Human sacrifice has been at the heart of human worship for as far back as humanity history stretches – and beyond. And it hasn’t went away. Many of our modern stories – of monsters and heroes – centers around human sacrifice and the sacrificing of humans. Whether you’re talking about Halloween or American Sniper, you’re still talking about the sacrifice of human lives to accomplish some higher goal and in service to some higher power. In this article, I look at human sacrifice in modern human storytelling, human sacrifice in human history, and at how the work of Jesus Christ has been to replace the sacrifice of men with the sacrifice of Himself and, in doing so, to totally transform human society at every level. Only through Christ can we hope to bring an end to the brutality of human sacrifice.
Human Sacrifice In Modern Stories
The climax of Halloween Ends (Yeah, I know)is a masterclass in a movie incorporating religious imagery into its visual storytelling. The theme of evil – what it is, how it infects you, how its spread through individuals and communities, how it destroys, etc. – has been a major theme. Myers himself is mostly a cripple, barely surviving the long term damage done by the injuries he suffered in the previous movie, Halloween Kills, and capable of only short bursts of powerful homicidal rage. But his legend, as The Boogeyman, as The Shape, is a corrosive slowly eating away at the community around him. In Ends we see how the fear induced by the legend of Michael Myers has destroyed both the community of Haddonfield, turning its own people against one another, and individuals, especially in the story of Corey Cunningham as he follows in the footsteps of Myers and descends into madness and murder.
All of these themes come to a head in the climax of the movie with the human sacrifice of Michael Myers.
Yes. You read that correctly.
In the climax of the film, Myers attacks Laurie Strode in her kitchen. It is a brutal fight that comes to an end with Laurie nailing Myers to her island/table using butcher knives driven through his hands. She then tilts over her fridge onto his legs, pinning one of them down. Once Michael is immobilized, Laurie tells Michael that she has tried to contain him and forgive him, that at one time she thought he might really be The Boogeyman, but really he is just a man. The movie gives us a close enough view of Michael’s face that we can see that he was horribly and permanently burned at the climax of the 2018 Halloween film. Then she slits his throat and, after a last jump scare where he tears his hand free, she slits his wrists. Myers then bleeds to death on her table.
As he dies the police show up and, after seeing what happened, agree to a request from Laurie. She leads a procession of cars, with Michael’s corpse tied to the top of hers and escorted by the police – lights blazing and sirens roaring – through town. As the people see his body drive past them they join in the procession until finally they arrive at a garage/junkyard shown multiple times previously in the film. Notably, all this occurs at night and the only light in this part of the flim comes form the people of Haddonfield, either their cars or flashlights. Michael’s body is finally dismembered when it is placed into a machine designed to crush cars, the machine is turned on, and we see him completely dismembered. The movie then cuts to the next day as Laurie opens up to a male friend her age and they discuss cherry blossoms and new life as we see everything illuminated and warmed by the light of the Sun. The last shot of the movie is the sun shining on the mask of Michael Myers, laying on a coffee table in Laurie’s living room.
What is the religious symbolism here? Well, all altars are symbolic tables. The sacrifices made on them are meals designed to connect the worshipper and his or her god or gods. This symbolism is the very basis of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper where Christians consume the symbolic body and blood of the slaughtered Lamb of God in order to renew their dedication to God and be saved from sin, Death, and Hell. No matter how ornate or simple, altars are tables and, likewise, tables can become altars. Anciently, sacrifices were made on the altar table by placing the victim upon the altar and slitting its throat, leaving it to bleed to death upon the table. A portion of the sacrifice was then burned so that it would symbolic drift up into the heavens and to God. The sacrifice would also be dismembered, torn apart, and the priest would keep the skin. And all of this was done before the worshippers in the temple come to make their own sacrifices.
