we have now arrived at a point where we can more fully understand those curious ideas of sacrifice and sacrament which lie at the root of so much that is essential in the jewish, the christian, and most other religions.

mr. galton tells us that to the damaras, when he travelled among them, all meat was common property. no one killed an ox except as a sacrifice and on a festal occasion; and when the ox was killed, the whole community feasted upon it indiscriminately. this is but a single instance of a feeling almost universal among primitive pastoral people. cattle and other domestic animals, being regarded as sacred, are rarely killed; and when they are killed, they are eaten at a feast as a social and practically religious rite—in short, sacramentally. i need not give instances of so well-known a principle; i will content myself with quoting what dr. robertson smith says of a particular race: “among the early semites generally, no slaughter was legitimate except for sacrifice.”

barbaric herdsmen, indeed, can hardly conceive of men to whom flesh meat is a daily article of diet. mr. galton found the idea very strange to his damaras. primitive pastoral races keep their domestic animals mainly for the sake of the milk, or as beasts of burden, or for the wool and hair; they seldom kill one except for a feast, at which the gods are fellow-partakers. indeed, it is probable, as the sequel will suggest, that domestic animals were originally kept as totems or ancestor-gods, and that the habit of eating 319the meat of sheep, goats, and oxen has arisen mainly out of the substitution of such a divine animal-victim for the divine human-victim of earlier usage. our butchers’ shops have their origin in mitigated sacrificial cannibalism.

sacrifice, regarded merely as offering to the gods, has thus, i believe, two distinct origins. its earliest, simplest, and most natural form is that whose development we have already traced,—the placing of small articles of food and drink at the graves of ancestors or kings or revered fellow-tribesmen. that from a very early period men have believed the dead to eat and drink, whether as corpse, as mummy, as ghost of buried friend, or as ethereal spirit of cremated chieftain, we have already seen with sufficient frequency. about the origin of these simplest and most primitive sacrifices, i think, there can be little doubt. savages offer at the graves of their dead precisely those ordinary articles of food which they consumed while living, without any distinction of kind; and they continue to offer them in the same na茂ve way when the ghost has progressed to the status of one of the great gods of the community.

but there is another mode of sacrifice, superposed upon this, and gradually tending to be more or less identified with it, which yet, if i am right, had a quite different origin in the artificial production of gods about which i have written at considerable length in the last three chapters. the human or animal victim, thus slaughtered in order to make a new god or protecting spirit, came in time to be assimilated in thought to the older type of mere honorific offerings to the dead gods; and so gave rise to those mystic ideas of the god who is sacrificed, himself to himself, of which the sacrament of the mass is the final and most mysterious outcome. thus, the foundation-gods, originally killed in order to make a protecting spirit for a house or a tribal god for a city or village, came at last to be regarded as victims sacrificed to the earth goddess or to the earth demons; and thus, too, the meriahs and other agricultural 320victims, originally killed in order to make a corn-god or a corn-spirit, came at last to be regarded as sacrifices to the earth, or to some abstract dionysus or attis or adonis. and since in the last case at least the god and the victim were still called by the same name and recognised as one, there grew up at last in many lands, and in both hemispheres, but especially in the eastern mediterranean basin, the mystic theory of the sacrifice of a god, himself to himself, in atonement or expiation, which forms the basis of the christian plan of salvation. it is this secondary and derivative form of sacrifice, i believe, which is mainly considered in professor robertson smith’s elaborate and extremely valuable analysis.

i have said that the secondary form of sacrifice, which for brevity’s sake i shall henceforth designate as the mystic, is found in most parts of the world and in both hemispheres. this naturally raises the question whether it has a single common origin, and antedates the dispersal of mankind through the hemispheres; or whether it has been independently evolved several times over in many lands by many races. for myself, i have no cut-and-dried answer to this abstruse question, nor do i regard it, indeed, as a really important one. on the one hand, there are many reasons for supposing that certain relatively high traits of thought or art were common property among mankind before the dispersion from the primitive centre, if a primitive centre ever existed. on the other hand, psychologists know well that the human mind acts with extraordinary similarity in given circumstances all the world over, and that identical stages of evolution seem to have been passed through independently by many races, in egypt and mexico, in china and peru; so that we can find nothing inherently improbable in the idea that even these complex conceptions of mystic sacrifice have distinct origins in remote countries. what is certain is the fact that among the aztecs, as among the phrygians, the priest who sacrificed, the victim he slew, and the image or great god to 321whom he slew him, were all identified; the killer, the killed, and the being in whose honor the killing took place were all one single indivisible deity. even such details as that the priest clothed himself in the skin of the victim are common to many lands; they may very well be either a heritage from remote ancestral humanity, or the separate product of the human mind, working along like grooves under identical conditions. in one word they may perhaps be necessary and inevitable corollaries from antecedent conceptions.

i must further premise that no religion as we now know it is by any means primitive. the most savage creeds we find among us have still hundreds of thousands of years behind them. the oldest religions whose records have descended to us, like those of egypt and of assyria, are still remote by hundreds of thousands of years from the prime original. cultivation itself is a very ancient and immemorial art. few savages, even among those who are commonly described as in the hunting stage, are wholly ignorant of some simple form of seed-sowing and tillage. the few who are now ignorant of those arts show some apparent signs of being rather degenerate than primitive peoples. my own belief or suspicion is that ideas derived from the set of practices in connexion with agriculture detailed in the last two chapters have deeply coloured the life and thought of almost the whole human race, including even those rudest tribes which now know little or nothing of agriculture. but i do not lay stress upon this half-formed conviction, to justify which would lead me too far afield. i shall be content with endeavouring to suggest how far they have coloured the ideas of the greater number of existing nations.

