By Nimue Brown
I don’t do sacrifice. I have no doubt that many of our pagan ancestors, druids included, sacrificed both creatures and humans to the gods. They did so to avoid divine wrath, and to seek good fortune. Sometimes perhaps also for divination. Theirs was a different world to ours. Sacrifice in that sense is about doing something to get what you want. Then along came Christianity and Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, a new consciousness in which we don’t kill people to please god (unless it’s a holy war, or they are heretics or pagans…). Sacrifice is of the self in that context. It becomes martyrdom and sainthood. We give our lives for our faith. Ideally in painful and horrible ways.
I’m not interested in killing anything and I’m not interested in martyrdom. I am also absolutely convinced that all historical ‘sacrifice’ (Jesus aside, he may be a special case) was to get something for the self. Be that good luck for a voyage, or the pleasure of knowing yourself to be on the way to sainthood. If we’re calling it sacrifice, we do probably, at some level, expect to get something for it. If we really thought a deity wanted us to do something of no benefit to ourselves, or the world, where the only gain would be that we have suffered for the deity – this is not a God I want anything to do with. To do something, or be asked to do something that is good in some way, should never be thought of as sacrifice, as I see it.
What’s been said…