How human sacrifice is represented in Western culture – from the Iliad to the first Gulf War– has been laid bare in a new book.
Ritual death has fascinated Western writers since the beginnings of European literature. It is prominent in Greek epic and tragedy, and returned to haunt writers after the discovery of the Aztec mass sacrifices.
Now a new study, examining the major cultural and historical revolutions that coloured the way writers and composers imagined human sacrifice, has been published.
Professor Derek Hughes' Culture and Sacrifice – Ritual Death in Literature and Opera was recently released to acclaim.
"It deals with the treatment of human sacrifice in literature and music-theatre, starting with classical epic and tragedy, and taking in such major figures as Shakespeare, Voltaire, Wagner, and Thomas Mann," explained Professor Hughes, a Chair in English at the University of Aberdeen.
The book has received enthusiastic praise from leading authorities.
Professor Sir Frank Kermode, one of the most distinguished British literary scholars, said: "Culture and Sacrifice is an astonishing book…The material is fascinating and it is presented with great authority by a scholar who writes with extraordinary force and clarity. Few will doubt the scope of this achievement. It is a long time since I myself read so impressive, and so fascinating, a work of scholarship."
Professor Terry Castle, of Stanford University, wrote: "Culture and Sacrifice is a marvellous work of scholarship: ambitious, disquieting and profound in its historical and philosophical ramifications…Hughes explores ritualized human sacrifice across an astonishingly diverse array of literary, artistic and musical works, taking in everyone from the Greeks and Goethe to Wagner and Thomas Mann. The story he tells is a disturbing, even appalling one – a veritable feast at the House of Atreus. But you cannot finish the book without a new and vastly deepened understanding of sacrifice's primal, ferocious, strangely productive role in human art and culture."
The book, published by Cambridge University Press, is widely available.