Sin, Sacrifice, and Atonement

89:0.1Prim­i­tive man re­garded him­self as be­ing in debt to the spir­its, as stand­ing in need of re­demp­tion. As the sav­ages looked at it, in jus­tice the spir­its might have vis­ited much more bad luck upon them. As time passed, this con­cept de­vel­oped into the doc­trine of sin and sal­va­tion. The soul was looked upon as com­ing into the world un­der for­feit—orig­i­nal sin. The soul must be ran­somed; a scape­goat must be pro­vided. The head-hunter, in ad­di­tion to prac­tic­ing the cult of skull wor­ship, was able to pro­vide a sub­sti­tute for his own life, a scape­man.

89:0.2The sav­age was early pos­sessed with the no­tion that spir­its de­rive su­preme sat­is­fac­tion from the sight of hu­man mis­ery, suf­fer­ing, and hu­mil­i­a­tion. At first, man was only con­cerned with sins of com­mis­sion, but later he be­came ex­er­cised over sins of omis­sion. And the whole sub­se­quent sac­ri­fi­cial sys­tem grew up around these two ideas. This new rit­ual had to do with the ob­ser­vance of the pro­pi­ti­a­tion cer­e­monies of sac­ri­fice. Prim­i­tive man be­lieved that some­thing spe­cial must be done to win the fa­vor of the gods; only ad­vanced civ­i­liza­tion rec­og­nizes a con­sis­tently even-tem­pered and benev­o­lent God. Pro­pi­ti­a­tion was in­sur­ance against im­me­di­ate ill luck rather than in­vest­ment in fu­ture bliss. And the rit­u­als of avoid­ance, ex­or­cism, co­er­cion, and pro­pi­ti­a­tion all merge into one an­other.