Hey there @witchin-bitchin-twopointoh I’m a real live Olorisha here. That means I’m an initiated priest in an Afro-Diasporic religion called Lukumi (or Santeria). You are perpetuating a lot of really bizarre ideas about Afro-Diasporic religions in your response to my post and I’m going to do you a favour by correcting you.
Animal sacrifice doesn’t happen “for no reason.” In Afro-Diasporic religions, animal sacrifice happens for very specific reasons: to feed the deities and the community, in order to heal people. Our deities eat just like people eat: they eat meat, vegetables, fruits, grains. We also give them cloth, beadwork, and money. All the things people get. We do this to show our gratitude and ask for their blessings. And we do it to heal. Our deities eat meat - much like humans, they require it to survive. This is not optional. None of our initiations or major ceremonies can happen without animal sacrifice. Again, not an option. It is an integral part of our rituals.
The meat is, in general, then cooked and used to feed the community. Afro-Diasporic communities are often low-income, and meat is expensive - sometimes prohibitively so. We give the deities the parts of the animals that are not eaten (ie, blood), and then cook the consumable meat and feed the entire community with it. Even in places where we don’t need this food distribution plan, I have seen people go out of their way to give the meat to poor and needy families.
“A lot of chickens” is a wild overstatement. Let’s do some math. Say you eat meat in three meals a day, and let’s say you’re really busy so you have to go buy that meat already prepared from fast food places or restaurants. That means three different chickens (for the sake of this example we’ll assume you’re only eating chickens) were used to feed you for one day. There are 365 days a year, so if you continued eating like this that is a total of 1095 chickens per year who are killed just for you, personally. How often do we feed Orisha or Nganga? Let’s say the priest is not initiating anyone but just working for themselves. That’ll mean that maybe once every three months we might give one chicken. That totals four chickens a year. Four chickens is not a lot compared to your yearly consumption of 1095 chickens, is it?
Afro-Diasporic religions are not Pagan, they are not part of your idea of witchcraft or Wicca or Western occultism. When Azealia Banks says “witch” what she means is “bruja” and in this context that means Palera. This is an entirely different thing from Paganism. What we do in Afro-Diasporic religions is absolutely none of your business and you have no right to tell us what to do.
Azealia Banks is a very complicated and problematic person. But she is a legit Palera and Aborisha. She did not start performing animal sacrifice for “shock value,” she does it because it is a requirement of the religion.
Your problem is that you do not see where your own meat comes from. We live in a culture largely divorced from farming, and the meat we consume (not me, outside of the religion I am a vegetarian actually) comes to us already prepared. As a result, many people who eat meat take a hypocritical stance towards the slaughter that leads to the meat they eat because they are not used to having to kill their own meat in order to eat it. This is the essence of First World Privilege. If you plan on continuing to eat meat, I would highly recommend going to a farm to learn how to kill and prepare your own meat. Not saying you should do this every day, just that learning how to do it will change your relationship to that meat and to nature in general.
We use humane methods to slaughter animals (beheading), and we ensure that the animals are respected before they are slaughtered. This means we buy from small farms where animals have actually had a chance to live (ie, free-range). Factory farms that produce the meat you eat daily torture animals in numerous way (electroshock, boiling to death, nailgun killing, skinning while alive, etc.). You are engaged in the daily torture of thousands of animals a year when you eat meat - and you’re going to say that when Afro-Diasporic religions treat animals respectfully and kill them humanely that we’re the problem? Get a clue.
Furthermore, animal sacrifice happens in nearly every religion. Christmas Dinner, for example? That is a religious animal sacrifice - usually of turkey or ham - which is, in religious households, prayed over before eaten. Halal meat? Sacrificed. Kosher meat? Sacrificed. Getting upset only about African religions sacrificing animals is straight up anti-Black racism.
