“Blood and Symbols” is an overview of the tradition of human sacrifice, whose roots go back to ancient times, while numerous echoes in the form of various bloodless rites have survived to this day. Those who want to tickle their nerves with bloody scenes, the authors immediately warn, that they tried to keep descriptions of cruelty to a minimum. And besides, sacrifices were not always bloody. In many religions, for example, there are traditions in which living people are dedicated to the gods—people who then continued living and thriving, only as “property” or a “spouse” of the deity. The authors’ goal was to show the connection between human sacrifice and the spiritual and cultural development of human communities; to trace how, over thousands of years, humanity slowly but steadily moved along the path of replacing bloody rituals with spiritual ones. And how, finally, it was the very failed human sacrifice—Abraham’s slaughter of his son Isaac—that became the foundation of three great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.