How can I record pain during a ritual sacrifice in my fantasy world? [closed]

Question

In my fantasy world, ritual sacrifices play a crucial role in religious and cultural practices. The priests and practitioners believe that the amount of pain endured by the sacrificial subject directly correlates with the strength of the resulting magical effects or the favour granted by the deities.

I want to create a believable system for measuring the pain experienced during these sacrifices. This system should be understandable within the context of a pre-modern society, but it can incorporate elements of magic or ancient technology.

Here are some details about my world:

• The society is roughly equivalent to a medieval civilization with limited access to advanced technology.
• Magic is prevalent and can be used to enhance or detect physiological responses.
• The sacrifices are usually humans, but occasionally animals are involved.
• The priests have access to various herbs, potions, and magical artefacts.
• Magic in this setting can only be used to store and transfer human emotion, one person can give any emotion it is feeling to others

How can I develop a system that allows the priests to measure and record the pain experienced during these sacrifices? I'm looking for methods that would make sense within this context, possibly involving magical tools or substances that react to pain levels.

If possible, I would like to record both the physical pain and mental pain separately, but if your answer doesn't, it's not a problem.

Any suggestions or ideas on how to approach this would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You've said it yourself:

• Magic in this setting can only be used to store and transfer human emotion, one person can give any emotion it is feeling to others

So, the priest can temporarily transfer the pain the sacrifice is experiencing to themselves or a witness, so that they can judge if the sacrifice is painful enough.

Also, I would expect that with pain-based sacrifices, the death of the sacrifice is an undesirable outcome. The most desirable sacrifice would be one in which the sacrifice suffered the greatest possible amount of pain for the greatest possible time. Death would cut that short.

Answer 2

Smiley Faces

Seriously.

Even with all the advances of modern medical science, we really don't have a way to objectively measure or even describe pain. You can objectively stick a thermometer inside someone and measure their temperature; you can count their respirations or pulses per minute. But you simply can't strap on a device that measures pain.

One reason for this is that heartbeats and breathing and temperatures are all objective phenomena. Pain is entirely subjective. Some people are very susceptible and will screech like banshees at the lightest prod, while others can be cut into without much of a flinch. Pain is an individual experience and an objectively applied intensity of stimulus can result in subjectively different responses at different times by the same person.

In the medical world we literally just ask the patient to rate their pain on a one to ten scale. We've also got a cute little scale of sad to happy faces for people that don't understand numeric scales. You could literally have a priest that does exactly this:

Answer 3

Measure heart rate variability

The variance between beats of the heart is a well known measurement of activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. It's also easy to observe. A primitive ritual could tear the heart out and see how it beat, a more advanced one could observe the rate of their pulse.

To make it more accurate, you would torture an extensive range of people with varying ages, genders, jobs, mental health etc and see how their heart rate varied with self reported pain levels. That way you could easily get a book to measure their pain based on how varied their heart beats are.

Answer 4

Let's use a magically-embued piece of thick leather

A ubiquitous image when Hollywood deals with pain is the proverbial stick in the mouth. This isn't as fictional as you might think, though. It's common for the jaws to clench in pain and the stick's purpose is to keep the sufferer from biting their tongue off or breaking their own teeth.

The problem is that there's a huge variability in the consequences of clenched jaws. Some people have stronger jaw muscles than others. Children aren't as strong as adults. Some people have easier to break teeth.... This really frustrated your priests because they couldn't get a consistent read on how much pain they were causing.

Then, one day, a clever magician thought to himself... "you know, if I use my magic skills just so, I can embue four... no, five! Five pieces of leather, stacked just so, and suddenly I have a completely accurate measure of how much pain we've caused!"

After riveting the layers together and casting Tensor's Universalizing Conundrum (twice... just in case), the priests now get a consistent measure of how much pain they caused no matter pain tolerance, age, gender, athletic ability, or anything else.

Answer 5

As the other answers have pointed out, we don't have a good way to objectively measure pain today (other than the scale of 1-10 charts, like the great one from Allie Brosh that elemtilas incorporates in their answer. Your world is not modern, so we don't have any real good solutions for medieval worlds.

That leaves magic. And ideas for magic are quite literally limitless. But there are patterns that work better than others. I regularly encourage worldbuilders to invoke Sanderson's First Law of magics:

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

His other laws are great too, but the first law resolves so many worldbuilding questions!

What conflict are you resolving with the measuring of pain? Do your priests just record this because it makes sense to you that somebody might want to have recorded it? How successful does it need to be? Could their measurements be completely and utterly wrong but "look" right from the outside and still accomplish the goals? Measuring the appearance of pain is far easier than actually measuring pain. What about observed effects of said pain? Do the priests actually observe the expected favour granted to them after a sacrifice? Measuring that might be easier than measuring the pain directly.

Questions like that are less directed at your specific magic measuring pain, and more pointed at how it fits into the context of the story. It's typically a great way to work away at the limitless possibilities of magics.

Answer 6

Standard pain thresholds (using animals)

Many animals, including humans, pass out as a response to pain. The cause is that the sudden stress causes the heart rate and blood pressure to decrease.

