It might be expecting a little too much from the reporter who penned this linked-to article (see source link below) for him/her to have gone into depth on the subject, but I do wish he or she had done a little more research. I reckon it’s a case of, if you want something done right, you’ve gotta do it yourself. Allow me, then, to elucidate. Mt. Lykaion in Greece was NOT originally a place of sacrifice to Zeus, the “chief of the Greek gods,” although in time worship of Zeus did absorb and replace the original, darker practices there. Discovered amidst the bones of animals used in sacrifices was a human skeleton dating back over three thousand years, the remains of a teenager who was killed as an offering not to Zeus but to some older, bloodier deity.
The myth of Lycaon, from which we get the word “Lycanthropy,” can be seen as a metaphor for the transition from human sacrifice as a common practice amongst the ancient Greeks of the region to a more modern, less savage means of worship. In the story, King Lycaon offers up human flesh to Zeus and is cursed for it, turned into a wolf. Reading between the lines we can glean that the lord of Olympus thus finding such sacrifice repugnant reflected the changing belief system of the peoples doing the sacrificing. The find of the skeleton proves that the myths are factual, and that human sacrifice was practiced on the mountain in the dim and haunted past.
