The God of Carnage

The Sacrifice of Isaac, by Caravaggio

A few days ago, a father threw his son off a bridge as revenge against his ex-wife. At first, according to some reports, he wanted to take the life of his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, but for some reason he decided to kill his own son to get at his ex. He was probably too much of a coward to confront two adults. After the murder, he sent an audio message to his ex-wife saying that he had done something “a little crazy”. The incident took place in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost Brazilian state. This kind of thing happens all the time, apparently. It is so common that I end up forgetting about it until another case appears in the media.

The case reminded me of another, similar one, that occurred a few years ago, also in Rio Grande do Sul, which fortunately did not end in death. A mother sent a video message to her ex-husband from inside the car saying that she was going to kill herself and her young daughter — all while her daughter cried in the back seat and tried to explain, in her childish vocabulary, that she did not want that. After the message, the woman deliberately crashed her car at high speed into another vehicle. There were no fatalities and she is now in jail.

It is much more common than we think for parents to kill their children. In fact, by far the greatest danger to young children comes from close and trusted people, such as parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and priests and pastors, who figure disproportionately among the abusers convicted by the courts in several countries. We can even say that violence against children is part of human history and its various constitutive myths. It is known that the practice of child sacrifice existed among some Israelite groups in ancient times, and the various biblical passages prohibiting the practice came after religious reforms made under King Josiah in the 7th century BC, and after the Babylonian exile of the Jews.

The religious practice of parents sacrificing their firstborn was common in the Mediterranean region, as attested by Greek, Roman, and Hebrew sources, and there is ample archaeological evidence. In addition to the Hebrews, it occurred among the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The idea of ​​sacrificing the firstborn is even accepted and then rejected by God in different parts of the Old Testament. For example, there is a growing scholarly consensus that the biblical narrative of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is a revision and that, originally, the sacrifice did in fact occur in the text. Only later did the myth gradually change to show that God was against child sacrifice.

The idea of ​​sacrificing the firstborn as a way of cleansing one's own sins is brought up in the Old Testament in the prohibition proclaimed by the prophet Micah. Over time, replacing human sacrifice with animal sacrifice became the norm. But this idea would return with the main human sacrifice contained in the Bible: the sacrifice of Jesus, the son of God, on the cross, which in the Christian mythology of the New Testament served to cleanse the sins of all humans who believed in him and repented. In addition to sacrifice as a way of cleansing sins, the Old Testament also presents the example of the judge Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter to Yahweh as a way of thanking him for having won a battle against the Ammonites.

The story of Jephthah's sacrifice came to be interpreted as a kind of warning against oaths, since Jephthah had sworn to God that he would sacrifice the first thing that came out of his door if he won the battle against the Ammonites. The first thing that came out of his door was his daughter, who came to greet him happily for his victory. However, Yahweh and the Bible never condemn Jephthah for the act, which shows that such a practice of human sacrifice in honor of the God of Israel was, at the very least, acceptable in certain contexts and during a certain period in Antiquity.

Beyond the Mediterranean and the Middle East, religious sacrifices of children and adults were also widely practiced in the Americas by pre-Columbian civilizations and cultures, as attested by the natives themselves, in addition to the testimony of the colonizers. As in the case of the Carthaginians, Phoenicians and Hebrews, there is also a wide range of archaeological records that attest to the veracity of the practice in the Americas. In the specific case of children, in all cultures in which sacrifices occurred, the parents accepted and participated in some way in the ritual, whether in the Americas or in the Mediterranean and Middle East.

In all cases, the belief was that their children would continue to exist in some form. Furthermore, if the ritualistic sacrifice of a child provided — at least in the minds of all members of that society — other healthy children for the parents, as well as good harvests, peace and prosperity in the near future, this was reason for happiness for everyone, especially at a time when infant mortality reached or even exceeded half of all births. It is a bizarre logic for us in the 21st century, yes, but in the minds of these people it made perfect sense.

