Intriguing premise, but ultimately I think a wrong one. Unlike things like slavery, child exposure, monarchy, spousal rape, even the making of eunuchs to an extent >> child sacrifice was thought bad by people at the very time.
The story of Jacob's sacfrice on Mt Moriah by Abraham - a sacrifice that does not happen - is an explicit rejection of the tradition of child sacrifice which was said to take place in Jerusalem. When the Romans denounced the Carthaganians there was real horror there. The Romans themselves were monsters and there was propaganda for sure but also rejection of this practice.
Christianity takes the Jewish rejection of child sacrifice a step further and sets up Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice, willing to pay a prince for humanity's sins. No child sacrifice necessary. Islam sees Abraham and Jacob as major prophets and accept the tradition.
In other words, the world you imagine - where Churches and Mosques allow child sacrifice - simply would not happen. It's a profound misunderstanding of the religious tradition. [They would and did allow other horrors in their name - just not this one].
There's more to the Akadeh ('Binding of Isaac'). Even in 1966, Nahum Sarna dismissed the theory that the story was meant to reject the practice: instead, the story assumes the practice was already universally abominable. Else it would not be a real test of Abraham's faith. So there's a lot published on that debate.
The Bible also records in 2 Kings 3:27 that the King of Moab offered his son as sacrifice; more to unpack there.
All I meant to say is that the rejection of the practice is built into the core story of Judaism and later into Xianity and Islam. It would be wrong to assume that child or human sacrifice was "accepted" in antiquity even in areas and times where it was practiced - unlike slavery.
It’s less a misunderstanding of the religious traditions than an attempt at imagining very morally different versions of them! While not worrying about what the other downstream differences would be if child sacrifice had become mainstream early on, because otherwise it’s not manageable. But there would undoubtedly be many differences if — say — someone had made a storytelling transmission error and the story of Abraham had mistakenly become pro-sacrifice
Yes but would Judaism ever been so intriguing all those god fearers and Xianity & Islam so compelling if they did not take the step of rejecting some of the barbarism of antiquity? It's kind of the moral territory they stake out - that morality is not arbitrary and there is such a thing as justice and order that is an improvement over what came before.
Also for the record I'm a Jewish/Hindu who's family literally started some sort of Canaanite cult (long story) so I have no fondness for prosletyzing monotheism. I'm genuinely thinking this through.
Something closer to the present would be society’s perceptions on anti-abortion activists. The debate within Christian communities about it sounds like a good simulation of how the pro- and anti-child sacrifice would have gone in ecumenical councils that alternate world. Another would be the de las Casas versus Sepulveda debates on the treatment of conquered peoples in the Americas. The latter was interestingly using Aristotelian principles to defend the inclusion of enslavement as part of the spoils of conquest, which sounds very Roman.
Odd that you find this so disturbing. Or maybe I'm the odd one.
Child exposure is one way to deal with excessive children. Sacrificing to a god at least gives the death a little dignity (and when you're dealing with fertility gods, "here, have this one back" seems suddenly a lot more plausible).
When it comes down to it, you're likely to see "substitutions", particularly in times of "fewer children" -- "we're too poor to give god our only chicken. we need to eat eggs to stay healthy. have grain, god, and retain worshippers"
Well, I and most readers are the product of millennia of cultural taboos against this practice. But yes, there is a way to see child sacrifice as a more sophisticated way of dealing with excess natality, as you say. I suppose it’s easy for people today to see every single child as precious and worthy of care and protection, but that was not always true historically
Yeah -- I consider it more objectionable the closer to "personhood" the kid attains (you can view that as closer to "moral agent" -- whereby I'm much less happy with sacrificing a five year old than a two year old).
You're running roughly two ideas, with human sacrifice:
1) Excess natality.
2) Affordable, "excess food" to provide mothers the ability to have more babies than are expected to attain "the age of majority."
Also, cute how you made that 18. Maybe that worked for Northern Europe, the Hebrews had "age of majority" at 12 or 13. As the Phoenicians were a Semitic people, it's more likely they'd put it lower.
You can see a "more modern version" of human sacrifice, where "we don't sacrifice 10 year olds, we've learned that they're nearly human."
