About This Forum: Social Sciences, Moral and Religious

[marct]

Hi Tom,

Long time no chat! Glad to see you back here posting again.

Marc, I don't think the practice of witchcraft/sorcery, in the context of ritual child sacrifice, has got anything to do with social stress or social strain at all. Infanticide, maybe, because certainly exogenous social shocks to the system create sociogenic forces which cause crime. But, the ritual practice of killing kids to appease spirits comes endogenously (from the other direction).

Of course the impetus is endogenous, or at least the symbol system supporting such sacrifices is. Don't forget that a lot of social strain is also endogenous as well. There's a couple of points I want to raise here. First, that one article doesn't really give us much of a clue as to the symbolic structure of the sacrifice system they are using. From the little data in the article, it appears to be some form of classic "blood pact" sacrifice, but that could be an artifact of the churches being involved (consider, by way of example, a similar craze that "happened" in North America; cf The Satanism Scare by Bromley, Best and Richardson). Outside of the lack of symbolic data, we don't know who the clients are, so motives can only be ascribed, which is also problematic.

What might, and I emphasize "might", be happening is a con job using a syncretism of local magic practices tied in with the "dark side" of Christianity (NB: "Satanism", symbolically, is an integral part of Christianity). That is one plausible explanation. Another plausible one would be something along the lines of a larger version of the Adolfo Constanzo group / cult which, on the surface at least, appears to have truly believed in the efficacy of blood rituals.

The idea that when one is unhappy with their station in life, one should sacrifice a child in hopes of a better, wealthier future doesn't correlate with any known system stressors that I know of, except maybe demographic pressures.

Cosmological causality is the main one. Hmmm, let me give you an example of this. All cultures and societies operate on belief structures about how "reality" is structured and what causal linkages exist. And, while it is rare to find cultures that have a direct link of child sacrifice leads to prosperity, there are a few examples such as the Phonecians, Carthage (same culture group) and the Aztecs and their culture group. And yes, demographic pressure combined with high birth rates and exceedingly stratified societies are the main stressors.

The few places where we see it happening not at a general cultural level, but as an inversion, tend to be periods of either high social stress and desperation (e.g. the Constanzo cult) or periods of high anomie (e.g. late 19th century France), or times where people believe they are being "tested" (e.g. GEN 22:1-24).

The belief system is a warped kind of theodicy where the thinking goes like this: if I make the ultimate sacrifice, I may be better off.

Oh, if my suspicions are correct, then it is indeed a warped theodicity. personally, my gut guess is that it is a syncretic front using primarily "Satanic" elements and symbolic logics.

There are indeed certain rituals with social structural links like this, but child sacrifice isn't one of them. I'm going to have to go with this just being a psychologically twisted kind of crime on this one.

Honestly, I don't have enough data to make even an argument from probability, so I'm (self)limited to ones of plausibility.

Cheers,

Marc