In this movie, Michael was the sacrifice made in atonement for the darkness and fear that had gripped Haddonfield. Laurie, as the person most connected with this legend and mythology of fear, acts as a high priestess of the Cult of Myers. She is the one who sacrifices him upon the altar table, slitting his throat and draining his blood. She is the one who makes his sacrifice known among the community so that they could purge their society of his evil. She is the one who dismembers Michael’s body. And she is the one that keeps his skin – his mask – in her home after the sacrifice has been completed. Having been the target of the Boogeyman, having been there at the origin of his myth, she is also there at the end of it, culminating in her work to purge her community of its evils by sacrificing the man, the monster, responsible for such evils and thereby returning the community to a place of peace and safety.
A Tale As Old As Time
At this point you may be thinking that all this is interesting, but you have a hard time seeing how it is relevant. The point is that humans have told this kind of story for as long as humans have existed. And not just told these stories, but lived them. In Mexico we have found the corpses of children killed as human sacrifices dedicated to the war god Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tlaloc. In pre-Columbian North America there was no city greater than Cahokia and we have found multiple graves of mass sacrifices of men, women, and children made by the Cahokians. Archaeologists have found fields of human sacrifices in ancient China and extensive archaeological work shows that human sacrifice in China lasted “from Neolithic times down to the twentieth century.” (Paragraph 9) The ancient Celts of Britain, those from whom we get Samhain and eventually Halloween, sacrificed humans to their gods to try and convince them to save the people from the Romans and committed cannibalism. Evidence has emerged in Greece of ancient people being sacrificed to Zeus. In North Africa, the people of Carthage sacrificed babies to their god Tophet, referred to in the Bible as Baal (“lord“) and Moloch (“king“).
The ancient Roman historian Livy records two instances of Romans practicing human sacrifice in his The War With Hannibal. In the 1972 Penguin edition, translated form the Latin by Aubrey de Sélincourt, the Romans first sacrifice a man and woman from Gaul and a Greek man and woman by burying them alive to appease the gods after Hannibal destroyed the Roman legions at Cannae. Livy also goes out of his way to point out that this is not the first time such a human sacrifice has occurred among the Romans. (see pg. 157) The second occasion is often overlooked, but it is no less important – perhaps even more important as it suggests that human sacrifice happened among the Romans far more than most historians acknowledge. In this case, the victorious Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio, soon to be known as Scipio Africanus, wins a smashing victory over the Carthaginian forces in Spain, drives them from the peninsula and, after putting down the last vestiges of native resistance, turns to punish the leaders of a group of soldiers who rebelled because they weren’t being paid on time.
Scipio has the leaders of this rebellion put to death for treason and many simply label it such and skip over it. But in doing so they ignore the religious language Scipio used to justify his actions and the sacrificial nature of what he was doing when he killed the soldiers:
You think it against nature if it rains stones or a thunderbolt falls or animals produce the wrong sort of young; but this [their rebellion] is a portent which neither sacrifice nor days of prayer can expiate, but only the blood of the men who perpetuated the crime.
The War With Hannibal, pg. 534. Emphasis in original.
The men are then stripped naked, whipped, beaten, tied to a stake, and then beheaded before the assembled before the soldiers who had followed them. Then soon after in a speech to his soldiers, Scipio explains his actions thusly:
Then, when with groans and tears I atoned with the lives of thirty men for the folly or guilt of eight thousand, it was like a knife thrust into my own flesh[.]
The War With Hannibal, pg. 539.
Scipio wasn’t “just” executing people for treason. The sin of their crime had sickened the community, his soldiers, and the only way to purge them of the taint of that sin was by a blood atonement, a human sacrifice made to cleanse the community of their wickedness and make everyone clean again. To ignore the fundamentally religious nature of these executions not only misses another example of Romans practicing human sacrifice, but it also why they committed these human sacrifices. Treason was the sin of disloyalty to the state, to the ethnic community, and the only way that such a sin could be purged and further sinners dissuaded from similar sin was to kill those who committed this sin – was to carry out a human sacrifice of the sinners in atonement of their own sins. It is to ignore the true nature of human government, both ancient and modern.
And these are put a few illustrations of the role human sacrifices have played in the pattern of human history. There are many more.
