On Id-ul-Adha, the Moon, too, seems to have sacrificed some of Herself:

The festival is also called Bakrid, and this is not because the Bakri (Goat) is beingvenerated, it’s because it is going to be sacrificed…

I was musing on how the concept of sacrificing something to appease a Higher Power came about…

this

is what the Wiki had to say.

I wonder if the gentle, repressed people of today’s urban societies realize that the pumpkins that they smash into the roads after smearing them with vermilion….are a symbol of blood sacrifice? I listened to one elderly gentleman (“I am proud to be a Brahmin”) holding forth on the horror of blood sacrifice on Id. This gentleman was utterly horrified when I explained to him how he too was upholding the ritual of sacrifice in a symbolic way…and he refused to accept the idea.

However, the idea that yielding up one life (even one’s own) will result in a reward in this world, or the next…that still intrigues me a lot.

Oh well, a lot of lambs to the slaughter would not find my post interesting at all….