Animal sacrifice… necessary?

Jaap Verduijn

The question “Do I have to sacrifice animals to practice Orisha

traditions?” is a pretty sore spot when it comes to discussing our
religion with “outsiders” Time upon time again we have to defend
our position on this subject, for yes: although probably not
absolutely necessary, you’ll hardly find an Ifa-Orisha, Santeria or
Lukumi House that does not sacrifice animals, either frequently or
not so frequently.

My own experience is that ritually snuffing the odd chicken or such raises an
enormous amount of Ashe, that would be rather difficult to raise otherwise.
Yet I don’t do it very often, for the simple reason that, when I divine on the
subject, my Orishas hardly ever ask for blood sacrifice. Their tastes seem to
change, or rather adapt to the culture and circumstances one lives in.

Especially in rural parts of Africa it was, and to a

large extend still is, customary to slaughter ones
own food, and the blood and some parts were more
or less automatically offered to the Orishas. That
means meals for humans and for Orishas were kind
of “integrated”: when the humans ate, the Orishas ate too. In the West this
has been turned inside out: an animal is sacrificed to the Orishas, and almost
as a second thought the meat is eaten by the human family. In Africa on the
other hand, an Orisha asking for a blood offering was part of normal kitchen
procedure: the family had to eat anyway, and if there was any good reason to
slaughter an animal and eat meat, this was reason for enjoyment and for
stuffing ones face with relatively rare delicacies.

We, in the West, don’t eat that way. Slaughtering an animal is out of place
here, instead of the “normal” thing to do. Which might indicate that making a
blood offering too has ceased to be the “normal” thing. There’s another side to
this issue as well. Until not so long ago, at least deep into the nineteenth
century and quite likely even into the twentieth, human sacrifice was not
unheard of in the religion, and earlier it was even fairly common – in the
mid-nineteenth human sacrifices were still often made in the Yoruba Ifa-
Orisha tradition.

However, this changed somewhere in time. There are many texts in the Ifa
Corpus that say: “And from that moment on no humans were sacrificed
anymore to Orisha So-and-so, but only sheep. Or goats. Or whatever”. So
human sacrifice, once considered an indispensable part of our religion, kinda
went out of fashion when public opinion began to frown upon it on account of
cultural ideas and customs changing. I have the feeling that something
similar may eventually happen to animal sacrifice.

It seems quite possible that divination will increasingly indicate that animal
sacrifices are no longer required, on account of ritual slaughter being so much
out of place in our cultures that it has become a very artificial act and even
“unnatural”. Orishas are not fond of “unnatural” things. They disposed of
human sacrifice, and every worshiper goes happily along with that. The time
may come when they dispose of animal sacrifice too. I dunno; I’m not an
Orisha.

Right now I would say that many ritual sacrifices need not to be done, but I
won’t go as far as to say that NONE of them should be done. In other words:
when the Orishas tell me that they accept something else, I’m not going to
snuff a rooster just because that would be the “traditional thing”. But when in
exceptional circumstances they insist on having a rooster or so, I’ll snuff the
beast without any qualms.

My personal perception is that animal sacrifice is kind of on the wane, and

mainly propagandized by those who haven’t yet found out that there are
changes all around us. I for one wouldn’t be unhappy to see it go completely
in any culture where one wouldn’t normally slaughter ones own food anyway.
But I guess it’s up to the Orishas to decide.

Update
A couple of years after I wrote this article, I think it must have been in the
summer of 2014, the Orishas did decide… at least as far as I myself and my
“omolette” Brenda are concerned. During a quite profound divination Ifa
clearly stated that for Brenda and me animal sacrifice had become a
blanket taboo, i.e. that it is a taboo unless in an individual case Ifa clearly
states that for that particular occasion the taboo has been lifted. This makes
sense – this sort of thing is part of the very nature of Ifa’s concept of “taboo”.
Many (food) taboos are imposed because the “taboo stuff” might in future
save the person’s life, like f’rinstance a certain kind of mushroom.

If you have such a taboo and still regularly eat that mushroom the body gets
used to the stuff, sort of creating an immunity to it… and when suddenly the
need arises for using that mushroom as a life saving medicine, the body
doesn’t react to it anymore. It’s a bit like antibiotics… if you use these too
often or too long the body becomes resistant to them, and on the next
occasion you might need them they won’t work anymore. Likewise, if you
keep snuffing animals for every tiny shitty “problem” you have, the forces
you deal with may kinda develop an immunity. I dunno, it simply seems to
make some kind of sense.

Something like that might be the case for Brenda, me, and those who
consider themselves part of my “non-Ilé”… “non” because I formally don’t
have one, there just are other Independents scattered around the globe who
might or might not want to occasionally follow some of my examples, even if
it were only to save themselves the trouble finding everything out for
themselves (wide grin)! As for myself, it is not impossible that sometime in
future a really serious situation will arise that cannot reasonably be solved
without the strong energy/ashé of some animal sacrifice, in which case Ifa
will undoubtedly inform me that the taboo has been temporarily lifted. We’ll
see. I’ve never encountered even one single really serious situation in my
seventy years of life yet, but you never know.

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