^ Interesting that you should mention that as I wanted to post this.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0902/sacrifice.htm
The Forensics of Sacrifice
Dawn Perlmutter
Literally hundreds of theories of violence have been posited in the study of crime. Some of the major criminological theories are: subcultural theories, blocked opportunity theories, control theories, labeling theories, learning theories, and social learning theories (
http://www.umsl.edu/~rkeel/200/subcult.html
) (
http://www.umsl.edu/~rkeel/200/learnin.html
and (
http://www.umsl.edu/~rkeel/200/labeling.html
). Unfortunately, these theories have not been applied in criminal investigative analysis. Profiling evolved from the FBI's understanding of serial murder, and from the somewhat broad mandate of the behavioral science unit within the FBI in the early 1970s to formally introduce psychological and behavioral science principles into law enforcement. Although alternative profiling methods are being developed around the world based on a variety of theoretical perspectives such as geographic profiling, methods that focus on offender profiles are still predominantly based on psychological theories of criminal behavior that revolve heavily around personality and psychological anomalies. That is the core of the problem. Since ritualistic crimes are the result of ethnic and religious diversity, they need to be examined from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. The most advantageous method of interpreting religious violence is to apply knowledge of world religions and theories of sacred violence, ritual, and sacrifice to the crimes. This does not imply that the work of scholars in academic disciplines that traditionally study crime and criminal behavior is not pertinent. In fact, two scholars in the fields of sociology and psychiatry have recently posed unique theories of violence that involve concepts of symbolism and sacrifice.
26
In an extraordinary book entitled Seductions of Crime, Jack Katz, a UCLA professor of sociology, takes an atypical position that questions standard sociological methods of analyzing crime. He argues that the study of crime has been preoccupied with a search for background forces, usually defects in the offenders’ psychological background or social environment, to the neglect of the positive attractions within the lived experience of criminality. He proposes that empirical research turn the direction of inquiry around to focus initially on the foreground rather than the background of crime and to make it our first priority to understand the qualities of experience that distinguish different forms of criminality.(32) Although it may be problematic to apply empirical research to what is essentially a philosophical endeavor, I certainly agree with Katz when he states:
As unattractive morally as crime may be, we must appreciate that there is genuine experiential creativity in it as well. We should then be able to see what are, for the subject, the authentic attractions of crime and we should then be able to explain variations in criminality beyond what can be accounted for by background factors . . . I suggest that a seemingly simple question be asked persistently in detailed application to the facts of criminal experience: what are people trying to do when they commit a crime?(33)
When applying that question to ritualistic crimes, the first point that needs to be emphasized is that perpetrators do not consider their actions criminal although they understand them to be illegal. For perpetrators of ritualistic crimes, the violent act is a necessary religious ritual, hence the phenomenology of religious experience is the key to understanding the motivation. Violence has been at the core of religious experience throughout history; the only difference is that in other times and places religious violence has been morally integrated into society.
Katz addresses the subject of homicide in his first chapter entitled "Righteous Slaughter" and poses the following questions; "What is the killer trying to do in a typical homicide? How does he understand himself, his victim, and the scene at the fatal moment? With what sense and what sensuality is he compelled to act?"(34) Ruling out murders committed for robberies or other predatory crimes, Katz describes homicide as a form of sacrificial violence and argues that "the modal criminal homicide is an impassioned attempt to perform a sacrifice to embody one or another version of the "Good."(35) Katz considers homicide as a form of sacrifice that derives from humiliation and disrespect and whose goal is to restore offended respectability and honor. He argues that the practical project that the impassioned attacker is trying to accomplish by lashing out against insistent humiliation is analogous to the practices of criminal punishment under the ancient regime, which were continuous with ancient traditions of sacrifice that demonstrated respect for the sacred.
