On a certain day around the year 1700 BC, on the slopes of Mount Juktas in central Crete, a small group of people had gathered in a temple for a religious ceremony. A young woman assisted a man a few years her senior: the high priest. His status was obvious from his splendid adornments, perhaps most precious of all the ring he wore made from iron, which was rarer than anything in Bronze Age Crete. On the altar before him was an 18-year-old man whom he had just killed in an act of human sacrifice. The island had been cursed with earthquakes for a long time at this point; the anger of the gods had to be appeased. But the sacrifice was not accepted. The savage act barely over, with cruel irony, the ground trembled and the temple came tumbling down. The priest lifted his arms above his head to protect himself, but the disaster was instantaneous. He, his assistant and a third person were buried under the debris with their sacrificial victim, then burned as the ruins caught fire. Here they remained until discovered more than three and a half thousand years later.

Today, Anemospilia is an unimposing, inaccessible place high above the coastal plains. North towards the Aegean, past the remains of the Minoan city of Knossos, modern-day Heraklion is vaguely visible in the distance. To the west lies the massive Mount Ida, where the god Zeus was born in a cave. Looking out over the landscape, it is easy to imagine that little has changed in the aeons since these stones last saw the light of day. Fields a varied grey-green palette of grain, vines, cypresses and olive trees. Paths trodden by man and beast since time immemorial, bordered by explosively colourful flowers. This is a beautiful and vengeful country, constantly trying to shake off its human occupants. But civilization perseveres.

It has in fact existed here longer than anywhere else in Europe. As far back as 1800 BC, there were major cities in Crete, with advanced government administration and – most importantly – a system of writing. Interestingly enough, the first recorded European language was not Indo-European, the language family covering 94% of the continent today. What exactly it was we do not know, since no one has yet been able to decipher the script, known as Linear A. What we do have is a wealth of material objects, documenting the Minoans’ art, architecture, religious worship and daily lives. When Sir Arthur Evans excavated the palace, temple complex and city of Knossos from 1900 onwards, the world was amazed by the beauty of this previously unknown culture’s artistic achievements. Evans called the civilization Minoan, after the mythical King Minos of Greek mythology. Frescos showed dolphins frolicking among trading ships in harbours with opulent architecture in the background. Goddesses and priestesses were portrayed in elegant costumes, reminding observers of the fashion of contemporary Paris. Other artwork shows young men engaged in the ceremony of bull leaping, where lithe figures jump over the back of the imposing beast. That the bull was sacred to Minoans can be seen from the stylised horns found on and around their temples, also at Anemospilia. These bull’s horns seem to have had a symbolic significance akin to the Christian cross or – perhaps more aptly – the Muslim crescent.[1]

But this idyllic equilibrium was under constant threat, located as the island was on fault lines both geological and political. Around 1500 BC, a volcano completely obliterated the island of Thera, leaving only the crater that is today’s Santorini. The eruption was of such a magnitude that it caused a volcanic winter as far away as China. Crete was hit by earthquakes and a gigantic tsunami, and was covered in ashes many inches deep. From the harbour of Heraklion can be seen the island of Dia. Located directly in the blast zone from the explosion, the island was devastated, and remains little more than a barren moonscape till this day.

Crete survived and rebuilt, but by now the once powerful city states were severely weakened. Gradually, the Minoans came under the influence of the mainland Greeks – the Mycenaeans. When a new writing system emerges around this time, the so-called Linear B, we can read this, since its language is simply Greek. The Greeks of Classical antiquity forgot what had gone before; by the time of the Trojan War, around 1200 BC, little was left of Minoan culture. When Homer wrote the story of that war, some 400 years later, only vague memories remained in the form of myth: the Palace of Knossos had become a labyrinth, the sacred Minoan bull, a Minotaur.

It seems incongruous that a society like the Minoan – so in harmony with nature, and with such artistic sensitivity – should practice one of the most brutal cultural practices we know of: the killing of other human beings for merely ceremonial purposes. And yet, this practice seems to have existed in numerous human cultures since the beginning of recorded history, and indeed before. The earliest example most of us are familiar with is in fact one of non-sacrifice. In chapter 22 of Genesis, God tells Abraham to take his son to a place called Moriah and kill him. Abraham is ready to comply, but as he is about to bring the knife down, the angel of God intervenes, and Isaac is saved. The sequence of events is important. The children of Israel wanted to make it clear that their devotion was no less than that of their neighbouring peoples – quite the opposite. The difference manifested in what Yahweh asked for: unlike other gods, he did not require unreasonable cruelty from his followers, as long as they worshipped him exclusively. In the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – human sacrifice has since been virtually unheard of.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were also generally averse to the practice, though it did occur. According to Plutarch, Themistocles sacrificed three captives to the god Dionysus Omestes before the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC.[2] In Rome, after the shock of the disastrous defeat at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, two Gauls and two Greeks were buried alive in the city centre. The historian Livy called it “a very un-Roman ritual”.[3] Their enemies had fewer such qualms. In his account of the wars in Gaul, De Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar writes about Celtic druids constructing giant men of straw where the limbs were filled with living people, and then set on fire.[4]

With the advent of Christianity, the nations of Europe left human sacrifice behind, but colonial expansion once more brought them into contact with this custom as it persisted among other races. When Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire, he and his companions were shocked by the level of bloodshed they encountered among the natives. According to Bernal Díaz, “hardly a day passed by that these people did not sacrifice from three to four, and even five Indians, tearing the hearts out of their bodies, to present them to the idols and smear the blood on the walls of the temple.”[5] Almost 400 years later, British forces invading the Kingdom of Benin in West Africa reported on enslavement, crucifixions, and human sacrifice on an unimaginable scale. Under British dominion, these practices were abolished.

