How Ideas Behave 1: Tales of Blood

Your enemies eat babies.

In the first and second centuries, a mysterious and violent religious cult terroized the citizens of Rome.  The cult, a peculiar mix of Jewish, Greek, and possibly Persian influences, arose in a backwater province known for religious zealotry and political rebellion. And it was increasingly infiltrating the city itself, especially among the middle class.

The cult was frightening because of its secretive ways, and because its followers were fanatical to point of suicide. But most troubling of all were reports of the cult’s secret rites. Bad enough were the rituals involving indiscriminate sex between all cult members, including close relatives.  But worst of all, some rituals involved human sacrifice, including the killing of infants and children.  Indeed, killing babies was how new members were initiated into the cult.

The initiation was deviously clever. Unknown to the new recruit, the other cult members had encased an infant in dough. During the initiation ceremony the group’s leaders would tell the naïve recruit to smash the dough with a hammer. Only when the blood came gushing out would the new member realize what he had truly done. As the infant blood flowed the other other cult members would lap it up like hungry jackals before removing the the baby from the dough and dismembering the remains  Then they’d turn to the horrified recruit and proclaim that he or she was bound to them by guilt, and must never speak to an outsider about what they had done.

The spread of such practices shocked the public, and so naturally the Roman citizens demanded the authorities do something. The Roman establishment, understandably, made efforts to wipe out this deadly cult. The cult, you might already know, was called Christianity, and it was sporadically persecuted for the next two hundred years.