Ha, yeah, 18 was in the spirit of changing as few things as possible between that world and ours, but I agree that realistically it would have been lower. Also AFAIK the bones in the tophet of Carthage are almost exclusively of newborns, anything older than that is probably totally imaginary
From an "end of the day" morality perspective, abandoning newborns versus "sacrificing them to gods" is utterly morally equivalent. The former culture views it as a "necessary evil" -- but it's not entirely implausible to see the latter culture doing the same, is it? "Gods have gifted us with too many children, here, send one to heaven now, rather than stay in this wretched world." -- how's that for memento mori-esque "views towards the afterlife?"
"The reality, as Clendinnen brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica, like an extra-spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings. And everybody had their role to play"
Very interesting article. I will say though, I do think child sacrifice probably was destined to die out. It seems to have even been controversial in the ancient world, as the Romans, Greeks, and Jews all heavily criticized it. The practice is evolutionarily self-defeating, as you mention. And even though you use antinatalism as an example of something that does not have fitness value yet persists, your example of the Shakers disproves your point. The Shakers died out because of their antinatalism, seemingly proving that certain beliefs are not destined to continue. I do think its interesting though, to wonder if their is any kind of moral "direction" in civilization or if it literally is all just random. I am inclined to think their is, at least a tiny bit, of direction in our moral development. Stuff like "dont steal" or "dont kill random people" are all things developed independently in multiple civilizations, so at the very least it seems like their is a basic moral architecture that is universal. It would be helpful to compare our species to another intelligent species to see if this is even cosmically universal, but alas we only have one test case. Even so, if I were to bet, I would expect even alien civilizations to have these basic values because of their biological benefit.
Yeah, I agree. The fuller version of the Shakers point is that we can both say that a meme like antinatalism is bad for a culture and for itself, since it is evolutionary self-defeating; and yet that it can be strong enough to persist for a surprisingly long time because of some of its other properties. The Shakers lasted hundreds of years. Likewise, even if child sacrifice is probably an evolutionary dead end, if it ends up being culturally fit for some other reason, then it can persist for some time. Ultimately, though, you're right that it was probably destined to vanish. It was relatively rare among human societies in the first place.
First, horrifying idea. Second, I've been working the details.
For a child sacrifice to be effective in a Semitic culture, it needs to be the first-fruits. A noble who offers their first-born to please the god, perhaps to turn the tide of a battle. Not an unwanted or sickly child. And not in any way with an upside: not 'sacrificing' a generation to win in Normandy (Hell, Gallipoli.) (And no Hunger Games for revenue either.)
We're still hearing the story of Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia. What if that had been the opening act to D-Day? ('Sir, weather conditions are 50-50 go no-go in the Channel. Should we activate Iphigenia?').
western world is in the process of legalising assisted suicide for minors even for conditions like depression - what is "child sacrifices" we find so disgusting were a form of assisted suicide of kids with incurable diseases in pain and suffering?
We think slavery has been abolished but what in "free people" living conditions today are worse including the ability to escape?
we think intellectual property protection is great way to reward creative people and advance innovation but in reality it creates artificial monopoly that destroys free market, used by big corporations to make extra profit and slow down development?
we do not need to alternative histories to see this moral issues - they are with us here and now
Assisted suicide for minors is, very obviously, unrelated to child sacrifice, and making an analogy between them is not useful, even if opposing both
Likewise for slavery vs. poverty. Poverty is bad but is the default status of humans, imposed on us by nature, which is why it's hard to escape; slavery is imposed by humans and is therefore a different kind of badness because humans can simply choose not to impose it
my point was that we don't know if historical accounts child sacrifice was actually child sacrifice - we are just guessing based on our view that everyone before us was immoral
Where we individually draw a line around a behavior that really costs us. It is as if we are expecting safety on this side of that line. Every certainty costs us in contemplation as versus what we have tried to simply eat our way through the days. What it looks like is yourself feeling his and her personal territory violated. Play droney music to a musician and if they have their way you will exit pursued by bear. In the Carthaginian instance the children must have been cremated, immolated in a death like sleep. As in the case of the Incas we would have signs if the children were brutalized, but in Carthage we surely should image Semitic song rather than military dance. I have lines around my private quiet that everybody in this town affords me, maybe or not a spastic but I bark, oh yes, have been hoarse from giving people new names more times than you will guess.
I suppose you meant genes, not memes? Great article, very thought provoking. Maybe in this world Monotheism would have come from the hand of the Persians with Ahura Mazda.
