"What is it with you moderns and human sacrifice, anyway?"

That question threw me, coming from him. "What brought that up?"

"Wherever a god shows up in fiction, human sacrifice is right behind." He tossed a book on the kitchen table, nearly knocking over my glass of iced tea. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. "Like that. The Wicker Man. A hundred others. Why is that, Jacob?" He was trying hard to look annoyed, but his blue-grey eyes twinkled. He wanted to play.

What the hell? I didn't have to work tomorrow, and it's not like I had a date or anything. I pulled a chair out from the kitchen table, turned it around and sat down. I leaned my elbows on the back of the chair. "You have to admit that human sacrifice happened. I mean, there's the Celts, the Norse, the Egyptians--and of course the Aztecs."

"True." He flicked an unruly lock of curly, auburn hair out of his face. I still have trouble with the red hair--goes against the Mediterranean stereotype. "But that's not many cultures in the grand scheme of things. Why do you assume they were the norm?"

"Isn't all religion originally based on human sacrifice? Sir James George Frazer and Robert Graves seemed to think so."

"Graves!" he snorted derisively. "He thinks I'm a road sign with a hard-on."

I bit my tongue before I said, "Well, aren't you?" I'm not entirely sure whether he knew what I was thinking. If he did, he chose to ignore me.

"What's their evidence?"

"Folk rituals," I answered with a shrug. "Dolls and such burned in effigy were substitutes for an original human sacrifice."

"Really?" His mouth twitched a little; he was losing control of the usually irrepressible grin. "Tell me, Jacob, have you ever seen a young child with a doll?"

"Once or twice."

"And could those children tell the difference between the doll and a real person?"

"Generally, yeah, they could."

"So you expect me to believe that a modern child understands metaphor and symbolism better than an ancient adult?"

I had to let him have that one; I was kind of embarrassed that I didn't see it coming. "There's one theory that says myths about humans dying are remnants of human sacrifice rituals."

"For example?"

"Adonis, Hyacinthos, Pallas, Attis, Orion...all companions of deities who happened to get killed. Not difficult to postulate that they were people who were killed for the gods."

"So you're saying those myths have some grain of truth? That there really were people named Adonis and Hyacinthos who were killed at a young age?"

Hell, he would know that better than me, wouldn't he? "Sure. Why not?"

"Then why stop at half the story? If you're going to believe any of it, why not go all the way and believe Hyacinthos was a good-looking young guy my brother took a liking to?"

He waited while I thought that one over, bouncing his right knee against the table leg; my iced tea glass walked over towards the edge. He caught the glass just before it did an impression of a lemming and put it back in front of me. "Well? Figured out where to draw the line, yet?"

"No. I'm a little rusty on my mythography right now. But you do have to admit, whenever one of you guys starts hanging around, mortals die"

"Doesn't that frighten you, Jacob?"

I paused long enough to swallow my mouthful of tea. "It used to. The first time you said you liked me, I stayed up all night reading everything ever written about you--myths, plays, poetry. I didn't find anyone who ever died for you."

"True. I've never been as passionate as the others. Too much work."

"Still...on the whole, there's a lot of dead bodies."

"You're right. Maybe that's one reason we stopped hanging around so much..." A rueful, musing expression settled onto his face, realized it didn't belong there, and fleeted away. "So. Do you still want to argue that human sacrifice was widespread?"

"Not right now. I'll have to do more research first."

"All right." He settled back into his chair. "It doesn't matter, anyway. Even if every culture performed human sacrifice, the gods never demanded it."

Now, I knew full well my part in this little drama consisted of "Why, yes, Socrates!" and "Of course, Socrates--how could it be otherwise?" Too bad I've never been good with scripts. "That is total bullshit. Artemis held the Greek fleet at bay and demanded that Agammemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia before she'd let them sail for Troy."

"Did she?"

"All the sources say so."

"And do they say whether Iphigeneia was actually sacrificed?"

"Well, most say that Artemis spirited her away to Taurus."

"Why would she do that, I mean, after she demanded the girl be sacrificed?"

"No idea. I don't claim to understand your family."