early pastoral races seldom kill a beast except on great occasions. when they kill it, they devour it in common, all the tribe being invited to the festival. but they also eat it in fellowship with their gods; every great feast is essentially a theoxenion, a lectisternium, a banquet in which the 322deities participate with mortals. it is this sense of a common feast of gods and men which gave, no doubt, the first step towards the complex idea of the sacramental meal—an idea still further developed at a later stage by the addition of the concept that the worshipper eats and drinks the actual divinity.

my own belief is that all sacrificial feasts of this godeating character most probably originated in actual cannibalism; and that later an animal victim was substituted for the human meat; but i do not insist on this point, nor attempt, strictly speaking, to prove it. it is hardly more than a deeply grounded suspicion. nevertheless, i will begin for convenience’ sake with the cannibal class of sacrifice, and will come round in time to the familiar slaughter of sheep and oxen, which in many cases is known to have supplanted a human offering.

acosta’s account of the mexican custom is perhaps the best instance we now possess of the ritual of cannibal mystic sacrifice in its fullest barbarity. “they took a captive,” says that racy old author, “at random; and before sacrificing him to their idols, they gave him the name of the idol to whom he should be sacrificed, and dressed him in the same ornaments, identifying him with the god. during the time that the identification lasted, which was for a year in some feasts, six months or less in others, they reverenced and worshipped him in the same manner as the idol itself. meanwhile, he was allowed to eat, drink, and make merry. when he went through the streets, the people came forth to worship him; and every one brought alms, with children and sick people that he might cure them and bless them. he did as he pleased in everything except that he had ten or twelve men about him, to prevent him from escaping. in order that he might be reverenced as he passed, he sometimes sounded upon a small flute, to tell the people to worship him. when the feast arrived, and he had grown fat, they killed him, opened him, and making a solemn sacrifice, eat him.” there, in the words 323of a competent authority, we have the simple cannibal feast in its fullest nakedness.

i need hardly point out how much this account recalls the khond custom of the meriah. the victim, though not really of royal blood, is made artificially into a divine king; he is treated with all the honours of royalty and godhead, is dressed like the deity with whom he is identified, and is finally killed and eaten. the last point alone differs in any large degree from the case of the meriah. we have still to enquire, “why did they eat him?”

the answer to this enquiry takes us into the very heart and core of the sacramental concept.

it is a common early belief that to eat of any particular animal gives you the qualities of that animal. the miris of northern india prize tiger’s flesh for men; it gives them strength and courage; but women must not eat it; ‘twould make them “too strong-minded.” the namaquas abstain from eating hare; they would become faint-hearted if they swallowed it; but they eat the meat of the lion or drink the blood of the leopard, in order to gain their strength and courage. among the dyaks, young men and warriors must not eat deer; it would render them cowardly; but women and very old men are allowed to eat it. men of the buro and aru islands feed on the flesh of dogs in order to be bold and nimble. mr. frazer has collected an immense number of similar instances, which show both how widespread and how deep-seated are such beliefs. even scrapings of the bones are sufficient to produce the desired result; in corea, the bones of tigers fetch a higher price than those of leopards as inspirers of courage. the heart of a lion is also particularly good for this purpose; and the tongues of birds are recommended for eloquence.

again, on the same analogy, the flesh and blood of brave men are eaten in order to inspire bravery. the australian kamilaroi eat the heart and liver of a valiant warrior in order to acquire his courage. the philippine islanders drink the blood of their bravest enemies. in the shire highlands 324of africa, those who kill a distinguished fighter eat his heart to get his courage. du chaillu’s negro, attendants, we saw, scraped their ancestors’ skulls, and drank the powder in water. “our ancestors were brave,” said they; “and by drinking their skulls, we shall be brave as they were.” here again i can only refer the reader for numerous examples to mr. frazer’s inexhaustible storehouse.

the case of du chaillu’s warriors, however, takes us with one bound into the heart of the subject. many savages for similar reasons actually eat their own dead fathers. * we learn from strabo that the ancient irish “deemed it honourable to devour the bodies of their parents.” so, herodotus tells us, did the issedones of central asia. the massaget忙 used “from compassion” to club and eat their aged people. the custom was quite recently common among the battas of sumatra, who used “religiously and ceremonially to eat their old relations.” in australia, it was usual to eat relatives who died by mischance. of the cucumas we read that “as soon as a relation died, these people assembled and eat him roasted or boiled, according as he was thin or fat.” the tarianas and tucanas, who drink the ashes of their relatives, “believe that thus the virtues of the deceased will be transmitted to the drinkers.” the arawaks think it the highest mark of honour they could pay to the dead to drink their powdered bones mixed in water. generally speaking, in a large number of cases, the parents or relatives were eaten in order “not to let the life go out of the family” or to preserve the bodies and souls in a kindred body; or to gain the courage and other qualities of the dead relation. in short, the dead were eaten sacramentally or, as one writer even phrases it, “eucharistically.” mr. hartland has collected many striking instances.

