Something extraordinary happens in the centuries leading to modernity: a civilization becomes conscious of its own sacrificial foundation and decides to reject it. This is not gradual cultural drift. This is deliberate, systematic, vehement opposition.
The Enlightenment philosophers attack sacrifice as barbarism. Monotheistic reformers declare the killing of humans an abomination. Ethical movements organize specifically to eliminate ritual slaughter. The French Revolution kills the priest who performs sacrifice. Scientific rationalism dismisses sacrifice as superstition masquerading as cosmic necessity.
But here is what Gigerenzer emphasizes: this fight is real. The opposition is not to something dead or vestigial. It is to something still happening, still powerful, still central to how civilization maintains itself. Sacrifice is still being performed during the Enlightenment. The fight is vehement because the soul's need is real, and the refusal requires genuine force.
This is a second-order killing: the civilization killing its own principle. And like all killings, it requires energy, determination, repeated assertion. You cannot kill something that is not alive.
Gigerenzer makes a crucial distinction: the rejection of sacrifice was not external compulsion. It was the soul's own demand. Something in consciousness itself called for the end of ritual killing.
This is not judgment of sacrifice as morally wrong—though that judgment emerges alongside the psychological need. The deeper movement is: consciousness itself was developing in a direction that required the end of sacrifice. The soul was ready to move beyond the archaic form.
But—and this is where the tragedy emerges—the consciousness that was developing did not know how to complete what it was beginning. It rejected the archaic form without finding a new container for the sacrificial necessity. It killed sacrifice but not the need for sacrifice.
Gigerenzer: "Modernity performed the second-order killing before it had developed the consciousness to survive that killing."1
The result: the rejection is incomplete. It is repression, not resolution. The civilization says no to sacrifice and then spends the next 300 years not knowing what to do with the soul's uncontained need.
The refusal took multiple philosophical forms, each attacking sacrifice from a different angle:
Enlightenment rationalism: Sacrifice is superstition. There is no cosmic necessity. The universe runs on natural laws, not on blood rituals. Therefore sacrifice is not only unnecessary but positively harmful—it redirects energy from productive work to useless ritual.
Monotheistic ethics: Sacrifice violates the sanctity of human life. A God of infinite justice and mercy would not demand the killing of innocents. Therefore sacrifice is not just archaic but contrary to the divine will itself. The move from child-sacrifice to the God who values the child supremely (Christianity's move) is presented as ethical evolution.
Moral philosophy: Sacrifice treats humans as objects to be destroyed for cosmic purposes. Enlightened ethics posits the dignity and autonomy of every person. Therefore sacrifice is fundamentally incompatible with a morality based on respect for persons.
Each of these frameworks finds real insight. But none of them addresses the underlying principle: if sacrifice is ontologically necessary (if the cosmos truly requires the killing to maintain differentiation), then these ethical and rational arguments do not eliminate the need. They only deny it.
Gigerenzer's critique: "Modernity rejected sacrifice on rational and ethical grounds but did not reckon with the soul's structural need for the killing. The result: the need remains, but now without conscious form."1
The civilizational cost of this incomplete rejection is severe. The soul's need for sacrifice does not vanish because consciousness decides it should. It represses. It goes underground. It manifests in distorted, uncontrolled forms.
Modernity is therefore defined by an unresolved tension: we have killed sacrifice (rejected it, criminalized it, declared it taboo), but we have not killed the need for sacrifice. We have only repressed the need into the unconscious, where it erupts as violence without form, meaning, or container.
The modern civilization becomes defined by what it killed—by the perpetual rejection, the continual reassertion that "we will not do this anymore." But this reassertion requires constant energy because the need keeps trying to emerge. We are a civilization built on the repression of its own foundation.
Gigerenzer: "Modernity's entire psychological structure is organized around the denial of what it killed. We cannot move forward because we are locked in the second-order killing, continually fighting the archaic consciousness that modernity itself produced."1
For contemporary psychology, this has radical implications. If the shadow—the repressed, the denied, the incompatible with ego-consciousness—includes the sacrificial consciousness itself, then shadow work means encountering the archaic.
This is not encountering the shadow in the individual psyche (childhood trauma, repressed sexuality, disowned aggression). This is encountering the shadow in the civilization, in the culture, in the inherited psychological structures. The sacrifice that modernity killed.
