Greek Animal Sacrifice
In English, when we say "sacrifice", we mean that
you have given up something you wanted in order to get something else,
like you sacrificed your best piece of candy in order to get your
friend to tell you his secret. In Greek, sacrifice was a much more
specific thing: it means killing a tame animal and offering part of
it to the gods, or to one specific god, while eating the rest of it
yourself.
We don't know when the Greeks first began to sacrifice animals to
their gods, but probably not long after they
first began to keep tame animals.
It was one thing to hunt and kill wild
animals like deer, or fish, but it bothered people
to kill animals they had taken care of, that trusted them. (And it
still bothers many people today.)
So people began to kill tame (domestic) animals only when they thought
a god wanted them to do it. And only all in a group, all together,
sharing the guilt.
Generally a sacrifice went something like this: somebody decided that
he or she owed something to a god, or that he or she wanted something
from a god. Or there were also regular times of year for sacrifices.
It's a lot like prayer: people today pray at certain times of year,
and maybe every Sunday morning or Saturday morning or Friday evening,
but also when someone is sick or before an exam, or after someone
gets better.
Once you had decided to sacrifice, you called together a suitable
group of people to participate. Many sacrifices were family
matters, like if someone was sick,
and perhaps one or two chickens
might be sacrificed with the family standing around, and then the
family would eat the chickens for dinner. There was a stone
altar outside each house that you could kill the chickens on, with
an appropriate ceremony. Then the fat and bones were offered up to
the god, while the meat was roasted over a fire.
(Yes, it bothered the Greeks that they ate the good part and gave
the god the yucky part. The myth of Prometheus
tries to explain why this is).
Other sacrifices were larger: a goat, a sheep, or a pig, or even sometimes a cow. To sacrifice a goat, you'd have to get together more than just your own kids: maybe the whole block, or your cousins and their kids. All the meat had to be eaten at once (partly for religious reasons and partly because there was no refrigeration!). Often sacrifices involved more than one animal, and the whole village or the whole town came to participate in it. This helped to bring people together, by showing you who was part of your group (we have potluck school dinners and end-of-season sports banquets and so on in the same way).
To find out more about Greek sacrifice, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Oxford First Ancient History, by Roy Burrell and Peter Connolly (1997). Lively interviews and pictures make the ancient Mediterranean come to life. For middle schoolers.
Eyewitness: Ancient Greece , by Anne Pearson.
Homo
Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth,
by Walter Burkert (1987). (Homo Necans means Man the Killer). Burkert
is one of the great experts in Greek religion.
Oracles
Mystery Cults
Main Greek religion page
Main Ancient Greece page
Main religion page
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