Sacrifice

While no scholarly consensus on the origins and function of sacrifice exist, multiple scholars have developed theories on sacrifice. E.B. Tylor suggested that sacrifice could be understood as a gift to the divine, either valued by the divinity on its own merits, valued as an act of homage, or valued based on the hardship of the sacrifice itself. Influenced by Robertson Smith, Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life argued that sacrifice served a dual function: social communion and divine communion. Working from ethnographies of the Aboriginal Australians published by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, Durkheim argued that the Aboriginal Australians…