CHAPTER XVIII.

RITES AND CEREMONIES.

Religious Rites: their purpose practical or symbolic—Prayer: its

continuity from low to high levels of Culture; its lower phases

Unethical; its higher phases Ethical—Sacrifice: its

original Gift-theory passes into the Homage-theory and the

Abnegation-theory—Manner of reception of Sacrifice by Deity—Material

Transfer to elements, fetish-animals, priests; consumption of

substance by deity or idol; offering of blood; transmission by fire;

incense—Essential Transfer: consumption of essence, savour,

&c.—Spiritual Transfer: consumption or transmission of soul of

offering—Motive of Sacrificer—Transition from Gift-theory to

Homage-theory: insignificant and formal offerings; sacrificial

banquets—Abnegation-theory; sacrifice of children, &c.—Sacrifice of

Substitutes: part given for whole; inferior life for superior;

effigies—Modern survival of Sacrifice in folklore and

religion—Fasting, as a means of producing ecstatic vision; its

course from lower to higher Culture—Drugs used to produce

ecstasy—Swoons and fits induced for religious purposes—Orientation:

its relation to Sun-myth and Sun-worship; rules of East and West as

to burial of dead, position of worship, and structure of

temple—Lustration by Water and Fire: its transition from material to

symbolic purification; its connexion with special events of life;

its appearance among the lower races—Lustration of new-born

children; of women; of those polluted by bloodshed or the

dead—Lustration continued at higher levels of Culture—Conclusion.

Religious rites fall theoretically into two divisions, though these

blend in practice. In part, they are expressive and symbolic

performances, the dramatic utterance of religious thought, the

gesture-language of theology. In part, they are means of intercourse

with and influence on spiritual beings, and as such, their intention is

as directly practical as any chemical or mechanical process, for

doctrine and worship correlate as theory and practice. In the science of

religion, the study of ceremony has its strong and weak sides. On the

one hand, it is generally easier to obtain accurate accounts of

ceremonies by eye-witnesses, than anything like trustworthy and

intelligible statements of doctrine; so that very much of our knowledge

of religion in the savage and barbaric world consists in acquaintance

with its ceremonies. It is also true that some religious ceremonies are

marvels of permanence, holding substantially the same form and meaning

through age after age, and far beyond the range of historic record. On

the other hand, the signification of ceremonies is not to be rashly

decided on by mere inspection. In the long and varied course in which

religion has adapted itself to new intellectual and moral conditions,

one of the most marked processes has affected time-honoured religious

customs, whose form has been faithfully and even servilely kept up,

while their nature has often undergone transformation. In the religions

of the great nations, the natural difficulty of following these changes

has been added to by the sacerdotal tendency to ignore and obliterate

traces of the inevitable change of religion from age to age, and to

convert into mysteries ancient rites whose real barbaric meaning is too

far out of harmony with the spirit of a later time. The embarrassments,

however, which beset the enquirer into the ceremonies of a single

religion, diminish in a larger comparative study. The ethnographer who

brings together examples of a ceremony from different stages of culture

can often give a more rational account of it, than the priest, to whom a

special signification, sometimes very unlike the original one, has

become matter of orthodoxy. As a contribution to the theory of religion,

with especial view to its lower phases as explanatory of the higher, I

have here selected for ethnographic discussion a group of sacred rites,

each in its way full of instruction, different as these ways are. All

have early place and rudimentary meaning in savage culture, all belong

to barbaric ages, all have their representatives within the limits of

modern Christendom. They are the rites of Prayer, Sacrifice, Fasting and

other methods of Artificial Ecstasy, Orientation, Lustration.

Prayer, ‘the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed,’ is the

address of personal spirit to personal spirit. So far as it is actually

addressed to disembodied or deified human souls, it is simply an

extension of the daily intercourse between man and man; while the

worshipper who looks up to other divine beings, spiritual after the

nature of his own spirit, though of place and power in the universe far

beyond his own, still has his mind in a state where prayer is a

reasonable and practical act. So simple and familiar indeed is the

nature of prayer, that its study does not demand that detail of fact and

argument which must be given to rites in comparison practically

insignificant. It has not indeed been placed everywhere on record as the

necessary outcome of animistic belief, for especially at low levels of

civilization there are many races who distinctly admit the existence of

spirits, but are not positively known to pray to them. Beyond this lower

level, however, animism and ceremonial prayer become nearly

conterminous; and a view of their relation in their earlier stages may

be best gained from a selection of actual prayers taken down word for

word, within the limits of savage and barbaric life. These agree with an

opinion that prayer appeared in the religion of the lower culture, but

that in this its earlier stage it was unethical. The accomplishment of

desire is asked for, but desire is as yet limited to personal advantage.

It is at later and higher moral levels, that the worshipper begins to

add to his entreaty for prosperity the claim for help toward virtue and

against vice, and prayer becomes an instrument of morality.

In the Papuan Island of Tanna, where the gods are the spirits of

departed ancestors, and preside over the growth of fruits, a prayer

after the offering of first-fruits is spoken aloud by the chief who acts

as high priest to the silent assembly: ‘Compassionate father! Here is

some food for you; eat it; be kind to us on account of it!’ Then all

shout together.[844] In the Samoan Islands, when the libation of ava was

poured out at the evening meal, the head of the family prayed thus:—

‘Here is ava for you, O gods! Look kindly towards this family: let

it prosper and increase; and let us all be kept in health. Let our

plantations be productive; let food grow; and may there be abundance

of food for us, your creatures. Here is ava for you, our war gods!

Let there be a strong and numerous people for you in this land.

‘Here is ava for you, O sailing gods (gods who come in Tongan canoes

and foreign vessels). Do not come on shore at this place; but be

pleased to depart along the ocean to some other land.’[845]

Among the Indians of North America, more or less under European

influence, the Sioux will say, ‘Spirits of the dead, have mercy on me!’

then they will add what they want, if good weather they say so, if good

luck in hunting, they say so.[846] Among the Osages, prayers used not

long since to be offered at daybreak to Wohkonda, the Master of Life.

The devotee retired a little from the camp or company, and with affected

or real weeping, in loud uncouth voice of plaintive piteous tone, howled

such prayers as these:— ‘Wohkonda, pity me, I am very poor; give me what

I need; give me success against mine enemies, that I may avenge the

death of my friends. May I be able to take scalps, to take horses! &c.’

Such prayers might or might not have allusion to some deceased relative

or friend.[847] How an Algonquin Indian undertakes a dangerous voyage,

we may judge from John Tanner’s account of a fleet of frail Indian bark

canoes setting out at dawn one calm morning on Lake Superior. We had

proceeded, he writes, about two hundred yards into the lake, when the

canoes all stopped together, and the chief, in a very loud voice,

addressed a prayer to the Great Spirit, entreating him to give us a good

look to cross the lake. ‘You,’ said he, ‘have made this lake, and you

have made us, your children; you can now cause that the water shall

remain smooth while we pass over in safety.’ In this manner he continued

praying for five or ten minutes; he then threw into the lake a small

quantity of tobacco, in which each of the canoes followed his

example.[848] A Nootka Indian, preparing for war, prayed thus: ‘Great

Quahootze, let me live, not be sick, find the enemy, not fear him, find

him asleep, and kill a great many of him.’[849] There is more pathos in

these lines from the war-song of a Delaware:—

‘O Great Spirit there above

Have pity on my children

And my wife!

Prevent that they shall mourn for me!

Let me succeed in this undertaking,

That I may slay my enemy

And bring home the tokens of victory

To my dear family and my friends

That we may rejoice together....

Have pity on me and protect my life,

And I will bring thee an offering.’[850]

The following two prayers are among those recorded by Molina, from the

memory of aged men who described to him the religion of Peru under the

Incas, in whose rites they had themselves borne part. The first is

addressed to the Sun, the second to the World-creator:—

‘O Sun! Thou who hast said, let there be Cuzcos and Tampus, grant

that these thy children may conquer all other people. We beseech

thee that thy children the Yncas may be the conquerors always, for

this hast thou created them.’

‘O conquering Uiracocha! Ever present Uiracocha! Thou who art in the

ends of the earth without equal! Thou who gavest life and valour to

men, saying “Let this be a man!” and to women, saying, “Let this be

a woman!” Thou who madest them and gavest them being! Watch over

them that they may live in health and peace. Thou who art in the

high heavens, and among the clouds of the tempest, grant this with

long life, and accept this sacrifice, O Uiracocha!’[851]

In Africa, the Zulus, addressing the spirits of their ancestors, think

it even enough to call upon them without saying what they want, taking

it for granted that the spirits know, so that the mere utterance ‘People

of our house!’ is a prayer. When a Zulu sneezes, and is thus for the

moment in close relation to the divine spirits, it is enough for him to

mention what he wants (‘to wish a wish,’ as our own folklore has it),

and thus the words ‘A cow!’ ‘Children!’ are prayers. Fuller forms are

such as these: ‘People of our house! Cattle!’—‘People of our house! Good

luck and health!’—‘People of our house! Children!’ On occasions of

ancestral cattle-sacrifice the prayers extend to actual harangues, as

when, after the feast is over, the headman speaks thus amid dead

silence: ‘Yes, yes, our people, who did such and such noble acts, I pray

to you—I pray for prosperity after having sacrificed this bullock of

yours. I say, I cannot refuse to give you food, for these cattle which

are here you gave me. And if you ask food of me which you have given me,

is it not proper that I should give it to you? I pray for cattle, that

they may fill this pen. I pray for corn, that many people may come to

this village of yours, and make a noise, and glorify you. I ask also for

children, that this village may have a large population, and that your

name may never come to an end.’ So he finishes.[852] From among the

negro races near the equator, the following prayers may be cited,

addressed to that Supreme Deity whose nature is, as we have seen, more

or less that of the Heaven-god. The Gold Coast negro would raise his

eyes to Heaven and thus address him: ‘God, give me to-day rice and yams,

gold and agries, give me slaves, riches, and health, and that I may be

brisk and swift!’ The fetish-man will often in the morning take water in

his mouth and say, ‘Heaven! grant that I may have something to eat

to-day;’ and when giving medicine shown him by the fetish, he will hold

it up to heaven first, and say, ‘Ata Nyongmo! (Father Heaven!) bless

this medicine that I now give.’ The Yebu would say, ‘God in heaven,

protect me from sickness and death. God give me happiness and

wisdom!’[853] When the Manganja of Lake Nyassa were offering to the

Supreme Deity a basketful of meal and a pot of native beer, that he

might give them rain, the priestess dropped the meal handful by handful

on the ground, each time calling, in a high-pitched voice, ‘Hear thou, O

God, and send rain!’ and the assembled people responded, clapping their

hands softly and intoning (they always intone their prayers) ‘Hear thou,

O God!’[854]

Typical forms of prayer may be selected in Asia near the junction-line

of savage and barbaric culture. Among the Karens of Burma, the

Harvest-goddess has offerings made to her in a little house in the

paddy-field, in which two strings are put for her to bind the spirits of

any persons who may enter her field. Then they entreat her on this wise:

‘Grandmother, thou guardest my field, thou watchest over my plantation.