* since this chapter was written, the subject of honorific

cannibalism has been far more fully treated by mr. sidney

hartland in the chapter on funeral rites, in the second

volume of the legend of perseus.

how this strange custom originates we may guess from mr. 325wyatt gill’s description of a new guinea funeral. “the women lacerated their faces and beat their breasts most affectingly,” he says; “and then, in the madness of their grief, pressed the matter out of the wounded thigh, and smeared it over their faces and persons, and even licked it up.” of the koiari corpses he says: “a fire is kept burning day and night at the head and feet for months. the entire skin is removed by means of the thumb and forefinger, and the juices plastered all over the face and body of the operator,—parent, husband, or wife of the deceased. the fire gradually desiccates the flesh, so that little more than the skeleton is left.” this naturally leads on to eating the dead, which indeed is practised elsewhere in new guinea.

but if men eat the bodies of their fathers, who are their family and household gods, they will also naturally eat the bodies of the artificial gods of cultivation, or of the temporary kings who die for the people. by eating the body of a god, you absorb his divinity; he and you become one; he is in you and inspires you. this is the root-idea of sacramental practice; you eat your god by way of complete union; you subsume him in yourself; you and he are one being.

still, how can you eat your god if you also bury him as a corn-spirit to use him as seed? the gonds supply us with the answer to that obvious difficulty. for, as we saw, they sprinkle the blood of the victim over the ploughed field or ripe crop, and then they sacramentally devour his body. such a double use of the artificial god is frequently to be detected, indeed, through the vague words of our authorities. we see it in the potraj ceremony, where the blood of the lamb is drunk by the officiating priest, while the remainder of the animal is buried beside the altar; we see it in the numerous cases where a portion of the victim is eaten sacramentally, and the rest burned and scattered over the fields, which it is supposed to fertilise. you eat your god in part, so as to imbibe his divinity; but you bury 326him in part, so as to secure at the same time his fertilising qualities for your corn or your vineyard.

i admit that all this is distinctly mystic; but mystery-mongering and strange reduplication of persons, with marvellous identifications and minute distinctions, have always formed much of the stock-in-trade of religion. if cults were all plain sailing throughout, what room for faith?—there would be less to engage the imagination of the votary.

and now let us return awhile to our mexican instances.

at the annual feast of the great god tezcatlipoca, which, like most similar festivals, fell about the same time as the christian easter, a young man was chosen to be the representative of the god for a twelvemonth. as in the case of almost all chosen victims, he had to be a person of unblemished body, and he was trained to behave like a god-king with becoming dignity. during his year of godship, he was lapped in luxury; and the actual reigning emperor took care that he should be splendidly attired, regarding him already as a present deity. he was attended by eight pages clad in the royal livery—which shows him to have been a king as well as a god; and wherever he went the people bowed down to him. twenty days before the festival at which he was to be sacrificed, four noble maidens, bearing the names of four goddesses, were given him to be his brides. the final feast itself, like those of dionysus, of attis, and of potraj, occupied five days—a coincidence between the two hemispheres which almost points to original identity of custom before the dispersion of the races. during these five days the real king remained in his palace—and this circumstance plainly shows that the victim belonged to the common class of substituted and temporary divine king-gods. the whole court, on the other hand, attended the victim. on the last day of the feast, the victim was ferried across the lake in a covered barge to a small temple in the form of a pyramid. on reaching the summit, he was seized and held down on a block of stone,—no doubt 327an altar of funereal origin,—while the priest cut open his breast with a stone knife, and plucked his heart out. this he offered to the god of the sun. the head was hung up among the skulls of previous victims, no doubt for oracular purposes, and as a permanent god; but the legs and arms were cooked and prepared for the table of the lords, who thus partook of the god sacramentally. his place was immediately filled by another young man, who for a year was treated with the same respect, and at the end of that time was similarly slaughtered.

i do not think i need point out the close resemblance of this ritual to that of the khond meriah, of the potraj, and of the festivals of dionysus, osiris, attis, and adonis. but i would also call particular attention to the final destination of the skull, and its exact equivalence to the skull of the animal-god in india and elsewhere.

“the idea that the god thus slain in the person of his representative comes to life again immediately,” says mr. frazer, “was graphically represented in the mexican ritual by skinning the slain man-god, and clothing in his skin a living man, who thus became the new representative of the godhead.” for example, at an annual festival in mexico, a woman was sacrificed who represented toci, the mother of the gods—a sort of yearly mexican cybele. she was dressed in the ornaments and bore the name of the goddess of whom she was believed to be an incarnation. after being feasted for several days, she was taken at midnight to the summit of a temple, and there beheaded. her body was flayed, and one of the priests, clothing himself in the skin, became the representative of the goddess toci. the skin of the woman’s thigh, however, was separately removed, and a young man who represented the god cinteotl, the son of toci, wrapt it round him like a mask. ceremonies then followed, in which the two men, clad in the woman’s skin, enacted the parts of the god and goddess. in all this, there is much that seems to me reminiscent 328of isis and horus, of cybele and attis, of semele and dionysus, and of several other eastern rituals.

still more significant is the yearly festival of the god totec, who was represented in like manner by a priest, clad in the skin of a human victim, and who received offerings of first-fruits and first-flowers, together with bunches of maize which had been kept for seed. here we have the closest possible analogy to the case of the meriah. the offering of first-fruits, made sometimes to the king, sometimes to the ancestral spirits, is here made to the human god of cultivation, who represents both in his own person.

many other cannibal sacrifices are recorded in mexico: in more than one of them it was customary for the priest to tear out the warm throbbing heart of the victim, and present it to the idol. whether these sacrifices in each particular case were of the ordinary or of the mystic type it is not always quite easy to decide; probably the worshippers themselves did not accurately discriminate in every instance. but however that may be, we know at least this much: when human sacrifices had been rare, the priests reminded the kings that the gods “were starving with hunger”; war was then made on purpose to take prisoners, “because the gods had asked for something to eat,” and thousands of victims were thus slaughtered annually. the blood of the victims was separately offered; and i may add in this connexion that as a rule both ghosts and gods are rather thirsty than hungry. i take the explanation of this peculiar taste to be that blood and other liquids poured upon the ground of graves or at altar-stones soon sink in, and so seem to have been drunk or sucked up by the ghost or god; whereas meat and solid offerings are seen to be untouched by the deity to whom they are presented. a minor trait in this blood-loving habit of the gods is seen in the fact that the mexicans also gave the god to drink fresh blood drawn from their own ears, and that the priests likewise drew blood from their legs, and daubed it on the temples. similar mitigations of self-immolation 329are seen elsewhere in the attis-priest drawing blood from his arms for attis, in the hebrew baal-priests “cutting themselves for baal,” and in the familiar hebrew rite of circumcision. blood is constantly drawn by survivors or worshippers as an act of homage to the dead or to deities.

