Human Sacrifice and Child Abuse, Then & Now (Part One)

Isaac, Abraham, Agamemnon and Iphigenia

We have a slew of new subscribers. We hope they stick around and read the posts. I think we offer an unflinching perspective on the present through the myth and history of ancient times not found elsewhere. Not casual reading.

This excerpt from Hermes Runs the Game begins a section that took three months to recover from writing. If you think the ancients sacrificing a firstborn for worldly gain has no relevance today, please consider the Biden family. First wife sacrificed, son sacrificed. Joe in dementia does not have the evil fortitude of say, papa Bush, who sacrificed his oldest daughter, playing golf with Crowley’s daughter ten minutes later, and initiating the trauma programming of Dubya. Don’t get me started on the Kennedys. Am I nuts, or is this how the world has been operating for quite some time? Tens and likely hundreds of thousand of children missing, for a reason, sacrificed to a particular deity that everyone bows to knowingly or not when they chant “God wins!” Name starts with “Y”.

William Blake, The Flight of Moloch, 1809.

Human Sacrifice & Child Abuse

God is a man-eater, and so humans are sacrificed to him. Before humans were sacrificed, animals were sacrificed, because those to whom they were sacrificed were not gods.

—The Gospel of Philip^⁠1

If the Father were to demand a human sacrifice, he would become vainglorious.

—The Testimony of Truth^⁠2

This proposed legislation is nothing short of child sacrifice, and clearly in reaction, among other things, to the recently passed Texas Heartbeat bill,” the Archbishop added. “It should come as no surprise, then, that that (Texas) bill is being challenged by none other than The Satanic Temple and precisely on the grounds of religious freedom. Indeed, HR 3755 is surely the type of legislation one would expect from a devout Satanist, not a devout Catholic.

—Archbishop of San Francisco Salvatore Cordileone 7 October 2021

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”

Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”

God say “No.” Abe say, “What?”

God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but

The next time you see me comin’ you better run!”

Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”

God says, “Out on Highway 61.”

—“Highway 61 Revisited”, Robert Allen Zimmerman

O love, you resemble a lion.

It is not improper to drink blood for you.

Who will ask a lion, “What kind of lion are you?

Why are you drinking blood?”

Every moment souls tell You,

“Our blood would be halal [permissible] for You.”

You would make great and immortal

The One whose blood you drink . . .

It is amazing. The lion of love is very thirsty.

He has the intention of shedding blood.

—Dîvan-i Kebîr, Rumi

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, 1757, Villa Valmarana, Italy.

We have spent such a terrifying time together decoding the blood of the sacrifice and the unspeakable technocratic agenda of co-opting us through it, that maybe we should ease up a bit and discuss something mellow, like human sacrifice. As sacrificocentric as the ancient Greeks were—unlike most of their Middle Eastern neighbors, the Phoenicians and their Israelite offspring, or the Celts, or the pre-Columbian Americans, or pretty much all of Asia and Africa—ritual killing of humans (anthropothysia) induced disquietude in them. Although there are scattered tales in their warfare history, and also in their mythology, human sacrifice was considered something that barbarians do. Plutarch—a Roman-era priest at Delphi—goes as far as saying that no decent god would ever require one.

I should say that these acts are not performed for any god, but are soothing and appeasing rites for the averting of evil spirits. Nor is it credible that the gods demanded or welcomed the human sacrifices of ancient days, nor would kings and generals have endured giving over their children and submitting them to the preparatory rites and cutting their throats to no purpose save that they felt they were propitiating and offering satisfaction to the wrath and sullen temper of some harsh and implacable avenging deities^⁠3 . . .

This enormous topic has received much ink, and we will look at a few pertinent parts, from the mythic to the chemical.

The Girl Named Iphigenia

As the Greek fleet of a thousand ships awaited their launch Troy-ward, no wind would bellow their sails. Mycenaean king Agamemnon led these forces, who were not exactly frothing to avenge^⁠4 the theft of his brother Menelaus’ renowned wife Helen from their home by the Trojan prince Paris. Still, stealing the wife of your host is as serious a breach of the sacred ancient hospitality rites as there comes. Agamemnon paused on the brink of adding to his already ill-fated family history of treachery, human sacrifice and cannibalism. Enjoy today’s episode of “As the Urn Turns”.

