4,000 Hecatombs, Animal Rights Activists, and a Certain Hindu Goddess

Other blogs (The Wild Hunt, A Heathen’s Day) have already commented on this, but as I figure that few in the English-speaking world take a pro-sacrifice stance, I thought I’d add my voice.

If you haven’t heard, a HUGE sacrifice is happening in Nepal. Between 200,000 and 400,000 animals will be sacrificed to the Goddess of Power, or a projected 2,000 to 4,000 hecatombs. That is a lot of meat.

The demand for the festival has actually gone up in recent years because some adjacent Hindu states have banned animal sacrifice. Conformity to Western (Christian) notions of propriety and animal cruelty have dealt a significant blow to some religious devotees in the region. Binaj Gurubacharya at The Huffington Post comments that “[p]articipants believe that animal sacrifices for the Hindu goddess Gadhimai will end evil and bring prosperity. Many join the festival from the state of Bihar in India, where animal sacrifices have been banned in some areas.”

I don’t support laws against animal sacrifice. Whether it’s because of the current issues with Santería in the United States or because it makes me think of anti-Pagan edicts of the Christian Roman Empire is up for debate.

Animals sacrificed to a deity aren’t, as many Americans seem to think, tortured on an altar for several hours and mutilated in strange ways. They are killed quickly and almost always consumed by ritual participants or sold by sacrificial meat vendors (an exception in pre-Reconstructed Hellenismos would be those animals sacrificed to ancestors/heroes or Chthonic deities because you don’t share meals with those in the Underworld). The situation in Nepal seems to conform to this:

[The festival] begins with the sacrifice of two wild rats, a rooster, a pig, a goat and a lamb before the temple's statue of Gadhimai.

Devotees can then bring their animals into the temple for ritual purification before taking them into the grounds where they will have their throats slit. The meat is distributed and eaten. (“Animal activists protest sacrifice festival,” The Daily Telegraph)

In fact, animal sacrifice in polytheism is more like Kosher slaughtering or the sacrifices done in Eastern Orthodox ceremonies around Easter.*

Animal rights activists need to stop projecting Christian notions of acceptability onto other cultures. Perhaps their great success in curbing commercial slaughterhouse atrocities has made them move on to the next target. Obviously, everyone in the West has already transitioned to a vegetarian diet, and all of us belong to PETA.

Certainly, people within religions that offer animal sacrifice sometimes have moral issues with it. Pythagoras believed that consuming any animal meant cannibalizing one’s spiritual kin, as souls transition among various species on the planet. Orpheus, according to Linda Johnsen’s Lost Masters, substituted wine and bread for the old blood sacrifice. You may recognize this. Christians incorporated some Orphic symbolism into their fictionalizations of Jesus’s life in order to attract converts and Hellenize their teachings. In Nepal, a young man named Ram Bahadur Bamjan has joined the animal rights activists in a crusade against blood sacrifice.

I will stand up for animal sacrifice because I believe in the traditions of my spiritual ancestors and I support the freedom of other religions to kill animals in sacred ritual. Because honestly, if you had to choose, would you pick a slaughterhouse that delights in terror or a shrine that makes the victim sacred?

*Greek-American Assemblyman Michael Gianaris (D-Queens), you are in my thoughts as I make this statement. I was disgusted by your condemnation of Daniel Halloran's comments about animal sacrifice, but maybe you don’t actually know the history of your own faith. Please note that I am a member of the Democratic party and a strong Socialist.