‘a ‘gift’ of what was most precious might have seemed to them a way to persuade their gods to behave kindly to them.’
did you ever wonder about the mentality of dieties that require blood sacrifice in order to procure sufficient worship from their creations...? for that matter, why would any omnipotent divinity, capable of total knowledge and limitless power, find it necessary to be worshiped in the first place...?
The victims of natural disasters have to blame something or someone...I imagine. Something or ‘someone’ with supernatural powers.
It wouldn’t be enough to sacrifice a bunch of old people or old animals; to persuade the ‘gods’ to be merciful, only the most precious and flawless, the most beautiful would prove their sincerity. The gods of wind, water, mountains and forests are picky.
Natural disasters and catastrophe’s leave long memories.
’ The astronomers and the geologists whose concern is all this .. should judge of the causes
which could effect the derangement of the day and could cover the earth with tenebrosity,’
wrote a clergyman who spent many years in Mexico and in the libraries of the Old World which
store ancient manuscripts of the Mayas and works of early Indian and Spanish authors about them.
[Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 1950].
http://www.spirasolaris.ca/wic.html