At this time of year I start thinking a lot about sacrifice. About what it is, and why it is important. In past centuries, this was the beginning of harvest time. All the work that we’ve put into our crops through the spring and summer is paying off, and we begin to bring the fruits of our labors in from the fields before they rot. In so doing, we kill a great many plants before their natural time. We cut them down and preserve them, so we will have grain, and fruits, and vegetables to carry us through the winter.

Today, the timing is different. We have a global season for planting and growing, and a shortfall or failure to harvest probably won’t mean my family starves this winter. (I am fortunate to live in a first-world country, and I realize this is not the case for all places on the planet.) But the truth is still there. In order for my family and I to survive, we kill things around us. Often brutally.

Around this time of year, conversations often come up that talk about sacrifice. I think it’s just part of our social consciousness, particularly as pagans. Many of them, like this one at About.com About.com Paganism/Wicca (Patti Wigington) Attorney: Why I Defent Goat Sacrifice. The comments are what I’m pointing to, not the post itself.

Why is it that we can’t accept that sacrifice is part of life? The nature of sacrifice is simple. You give up something of value in hope that you will recieve something which you desire. Sacrifice takes many forms, and has many layers. I think it’s not only wise, but vital, that we as people consider the various levels upon which our actions and sacrifices have meaning.

For instance, I often (among pagans anyway) hear people thanking the earth for providing the bounty of the harvest. But I almost never hear them thank the spirit of the plant or animal they are planning on ingesting. I think making the food they are about to ingest spirit-less prevents us from thinking about the truth of what’s going on. We are killing this other thing that we may devour the force of it’s life and sustain our own. Thanking the spirit of the food is far more difficult, and far more respectful than thanking a nebulous earth-mother-goddess for providing. Yes, she has provided, but we make the choice to partake of what has been provided, and that requires sacrifice. Pretending differently strikes me as a self-delusion perpetuated by the Harm None myth.

There are a lot of facets that come up for me here. One of the ones that frustrates me the most has to do with vegetarians and vegans. I know many of both, and I have a deep respect for their choice of diet. However, I sometimes question the motives of vegetarians. If you believe it is healthier for you to eat vegetarian. That’s great. If you have an ethical dillema with the way livestock is raised and slaughtered, we’re cool. I might question your thoughts on the mass-production and forced growth of crops, and how that affects the lives of humans and livestock, but it’s cool. If your reason for being a vegetarian is “Because I don’t think other things should die so I can survive,” I’m going to get annoyed, because life requires death. If you don’t see that then you aren’t paying attention.

I don’t want to rant about that much, so that’s all I’m going to say on the matter. Getting back to sacrifice, think for a moment about what it means to sacrifice something. To give up something of value. For a sacrifice to mean something, you have to miss it. You have to give it up. The more important what you are giving up is to you, the more valuable the sacrifice, the more meaning it has, the more power it has. I think this is something that we miss when we talk about sacrifice today. I think it’s something we don’t want to see. We’re all caught up in symbolic sacrifice, which has value and power. But we sort of see it as a way of getting around the necessity of sacrifice to create change. Symbolic sacrifice is powerful because it reminds us of the real deal. It stirs the feelings and memories of real sacrifice, and that gives it ooomph.

But in the end, it is only symbolic, and there’s only so much ooomph our memories and fears can give it. Imagine the discipline and power you could generate by fasting for a day. That imagining can be given as sacrifice. We can make it real and experience it in our minds and it can have great power. But the experience of fasting for a day releases a far greater power, because we have actually pursued the course and given of ourselves to the path. (On a side note, we often lose the power of sacrificial acts by spending time focusing on the act of the sacrifice, and not focusing the energy on our goal, or spending too much time congratulating ourselves for our efforts.)

Just as important, is the realization that the object being sacrificed is not necessarily the primary source of power when talking about sacrifice. The power comes from what we have sacrificed yes, but also from our reaction to the act of that sacrifice. Burning a wicker goat in place of cutting a real goats throat may have exactly the same physical energy involved (although if we bring spirits and Gods into the equation, often the object being sacrificed is of tantamount importance). But it is much easier for us to burn a wicker goat than to actually cut the throat of a real one. The power of our reaction to the act of actually killing a goat is (in general) much more visceral and powerful than our emotional response to watching a wicker pile go up in flame. This is the level that we ignore often. Sacrificing our own desires, compromising our ethics or taste. These are the things that powerful sacrifices are made of. It’s not about the goat. It’s about what you have to give up in order to carry out the sacrifice of the goat.

One could view it in a karmic light, and I think one should explore that, but it’s not my point of interest tonight. For now, think about that goat. What does it cost you to burn a wicker effigy of it? What does it cost you to shoot it with a gun from 50 feet? To inject it with poison? What if it’s a goat that you’ve never seen before? How is that cost different if you raised the goat from birth? If you eat meat, is the sacrifice different if you slaughter it in a way to make the goat inedible, wasting the virtue of it’s flesh?

The point I’m driving at here, is that sacrifice is not so simple as give up A to get B. The power in A, the value of A, is not the most important part of the equation, it’s only one part of the price. The other part is equally important, and sometimes more important. What does it cost you to give up A?

One last thought. In our society, A is almost always money. How does it affect your relationship with money to think about it as the currency of your labor, the product of the hours you have sacrificed at work? And if we view money as a symbolic sacrifice of that time and effort, are the things we spend it on worth it?