i might multiply instances of human sacrifices of the mystic order elsewhere, but i prefer to pass on to the various mitigations which they tend to undergo in various communities. in its fullest form, i take it, the mystic sacrifice ought to be the self-immolation of a divine priest-king, a god and descendant of gods, himself to himself, on the altar of his own divine foundation-ancestor. but in most cases which we can trace, the sacrifice has already assumed the form of an immolation of a willing victim, a temporary king, of the divine stock only by adoption, though sometimes a son or brother of the actual monarch. further modifications are that the victim becomes a captive taken in war (which indeed is implied in the very etymology of the latin word victima), or a condemned criminal, or an imbecile, who can be more readily induced to undertake the fatal office. of all of these we have seen hints at least in previous cases. still more mitigated are the forms in which the victim is allowed to escape actual death by a subterfuge, and those in which an image or effigy is allowed to do duty for the living person. of these intermediates we get a good instance in the case of the bhagats, mentioned by col. dalton, who “annually make an image of a man in wood, put clothes and ornaments on it, and present it before the altar of a mahadeo” (or rude stone phallic idol). “the person who officiates as priest on the occasion says, ‘o, mahadeo, we sacrifice this man to you according to ancient customs. give us rain in due season, and a plentiful harvest.’ then, with one stroke of the axe, the head of the image is struck off, and the body is removed and buried.” this strange rite shows us a surviving 330but much mitigated form of the khond meriah practice.

as a rule, however, such bloodless representations do not please the gods; nor do they succeed in really liberating a ghost or corn-god. they are after all but feeble phantom sacrifices. blood the gods want, and blood is given them. the most common substitute for the human victim-god is therefore the animal victim-god, of which we have already seen copious examples in the ox and kid of dionysus, the pig of attis, and many others. it seems probable that a large number of sacrifices, if not the majority of those in which domestic animals are slain, belong in the last resort to the same category. thus, indeed, we can most easily explain the theory of the so-called “thean-thropic” victim,—the animal which stands for a man and a god,—as well as the point of view of sacrifice so ably elaborated by dr. robertson smith.

according to this theory, the domestic animals were early regarded as of the same kin or blood as the tribe; and the slaughter of an ox, a goat, or a sheep could only be permitted if it were done, like the slaughter of a king’s son, sacrificially and sacramentally. in my own opinion, this scarcely means more than that the sacred domestic animals were early accepted as substitutes for the human victim, and that they were eaten sacrificially and sacramentally as the human victim was also eaten. but i will waive this somewhat controversial point, and content myself with suggesting that the animal victim was habitually treated as in itself divine, and that its blood was treated in the same way as the blood of the original cannibal offering. at the same time, the sacrifice was usually offered at the altar of some older and, so to speak, more constant deity, while the blood of the victim was allowed to flow over the sacred stone. certainly, both among the arabs and the hebrews, all slaughter of domestic animals appears to have been at one time sacrificial; and even when the slaughter ceased necessarily to involve a formal sacrifice, it was still thought 331necessary to slay the victim in the name of a god, and to pour out the blood in his honour on the ground. even in the gr忙co-roman world, the mass of butcher’s meat was “meat offered to idols.” we shall see hereafter that among existing savages the slaughter of domestic animals is still regarded as a sacred rite.

i believe also that as a rule the blood-offering is the earliest and commonest form of slaughter to the gods; and that the victim in the earlier stages was generally consumed by the communicants, as we know the cannibal victim to have been consumed among the mexicans, and as we saw the theanthropic goat or kid was orgiastically devoured by the worshippers of dionysus. it is a detail whether the sacred victim happened to be eaten raw or cooked; the one usage prevailed in the earlier and more orgiastic rites, the other in the milder and more civilised ceremonies. but in either case, the animal-god, like the human god, was eaten sacramentally by all his worshippers, who thus took into themselves his divine qualities. the practice of burning the victim, on the other hand, prevailed mainly, i think, among cremationists, like the tyrians and hellenes, though it undoubtedly extended also to many burying peoples, like the hebrews and egyptians. in most cases even of cremated victims, it would appear, a portion at least of the animal was saved from the fire and sacramentally eaten by the worshippers.

once more, the victim itself was usually a particular kind of sacred animal. this sacredness of the chosen beast has some more important bearings than we have yet considered. for among various pastoral races, various domesticated animals possess in themselves positive sanctity. we know, for example, that cows are very holy in the greater part of india, and buffaloes in the deccan. among the african peoples of the pastoral tribes, the common food is milk and game; cattle are seldom slaughtered merely to eat, and always on exceptional or sacred occasions—the very occasions which elsewhere demand a human 332victim—such as the proclamation of a war, a religious festival, a wedding, or the funeral of a great chieftain. in such cases, the feast is public, all blood-relations having a natural right to attend. the cattle-kraal itself is extremely sacred. the herd and its members are treated by their masters with affectionate and almost brotherly regard.

