sacrificeprotects a society by ensuring that a society avoids becoming its own
victim. Sacrifice operates to replenish the food supply with the assistance
of supernatural beings, and thus guarantees the continual life of a society.
By channeling aggression and anxiety, sacrifice does not allow them to
reach dangerous levels because aggression is focused on the victim and
anxiety is overcome with a successful outcome. Thus anxiety can be
transformed by a sacrificer becoming anxious to give and not to lose
something. Being anxious to give something, the sacrificer receives an
adequate return on his generosity. By overcoming and transforming anx-
iety and aggression, the group is more closely united by their efforts, and
this helps to prevent greediness associated with competition for sparse
food supplies.
The sacrificial victim or scapegoat is the central actor and focal point
of the sacrifice because it is around the victim that action occurs and to
which it is directed. The victim is both innocent and guilty. Because the
conflicts or problems are not its fault, the victim is innocent, whereas it
is guilty because a victim is required to atone for those very conflicts and
problems. For example, the Native American Skidi Pawnee performs a
human sacrifice by capturing a girl from an enemy village, who is then
purified with smoke, painted red, and dressed in black. After being lifted
onto a scaffold and tied into position, her captor shoots her through the
heart with a sacred arrow and bow, another participant strikes her on the
head with a sacred war club, a priest cuts open her chest and smears his
face with the victim’s blood, a captor catches the falling blood on dried
buffalo meat and corn seeds, and finally all male members of the society
shoot arrows into victim’s body. The innocent female victim carries away
the pollution of the community, and her blood ensures fertile crops and
abundant buffalo. The Pawnee victim mediates between the human and
divine worlds, and she links them together. This scenario suggests that
the divine becomes subject to human control or coercion in order to
receive necessary mundane benefits for survival.
Cross-cultural incidents of sacrifice tend to conform to a threefold struc-
ture: consecration, invocation–immolation, and communion–purification.
The first phase involves making sacred the location of the sacrifice, its
time, the victim, and all participants. Among the Native American Sioux a
sweat lodge is used to purify and revivify persons in a formal rite, Inipi.
The darkness of the interior of the lodge after the door is closed is symbolic
of a return to the womb where participants will be reborn. While partici-
pants are seated in the tent, water is sprinkled over the hot stones causing
steam to raise, heat the interior of the tent, and purify the participants.
The invocation–immolation phase suggests that the sacrificer speaks
to god, and he states the intention of the sacrifice. Immolation is the