The Original Sacrifice
How the Indo-European pursuit of glory, fear of death, and animal sacrifice ritual shaped our culture and our metacrisis.
Out on the Eurasian Steppe around 5000 years ago, our core ideas of family and culture changed in a radical way. Over the last few years studying what happened there, I have come to see this shift as such a profound moment in the history of mankind that it should be considered an evolutionary leap. It certainly lies at the heart of what’s driving our deep ecological, cultural and spiritual issues today — what is now being called our polycrisis or metacrisis.
In my last few articles, I have tried to draw up a wide-angle historical understanding of these events by summarizing different but converging angles of research. This has included David Graeber and David Wenslows groundbreaking work presented in their book The Dawn of Everything from 2021, in which they showed that our traditional big-picture historical narrative has almost nothing to do with the facts, and that the accumulating evidence from archaeology, anthropology and other disciplines is pointing us towards a completely new account of human development and world history. Towards the end of their book they suggested that the patriarchal household is the cause for the recent human turn towards oppression, war and environmental destruction, a claim I have tried to explore through the research into our matriarchal prehistory, and the Indo-Europeans and their development of horseback riding, wheeled transportation, and warfare.
If you haven’t read my other articles about this, here’s a brief summary:
It seems that for hundreds of thousands of years of human development, all the way from the small bands of Neanderthal hunter-gatherers to the advanced civilizations of the Neolithic, women were the primary economic leaders of the family and the clan. This sprang out of and was closely related to the initial idea of family belonging and ancestral heritage as coming through the mother. The matriarch “owned” the shelter or the house, where men lived as their mother's son or sister’s brother. The idea of fathers did not yet exist, which means that there were also no “wives,” “husbands,” or maybe even monogamous relationships. This social reality was mirrored in a general spiritual understanding of the world itself as feminine and “mother-like,” a womb-like ground of being from which everything is born, dies back into, and is reborn from again, over and over.
Over millions of years, as humans slowly spread across the earth, we sought out areas offering diverse and easy access to food, which most often meant wetlands, coastlines, and river valleys. The Neolithic cultures that populated the Steppe initially followed this pattern as well, settling along the lush banks of creeks and rivers and sustaining themselves by a mix of foraging, hunting and simple agriculture. A period of climate cooling and drying that began about 6000 years ago put an end to that way of life, however, causing the rivers and creeks to dry up, the grain to stop growing, and the edible plants and wild animals to disappear. The only way to survive was for these tribes to become fully dependent on large flocks of grazing animals. Since the herding belonged to the men and the agriculture and foraging to the women, this transition also made women less economically relevant, and men the sole “breadwinners”. In the pursuit of grass for their herds, the men were forced to move the animals ever further away from the river valley villages and out on the open expanse of the grasslands, which created the conditions for a male culture that existed apart from the women, children and old folks back in the village. In this lopsided and traumatic situation, men took over from women as heads of the household, the family line began running from father to son rather than mother to daughter, and patrilineality became the new norm.
As the climate situation kept deteriorating and the flocks of animals grew larger, conflict between tribes over grazing grounds became commonplace. While humans have always occasionally fought each other over resources, at this time on the Steppe, it became a permanent situation, which continuously confronted the people in this area with the impossible and extremely traumatic choice of either killing their neighbors or seeing their own family starve or be killed. It must have been a world quite similar to the one mirrored today in the Mad Max movies, but with a flock of skinny cows rather than oil tankers. To keep their herds of animals alive and protected from theft, the men had to develop and cultivate a new kind of ruthlessness that would allow them to habitually commit violence, and if their clan and family were to survive in the long term, they needed loyal and strong sons who could pick up the fight after them.
This new separation between the sexes and the emergence of patrilineality and endemic conflict are closely interwoven with four profound technological advancements:
The domestication and riding of horses, around 6-4000 years ago
The invention of the wheeled carriage for transport, which made Indo-European tribes semi-nomadic around 5000-4000 years ago
The development of the war chariot and a fully nomadic, aristocratic warrior class around 4000-3000 years ago.
The development of the compound bow, cavalry, and standing armies around 3000 years ago
Aided by those new technologies, this herder-warrior “Patriarchal package” spread out from the Steppe in successive waves in all directions — to northern Europe, West Asia and the Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, and the northern border of China — profoundly influencing and changing the cultures they came into contact with. Before this time, there is little to no evidence for inequality and systemic conflict in human culture, but immediately afterward, between 2000-1000 BCE, war, centralized authority, hierarchical social structures and men’s ownership of animals, women and subjugated cultures emerge across the whole Eurasian continent, with Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria in Mesopotamia; the Vedic period in India; the Shang dynasty in China; the Mycenaean Greeks, Hittites, and Phoenicians in the Mediterranean; and the transition from the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom in Egypt.
