is very deep cos most often times they do not kill the children but make them into imbeciles that you have to keep in closet to throw up money and every time you go to get that money you have to live with yourself knowing its your son or your daughter that is int hat wardrobe and not really alive but more like a zombie. cos really the person is technically dead. none of them survives it and what normal person vomits money?