Modern Gods, Modern Human Sacrifices
With all these examples so prevalent throughout every human culture throughout all of human history, it therefore isn’t surprising that, intentionally or through cultural osmosis, Halloween Ends hit upon the same theme: that sin can only be purged and society maintained through the sacrifice of human life to the gods and ideals the community is founded upon. And it is no surprise that this story has been a hit with the modern public, as evidenced by the financial success of the movie. As David Gornoski explains, human sacrifice is as present in our modern world as it was in the ancient one:
Don’t be blinded by our modern sensibilities. Sure, we’ve made objective refinements. But these gods still exist. They’re called Germany, France, United States, Japan, and so on: nation-states. And we’ve devised myths – social contract theories, the will of the people, majority rule, the thin blue line, and so on – to justify feeding them more sacrificial victims. We see their political figureheads as capstones – vicarious figures by which we collectively experience a sacred body to which we belong. We ritually cast out figureheads – High Priests of a labyrinthine complex of regulatory rituals – that wear out their sacred welcome in a ritual we call voting. And we anonymously cast out, through plunder and sometimes blood, rule breakers who violate regulations – vestiges of rites of valor, sacred games, and taboos that accompanied our archaic sacrificial origins.
The State is the Religion of the Hidden Corpse
Brain Zahnd is credited with the observation, that “A nation does not metastasize into an empire without shedding rivers of innocent blood. This is what the myths and monuments try to hide.” He is correct as far as he goes, he just doesn’t go far enough. In the above quotation, Gornoski goes all the way, exposing the truth we all want to ignore, that we all have been trained from our childhood to ignore. It is not merely the empires and superpowers that are built on death, a fact which they endless try to hide by glorifying the slaughter that gains and maintains for them their wealth and power. The truth is the nation itself – all nations, all countries, everyplace upon the planet – are built on the bones of human sacrifices.
For the politicians who serve as the masters of the complex rituals of institutional power to demand that your child must go and suffer and bleed and kill and die in order to further the purposes of and ensure the continuance of the institutions of political power and in the name of national perseverance is to demand that humans be sacrificed for the good of the nation and its powermongers. For you to believe that you should sacrifice your children for the good of the nation, for its continued existence and power in the face of some existential outside threat is to believe in human sacrifice. When you talk about soldiers and families sacrificing their liberty and their lives for the common good all you’re saying is that you believe in sacrificing human lives for the nation – you are defending, promoting, and honoring human sacrifice. And on a massive scale far bloodier and destructive than anything the ancient Aztecs ever accomplished because this doesn’t even account for the millions of humans sacrifices made when the nation’s military oppresses, bombs, and slaughters others outside the country. Not only are you saying you are willing to sacrifice your own children to the Gods of War when you “support the troops/the military/the nation/the government,” you’re saying you’re okay sacrificing the children of complete strangers on the Altars of War.
No wonder Boyd K. Packer compared war to sacrificing people to the bloodthirsty idol Moloch and that Spencer W. Kimball said that reliance on the military and weapons to protect us was pure idolatry.
The same mentality justifies the violence the government does to people at home through its policing forces in order to maintain its rules and to compel you to obey its edicts. The entire legal system is based on brutality and human sacrifice. Don’t believe me? Just ask Eric Garner, throttled to death by plains cloths police for the dastardly and civilization threatening crime of selling individual cigarettes. Ask George Floyd, throttled to death in the gutter like a mangy rat for the unbearable crime of falling over while stepping off a curb. Ask Philando Castile, murdered like a rabid dog in front of his girlfriend and daughter for putting his hands up. Ask Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill homeless man who suffocated because the police beat him so severely it caved in his chest all because he was incapable of remaining absolutely still. Ask Ryan Whittaker, shot down in cold blood while kneeling in his door way in front of the police.
The list of people killed by the police is endless. The amount of humans sacrificed to the God of the Legal System is innumerable. And make no mistake. When you suggest that it is acceptable for anyone to kill another human in order to enforce the artificially constructed thing that is man-made law then you are saying you are okay sacrificing human lives to support it. By saying the sacrifice of human lives is worth what you think the end result is then you are literally engaging in human sacrifice. Just because you aren’t pulling the trigger or locking people in cages personally is irrelevant when you take part in the system that justifies it and does it in your name. Most of the Mexica never swung the sacrificial dagger either. That doesn’t mean they weren’t part of the system of human sacrifice. Neither are you.