I’d now like to turn to the mythical, spiritual and religious aspects of those early patriarchal cultures, and how the “sacrifical spiritual motor” they invented continues to drive our culture today.
The New Sky Gods
The Indo-Europeans' turn towards full-time herding came out of desperation: The rivers and creeks dried up, the grain wouldn't grow, the edible plants and wild animals disappeared, and cattle and horses were the only lifeline. In this situation, the all-encompassing Earth Mother must have begun to seem fickle, cold-hearted and indifferent to the suffering of her children. In contrast, the sun and the stars above remained steadfast and unflinching in their movements, reliably guiding the men across the near-eternal expanse of the plains. During that time they gave the trustworthy and eternal open sky the new name Dyeus Pater, Father Sky, later becoming Dyaus Pitar in Sanskrit, Zeus Pater in Greek, and Ju-piter in Latin.
And as the most important family unit on earth became that of father and son, the most important divine relationship became that of Dyeus Pater and his son Perkuno, the thunder god, who, just like his human warlord counterpart, rode around in a war chariot while wielding the mace club of power. Perkuno later became Thor in Scandinavia, the thunder god Svarožić/Radegast in Slavic areas, the Vedic, Greek, and later Roman war gods Indra, Ares, and Mars, as well as the Chinese thunder god Leigong.
Up until this time, the Great Mother Goddess had reigned supreme in her various forms as the ultimate reality, but afterwards she splintered into the many different wives, mistresses and rape victims of the primary father and son couple that we know from the Greek, Norse, and other pantheons. Heaven and earth became fundamentally separated in a way they had not been before, with the divine, good and masculine up above, and the bad, untrustworthy and feminine down below, here on earth.
“The Sacrificial Religious Motor”
It was not given that the early Indo-Europeans would become accustomed to systematic and constant violence. People must have faced the same situation of starvation and extinction many times over the course of human history without deciding to destroy their neighbors so that their own immediate family could survive. Despite our current impression of ourselves as a species, it is actually quite difficult for us to hurt each other with deliberate intent, even when faced with the threat of our children starving to death. As David Graeber concluded:
“It's almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in systematic yet indiscriminate ways … For most of human history, no one saw much reason to do such things; or if they did, it was rare.”
The early Indo-Europeans convinced themselves that killing their neighbors and raping their women was a necessary and good thing by a set of interrelated new ideas and practices, with the animal sacrifice ritual as its center. It was both the way in which they managed to legitimize, encourage, and desensitize themselves to violence, and the foundation for religion, as it has continued up until today. As this “motor” continues to operate at the center of our consumerist, capitalistic culture, it’s essential that we understand its different components and how they work together.
Animal Sacrifice
Just as there is little evidence of systematic violence and social hierarchy before the Indo-Europeans, there are also few signs of animal sacrifice before that time. In their turn towards violence, however, they began to imagine that the world itself was made by a primordial sacrifice, something they had to continuously reenact and repeat in order to maintain social and cosmic order.
Their creation myth that supported this began with two men, Manu (Man) and Yemo (Twin), traveling through the cosmos alongside a Great Cow. Through the lens of matriarchal studies, we can understand the Cow as an ancient symbol for the Great Mother Goddess, and through the work of Robert Graves, we could also look at this initial image of the traveling Man and his Twin as ancient, matriarchal symbols of the different stages of a man’s life. In the new Indo-European cosmological plot, however, just as the chief created a future for his clan by killing his neighbors, Man structured reality and created the world by killing his Twin (and in some later versions also the cow). With the help of the Sky Gods, Manu then used Yemo’s dead body to make the basic elements of the world and all the various kinds of animals and people in it. The Norse myth of Ymir, the Vedic Purusha, and Roman Remus are all descendants of this story.
The myth served as the theological scaffolding for the two new societal authorities that emerged at that time — the Priest and the King. Manu was the archetypal First Priest, the one who brought our ordered world into existence by sacrificing his brother. Twin, on the other hand, was the archetypal first King. His body is the earth itself and all that it contains. This is the original meaning of sovereign, having supreme power or authority: the King owns and controls the land because he is it. As his power wanes and he loses control, he is sacrificed, and his power is transferred to the next king. This twofold, Priest-and-King basic structure of hierarchical authority appears to have come about at the same time as systematic violence, around 5000 years ago, and it is easy to see how it has continued up to our own times of popes and monarchs, church and nation state.