The term "meme" originated as a metaphor for how ideas spread *like* genes, and only got applied to viral (another biology metaphor!) internet posts decades later
The idea of "only the best" for the god would have surely degraded over the centuries and only the children of the poor would have been fed to the furnace. Human nature would not allow the heirs to wealth to die miserably in reality. Great imagining but reality dictates otherwise.
I was trying to work out the maths, I don't think you could consistently sacrifice a younger sibling upon an older sibling reaching the age of majority, as this would halve your birthrate. Well, a society could do that for a bit, but it couldn't do that forever, unless they could fudge a bit and sacrifice children who had died anyway, as infant mortality would have been high.
I think if it did happen in Carthage or elsewhere it was probably a relatively rare practice, like something you did in unusual circumstances or if you were a prominent family, certainly not half of all children. And if you sacrifice say the less healthy children then maybe the sacrifices don’t have that much of a demographic impact because they take the place of other child mortality. But yeah having a full mathematical model of this would be interesting!
We actually have a lot of natural experiments regarding a lot of pagan practices.
Christians fought very hard against things they deemed abhorrent in Roman culture (sexual immorality, child exposure, abortion, infanticide) and even where they made compromises (slavery) they ended up de facto and then de jure abolishing it, for which there is no other precedent among cultures.
Likelihood of Christians adopting moloch sacrifice (even absent a constant Old Testament theme arguing against it, as Jews were coexisting with Phoenicians and their norms) is zero.
I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's science fiction story "The Dead Past" about a historian trying to access a device allowing people to view the past called a chronoscope to prove the Carthaginians did not sacrifice their children.
Intriguing premise, but ultimately I think a wrong one. Unlike things like slavery, child exposure, monarchy, spousal rape, even the making of eunuchs to an extent >> child sacrifice was thought bad by people at the very time.
The story of Jacob's sacfrice on Mt Moriah by Abraham - a sacrifice that does not happen - is an explicit rejection of the tradition of child sacrifice which was said to take place in Jerusalem. When the Romans denounced the Carthaganians there was real horror there. The Romans themselves were monsters and there was propaganda for sure but also rejection of this practice.
Christianity takes the Jewish rejection of child sacrifice a step further and sets up Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice, willing to pay a prince for humanity's sins. No child sacrifice necessary. Islam sees Abraham and Jacob as major prophets and accept the tradition.
In other words, the world you imagine - where Churches and Mosques allow child sacrifice - simply would not happen. It's a profound misunderstanding of the religious tradition. [They would and did allow other horrors in their name - just not this one].
There's more to the Akadeh ('Binding of Isaac'). Even in 1966, Nahum Sarna dismissed the theory that the story was meant to reject the practice: instead, the story assumes the practice was already universally abominable. Else it would not be a real test of Abraham's faith. So there's a lot published on that debate.
The Bible also records in 2 Kings 3:27 that the King of Moab offered his son as sacrifice; more to unpack there.
All I meant to say is that the rejection of the practice is built into the core story of Judaism and later into Xianity and Islam. It would be wrong to assume that child or human sacrifice was "accepted" in antiquity even in areas and times where it was practiced - unlike slavery.
It’s less a misunderstanding of the religious traditions than an attempt at imagining very morally different versions of them! While not worrying about what the other downstream differences would be if child sacrifice had become mainstream early on, because otherwise it’s not manageable. But there would undoubtedly be many differences if — say — someone had made a storytelling transmission error and the story of Abraham had mistakenly become pro-sacrifice
Yes but would Judaism ever been so intriguing all those god fearers and Xianity & Islam so compelling if they did not take the step of rejecting some of the barbarism of antiquity? It's kind of the moral territory they stake out - that morality is not arbitrary and there is such a thing as justice and order that is an improvement over what came before.
Also for the record I'm a Jewish/Hindu who's family literally started some sort of Canaanite cult (long story) so I have no fondness for prosletyzing monotheism. I'm genuinely thinking this through.
That background is very intriguing, in case you feel like telling some of that long story!
Something closer to the present would be society’s perceptions on anti-abortion activists. The debate within Christian communities about it sounds like a good simulation of how the pro- and anti-child sacrifice would have gone in ecumenical councils that alternate world. Another would be the de las Casas versus Sepulveda debates on the treatment of conquered peoples in the Americas. The latter was interestingly using Aristotelian principles to defend the inclusion of enslavement as part of the spoils of conquest, which sounds very Roman.
These are great parallels!
