This topic, property treated, would require a Joseph Campbell as lecturer and a full semester course to cover adequately. But let us do our best, starting at the beginning -- where it's often best to start.
The first commandment given to Adam upon leaving the Garden was to offer sacrifice. Obediently, Adam did.
One day a messenger appeared, asking Adam why he was doing what he was doing. He answered, "I know not, save the Lord commanded me" (Moses 5:6). The angel then instructed him about what blood sacrifice meant.
Faith and Obedience
First, Adam was told, sacrifice is double test of faith and obedience. We are expected to have faith that what the Lord asks us to do is wise and just and that during our mortal probation we will not always be able fully to understand the reasoning behind each law. Second, we are expected to obey: to keep the law whether we like it or not, or understand it or not.
This puts one in mind of the state of our knowledge of the Word of Wisdom only a generation ago. At that time we were told not to smoke, to avoid alcoholic beverages, not to indulge in meat except in winter and times of famine, and to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables in their season. But no one knew precisely why. Today's science has progressed to a point where we now know that tobacco is the biggest and most costly killer around; that as many as twenty per cent of us are potential alcoholics, and that it is better to abstain entirely rather than fall into the addiction trap; and that too much red meat is a major cause of colon cancer, the second largest killer of adult males -- while the roughage offered by fruits and vegetables is a powerful deterrent to developing colon problems. In time we'll understand that none of the Lord's commandments is arbitrary and that there is no distinction between the spiritual and the temporal in the economy of Heaven.
To repeat: the first two great lessons of sacrifice, i.e. giving up of something precious to us, are 1) to develop our faith that the Lord is wise and just and 2) to learn that obedience to law is for our own good. But there is more.
Imperfect Language is an Impediment to Learning
It is said that one cannot think without language and that it is possession of language which raises man above the other animals. The author is not in a position dogmatically to controvert this assertion. But he doubts it. For one thing, he has a fixed early childhood memory of learning to use limbs and body reflexes to turn over in his cradle at a period clearly pre-dating acquisition of language, suggesting that men may learn and remember quite a lot without language. And his observation of similar learning experiences with dogs and horses he has owned, further convinces him that there are significant lessons which can be learned (and taught) independent of language.
The great German philosopher Alexander von Humboldt was persuaded that different languages pierce reality to different levels and reflect different perspectives of reality. Ludwig von Wittgenstein, added the thought that, whatever one may think of Noam Chompski's later notion that language acquisition is "deep wired" in the human brain, every language has several layers of meaning; and, most importantly, that human language is not always strictly logical. Or, better, that language possesses a "higher logic".
Every tongue possesses important idioms and conventions which leapfrog nominal logic, and serve as vital shortcuts to understanding. So one can say with certain confidence, that while language is undoubtedly wonderfully helpful in the learning process, language alone is not sufficient. Any number of great thinkers and inventors tell how their deepest insights have come by inexplicable intuition in the depths of sleep. Regrettably, modern computer technologists have paid little attention to Wittgenstein, and are having to re-learn what he taught us almost eighty years ago as they grapple with the surface illogics of language in the attempt to develop computer driven translation programs.
Sapir and Steiner have gone so far as to suggest that different languages filter out (differentially) perhaps more than they include from the phenomenal world, so that we unconsciously build up a perception of "reality" according to the language habits of our language/cultural group. I have written elsewhere why science may have started with the Greeks, progressing to the Romans, and on to the French, the Germans, and the Anglo-Saxons (and more recently the Orientals -- and perhaps eventually the Hopi Indians whose language is said to be full of nuances more suitable to express certain insights of quantum mechanics as applied to quark and string theory than any other known language), as the linguistically-determined perception of reality of each of these languages became matched to the state of science of the day.
I suspect that the Master Teacher recognized that such defects in perceiving and transmitting truth would arise in post-Babel languages and planned from the outset to introduce a number of great non-language based teaching symbols to overcome to the extent possible such constraints on learning and the differential effects of language. This would assist in bringing the world's peoples to a unity of faith and understanding of the purpose of life and nature of the universe.
Sacrificial Symbolism
Among the most widespread of such great teaching symbols are:
Anointing With Olive Oil: The olive has been the basis of life for the Mediterranean World since time immemorial. The olive is among the longest lived of all plant life. Some trees in Gethsemane were there when Jesus prayed to his Father two thousand years ago. The wood of the olive is useful for construction, cooking, and creating decorative objects. The oil is essential for cooking in much of the world, and has recently been found to be one of the most healthful known for both cooking and creation of table dressings.
It is altogether appropriate that olive oil be used both in the consecration of kings and of the sick and dying -- symbolically representing long life, good health, and devoted service.
Baptism : Try to imagine a more polyform symbol relating the innocence of the new-born babe coming forth from the womb to sin, repentance, cleansing and rebirth, adoption into a new family and taking upon oneself the name of the new parent (i.e. becoming a Christian), death (being buried in the water), and resurrection (coming forth anew from the grave). With the changes in this great ordinance adopted for all sorts of rationalistic human reasons, much if not all of this powerful teaching symbolism has been lost.
