“The sacrifice of animals on pagan altars, as with sacrificial ceremonies which sometimes involved human beings, was the result of their ignorance of the fundamental principle underlying sacrifice. They did not realize that their offerings must come from their own inner nature for it to be acceptable.”
Manly P Hall
One of the mysteries of initiation: the sacrifice of our lower nature in order to separate ourselves from it.
The symbolism of animal sacrifice and its profound implications; the creatures are substitutes for a sacrifice which is not one in view of the negligible loss compared to the gains. The initiation is the sacrifice of the lower human part through spiritual fission.
Animal sacrifice as such is an offering, the blood of the animal falls into the depths of the earth while its spirit rises and feeds the Gods. When cooking, the flames rise, and the charred remains descend. The sacrifice of an animal is on a human symbolic level a fission, a separation.
The animal represents the lower nature of man which must be buried, or more precisely placed in the infernal hordes of the lower worlds. While the initiated spirit rises on the ladder of perfection. This symbolic death concerns only the lower part, the body and the blood, returned to the lower world. The higher world carries the spirit into a higher plane, into the perfections of initiation.
Sacrifice is therefore the symbol of our rejected part, our shadow part from which we separate ourselves and push back down, which is the immediate consequence of initiation.