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Christa Pike, Human Sacrifice

Christa Pike, Human Sacrifice

Last updated on: October 19, 2026 at 10:14 pm by Tom Swiss

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Christa Pike, Human Sacrifice 2026-10-19T22:14:18-04:00 Tom Swiss

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It is not hard to kill a human being.

Christa Pike was just 18 years old when she and two accomplices killed Colleen Slemmer, torturing her for at least half an hour before beating her head in. Pike didn’t need a lot — just a box cutter, a meat cleaver, a chunk of asphalt, and two friends. She had orders of magnitude fewer resources than those available to the state of Tennessee on September 30th, when that state tried and failed to kill Pike.

But it is hard to kill a human being in a way that disguises the brutality and bloodthirstiness of the act.

Pike wasn’t concerned with doing so; indeed she deliberately disfigured Slemmer’s body, stealing part of her skull and carving a pentagram into her chest — the 1990s pop-culture fascination with “Satanic rituals” was in full swing, and it was alleged that the skull-stealing was meant to trap Slemmer’s soul. (It was actually her accomplice and then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and not Pike, who had a satanic altar.)

But Tennessee wasn’t just trying to kill Pike. It was trying to perform a ritual of its own: a human sacrifice ritual. That put a whole lot of extra requirements on to the killing.

Executions have always been symbolic actions meant to assert the power of the state — not just its temporal power, but its supposed power to bring order to the world. They are a twisted and dark inversion of the healing role of the sacred king.

“The hands of the king are the hands of a healer”, as Tolkein puts it, and literary critic Jane Chance expands “the power of a king resides in his ability…to return or renew that which has been torn or debilitated”. But the modern state cannot heal; particularly not though executions. You cannot lessen violence in a society, cannot renew what has been torn by a murder, by having the state set the example of murdering people.

The state can only try to mock this ritual healing role. And in an age of scientific healing, executions must also wear a scientific cloak if they are to perform their ritual function, if they are to pretend to be healing for the social body.

Mocking Medicine

Electrotherapy was all the rage in the late 19th century, and in 1867, renowned physician Alphonse David Rockwell co-authored a book titled The Medical Uses of Electricity.

Two decades later, Rockwell helped design the first electric chair.

The first electrical execution was a badly botched affair, but this did not stop the chair from catching on. However it did inspire American ingenuity, and in the years after WWI’s widespread introduction of poison gas, problems with electrocution led many states to try better dying through chemistry. The gas chamber, another scientific triumph.

Execution by poison gas also turned out to be less humane than originally envisioned, and took a big PR hit when Nazis sent Holocaust victims to the showers. While gas chambers went out of fashion, state asphyxiation has recently made a comeback with nitrogen asphyxiation delivered through a mask which mocks the lifesaving oxygen mask.

Modern IV therapy began in 1950 with the plastic disposable IV catheter, and became common in the 1960s — and laws to execute people with lethal IV injections followed in the 1970s.

None of this mocking of medicine and science would be necessary if the goal were simply to kill a person without needless physical pain. We’ve had explosives, and thus the ability to render a human being’s head and brain into a fine pink mist, faster than sensation could travel through the nervous system, since the Middle Ages.

But the only cases I can find with a quick internet search of execution via explosives were from ISIS. Or perhaps we might count the old execution method made famous by the British in India, where the condemned is “blown from a gun.”

Or we could shoot people in the back of the head, like the old days of the USSR or the PRC.

But these methods interfere with the ritual optics of the thing. They give away the game. Of course, some of our leaders aren’t even trying to play that game; Pete Hegseth’s desire to kill Nidal Hasan by firing squad and broadcast the killing to the world shows that. But that was so exceptional that bipartisan objections stopped at least the televising of the killing.

Christa Pike did a terrible thing. But we’re supposed to be better than she was on the worst day of her shitty life. And we should not pull other people into our ritual work — especially into human sacrifice rituals.

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