The problem is that they were ignorant and did not know that they were killing their children in brutal ways for nothing, since there was no deity to be appeased, no supernatural world to be contemplated, no sin to be cleansed. Unless we take into account hypotheses such as those of Georges Bataille, for whom, in all cultures, acts of sacrifice, including human sacrifice, serve to eliminate the excess energy that exists in everything and whose destiny is to be wasted in some way. He calls this excess the “accursed share”. However, it was not exactly with this in mind that parents gave their children to the flames or to be cut. In The Accursed Share, Bataille writes:

[...] just as the herbivore relative to the plant, and the carnivore relative to the herbivore, is a luxury, man is the most suited of all living beings to consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy offered up by the pressure of life to conflagrations befitting the solar origins of its movement.

Later in the same work, he writes the following:

The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings.

But, unlike the literal absence of gods and the supernatural to which the ancients believed in sacrificing their victims, at least Bataille's idea incorporates a necessity intrinsic to life itself: the elimination of an excess of energy that could not be used in the restricted economy. According to him, the restricted economy is one in which the relations of production and exchange are based on the utility of what is produced and on the principle of scarcity; in other words, it is political economy and its various theories, as we know it. But there is another economy, the general economy, according to Bataille. In it, there is no scarcity, but an excess of energy that necessarily ends up being wasted in some way.

Contemporary industrial societies, by denying this, promote eternal accumulation and the idea of ​​infinite growth, which is impossible. They end up, whether they want to or not, sacrificing people not in collective rituals that aim to touch the sacred, but in profane ways, such as in wars, various conflicts, class exploitation and diffuse violence. From Bataille's point of view, the ancients were not better than us in a romantic sense, they just had a more honest relationship with the need to spend the accursed share, a need that was often overflowed with the aim of touching the sacred through festivals, rituals and sacrifice — including human sacrifice.

This excess is not limited to humans, but is present in the very ontology of the material universe, in Bataille's conception. There is an abundance in the material world that cannot be contained and needs to be released. As a basic example, we need only think of the Sun: it radiates much more energy that is lost in the vastness of the cosmos than is absorbed by living beings on Earth. This is the crux of the matter for him. In the case of human beings, for Bataille, the advent of consciousness separated us from the eternal present in which other living beings live, since they are immanent to nature. In this, he reminds me a lot of Cioran and Zapffe. For Bataille, the desire to get closer to the sacred would be precisely the unconscious need we feel to reconnect, even if only for a few moments, with the lost immanence in which other living beings find themselves.

Bataille is closer to Nietzsche when it comes to life, since, unlike Schopenhauer, he does not reject it, nor does he promote asceticism as the great moral ideal, on the contrary. But it is worth noting the idea that, for Bataille, there is an abundance of energy that necessarily needs to be spent in ways considered unproductive by the so-called restricted economy. It can be spent through non-reproductive sexual acts, art, sacrifice, the gift economy, or through transgressive acts in general. If a society is not organized in such a way that the expenditure of the accursed share is carried out in an appropriate way, it will eventually occur in a profane way through war, exploitation, and also through our daily violence.

Unlike Bataille, who is radically materialistic, the idealist Schopenhauer considers Will as the metaphysical ground that sustains the empirical world. Everything we see is an expression of this one Will, which is infinite and timeless. We ourselves are expressions of it, we are its puppets in a sense. The Will is never satisfied, and therefore all its representations are never satisfied. This is why Schopenhauer writes that life is like a pendulum between pain and boredom, with pleasure, satisfaction, and happiness being the fleeting moments between these two extremes of the pendulum. Yes, there is an abundant source of life, but in Schopenhauer's view, the pain caused by it is reason for regret and also a reason to reject existence itself.

It is at the intersection of their thinking that I see the tragedy and horror of the carnage we inflict on each other. On the one hand, there is something unique that separates the violence committed by man from that committed by other animals and by nature in general, including the natural “violence” of aging, disease, and death. On the other hand, there is a continuity between natural evil and evil committed by man. After all, we are as much children of nature as the most effective predators. We have become masters at inflicting pain far beyond any pride of lions that devour their prey alive. But they, at least, have the excuse of not knowing what they are doing. We know and yet we do it — or, as someone like Bataille would say, we know and we have the need to do it.