The third character in that foundational drama was Trito (literally “third man”), the original human hero warrior. Shortly after the world was created, Trito received domesticated cattle as a gift from the Sky Gods, but it was treacherously stolen from him by a three-headed, six-eyed serpent called Ngwhi (the Proto-Indo-European word root for negation). The symbolism of the serpent is often explained as disorder or chaos, but to my mind, it could also be considered as another symbol for the feminine aspects of reality, or the matriarchal cultures that the Indo-Europeans conquered. To retrieve the cattle, Trito asked Perkuno, the war god for help, and together they went to the cave or the mountain of the serpent, killed her, and brought the cattle back home. Crucially, as Tito returned home, he handed a cow over to the priest Manu, who killed it and burned it in a fire so that the rising smoke could reach the Sky Gods to please them and thank them for their divine intervention.
While the details of the story have morphed and changed through the millennia, the sequence of theft, recovery, and restoration has remained a core narrative structure in Western culture. A few of the countless examples are: Odysseus and Achilles’ reclaiming of Helen in the Trojan War; Perseus slaying Cetus to save Andromeda; Beowulf’s destruction of Grendel and his mother; Sigurd slaying the dragon Fafnir; Bilbo reclaiming the treasure from Smaug; or Neo of the Matrix films, working to free the humans themselves as the stolen cattle.
Several essays would be needed to unpack this in all its detail, but most important for this article is the new relationship the story establishes between humans and gods, with the sacrifice as the bridge between the two. It also shows the mutual dependency between the warrior and the priest, where the warrior’s raid was authorized and blessed by the priest on behalf of the gods, and the warrior, in turn, confirmed the authority and position of the priest by asking him to perform the concluding sacrifice.
The sacrificial ritual and its associated practices of poetry recitation, soma-drinking, and so on were for the nobility only, the priests, chiefs and warriors. It was prohibited for women, slaves and subjugated peoples, serving to formalize these initial divisions into the later caste systems.
Kóryos groups
The reconstructed word kóryos, meaning “war band” or “men under arms” (männerbund in modern German), was the Indo-European way of initiating boys into adulthood. After undergoing a painful trial, adolescent males from the societal warrior elite were placed together in a war-band of up to twelve members and sent away to live in the wild for up to two years with only their weapons as possessions. They’d try to become like wolves or wild dogs, raiding and stealing from neighboring tribes and raping their women. If they survived to the end of the period, they were accepted back into their tribe as fully formed warriors and allowed to own women and animals of their own. This systematized raiding, pillaging and sexual violence was an essential part of how the Indo-European culture spread across the world, as all this transgressive behavior had to take place outside of the heartland of their own tribe. Genetic studies have shown that it was primarily these kóryos groups of young men who migrated into new areas and fathered children with native women, while men in the defending areas died off, and women and children migrated away from the border regions where these war bands operated.
Soma
From archaeological finds and from the two text sources closest to the Indo-Europeans — the Avesta of zoroastrianism, and the Rigveda of Hinduism — we know that the narcotic drink Soma was an essential part of the sacrificial ritual. Out of the Rigveda’s 1028 hymns, 114 are dedicated to it exclusively, and it features prominently in many more. The glory of Indra, for instance, is often illustrated by him consuming vast amounts of soma. The exact composition of the drink has been lost over time, but researchers largely agree that the central ingredient was from the Ephedra plant, producing a narcotic effect similar to amphetamine, which would have heightened feelings of power, aggression, and even violent intent. It was considered both a drink and a deity in its own right, and the ability to execute violence in a successful way was often attributed to soma’s influence:
Like violent gusts of wind, the draughts that I have drunk have lifted me... In one short moment will I smite the earth in fury here or there: Have I not drunk of Soma juice?
-Indra, Rigveda 10.119.
Glory
Initially, cattle-raiding and skirmishing with neighboring tribes provided food for the clan during difficult periods, allowed young men to raise cattle for bride-price payments, and served as a way for the group to maintain internal cohesion. Over time, however, as the kóryos system became institutionalized and the spearhead for Indo-European expansion, the raiding became increasingly symbolic and status-oriented. Central to this was the term ḱléwos, or kleos in Greek, literally meaning "what others hear about you", and most often translated to "renown" or "glory".
