I second the Hamlet citation; it's certainly what leaped out at me.
Tangential to the sacrifice topic: I came up with a notion for a magic system years ago (and never did anything with it), based around the notion of Conservation of Uncertainty. You can make unlikely (or at least uncertain) things guaranteed to happen, but only by trading off *increased* uncertainty somewhere else. If you want to do a very large magical working, say to ensure a good harvest or a nation's success in war, you need an equally large vector of uncertainty -- the traditional implementation of which would be to put the King into a situation where he had a 50% chance of dying. As Kings grew in political power, this practice got corrupted into the ceremonial and/or proxy 'sacrifices' that we see in recorded history. Such practices don't actually work (in a magical sense), but they had a lot of cultural inertia behind them.
no subject
Tangential to the sacrifice topic: I came up with a notion for a magic system years ago (and never did anything with it), based around the notion of Conservation of Uncertainty. You can make unlikely (or at least uncertain) things guaranteed to happen, but only by trading off *increased* uncertainty somewhere else. If you want to do a very large magical working, say to ensure a good harvest or a nation's success in war, you need an equally large vector of uncertainty -- the traditional implementation of which would be to put the King into a situation where he had a 50% chance of dying. As Kings grew in political power, this practice got corrupted into the ceremonial and/or proxy 'sacrifices' that we see in recorded history. Such practices don't actually work (in a magical sense), but they had a lot of cultural inertia behind them.