Sacrificial practices are multiple, but the basic principle is simple: it is a form of communication with the supernatural realm, often – though not always – as a form of appeasement.[6] The greater the sacrifice, the greater the appeasement, and the greatest sacrifice of all is of course a human life. Under normal circumstances, such sacrifice will maintain the harmony between the upper and lower world, since natural sequences are cyclical, and matters tend to revert to their regular state. But then there are the situations where this does not happen. Climate change or natural disasters, internal disruption or foreign invasion: certain conditions can put such a stress on society that it threatens complete societal collapse. Joseph Tainter defines this as “…a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.”[7] Under these circumstances, it would be natural for the affected to assume a severe disruption in the relationship between the human and the divine, and as a result, practices like human sacrifice might escalate to apocalyptic proportions.

The idea of human sacrifice as a response to crisis was central to the writings of the Finnish sociologist Edvard Westermarck. A moral relativist, Westermarck was interested in the more extreme traditions of behaviour across human cultures, and in his book The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (vol. 1, 1906), he devoted a substantial chapter to human sacrifice. Here he emphasises the role played by war, epidemics and famine as a driver of the practice. Westermarck based this on a wide array of sources, from ancient narratives to ethnographical studies from his own time. A typical passage reads:

When hard-pressed in battle, the King of Moab sacrificed his eldest son as a burnt offering on the wall. In times of great calamities, such as war, the Phenicians sacrificed some of their dearest friends, who were selected by votes for this purpose. During a battle with king Gelo of Syracuse, the general Hamilcar sacrificed innumerable human victims, from dawn to sunset; and when Carthage was reduced to the last extremities, the noble families were compelled to give up two hundred of their sons to be offered to Baal.[8]

But there is a problem with this interpretation, namely that history tends to be written by the victors. From Caesar, to Diaz, to R.H. Bacon, who took part in – and wrote about – the British punitive expedition to Benin in 1897, the sources we have are from conquerors describing the peoples they subjugated. By exaggerating the savagery of the conquered, they delegitimise their right to sovereignty, and paint their own conquest as a civilising mission. The narrative histories can therefore often be seen as imperialist propaganda, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

Modern research tends to focus less on these narrative sources, and more on what can be found through archaeological findings and, where available, indigenous sources. What is often discovered is human sacrifice as part of ordinary, periodically repeating rituals, such as the burial of a king or the consecration of a new building. In the case of Benin, a study from 1965 found no signs of a culture in decline or crisis at the time of the British invasion. The author’s contention that human sacrifice was “not excessive” may seem bizarre and macabre to modern sensitivities, but it serves simply as a reminder of the necessity of trying to see customs within their local context, rather than clouded by external interpretations and distortions.[9]

As for Anemospilia, the archaeologist credited with the discovery, Yannis Sakellarakis, presented a compelling argument for the human sacrifice interpretation. The presumed sacrificial victim had a ceremonial bronze dagger resting on his chest, and his legs were pulled back in an unnatural way. He also showed signs of bloodletting. According to an expert, if a body is drained of blood, its bones will remain white when burned, rather than turn black.[10] And yet, these results have not been universally accepted. While one historian called the excavators’ inference “inevitable”, another questioned several of the central assumptions.[11]

The archaeological evidence may still be ambiguous. It would be naïve, however, to dismiss the findings as incompatible with the high culture of the Minoans. Where would that leave us with the numerous other, equally rich cultures, where human sacrifice demonstrably did take place? Perhaps, instead of thinking of sumptuous art and brutal rituals as incongruous, we should see them as two sides of the same story? The Minoans, in their art, rituals and lives, showed a deep appreciation for a land that gave with abundance, yet took away with abandon. Is this not all of history? The eternal struggle to balance the forces of life and death, of beauty and savagery. True art captures this.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the bull-leaping ceremony. As the performer makes his move, there is a moment of beautiful, perfect harmony of man and beast, that could at any point disintegrate into carnage and tragedy. For a few seconds, the leaper is suspended in the clear Mediterranean air, between sacred mountain and wine-red sea. And right there, Europe begins.

[1] Rodney Castleden, Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (London ; New York: Routledge, 1990), 133–34.

[2] Dennis D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), 111–15. Hughes doubts the story’s veracity.

[3] Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (London: Profile Books, 2016), 180.

[4] C. Julius Caesar, Caesar’s Gallic War, trans. W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1869), 6.16.

[5] Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, The Memoirs of The Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, trans. John Ingram Lockhart, vol. 1 (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844), 119‑20.

[6] Laerke Recht, Human Sacrifice: Archaeological Perspectives from around the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 2‑4.

[7] Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 4.

[8] Edvard Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1912), 140‑1.

[9] James D. Graham, ‘The Slave Trade, Depopulation and Human Sacrifice in Benin History’, Cahiers d’études africaines 5, no. 18 (1965): 330.

[10] Yannis Sakellarakis and Efi Sapouna-Sakellaraki, ‘Drama of Death in a Minoan Temple’, National Geographic 159 (1981): 205‑22.

[11]  Castleden, Minoans, 169–71; Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece, 13‑17.