The nature and gravity of punishment defined the offense of which the condemned was guilty. To sustain the symbolism of the king’s regal sensibilities, each affront to the king’s rule must be given idiosyncratic punishment. The extent of the offense was defined for all to see by the pains the offender was forced to experience. The callous desecration of the criminal’s body was a method of celebrating the precious sensibility that the crime had offended. Such punishments exacted in the name of divine right were continuous with ancient traditions of sacrifice that demonstrated respect for the sacred. When a lamb’s throat is slashed in a religious ceremony, the production of a dead animal is not the objective. A ritual slaughter might follow, the choice parts to be burned in a deferential offering. On other occasions, the drawing of blood, the scarring of a body, or a nonfatal dismemberment might demonstrate sufficient respect. Overall, the practical project--the concern that organized the bloody, righteous behavior--is the manifestation of respect for the sacred. It is not enough to feel devotional spirit. Respect has to be objectified in blood . . . What is at stake in everyday contemporary violence is not a king’s divine right but the sacred core of respectability that the assailant is defending and defining through his violence.(36)
27
Katz also argues that in the details of the assault, the project of sacrificial violence recreates the truth of the offense received. He exemplifies this by analyzing cursing that occurs during impassioned attacks. Katz initially distinguishes how expressions that are common when venting anger against the victim differ from expressions used in sacrificial violence.
Attackers curse, not in the superficial sense of throwing "dirty" words in the vicinity of their victims, but in the more profound, ancient sense of casting a spell or invoking magical forces to effect degrading transformations in a polluting offender. Such cursing is at best an indirect way of venting anger and is often useless or even counterproductive in removing the irritant. But it is a direct and effective way of doing just what it appears to do: symbolically transforming the offending party into an ontologically lower status . . . Cursing is an eminently sensible way of making a subsequent attack into a service honoring the sacred. Now the attack will be against some morally lower, polluted, corrupted, profanized form of life, and hence in honor of a morally higher, more sacred and an eternally respectable realm of being . . . Cursing sets up violence to be a sacrifice to honor the attacker as a priest representing the collective moral being. If the priest is stained by the blood of the sacrifice, by contact with the polluting profane material, that is a measure of the priest’s devotion to society.(37)
Although the perpetrator may not be aware of this dynamic, Katz is essentially arguing that contemporary murders conducted in righteous rage fulfill the same purpose as ancient sacrifices: to restore respect for the sacred, in this case the sacred core of the individual. Although religious scholars may argue with Katz’s interpretation of the function of sacrifice, it is extraordinary that a sociologist contemplates criminal behavior in terms of sacrificial experience.
In another unique interpretation of criminal behavior, psychiatrist James Gilligan suggests in Violence, Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes that in order to understand murder and other forms of violent behavior we must learn to interpret action as symbolic language with a symbolic logic of its own. Although Gilligan essentially views the underlying causes of violence as humiliation and shame, he acknowledges that murder is carried out in violent rituals that are profoundly symbolic and meaningful. In Chapter Three, entitled "Violent Action as Symbolic Language: Myth, Ritual, and Tragedy," he describes a twenty-year-old man named Ross L. who on a cold winter night had run into a former high-school classmate who offered him a ride home; during the ride he took out a knife and stabbed her to death. He then mutilated her eyes, cut out her tongue, and threw her out of the car. He was neither stealing her car nor had he raped her. He was sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. Gilligan questions why Ross felt the need to stab out her eyes and cut out her tongue. Ross L. had utter absence of remorse or guilt and feelings not only of total innocence but of wounded innocence despite the fact that he admitted he had committed the acts. He felt that the only justification he needed for his crime was that he didn’t like the way she was looking at him and he didn’t want her talking about him.(38) Gilligan interpreted the underlying symbolic logic of Ross’s mutilation as a desperate attempt to ward off intolerable emotions of shame and humiliation. Gilligan states,
