Goats, Bulls, Pigs, Other Sacrificial Animals and Human Beings
Religion, Politics, and All the State Chicanery Above: The Sacrifice by Leonardo Bistolfi (Image: Nancy Cantwell/Unsplash) An Introduction to Conventional Sacrifice We usually refer to holocaust to mean only the WWII tragedy. All of us picture the Nazi brutality and Jews screaming and running helter-skelter, and dying, when we hear this word. However, particularly in the Greek and Jewish cultures of yore, it refers to a ritual sacrifice. Perhaps, the Nazis were impudent, and they started using the term, which is literally a burnt offering among the Jews. We can save the story about the genocide for some other time and now, we can go back to the world of religious sacrifice. Closer home, for us from a Hindu background, animal sacrifice is followed during the Durga Puja festival. For more Hindu families and the lack of goats, people also use ash gourds for the sacrifice. In Islam, people also observe aqeeqah , in which an animal is sacrificed on the occasion of a child’s birth. Usu