a few further points must also be added. among early races, to kill and eat wild animals, or to kill and eat enemies, who are not members of the tribe, is not accounted in any way wrong. but to kill a tribesman—to shed kindred blood—is deeply sinful; and so it is sinful to kill and eat the domestic herds. in old age, indeed, or when sick and feeble, you may kill and eat your blood-relation blamelessly; and so you may also kill and eat old or sickly cattle. but as a rule, you only eat them sacramentally and sacrificially, under the same circumstances where you would be justified in killing and eating a human victim. thus, as a rule, each tribe has its own sacred beast, which is employed as a regular substitute for a man-god. among the arabs, this beast was a camel; among the indian peoples, the bull or the buffalo; among shepherd races, it is the sheep or goat; among the teutons, the horse; among many settled urban peoples, the pig; and with the samoyeds and os-tiaks, their one chattel, the reindeer.

also, as a rule, the cow or other female animal was not usually sacrificed; she was kept for milk-yielding. it was the bull, the ram, the ox, the he-goat that was oftenest offered and eaten sacramentally. mere utilitarian considerations would soon lead to this use, just as our own butchers kill ram lambs by choice, and spare the ewes for breeding. the custom, once introduced, would tend to become sacred; for whatever our divine ancestors did is itself divine, and should not be lightly or carelessly altered. hence we can understand that supreme sanctity of the cow, which has made so many races refuse to sacrifice it, while they sacrifice and eat the bull or ox without let or scruple. 333thus the todas have never eaten the flesh of the female buffalo; but the male they eat once a year, sacramentally, all the adult men in the village joining in the ceremony of killing and roasting it.

a remarkable instance of the theanthropic sacrifice of such a sacred animal is given us in nilus’s account of the ceremony performed by the arabs of his time. a holy camel, chosen as a victim, was bound upon a rude cairn of piled-up stones. in this primitive altar we can hardly fail to recognise the grave of an early tribal chieftain. the leader of the band then led the worshippers thrice round the cairn in a solemn procession, chanting a solemn hymn as they went. as the last words of the hymn were sung, he fell upon the camel (like potraj on the lamb), wounded it, and hastily drank of the blood that gushed out from it. forthwith the whole company fell on the victim with their swords, hacked off pieces of the quivering flesh, and devoured them raw with such wild haste that between the rise of the day-star and that of the sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood, and entrails, was absolutely eaten. i need not point out the close resemblance of this savage rite to those of potraj and of dionysus. it is a point, however, to observe that here also the blood falls on the cairn or grave or altar. i may note that the annual sacrifice of the paschal lamb among the shepherd hebrews is obviously a mere mitigation of this barbarous rite. in that case, as might be expected in a more civilised race, the victim is roasted whole: but it is similarly necessary that every part of it should be hastily eaten. legend further informs us, in the instance of the passover, that the lamb was a substitute for a human victim, and that the first-born were sanctified to jahweh, instead of being sacrificed. note also that the feast of the paschal lamb occupied the now familiar space of five days: the sacred animal was chosen on the tenth day of the month, and sacrificed on the fourteenth. the whole ceremonial is most illustrative and full of survivals.

though 334it breaks for a moment the thread of my argument, i find it impossible not to mention here the curious parallel case of the judicial sacrifice among the battas of sumatra, which is the human analogue of the arabian camel-sacrament. only in this instance, as in so many others, sacrifice and punishment merge into one another. “with them the adulterer, the night-thief, and those who had treacherously attacked a town, a village, or a particular person, were condemned to be eaten by the people. they were tied to three posts; their legs and their arms were stretched out in the shape of a st. andrew’s cross;and then, when a signal was given, the populace rushed upon the body and cut it into fragments with hatchets or with knives, or perhaps more simply with their nails and their teeth. the strips so torn off were devoured instantly, all raw and bloody; they were merely dipped into a cocoanut bowl containing a sauce prepared beforehand of lemon-juice and salt. in the case of adultery, the outraged husband had the right of choosing first what piece he liked best. the guests invited to the feast performed this work with so much ardour that they often tore and hurt each other.” i do not think we can read this account without being struck by its close analogy to many of our previous sacrifices, both of human corn-gods and of sacred animals. the criminal is here nothing more than the substitute for a holy human victim.

and now we must also remember that in most countries the gods were housemates of their worshippers, present at all times in every home, and partakers of every meal, side by side with the living. they lived in the house, as still in new guinea. libations to them were poured from every cup; food was offered to their ghosts or skulls or wooden images at every family gathering. the ordinary feasts were thus mere enlarged festal gatherings, at which a victim was sacrificially slain and sacramentally eaten; and the visitors believed they were eating the body and blood of the god to their own salvation. greater sacrifices, like the 335hecatombs, or the heroic indian horse-sacrifice, must have been relatively rare; but in all of them we see clear proof that the victim was regarded as a sacred animal, that is to say a god, in one of his embodiments.

clear evidence of this equivalence is seen in the fact that the worshippers often clad themselves in the skin of the victim, as the mexicans did in the skin of the annual god. sometimes the hide is even used to deck the idol. in the cyprian sacrifice of a sheep to the sheep-goddess aphrodite, the celebrants wore the skin of the sheep; while the assyrian dagon-worshipper offered the fish-sacrifice to the fish-god, clad in a fish-skin. of similar import is doubtless the 忙gis or goat-skin of athena, envisaged as a goat-goddess, and the skins used in the dionysiac mysteries. i do not hesitate to affiliate all these on a primitive usage like that of the mexican cannibal sacrifice.

