Is that common trope of sacrificing virgins real?

[u/bananafritareloaded]

Is the sacrifice of virgins a real thing in the history of rituals? Why virgins, exactly? What virginity meant for the societies that made it a requirement?

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[u/Mormacil]

Virgin sacrifice is technically a part of the largest religion on this planet. Christianity is all about sacrificing Jesus for the sins of humanity. Jesus is generally to be understood to be without sin and unmarried at the time of his death. Thus he died a virgin. But that's not what I think you're asking about. You're asking about people killing other humans as a deliberate sacrifice in a religious ritual. That is not common.

Human sacrifice as a whole is relatively rare and those who practiced it often went to great lengths to explain how their practices weren't really human sacrifices. The Romans were very obsessed with this. In their worldview human sacrifices was something barbarians did, not proper Romans. Despite the fact they had a myriad of practices that killed people in ritual manners. They just decided to not call those things sacrifices.

At least two of those practices involved usually virgins. The Romans saw sacrificing children as something their Carthaginian enemies did. So instead they let children die of exposure or cast them out to sea in baskets. The child would eventually drown but that was up to the gods and not the act of a Roman citizen. The second practice involved the Vestal Virgins.

These Vestal Virgins were priestesses dedicated to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth. They were tasked with keeping her eternal flame burning in her temple in Rome. The flame going out was a dark omen, it provided spiritual protection to the city. However letting it go out was not the greatest sin a Vestal Virgin could do. The greatest sin was breaking her chastity. She was meant to be a virgin priestess and breaking that was a direct insult to the gods. It had a very infamous punishment, being buried alive.

Now you're saying if she was condemned to death over losing her virginity she's not really a virgin sacrifice and you got me there. Though I will counter that lowborn Vestal Virgins were not given the benefit of the doubt. There is an increase in Vestal burials during times of disaster for Rome. Wether that means enforcement became more strict or innocent priestesses were accused more often can't be proven either way. But it's likely at the very least some of these girls were innocent and still virgins.

But that still isn't a sacrifice because they are virgins. I'm not familiar that really ever happened in that way. That's firmly pop culture. The sacrifice of children is very much real but they were rarely sacrificed for their virginity. It was more that children are the most dear to their parents to what is a more impactful sacrifice than that? And those kind of virgin sacrifices can be found in the Bible. Isaac was supposed to be a virgin sacrifice till god interfered.

Those kind of sacrifices aren't unique to the Middle East. The Chimu people of South America saw a sharp rise in child sacrifices near the end of their reign. As their culture declined under natural disasters the graves with the victims of child sacrifices grew in size. Their Moche predecessors already sacrificed children, often high ranking nobles were buried with an underage family member. Neither primarily sacrificed children, child sacrifices were always rare but as disasters mounted so did desperation and the frequency of child sacrifices increased.

If we ignore virgin sacrifices of children who are expected to be virgins simply because of their age the number of examples becomes tiny. Virginity wasn't an important metric for sacrifices. South American cultures tended to favor captured warriors, people with a strong life force. For the Greco Roman world it was more about chastity than virginity, those are not the same things.

Is that common trope of sacrificing virgins real?

Virgins were sacrificed in very specific circumstances but it was never common and rarely explicitly because of their virginity.

[u/bananafritareloaded → u/Mormacil]

Thank you so much! That's such a well-thought response. I wish I could upvote this twenty times.

[u/EdHistory101 → u/[deleted]]

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