Agamemnon’s great-grandfather Tantalus cursed his House of Atreus^⁠5 by testing the gods’ omniscience (and somn skills) by feeding his son Pelops to them to see if they noticed human flesh in the pot. They did. Thus the adjective ‘tantalizing’, as his underworld punishment had him hungrily stretch for fruit and thirstily stoop for water, and have it eternally disintegrate as he reached. Agamemnon’s mother Aerope as a maiden was caught indelicato with a slave, condemned to drowning by her father, but escaped. Agamemnon’s father is Atreus, who with his brother Thysetes, murdered their half-brother Chrysippus, who himself had been a victim of rape as a child by his tutor. Atreus and Thysetes are banished to Mycenae, where they vie for kingship.

Atreus vows a sacrifice of his best lamb to Artemis, known by the Romans as Diana, huntress and goddess of things wild, and kindred to the moon like Hékaté. Artemis figures prominently later. Atreus discovers a golden lamb, and instead of sacrificing this obvious ‘best of’, he ferrets it off to his wife Aerope. Aerope’s wandering eye never straightened, and she then hands it off to her lover, who just happens to be Atreus’ brother Thysetes. The brothers agree that whomever has the golden lamb shall be king. Thus Thysetes claims the throne.

Zeus, never one to pass an opportunity to meddle with earthlings, sends our old friend Hermes to Atreus, advising him to have his brother renounce the throne if the sun rose in the west and set in the east. Zeus then has Helios go retro, doing exactly that, inverting the day, and Atreus becomes king in reversal: but an unhappy one when he learns of his wife’s incestuous affair with his brother. His revenge is to cook the sons of Thysetes and trick him into eating them. As a cannibal, Thysetes is compelled into a life of exile, where the niceties continue, such as him fathering a child with his own daughter, who eventually murders Atreus. But we must get to Troy, even if by infinite digressions.

Agamemnon, born of Aerope and Atreus, goes into exile in Sparta on the death of his father, and eventually becomes king of Mycenae, and generally the most powerful of potentates. Two of his children are Iphigenia and Orestes by the sister of Helen, Clytemnestra. No surprise that it doesn’t end well for Agamemnon, who is murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover at a banquet celebrating his return from a decade fighting in Troy. Orestes then kills his mother in revenge (under orders of Apollo), which actually results in an Olympian trial and acquittal.

But back to the harbor of Aulis. Agamemnon, one of those mortals who never gets that it is a mistake, an act of unforgivable hubris, to claim you can beat the gods at anything,^⁠6 boasts of besting Artemis at hunting. He rubs it in by killing one of her sacred deer. It is for this no ill or fair wind blows. Not to mention the raging plague, a real one. The seer (mantis) Calchas tells Agamemnon that Artemus requires a sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia as appeasement to release the wind. Here, even this hardened head of the combined Greek war machine sheds tears at the prospect of the human sacrifice of his daughter, peerless Iphigenia.

The Binding of Isaac

Please allow for a quick digression to the inevitable comparison of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter to Abraham sacrificing Isaac (as an olah, a burnt offering: Genesis 1-22). Contrary to the Dylan quote at the start of the chapter, and pretty much all projection from commenters through the centuries, Abraham offers no protest to Yahweh’s desideratum. (“Abraham!” “Here I am.” Sounds like school roll call. Not to mention mom Sarah’s being too unimportant to consult.) He objects to Yahweh vocally in other instances; you would think this would be important to him. He lies to Isaac and his slaves that they are going on a regular sacrificial jaunt. Isaac comes across as clueless. 

One odd detail is that Yahweh makes the demand of Abraham personally, then sends an angel to stop the sacrifice. “Now I know that you fear god.” Then, obvious question here: Why does an omniscient deity need confirmation of Abraham’s faith? He would know, by definition. Then, either, as the Gnostics claim, Yahweh is an elitist archon demiurge—like the World Economic Forum or the NeoConmen who think they know what is best for all of us muttonheads—or something of a sadist relishing vengeance and suffering, as much of the bible bears out.

For his willingness, the angel, again speaking for Yahweh, promises him “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and sand on the seashore.^⁠7 Your descendants will take possession of the cities of your enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you obeyed me.”

At stake here is the value involved in the story. Is Abraham ready to give up his son’s life simply to demonstrate his faith in God? Or is his faith more about gaining weighty divine favors? In the first case, we are talking about sacrifice as a sacred act, which produces a kind of nonmonetary or inherently religious value—the standard of faith. In the latter case, sacrifice is a utilitarian act^⁠8 . . .

