Understanding Religious Sacrifice

This volume provides an introduction to the major classic and modern writings dealing with religious sacrifice. It traces the history of scholarly attempts to define, classify and explain sacrifice and offers a view of the competing theories of sacrificial behaviour.
This volume provides an introduction to the major classic and modern writings dealing with religious sacrifice. Collected here are 25 influential selections, each with a brief introduction addressing the overall framework and assumptions of its author. As they present different theories and examples of sacrifice, these selections also discuss important concepts in religious studies such as the origin of religion, totemism, magic, symbolism, violence, structuralism and ritual performance. Students of comparative religion, ritual studies, the history of religions, the anthropology of religion and theories of religion should find the historical organization and thematic analyses presented in this collection useful.