In Themiclesia, human sacrifice has been a part of history between about 2300 B.C. to 520 B.C., and prominently so between 2000 B.C. and 1600 B.C.; from then onto 520 B.C., when it was officially banned, it only occurred in marginal and minority states. There were two major occasions that call for human sacrifice: funerals, and ancestral commemoration.
In the former, from about 2300 B.C. the waxing royal power demanded progressively extravagant grave goods to satisfy the internal need, on the survivors' parts, to have outwardly done their best to "care for the dead, as though they were alive". It seems that originally victim could have been willing, when an inscription (fragmentary) read that the victim, "having felt the necessity to follow his owner/ forwards ran and fell into the coffin thereof/ and demanded to be shut in with him". Later on, this tradition continued so that hundreds would be "shut in" with the deceased monarch; this practises also spread to major and minor noble houses. It so proliferated that all slaveholders were expected to be accompanied in the afterlife by one quarter to one third of his total estate in slaves. In some isolated cases, the victims were decapitated at the site of the grave, but later on it seems all victims were simply thrown into the grave and buried therein.
In the latter, matters were quite complex as the strict decorum of ancestral worship varied from time to time. Generally speaking, the number of generations to be venerated by a lord varied with his status; the king was allowed to venerate up to 7 generations; greater lords 5, and subordinate lords 3. The day on which a specific ancestor died would be marked down, and sacrifices would be done to him on that day, annually. The physical sacrifice would be conducted at the site of the grave, or at the family shrine. The primary method is strangulation (as the body had to remain intact to make a useful servant when received by the ancestral spirit), but other methods have been known.
The precise number of victims depended on an oracle conducted before the event was to occur. Generally speaking, the oracle started with 1 victim. If this oracle was omenous, another would be done, for 2 victims, and hence 4, and 8, until the oracle returned auspicious. The highest number ever reached was 36656, but it is certain that this was never carried out. To finance these victims, each state eagerly conquered neighbouring cultures, which were less developed than the states. This tradition damaged the demographics of New Odessa permanently, as it resulted in a largely wiped out competing cultures, who may eventually prove a threat to Themiclesia, whose culture is inherently against force. Questions have arisen as to why were there no "barbarian tribes" in the peripheral area, and the answer is that they have all been destroyed. The lack of competing cultures brought for Themiclesia her second golden age, between 1500 and 600 B.C.
Ultimately, human sacrifice is just one element in the mystic ancestral cult of Themiclesia, but an expendable one. It arose to satisfy an ideological requirement (filial piety), and it also diminished due to ideological change. Philosophers argued that ancestral spirits were already in a perfect world in the after life, and hence there is no need for slaves, either at the point of funeral, or later on.
