Human Sacrifice in Norse Mythology

Most, and probably all, civilizations in their earliest phases have practiced proto-religions which routinely included human sacrifice. From the Greeks and Romans to the Sumerians and Egyptians, myth and magic constituted these pre-religious varieties of polytheism.

Attempts to manipulate nature are termed ‘magic,’ and the mythologies of the Norse are no exception. One of the first authors to note this was Tacitus, the ethnographer whose chief work about northern Europe is titled Germania. Two scholars, E.O.G. Turville-Petre and Edgar Charles Polomé, write that:

In his Germania, Tacitus described the worship of a goddess, Nerthus, on an island, probably in the Baltic Sea. Whatever symbol represented her was kept hidden in a grove and taken around once a year in a covered chariot. During her pageant, there was rejoicing and peace, and all weapons were laid aside. Afterward, she was bathed in a lake and returned to her grove, but those who participated in her lustration were drowned in the lake as a sacrifice to thank her for her blessings.

By killing human beings as offerings to the Norse deities, the Norse hoped to gain some good fortune: a military victory, good weather, human fertility, or a bountiful harvest.

The Norse were not monolithic. Among them were many different tribes, each of which had its own variant of the foundational mythology. The Semnones occupied regions in southern Scandinavia and in what is now Germany.

Sacrifice often was conducted in the open or in groves and forests. The human sacrifice to the tribal god of the Semnones, described by Tacitus, took place in a sacred grove; other examples of sacred groves include the one in which Nerthus usually resides. Tacitus does, however, mention temples in Germany, though they were probably few. Old English laws mention fenced places around a stone, tree, or other object of worship. In Scandinavia, men brought sacrifice to groves and waterfalls.

Human sacrifice would continue to be common among not only among the Norse, but also among other European tribes, until roughly the era of Charlemagne. Made emperor in 800 A.D., he fostered education and culture, expanding his Frankish influence eastward and northward.

The Danish National Museum concludes that “archaeological finds from recent years show that human sacrifice was a reality in Viking Age Denmark.”

An Unlikely Bond: Henry Ford and Mohandas Gandhi

People like Henry Ford, a wealthy industrialist and a famous inventor, are more likely to receive fan letters than to write them, but Ford did write at least one. In July 1941, he wrote a letter to Mohandas Gandhi, expressing his admiration for Gandhi’s work.

The letter took two months to reach Gandhi. Mail from Detroit to India was slowed by WW2.

When Ford wrote the letter, the United States had not yet entered the war. By the time Gandhi received the letter, President Roosevelt was delivering a speech to Congress, and war was declared on December 8, 1941, the day Gandhi got Ford’s correspondence.

But Henry Ford hadn’t written about the war. He was merely expressing his admiration for Gandhi’s work.

One link between Ford and Gandhi was that both men had a thorough understanding of industrial processes and economics. Gandhi’s political work in India was carried out by the concrete process of forming thread on a spinning wheel and by the process of deriving table salt from evaporating seawater.

Both men understood the economic, social, and political impacts of such mechanical processes.

In response to Ford’s letter, Gandhi sent him a spinning wheel, which Ford displayed in his museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The spinning wheel is still there.

Social Class Structure in Mexico in the Early 19th Century

At the beginning of the 1800s, a system of social classes structured Mexican society, politics, and economics. At the top were the criollos, colonists born in Mexico to European parents. Along with the criollos were the European settlers themselves, who, however, by this time were few in number.

The fragmentation of Mexican society extended to subgroups within the major groups. The criollos, e.g., were divided among themselves regarding how far suffrage should extend.

Further down were the Indians, the Native Americans living in Mexico. The imperial government in Spain guaranteed them certain conditions, that they would have specified lands and be given a certain immunity from the colonial government.

The Spanish government didn’t do this out of the purest altruism: by stabilizing the Indians and giving them an at least minimal status, the imperial government in Spain hoped to create a roadblock to the increasing ambitions of the criollos, who wanted increasing influence in the colonial administration, and eventually independence.

The Spanish clergy worked toward the same goals as the Spanish imperial government, but with contrasting motives. As one history textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007), notes, “Spanish priests worked” in Mexico “for better treatment of Native Americans.”

Mexican society included a spectrum of other social classes, based on race, ethnicity, and culture: mestizos and zambos and about a half-dozen more.

