Christmas celebrates the defining event of our civilisation The
idea of sacrifice, of propitiation, seems to be innate in
humanity. Even the most rational people, at times of stress, can
find themselves half-bargaining with unnamed powers: let my
child recover and I'll do such-and-such. Religion is, in some
ways, a collective expression of such instincts, and physical
sacrifice, by a process of parallel evolution, became central to
sacramental practice on every continent. At the end of the
nineteenth century, James Frazer outraged some Christians by
publishing The Golden Bough, a study of king-sacrifice which
established links between pagan and Christian practice. Across
Europe and the Levant, we find precursors of at least one part
of the Christian message: the notion that a ritual death might
secure a collective redemption. C.S. Lewis who, after his
conversion to Christianity, retained his fascination with
paganism, had a typically poetic explanation for these
similarities. God, he wrote, had been sending t