Genuine shadow work—the kind Gigerenzer calls for—would require:
This is not approval of ritual killing. It is recognition that until consciousness can consciously encounter and transform the sacrificial principle, it will continue erupting as unconscious violence.
Gigerenzer vs. Enlightenment Philosophy (Kant, Descartes, Locke) — Reason vs. Necessity: Enlightenment philosophers reject sacrifice as irrational, contrary to the light of reason. Gigerenzer agrees sacrifice cannot be justified rationally—but argues this is because sacrifice is not a rational operation. It is a cosmological necessity that reason cannot contain. Enlightenment assumes that reason is the highest court of appeal; whatever cannot be rationally justified should be rejected. Gigerenzer assumes that being has necessities that exceed reason's capacity to judge them. The convergence: both systems reject sacrifice as archaic. The divergence: Enlightenment rejects it as unnecessary; Gigerenzer rejects rational rejection as insufficient. Enlightenment assumes reason can guide civilization; Gigerenzer suggests reason is itself a product of the consciousness-formation that sacrifice enables.
Gigerenzer vs. Historical Materialism (Marx, Engels) — Base vs. Soul: Historical materialism traces social forms to economic structures and material conditions. Sacrifice, for Marxists, serves economic functions (maintaining hierarchy, enabling control of labor). Gigerenzer places sacrifice at a deeper level: it is not epiphenomenal to economic conditions. It is the condition for consciousness-formation itself. Marxism assumes that once you change the material base, consciousness will follow. Gigerenzer suggests consciousness is constituted through sacrifice; changing material conditions without addressing sacrificial necessity leaves the soul unresolved. Both systems recognize something fundamental is at stake in sacrifice. But Marxism treats it as social mechanism; Gigerenzer treats it as soul-operation.
Gigerenzer vs. Post-Structuralism (Derrida, Foucault) — Deconstruction vs. Necessity: Post-structuralism deconstructs the power structures that sacrifice enforces, showing how sacrifice perpetuates hierarchy and control. This critique is real. But Gigerenzer suggests post-structuralism, in deconstructing sacrifice, assumes it can be simply eliminated through critical consciousness. It treats sacrifice as ideological mystification rather than as cosmological necessity. Both systems agree that modernity's relation to sacrifice is problematic. But post-structuralism suggests the problem can be deconstructed away; Gigerenzer suggests the problem is structural to being itself.
The second-order killing cannot be understood through psychology or history alone.
Historically, we can trace the movements, the arguments, the philosophical positions that led to the rejection of sacrifice. We can document the centuries-long fight. But history cannot explain why, after sacrifice was abolished, violence increased in its pathological forms. History describes the fact but not the mechanism.
Psychology explains the mechanism: repression. The need was not eliminated, only denied. But psychology of the individual does not explain how this plays out across a civilization, how it shapes institutions, how it becomes the organizing principle of modernity itself.
The handshake: The rejection of sacrifice is both a historical event and a psychological mechanism. Understanding modern violence, modern meaninglessness, modern psychological neurosis requires recognizing that modernity is built on the repression of its own foundational principle. The history tells you what happened; psychology tells you why it continues to haunt us.
If Gigerenzer is right, then modernity's entire ethical project—the fight against violence, the dream of a non-violent world, the hope that enlightenment would bring peace—is built on a fundamental misunderstanding. We cannot eliminate violence by denying necessity. We can only transform it into pathology.
This means every progressive movement that promises to end violence, every therapy that promises to heal aggression, every ethics that promises peace—all are performing the second-order killing again. All are denying the soul's structural need, not resolving it.
A true ethics would not aim to eliminate violence but to ritualize it, contain it, make it conscious. But modernity's entire ethical framework makes this impossible.
If the rejection of sacrifice was the soul's own need, what was the consciousness trying to become? What development was modernity attempting when it turned against its own foundation?
Gigerenzer states that modernity has not yet developed the consciousness to survive the killing of sacrifice. What would that consciousness look like? What would need to happen for the rejection to be complete rather than repressed?
If shadow work requires encountering the sacrificial consciousness that modernity repressed, how would that work in contemporary psychology? What would it mean to consciously engage with the archaic principle?