Look out for men entering; look sharp for people coming in. If they

come, bind them with this string, tie them with this rope, do not let

them go!’ And at the threshing of the rice they say: ‘Shake thyself,

Grandmother, shake thyself! Let the paddy ascend till it equals a hill,

equals a mountain. Shake thyself, Grandmother, shake thyself!’[855] The

following are extracts from the long-drawn prayers of the Khonds of

Orissa: ‘O Boora Pennu! and O Tari Pennu, and all other gods! (naming

them). You, O Boora Pennu! created us, giving us the attribute of

hunger; thence corn food was necessary to us, and thence were necessary

producing fields. You gave us every seed, and ordered us to use

bullocks, and to make ploughs, and to plough. Had we not received this

art, we might still indeed have existed upon the natural fruits of the

jungle and the plain, but, in our destitution, we could not have

performed your worship. Do you, remembering this—the connexion betwixt

our wealth and your honour—grant the prayers which we now offer. In the

morning, we rise before the light to our labour, carrying the seed. Save

us from the tiger, and the snake, and from stumblingblocks. Let the seed

appear earth to the eating birds, and stones to the eating animals of

the earth. Let the grain spring up suddenly like a dry stream that is

swelled in a night. Let the earth yield to our ploughshares as wax melts

before hot iron. Let the baked clods melt like hailstones. Let our

ploughs spring through the furrows with a force like the recoil of a

bent tree. Let there be such a return from our seed, that so much shall

fall and be neglected in the fields, and so much on the roads in

carrying it home, that, when we shall go out next year to sow, the paths

and the fields shall look like a young corn-field. From the first times

we have lived by your favour. Let us continue to receive it. Remember

that the increase of our produce is the increase of your worship, and

that its diminution must be the diminution of your rites.’ The following

is the conclusion of a prayer to the Earth-goddess: ‘Let our herds be so

numerous that they cannot be housed; let children so abound that the

care of them shall overcome their parents—as shall be seen by their

burned hands; let our heads ever strike against brass pots innumerable

hanging from our roofs; let the rats form their nests of shreds of

scarlet cloth and silk; let all the kites in the country be seen in the

trees of our village, from beasts being killed there every day. We are

ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is good for us.

Give it to us!’[856]

Such are types of prayer in the lower levels of culture, and in no small

degree they remain characteristic of the higher nations. If, in

long-past ages, the Chinese raised themselves from the condition of rude

Siberian tribes to their peculiar culture, at any rate their consecutive

religion has scarce changed the matter-of-fact prayers for rain and good

harvest, wealth and long life, addressed to manes and nature-spirits and

merciful Heaven.[857] In other great national religions of the world,

not the whole of prayer, but a smaller or larger part of it, holds

closely to the savage definition. This is a Vedic prayer: ‘What, Indra,

has not yet been given me by thee, Lightning-hurler, all good things

bring us hither with both hands ... with mighty riches fill me, with

wealth of cattle, for thou art great!’[858] This is Moslem: ‘O Allah!

unloose the captivity of the captives, and annul the debts of the

debtors: and make this town to be safe and secure, and blessed with

wealth and plenty, and all the towns of the Moslems, O Lord of all

creatures! and decree safety and health to us and to all travellers, and

pilgrims, and warriors, and wanderers, upon thy earth, and upon thy sea,

such as are Moslems, O Lord of all creatures!’[859] Thus also,

throughout the rituals of Christendom, stand an endless array of

supplications unaltered in principle from savage times—that the weather

may be adjusted to our local needs, that we may have the victory over

all our enemies, that life and health and wealth and happiness may be

ours.

So far, then, is permanence in culture: but now let us glance at the

not less marked lines of modification and new formation. The vast

political effect of a common faith in developing the idea of exclusive

nationality, a process scarcely expanding beyond the germ among savage

tribes, but reaching its full growth in the barbaric world, is apt to

have its outward manifestation in hostility to those of another creed,

a sentiment which finds vent in characteristic prayers. Such are these

from the Rig-Veda: ‘Take away our calamities. By sacred verses may we

overcome those who employ no holy hymns! Distinguish between the Aryas

and those who are Dasyus: chastising those who observe no sacred

rites, subject them to the sacrificer.... Indra subjects the impious

to the pious, and destroys the irreligious by the religious.’[860] The

following is from the closing prayer which the boys in many schools in

Cairo used to repeat some years ago, and very likely do still: ‘I seek

refuge with Allah from Satan the accursed. In the name of Allah, the

Compassionate, the Merciful ... O Lord of all creatures! O Allah!

destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of

the religion! O Allah! make their children orphans, and defile their

abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and give them and their families

and their households and their women and their children and their

relations by marriage and their brothers and their friends and their

possessions and their race and their wealth and their lands as booty

to the Moslems! O Lord of all creatures!’[861] Another powerful

tendency of civilization, that of regulating human affairs by fixed

ordinance, has since early ages been at work to arrange worship into

mechanical routine. Here, so to speak, religion deposits itself in

sharply defined shape from a supersaturated solution, and crystallizes

into formalism. Thus prayers, from being at first utterances as free

and flexible as requests to a living patriarch or chief, stiffened

into traditional formulas, whose repetition required verbal accuracy,

and whose nature practically assimilated more or less to that of

charms. Liturgies, especially in those three quarters of the world

where the ancient liturgical language has become at once

unintelligible and sacred, are crowded with examples of this

historical process. Its extremest development in Europe is connected

with the use of the rosary. This devotional calculating-machine is of

Asiatic invention; it had if not its origin at least its special

development among the ancient Buddhists, and its 108 balls still slide

through the modern Buddhist’s hands as of old, measuring out the

sacred formulas whose reiteration occupies so large a fraction of a

pious life. It was not till toward the middle ages that the rosary

passed into Mohammedan and Christian lands, and finding there

conceptions of prayer which it was suited to accompany, has flourished

ever since. How far the Buddhist devotional formulas themselves

partake of the nature of prayer, is a question opening into

instructive considerations, which need only be suggested here. By its

derivation from Brahmanism and its fusion with the beliefs of rude

spirit-worshipping populations, Buddhism practically retains in no

small measure a prayerful temper and even practice. Yet, according to

strict and special Buddhist philosophy, where personal divinity has

faded into metaphysical idea, even devotional utterances of desire are

not prayers; as Köppen says, there is no ‘Thou!’ in them. It must be

only with reservation that we class the rosary in Buddhist hands as an

instrument of actual prayer. The same is true of the still more

extreme development of mechanical religion, the prayer-mill of the

Tibetan Buddhists. This was perhaps originally a symbolic ‘chakra’ or

wheel of the law, but has become a cylinder mounted on an axis, which

by each rotation is considered to repeat the sentences written on the

papers it is filled with, usually the ‘Om mani padme hûm!’

Prayer-mills vary in size, from the little wooden toys held in the

hand, to the great drums turned by wind or water-power, which repeat

their sentences by the million.[862] The Buddhist idea, that ‘merit’

is produced by the recitation of these sentences, may perhaps lead us

to form an opinion of large application in the study of religion and

superstition, namely, that the theory of prayers may explain the

origin of charms. Charm-formulas are in very many cases actual

prayers, and as such are intelligible. Where they are mere verbal

forms, producing their effect on nature and man by some unexplained

process, may not they or the types they were modelled on have been

originally prayers, since dwindled into mystic sentences?

The worshipper cannot always ask wisely what is for his good, therefore

it may be well for him to pray that the greater power of the deity may

be guided by his greater wisdom—this is a thought which expands and

strengthens in the theology of the higher nations. The simple prayer of

Sokrates, that the gods would give such things as are good, for they

know best what are good,[863] raises a strain of supplication which has

echoed through Christendom from its earliest ages. Greatest of all

changes which difference the prayers of lower from those of higher

nations, is the working out of the general principle that the ethical

element, so scanty and rudimentary in the lower forms of religion,

becomes in the higher its most vital point; while it scarcely appears as

though any savage prayer, authentically native in its origin, were ever

directed to obtain moral goodness or to ask pardon for moral sin. Among

the semi-civilized Aztecs, in the elaborate ritual which from its early

record and its original characteristics may be thought to have a partial

authenticity, we mark the appearance of ethical prayer. Such is the

supplication concerning the newly-elect ruler: ‘Make him, Lord, as your

true image, and permit him not to be proud and haughty in your throne

and court; but vouchsafe, Lord, that he may calmly and carefully rule

and govern them whom he has in charge, the people, and permit not, Lord,

that he may injure or vex his subjects, nor without reason and justice

cause loss to any; and permit not, Lord, that he may spot or soil your

throne or court with any injustice or wrong, &c.’[864] Moral prayer,

sometimes appearing in rudiment, sometimes shrunk into insignificance,

sometimes overlaid by formalism, sometimes maintained firm and vigorous

in the inmost life, has its place without as well as within the

Jewish-Christian scheme. The ancient Aryan prayed: ‘Through want of

strength, thou strong and bright god, have I gone wrong; have mercy,

almighty, have mercy!... Whenever we men, O Varuna, commit an offence

before the heavenly host, whenever we break the law through

thoughtlessness, have mercy, almighty, have mercy!’[865] The modern

Parsi prays: ‘Of my sins which I have committed against the ruler

Ormazd, against men, and the different kinds of men.... Deceit,

contempt, idol-worship, lies, I repent of.... All and every kind of sin

which men have committed because of me, or which I have committed

because of men; pardon, I repent with confession!’[866] As a general

rule it would be misleading to judge utterances of this kind in the

religions of classic Greece and Rome as betokening the intense habitual

prayerfulness which pervades the records of Judaism, Mohammedanism,

Christianity. Moralists admit that prayer can be made an instrument of

evil, that it may give comfort and hope to the superstitious robber,

that it may strengthen the heart of the soldier to slay his foes in an

unrighteous war, that it may uphold the tyrant and the bigot in their

persecution of freedom in life and thought. Philosophers dwell on the

subjective operation of prayer, as acting not directly on outward

events, but on the mind and will of the worshipper himself, which it

influences and confirms. The one argument tends to guide prayer, the

other to suppress it. Looking on prayer in its effect on man himself

through the course of history, both must recognize it as even in savage

religion a means of strengthening emotion, of sustaining courage and

exciting hope, while in higher faiths it becomes a great motive power of

the ethical system, controlling and enforcing, under an ever-present

sense of supernatural intercourse and aid, the emotions and energies of

moral life.