The piece about anti-natalist memes remind me about my own article: https://theborys.substack.com/p/how-memes-are-killing-births
Odd that you find this so disturbing. Or maybe I'm the odd one.
Child exposure is one way to deal with excessive children. Sacrificing to a god at least gives the death a little dignity (and when you're dealing with fertility gods, "here, have this one back" seems suddenly a lot more plausible).
When it comes down to it, you're likely to see "substitutions", particularly in times of "fewer children" -- "we're too poor to give god our only chicken. we need to eat eggs to stay healthy. have grain, god, and retain worshippers"
Well, I and most readers are the product of millennia of cultural taboos against this practice. But yes, there is a way to see child sacrifice as a more sophisticated way of dealing with excess natality, as you say. I suppose it’s easy for people today to see every single child as precious and worthy of care and protection, but that was not always true historically
Yeah -- I consider it more objectionable the closer to "personhood" the kid attains (you can view that as closer to "moral agent" -- whereby I'm much less happy with sacrificing a five year old than a two year old).
You're running roughly two ideas, with human sacrifice:
1) Excess natality.
2) Affordable, "excess food" to provide mothers the ability to have more babies than are expected to attain "the age of majority."
Also, cute how you made that 18. Maybe that worked for Northern Europe, the Hebrews had "age of majority" at 12 or 13. As the Phoenicians were a Semitic people, it's more likely they'd put it lower.
You can see a "more modern version" of human sacrifice, where "we don't sacrifice 10 year olds, we've learned that they're nearly human."
Ha, yeah, 18 was in the spirit of changing as few things as possible between that world and ours, but I agree that realistically it would have been lower. Also AFAIK the bones in the tophet of Carthage are almost exclusively of newborns, anything older than that is probably totally imaginary
From an "end of the day" morality perspective, abandoning newborns versus "sacrificing them to gods" is utterly morally equivalent. The former culture views it as a "necessary evil" -- but it's not entirely implausible to see the latter culture doing the same, is it? "Gods have gifted us with too many children, here, send one to heaven now, rather than stay in this wretched world." -- how's that for memento mori-esque "views towards the afterlife?"
According to this, we don't have to imagine it. There was a society with an even more extensive system of human sacrifice only 500 years ago.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-aztecs-by-inga-clendinnen
"The reality, as Clendinnen brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica, like an extra-spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings. And everybody had their role to play"
What does it say about me that the Aztecs and Carthage are two of the civilizations that fascinate me the most
Depends. I'm fascinated by lots of things I don't like or want to have happen.
Very interesting article. I will say though, I do think child sacrifice probably was destined to die out. It seems to have even been controversial in the ancient world, as the Romans, Greeks, and Jews all heavily criticized it. The practice is evolutionarily self-defeating, as you mention. And even though you use antinatalism as an example of something that does not have fitness value yet persists, your example of the Shakers disproves your point. The Shakers died out because of their antinatalism, seemingly proving that certain beliefs are not destined to continue. I do think its interesting though, to wonder if their is any kind of moral "direction" in civilization or if it literally is all just random. I am inclined to think their is, at least a tiny bit, of direction in our moral development. Stuff like "dont steal" or "dont kill random people" are all things developed independently in multiple civilizations, so at the very least it seems like their is a basic moral architecture that is universal. It would be helpful to compare our species to another intelligent species to see if this is even cosmically universal, but alas we only have one test case. Even so, if I were to bet, I would expect even alien civilizations to have these basic values because of their biological benefit.
Yeah, I agree. The fuller version of the Shakers point is that we can both say that a meme like antinatalism is bad for a culture and for itself, since it is evolutionary self-defeating; and yet that it can be strong enough to persist for a surprisingly long time because of some of its other properties. The Shakers lasted hundreds of years. Likewise, even if child sacrifice is probably an evolutionary dead end, if it ends up being culturally fit for some other reason, then it can persist for some time. Ultimately, though, you're right that it was probably destined to vanish. It was relatively rare among human societies in the first place.
First, horrifying idea. Second, I've been working the details.
For a child sacrifice to be effective in a Semitic culture, it needs to be the first-fruits. A noble who offers their first-born to please the god, perhaps to turn the tide of a battle. Not an unwanted or sickly child. And not in any way with an upside: not 'sacrificing' a generation to win in Normandy (Hell, Gallipoli.) (And no Hunger Games for revenue either.)
We're still hearing the story of Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia. What if that had been the opening act to D-Day? ('Sir, weather conditions are 50-50 go no-go in the Channel. Should we activate Iphigenia?').