And speaking of carnage, in our society no carnage leaves us more horrified than that committed against children. Yes, it is sad when natural evils, such as diseases, strike children, but when human violence touches them, especially when they are torn apart, we are driven to a paroxysm of indignation and terror. While many ancient societies sacralized and ritualized their deaths, something that we consider barbaric — in my opinion, rightly so — the contemporary world simply barbarizes them without the slightest justification. In this sense, and only in this sense, I cannot but agree with Bataille on the difference between the sacred and profane expenditure of human life.

In recent years, thanks to new attention generated around the case of the missing children of Guaratuba in the early 1990s, on the coast of the Brazilian state of Paraná, the horror of the murder of the 6-year-old boy Evandro Ramos Caetano has returned to the minds of many Brazilians. His body was found in the woods, scalped, without his hands, his toes, his stomach and torso cut open, and most of his internal organs missing. In short, he was torn appart. At the time, 7 people were accused and convicted of the murder, which allegedly took place during a Satanic ritual. Today, thanks mainly to the investigative journalism work of Ivan Mizanzuk, it is known that the accused were tortured and forced to confess. They were finally exonerated by the courts in 2023.

In addition to Evandro, the skeleton remains of another boy, Leandro Bossi, who had disappeared two months earlier, were also found in Guaratuba. His skeleton was also missing hands and toes. A few years earlier, in 1989, in the same region, the body of an 11-year-old girl named Sandra was found in the woods. She had been scalped, with her hands and toes missing. The most recent journalistic investigation points to the similarities between the cases and the likely involvement of a single sadistic maniac. It is unlikely that he knew all the victims' families, since none of the families knew each other, but it is certainly something that would have interested Bataille, who was fascinated by Gilles de Rais.

Gilles de Rais was a French marshal during the Hundred Years' War and fought alongside Joan of Arc against the English. A nobleman, he owned a castle and attracted dozens of local children who disappeared within its walls. It was later discovered that he mutilated and murdered them for pleasure, with the help of at least two of his servants. The cruelty with which he committed the crimes, which he confessed to without the need of torture that was common at the time, is shocking to this day. He and his two servants were sentenced to death and executed in 1440.

Yes, it may indeed be that there is an accursed share that is always destined for expenditure in one way or another, as Bataille claims. It may also be that the destruction of human lives through violence at the hands of other humans, in a sacred or profane way, is one of the expressions that this type of destruction must eventually take, whether we like it or not. But that does not prevent us from being astonished by these things, it does not take away our right to reject all these horrors, as implied by the thinking of Schopenhauer, Cioran, Zapffe, Cabrera and so many other thinkers who reject existence. In The Tears of Eros, Bataille wrote:

This world is one of blood sacrifice.

He refers here to animal sacrifices in voodoo, but this work also deals with human sacrifice in various cultures, especially the sovereign's ability to order the death of others, even through horrendous methods. Shortly after talking about voodoo, he talks about the famous Chinese execution method called lingchí, or death by a thousand cuts, where the executioners slowly remove the skin of the condemned with the help of knives. The book even shows a series of famous photos, taken of a criminal who was executed in this way in 1905. However, I think we can expand on Bataille's thinking about the need to spend the accursed share: the world, in fact, demands suffering from all sentient beings, to a greater or lesser extent.

It is not only the world of animal sacrifice by humans, or the world of human death at the hands of other humans, that we can consider a world of bloody sacrifice. All sentient life has lived under this condition since its inception. However, it is true that we humans have managed to make what was already very bad even worse. In any case, however, it is as if reality was, all of it, divine; we are all part of God, as Spinoza thought. This God, however, is not elegant and perfectly rational in a way that is endearing to us. This God seems to have always demanded an enormous amount of carnage. The tears of all those who suffer nourish God, especially the tears of the most vulnerable.

by Fernando Olszewski