Sacrifice

A sacrifice is a ritual that consumes some kind of material. The material to be sacrificed (offered as a present, killed, eaten, burned, or just destroyed) could represent the person offering the sacrifice or the receiver of the sacrifice, or it can represent the institution or social structure desired to be maintained by the ritual. Often, the text accompanying the ritual refers to all these levels, and in this way, the sacrificial material becomes the focal point for the course of the world and - life.
In the last verse of the Purusha hymn (see section 2) is a phrase that seems completely absurd but is interesting for our understanding of sacrifice as a phenomenon: “With the offering, the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice.” Only a highly specialized priesthood would come up with something like that. But in a way, the statement shows the strange circular logic characteristic of the sacrifice. Purusha is it all: the designation of the world, and the sacrifice from which the world is created. One could say that the one quarter of him which is in this world is sacrificed to the three quarters of him that are hidden in the world of the gods. The visible quarter is constantly kept going with surplus energy from the invisible three quarters. A sacrifice keeps the world going and renews the order established with the creation. "These were the first rules,” the text says, thus seeing the sacrifice as the creator of the social order - in primordial times and at any later sacrifice.

We can learn more about this by comparing sacrifices and thoughts on sacrifice elsewhere in the world. In Christian churches, the Holy Communion or the Eucharist is a sacrifice. Sometimes, it is also called 'communion', because the participants go to the altar, and in front of the altar there is a semicircle with cushions where they can kneel and receive the sacrificial material. Often, an ancient hymn "O thou Lamb of God" is sung. Three times, it implores Christ as the sacrificial Lamb, who took upon him the sins of the world. Each participant receives a wafer, an ultra-thin slice of bread and a small cup of wine. Before eating and drinking, the Christian minister reads aloud a short text in memory of the Last Supper that Jesus, according to the Christian myths, shared with his disciples shortly before he was arrested and executed. On that occasion, tradition says, he broke a loaf of bread into pieces, shared it with the disciples and said, "Take this and eat it: it is my body, which is given for you. "In the same way, he poured wine, saying, "Drink all thereof, this cup is the new covenant with my blood, which is shed for you that your sins will be forgiven." When the bread and wine are handed out, the minister speaks to each participant: "This is the body of Jesus Christ" and "This is the blood of Jesus Christ."

Sources' Analysis

Source n° 1
The Christian churches share the Eucharist, but they perceive of it in different ways. The ritual is not so easily understood, and doctrinal disputes about its 'true' meaning have drawn bloody trails through church history. To decide about who is right or wrong in doctrinal controversies is not the task of the study of religions. Nevertheless, its comparative approach allows an understanding at a higher level of abstraction: In Ancient India, they considered any sacrifice as Purusha, the first man, embodying the potential for the entire world order that was to come. Likewise, Christ can be seen as the (creative) primordial word that  creates, and thus renews or recreates; and even today, a tiny piece of bread and a little wine can be made into the body and blood of Christ and thereby re-establish ritually what happened when Jesus was executed and reunited with the father, from whom he had come. The annulment of original sin and restoration of the relationship with God to what it was before the fall and the expulsion from paradise. The ritual makes a fait accompli available: Jesus has been reunited with his father, and so has everyone who has eaten from his body and drunk from his blood!

Source no 2
An interesting illustration of how the sacrament of the Holy Communion, or The Eucharist, can become incorporated in the Christian myths and other narratives and implemented in the church and institutions of society, can be deduced from altar pieces from the late Middle Ages in e.g. Germany.
The altarpiece (below) from Tribsees near Stralsund in Germany ends with the coronation of Friedrich 3, the last German emperor to be crowned by the Pope in Rome. It took place in 1452, and the altarpiece must be from approximately that time - and subsequently from a period preoccupied with the mechanism in the ritual: the mysterious transformation of bread to Christ himself. Since the New Testament, Christ can also mean “the word” (in Greek: logos), i. e. the word that created and ordered the world, and the entire Bible in the sense of “the word of God”.