"Who does?" He leaned back and put his feet up on my kitchen table. His sneakers bore Nike's "swoosh" trademark--terribly funny, considering the swoosh was a stylized wing. "Still, if she spirited the girl away, she probably didn't actually want her dead, right?"

"Then why ask for the sacrifice?"

"I think you've read the Iliad, Jacob."

"Seven times. Three in Greek."

"Then you should be able to tell me what side Artemis fought on?"

"Troy's."

"So would you say she had another reason for wanting the Greek fleet not to sail?"

"Well, yes--wait a minute. You're saying she demanded Iphigeneia as a deterrent? That she never expected Agamemnon to go through with it?"

"If that were true, it certainly would explain the whole 'spiriting away' thing, wouldn't it?"

Once again I had to wonder whether he ever actually answered any questions straight or if he just did this crap to me. I figured I'd try a pantheon shift. "Okay, then, what about Abraham and Isaac? Genesis 23."

"You mean Genesis 22:2. 'And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon the mountain.'"

"Yeah. That." The irony of him quoting Genesis better than a guy named "Jacob" was not lost on me. Based on the grin on his face, it wasn't lost on him either.

"Was Isaac sacrificed? Or did he somehow manage to survive long enough to sire your namesake?"

"You know damn well Yahweh restrained Abraham at the last minute."

"So? Why demand the sacrifice and then save the kid in the end?"

"If I'm remembering right, it was a test." I started going through other examples, ones where the person actually died. "Hm...the ghost of Achilles demanded that Polywhassername--one of Priam's daughters--be sacrificed at his grave."

He chuckled. "The ghost demanded a sacrifice at his grave. Jacob, surely you're not claiming Achilles was one of the athanatoi?"

"No, he wasn't an immortal."

"So you call that a god demanding human sacrifice? I call it a pissed-off mortal demanding revenge from beyond the grave."

"Okay--Pentheus and Lycurgus. Dionysus had his Maenads tear them to pieces. Sounds like demanding human sacrifice to me."

"Only to a careless reader."

"'Careless', huh?" I gave him the bird. He cocked an eyebrow at me, and my middle finger curled back down. "Sorry."

"And isn't that exactly what got Pentheus and Lycurgus ripped apart in the Bacchae?"

"I don't recall them flipping off Dionysus."

"Did they show any respect for his divinity?"

I had to take another drink of tea to keep from snickering. "Divinity" always sounds like fudge to me. "Godhead" isn't any better, but it would be more appropriate for a phallic guy like Dionysus.... "Um...no, they didn't believe he was a god."

"Did they discourage or interfere in his worship?"

"That's an understatement. They tried to drag his Maenads back home, kicking and screaming."

"So...what do you think was Dionysus' motive for wanting their deaths? Sacrifice? Or anger?"

I was starting to see his pattern. "So if I give you any examples of gods demanding human sacrifice, you'll just argue that it's for some ulterior motive?"

"I can do better than that. I can convince you that, not only did the gods never demand human sacrifice, they actually find it pretty disgusting."

"Really."

He stretched his arms, then laced his fingers behind his head. "Let's go back to your good friend Frazer." He ignored my crinkled nose. "Doesn't he say that these effigies were substitutes for human sacrifice?

"He makes that argument, yes."

"Why does he think people offer sacrifices?"

"Make the crops grow, make the rains come, have lots of babies, keep plague and predators away--same old, same old."

His lower lip curled out, and he sniffed indignantly. "You forgot safety while traveling."

"Well, of course, safety while traveling. That and flower delivery." He scowled at me for that one, but at least he stopped pouting. "You had a point?"

"When people stopped offering human sacrifices and started offering substitutes, did all the crops stop growing? Babies stop being born?"

"Apparently not."

"I can think of three possible explanations. One. The gods don't really exist. Two. The gods exist, but they are too dumb to tell the difference between a person and a sheaf of wheat. Three. The gods never really wanted human sacrifice in the first place. Which do you think is most likely?"