Blood Sacrifice : Animal sacrifice is another of these great, pan-phenomenal symbols. During Adam's first post-Garden experience with the noumen, the angel went on to explain (Moses 5:7), "This is a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father", telling Adam to teach his children to do this in all their generations so all mankind would learn to look forward to the coming of a Savior.
Blood sacrifice of a baby lamb was thus conceived as a powerful teaching symbol. As with any symbol, sacrifice has of course its limitations. It depends in the last resort on analogy to the promise of resurrection to be brought by a coming savior, since the animal itself cannot be brought back to life. But is hard to imagine a more powerful teaching device to reinforce and deepen one's understanding of the great events of this life: birth, anguish, suffering, death, and redemption.
As with baptism, early apostasy eroded much of sacrifice's symbolic imagery. Cain decided it was quicker, easier (and cheaper) to make offerings from his fruit orchard: but the sin, anguish, and death which confronts each of us, was utterly lost with the change in substance. And with such contamination of imagery, blood sacrifice began to lose its teaching effect, degenerating into the meaningless gore of Baal worship, Aztec maiden and warrior slaughter, and Hawaiian volcano jumping.
With these insights, one can perhaps better appreciate God's purpose in commanding Abraham at the beginning of the fourth dispensation when the world was steeped in sin to offer Isaac as a human sacrifice. This awesome and apparently perverse return to human sacrifice which Abram had fled Haran to escape, in fact, resulted in effectively restoring the original two purposes of the ritual -- faith and obedience. And the last minute revocation of the edict, and divine providence of the ram in the thicket, powerfully reinforced the relationship between the death of the symbolic animal and the restoration to life (or at least salvation from death -- every symbol has its limits) of the only begotten son. So, at least among the promised seed, animal sacrifice was again put on track to help future generations look forward to the coming of a Savior.
Cultural Invention , or Deep Wiring?
It will be readily recognized that in one form or another, the practice of religious sacrifice spread around the globe. The Emperor of China annually offered sacrifice at Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven a mile from the Center of the Forbidden City; the Romans made no major decision without "taking the auspices", i.e. examining the entrails of a sacrificial animal or fowl; and, as noted, sacrifice took on exceptionally degenerate forms among Baal worshippers, and the Mayas and Aztecs of the New World.
Together with the spread of sacrifice, kings and upper classes of many lands came to think of themselves as kin of the gods: viz. the many demi-gods among the Greek warrior heroes; the god-like pretensions of the rulers of Babylon, Persia and the Indus Valley; the notions of the Chinese and Japanese Imperial Families; and Aztec and Inca rulers. Even the notably rationale Romans early took to apotheosizing deceased emperors (indeed, Claudius, as he lay dying proclaimed, "I feel myself becoming a god"). How did such at least superficially similar concepts and forms of worship come about?
In his exceptionally informative and insightful book on comparative religion, Professor Spencer Palmer of Brigham Young University, offers five possibilities:
1. Hugh Nibley's notion of cultural diffusion , under which roaming tribesmen carried with them more or less confused notions of ancient religion from a common center, which took on variant forms as events, history, and wavering folk-memory modified the original form of worship/tribal philosophy.
2. Independent invention , as peoples in far distant regions of the world confronted similar life-problems, they may well have dredged up somewhat similar folk-explanations (myths) or sympathetic-magic-type solutions to make more bearable life's common hardships and problems.
3. Archetypical thought proces ses grounded in the human subconcience (akin to Chompsky's language-learning "deep wiring"). Sigmund Freud and, especially, Carl Jung, relied on such deep-seated archetypes in human thinking as underpinning for much of their psychotherapy -- as did the Grimm Brothers in their linguistic explanations for similarities in the mythology and fairy tales of widely dissimilar cultures.
4. As a possible arabesque on the above, some see such "archetypical thinking" as a phenomenon related to Wordsdworth's "trailing clouds of glory" -- i.e. a not uncommon faint human memory of the Preexistence.
5. Palmer puts forward as perhaps the best explanation of such commonality, B.H. Roberts' and Milton R. Hunter's teaching (among other General Authorities) that God reserved some of the best of the "Valiant and Great Ones" to serve as "behind the lines" warriors to be born among every language, tongue, and people, to teach each people as much of the Philosophy of Heaven as they were capable of understanding and accepting in their given circumstances. Laotze, Confucius, Gautama, Zoroaster, Plato, Jesus, Mohammed, Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, Huss, Zwingli, the Wesleys, Joseph Smith (and John Paul II?) can all be seen as brothers, valiant sons of the same God of Heaven -- all teaching the basic Great Truths as God gave them in their circumstances to see the truth. Thus the underlying similarities of all great religions.
What Can Be Said of Sacrifice in Our Day?