A clue might be found in what Abraham named the mountain where this sacrifice did not take place:^⁠9 The Lord Will Provide. All his rewards for a willingness to unapologetically slaughter his son come due on the earthly plane. But this trade of one’s firstborn for terrestrial gain happened de rigueur in the days of Abraham. Especially through the worship of the Phoenician pantheon, which was led by El, supported by lesser gods, like Ba’al and Yahweh. All of them had children burned for their propitiation. Scholars—waking from the opium dream of nobly-founded Abrahamic religions—have been lethargically accepting the copious archeological evidence establishing the global ubiquity of ancient human sacrifice.

Persian miniature, Ibrahim’s Sacrifice, Timurid Anthology, 1400s. (Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon.)

What is instructive here is that this episode, called in the Hebrew tradition “The Binding of Isaac”, morphs into a morality tale, especially in the influential hands of Søren Kierkegaard, writing under the name Johannes de silentio.^⁠10

Kant felt that in these circumstances, Abraham should have said a resounding “No.” Kant does not let him off the hook as does Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard allows Abraham to suspend the ethical—that standard of morality that applies to us all; for Kierkegaard, Abraham is above the law because of his faith. His faith “is a paradox which is capable of transforming a murder into a holy act well-pleasing to God”.^⁠11

Kierkegaard’s reading has Abraham’s faith superseding and transmuting morality.^⁠12 This is the sort of elitist “we know what’s best for you muggles” position that gave us the patriot act via the Neo-cons, the unconstitutional mandates of 2020, the illegal and immoral death jabs of 2021, and the emerging food restrictions and heating fuel shortages under the complete bullshit of fossil fuel carbon-caused environmentalism. Not only is there no such thing as a global climate crisis, there is no such thing as an environment. Just another abstraction overriding experience. We do indeed experience warmth, coldth, wind and precipitation, but weather? Maybe in New England, where they say, “We got some weather coming.”

It is the same elitism that just about every religion—from the Abrahamic to the Theosophical—manufactures to make sure the only divine you connect to is one they invent for you to have sloppy faith in, that they control the one-way roads to, not Hermes. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, the WHO, the CDC et al all absolve themselves for murder in the name of pleasing their god. And their god dresses funny. Morality emerges directly and effortlessly in each moment from true connection to our source: not faith, not the Constitution, not the words of books written pseudographically in god’s name. For the Archaic Greeks that connection was facilitated by the sacrifice; for the contemporary world that connection is severed through these inverted sacrifices.

In reality, this is not a morality choice for Abraham. There is no indication of even a decision being made. Eminent thinkers like Kierkegaard and Robert Zimmerman project back onto Abraham a contemporary morality drawn from scripture or Darwinism that did not exist then, nor does it really now.

We are presented in modern interpretations with Abraham being in anguish over the demand. Yet no indications of such emotions are present in the Bible . . . this act, which creates such horror to the modern mind, was in fact regularly performed by what was seen at the time, as the most advanced and cultured peoples . . . There seem to be no indications of unwillingness on the part of the people to perform these sacred acts of child sacrifice . . . Abraham, when asked to sacrifice his first born to solidify the new contract (covenant) between him and his god (concerning the allocations of new lands to him and his descendants) simply was, in fact, being asked to follow standard operating procedure of the time . . . We must accept something that we appear not willing to know about ourselves. That understanding is the fact that for a good part of human history, the idea of human sacrifice was thought of as a needed, valuable, and a good act.^⁠13

The reason to hammer home this nail in the Abrahamic coffin: There are vast numbers of ‘humans’ in places of control everywhere on Earth who are sadistically torturing, raping, cannibalizing, and sacrificing children today, all the while sexually getting off on their abominable evil, in the name of their chosen deity. At least in ancient times a mere death was required. The theory of evolution only rings true if inverted. “Are we not men? We are Devo!”^⁠14

Wall fresco, Pompeii, thought to be a copy of Greek painter Timanthes of Cythnus, 300s BC. (Museum of Naples.) Agamemnon, veiled, cannot watch the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia which he has authorized. Calchas, the seer who proclaimed that Artemis (above, with bow) desired the sacrifice, is given the knife to do the deed. At the last second she replaces Iphigenia with a hart.