While the concept of "history" had existed before this — in the retelling of a clan's origin story or their ancestral line back to the primordial clan mother, for instance — for these warrior-herders, it took on a different dimension. Having aligned themselves with the image of the new, male Sky Gods and rejected the previously all-encompassing Earth Mother, they also lost the ancient belief that she would swallow them up as they died and rebirth them again later. For them, the underworld changed from being a fertile place of new beginnings to a bleak, shadowy and impure place they wanted to avoid. Perhaps as the first people in human history, these people began to imagine themselves as individuals existing separately from the earth, and their personhood as something that ended at death. Kleos, reputation or glory, was the only thing that lived on, so to amass it was the only way to achieve permanence and avoid the anonymity, and perhaps more importantly, commonality, of death. If the pursuit of kleos was successful, it became kleos aphthiton, "imperishable fame" — śravas akṣitam in Vedic Sanskrit and ḱléwos ndhgwhitóm in reconstructed Indo-European. This "fame that does not decay" was the only thing that could lift the warrior (it was not available for slaves or women) out of the churn and strife of human existence and into the realm of the divine.
Just as the kóryos system was an important component for the Indo-European expansion as a whole, it also increased the focus on kleos, since when the boys were not fighting or stealing from other clans, they spent their time reciting songs and poems about the glorious raiders of the past. In fact, it would appear that it was within these groups that heroic poetry, individual fame, and glory-seeking behavior all emerged for the first time, or at least where it first occupied a central part of a culture. By the end of the early Indo-European period, warrior activities were no longer evaluated only by their practical outcomes, such as the clan's welfare and survival, but more and more by their potential to generate kleos aphthiton for an individual.
As with the sacrificial ritual, the priests also held a crucial, mediating role in the assigning of kleos. In those early days, before the position split up into different roles, "priest" would also have meant the prophet, legislator, orator, soothsayer, and so on. In the aspect of bard or poet, he would have had the say in who was to be included in the songs, and how much kleos they deserved.
Kurgans
As the Indo-European relationship to death changed, so did their burial customs. Up until this time in history, people would usually be laid to rest in some sort of anonymous common grave along with a few shells and a sprinkle of ochre to encourage their swift return. As the Indo-European warrior class emerged, however, they began constructing monumental, individual graves for their attempt at "imperishable fame". When Marija Gimbutas systematized her theory of patriarchal steppe cultures in the 1950s, it was called the "kurgan theory" or "kurgan hypothesis" in reference to these so-called kurgan mounds.
Out on the flat steppe, these mounds were constructed by digging up the grass turf and layering it in piles over a grave or a grave chamber. At first, the mounds were constructed out of pristine grazing grounds, but as environmental damage from over-grazing became more common, they were increasingly made from depleted soil. At the beginning of the period, they were small mounds less than a meter tall, but grew to the point where a large one would be more than 50 meters in diameter (about the width of a soccer field). As an indication of the effort they put into their kleos through these mounds, the 50-meter Chertomlyk kurgan is estimated to have required more than five hundred worker-days to build (meaning that 100 men could have built it in about a week). 75 hectares of grazing land was cut out and stacked to build it, the equivalent of about 100 soccer fields, or a quarter of NYC's Central Park, or twice the area of the Vatican.
Conclusion
This matriarchal/patriarchal perspective on history provides a powerful lens for contemplating the deeper swells and currents in our culture today. It is very much an unfolding story, however, a view on history that has just come along in the last few decades of groundbreaking research. As most of these connections remain underexplored, I want to end this article with some of the ways that I continue to wonder about all of this.
Our general political divide between right and left can be understood as an expression of these two worldviews, with a matriarchal, egalitarian, and consensus-oriented original system on one hand, and the patriarchal, hierarchical, and territorial on the other. Communism, socialism, the welfare state, women’s rights, and so on, could be understood as deep-seated matriarchal impulses resurfacing after a period of patriarchal hegemony. Perhaps other distributed power structures, like the internet and cryptocurrencies, can also be seen in this light.
In the same way, it is not difficult to spot the Indo-European mindset within today’s capitalism. India and Europe at the time of the Indo-Europeans’ arrival were mostly dense jungle, which, by the sacred Agni sacrificial fire, was burned down and opened up as grazing grounds. Palynological studies indicate that the immigration of steppe peoples during the Bronze Age caused more than half of Europe's forests to disappear, something that has continued across all continents since then, and is still going on in the rainforests of Indonesia and Brazil. For a trader or an industrialist, whatever means of extraction they are using — cattle, mining equipent, or financial derivatives — is considered a righteous and divine gift for to them to use, and their success in a cutthroat market continues to be interpreted as divine grace and favor — or “luck” as it’s more often called in our “secularized” environment.
