| | Agreed, Luke. Sanction, too -- and I cut and pasted it into a little poster for my offiice. The writing was finely crafted, indeed.
Ted Keer -- I also (ambiguously) agree that the tradition has roots in something perhaps not totally negative: the realization that people have spirits. That there is something more to us than the stuff we see outside. The idea that someone can live after death has been attributed to the common experience of dreaming about someone who died. That actually required quite a bit of brain to do and then to self-reflectively understand... or misunderstand, as the case may be.
That said, the resistance of the victims certainly belies the claim that there is life after death. "OK, you first..."
Finally, the Terracotta Army probably was created to subsitute for living victims, a conceptual and cultural leap on the part of at least one Chinese emperor (Shi Huang Di, c. 210 BCE). So, it is not as if the problem were unsolveable until the Enlightenment or anything.
The Greeks changed the story of Iphegenia. It remains a sacrifice in the Iliad, but also gave rise to other myths in which she went to Tarus or some other place. So, too, with the Sacrifice of Abraham, discussed here on RoR: though infant sacrifice continued among some Semitic peoples (Tyre, Carthage), the Jews abandoned it and that story tells of that.
So, again, while the sacrificing of retainers or family was widespread and culturally explicable, it was still stupid and wrong and should have been pretty easy to figure out, but for the drunken egotism so clearly painted by Bridget.
(In fact... after posting that, I went back and looked again at the Terracotta Army and it had to be a tremendous waste of resources just to create and bury them. I think that before taking office, every king, president and precinct delegate ought to read Ozymandias into the public record and digitally sign it.)
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 5/27, 8:57am)
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You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.
