|WE {318}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 {319}the 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 naïve
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 {320}victims, 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 {321}whom 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 {322}deities 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
{323}of 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 {324}of 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
Massagetæ 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. {325}Wyatt
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 {326}him 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 {327}an 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 {328}of 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 {329}are 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 {330}but 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 {331}necessary 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 Græco-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 {332}victim--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. {333}Thus 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 {334}it 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 {335}hecatombs, 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 ægis
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 {336}so 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 {337}seem 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 Chambéry, 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 {338}it 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 {339}of 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 Korê, 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 {340}the 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 {341}on 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, {342}which 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 {343}of 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 {344}Asia 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 Maniæ; 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 {345}could 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. {346}And 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_.