First of all, it is to be said that we no longer are commanded to kill lambs on the sacrament altar (or burn the remains just outside the chapel door) -- or to lift up brazen serpents to help keep people in mind of the saving power of a coming Savior. (While this is not the place to expatiate, it seems that Satan once again expropriated a symbol of the coming Christ when he took on the appearance of a serpent in the Garden.
It can be defensibly argued that the serpent, because of its immunity to most animal diseases and resistance to death (remember the childhood saying that "snakes can't die until the sun goes down"), was an early symbol of the Great God. Moses was commanded to raise up a brass serpent in the wilderness to heal the Children of Israel. And the symbol of Quetzalcoatl, who is convincingly associated with the appearance of the resurrected Christ on the American Continent, took symbolic form as a feathered serpent. Interestingly, the serpent was also chosen by the Greeks (who considered themselves to be "cousins" of the Israelites -- possibly correctly so, considering the teaching of some LDS authorities that the Dorians were descendants of some of the "Lost Tribes" of Israel who wandered south into the Peleponesis instead of continuing with the majority into northern Europe) as the symbol of the healing arts -- viz. the caduceus, which even today is the totem of the medical profession.
Christ, prepared to lay down his life for all mankind, fulfilling at last the purpose for which he was born and for which mankind had for millennia been performing blood sacrifice looking forward to his coming, in his last meeting with the Twelve "took bread and broke it", and "blessed wine and drank it", thus introducing the new symbolism of a new age: a bloodless symbol replacing the sacrifice of altar and cross -- now looking forward to the glorious Feast of the Son of God which would take place at his Second Coming. The followers were commanded to hold this feast "as often as ye meet together" to keep them in mind of His return.
To be sure, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is also designed to remind us of his sacrifice, to induce us to repent regularly of every sin of commission and omission, to again take upon ourselves His name and re-dedicate ourselves to keeping his commandments. And in doing so, He promises to renew all His Covenants with us.
As a result, when we leave the Service, having worthily partaken of the Sacrament, we are as clean and fresh in life as at the time of original baptism. A beautiful and powerful ceremony of re-dedication and renewal.
But the emphasis, as noted, is on looking forward. No one, Christian, pagan, or Jew, needs reminding that Jesus Christ lived and died, whatever one may think of him. Nothing has been more written about or examined in such detail as the life and death of Jesus -- whether one accepts him as Savior or not. So blood sacrifice no longer has meaning (with the exception of the final Great Blood Sacrifice at the Temple upon His coming -- intended for no other purpose than to accomplish the "Restoration of All Things" -- a one time event).
Christ's substitution of the bread and wine (or water -- which flowed from his side when it was pierced by the lance), properly understood, is as equally rich and powerful a teaching symbol as was blood sacrifice in its time.
But, inevitably, the new symbol once more became subject to perversion. Unwilling to abandon blood sacrifice to which many had become accustomed, the philosophers of apostasy began to insist that instead of being a simple teaching symbol as was intended, the new sacrament of bread and wine involved the mystical change of bread into Christ's actual body and the wine into His blood, with His agonizing sacrifice on the cross being reenacted each time the ceremony was consummated.
We LDS, on the other hand, see the sacrament simply as another teaching symbol, among all the other symbols God has provided to keep His people in mind of the great journey from Preexistance to Immortality through the probationary experience of life. And why do we LDS participate in this rite weekly, instead of daily (as in some churches), or only on the High Holidays (as with others)?
I suggest that this is a deliberate symbol built upon a symbol, recalling the seven days of creation which ended with the bringing forth of Adam as a perfect man, a son of God.
Each Sunday, we ourselves symbolically become new creatures made in God's perfect image as we emerge from Sacrament Meeting after having partaken of the bread and water. If we do this regularly and worthily, we may eventually find ourselves to have kept the Great Commandment, to "Be perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48).
This leads to consideration of the notion of the complete and perfect sacrifice: not the giving up of the occasional lamb or ewe, nor the casting of the occasional alm to an importunate beggar. Or paying ten percent of our increase as tithing. Or fulfilling our civic duty to pay taxes to help ease the suffering of the indigent, or ease periodic unemployed, or help those without medical coverage. Or even our spending two years in missionary work to share our happiness with others; or four or five years in a Bishopric or Stake Presidency, or High Council.
As we progress towards perfection, we will, at an appropriate time be called upon to enter the House of the Lord, where as part of the Endowment Ceremony one will be invited to dedicate "all of your time, talent, and possessions (if it so be required) for the achievement of His work and the building up of the Kingdom of God". This is the complete and perfect sacrifice towards which all previous symbolism has been pointing.
As we approach the Easter season, when our Elder Brother the Savior Jesus Christ, gave his all that we might be forgiven and redeemed and given the privilege to become as he is, so that we, too, might live with the Father and participate in His work, might we reflect as individuals and families on the message of sacrifice. May we prepare ourselves to give ourselves in sacrifice, not in bloody death, but as Saviors on Mount Zion in the Temple of the Lord, is my prayer. Amen. (Beijing Branch 3/28/93)
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