having reached this point, we can see further that the case where a sacred animal, the representative of a human victim, is slaughtered before the altar of an older god is exactly equivalent to the other known case where a human victim is slaughtered before the foundation-stone of a town or village. in either case, there is a distinct renewal of the divine life; fresh blood, as it were, is instilled by the act into the ancient deity. all the other concomitants are precisely the same. thus at the theban sacrifice of a ram to the ram-god amen, the worshippers bewailed the victim, as the women bewailed adonis and attis; and the image of amen was finally draped in the skin of the victim, while its body was buried in a sacred coffin. at the buphonia or sacramental ox-slaying in athens, there was a regular trial after the victim was slain, everybody throwing the blame on one another, till at last the knife that inflicted the wound was found guilty of murder and cast into the sea. (this casting into the sea of a guilt-bearer for the community will meet us again when we come to consider the doctrine of the atonement.) so we saw that the potraj fled after the performance of his sanguinary sacrifice; and 336so too the slayer of the dionysus-calf at tenedos fled for his life when the ceremony was completed. indeed, we get many intermediate cases, like that of the goat dressed up as a girl which was offered theanthropically to artemis munychia, or that of the dionysus-calf clad in buskins, whose mother-cow was treated as a woman in child-birth. to me, all these instances are obvious attempts to palm off, as it were, on the gods a sacred animal in place of a genuine human victim. they are little more than divine legal fictions, eked out, no doubt, by the fiction of kinship between the herd and its masters.

as a whole, then, we may venture to say not perhaps that all, but that a great number of sacrifices, and certainly the best-known among historic nations, are slaughters of animal substitutes for human victims; and that the flesh is sacramentally consumed by the worshippers.

there is one special form of this animal sacrifice, however, which i cannot here pass over in complete silence. it is the one of which the harvest-feast is the final relic. mr. frazer has fully worked out this theme in his fascinating essay: to detail it here at length would occupy too much space; i can only give the barest outline of his instances. originally, it would seem, the corn-god or corn-spirit was conceived during the reaping as taking refuge in the last sheaf left standing. whoever cut that wisp of corn slew the corn-spirit, and was therefore, on the analogy of the slayer of the divine king, himself the corn-spirit. mr. frazer does not absolutely assert that this human representative was originally killed and eaten, though all analogy would seem to suggest it; but that he was at least killed is abundantly certain; and killed he still is, in dumb show at any rate, on many modern european corn-fields. more often, however, the corn-spirit is supposed to be embodied in any animal which happens to be found in the last sheaf, where even now small creatures like mice and hedgehogs often take refuge. in earlier times, however, wolves, wild boars, and other large animals 337seem to have been frequently met with under similar circumstances. however that may be, a great many beasts—generally sacred beasts—are or have been sacramentally eaten as representatives of the corn-god; while, conversely, the last sheaf is often made up into the image of a man or still more often of a woman, and preserved religiously for a year, like the annual king, till the next harvest. sometimes a cock is beheaded and eaten at the harvest feast, special importance being here attached to its head, as to the head of the human victim in so many other cases. sometimes, as with the ancient prussians, it was the corn-goat whose body was sacramentally eaten. sometimes, as at chamb茅ry, an ox is slaughtered, and eaten with special rites by the reapers at supper. sometimes, it is the old sacred teutonic animal, the horse, that is believed to inhabit the last wisp of corn. i will add parenthetically here (what i trust in some future work to show) that we have probably in this and kindred ideas the origin of the sacred and oracular heads of horses and oxen attached to temples or built into churches. sometimes, again, it is a pig that represents the god, and is ceremonially eaten at the harvest festival.

i need hardly mention that all these sacred animals, substitutes for the original human god, find their parallels in the festivals of dionysus, attis, osiris, demeter, adonis, lityerses, and the other great corn and wine gods of the historic civilisations.

but there is yet another and more sublimated form of sacramental feast. since the corn-god and the wine-god, when slain, undergo resurrection in the corn and the vine, may we not also eat their bodies as bread, and drink their blood as wine or soma?

to people already familiar, first with the honorific cannibal form of god-eating, and then with its gentler animal-victim modification, nothing could be more natural than this slight transference of feeling. nay, more: whoever eat bread and drank wine from the beginning must have known 338it was the body and blood of a god he was eating and drinking. still, there is a certain difference between mere ordinary every-day food and the sacramental feast, to which sacred cannibalism and animal-sacrifice had now familiarised men’s minds. accordingly, we find in many cases that there exists a special sacramental eating and drinking of bread and wine, which is more especially regarded as eating the body and drinking the blood of the deity.

some curious illustrative facts may here be cited. since straw and corn grow from the slaughtered corn-god, they may be regarded as one of his natural embodiments. hence, when human sacrifices are prohibited, people sometimes make a straw god do duty for a human one. the gonds, we saw, used once to kidnap sacred brahman boys—gods by race, as it were, yet strangers and children—scatter their blood over the fields, and eat their bodies sacramentally. but when the unsympathetic british government interfered with the god-making habits of the gond people, they took, says col. dalton, to making an image of straw instead, which they now similarly sacrifice. so it may be noted in many of the ceremonies of “burying the carnival” and the like, which i have already cited, that a straw man is substituted symbolically for the human victim. indeed, in that singular set of survivals we have every possible substitute—the mock king, the imbecile, the pretended killing, the ceremonial shedding of blood, the animal victim, and the straw man or effigy. i may add that even the making of our modern guy fawkes as “a man of straw” is thus no mere accident. but we get a very similar use of corn in the curious practice of fashioning the corn-wife and the corn-baby, so fully detailed by mr. frazer. in this attenuated survival of human sacrifice, a sheaf of corn does duty for a human victim, and represents the life of the corn-god or corn-spirit from one year to another. all the existing evidence goes to suggest the idea that at harvest a corn-maiden or corn-wife, after a year 339of deification, was slain in former times, and that the human victim is now represented by her vegetable analogue or equivalent, the corn in the ear, a sheaf of which does duty in her place, and reigns as corn-queen till the next year’s harvest. the corn-baby is thus a temporary queen, made of corn, not of human flesh and blood. we may compare with this case the account of the sioux girl who was sacrificed by the pawnees, by being burned over a slow fire, and then shot (like st. sebastian) with arrows. the chief sacrificer tore out her heart and devoured it, thus eating the goddess in true cannibal fashion. while her flesh was still warm, it was cut up into small pieces and taken to the corn-field. drops of blood were squeezed from it upon the grains of seed-corn; after which it was all covered up in the ground to form a crop-raiser. of such a ghastly goddess-making ceremony, our seemingly innocent harvest comedy of the corn-baby is probably the last surviving relic. mr. frazer rightly connects it with the cult of the athenian kor锚, persephone. i think, indeed, the double form of the name, “the old woman” and “the corn-baby,” makes it probable that the pair are the vegetable equivalents of both demeter and her ravished daughter.