If the sudden stress of a sacrifice can be transferred to animals (through magic), then a society could measure which animals are the most and least stress resistant (as measured by how much stress they can take before they pass out). Then the society can proceed to develop and animal "pain tolerance" scale. Perhaps looking something like this:

Level 0: No known animal passes out (under magical pain stress).

Level 1: A chicken passes out (under magical pain stress).

Level 2: A rat passes out (under magical pain stress).

Level 3: A dog passes out (under magical pain stress).

Level 4: A sheep passes out (under magical pain stress).

Level 5: A human passes out (under magical pain stress).

Level 6: A cow passes out (under magical pain stress).

Note that this system doesn't require that the pain be transferred to the animal, just the emotions that lead to the stress response.

Answer 7

<Make a magic wall with a cord attached, maybe two cords. One cord has a band that goes around the victim's head, the other that goes around the chest.

As pain increases during the sacrifice the wall goes from white to red to black, the darker the more pain.

If you go with the two-cord route, make it so one side of the wall measures physical pain, the other mental.

This has the benefit of being difficult to exactly calibrate, it's more likely that they would have a sort of color-selection palette and would compare against to know they have collected "enough".

Answer 8

Do you know the fair game, where one hits with a hammer a target, with the scope of ringing a bell up in the scale?

You can do something similar with your subject: attach ropes to the limbs of the subject, and measure how much they for example lift a known weight when subject to pain. It's very difficult to not flinch at all when a painful stimulus is given, so the method is fairly accurate.

Answer 9

I can't base capturing pain on anything I know, as far as I'm concerned that's only Science Fiction.

Now, as for the actual question.

You could at the beginning of the Ritual create 2 scrolls which would be impaled in each lung (presumably causing a lot of pain, making them "activate"). Over the ritual they would absolve every sensation felt by the sacrificed, until their god deemed enough, at which time the scrolls would erupt from the back glowing 2 different colours (differentiating for mental anguish and physical pain).

Those scrolls would then have to be carried away to a volcano to be sacrificed to said god, meanwhile the person who carried each scroll would feel the affliction of the sacrificed. Could even be used as a torture weapon itself.

Answer 10

How about- a papyrus roll, with a sort of gramophone needle recording the scream. The ink is the blood of the sacrifice. Nothing like a sine-wave in bloody red. If you need more funny scribbles, you can record whatever makes a wave. And you can replay the recording. And it is not magic. Not nano. Its steam-punky and needs a guy pulling the paper forward while somebody else dies horribly. If the guy has PTSD, that might even show, in the shivering, uneven movement of the paper.

For additional horror, why not use the skin of the last sacrifice as parchment to record the screams on.

Answer 11

A/B testing to create a heuristic pain scale

A good way of predicting pain eludes modern science, not because we don't know how to test it, but because we can not ethically test it. The reason modern pain scales are so vague is because when a doctor sees a patient for a neuroma, he can't then also break the person's arm to determine which one is actually more painful. Imagine you have a pool of 100 pain experiments: broken arms, stubbed toes, loud noises, root canals, jellyfish stings... all sorts of stuff. Using humans as test subjects, you inflict 2 forms of pain from the list on a person and ask them which one hurt more. Repeating each possible pair 10 times (using different test subjects for each repeated pairing), you will end up with 1000 total tests for each kind of pain. Yes this is going to need a BIG sample pool... but that's okay, because your society is already okay with inflicting lots of pain on lots of people, and the outcome of theses experiments is important enough that someone will be more than happy to fund the project.

Charting your findings

When you are done, you tally up how many times each form of pain "won" and you will have yourself all the heuristic data you need to create an objective pain scale. You can then lay out your pain scale either as a normal distribution or a uniform distribution, depending on how you want to present your findings.

If you want to present it as a normal distribution, you score each form of pain 0 to 1000 to measure how many times it won its experiments. This will likely create a bell curve where most forms of pain are somewhere around 500 points, and only extreme outliers will be anywhere near 0 or 1000. You can then, if you so choose, apply a linear transformation to scale the score to easier to work with numbers; like if you want a 0-10 scale, just divide the score by 100.

The other way to chart it would be if you want to measure pain types by what percentile they fall in. So, you still score each pain type, but instead of a uniform transformation, you assign each experiment a score based on how it ranks against other pain experiments. So, if you want to do a 1-10 pain scale, the lowest 10% of scores are a 1, the next 10% are a 2, etc. This will help people using the scale better rank all of those medium kinds of pain which will likely have very similar scores near the middle, but offers less distinction at extreme ends of the scale.

If your goal is pick the best pain method for torture, I'd suggest using a normal distribution, but if you want to use it for medical purposes, like figuring out what order to triage patients in, I'd suggest a uniform distribution chart; so, it's possible that your society will use this data to compile 2 different scales depending on when they are doing torture or medicine.

Estimating New kinds of pain

The obvious issue here is that once your chart is done, it's hard to add new kinds of pain without redoing the whole thing... but there are good methods for estimating new kinds of pain. Let's say you have a new idea for torture that you expect to score around an 8. You AB test it against a known 8 point torture, and the test subjects either rank it overall as higher or lower than the control. Continue doing this until your new test falls between 2 known tests and you will have a good estimate of where on the pain scale your new experiment belongs.