Mourning becomes Elektra.
Finally, horrifying idea. But lots of questions.
I'll just throw a few random thoughts here:
western world is in the process of legalising assisted suicide for minors even for conditions like depression - what is "child sacrifices" we find so disgusting were a form of assisted suicide of kids with incurable diseases in pain and suffering?
We think slavery has been abolished but what in "free people" living conditions today are worse including the ability to escape?
we think intellectual property protection is great way to reward creative people and advance innovation but in reality it creates artificial monopoly that destroys free market, used by big corporations to make extra profit and slow down development?
we do not need to alternative histories to see this moral issues - they are with us here and now
Assisted suicide for minors is, very obviously, unrelated to child sacrifice, and making an analogy between them is not useful, even if opposing both
Likewise for slavery vs. poverty. Poverty is bad but is the default status of humans, imposed on us by nature, which is why it's hard to escape; slavery is imposed by humans and is therefore a different kind of badness because humans can simply choose not to impose it
my point was that we don't know if historical accounts child sacrifice was actually child sacrifice - we are just guessing based on our view that everyone before us was immoral
Sure! There's lively debate about this, trying to determine if it was sacrifice vs. mortality for other reasons
Where we individually draw a line around a behavior that really costs us. It is as if we are expecting safety on this side of that line. Every certainty costs us in contemplation as versus what we have tried to simply eat our way through the days. What it looks like is yourself feeling his and her personal territory violated. Play droney music to a musician and if they have their way you will exit pursued by bear. In the Carthaginian instance the children must have been cremated, immolated in a death like sleep. As in the case of the Incas we would have signs if the children were brutalized, but in Carthage we surely should image Semitic song rather than military dance. I have lines around my private quiet that everybody in this town affords me, maybe or not a spastic but I bark, oh yes, have been hoarse from giving people new names more times than you will guess.
I suppose you meant genes, not memes? Great article, very thought provoking. Maybe in this world Monotheism would have come from the hand of the Persians with Ahura Mazda.
Where do you think I meant genes?
“A family that sacrifices its children will have a harder time passing its memes to the next generation;”
and
“Besides, parasitic memes can spread even if they are harmful to their hosts.”
I did mean memes in both! Those sentences also work with genes, but culture is what I was writing about here
Oh, then I do not have as good a grasp in english as I thought. Much to rumiate about.
The term "meme" originated as a metaphor for how ideas spread *like* genes, and only got applied to viral (another biology metaphor!) internet posts decades later
The idea of "only the best" for the god would have surely degraded over the centuries and only the children of the poor would have been fed to the furnace. Human nature would not allow the heirs to wealth to die miserably in reality. Great imagining but reality dictates otherwise.
Yeah, probably. But elites have been known to perform costly actions for status from time to time
I was trying to work out the maths, I don't think you could consistently sacrifice a younger sibling upon an older sibling reaching the age of majority, as this would halve your birthrate. Well, a society could do that for a bit, but it couldn't do that forever, unless they could fudge a bit and sacrifice children who had died anyway, as infant mortality would have been high.
I think if it did happen in Carthage or elsewhere it was probably a relatively rare practice, like something you did in unusual circumstances or if you were a prominent family, certainly not half of all children. And if you sacrifice say the less healthy children then maybe the sacrifices don’t have that much of a demographic impact because they take the place of other child mortality. But yeah having a full mathematical model of this would be interesting!
We actually have a lot of natural experiments regarding a lot of pagan practices.
Christians fought very hard against things they deemed abhorrent in Roman culture (sexual immorality, child exposure, abortion, infanticide) and even where they made compromises (slavery) they ended up de facto and then de jure abolishing it, for which there is no other precedent among cultures.
Likelihood of Christians adopting moloch sacrifice (even absent a constant Old Testament theme arguing against it, as Jews were coexisting with Phoenicians and their norms) is zero.
Yes in our thought experiment it would obviously be a very different Christianity!
Maybe it would even be called differently xd
Great world building exercise for aspiring novelists! As fascinating as it can be disturbing. 🤓
I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's science fiction story "The Dead Past" about a historian trying to access a device allowing people to view the past called a chronoscope to prove the Carthaginians did not sacrifice their children.
I wasn't aware of this story, super cool, I'm reading it now
It was interesting! Though the Carthage part is kind of incidental to the main point haha