As Dr. Carl Jung explained, the urge to worship is a inalienable part of the human psyche. It can neither be removed nor denied. The best we can do is change who and what we worship. As society becomes increasingly secularized it has become inevitable that men would come to worship the forces of secularization – the state, the government. And our modern gods of government are just as blood thirsty and hungry for human lives as they were in Livy’s day. Luckily, unlike Livy, we have access to a greater source of truth, one that would end all human sacrifice – forever.
A Great and Final Sacrifice
As David Gornoski ably explains, the cultural mission of Jesus was radical and revolutionary in every sense. He did not merely come to tell everyone to be nice to one another. He came to overthrow the entire system of human built sacrifices, of every false religion, of every ideology that would slaughter others for any reaosn at all. Through His Atonement, by His sacrifice of Himself, Christ brings an end to all sacrifice, offers true salvation to all, and reveals the lies and brutality that humanity has based its worldly social, political, religious, and economical systems upon. Then and now His example confuses those who worship might and justify human sacrifice, usually in some form of self-defense. Instead of a vicious lion who would rend our enemies apart for us, we have been given a Lamb whose commandment is to redeem our enemies and make them our friends. Christ is a king, but not of this world. Where the princes of the Gentiles rule through violence, blood, and horror, the Kingdom of Christ is ruled through “long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:41–43) Where we have been taught to kill or be killed, Christ has commanded us we sheath our swords forever and warned those of His church that who kill face eternal damnation, receiving forgiveness neither here or hereafter.
Through His example and His Gospel, Jesus exposes the violent ideologies for the infernal lies they are and shows us the only way to escape the false religions of human sacrifice – through His sacrifice and by living His teachings. It is not enough to merely slay our enemies. As we see in Halloween Ends, the death of Michael Myers doesn’t prevent others from taking upon themselves his name, his identity, and his crimes. It doesn’t prevent the next murderer. As we see in history, the brutal torture and murder of one set of traitors, one set of rule breakers, one group of law violators, doesn’t prevent others from doing the same. The Romans wiped out Carthage, making a desert and calling it peace. The Allies annihilated the Nazis and levelled Germany, only for the Soviet Union to rise to power. No matter how many you sacrifice, there is always more sin, more danger, more threats out there coming to get you. The only way to ensure there are no more threats is to ensure that there are no more people – to ensure that we all unavoidably perish. Even that threat may not be enough, as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Cold War suggest.
Perhaps no one has explained the revolutionary essence of the sacrifice of Christ better than Amulek, himself no stranger to the horrors of human sacrifice:
Behold, I say unto you, that I do know that Christ shall come among the children of men, to take upon him the transgressions of his people, and that he shall atone for the sins of the world; for the Lord God hath spoken it.
For it is expedient that an atonement should be made; for according to the great plan of the Eternal God there must be an atonement made, or else all mankind must unavoidably perish; yea, all are hardened; yea, all are fallen and are lost, and must perish except it be through the atonement which it is expedient should be made.
For it is expedient that there should be a great and last sacrifice; yea, not a sacrifice of man, neither of beast, neither of any manner of fowl; for it shall not be a human sacrifice; but it must be an infinite and eternal sacrifice.
…And behold, this is the whole meaning of the law, every whit pointing to that great and last sacrifice; and that great and last sacrifice will be the Son of God, yea, infinite and eternal.
Alma 34: 8-10, 14
By suffering and dying, Christ overthrew the world and exposed the lies of human sacrifice in all its forms. Our only hope is to abandon the project of human sacrifice altogether by turning to Christ, taking part in His infinite and eternal sacrifice, keeping His commandments, and thus to be saved – body, mind, spirit, and society. And when we do so – when we build a society that rejects human sacrifice in all its infernalistic forms? Then we will have built Zion – the negation of all human sacrifice and affirmation that all humans are of infinite and eternal value. That all are the Children of God.