Sacrifice has its apparent origin in the same early period of culture

and its place in the same animistic scheme as prayer, with which through

so long a range of history it has been carried on in the closest

connexion. As prayer is a request made to a deity as if he were a man,

so sacrifice is a gift made to a deity as if he were a man. The human

types of both may be studied unchanged in social life to this day. The

suppliant who bows before his chief, laying a gift at his feet and

making his humble petition, displays the anthropomorphic model and

origin at once of sacrifice and prayer. But sacrifice, though in its

early stages as intelligible as prayer is in early and late stages

alike, has passed in the course of religious history into transformed

conditions, not only of the rite itself but of the intention with which

the worshipper performs it. And theologians, having particularly turned

their attention to sacrifice as it appears in the higher religions, have

been apt to gloss over with mysticism ceremonies which, when traced

ethnographically up from their savage forms, seem open to simply

rational interpretation. Many details of offerings have already been

given incidentally here, as a means of elucidating the nature of the

deities they are offered to. Moreover, a main part of the doctrine of

sacrifice has been anticipated in examining the offerings to spirits of

the dead, and indeed the ideal distinction between soul and deity breaks

down among the lower races, when it appears how often the deities

receiving sacrifice are themselves divine human souls. In now attempting

to classify sacrifice in its course through the religions of the world,

it seems a satisfactory plan to group the evidence as far as may be

according to the manner in which the offering is given by the

worshipper, and received by the deity. At the same time, the examples

may be so arranged as to bring into view the principal lines along which

the rite has undergone alteration. The ruder conception that the deity

takes and values the offering for itself, gives place on the one hand to

the idea of mere homage expressed by a gift, and on the other to the

negative view that the virtue lies in the worshipper depriving himself

of something prized. These ideas may be broadly distinguished as the

gift-theory, the homage-theory, and the abnegation-theory. Along all

three the usual ritualistic change may be traced, from practical reality

to formal ceremony. The originally valuable offering is compromised for

a smaller tribute or a cheaper substitute, dwindling at last to a mere

trifling token or symbol.

The gift-theory, as standing on its own independent basis, properly

takes the first place. That most childlike kind of offering, the giving

of a gift with as yet no definite thought how the receiver can take and

use it, may be the most primitive as it is the most rudimentary

sacrifice. Moreover, in tracing the history of the ceremony from level

to level of culture, the same simple unshaped intention may still

largely prevail, and much of the reason why it is often found difficult

to ascertain what savages and barbarians suppose to become of the food

and valuables they offer to the gods, may be simply due to ancient

sacrificers knowing as little about it as modern ethnologists do, and

caring less. Yet rude races begin and civilized races continue to

furnish with the details of their sacrificial ceremonies the key also to

their meaning, the explanation of the manner in which the offering is

supposed to pass into the possession of the deity.

Beginning with cases in which this transmission is performed bodily, it

appears that when the deity is the personal Water, Earth, Fire, Air, or

a fetish-spirit animating or inhabiting such element, he can receive and

sometimes actually consume the offerings given over to this material

medium. How such notions may take shape is not ill shown in the quaintly

rational thought noticed in old Peru, that the Sun drinks the libations

poured out before him; and in modern Madagascar, that the Angatra drinks

the arrack left for him in the leaf-cup. Do not they see the liquids

diminish from day to day?[867] The sacrifice to Water is exemplified by

Indians caught in a storm on the North American lakes, who would appease

the angry tempest-raising deity by tying the feet of a dog and throwing

it overboard.[868] The following case from Guinea well shows the

principle of such offerings. Once in 1693, the sea being unusually

rough, the headmen complained to the king, who desired them to be easy,

and he would make the sea quiet next day. Accordingly he sent his

fetishman with a jar of palm oil, a bag of rice and corn, a jar of

pitto, a bottle of brandy, a piece of painted calico, and several other

things to present to the sea. Being come to the sea-side, he made a

speech to it, assuring it that his king was its friend, and loved the

white men; that they were honest fellows and came to trade with him for

what he wanted; and that he requested the sea not to be angry, nor

hinder them to land their goods; he told it, that if it wanted palm oil,

his king had sent it some; and so threw the jar with the oil into the

sea, as he did, with the same compliment, the rice, corn, pitto, brandy,

calico, &c.[869] Among the North American Indians the Earth also

receives offerings buried in it. The distinctness of idea with which

such objects may be given is well shown in a Sioux legend. The Spirit of

the earth, it seems, requires an offering from those who perform

extraordinary achievements, and accordingly the prairie gapes open with

an earthquake before the victorious hero of the tale; he casts a

partridge into the crevice, and springs over.[870] One of the most

explicit recorded instances of the offering to the Earth is the hideous

sacrifice to the Earth-goddess among the Khonds of Orissa, the tearing

of the flesh of the human victim from the bones, the priest burying half

of it in a hole in the earth behind his back without looking round, and

each householder carrying off a particle to bury in like manner in his

favourite field.[871] For offerings to the Fire, we may take for an

example the Yakuts, who not only give him the first spoonful of food,

but instead of washing their earthen pots allow him to clean out the

remains.[872] Here is a New Zealand charm called Wangaihau, i.e.,

feeding the Wind:—

‘Lift up his offering,

To Uenga a te Rangi his offering,

Eat, O invisible one, listen to me,

Let that food bring you down from the sky.’[873]

Beside this may be set the quaint description of the Fanti negroes

assisting at the sacrifice of men and cattle to the local fetish; the

victims were considered to be carried up in a whirlwind out of the midst

of the small inner ring of priests and priestesses; this whirlwind was,

however, not perceptible to the senses of the surrounding

worshippers.[874] These series of details collected from the lower

civilization throw light on curious problems as to sacrificial ideas in

the religions of the classic world; such questions as what Xerxes meant

when he threw the golden goblet and the sword into the Hellespont, which

he had before chained and scourged; why Hannibal cast animals into the

sea as victims to Poseidon; what religious significance underlay the

patriotic Roman legend of the leap of Marcus Curtius.[875]

Sacred animals, in their various characters of divine beings,

incarnations, representatives, agents, symbols, naturally receive meat

and drink offerings, and sometimes other gifts. For examples, may be

mentioned the sun-birds (tonatzuli), for which the Apalaches of

Florida set out crushed maize and seed;[876] the Polynesian deities

coming incarnate in the bodies of birds to feed on the meat-offerings

and carcases of human victims set out upon the altar-scaffolds;[877]

the well-fed sacred snakes of West Africa, and local fetish animals

like the alligator at Dix Cove which will come up at a whistle, and

follow a man half a mile if he carries a white fowl in his hands, or

the shark at Bonny that comes to the river bank every day to see if a

human victim has been provided for his repast;[878] in modern India

the cows reverently fed with fresh grass, Durga’s meat-offerings laid

out on stones for the jackals, the famous alligators in their

temple-tanks.[879] The definition of sacred animal from this point of

view distinctly includes man. Such in Mexico was the captive youth

adored as living representative of Tezcatlipoca, and to whom banquets

were made during the luxurious twelvemonth which preceded his

sacrifice at the festival of the deity whom he personated: such still

more definitely was Cortes himself, when Montezuma supposed him to be

the incarnate Quetzalcoatl come back into the land, and sent human

victims accordingly to be slaughtered before him, should he seem to

lust for blood.[880] Such in modern India is the woman who as

representative of Radha eats and drinks the offerings at the shameless

orgies of the Saktas.[881] More usually it is the priest who as

minister of the deities has the lion’s share of the offerings or the

sole privilege of consuming them, from the Fijian priest who watches

for the turtle and puddings apportioned to his god,[882] and the West

African priest who carries the allowances of food sent to the local

spirits of mountain, or river, or grove, which food he eats himself as

the spirit’s proxy,[883] to the Brahmans who receive for the divine

ancestors the oblation of a worshipper who has no sacred fire to

consume it, ‘for there is no difference between the Fire and a

Brahman, such is the judgment declared by them who know the

Veda.’[884] It is needless to collect details of a practice so usual

in the great systematic religions of the world, where priests have

become professional ministers and agents of deity, as for them to

partake of the sacrificial meats. It by no means follows from this

usage that the priest is necessarily supposed to consume the food as

representative of his divinity; in the absence of express statement to

such effect, the matter can only be treated as one of ceremonial

ordinance. Indeed, the case shows the caution needed in interpreting

religious rites, which in particular districts may have meanings

attached to them quite foreign to their general intent.

The feeding of an idol, as when Ostyaks would pour daily broth into the

dish at the image’s mouth,[885] or when the Aztecs would pour the blood

and put the heart of the slaughtered human victim into the monstrous

idol’s mouth,[886] seems ceremonial make-believe, but shows that in each

case the deity was somehow considered to devour the meal. The conception

among the lower races of deity, as in disembodied spiritual form, is

even less compatible with the notion that such a being should consume

solid matter. It is true that the notion does occur. In old times it

appears in the legend of Bel and the Dragon, where the footprints in the

strewn ashes betray the knavish priests who come by secret doors to eat

up the banquet set before Bel’s image.[887] In modern centuries, it may

be exemplified by the negroes of Labode, who could hear the noise of

their god Jimawong emptying one after another the bottles of brandy

handed in at the door of his straw-roofed temple;[888] or among the

Ostyaks, who, as Pallas relates, used to leave a horn of snuff for their

god, with a shaving of willow bark to stop his nostrils with after the

country fashion; the traveller describes their astonishment when

sometimes an unbelieving Russian has emptied it in the night, leaving

the simple folk to conclude that the deity must have gone out hunting to

have snuffed so much.[889] But these cases turn on fraud, whereas

absurdities in which low races largely agree are apt to have their

origin rather in genuine error. Indeed, their dominant theories of the

manner in which deities receive sacrifice are in accordance not with

fraud but with facts, and must be treated as strictly rational and

honest developments of the lower animism. The clearest and most general

of these theories are as follows.

When the deity is considered to take actual possession of the food or

other objects offered, this may be conceived to happen by abstraction of

their life, savour, essence, quality, and in yet more definite

conception their spirit or soul. The solid part may die, decay, be taken

away or consumed or destroyed, or may simply remain untouched. Among

this group of conceptions, the most materialized is that which carries

out the obvious primitive world-wide doctrine that the life is the

blood. Accordingly, the blood is offered to the deity, and even

disembodied spirits are thought capable of consuming it, like the ghosts

for whom Odysseus entering Hades poured into the trench the blood of the

sacrificed ram and black ewe, and the pale shades drank and spoke;[890]

or the evil spirits which the Mintira of the Malay Peninsula keep away

from the wife in childbirth by placing her near the fire, for the demons

are believed to drink human blood when they can find it.[891] Thus in

Virginia the Indians (in pretence or reality) sacrificed children, whose

blood the oki or spirit was said to suck from their left breast.[892]

The Kayans of Borneo used to offer human sacrifice when a great chief

took possession of a newly built house; in one late case, about 1847, a

Malay slave girl was bought for the purpose and bled to death, the

blood, which alone is efficacious, being sprinkled on the pillars and

under the house, and the body being thrown into the river.[893] The same

ideas appear among the indigenes of India, alike in North Bengal and in

the Deccan, where the blood alone of the sacrificed animal is for the

deities, and the votary retains the meat.[894] Thus, in West Africa, the

negroes of Benin are described as offering a cock to the idol, but it

receives only the blood, for they like the flesh very well

themselves;[895] while in the Yoruba country, when a beast is sacrificed

for a sick man, the blood is sprinkled on the wall and smeared on the

patient’s forehead, with the idea, it is said, of thus transferring to

him the victim’s life.[896] The Jewish law of sacrifice marks clearly

the distinction between shedding the blood as life, and offering it as

food. As the Israelites themselves might not eat with the flesh the

blood which is the life, but must pour it on the earth as water, so the

rule applies to sacrifice. The blood must be sprinkled before the

sanctuary, put upon the horns of the altar, and there sprinkled or

poured out, but not presented as a drink offering—‘their drink-offerings

of blood will I not offer.’[897]