To understand or make sense of this man’s mutilation of his victim, which is senseless from any rational standpoint, we need to see it as the concrete, nonverbal expression of the following thought (which has the structure of all unconscious thought, of magical thinking): "If I destroy eyes, I will destroy shame" (for one can only be shamed in the [evil] eyes of others); in other words, "If I destroy eyes, I cannot be shamed"; and "if I destroy tongues, then I cannot be talked about, ridiculed or laughed at; my shamefulness cannot be revealed to others. The emotional logic that underlies this particular crime, then, which I called the logic of shame, takes the form of magical thinking that says, "If I kill this person in this way, I will kill shame--I will be able to protect myself from being exposed and vulnerable to and potentially overwhelmed by the feeling of shame.(39)
28
Gilligan further describes mutilations in terms of rituals that provide insight into the motivations for the murders,
The rituals surrounding violence, then, like all rituals, are profoundly symbolic and hence profoundly meaningful (that is, they express many highly specific and closely related meanings, which cannot be translated into a consistent set of propositions). In fact they are more symbolic, and hence more meaningful, the more "senseless" they appear to the rational mind, because they follow laws of magical thinking rather than rational thinking.(40)
Gilligan’s description of ritual essentially sums up my basic premise concerning the analysis of ritualistic crimes; there is, however, a significant difference in our interpretations of magical thinking. For Gilligan and most psychiatrists, magical thinking is an unconscious endeavor, whereas, in an occult religious worldview, magical thinking is a literal conscious endeavor. The different theoretical interpretations have significant consequences. For example, Gilligan states:
the mutilation served as a magical means of accomplishing something that even killing one’s victim cannot do, namely, that of destroying the feeling of shame itself . . . So an intensification of the whole project through the introduction of magic, by means of ritual, is necessary, if it is to be powerful enough to enable the murderer to stave off the tidal wave of shame that threatens to engulf him and bring about the death of the self.(41)
In a symbolic analysis mutilations such as cutting out eyes, tongue, or heart can represent religious rituals in the context of specific theologies that magically empower the murderer without having anything to do with feelings of shame.
Although both Katz and Gilligan have proposed extraordinary theories of violent behavior, the problem is that they are describing sacrifice and magical thinking as a subconscious activity of the perpetrator. Both scholars have a fundamental understanding of symbolism, magical thinking, and sacrifice, but cannot completely depart from the Western psychological assumptions of their respective disciplines. They both claim that the underlying motivation for violence is humiliation and shame and the reclaiming of self-respect. What they fail to recognize is that for some perpetrators of ritualistic crimes, magic and sacrifice are conscious endeavors whose underlying motivation is to develop hidden powers to magically manipulate events through violent rituals. This may or may not produce the result of reclaiming self-respect. However, it is important to mention that, as in the case of Ross L., not all ritualistic crimes are enacted in the context of a belief system, but the symbolic analysis methodology provides for this scenario, relegating the crime to a secular ritual killing. It is also necessary to emphasize that the various theoretical perspectives are not always mutually exclusive. In the previously mentioned cases of dabblers who committed ritual murders, shame and humiliation were the underlying emotions that initiated their interest in the occult. The significant difference when applying theories to the analysis of ritualistic crime is that sacrificial theories and magical ideologies are more useful for profiling. Although symbolic analysis recognizes ritual murders conducted for secular reasons, psychological theories are not always applicable to true believers who are not conducting their violent rituals because they were shamed or humiliated. For true believers ritual murder is nothing less than sacrifice in its original form. For this reason, magical thinking, the key to ritualistic crimes, has to be examined in terms of conscious choices, not subconscious feelings.
Magical thinking has been studied in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and religion. Scholars generally attribute magical thinking to primitive peoples who did not have explanations for the world or to a developmental stage in children whose cognitive abilities have not developed an understanding of the principles of cause and effect. The only explanation that is provided for adults who engage in magical thinking is that it is a form of psychopathology or subconscious wish fulfillment. This is the essence of the problem: ritualistic crimes are not interpreted from a worldview that allows for the possibility of magic to exist.
Statistics: Posted by Project Willow — Fri Jan 18, 2013 3:55 am