in other cases, however, it is the actual bread and wine themselves, not the straw or the corn in the ear, that represent the god and are sacramentally eaten. we owe to mr. frazer most of our existing knowledge of the wide prevalence and religious importance of this singular ritual.

we have seen already that in many countries the first-fruits of the crops are presented either to ancestral ghosts, or to the great gods, or else to the king, who is the living god and present representative of the divine ancestors. till this is done, it would be unsafe to eat of the new harvest. the god within it would kill you. but in addition to the ceremonial offering of first-fruits to the spirits, many races also “eat the god” in the new corn or rice sacramentally. in wermland, in sweden, the farmer’s wife uses 340the grain of the last sheaf (in which, as we saw, the corn-god or corn-spirit is supposed specially to reside), in order to bake a loaf in the shape of a little girl. here we have the maiden, who was previously sacrificed as a corn-goddess or persephone, reappearing once more in a bread image. this loaf is divided among all the household and eaten by them. so at la palisse in france, a man made of dough is hung upon the fir-tree which is carried home to the granary on the last harvest-waggon. the dough man and the tree are taken to the mayor’s house till the vintage is over; then a feast takes place, at which the mayor breaks the dough man in pieces, and gives the fragments to the people to eat. here, the mayor clearly represents the king or chief, while the feast of first-fruits and the sacramental eating are combined, as was perhaps originally the case, in one and the same sacrificial ceremony. no particular mention is made of wine; but as the feast is deferred so as to take place after the vintage, it is probable that the blood of the wine-god as well as the body of the corn-god entered once at least into the primitive ritual.

many similar feasts survive in europe; but for the rite of eating the corn-god in its fullest form we must go once more to mexico, which also supplied us with the best and most thoroughly characteristic examples of the cannibal god-eating. twice a year, in may and december, an image of the great mexican god huitzilopochtli was made of dough, then broken in pieces, and solemnly eaten by his assembled worshippers. two days before the may feast, says acosta, the virgins of the temple kneaded beet-seeds with roasted maize, and moulded them with honey into a paste idol, as big as the permanent wooden idol which represented the god, putting in glass beads for eyes, and grains of indian corn in the place of teeth. the nobles then brought the vegetable god an exquisite and rich garment, like that worn by the wooden idol, and dressed the image up in it. this done, the carried the effigy on a litter 341on their shoulders, no doubt to mark its royal authority. on the morning of the feast, the virgins of the god dressed themselves in garlands of maize and other festal attire. young men, similarly caparisoned, carried the image in its ark or litter to the foot of the great pyramid temple. it was drawn up the steps with clanging music of flutes and trumpets—a common accompaniment of god-slaying ceremonies. flowers were strewed on it, as was usual with all the gods of vegetation, and it was lodged in a little chapel of roses. certain ceremonies of singing and dancing then took place, by means of which the paste was consecrated into the actual body and bones of the god. finally, the image was broken up and distributed to the people, first the nobles, and then the commonalty, who received it, men, women, and children, “with such tears, fear, and reverence as if it were sacred, saying they did eat the flesh and bones of god, wherewith they were grieved.” i need not point out the close resemblance here to the mourning over the bodies of attis and adonis, nor to the rites of dionysus.

still more closely does the december feast (which took place, like christmas, at the winter solstice) recall the cannibal practice; for here an image of the god was made of seeds, kneaded into dough with the blood of children. such a massacre of the innocents occurs often elsewhere in similar connexions: we shall meet with it again on a subsequent occasion. the image was placed on the chief altar of the temple, and on the day of its epiphany, the king of mexico offered incense to it. bambino gods like this are well known in other countries. next day it was taken down, and a priest flung at it a flint-tipped arrow. this was called “killing the god so that his body might be eaten.” one of the priests then cut out the heart of the image and gave it to the actual king to eat, just as in other sacrifices the priest cut out the throbbing heart of the human victim and placed it in the mouth of the cannibal god. the rest of the image was divided into small pieces, 342which were distributed to all the males of the community, adults or children. the ceremony was called “god is eaten.”