Spirit being considered in the lower animism as somewhat of the

ethereal nature of smoke or mist, there is an obvious reasonableness

in the idea that offerings reduced to this condition are fit to be

consumed by, or transmitted to, spiritual beings towards whom the

vapour rises in the air. This idea is well shown in the case of

incense, and especially a peculiar kind of incense offered among the

native tribes of America. The habit of smoking tobacco is not

suggestive of religious rites among ourselves, but in its native

country, where it is so widely diffused as to be perhaps the best

point assignable in favour of a connexion in the culture of the

northern and southern continent, its place in worship is very

important. The Osages would begin an undertaking by smoking a pipe,

with such a prayer as this: ‘Great Spirit, come down to smoke with me

as a friend! Fire and Earth, smoke with me and help me to overthrow my

foes!’ The Sioux in Hennepin’s time would look toward the Sun when

they smoked, and when the calumet was lighted, they presented it to

him, saying: ‘Smoke, Sun!’ The Natchez chief at sunrise smoked first

to the east and then to the other quarters; and so on. It is not

merely, however, that puffs from the tobacco-pipe are thus offered to

deities as drops of drink or morsels of food might be. The calumet is

a special gift of the Sun or the Great Spirit, tobacco is a sacred

herb, and smoking is an agreeable sacrifice ascending into the air to

the abode of gods and spirits.[898] Among the Caribs, the native

sorcerer evoking a demon would puff tobacco-smoke into the air as an

agreeable perfume to attract the spirit; while among Brazilian tribes

the sorcerers smoked round upon the bystanders and on the patient to

be cured.[899] How thoroughly incense and burnt-offering are of the

same nature, the Zulus well show, burning incense together with the

fat of the caul of the slaughtered beast, to give the spirits of the

people a sweet savour.[900] As to incense more precisely of the sort

we are familiar with, it was in daily use in the temples of Mexico,

where among the commonest antiquarian relics are the earthen

incense-pots in which ‘copalli’ (whence our word copal) and bitumen

were burnt.[901] Though incense was hardly usual in the ancient

religion of China, yet in modern Chinese houses and temples the

‘joss-stick’ and censer do honour to all divine beings, from the

ancestral manes to the great gods and Heaven and Earth.[902] The

history of incense in the religion of Greece and Rome points the

contrast between old thrift and new extravagance, where the early

fumigations with herbs and chips of fragrant wood are contrasted with

the later oriental perfumes, myrrh and cassia and frankincense.[903]

In the temples of ancient Egypt, numberless representations of

sacrificial ceremony show the burning of the incense-pellets in

censers before the images of the gods; and Plutarch speaks of the

incense burnt thrice daily to the Sun, resin at his rising, myrrh at

his meridian, kuphi at his setting.[904] The ordinance held as

prominent a place among the Semitic nations. At the yearly festival of

Bel in Babylon, the Chaldæans are declared by Herodotus to have burned

a thousand talents of incense on the large altar in the temple where

sat his golden image.[905] In the records of ancient Israel, there has

come down to us the very recipe for compounding incense after the art

of the apothecary. The priests carried every man his censer, and on

the altar of incense, overlaid with gold, standing before the vail in

the tabernacle, sweet spices were burned morn and even, a perpetual

incense before the Lord.[906]

The sacrifice by fire is familiar to the religion of North American

tribes. Thus the Algonquins knew the practice of casting into the fire

the first morsel of the feast; and throwing fat into the flames for the

spirits, they would pray to them ‘make us find food.’ Catlin has

described and sketched the Mandans dancing round the fire where the

first kettleful of the green-corn is being burned, an offering to the

Great Spirit before the feast begins.[907] The Peruvians burnt llamas as

offerings to the Creator, Sun, Moon, and Thunder, and other lesser

deities. As to the operation of sacrifice, an idea of theirs comes well

into view in the legend of Manco Ccapac ordering the sacrifice of the

most beautiful of his sons, ‘cutting off his head, and sprinkling the

blood over the fire, that the smoke might reach the Maker of heaven and

earth.’[908] In Siberia the sacrifices of the Tunguz and Buraets, in the

course of which bits of meat and liver and fat are cast into the fire,

carry on the same idea.[909] Chinese sacrifices to sun and moon, stars

and constellations, show their purpose in most definite fashion; beasts

and even silks and precious stones are burned, that their vapour may

ascend to these heavenly spirits.[910] No less significant, though in a

different sense, is the Siamese offering to the household deity, incense

and arrack and rice steaming hot; he does not eat it all, not always any

part of it, it is the fragrant steam which he loves to inhale.[911]

Looking now to the records of Aryan sacrifice, views similar to these

are not obscurely expressed. When the Brahman burns the offerings on the

altar-fire, they are received by Agni the divine Fire, mouth of the

gods, messenger of the All-knowing, to whom is chanted the Vedic

strophe, ‘Agni! the sacrifice which thou encompassest whole, it goes

unto the gods!’[912] The Homeric poems show the plain meaning of the

hecatombs of old barbaric Greece, where the savour of the burnt offering

went up in wreathing smoke to heaven, ‘Κνίσση δ’ οὐρανὸν ἶκεν ἐλισσομένη

περὶ καπνῷ.’[913] Passed into a far other stage of history, men’s minds

had not lost sight of the archaic thought even in Porphyry’s time, for

he knows how the demons who desire to be gods rejoice in the libations

and fumes of sacrifice, whereby their spiritual and bodily substance

fattens, for this lives on the steam and vapours and is strengthened by

the fumes of the blood and flesh.[914]

The view of commentators that sacrifice, as a religious act of remote

antiquity and world-wide prevalence, was adopted, regulated, and

sanctioned in the Jewish law, is in agreement with the general

ethnography of the subject. Here sacrifice appears not with the lower

conception of a gift acceptable and even beneficial to deity, but with

the higher significance of devout homage or expiation for sin. As is so

usual in the history of religion, the offering consisted in general of

food, and the consummation of the sacrifice was by fire. To the

ceremonial details of the sacrificial rites of Israel, whether

prescribing the burning of the carcases of oxen and sheep or of the

bloodless gifts of flour mingled with oil, there is appended again and

again the explanation of the intent of the rite; it is ‘an offering made

by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.’ The copious records of

sacrifice in the Old Testament enable us to follow its expansion from

the simple patriarchal forms of a pastoral tribe, to the huge and

complex system organized to carry on the ancient service in a now

populous and settled kingdom. Among writers on the Jewish religion, Dean

Stanley has vividly portrayed the aspect of the Temple, with the flocks

of sheep and droves of cattle crowding its courts, the vast apparatus of

slaughter, the great altar of burnt-offering towering above the people,

where the carcases were laid, the drain beneath to carry off the streams

of blood. To this historian, in sympathy rather with the spirit of the

prophet than the ceremony of the priest, it is a congenial task to dwell

upon the great movement in later Judaism to maintain the place of

ethical above ceremonial religion.[915] In those times of Hebrew

history, the prophets turned with stern rebuke on those who ranked

ceremonial ordinance above weightier matters of the law. ‘I desired

mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt

offerings.’ ‘I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of

he goats.... Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings

from before mine eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do well.’

Continuing the enquiry into the physical operation ascribed to

sacrifice, we turn to a different conception. It is an idea well vouched

for in the lower culture, that the deity, while leaving apparently

untouched the offering set out before him, may nevertheless partake of

or abstract what in a loose way may be described as its essence. The

Zulus leave the flesh of the sacrificed bullock all night, and the

divine ancestral spirits come and eat, yet next morning everything

remains just as it was. Describing this practice, a native Zulu thus

naïvely comments on it: ‘But when we ask, “What do the Amadhlozi eat?

for in the morning we still see all the meat,” the old men say, “The

Amatongo lick it.” And we are unable to contradict them, but are silent,

for they are older than we, and tell us all things and we listen; for we

are told all things, and assent without seeing clearly whether they are

true or not.’[916] Such imagination was familiar to the native religion

of the West Indian islands. In Columbus’ time, and with particular

reference to Hispaniola, Roman Pane describes the native mode of

sacrifice. Upon any solemn day, when they provide much to eat, whether

fish, flesh, or any other thing, they put it all into the house of the

cemis, that the idol may feed on it. The next day they carry all home,

after the cemi has eaten. And God so help them (says the friar), as the

cemi eats of that or anything else, they being inanimate stocks or

stones. A century and a half later, a similar notion still prevailed in

these islands. Nothing could show it more neatly than the fancy of the

Caribs that they could hear the spirits in the night moving the vessels

and champing the food set out for them, yet next morning there was

nothing touched; it was held that the viands thus partaken of by the

spirits had become holy, so that only the old men and considerable

people might taste them, and even these required a certain bodily

purity.[917] Islanders of Pulo Aur, though admitting that their banished

disease-spirits did not actually consume the grains of rice set out for

them, nevertheless believed them to appropriate its essence.[918] In

India, among the indigenes of the Garo hills, we hear of the head and

blood of the sacrificed animal being placed with some rice under a

bamboo arch covered with a white cloth; the god comes and takes what he

wants, and after a time this special offering is dressed for the company

with the rest of the animal.[919] The Khond deities live on the flavours

and essences drawn from the offerings of their votaries, or from animals

or grain which they cause to die or disappear.[920] When the Buraets of

Siberia have sacrificed a sheep and boiled the mutton, they set it up on

a scaffold for the gods while the shaman is chanting his song, and then

themselves fall to.[921] And thus, in the folklore of mediæval Europe,

Domina Abundia would come with her dames into the houses at night, and

eat and drink from the vessels left uncovered for their increase-giving

visit, yet nothing was consumed.[922]

The extreme animistic view of sacrifice is that the soul of the offered

animal or thing is abstracted by or transmitted to the deity. This

notion of spirits taking souls is in a somewhat different way

exemplified among the Binua of Johore, who hold that the evil

River-spirits inflict diseases on man by feeding on the ‘semangat,’ or

unsubstantial body (in ordinary parlance the spirit) in which his life

resides,[923] while the Karen demon devours not the body but the ‘la,’

spirit or vital principle; thus when it eats a man’s eyes, their

material part remains, but they are blind.[924] Now an idea similar to

this furnished the Polynesians with a theory of sacrifice. The priest

might send commissions by the sacrificed human victim; spirits of the

dead are eaten by the gods or demons; the spiritual part of the

sacrifices is eaten by the spirit of the idol (i.e. the deity dwelling

or embodied in the idol) before whom it is presented.[925] Of the

Fijians it is observed that of the great offerings of food native belief

apportions merely the soul to the gods, who are described as being

enormous eaters; the substance is consumed by the worshippers. As in

various other districts of the world, human sacrifice is here in fact a

meat-offering; cannibalism is a part of the Fijian religion, and the

gods are described as delighting in human flesh.[926] Such ideas are

explicit among Indian tribes of the American lakes, who consider that

offerings, whether abandoned or consumed by the worshippers, go in a

spiritual form to the spirit they are devoted to. Native legends afford

the clearest illustrations. The following is a passage from an Ottawa

tale which recounts the adventures of Wassamo, he who was conveyed by

the spirit-maiden to the lodge of her father, the Spirit of the Sand

Downs, down below the waters of Lake Superior. ‘Son-in-law,’ said the

Old Spirit, ‘I am in want of tobacco. You shall return to visit your

parents, and can make known my wishes. For it is very seldom that those

few who pass these Sand Hills, offer a piece of tobacco. When they do

it, it immediately comes to me. Just so,’ he added, putting his hand out

of the side of the lodge, and drawing in several pieces of tobacco,

which some one at that moment happened to offer to the Spirit, for a

smooth lake and prosperous voyage. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘every thing

