ABSTRACT
William Robertson Smith noted long ago the close connection between sacrifice and clan membership, but it was Nancy Jay who outlined the various ways in which sacrifices establish and maintain patriarchal practices. As a ritual, animal sacrifice is "male child-birthing", to use Valeri's description of Hawaiian sacrifice. In Greek society, a newborn was admitted into a family by a sacrifice at the hearth; without it, the baby would be left to die or at least excluded from the family line. The violent deaths of Polyxena, sacrificed by Neoptolemus to appease the ghost of Achilles, and Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to Artemis to help the Greeks against Troy, might seem to prefigure the death of the martyr mother. The wish to live forever is often connected with an impulse toward death, one of the reasons afterlife traditions are accompanied by restrictions against suicide.