When it comes to religion, Christian priests and Hindu brahmins continue to present themselves as mediators between the earthly and divine — their focus is still on how to curry favor with the gods and find a way to escape from earth. Allah and Muhammed, God and Jesus, Yahweh and Moses all seem directly descended from Dyaus Pitar and his Perkuno. On the other hand, one of Christianity’s central symbols is the strikingly matriarchal Virgin Mother and Baby Jesus, kept alive and worshipped by the non-priestly and non-warrior segments of the population even throughout peak Patriarchy and its attempted extermination of all feminine values.
Kleos, celebrity and fame as a bulwark against death, is our culture’s primary ethos, just as it was 5000 years ago for the Indo-Europeans. It’s in our rows of named gravestones, in politicians naming roads and dams after themselves, in philanthropists donating their money in exchange for their name on a wall, and, of course, in the everyman’s frazzled and headless social media pursuit of name recognition. Hero worship continues much as before, with businessmen, sports stars, music idols, and so on taking the place of the warrior, the main difference being that the fast horse has been exchanged for a car, a boat, or a private jet. The central Indo-European power symbol of the mounted warrior is found outside practically every palace and castle, the mace war hammer continues to be in symbolic use as the royal sceptre of power, and the most popular team sport in the world, football, is an obvious reenactment of grassland skirmishing and raiding.
Our version of the kóryos groups is easily found in adolescent boys being sent to the army, to the Hitlerjugend, to boarding schools, and these days, most notably to online multiplayer first-person shooters. 97% of U.S. teenage boys play video games, and more than 60% identify as “gamers” (73% and 17%, respectively, for girls). This isolation from the immediate family group and fraternal cultivation of a violent mindset is, in essence, the same as it when it first came about 5000 years ago.
However, when the kóryos system brought together groups of young men and isolated them for extended periods of time, it ended up not just cultivating ruthlessness and a capacity for violence, but also self-reflection and contemplation. Monastic orders are really only evolved forms of kóryos groups — what happened when the newly formed armies didn’t have anyone to fight for a while. So just as the development of Patriarchy produced the first war, systemic oppression, and environmental degradation, it also produced modern philosophy, spirituality, and the notion of a human as an individual with free will who interacts with the world.
To end: the so-called Axial Age — the simultaneous appearance of wise sages and prophets across the whole Eurasian continent — is most often considered a mysterious and somewhat unexplainable occurrence. In my next article, however, I will begin to look at it as a result of what patriarchy set in motion, an inevitable response to the implausible and unsustainable division of reality into good and bad, heaven and earth, pure and impure, which the Indo-Europeans came up with and propagated across the earth.
After all, if there was one thing Zoroaster, Jesus, Buddha, Chuang-tzu, Lao-tzu, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Empedocles, Socrates and so on would agree on, is that there was no use in continuing on with the core Indo-European practice of sacrificing animals to the Sky Gods.
Some of the books and works I’ve used to compile this article:
The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wenslow, 2021
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony, 2007
Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy: West Asia and Europe, by Heide Goettner-Abendroth, 2022
The White Goddess, by Robert Graves, 1948
The Creation of Patriarchy, by Gerda Lerner, 1986
Comparative Mythology, by Jaan Puhvel, 1987
Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln, 1999
Death, War, And Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice, Bruce Lincoln, 1991
In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth, J.P. Mallory, 1989
Indo-European Poetry and Myth, Martin West, 2007
The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, Gregory Nagy, 2013
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, Christopher I. Beckwith, 2009
Websites & PDF’s:
Proto-Indo-European Deities, Ceisiwr Serith
The dogs of war: A Bronze Age initiation ritual in the Russian steppes, by David W. Anthony, et al., 2017
The Origins of Fatherhood, by Sebastian Kramer, 1991
Burial mounds of Scythian elites in the Eurasian steppe: New discoveries, by Hermann Parzinger, 2016
How To Kill a Dragon, by Calvert Watkins, 1995
The Rigveda, translated by Ralph T.H Griffith, 1896
Indo-Europeans in the Ancient Yellow River Valley, by Shaun C. R. Ramsden, 2021
Sacrificing Sacrifice to Self-Sacrifice: Sublimation of Sacrificial Violence in Western Indo European Cultures during Karl Jaspers' Axial Period, Eric D. Meyer, 2016