Human sacrifice
offering of a human being to a god or goddess in tribute, as an act of repentance, to ask forgiveness, or in exchange for a favor
Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more humans as part of a ritual, which is typically intended to please or appease gods, a human ruler, public or jurisdictional demands for justice by capital punishment, an authoritative/priestly figure, spirits of dead ancestors, or as a retainer sacrifice, wherein a monarch's servants are killed in order for them to continue to serve their master in the next life. Closely related practices found in some tribal societies are cannibalism and headhunting. Human sacrifice is also known as ritual murder.
Human sacrifice was practiced in many societies, beginning in prehistoric times. By the Iron Age (1st millennium BCE), with the associated developments in religion (the Axial Age), human sacrifice was becoming less common throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia. During classical antiquity, it came to be looked down upon as barbaric. In the Americas, however, human sacrifice continued to be practiced, by some, to varying degrees until the European colonization of the Americas. Today, human sacrifice has become extremely rare.
Modern secular laws treat human sacrifices as murder. Most major religions in the modern day condemn the practice.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Human sacrifice” is offering of a human being to a god or goddess in tribute, as an act of repentance, to ask forgiveness, or in exchange for a favor. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Human, sacrifice and offering, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q119094. The Library of Congress control number is sh85116392. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Human sacrifice” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.