offered me on earth, comes immediately to the side of my lodge.’ Wassamo

saw the women also putting their hands to the side of the lodge, and

then handing round something, of which all partook. This he found to be

offerings of food made by mortals on earth. The distinctly spiritual

nature of this transmission is shown immediately after, for Wassamo

cannot eat such mere spirit-food, wherefore his spirit-wife puts out her

hand from the lodge and takes in a material fish out of the lake to cook

for him.[927] Another Ottawa legend, the already cited nature-myth of

the Sun and Moon, is of much interest not only for its display of this

special thought, but as showing clearly the motives with which savage

animists offer sacrifices to their deities, and consider these deities

to accept them. Onowuttokwutto, the Ojibwa youth who has followed the

Moon up to the lovely heaven-prairies to be her husband, is taken one

day by her brother the Sun to see how he gets his dinner. The two look

down together through the hole in the sky upon the earth below, the Sun

points out a group of children playing beside a lodge, at the same time

throwing a tiny stone to hit a beautiful boy. The child falls, they see

him carried into the lodge, they hear the sound of the sheesheegwun (the

rattle), and the song and prayer of the medicine-man that the child’s

life may be spared. To this entreaty of the medicine-man, the Sun makes

answer, ‘Send me up the white dog.’ Then the two spectators above could

distinguish on the earth the hurry and bustle of preparation for a

feast, a white dog killed and singed, and the people who were called

assembling at the lodge. While these things were passing, the Sun

addressed himself to Onowuttokwutto, saying, ‘There are among you in the

lower world some whom you call great medicine-men; but it is because

their ears are open, and they hear my voice, when I have struck any one,

that they are able to give relief to the sick. They direct the people to

send me whatever I call for and when they have sent it, I remove my hand

from those I had made sick.’ When he had said this, the white dog was

parcelled out in dishes for those that were at the feast; then the

medicine-man when they were about to begin to eat, said, ‘We send thee

this, Great Manito.’ Immediately the Sun and his Ojibwa companion saw

the dog, cooked and ready to be eaten, rising to them through the

air—and then and there they dined upon it.[928] How such ideas bear on

the meaning of human sacrifice, we may perhaps judge from this prayer of

the Iroquois, offering a human victim to the War-god: ‘To thee, O Spirit

Arieskoi, we slay this sacrifice, that thou mayst feed upon the flesh,

and be moved to give us henceforth luck and victory over our

enemies!’[929] So among the Aztec prayers, there occurs this one

addressed to Tezcatlipoca-Yautl in time of war: ‘Lord of battles; it is

a very certain and sure thing, that a great war is beginning to make,

ordain, form, and concert itself; the War-god opens his mouth, hungry to

swallow the blood of many who shall die in this war; it seems that the

Sun and the Earth-God Tlatecutli desire to rejoice; they desire to give

meat and drink to the gods of Heaven and Hades, making them a banquet of

the flesh and blood of the men who are to die in this war,’ &c.[930]

There is remarkable definiteness in the Peruvian idea that the souls of

human victims are transmitted to another life in divine as in funeral

sacrifice; at one great ceremony, where children of each tribe were

sacrificed to propitiate the gods, ‘they strangled the children, first

giving them to eat and drink, that they might not enter the presence of

the Creator discontented and hungry.’[931] Similar ideas of spiritual

sacrifice appear in other regions of the world. Thus in West Africa we

read of the tree-fetish enjoying the spirit of the food-offering, but

leaving its substance, and an account of the religion of the Gold Coast

mentions how each great wong or deity has his house, and his priest and

priestess to clean the room and give him daily bread kneaded with

palm-oil, ‘of which, as of all gifts of this kind, the wong eats the

invisible soul.’[932] So, in India, the Limbus of Darjeeling make small

offerings of grain, vegetables, and sugar-cane, and sacrifice cows,

pigs, fowls, &c., on the declared principle ‘the life breath to the

gods, the flesh to ourselves.’[933] It seems likely that such meaning

may largely explain the sacrificial practices of other religions. In

conjunction with these accounts, the unequivocal meaning of funeral

sacrifices, whereby offerings are conveyed spiritually into the

possession of spirits of the dead, may perhaps justify us in inferring

that similar ideas of spiritual transmission prevail extensively among

the many nations whose sacrificial rites we know in fact, but cannot

trace with certainty to their original significance.

Having thus examined the manner in which the operation of sacrifice is

considered to take physical effect, whether indefinitely or definitely,

and having distinguished its actual transmission as either substantial,

essential, or spiritual, let us now follow the question of the

sacrificer’s motive in presenting the sacrifice. Important and complex

as this problem is, its key is so obvious that it may be almost

throughout treated by mere statement of general principle. If the main

proposition of animistic natural religion be granted, that the idea of

the human soul is the model of the idea of deity, then the analogy of

man’s dealings with man ought, _inter alia_, to explain his motives in

sacrifice. It does so, and very fully. The proposition may be maintained

in wide generality, that the common man’s present to the great man, to

gain good or avert evil, to ask aid or to condone offence, needs only

substitution of deity for chief, and proper adaptation of the means of

conveying the gift to him, to produce a logical doctrine of sacrificial

rites, in great measure explaining their purpose directly as they stand,

and elsewhere suggesting what was the original meaning which has passed

into changed shape in the course of ages. Instead of offering a special

collection of evidence here on this proposition, it may be enough to ask

attentive reference to any extensive general collection of accounts of

sacrifice, such for instance as those cited for various purposes in

these volumes. It will be noticed that offerings to divinities may be

classed in the same way as earthly gifts. The occasional gift made to

meet some present emergency, the periodical tribute brought by subject

to lord, the royalty paid to secure possession or protection of acquired

wealth, all these have their evident and well-marked analogues in the

sacrificial systems of the world. It may impress some minds with a

stronger sense of the sufficiency of this theory of sacrifice, to

consider how the transition is made in the same imperceptible way from

the idea of substantial value received, to that of ceremonial homage

rendered, whether the recipient be man or god. We do not find it easy to

analyse the impression which a gift makes on our own feelings, and to

separate the actual value of the object from the sense of gratification

in the giver’s good-will or respect, and thus we may well scruple to

define closely how uncultured men work out this very same distinction in

their dealings with their deities. In a general way it may be held that

the idea of practical acceptableness of the food or valuables presented

to the deity, begins early to shade into the sentiment of divine

gratification or propitiation by a reverent offering, though in itself

of not much account to so mighty a divine personage. These two stages of

the sacrificial idea may be fairly contrasted, the one among the Karens

who offer to a demon arrack or grain or a portion of the game they kill,

considering invocation of no avail without a gift,[934] the other among

the negroes of Sierra Leone, who sacrifice an ox ‘to make God glad very

much, and do Kroomen good.’[935]

Hopeless as it may be in hundreds of accounts of sacrifice to guess

whether the worshipper means to benefit or merely to gratify the deity,

there are also numbers of cases in which the thought in the sacrificer’s

mind can scarcely be more than an idea of ceremonial homage. One of the

best-marked sacrificial rites of the world is that of offering by fire

or otherwise morsels or libations at meals. This ranges from the

religion of the North American Indian to that of the classic Greek and

the ancient Chinese, and still holds its place in peasant custom in

Europe.[936] Other groups of cases pass into yet more absolute formality

of reverence. See the Guinea negro passing in silence by the sacred tree

or cavern, and dropping a leaf or a sea-shell as an offering to the

local spirit;[937] the Talein of Burma holding up the dish at his meal

to offer it to the nat, before the company fall to;[938] the Hindu

holding up a little of his rice in his fingers to the height of his

forehead, and offering it in thought to Siva or Vishnu before he eats

it.[939] The same argument applies to the cases ranging far and wide

through religion, where, whatever may have been the original intent of

the sacrifice, it has practically passed into a feast. A banquet where

the deity has but the pretence and the worshippers the reality, may seem

to us a mere mockery of sacrifice. Yet how sincerely men regard it as a

religious ceremony, the following anecdote of a North American Indian

tribe will show. A travelling party of Potawatomis, for three days

finding no game, were in great distress for want of food. On the third

night, a chief, named Saugana, had a dream, wherein a person appearing

to him showed him that they were suffering because they had set out

without a sacrificial feast. He had started, on this important journey,

the dreamer said, ‘as a white man would,’ without making any religious

preparation. Therefore the Great Spirit had punished them with scarcity.

Now, however, twelve men were to go and kill four deer before the sun

was thus high (about nine o’clock). The chief in his dream had seen

these four deer lying dead, the hunters duly killed them, and the

sacrificial feast was held.[940] Further illustrative examples of such

sacred banquets may be chosen through the long range of culture. The

Zulus propitiate the Heaven-god above with a sacrifice of black cattle,

that they may have rain; the village chiefs select the oxen, one is

killed, the rest are merely mentioned; the flesh of the slaughtered ox

is eaten in the house in perfect silence, a token of humble submission;

the bones are burnt outside the village; and after the feast they chant

in musical sounds, a song without words.[941] The Serwatty Islanders

sacrifice buffaloes, pigs, goats, and fowls to the idols when an

individual or the community undertakes an affair or expedition of

importance, and as the carcases are devoured by the devotees, this

ensures a respectable attendance when the offerings are numerous.[942]

Thus among rude tribes of Northern India, sacrifices of beasts are

accompanied by libations of fermented liquor, and in fact sacrifice and

feast are convertible words.[943] Among the Aztecs, prisoners of war

furnished first an acceptable sacrifice to the deity, and then the

staple of a feast for the captors and their friends;[944] while in

ancient Peru whole flocks of sacrificed llamas were eaten by the

people.[945] The history of Greek religion plainly records the

transition from the early holocausts devoted by fire to the gods, to the

great festivals where the sacrifices provided meat for the public

banquets held to honour them in ceremonial homage.[946]

Beside this development from gift to homage, there arises also a

doctrine that the gist of sacrifice is rather in the worshipper giving

something precious to himself, than in the deity receiving benefit. This

may be called the abnegation-theory, and its origin may be fairly

explained by considering it as derived from the original gift-theory.

Taking our own feelings again for a guide, we know how it satisfies us

to have done our part in giving, even if the gift be ineffectual, and

how we scruple to take it back if not received, but rather get rid of it

in some other way—it is corban. Thus we may enter into the feelings of

the Assinaboin Indians, who considered that the blankets and pieces of

cloth and brass kettles and such valuables abandoned in the woods as a

medicine-sacrifice, might be carried off by any friendly party who

chanced to discover them;[947] or of the Ava Buddhists bringing to the

temples offerings of boiled rice and sweetmeats and coco-nut fried in

oil, and never attempting to disturb the crows and wild dogs who

devoured it before their eyes;[948] of the modern Moslems sacrificing

sheep, oxen, and camels in the valley of Muna on their return from

Mekka, it being a meritorious act to give away a victim without eating

any of it, while parties of Takruri watch around like vultures, ready to

pounce upon the carcases.[949] If the offering to the deity be continued

in ceremonial survival, in spite of a growing conviction that after all

the deity does not need and cannot profit by it, sacrifice will be thus

kept up in spite of having become practically unreasonable, and the

worshipper may still continue to measure its efficacy by what it costs

him. But to take this abnegation theory as representing the primitive

intention of sacrifice would be, I think, to turn history upside down.

