What is Sacrifice?Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals to a higher purpose, in particular divine beings, as an act of propitiation or worship. While sacrifice often implies the ritual killing of an animal, the term offering can be used for bloodless sacrifices of food or artifacts.
What is Gnostic?Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: gnostikos, "having knowledge") is a modern name for a variety of ancient religious ideas and systems. Originating in Jewish-Christian milieus in the first and second century AD. These systems believed that the material world is created by an emanation of the highest God, trapping the divine spark within the human body.Gnosticism is also defined as the belief in, dualism of good and bad and special knowledge for salvation.
Who is Yahweh?Yahweh was the national god of the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah. His exact origins are disputed, although they reach back to the early Iron Age and even the Late Bronze: his name may have begun as an epithet of El, head of the Bronze Age Canaanite pantheon, but the earliest plausible mentions of Yahweh are in Egyptian texts that refer to a similar-sounding place name associated with the Shasu nomads of the southern Transjordan. In the oldest biblical literature, Yahweh is a typical ancient Near Eastern "divine warrior", who leads the heavenly army against Israel's enemies; he later became the main god of the Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) and of Judah, and over time the royal court and temple promoted Yahweh as the god of the entire cosmos, possessing all the positive qualities previously attributed to the other gods and goddesses.