Child Sacrifice in Asia

The ancient Shang Dynasty of China held massive ceremonies involving human sacrifice. These rituals involved the slaughter of men, women, and children. Priests would decapitate hundreds of victims, toss their bodies into a burial pit, and then set the collection of piled corpses on fire as an offering to appease their angry god. One ancient oracle bone, used to supposedly divine the will of their god, revealed the scope of this horrific tradition as it asked, “Shall one thousand humans be sacrificed?”

Modern minds assume that ritual sacrifice simply faded into oblivion as humanity progressed. This is simply not true. In the nineteenth century, Baptist missionary William Carey traveled to India and was horrified to discover that widows were burned alive atop the corpses of their husbands in a practice called Sati. Likewise, many Hindu mothers worshiped the gods by drowning their newborn babies in the Ganges River. Once the Christian ethics of Western civilization were introduced to India, these practices were outlawed. In one of his letters, William Carey wrote:

I have…presented three petitions or representations to Government for the purpose of having the burning of women and other modes of murder abolished…. In the case of infanticide and voluntary drowning in the river, laws were made to prevent these, which have been successful.[2]

Child Sacrifice Among Native Americans

Likewise, as the French and British settled North America, they were appalled to discover that numerous indigenous tribes engaged in horrific child sacrifice rituals, much like the ancient Canaanites.

André Pénicaut, an interpreter for French settlers in Louisiana, described the rituals of the Native American tribes in the early 18th century. In one instance, the Taensa tribe gathered at their temple, and “the fathers and mothers brought their children, and after having strangled them, they threw them into the fire.” French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville likewise recalled how one tribe “threw five little children in swaddling clothes into the fire,” adding that many more would have been killed “had not three Frenchmen run thither and prevented them.” French missionary Jean Francois Buisson de Saint-Cosme, who was martyred by the Natchez tribe, wrote of how they sacrificed sick infants as burnt offerings “to appease the spirit.” They also sacrificed children whenever a member of the royal family died.

In Virginia, English settler Henry Spelman likened the Powhatan tribe’s worship practices to devil worship. Appalled by grotesque rituals, Spelman explained that they would sacrifice two or three children each year in a ring of fire. He wrote, “After the bodies which are offered are consumed by the fire and their ceremonies performed, the men depart merrily, the women weeping.” Despite all the modern consternation over European colonialism, no scholar can deny that it was the introduction of Christian ethics that put an end to these barbaric rituals among North America’s indigenous tribes.