None

[Lars Martin Fosse]

At 10:36 22.04.98 -0400, you wrote:
>Jean Fezas said about the  human sacrifice reported from Jambewa:
>
>"If this murder it is the first (and only) incident of this kind, it has
nothing to
>do with a ritual.
>If there is no ritual it is not  a "brutal human sacrifice" it is an
instance of
>mental illness..."
>
>Not quite.  It's the first reported from this locality, not the first in
India.  After
>all, one can buy the Kalikapurana in the bazar and find a ritual for human
>sacrifice in it.
>
>Allen Thrasher

Hm. Not quite?. I think it depends upon how "human sacrifice" is treated in
practical life. It can for instance be regarded as a symbolic event and not
necessarily entail the killing of a human being. If we go back 2000 years or
so (or in Scandinavia, merely a 1000 years), human sacrifice was practiced
on a regular basis as part of a (mainstream) cult (e.g. at the "hov" in
Uppsala, where people were hanged as sacrifices to Odin/Wotan according to
Adam of Bremen). Hinduism does not practice human sacrifice as a matter of
course, to the contrary, there is very early a reaction against all sorts of
bloody sacrifices. The case reported here recently about a man who
sacrificed his son is in my opinion clearly pathological. So I still think
human sacrifices in India should be relegated to the field of psychiatry
rather than the field of Indology.


Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse


Dr.art. Lars Martin Fosse
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