Sacrifice deceives the god and grounds the ego’s deferral of present to future

Evidence

All human sacrifices, when systematically executed, deceive the god to whom they are made: they subject him to the primacy of human ends, and dissolve his power; and the deception of the god carries over smoothly into that practised by the disbelieving priests on the believers … By means of Odysseus, only the aspect of deception in sacrificeprobably the quintessential reason for the fictitious character of mythis elevated to self-consciousness. The discovery that symbolic communication with the deity through sacrifice is not actual must be an age-old experience. The sacrificial representation that a fashionable irrationalism has so exalted, cannot be separated from the deification of the human sacrificethe deceit of a priestly rationalization of death by means of an apotheosis of the predestined victim. Something of this trickery, which elevates the frail individual to the status of a vehicle of divine substance, has always been apparent in the egowhich owes its existence to the sacrifice of the present moment to the future. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1382

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the third published essay on sacrifice, ‘On Sacrifice’ — both treat sacrificial logic as stabilizing a social order; this passage adds the self-deception/priestly-deception angle. — connects to: Sacrifice is the magical prototype of rational exchange for mastering gods — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 59; The ego is built on the same self-deception as ritual sacrifice — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 60; Believing salvation guarantees future reward frees Christians from present moral responsibility — Chuck Missler, The Kingdom, Power and Glory: The…, 136
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the sacrifice essay: it supplies the Frankfurt School’s own reading of sacrifice as structural deception rather than genuine transcendence, worth citing alongside Dido and the Ur tombs.

Broader Connections

• The ego is built on the same self-deception as ritual sacrifice #corroborates (0.88) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 60
• Sacrifice is the magical prototype of rational exchange for mastering gods #qualifies (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 59