I thought I'd throw my two pennies in about human sacrifice.

One of my 'guilty' pleasures when it comes to research is Black/Practical/Popular magic. Why? For the simple reason you find out what people really desire in life. Yes, for communal events people will band together and pray for puppies, rainbows, and kittens, but that is only one side to the coin. As long as people have believed in something bigger and more powerful than themselves, people have been trying to harness that power for their own benefit. While you may see it surface more during times of distress or transition, it has been- and always will be, there.

What is going in Uganda is unique because ~1% of the population practice indigenous religions. The rest overwhelmingly Christian (42% Catholic) with Muslims representing about 12%. I would be really interested to see if there is some kind of religious syncretism going on- similar to how Catholicism and African/Yoruba religion formed Vodou.


Also, aside from the cultures that were mentioned there is evidence that human sacrifice was practiced by the Minoans on Crete, who had a heavy influence on the Greeks. A dig at Anemospilia had the body of a young man hog tied on what archaeologists believe was an altar with a bronze dagger lodged in his bones. Another dig at Knossos revealed the bones of children who had been slaughtered in a similar manner to sheep and goats. The bones were found in a building archaeologists have dubbed "North House" and I believe no other artifacts were found near the bones.

In both the cases at Anemospilia and Knossos, archaeologists believe something ritualistic was going on, but why they were doing it is lost to the ages. We, from a 21st century perspective, would like to believe such events were to have an impact on events of cosmological importance, but in these cases, we simply have no religious records to go by.