Victim (religion)

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A sacrifice in religion is the offering of material objects of an animated or inanimate nature to a superior metaphysical power presented to the person who is the victim. With this power, depending on the imagination, ancestors, spirits or deities can be endowed.

Sacrifice is a process that is usually associated with a ritual and with a special feast, which as a sacrificial feast can be an elementary part of a religion. Rituals play an important role in human coexistence and can be found for each collective. Sacrifice rituals are social acts with which people often consciously and intentionally seek to interact with their environment.

Religiously, victims can be classified as atonement victims, bitpotters, thanksgiving victims, cleansing victims and praise victims. One of the historically oldest victims is the firstfruit and death victims.

When sacrificing animals, their flesh and blood are eaten according to most rules at a cult-bound meal. Depending on the custom, the entire victim community participates or deputy to the victim leader preceding it. This can be a priest, shaman or other agent of cult-religious actions, who is given a mediating role between people and the respective deity. In religions that advocate human sacrifice, these are considered the highest quality form of sacrifice.

The object of a religious sacrifice is to be distinguished conceptually or semantically from the object of a bartering.

Etymology
The noun sacrifice is a regression from the verb sacrifice. This verb (opfarōn), already recorded in Old High German, is traced back to the Latin verb operari (“to perform”, “to perform”) or to Latin offerre (“to perform”, “to give”), meaning “to serve the deity”, “to give alms”. According to the Etymological Dictionary of the German Language (Kluge/Seebold), the Latin offerre ("offer") also exercised influence on the meaning, which became English offer ("offer") via the Old Saxon. The Grimm dictionary had adopted a direct derivation from offerre in 1889 and was based on the chronicle of Johannes Aventinus.
In addition, in the German language the word “victim” can be used in triple meaning. It denotes both the act of sacrifice and the object of sacrifice as well as the offering.

Introduction and bases
The basis of religions are corresponding (religious) concepts that find expression in the respective belief in certain transcendent (supernatural, supernatural, supersensible) forces. Imaginations that integrate, create and consolidate the almighty and supernatural into religious rituals, according to Voland (2010), human communities that transcend the family or clan.
Rituals are human actions and action complexes. It can be between the ritual in the narrower sense and mögli