Offerings and sacrifices to the spirits are found in many shamanic cultures, from food, drink and tobacco, or the fee a patient pays, to the killing of animals. In Therapeutic Shamanism animal sacrifice is understood as a practice of farming and herding societies, where animals had become property, whereas hunter-gatherers, who had no animals to spare, showed respect and gratitude to the animals they killed. Offerings of thanks in our own practice are a different matter, with their own answer on altars, fetishes and offerings.
What do sacrifice and offering mean in shamanism generally? #
There is no single meaning, because every culture has its own practice. The shamanic practitioner and teacher Christina Pratt, in her An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, describes an offering as “a symbolic manifestation of a prayer, or gratitude, extended to the spirits”. Its purpose, she writes, is fairly consistent from culture to culture, whilst its form varies: flowers, rice and rice wine in Southeast Asia, prayer flags in Tibet, coca leaves in South America, the best portions of the harvest or a feast in Africa, and prayer sticks or tobacco ties in parts of North America.1 She gives these by region and does not say how the peoples concerned lived, though many of the things on her list, such as rice, rice wine, a harvest and tobacco, are the produce of farming.
Sacrifice, in Pratt’s account, is “an essential element in shamanism”, which she understands as an exchange of energies. It ranges from the fee a patient offers to the killing of an animal. Blood sacrifice is used especially in cases of disease or death, to fend off or placate a spirit thought to be causing them, and animals are also sacrificed at funerals to help the dead on their way.2 Her funeral examples are the Sora of eastern India, who sacrifice a buffalo, and shamans in Siberia and Mongolia, who sacrifice a horse or caribou. The anthropologist Piers Vitebsky places the Sora amongst the crop-growing societies of South and Southeast Asia.3
Did hunter-gatherers sacrifice animals? #
Rarely, if ever. In many shamanic societies today, in large parts of Mongolia, Siberia and Africa for example, sacrificing animals to the spirits is commonplace, and in some places regarded as essential to shamanic work. In the places named these are pastoral, herding societies; in Mongolia, herding was adopted several thousand years ago. Some hunter-gatherer cultures may have practised animal sacrifice, but if the practice did exist amongst them it was extremely rare. For one thing, hunter-gatherers did not have “spare” animals lying around, since it is agriculture that produces such a surplus. More importantly, hunter-gatherers would not have dreamt of using animals in this way, because their relationship with animals was not hierarchical. Animals were not property, or commodities to be used as humans saw fit.4
Original animists did not sacrifice animals in order to practise shamanism. They took animals’ lives only because they had to, to eat, and doing so was a momentous thing, surrounded with ceremony and ritual and done only out of necessity. Killing animals as a sacrifice to the spirits emerges as people fall away from that way of living, because it is a hierarchical relationship with the Animal People.
Paul Francis has met the other view in person, in several conversations with a Mongolian shaman who claims a lineage of twenty-seven generations and is scathing of Westerners who practise shamanism without animal sacrifice, since in his tradition working with the spirits must involve blood sacrifice. Twenty-seven generations reach back only a few hundred years, whereas agriculture has been practised in Mongolia for thousands. The conviction that owning and farming animals, and then sacrificing them to the spirits, is intrinsic to shamanism is itself a mark of how far Taker thinking has shaped that tradition.4
Vitebsky describes the same shift from the anthropologist’s side. In herding and crop-growing societies, he writes, the emphasis of ritual moves away from the body of the hunted animal, “which is always shown respect and may be given an offering of food and alcohol”, to that of a domestic animal which is sacrificed.5
Why does it matter whether a people farmed or hunted? #
Because shamanism changes when Taker thinking enters a society. Therapeutic Shamanism distinguishes pre-Fallen shamanism, the shamanism of hunter-gatherers, practised for tens of thousands of years, from Fallen shamanism, the shamanism of agricultural, hierarchical societies, shaped by the myth of human supremacy. Fallen shamanism has a different relationship with the other-than-human, and animal sacrifice is one of its marks, along with an emphasis on de-possession work, inviting in spirit possession, and hierarchical thinking.6
So a practice being old, or belonging to a living shamanic tradition, does not make it part of the original animist way of life. A society that practises a form of shamanism or animism is not necessarily free of Taker thinking, and how far it has been influenced varies with how recently it adopted an agricultural way of life. The full account is in What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism? and What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
What about gods who demand sacrifice? #
Hunter-gatherer cultures generally had little interest in gods and goddesses. They knew of such beings, respected and honoured them, and understood that beings so vast would have little interest in something as small as humans, no more than a mountain, the wind or the rain has.7 The gods who demand worship, great buildings, endless tributes and the sacrifice of animals, and sometimes of people, appear only with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer and the first city-states. These are not Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer beings at all, but collective “demons”, repressed energies from the human collective unconscious, gods made in our own image demanding “sacrifices of blood and gold”.8 See Do animists believe in God, or in gods and goddesses? What is the Great Mystery?
How did hunting peoples honour the animals they killed? #
With respect and gratitude, because the animals were people with souls of their own. Pratt quotes an Inuit shaman, of a hunter-gatherer people of the Arctic, for whom “the greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls”, since every creature killed for food or clothing has a soul, as humans do. She describes the animal’s soul being honoured in a feast of gratitude.9 Amongst hunters, the emphasis fell on honouring a life that had been taken. See What does animism say about killing and eating?
What place do offerings have in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
A simple and personal one. Some practitioners prepare for a journey with an altar or shrine on which they leave an offering, as one of many ways of moving from ordinary consciousness towards the shamanic state; others use nothing of the kind.10 An offering can also be a way of expressing gratitude, and Finding Your Deep Soul has an exercise for giving a gift to the Lower-World Tribe. What matters is the gratitude and the relationship, never an exchange. That side of the subject, including what giving back means in practice, is covered in What are altars, fetishes and offerings for? and Why is gratitude an animist practice?