The mere fact of sacrifices to deities, from the lowest to the highest

levels of culture, consisting to the extent of nine-tenths or more of

gifts of food and sacred banquets, tells forcibly against the

originality of the abnegation-theory. If the primary motive had been to

give up valuable property, we should find the sacrifice of weapons,

garments, ornaments, as prevalent in the lower culture as in fact it is

unusual. Looking at the subject in a general view, to suppose men to

have started by devoting to their deities what they considered

practically useless to them, in order that they themselves might suffer

a loss which none is to gain, is to undervalue the practical sense of

savages, who are indeed apt to keep up old rites after their meaning has

fallen away, but seldom introduce new ones without a rational motive. In

studying the religion of the lower races, men are found dealing with

their gods in as practical and straightforward a way as with their

neighbours, and where plain original purpose is found, it may well be

accepted as sufficient explanation. Of the way in which gift can pass

into abnegation, an instructive example is forthcoming in Buddhism. It

is held that sinful men are liable to be re-born in course of

transmigration as wandering, burning, miserable demons (preta). Now

these demons may receive offerings of food and drink from their

relatives, who can further benefit them by acts of merit done in their

name, as giving food to priests, unless the wretched spirits be so low

in merit that this cannot profit them. Yet even in this case it is held

that though the act does not benefit the spirit whom it is directed to,

it does benefit the person who performs it.[950] Unequivocal examples of

abnegation in sacrifice may be best found among those offerings of which

the value to the offerer utterly exceeds the value they can be supposed

to have to the deity. The most striking of these found among nations

somewhat advanced in general culture, appear in the history of human

sacrifice among Semitic nations. The king of Moab, when the battle was

too sore for him, offered up his eldest son for a burnt-offering on the

wall. The Phœnicians sacrificed the dearest children to propitiate the

angry gods, they enhanced their value by choosing them of noble

families, and there was not wanting among them even the utmost proof

that the efficacy of the sacrifice lay in the sacrificer’s grievous

loss, for they must have for yearly sacrifice only-begotten sons of

their parents (Κρόνῳ γαρ Φοίνικες καθ’ ἕκαστον ἔτος ἔθυον τὰ ἀγαπητὰ καὶ

μονογενῆ τῶν τέκνων). Heliogabalus brought the hideous Oriental rite

into Italy, choosing for victims to his solar divinity high-born lads

throughout the land. Of all such cases, the breaking of the sacred law

of hospitality by sacrificing the guest to Jupiter hospitalis, Ζεὺς

ξένιος, shows in the strongest light in Semitic regions how the value to

the offerer might become the measure of acceptableness to the god.[951]

In such ways, slightly within the range of the lower culture, but

strongly in the religion of the higher nations, the transition from the

gift-theory to the abnegation theory seems to have come about. Our

language displays it in a word, if we do but compare the sense of

presentation and acceptance which ‘sacrificium’ had in a Roman temple,

with the sense of mere giving up and loss which ‘sacrifice’ conveys in

an English market.

Through the history of sacrifice, it has occurred to many nations that

cost may be economized without impairing efficiency. The result is seen

in ingenious devices to lighten the burden on the worshipper by

substituting something less valuable than what he ought to offer, or

pretends to. Even in such a matter as this, the innate correspondence in

the minds of men is enough to produce in distant and independent races

so much uniformity of development, that three or four headings will

serve to class the chief divisions of sacrificial substitution among

mankind.

To give part for the whole is a proceeding so closely conformed to

ordinary tribute by subject to lord, that in great measure it comes

directly under the gift-theory, and as such has already had its examples

here. It is only when the part given to the gods is of contemptible

value in proportion to the whole, that full sacrifice passes gradually

into substitution. This is the case when in Madagascar the head of the

sacrificed beast is set up on a pole, and the blood and fat are rubbed

on the stones of the altar, but the sacrificers and their friends and

the officiating priest devour the whole carcase;[952] when rich Guinea

negroes sacrifice a sheep or goat to the fetish, and feast on it with

their friends, only leaving for the deity himself part of the

entrails;[953] when Tunguz, sacrificing cattle, would give a bit of

liver and fat and perhaps hang up the hide in the woods as the god’s

share, or Mongols would set the heart of the beast before the idol till

next day.[954] Thus the most ancient whole burnt-offering of the Greeks

dwindled to burning for the gods only the bones and fat of the

slaughtered ox, while the worshippers feasted themselves on the meat, an

economic rite which takes mythic shape in the legend of the sly

Prometheus giving Zeus the choice of the two parts of the sacrificed ox

he had divided for gods and mortals, on the one side bones covered

seemly with white fat, on the other the joints hidden under repulsive

hide and entrails.[955] With a different motive, not that of parsimony,

but of keeping up in survival an ancient custom, the Zarathustrian

religion performed by substitution the old Aryan sacrifice by fire. The

Vedic sacrifice Agnishtoma required that animals should be slain, and

their flesh partly committed to the gods by fire, partly eaten by

sacrificers and priests. The Parsi ceremony Izeshne, formal successor of

this bloody rite, requires no animal to be killed, but it suffices to

place the hair of an ox in a vessel, and show it to the fire.[956]

The offering of a part of the worshipper’s own body is a most usual act,

whether its intention is simply that of gift or tribute, or whether it

is considered as a _pars pro toto_ representing the whole man, either in

danger and requiring to be ransomed, or destined to actual sacrifice for

another and requiring to be redeemed. How a finger-joint may thus

represent a whole body, is perfectly shown in the funeral sacrifices of

the Nicobar islanders; they bury the dead man’s property with him, and

his wife has a finger-joint cut off (obviously a substitute for

herself), and if she refuses even this, a deep notch is cut in a pillar

of the house.[957] We are now concerned, however, with the

finger-offering, not as a sacrifice to the dead, but as addressed to

other deities. This idea is apparently worked out in the Tongan custom

of tutu-nima, the chopping off a portion of the little finger with a

hatchet or sharp stone as a sacrifice to the gods, for the recovery of a

sick relation of higher rank; Mariner saw children of five years old

quarrelling for the honour of having it done to them.[958] In the Mandan

ceremonies of initiation into manhood, when the youth at last hung

senseless and (as they called it) lifeless by the cords made fast to

splints through his flesh, he was let down, and coming to himself

crawled on hands and feet round the medicine-lodge to where an old

Indian sat with hatchet in his hand and a buffalo skull before him; then

the youth, holding up the little finger of his left hand to the Great

Spirit, offered it as a sacrifice, and it was chopped off, and sometimes

the fore-finger afterwards, upon the skull.[959] In India, probably as a

Dravidian rather than Aryan rite, the practice with full meaning comes

into view; as Siva cut off his finger to appease the wrath of Kali, so

in the southern provinces mothers will cut off their own fingers as

sacrifices lest they lose their children, and one hears of a golden

finger being allowed instead, the substitute of a substitute.[960] The

New Zealanders hang locks of hair on branches of trees in the

burying-ground, a recognised place for offerings.[961] That hair may be

a substitute for its owner is well shown in Malabar, where we read of

the demon being expelled from the possessed patient and flogged by the

exorcist to a tree; there the sick man’s hair is nailed fast, cut away,

and left for a propitiation to the demon.[962] Thus there is some ground

for interpreting the consecration of the boy’s cut hair in Europe as a

representative sacrifice.[963] As for the formal shedding of blood, it

may represent fatal bloodshed, as when the Jagas or priests in Quilombo

only marked with spears the children brought in, instead of running them

through;[964] or when in Greece a few drops of human blood had come to

stand instead of the earlier and more barbaric human sacrifice;[965] or

when in our own time and under our own rule a Vishnuite who has

inadvertently killed a monkey, a garuda, or a cobra, may expiate his

offence by a mock sacrifice, in which a human victim is wounded in the

thigh, pretends to die, and goes through the farce of resuscitation, his

drawn blood serving as substitute for his life.[966] One of the most

noteworthy cases of the survival of such formal bloodshed within modern

memory in Europe must be classed as not Aryan but Turanian, belonging as

it does to the folklore of Esthonia. The sacrificer had to draw drops of

blood from his forefinger, and therewith to pray this prayer, which was

taken down verbatim from one who remembered it:—‘I name thee with my

blood and betroth thee with my blood, and point thee out my buildings to

be blessed, stables and cattle-pens and hen-roosts; let them be blessed

through my blood and thy might!’ ‘Be my joy, thou Almighty, upholder of

my forefathers, my protector and guardian of my life! I beseech thee by

strength of flesh and blood; receive the food that I bring thee to thy

sustenance and the joy of my body; keep me as thy good child, and I will

thank and praise thee. By the help of the Almighty, my own God, hearken

to me! What through negligence I have done imperfectly toward thee, do

thou forget! But keep it truly in remembrance, that I have honestly paid

my gifts to my parents’ honour and joy and requital. Moreover falling

down I thrice kiss the earth. Be with me quick in doing, and peace be

with thee hitherto!’[967] These various rites of finger-cutting,

hair-cutting, and blood-letting, have required mention here from the

special point of view of their connexion with sacrifice. They belong to

an extensive series of practices, due to various and often obscure

motives, which come under the general heading of ceremonial mutilations.

When a life is given for a life, it is still possible to offer a life

less valued than the life in danger. When in Peru the Inca or some great

lord fell sick, he would offer to the deity one of his sons, imploring

him to take this victim in his stead.[968] The Greeks found it

sufficient to offer to the gods criminals or captives;[969] and the like

was the practice of the heathen tribes of northern Europe, to whom

indeed Christian dealers were accused of selling slaves for sacrificial

purposes.[970] Among such accounts, the typical story belongs to Punic

history. The Carthaginians, overcome and hard pressed in the war with

Agathokles, set down the defeat to divine wrath. Now Kronos had in

former times received his sacrifice of the chosen of their sons, but of

late they had put him off with children bought and nourished for the

purpose. In fact they had obeyed the sacrificer’s natural tendency to

substitution, but now in time of misfortune the reaction set in. To

balance the account and condone the parsimonious fraud, a monstrous

sacrifice was celebrated. Two hundred children, of the noblest of the

land, were brought to the idol. ‘For there was among them a brazen

statue of Kronos, holding out his hands sloping downward, so that the

child placed on them rolled off and fell into a certain chasm full of

fire.’[971] The Phœnician god here called Kronos is commonly though not

certainly identified with Moloch. Next, it will help us to realize how

the sacrifice of an animal may atone for a human life, if we notice in

South Africa how a Zulu will redeem a lost child from the finder by a

bullock, or a Kimbunda will expiate the blood of a slave by the offering

of an ox, whose blood will wash away the other.[972] For instances of

the animal substituted for man in sacrifice the following may serve.

