Then satiation, for a time.
It seems to me this is what sacrifice provides. And sacrifice was nearly universal in the ancient world, and is still practiced even today in most Muslim nations (Id al Adha), and in places like Haiti, Nepal, and India. For their part, the Romans offered sacrifices to all their gods. Gibbon makes that clear, and the main reason they differentiated between the Jews and the Christians–despite both rejecting polytheism–was that the former at least practiced an ancestral religion and offered recognizable animal sacrifices on altars prepared for the purpose.
We are not physically hungry, but there remains some primal energy in us which, unprocessed, brings out this cyclic need for aggression. I do think sociologically some wars are forms of mass sacrifice. Aggression arises which seeks release in killing. All that need happen for a war is for this energy to arise on both sides.
In some respects sacrifice checks this need, which is good, but it remains a bestial impulse, one unsuited to any higher spirituality.
Our physical bodies, with all their atavistic instincts and needs and drives, interact with our spirits–which recognize a different home–in ways we really don’t understand, but which are best approached from the side of traditional religious practices, through Humanistic psychology.