When we think of the word 'sacrifice' we think of it, these days, often as a dirty word. Sure, Jesus was 'sacrificed' for our sins, but such nomenclature has been turned over for 'died for our sins', while 'sacrifice' has come to mean things like 'animal sacrifice' which is obviously bad, right? Yet this pejorative sense of sacrifice is a relatively new occurrence to our modern tongue. A sacrifice is giving up something that you cherish, it is not a wanton and senseless act as is commonly portrayed. The Proto-Indo-European word itself1, 'sakros' means to make something sacred, thus to sacrifice means to sanctify through giving. We as moderns have forgotten what it means to hold anything sacred enough to relinquish it!
We speak of 'animal sacrifice' with this kind of stiff upper lip, as if the factory farms that we have created to rival the depths of avicii2 are somehow more human than simple animal sacrifice. Yet even then, perhaps there be a sour taste in your mouth still, 'animal sacrifice', yuck right? Yet I repeat again, it was a SACRIFICE, you must understand that when humans practiced animal husbandry in our near and distant past they were not doing at the scale they were doing it now, and more often than not they were mostly living off3 of the animal's milk. When an animal was sick, old, injured, or the human tribe was desperate, an animal would be sacrificed, and eaten. Sacrifice is just a way to say 'we killed this animal to eat it' yet the very essence of that word in namespace, 'sacrifice' shows that this was something much more deeper than the ritual killing of animals in factory farms.
Herders and nomads intuitively understood that they were4 apart of the world, not separate from it, you had to love your animals, you could not dissociate from their deaths. They were your companions, they were apart of the tribes. The animals too, likely felt this way.
Cows, goats, sheep, these are nomadic animals that are entirely at odds with their environment, so what does a Human offer them? Protection. And this is one of the oldest covenants known to man, you protect us and we nourish you with our milk and sacrifice our kith and kin in your times of desperation so that a mutual pact may be had between us.
This is the same covenant structure we see throughout Genesis5 and Exodus; God with Noah, Abraham, Moses. Always the same pattern: I will do this, you will do that, and together we create something neither could achieve alone. The covenant with animals preceded and provided the template for all human understanding of sacred contract. We learned reciprocity from sheep before we learned it from angels.
And this pact was real, this covenant shaped these animals, they changed, they were molded by their interactions with us, and so too were we. We wore their skin and hair to shield us from the cold, so they started to grow more for us, we adapted to drinking their milk6, so they started to produce more for us. Our bodies keep the score. We made them meek, but in their meekness they became great in covenant with man, together man's herds were unstoppable, who could stop them?
These were not men and their cattle slaves, and this is eminently obvious from even a cursory look at nomadic tribes mythologies, goat gods, cow gods, these were beings that carried real and serious reverential worth. Hathor the Egyptian Cow Goddess7 was the acknowledgment that cattle had given humans civilization itself. The Norse Authumbla8, the primeval cow who licked the first god from ice, encoded the memory that without cattle, there would be no culture. We made a pact, a holy holy pact with them, and now behold the tortures that we put them through.
Could even Mara conceive of horror9 that man has wrought with factory farming? Even the wicked Devadatta10 does not deserve a single life as a factory farmed cow. The Buddhist hell realms, for all their creative tortures, never imagined beings bred to be unable to move, pumped with hormones until their legs break under their own weight, kept in darkness their entire lives. The ancient imagination of evil was limited by assuming some connection between suffering and justice. Factory farming breaks even hell's logic! Suffering without meaning, torture without redemption, death without sacrifice. We have gone back on our covenant with the Ungulate, enslaved them to feed our craven need for endless growth like cancers upon our God given Earth, we have turned our back on the very beings which allowed us to rise out of a primitive state, we have left them behind, corralled them into escheresque horrors beyond your wildest imaginations, and we wonder why all the food is making us sick?
Samsara is samsara, but that doesn't mean we have to break the most fundamental oath in our tradition, the holy covenant of the guest and host. The Greeks called this principle Xenia11, Comparative Mythologists may call it the 'Ghosti Principle12' from the PIE root 'ghosti' which gives us the words Guest, Host, and Ghost, the sacred law of hospitality that even the Gods themselves couldn't break. To violate ghosti was to invite Hell. What we've done to animals isn't just cruel; it's impious in the deepest sense. We've made them guests in our world and then tortured them. The curses of Hell already here, they manifest as cancer, heart disease, pandemics jumping from tortured animals to their torturers. With no covenant to speak of, no respect, how can we go on living breaking such a massive oath?
I sit here eating Pho, cooked in the bones of cow, served with the flesh of cow, and I think about all of this, and I know that we are as much them as they are us, perhaps we cannot hope to end factory farming as much as we yearn to, perhaps economics constrain you from eating meat that is not made in torture prisons, the fact of the matter is that we evolved with them as much as they evolved with us, we are intertwined, and we must seek to make our relationship not just with the Ungulates but with all of nature equitable, equality is for man, but man is the shepherd and steward of this beautiful garden we call home, and thus we must treat the flora and fauna with empathy and the full meaning of equity.
The Jews in their ancient texts are said to have believed whoever saves a life saves the world entire13, yet they also say whoever destroys a life destroys the world entire. Each factory farm is a universe of destroyed worlds. The medieval esotericists understood animals had souls14, not "rational souls" like humans, but sensitive souls capable of real and raw suffering. Descartes convinced us they were machines15 to justify vivisection. We chose the comfortable lie over the demanding truth.
The Lakota tribe had a saying: "Mitakuye Oyasin16" meaning the sum of all my relations. Every meal was recognized as eating your relatives, for we all draw our breath from the same Mother17, no? The question isn't whether to kill; life feeds on life18, but whether to kill with consciousness or blindness, with gratitude or greed, as sacrifice or as slaughter. We must bring back 'animal sacrifice' not because it sounds cool, but it is because it is what is right, because a burger without acknowledgement of sacrifice is murder.