But by the 1820s, the Mexicans succeeded in gaining independence from Spain. The social classes were now seen as classes of citizenship. Starting in Mexico City after the revolution, the right to vote was clearly defined and limited to certain demographic groups. As historian Irving Levinson writes,

By 1846, this pattern of exclusion applied to the entire nation. In that year, the federal government promulgated election regulations limiting suffrage to members of eight groups: land owners, mine owners and operators, military officers, clergy, magistrates, manufacturers, and members of learned professions. For some of these categories, such as that of landowner, the state also set minimum income requirements. By definition, owners of small farms and ranches, rural laborers, industrial workers, common tradespersons, and mine workers could not vote, let alone run for office.

The politics of Mexico, as a newly-independent nation, became the politics of class warfare.

As this class system asserted itself in the first two decades after Mexico gained its independence, it weakened Mexican society. Levinson continues:

In 1846, deep and violent disputes whose origins lay in the country’s colonial past divided Mexico. The first and most important of these chasms lay along lines of ethnicity and race.

Mexico’s internal social divisions would cause it to lose its first major war, and cause a major change among the political factions. The fissures in Mexican society prevented unified support for Mexico’s war efforts. The war is linked to a significant shift in Mexican partisan politics. The new postwar partisan trends led to an era known as “La Reforma” in Mexican history.

Exploring Sharia - Hadd and Hudud

As Islam continues to spread geographically, and to intensify itself in those regions it already occupies, an understanding of the intersection between Islamic culture and Islamic law explains events.

Sharia, as is known, is a distillation of legal principles from the ‘trilogy’ - the three texts which form the core of Islam: the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira.

The foundation of Sharia is the Hadd. While there is room for debate and interpretation in much of Sharia, the Hadd is considered the non-negotiable bedrock of Islamic civil law.

Hudud is simply the plural form of Hadd, and both words are used in scholarship. A glossary published in Oxford Islamic Studies explains that Hadd is a

Limit or prohibition; pl. hudud. A punishment fixed in the Quran and hadith for crimes considered to be against the rights of God. The six crimes for which punishments are fixed are theft (amputation of the hand), illicit sexual relations (death by stoning or one hundred lashes), making unproven accusations of illicit sex (eighty lashes), drinking intoxicants (eighty lashes), apostasy (death or banishment), and highway robbery (death).

Islamic scholars find room for interpretation regarding any crime which doesn’t fit into one of the six categories listed above:

Punishment for all other crimes is left to the discretion of the court; these punishments are called tazir.

While the forms of Sharia vary from one nation to another, the core of Hadd is immutable, and forms a standard within Islam. Saudi Arabia has long enforced Hadd, and

recently fundamentalist ideologies have demanded the reintroduction of hudud, especially in Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan.

Pakistan approved legislation in February 1979 which incorporated Hadd into its civil code, and subsequently stoning, whipping, and amputation of hands is considered a governmental function, not a religious one, within the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Carl Menger Develops Economic Thought

During his years, from 1873 to 1903, as a professor of economics at the University of Vienna, Carl Menger developed both the ‘marginal utility theory’ and the ‘subjective theory of value.’

What are these concepts, and how do they affect our daily economic activities and experiences?

The ‘subjective theory of value’ tells us that it is in the mind of the individual buyer that a relative value is established for anything that might be purchased. If one person really likes coffee, he’ll be willing to pay more for it than a person who doesn’t care that much for the coffee.

This shows that the ‘value’ of the coffee is not located in the coffee, but rather in the mind. It’s the same coffee, but one person might be willing to pay $1 for it, while another person is willing to pay $2 for it.

The ‘value’ is also not determined by relative scarcity or abundance. Two goods which are equally rare, or equally common, may yet fetch two different prices.

The ‘marginal utility theory’ tells us that the amount of practical use or please we obtain from each unit of a good varies. If I’m a student getting ready for a new academic year, the first pencil I buy is probably of great value to me: the second pencil less so. I might buy a package of ten pencils, but I probably won’t buy a package of 1,000 pencils. Why?

The difference between the first pencil and the second pencil is that the second pencil has less value to me, but only slightly less. The second pencil still adds significantly to my perceived utility, so I buy it.

At some point the value of an additional pencil is very small. The difference between having one pencil or having two is significant. The difference between having 999 pencils or having 1,000 pencils is not significant.

Carl Menger developed these ideas within the history of economics. As the Encyclopedia Britannica notes,

Goods are valuable because they serve various uses whose importance differs. Menger used this insight to resolve the diamond-water paradox that Adam Smith posed but never solved.

The ‘diamond-water paradox’ refers to the fact that, although water is necessary to life and diamonds are not, we usually pay much more for diamonds. But a man dying of thirst in the desert will reverse the relative prices, and pay more for a glass of water than for a diamond.