"Hrm....Well, Frazer obviously supported theory number one. But if I go with that one, I probably ought to check into a mental institution for hallucinations. Choosing number two is the moral equivalent of putting a 'smite me' sign on my back." I shrugged. "Guess that leaves me with number three."

He licked his finger and drew a hash mark in the air. The air crackled as a blue streak appeared behind his finger and hovered in midair beside his head. The faint scent of ozone suggested he'd been playing with his daddy's toys again. "Do you know the story of Tantalus?"

"Tantalus...oh, right. He's the guy in Tartaros, doomed to spend eternity always hungry and thirsty, with water up to his chin and fruit just out of reach. He's the source of the word tantalize."

"Do you remember why?"

I was pretty sure that "Just 'cause" was the wrong answer. "Hang on." I got up and went to the living room. My Oxford Companion to Classical Literature was right were it belonged, eight books from the bottom in stack number four. I fished it out without knocking over the stack (practice makes perfect) and brought it back to the kitchen.

I turned my chair around the right way and flipped to the Ts as I sat down. He sighed audibly; "patient" was not one of his epithets. "Here it is. Tantalus was punished because he killed his son Pelops and served him to the gods for dinner."

He nodded while I took another drink. "And do you think he was damned for eternity because he served the kid with Chardonnay instead of Chianti?"

He's been trolling for a spit take ever since I met him; he actually almost got it that time. Nothing like sweet tea up your nose... "N-no," I coughed. "I guess not."

A second mark went up next to the first one. "Jacob, what's the definition of sacrifice?"

"Offering something to a deity in propitiation or homage."

"Do gods always accept offered sacrifices?"

"Well, most religions have some kind of divination to discover if the sacrifice was accepted, so I'd have to say, no, gods don't accept every sacrifice."

"So what makes a sacrifice acceptable?"

"Hell, you tell me." The disappointment was clear on his face. I had this strange feeling I should be trying harder. "Well...in most mythos, the gods predate humankind...and you guys have done okay without any sacrifices for a few thousand years...so we can probably assume the gods don't really need anything from us..."

He relaxed a little, and I felt less stupid. "So if the sacrifice isn't really for the gods," I continued, "then it should probably be something valuable to the giver."

"Would it be okay to sacrifice something that didn't belong to you?"

I put on my best too-many-years-at-Dickens-Fest accent. "I say, that would be dashed unethical, wot?" He blinked at me, his brow knit, his eyebrows raised. I actually confused him! "I mean, no, I don't think that would be okay."

He blinked at me for a moment longer before he continued. "And whose life, ultimately, belongs to you?"

"Well, we don't have slavery anymore...women are actually considered people now--children, too...." I shrugged. "Your own, I guess."

He traced a third mark in the air beside the other two. All three marks swirled into a circle, spun for a few moments, then faded. "So, if the main point of a sacrifice is to give something of yourself, and the only life you can ever really possess is your own--"

"--then self-sacrifice becomes the only circumstance where human sacrifice would be acceptable."

He nodded his approval; I felt more intelligent, more insightful, somehow. "One final question, Jacob, just to tie this back to an earlier discussion: what would you call the act of self sacrifice for a higher cause?"

"That's easy--heroism."

"And we've always been in favor of that. Jacob, what's wrong?"

"Huh?" I hadn't realized I drifted off. "I...uh...well, all this talk about self sacrifice has me a little...um...nervous."

He cocked his head at me. "Really?"

"Well, considering some of the results of previous conversations, ending on the topic of self-sacrifice seems a bit...ominous..."

His laughter was oddly pleasing and mocking at the same time. "Relax, Jacob. We all know you're not a hero. Neither was Homer." He kicked his chair back and stood. His normal expression--that playful, "who gives a damn" grin--fell into place. The game was over. "It's been fun, Jacob, as always, but I have to get back to work."

He had already vanished before I opened my mouth to say good bye. I wasn't surprised--he'd always been a quick one.

The End

Bio

"I've been writing stories for as long as I can remember. Finally, with the support of my wonderful husband Tony and the help of Apollon and Hermes, these stories are getting out of my brain and into the world. I hope you enjoy it!"