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#Sacrifice

Offering, ritual death, giving up something for power or favour.

A Chinese woodblock line-illustration titled "Diagram of the Ritual Arrangement for the Great Collective Sacrifice in the Front Hall of the Imperial Ancestral Temple": the temple eaves at upper left and, ranged beneath, rows of labelled ritual dishes and stands — grain and salt, dried fish, dates and chestnuts, the bian, dou, deng and xing offering vessels, a wine-jar (zun), and the great-beast (tailao) meat stands bearing the sheep and pig — set out for the ancestral sacrifice.
Chinese

Ancestor Veneration and the Lineage Temple

The dead did not vanish. One soul rose bright into the air and one sank into the ground, and between them the living built a temple, seated a grandson in the ancestor's chair, and fed him until he spoke the blessing back.

8 min*Liji*
A tall Chinese silk hanging scroll in ink and colour — a towering, mist-wreathed mountain gorge threaded with waterfalls and drifting cloud-dragons, and across the lower half crowds of tiny labourers on timber scaffolding, derricks and ladders cutting the rock to channel the floodwaters away; a robed figure oversees the work from a ledge at the upper right.
Chinese

Gun, Yu, and the Great Flood

The waters had swallowed the hills and were climbing towards heaven, and the father who tried to wall them out failed and died for it; only his son, cut from the same body, found the way to let the flood run home to the sea.

7 minShanhaijing
The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin: a tall pink-sandstone monument carved in relief. The Akkadian king Naram-Suen, wearing a horned helmet of divinity and carrying a bow and spear, climbs a wooded mountain above his soldiers, who advance in file; his defeated enemies fall, flee and beg beneath him, and sun-and-star glyphs of the gods shine over the peak.
Mesop.

The Curse of Agade

A king took axes to the god's own house, packed the temple's gold into leather bags, and loaded it onto ships. So the poets, four centuries after the city fell, explained why Agade vanished from the earth.

6 min'The cursing of Agade'
A striding, roaring lion in molded glazed brick — tawny mane, cream body, tail curling up behind — walking left to right across a turquoise-blue field bordered above and below by bands of ochre brick, from the Processional Way of Babylon.
Mesop.

The Akitu: Babylon's New Year Festival

For eleven days each spring the priests of Babylon washed a god, stripped a king of his crown and slapped him until he wept, then carried the whole company of the gods out through the glazed gate to renew the year.

8 minF. Thureau-Dangin
An ancient Egyptian sunk-relief scene carved in stone: the dead god Osiris lies wrapped as a mummy on a low funerary bier beneath an arched shrine-canopy, a bird (the soul as a hawk) hovering with outspread wings over the canopy's ridge; a tall crowned goddess stands mourning at the left and another at the right, each with columns of hieroglyphs above, the whole panel worn grey temple limestone.
Egyptian

The Mysteries of Osiris at Abydos

Once a year the god was carried out to die, hunted to his grave on the desert flats, and brought home again: what a royal treasurer, a Greek philosopher and a temple archive each saw of the drama, across seventeen centuries.

8 minIkhernofret Stela
An 18th-century Icelandic manuscript illustration of the binding of Fenrir: at right the crowned god Týr, sword raised in one hand, his other hand thrust into the jaws of the great wolf, which bites down on it; the wolf Fenrir crouches at centre; at left a second crowned god of the Aesir holds a spear and a curved fetter; a handwritten caption box sits at the upper right.
Norse

Tyr, God of the Oath

The boldest of the Aesir laid his sword-hand in a wolf's jaws to bind a doom he could not defeat, and lost it: the god who kept a pledge he knew was false.

5 minSnorri Sturluson
A monochrome wash drawing of the binding of Fenrir: the great wolf's jaws gaping wide around the god Týr's outstretched hand as the unbreakable fetter holds.
Norse

The Binding of Fenrir

A wolf the gods reared at home, two iron chains he snapped like kindling, and a ribbon of six impossible things: how the Aesir caught the beast fated to kill Odin, and what it cost the one god brave enough to feed him.

6 minSnorri Sturluson
Line engraving of the three nude sons of Bor — Odin, Vili and Ve — straining upward to raise the vaulted mass of the slain giant Ymir's body into the sky-dome above them, standing on rocky ground over waves with mist and flame swirling at either side.
Norse

Creation from Ginnungagap

Before earth or heaven there was a yawning gap, and on either side of it fire and ice: how the first giant quickened between them, and how the world was built from his murdered body.

7 minPoetic Edda
A naïve 17th-century Icelandic manuscript drawing of the Norse god Freyr as a bearded, long-haired man standing frontally with his hands on his hips, wearing a buttoned dark tunic, wide breeches and boots, his name "Freir" inscribed in the upper-right corner.
Norse

Freyr, Lord of Plenty

He climbed into a seat that was not his, looked out over all the worlds, and fell so hard for a giant's daughter that he gave away the one sword that could have saved him: the Vanir god of the fruitful season, lord of the elves, and the most renowned of the gods you called on for peace.

6 minPoetic Edda
A 19th-century wood-engraving of the world-ash Yggdrasil seen whole: an eagle perched at the crown among the upper branches with four stags browsing the foliage, the central world encircled by the rainbow Bifröst and a ring of water, and the serpent Níðhöggr coiling among the exposed roots at the foot of the tree.
Norse

Yggdrasil, the World Tree

The great ash that binds the worlds is not a serene axis but a creature in perpetual pain: gnawed above, rotting within, torn from below, and still standing green over the well where the Norns pour their clay.

8 minPoetic Edda
A romantic pen-and-ink drawing of Odin on his night-ride: the god in a wide-brimmed hat and cloak riding down toward the shadowy gate of Hel, his spear lowered.
Norse

Odin, the Allfather

He hanged himself on the world-tree and gave an eye to a well, and in return he took the runes and the deepest draught of wisdom: the god who paid for knowledge in his own flesh.

6 minPoetic Edda
A youthful Bacchus reclining behind a stone table, bare-shouldered in a loose white robe and crowned with an autumnal wreath of grapevine leaves and dark grape clusters. He holds out a shallow footed glass of red wine in his left hand while the fingers of his right toy with the black bow of his sash. A large glass carafe of red wine stands at the lower left, and a heaped bowl of fruit — grapes, apples, a pear, a split pomegranate and figs — sits before him against a dark ground.
Greek

Dionysus, God of Wine and Ecstasy

The twice-born stranger who turns pirates into dolphins and a mother into her son's killer, the loosener of cares who is lethal to anyone who denies him.

6 minEuripides
An engraving of a colossal, heavily muscled Hercules standing frontally, the Nemean lion-skin worn as a hood over his head and draped down his left side, the knotted olive-wood club resting over his right shoulder; small background vignettes show his combats with Antaeus, Cacus and Achelous in a classical landscape.
Greek

Heracles, the Greatest Hero

The strongman son of Zeus strangled serpents in his cradle and cleaned the world of monsters, but the labour that made him a god began in the ruin of his own house.

6 minPseudo-Apollodorus