Recently, someone I knew was struggling, and I was trying to support him. Apart from real acts of help, I was making a point of thinking of the person and actively wishing him well. Praying, one might say. My girlfriend suggested that during this time, I could give up alcohol. Because it was something that I enjoyed, she said, I could forgo it in support of my prayers. I didn’t understand at first, because I couldn’t see any connection between the two. I understood sacrifice to be a matter of effective deprivation. Essentially, you give up or refrain from one thing in the present in return for something greater in the future, and there is a causal connection between the sacrifice and the result. In this sense, it would have made sense to forgo drinking in order to improve my own health, but not so much to support someone else.

Many cultures practised sacrifice and performed sacrificial rituals. In these rituals, food, animals, or even people would be left or slaughtered at temples. These acts were often framed as offerings to gods, intended to please or mollify these higher spirits. Taken at face value, the rituals were thus occasions on which humans transacted with spiritual beings. The spiritual beings were thought to have control over the natural world, and crops and animals were the tribute that they exacted as payment for the favourable exercise of this control. In the spirit of effective deprivation, the sacrifice might be made to cause the gods to prevent a natural disaster or to bring about victory in war. Without this metaphysical context, the sacrifices would otherwise seem to constitute acts of senseless waste.

Yet they could also be viewed as rituals with primarily an internal, psychological import for the people making them. In this sense, the sacrifice is purely a gesture, without any real or intended causal impact on the world. It is a symbolic act that represents an intention. Talk is proverbially cheap, and the same could be said for intentions and hopes. They are themselves by nature easy and ephemeral. They have to be captured or manifested in some way to become serious. We speak of “setting” intentions. On a literal level, the mental image is one of placing or standing up the intention. If so, there must be something – a base or foundation – on or in which to set the intention. It doesn’t stand on its own. Sacrifice can be that foundation. It can ground the intention and stabilize it. Irrespective of its form and tangible casual effect, the sacrifice can thus serve the intention. By virtue of its inherent hardship, it strengthens fleeting or unserious hopes and intentions and motivates the person in bringing out their realization. Sacrifice is the foundation in which you set an intention.