Free Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

least for important occasions. King Agamemnon, leader of the Trojan War expeditionary forces, sacrifices his daughter, as the Old Testament military leader Jephthah sacrifices his: what both of them get in return is victory. Joshua, after his conquests of Canaanite cities, slaughtered all the captives and also their animals as an offering to God, just as Elijah slaughters the 450 priests of Baal. The first-born of any species, including the human species, was thought to belong to God in any case — thus Abraham’s lack of surprise when God tells him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. The introduction of animal substitution for human victims is said to be illustrated by this story, as in the event it’s a ram rather than a child that gets its throat slit. However, human sacrifice — mostly of children — was a widespread practice in the ancient world; and these were substitution sacrifices, redeeming the debts you owed or paying the gods for favours. Instead of yourself, you offered up a suitable bit of your property — a bull, a dove, a child, a slave — muttering all the while some version of “Do it to Julia.”
    Happily, by the time of the Book of Numbers, money equivalents could be offered instead. Think of that the next time you drop your envelope into the collection plate at church. That twenty-dollar bill is a substitute for your getting your throat cut, and cheap at the price.
    WHICH BRINGS US to the Christian religion. Christ is called the Redeemer, a term drawn directly from the language of debt and pawning or pledging, and thus also from that of substitute sacrifice. In fact, the whole theology of Christianity rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them, and how you might get out of paying by having someone else pay instead. And it rests, too, on a long pre-Christian history of scapegoat figures — including human sacrifices — who take your sins away for you.
    Here’s the condensed version, and I apologize if through having squashed it into so short a form I don’t do it full justice:
    God gave Man life and was therefore owed a debt of absolute gratitude and obedience. Man, however, did not repay this debt as he should have done, but reneged on it through an act of disobedience. In this way he put himself and his descendants permanently in hock — for, as we know if we’ve ever dealt with wills, a person’s debts devolve on the heirs and assigns of the debtor. As regards the built-in debt of sin, the creditor is sometimes thought to be Death, sometimes the Devil: this entity collects either (a) your life or (b) your soul — or both — as payment for the debt you yourself still owe due to your rascally distant ancestor.
    The debt load of sin you’ve inherited from Adam — “Original Sin,” as it’s known — which has been added to through your own probably not very original sins — can never be repaid by you, because the sum total is too large. So unless someone steps forward on your behalf, your soul will become (a) extinct or (b) a slave of the Devil in Hell, to be disposed of in some unpleasant way. Various of these ways are described by Dante, where Hell is ruled over by a really horrible version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, ingeniously bent on making the punishment fit the crime. If that’s too medieval for you, a shorter rendition can be had in the sermon on Hell incorporated into James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
    During their lifetimes, all souls not in a state of grace or actually sold to the Devil fully and finally are believed to be in an intermediate condition: in peril, but not fully damned as yet. Christ is thought to have redeemed all souls, in theory at least, by having acted as a cosmic Sin Eater — he took everyone else’s sins upon himself at the Crucifixion, where, with Geshtinanna-like selflessness, he offered himself up as the substitute human sacrifice to end all substitute human sacrifices — thereby