Among the Khonds of Orissa, when Colonel Macpherson was engaged in

putting down the sacrifice of human victims by the sect of the

Earth-goddess, they at once began to discuss the plan of sacrificing

cattle by way of substitutes. Now there is some reason to think that

this same course of ceremonial change may account for the following

sacrificial practice in the other Khond sect. It appears that those who

worship the Light-god hold a festival in his honour, when they slaughter

a buffalo in commemoration of the time when, as they say, the

Earth-goddess was prevailing on men to offer human sacrifices to her,

but the Light-god sent a tribe-deity who crushed the bloody-minded

Earth-goddess under a mountain, and dragged a buffalo out of the jungle,

saying, ‘Liberate the man, and sacrifice the buffalo!’[973] This legend,

divested of its mythic garb, may really record a historical substitution

of animal for human sacrifice. In Ceylon, the exorcist will demand the

name of the demon possessing a demoniac, and the patient in frenzy

answers, giving the demon’s name, ‘I am So-and-so, I demand a human

sacrifice and will not go out without!’ The victim is promised, the

patient comes to from the fit, and a few weeks later the sacrifice is

made, but instead of a man they offer a fowl.[974] Classic examples of

substitution of this sort may be found in the sacrifice of a doe for a

virgin to Artemis in Laodicæa, a goat for a boy to Dionysos at Potniæ.

There appears to be Semitic connexion here, as there clearly is in the

story of the Æolians of Tenedos sacrificing to Melikertes (Melkarth)

instead of a new-born child a new-born calf, shoeing it with buskins and

tending the mother-cow as if a human mother.[975]

One step more in the course of substitution leads the worshipper to make

his sacrifice by effigy. An instructive example of the way in which this

kind of substitution arises may be found in the rites of ancient Mexico.

At the yearly festival of the water-gods and mountain-gods, certain

actual sacrifices of human victims took place in the temples. At the

same time, in the houses of the people, there was celebrated an

unequivocal but harmless imitation of this bloody rite. They made paste

images, adored them, and in due pretence of sacrifice cut them open at

the breast, took out their hearts, cut off their heads, divided and

devoured their limbs.[976] In the classic religions of Greece and Rome,

the desire to keep up the consecrated rites of ages more barbaric, more

bloodthirsty, or more profuse, worked itself out in many a compromise of

this class, such as the brazen statues offered for human victims, the

cakes of dough or wax in the figure of the beasts for which they were

presented as symbolic substitutes.[977] Not for economy, but to avoid

taking life, Brahmanic sacrifice has been known to be brought down to

offering models of the victim-animals in meal and butter.[978] The

modern Chinese, whose satisfaction in this kind of make-believe is so

well shown by their despatching paper figures to serve as attendants for

the dead, work out in the same fanciful way the idea of the sacrificial

effigy, in propitiating the presiding deity of the year for the cure of

a sick man. The rude figure of a man is drawn on or cut out of a piece

of paper, pasted on a slip of bamboo, and stuck upright in a packet of

mock-money. With proper exorcism, this representative is carried out

into the street with the disease, the priest squirts water from his

mouth over patient, image, and mock-money, the two latter are burnt, and

the company eat up the little feast laid out for the year-deity.[979]

There is curious historical significance in the custom at the inundation

of the Nile at Cairo, of setting up a conical pillar of earth which the

flood washes away as it rises. This is called the arûseh or bride, and

appears to be a substitute introduced under humaner Moslem influence,

for the young virgin in gay apparel who in older time was thrown into

the river, a sacrifice to obtain a plentiful inundation.[980] Again, the

patient’s offering the model of his diseased limb is distinctly of the

nature of a sacrifice, whether it be propitiatory offering before cure,

or thank-offering after. On the one hand, the ex-voto models of arms and

ears dedicated in ancient Egyptian temples are thought to be grateful

memorials,[981] as seems to have been the case with metal models of

faces, breasts, hands, &c., in Bœotian temples.[982] On the other hand,

there are cases where the model and, as it were, substitute of the

diseased part is given to obtain a cure; thus in early Christian times

in Germany protest was made against the heathen custom of hanging up

carved wooden limbs to a helpful idol for relief,[983] and in modern

India the pilgrim coming for cure will deposit in the temple the image

of his diseased limb, in gold or silver or copper according to his

means.[984]

If now we look for the sacrificial idea within the range of modern

Christendom, we shall find it in two ways not obscurely manifest. It

survives in traditional folklore, and it holds a place in established

religion. One of its most remarkable survivals may be seen in Bulgaria,

where sacrifice of live victims is to this day one of the accepted rites

of the land. They sacrifice a lamb on St. George’s day, telling to

account for the custom a legend which combines the episodes of the

offering of Isaac and the miracle of the Three Children. On the feast of

the Panagia (Virgin Mary) sacrifices of lambs, kids, honey, wine, &c.,

are offered in order that the children of the house may enjoy good

health throughout the year. A little child divines by touching one of

three saints’ candles to which the offering is to be dedicated; when the

choice is thus made, the bystanders each drink a cup of wine, saying

‘Saint So-and-So, to thee is the offering.’ Then they cut the throat of

the lamb, or smother the bees, and in the evening the whole village

assembles to eat the various sacrifices, and the men end the ceremony

with the usual drunken bout.[985] Within the borders of Russia, many and

various sacrifices are still offered; such is the horse with head

smeared with honey and mane decked with ribbons, cast into the river

with two millstones to its neck to appease the water-spirit, the

Vodyany, at his spiteful flood-time in early spring; and such is the

portion of supper left out for the house-demon, the domovoy, who if not

thus fed is apt to turn spirit-rapper, and knock the tables and benches

about at night.[986] In many another district of Europe, the tenacious

memory of the tiller of the soil has kept up in wondrous perfection

heirlooms from præ-Christian faiths. In Franconia, people will pour on

the ground a libation before drinking; entering a forest they will put

offerings of bread and fruit on a stone, to avert the attacks of the

demon of the woods, the ‘bilberry-man;’ the bakers will throw white

rolls into the oven flue for luck, and say, ‘Here, devil, they are

thine!’ The Carinthian peasant will fodder the wind by setting up a dish

of food in a tree before his house, and the fire by casting in lard and

dripping, in order that gale and conflagration may not hurt him. At

least up to the end of the 18th century this most direct elemental

sacrifice might be seen in Germany at the midsummer festival in the most

perfect form; some of the porridge from the table was thrown into the

fire, and some into running water, some was buried in the earth, and

some smeared on leaves and put on the chimney-top for the winds.[987]

Relics of such ancient sacrifice may be found in Scandinavia to this

day; to give but one example, the old country altars, rough earth-fast

stones with cup-like hollows, are still visited by mothers whose

children have been smitten with sickness by the trolls, and who smear

lard into the hollows and leave rag-dolls as offerings.[988] France may

be represented by the country-women’s custom of beginning a meal by

throwing down a spoonful of milk or bouillon; and by the record of the

custom of Andrieux in Dauphiny, where at the solstice the villagers went

out upon the bridge when the sun rose, and offered him an omelet.[989]

The custom of burning alive the finest calf, to save a murrain-struck

herd, had its last examples in Cornwall in the 19th century; the records

of bealtuinn sacrifices in Scotland continue in the Highlands within a

century ago; and Scotchmen still living remember the corner of a field

being left untilled for the Goodman’s Croft (i.e., the Devil’s), but the

principle of ‘cheating the devil’ was already in vogue, and the piece of

land allotted was but a worthless scrap.[990] It is a remnant of old

sacrificial rite, when the Swedes still bake at yule-tide a cake in the

shape of a boar, representing the boar sacrificed of old to Freyr, and

Oxford to this day commemorates the same ancestral ceremony, when the

boar’s head is carried in to the Christmas feast at Queen’s College,

with its appointed carol, ‘Caput apri defero, Reddens laudes

Domino.’[991] With a lingering recollection of the old libations, the

German toper’s saying still runs that heeltaps are a devil’s

offering.[992]

As for sacrificial rites most fully and officially existing in modern

Christendom, the presentation of ex-votos is one. The ecclesiastical

opposition to the continuance of these classic thank-offerings was but

temporary and partial. In the 5th century it seems to have been usual to

offer silver and gold eyes, feet, &c., to saints in acknowledgment of

cures they had effected. At the beginning of the 16th century, Polydore

Vergil, describing the classic custom, goes on to say: ‘In the same

manner do we now offer up in our churches sigillaria, that is, little

images of wax, and oscilla. As oft as any part of the body is hurt, as

the hand, foot, breast, we presently make a vow to God, and his saints,

to whom upon our recovery we make an offering of that hand or foot or

breast shaped in wax, which custom has so far obtained that this kind of

images have passed to the other animals. Wherefore so for an ox, so for

a horse, so for a sheep, we place puppets in the temples. In which thing

any modestly scrupulous person may perhaps say he knows not whether we

are rivalling the religion or the superstition of the ancients.’[993] In

modern Europe the custom prevails largely, but has perhaps somewhat

subsided into low levels of society, to judge by the general use of mock

silver and such-like worthless materials for the dedicated effigies. In

Christian as in præ-Christian temples, clouds of incense rise as of old.

Above all, though the ceremony of sacrifice did not form an original

part of Christian worship, its prominent place in the ritual was

obtained in early centuries. In that Christianity was recruited among

nations to whom the conception of sacrifice was among the deepest of

religious ideas, and the ceremony of sacrifice among the sincerest

efforts of worship, there arose an observance suited to supply the

vacant place. This result was obtained not by new introduction, but by

transmutation. The solemn eucharistic meal of the primitive Christians

in time assumed the name of the sacrifice of the mass, and was adapted

to a ceremonial in which an offering of food and drink is set out by a

priest on an altar in a temple, and consumed by priest and worshippers.

The natural conclusion of an ethnographic survey of sacrifice, is to

point to the controversy between Protestants and Catholics, for

centuries past one of the keenest which have divided the Christian

world, on this express question whether sacrifice is or is not a

Christian rite.

The next group of rites to be considered comprises Fasting and certain

other means of producing ecstasy and other morbid exaltation for

religious ends. In the foregoing researches on animism, it is frequently

observed or implied that the religious beliefs of the lower races are in

no small measure based on the evidence of visions and dreams, regarded

as actual intercourse with spiritual beings. From the earliest phases of

culture upward, we find religion in close alliance with ecstatic

physical conditions. These are brought on by various means of

interference with the healthy action of body and mind, and it is

scarcely needful to remind the reader that, according to philosophic

theories antecedent to those of modern medicine, such morbid

disturbances are explained as symptoms of divine visitation, or at least

of superhuman spirituality. Among the strongest means of disturbing the

functions of the mind so as to produce ecstatic vision, is fasting,

accompanied as it so usually is with other privations, and with

prolonged solitary contemplation in the desert or the forest. Among the

ordinary vicissitudes of savage life, the wild hunter has many a time to

try involuntarily the effects of such a life for days and weeks

together, and under these circumstances he soon comes to see and talk

with phantoms which are to him visible personal spirits. The secret of

spiritual intercourse thus learnt, he has thenceforth but to reproduce

the cause in order to renew the effects.

