Ethical understanding of the concept of voluntary sacrifice in old Georgia

Abstract

Voluntary sacrifice with the mechanism of "scapegoating" occupied one of the defining places in the ancient Georgian sacrificial system. The emergence of this concept already indicates a deep sacrificial crisis in the form of an ethical dilemma. The search for a way out of this crisis first shifted the center of gravity to the so-called enthusiastic victim, and simultaneously, or later, to animals, although not to all species, but to those categories of animals whose behavior could be seen as an expression of a "free will." Therefore, several practices and mechanisms were established through which the animal was "thankfully sacrificed," "willfully burned," etc. In the sacrificial practices of the later period, we see a vivid sacrificial crisis of another type, which is due to the deserialization-profanation process taking place in society in the wake of the development of rational-pragmatist thinking. Here, the pragmatic need comes before the feeling of the sacred, and the existential requirements exceed the ritual sacred. We can consider this process a manifestation of the transition from archaic thinking to modern.

oluntary sacrifice with the mechanism of "scapegoating" occupied one of the defining places in the ancient Georgian sacrificial system. The emergence of this concept already indicates a deep sacrificial crisis in the form of an ethical dilemma. The search for a way out of this crisis first shifted the center of gravity to the so-called enthusiastic victim, and simultaneously, or later, to animals, although not to all species, but to those categories of animals whose behavior could be seen as an expression of a "free will." Therefore, several practices and mechanisms were established through which the animal was "thankfully sacrificed," "willfully burned," etc. In the sacrificial practices of the later period, we see a vivid sacrificial crisis of another type, which is due to the deserialization-profanation process taking place in society in the wake of the development of rational-pragmatist thinking. Here, the pragmatic need comes before the feeling of the sacred, and the existential requirements exceed the ritual sacred. We can consider this process a manifestation of the transition from archaic thinking to modern.V