The notion of marginal utility applies not only to goods, but also to labor:

Menger also used it to refute the view, popularized by David Ricardo and Karl Marx, that the value of goods derives from the value of labour used to produce them. Menger proved just the opposite: that the value of labour derives from the value of the goods it produces, which is why, for example, the best professional basketball players or most popular actors are paid so much.

Before Menger, much of ‘classical’ economics focused on impersonal concepts such as aggregate supply and aggregate demand, relative scarcity and relative abundance, and the cost of labor and material required to produce a given good.

The work of Carl Menger supersedes the thought of Ricardo, Marx, and even Adam Smith, first because it offers an insight into the ‘diamond-water paradox,’ but also because, as Joseph Salerno writes, it transforms economic thought by introducing, and focusing upon, the psychology of the individual buyer or seller.

This brings us to the question of value which so vexed, and ultimately defeated, the Classical economists. Because they were tragically unable to grasp that specific quantities and not entire classes of goods were the object of human action, the Classical economists dropped ‘use value’ from their analysis. But Menger, with his unblinking focus on individual action, easily recognized the profound significance of the concept of the marginal unit - the quantity of a good relevant to choice - for the whole of economic theory.

Marginal utility theory also explains how and why marginal price changes: usually downward - after paying for one slice of cake, I’m full and I’m likely to offer a lower price for the second or third slice. It is important to note cases in which the marginal price goes up: I’m likely to offer a higher price for 32 chess figures than for 31 of them. I’m likely to offer a much higher price for 52 playing cards than for 51 of them.

Carl Menger’s economic writings have played a major role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Berlin Conference: Avoiding War in Africa

In the late 1800s, various European nations were eager to explore Africa. To prevent these expeditions from getting out of control, a major international gathering was held in Berlin.

Many different countries sent representatives to this meeting. They made agreements so that the competition between the European nations remained moderate.

This ended the fear that rivalry between different groups of European settlers could turn into war. (Four centuries earlier, in 1494, an agreement between Spain and Portugal prevented war in South America, where both of those nations had settlers.)

Beyond preventing war, the Berlin Conference help establish some other regulations for Africa. The treaty which contained these agreements was called the “General Act” of the Berlin Conference. As historian Andrew Zimmerman writes,

The General Act guaranteed a free flow of commerce along the African coast and in the Congo and Niger Rivers and their tributaries. The signatories also vowed to fight slavery in Africa; “watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being”; guarantee “freedom of conscience and religious toleration” for foreigners and Africans alike; and protect “Christian missionaries, scientists and explorers.”

While the treaty avoided a war between the European nations, and ensured the welfare of the Africans, it created tensions with the Ottoman Empire. Egypt and the Sudan, along with other regions of northern and eastern Africa, were still part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottomans operated a thriving slave trade in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Although slavery had been eliminated in Europe and North America, it still existed in many areas in the Middle East.

The slave traders from the Ottoman Empire were concerned that the Europeans in Africa would prevent them from capturing Africans and sending them to be sold in the slave markets of Istanbul or Arabia. This led to frictions between Ottoman representatives and European governments.

The Berlin Conference: Fighting Slavery

What was the net effect of European colonization in Africa? Was this activity merely the expression of greed for power and greed for materials? That is the story often presented. Is there another side to this narrative?

The documentation of the Berlin Conference, at which the various European powers organized territory in Africa, offers a glimpse into a different set of motives.

The agreements made in Berlin committed the Europeans to reducing and eventually eliminating slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Although slavery had ended in the United States in 1863, it continued in Brazil until 1888, and in the Ottoman Empire, slaves were publicly bought and sold until 1908.

At the time of the Berlin Conference, then, slavery was still a very real problem in the world. As historian Andrew Zimmerman writes,

The European partition of Africa, given formal sanction at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885, is often treated as an expression of exuberant nationalism in which each nation, vying for what Germans would come to call a “place in the sun,” sought to outdo the others in sticking their flags in far-flung territories. In fact, it was an expression of exuberant humanitarianism, guaranteed by such state power as the signatories of the General Act of the Berlin Conference were willing to provide.

Not only did the Berlin Conference seek to end slavery and the slave trade in Africa, it worked also to promote religious freedom, and to preserve the native cultures of the tribes in its territories.

This led to increased tension and conflict with Muslim lands, because Saudi Arabia and Qatar were still importing African slaves well into the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia, along with Yemen, didn’t formally make slavery illegal until 1962. In Qatar, slavery is still legal, as recently as 2017.

After the Berlin Conference, in the early 1890s, caravans of slaves were still transported through Ethiopia on their way to the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, the signatories to the Berlin Conference were able to largely reduce, but not entirely eliminate, slavery and the slave trade in Africa.