Agamemnon’s Tears

Agamemnon lures his wife Clytemnestra and Iphigenia to Aulos by claiming his daughter will marry semi-divine Achilles, considered a good catch by any mythic standards. Achilles is not in on this ruse. She comes to the sacrificial altar thinking she is a bride. Agamemnon, unlike laconic Abraham, is distraught, and hands the knife to Calchas, the seer who claimed that Artemis desired this sacrifice. Iphigenia, not one to deny her goddess, and showing more intrepidity than the men in the story, goes willingly and heroically to be sacrificed.

Here is where the story trifurcates into mytho-timelines. Either Iphigenia is actually sacrificed; or, Artemis substitutes a hart deer to replace her at the last second, where: either no one notices as the goddess whisks her away, and they all believe she is killed, or they see the miracle of her replacement by the hart. Either way Iphigenia is gone, the ships sail, and the narrative lives on to tell itself.

In the most popular timeline, codified in plays by Euripides (Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia at Tauris), Artemis magically takes Iphigenia out of this mess and installs her as head priestess at her temple in Tauris. As you might guess from the name, Tauris and the Taurians go way back, to the age of Taurus. Their customs include pre Greek anti-hospitality codes, such as sacrificing any Greek stranger who lands upon their shores. Ironically then, Iphigenia as head priestess runs this human sacrificial ritual, which becomes rather problematic when her brother Orestes and a friend show up unrecognized. The rest of this wonderful tale winds too long for us. The upshot has them all escaping together with the sacred wooden statue of Artemis so that even the goddess can now enter the age of Aries, Orestes can atone for his matricidal fate, and we can move along also. All of this becomes contemporarily relevant when a map reveals that Tauris sits in ancient Crimea.

¹ Translation by Marvin Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus, Harper One, 2005. Usually dated from the 3rd century.

² Another Nag Hammadi tractate, translated by Søren Giversen and Birger A. Pearson. Dated to late 2nd early 3rd century Alexandria.

³ Plutarch, Moralia, 417 c-d.

⁴ Odysseus, for example, feigned madness, ala Hamlet, until coerced to fight.

⁵ Frank Herbert in Dune calls the protagonistic family House Atreides (the patronymic form of Atreus).

⁶ Agamemnon’s ‘prize’ spoil from Troy is the seer Cassandra, whose eponymous complex arises from her besting Apollo at prophesy (or alternately refusing his advances) and thus curses her to complete accuracy, but no one will listen. “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” is her unheeded cry at the fated arrival of the Trojan (actually Greek) horse; Arachne is turned to an eternally weaving spider for besting Athena in this art which she gave to humanity; Aphrodite thought that Psyche’s beauty rivalling hers was worthy of a plague and a demand of her sacrifice to end it; and to circle back, Niobe, daughter of aforementioned Agamemnon’s great-grandfather Tantalus, claimed herself more fortunate than Leto, mother of the also aforementioned Artemus, by dint of producing more children. For this she turns to teary stone from watching them all die.

⁷ Contemporary echoes of vast seed-spreading include Brazilian ‘psychic surgeon’ João Texeira de Faria (aka ‘John of God’), beloved of Oprah, who besides the 600 accusations of rape, had a large slave harem producing children by and for him, for currently unknown reasons; Jeffrey Epstein was hoping to do (or maybe did) much the same autogenetic regurgitation at his New Mexico ranch before he didn’t commit suicide.

⁸ Rane Willerslev, “God on Trial”.

⁹ There is good textual reason to question even the sacrificial replacement story. Young Isaac is not mentioned as coming down from the mountain, only noting that Abraham returned to his slaves. Other than a marriage, Isaac subsequently becomes a non-character in the Bible.

¹⁰ Fear and Trembling, 1843. Note the name’s proximity to Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, possibly the first literary work to expose and promote the use of adrenochrome.

¹¹ Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial, p 123; Kierkegaard quote, Fear and Trembling, p 64.

¹² Written around the same time, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work covers similar ground of trying to be an ubermensch.

¹³ Glenn Young, The Ba’al Theory of Christianity, p 42-3.

¹⁴ From “Jocko Homo” by the band Devo, formed as a response to the senseless 5 May 1971 murder of four and wounding of nine students at Kent State in Ohio. Two of the founders of Devo attended the protests and were enrolled there, as was Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. The preponderance of support in the US at the time was for the National Guard and faulted the students. Subsequently that sentiment has reversed.