i will not multiply examples of the main principle of eating the corn-god in the shape of little cakes or human images, which have been collected in abundance all the world over. mr. frazer’s work is a perfect thesaurus of analogous customs. i will rather call attention to one or two special parallels with similar god-eating rites, cannibal or animal, which occur elsewhere. at the close of the rice harvest in boeroe, in the east indies, each clan meets at a common sacrificial meal, to which every member of the clan is bound to contribute a little of his new rice from the current season. this is called “eating the soul of the rice.” but some of the rice is also set apart and offered to the spirits—that is, i take it, to the ghosts of ancestors. this combination is like the common case of the human victim being offered on the altar-stone of earlier ancestral deities. amongst the alfoers of celebes, again, it is the priest who sows the first rice-seeds, and plucks the first ripe rice in each field. this he roasts and grinds into meal, giving some of it to each member of the family. here the priest no doubt represents the old tribal priest-king. several similar practices are reported from india, only one of which need at present detain us. among the hindoos of the deccan there is a magical and sacramental eating of the new rice; but the special point of interest to be noted here is the fact that some of it is offered to the god ganesa, after which the whole family partake of the produce. among the kafirs of natal and zululand, however, it is at the king’s kraal that the people assemble for their sacramental feast of new fruits, where they dance and perform certain sacred ceremonies. in this case, the king, the living god, seems to take the place of the god, the dead king, in the indian festival. various grains are mixed with the flesh of a sacrificed animal, in whom we shall now have perhaps little difficulty in recognising the representative 343of a human corn-god victim; and a portion of this mess is placed in the mouth of each man by the king himself, here officiating in his capacity of ancestral priest. by the light of such analogies, i think we need have no hesitation in reconstructing the primitive sacramental feast, where a man was sacrificed as an annual manufactured corn-god; seeds were mixed with his blood; his flesh was eaten sacramentally by the people, fed by the king; a part of his body was also eaten by the king himself, and a part was offered to the great gods, or to the tribal god, or the foundation god or goddess of the village or city. after putting together the various survivals already cited, i do not think this is too large an exercise of the constructive faculty.

an interesting mixed case of god-eating, in which the cake was baked, not in the form of a man, but of a divine animal, i have seen myself in the house of irish emigrants in canada. the new corn was there made into loaves or buns in the shape of little pigs, with currants for eyes; and one of these was given to each of the children. though merely regarded as a playful custom, this instance, i venture to think, has still its own illustrative value.

the practice of kneading sacramental cakes from the blood of infants, which we saw to prevail in the case of a mexican god, is parallelled in the practice of mixing them with shreds of the flesh from an animal victim in the zulu ceremony. the cannibal form of the rite must, however, have been very widespread; as we gather from the fact that a christian sect, the paulicians, were accused of it as late as the eighth century. john of osun, patriarch of armenia, wrote a diatribe against these sectaries, in which he mentions the fact that they moulded an image of wheaten flower with the blood of children, and eat therewith their unholy communion. of course, there could have been no direct intercourse in the ninth century between armenia and mexico; but the accusation shows at least that similar ceremonies were known or remembered in 344asia as actual practices. indeed, the harranians in the middle ages annually sacrificed an infant, and boiling down its flesh, baked it into cakes, of which every freeman was allowed to partake. in both these cases, we have the two extremes of eating the god combined in one practice—the cannibal rite and the sacramental corn-cake.

mr. frazer calls attention to another interesting transitional instance. loaves made in the shape of men were called at rome mani忙; and it appears that such loaves were specially made at aricia. now aricia was also the one place in italy where a divine priest-king, the rex nemoralis, lived on well recognised into the full blaze of the historic period, on the old savage tenure of killing his predecessor. again, mania was the name of the mother or grandmother of ghosts. woollen images, dedicated to this latin cybele, were hung out in rome at the feast of the compitalia, and were said to be substitutes for human victims. mr. frazer suggests that the loaves in human form which were baked at aricia were sacramental bread; and that in old days, when the rex nemoralis was annually slain, loaves were also made in his image as in mexico, and were eaten sacramentally by his worshippers. i do not hesitate myself to suggest still further that the gingerbread cakes, shaped like a man, and still richly gilt, which are sold at so many fairs in france and italy, and also sometimes in england, are last dying relics of similar early sacramental images. for fairs are for the most part diminished survivals of religious festivals.

as the theanthropic animal victim represents a man and a god, it is reasonable that a cake shaped as an animal and baked of flour should sometimes do as well as the animal victim. for the corn is after all the embodiment of the corn-god. hence bakers in the antique world used to keep in stock representations in dough of the various sacrificial animals, for people who were too poor to afford the originals. oxen and sheep were regularly so represented. when mithridates besieged cyzicus, and the people 345could not get a black cow to sacrifice to persephone, they made a dough cow and placed it at the altar. at the athenian festival of the diasia, cakes shaped like animals were similarly sacrificed; and at the osiris festival in egypt, when the rich offered a real pig, the poor used to present a dough pig as a substitute, like the dough pig of the irish canadians.

but in many other rites, the sacramental and sacrificial cake has entirely lost all semblance of a man or animal. the god is then eaten either in the shapeless form of a boiled mess of rice or porridge, or in a round cake or loaf, without image of any sort, or in a wafer stamped with the solar or christian cross. instances of this type are familiar to everyone.

more closely related still to primitive cannibalism is the curious ritual of the sin-eater, so well elaborated by mr. sidney hartland. in upper bavaria, what is called a corpse-cake is kneaded from flour, and placed on the breast of a dead person, in order to absorb the virtues of the departed. this cake is then eaten by the nearest relation. in the balkan peninsula, a small image of the dead person was made in bread and eaten by the survivors of the family. these are intermediate stages between cannibalism and the well-known practice of sin-eating.

i hope i have now made clear the general affiliation which i am seeking to suggest, if not to establish. my idea is that in the beginning certain races devoured their own parents, or parts of them, so as to absorb the divine souls of their forebears into their own bodies. later, when artificial god-making became a frequent usage, especially in connexion with agriculture, men eat the god, or part of him, for a similar reason. but they likewise eat him as the corn or yam or rice, sacramentally. when thean-thropic victims were substituted for the man-god, they eat the theanthropic victim in like manner. also they made images in paste of both man and beast, and, treating these as compounded of the god, similarly sacrificed and eat them. 346and they drank his blood, in the south as wine, in the north as beer, in india as soma. if this line of reconstruction be approximately correct, then sacraments as a whole are in the last resort based upon survival from the cannibal god-feast.

it is a significant fact that in many cases, as at the potraj festival, the officiating priest drinks the blood of the divine victim, while the laity are only permitted to eat of its body.