The Highest Alter, the story of Human Sacrifice by Patrick Tierney

The Highest Alter, the story of Human Sacrifice by Patrick Tierney

The words "human sacrifice" usually conjure up images of Abraham and Isaac, or of ancient pagan rituals long since abandoned. But human sacrifice is not just a thing of the past: in parts of South America it continues to take place even today.

In 1983 Patrick Tierney went to Peru on a magazine assignment to investigate an autopsy that had just been performed on an extremely well preserved mummy - the 500-year-old remains of an Incan boy, discovered thirty years earlier on a remote peak in the Andes. The cause of death, the paleopathologist concluded, was neither disease nor illness: the boy had been the victim of human sacrifice.

This discovery, confirmed by sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of the Incas' religious practices, prompted Tierney to begin his own investigation, which led to the even more startling revelation that human sacrifice was - and is - still being practised in remote areas of Chile and the Peruvian Andes. In The Highest Altar Tierney describes how he followed the leads he had uncovered, tracking down specific incidents and trying to understand the complex social and political motives of the shamans, yatiris and brujos who still perform the ancient ritual of sacrifice.

The Highest Altar is the first book to illuminate the significance of human sacrifice in man's social and religious development. Anthropologists and archaeologists are only now beginning to recognize that the "ritual power to kill" stands at the heart of many ancient societies and of much of our own cultural heritage: it is the mystery that unlocks the enduring enigma of Stonehenge, the complicated chain of high-altitude Incan shrines, Abraham's thwarted sacrifice of Isaac and even the crucifixion of Christ. Human sacrifice is a fundamental part of our past - and a haunting, little-explored element of our present.

Details

• Hardcover with dust jacket
• Condition: Very good, dust jacket has only very light signs of use on the top, no notes/stamps 
• ISBN: 9780747504986
• Publishing House: Bloomsbury