The rite of fasting, and the utter objective reality ascribed to what we

call its morbid symptoms, are shown in striking details among the savage

tribes of North America. Among the Indians (the accounts mostly refer to

the Algonquin tribes), long and rigorous fasting is enjoined among boys

and girls from a very early age; to be able to fast long is an enviable

distinction, and they will abstain from food three to seven days, or

even more, taking only a little water. During these fasts, especial

attention is paid to dreams. Thus Tanner tells the story of a certain

Net-no-kwa, who at twelve years old fasted ten successive days, till in

a dream a man came and stood before her, and after speaking of many

things gave her two sticks, saying, ‘I give you these to walk upon, and

your hair I give it to be like snow;’ this assurance of extreme old age

was through life a support to her in times of danger and distress. At

manhood the Indian lad, retiring to a solitary place to fast and

meditate and pray, receives visionary impressions which stamp his

character for life, and especially he waits till there appears to him in

a dream some animal or thing which will be henceforth his ‘medicine,’

the fetish-representative of his manitu or protecting genius. For

instance, an aged warrior who had thus in his youth dreamed of a bat

coming to him, wore the skin of a bat on the crown of his head

henceforth, and was all his life invulnerable to his enemies as a bat on

the wing. In after life, an Indian who wants anything will fast till he

has a dream that his manitu will grant it him. While the men are away

hunting, the children are sometimes made to fast, that in their dreams

they may obtain omens of the chase. Hunters fasting before an expedition

are informed in dreams of the haunts of the game, and the means of

appeasing the wrath of the bad spirits; if the dreamer fancies he sees

an Indian who has been long dead, and hears him say, ‘If thou wilt

sacrifice to me thou shalt shoot deer at pleasure,’ he will prepare a

sacrifice, and burn the whole or part of a deer, in honour of the

apparition. Especially the ‘meda’ or ‘medicine-man’ receives in fasts

much of his qualification for his sacred office. The Ojibwa prophetess,

known in after life as Catherine Wabose, in telling the story of her

early years, relates how at the age of womanhood she fasted in her

secluded lodge till she went up into the heavens and saw the spirit at

the entrance, the Bright Blue Sky; this was the first supernatural

communication of her prophetic career. The account given to Schoolcraft

by Chingwauk, an Algonquin chief deeply versed in the mystic lore and

picture-writing of his people, is as follows: ‘Chingwauk began by saying

that the ancient Indians made a great merit of fasting. They fasted

sometimes six or seven days, till both their bodies and minds became

free and light, which prepared them to dream. The object of the ancient

seers was to dream of the sun, as it was believed that such a dream

would enable them to see everything on the earth. And by fasting long

and thinking much on the subject, they generally succeeded. Fasts and

dreams were at first attempted at an early age. What a young man sees

and experiences during these dreams and fasts, is adopted by him as

truth, and it becomes a principle to regulate his future life. He relies

for success on these revelations. If he has been much favoured in his

fasts, and the people believe that he has the art of looking into

futurity, the path is open to the highest honours. The prophet, he

continued, begins to try his power in secret, with only one assistant,

whose testimony is necessary should he succeed. As he goes on, he puts

down the figures of his dreams and revelations, by symbols, on bark or

other material, till a whole winter is sometimes passed in pursuing the

subject, and he thus has a record of his principal revelations. If what

he predicts is verified, the assistant mentions it, and the record is

then appealed to as proof of his prophetic power and skill. Time

increases his fame. His _kee-keé-wins_, or records, are finally shown to

the old people, who meet together and consult upon them, for the whole

nation believe in these revelations. They in the end give their

approval, and declare that he is gifted as a prophet—is inspired with

wisdom, and is fit to lead the opinions of the nation. Such, he

concluded, was the ancient custom, and the celebrated old war-captains

rose to their power in this manner.’ It remains to say that among these

American tribes, the ‘jossakeed’ or soothsayer prepares himself by

fasting and the use of the sweating-bath for the state of convulsive

ecstasy in which he utters the dictates of his familiar spirits.[994]

The practice of fasting is described in other districts of the

uncultured world as carried on to produce similar ecstasy and

supernatural converse. The account by Roman Pane in the Life of Colon

describes the practice in Hayti of fasting to obtain knowledge of future

events from the spirits (cemi); and a century or two later, rigorous

fasting formed part of the apprentice’s preparation for the craft of

‘boyé’ or sorcerer, evoker, consulter, propitiator, and exorciser of

spirits.[995] The ‘keebèt’ or conjurers of the Abipones were believed by

the natives to be able to inflict disease and death, cure all disorders,

make known distant and future events, cause rain, hail, and tempests,

call up the shades of the dead, put on the form of tigers, handle

serpents unharmed, &c. These powers were imparted by diabolical

assistance, and Father Dobrizhoffer thus describes the manner of

obtaining them:—‘Those who aspire to the office of juggler are said to

sit upon an aged willow, overhanging some lake, and to abstain from food

for several days, till they begin to see into futurity. It always

appeared probable to me that these rogues, from long fasting, contract a

weakness of brain, a giddiness, and kind of delirium, which makes them

imagine that they are gifted with superior wisdom, and give themselves

out for magicians. They impose upon themselves first, and afterwards

upon others.’[996] The Malay, to make himself invulnerable, retires for

three days to solitude and scanty food in the jungle, and if on the

third day he dreams of a beautiful spirit descending to speak to him,

the charm is worked.[997] The Zulu doctor qualifies himself for

intercourse with the ‘amadhlozi,’ or ghosts, from whom he is to obtain

direction in his craft, by spare abstemious diet, want, suffering,

castigation, and solitary wandering, till fainting fits or coma bring

him into direct intercourse with the spirits. These native diviners fast

often, and are worn out by fastings, sometimes of several days’

duration, when they become partially or wholly ecstatic, and see

visions. So thoroughly is the connexion between fasting and spiritual

intercourse acknowledged by the Zulus, that it has become a saying among

them, ‘The continually stuffed body cannot see secret things.’ They have

no faith in a fat prophet.[998]

The effects thus looked for and attained by fasting among uncultured

tribes continue into the midst of advanced civilization. No wonder that,

in the Hindu tale, king Vasavadatta and his queen after a solemn penance

and a three days’ fast should see Siva in a dream and receive his

gracious tidings; no wonder that, in the actual experience of to-day,

the Hindu yogi should bring on by fasting a state in which he can with

bodily eyes behold the gods.[999] The Greek oracle-priests recognized

fasting as a means of bringing on prophetic dreams and visions; the

Pythia of Delphi herself fasted for inspiration; Galen remarks that

fasting dreams are the clearer.[1000] Through after ages, both cause and

consequence have held their places in Christendom. Thus Michael the

Archangel, with sword in right hand and scales in left, appears to a

certain priest of Siponte, who during a twelvemonth’s course of prayer

and fasting had been asking if he would have a temple built in his

honour:—

‘precibus jejunia longis

Addiderat, totoque orans se afflixerat anno.’[1001]

Reading the narratives of the wondrous sights seen by St. Theresa and

her companions, how the saint went in spirit into hell and saw the

darkness and fire and unutterable despair, how she had often by her side

her good patrons Peter and Paul, how when she was raised in rapture

above the grate at the nunnery where she was to take the sacrament,

Sister Mary Baptist and others being present, they saw an angel by her

with a golden fiery dart at the end whereof was a little fire, and he

thrust it through her heart and bowels and pulled them out with it,

leaving her wholly inflamed with a great love of God—the modern reader

naturally looks for details of physical condition and habit of life

among the sisterhood, and as naturally finds that St. Theresa was of

morbid constitution and subject to trances from her childhood, in after

life subduing her flesh by long watchings and religious discipline, and

keeping severe fast during eight months of the year.[1002] It is

needless to multiply such mediæval records of fasts which have produced

their natural effects in beatific vision—are they not written page after

page in the huge folios of the Bollandists? So long as fasting is

continued as a religious rite, so long its consequences in morbid mental

exaltation will continue the old and savage doctrine that morbid

phantasy is supernatural experience. Bread and meat would have robbed

the ascetic of many an angel’s visit; the opening of the refectory door

must many a time have closed the gates of heaven to his gaze.

It is indeed not the complete theory of fasting as a religious rite, but

only an important and perhaps original part of it, that here comes into

view. Abstinence from food has a principal place among acts of

self-mortification or penance, a province of religious ordinance into

which the present argument scarcely enters. Looking at the practice of

fasting here from an animistic point of view, as a process of bringing

on dreams and visions, it will be well to mention with it certain other

means by which ecstatic phenomena are habitually induced.

One of these means is the use of drugs. In the West India Islands at the

time of the discovery, Columbus describes the religious ceremony of

placing a platter containing ‘cohoba’ powder on the head of the idol,

the worshippers then snuffing up this powder through a cane with two

branches put to the nose. Pane further describes how the native priest,

when brought to a sick man, would put himself in communication with the

spirits by thus snuffing cohoba, ‘which makes him drunk, that he knows

not what he does, and so says many extraordinary things, wherein they

affirm that they are talking with the cemis, and that from them it is

told them that the infirmity came.’ On the Amazons, the Omaguas have

continued to modern times the use of narcotic plants, producing an

intoxication lasting twenty-four hours, during which they are subject to

extraordinary visions; from one of these plants they obtain the ‘curupa’

powder which they snuff into their nostrils with a Y-shaped reed.[1003]

Here the similar names and uses of the drug plainly show historical

connexion between the Omaguas and the Antilles islanders. The

Californian Indians would give children narcotic potions, in order to

gain from the ensuing visions information about their enemies; and thus

the Mundrucus of North Brazil, desiring to discover murderers, would

administer such drinks to seers, in whose dreams the criminals

appeared.[1004] The Darien Indians used the seeds of the Datura

sanguinea to bring on in children prophetic delirium, in which they

revealed hidden treasure. In Peru the priests who talked with the

‘huaca’ or fetishes used to throw themselves into an ecstatic condition

by a narcotic drink called ‘tonca,’ made from the same plant, whence its

name of ‘huacacacha’ or fetish-herb.[1005] The Mexican priests also

appear to have used an ointment or drink made with seeds of

‘ololiuhqui,’ which produced delirium and visions.[1006] In both

Americas tobacco served for such purposes. It must be noticed that

smoking is more or less practised among native races to produce full

intoxication, the smoke being swallowed for the purpose. By smoking

tobacco, the sorcerers of Brazilian tribes raised themselves to ecstasy

in their convulsive orgies, and saw spirits; no wonder tobacco came to

be called the ‘holy herb.’[1007] So North American Indians held

intoxication by tobacco to be supernatural ecstasy, and the dreams of

men in this state to be inspired.[1008] This idea may explain a

remarkable proceeding of the Delaware Indians. At their festival in

honour of the Fire-god with his twelve attendant manitus, inside the

house of sacrifice a small oven-hut was set up, consisting of twelve

poles tied together at the top and covered with blankets, high enough

for a man to stand nearly upright within it. After the feast this oven

was heated with twelve red-hot stones, and twelve men crept inside. An

old man threw twelve pipefulls of tobacco on these stones, and when the

patients had borne to the utmost the heat and suffocating smoke, they

were taken out, generally falling in a swoon.[1009] This practice, which

was carried on in the last century, is remarkable for its coincidence

with the Scythian mode of purification after a funeral, as described by

Herodotus. He relates that they make their hut with three stakes sloping

together at the top and covered in with wooden felts; then they cast

red-hot stones into a trough placed within and throw hemp-seed on them,

which sends forth fumes such as no Greek vapour-bath could exceed, and

the Scyths in their sweating-hut roar with delight.[1010]

Not to dwell on the ancient Aryan deification of an intoxicating drink,

the original of the divine Soma of the Hindus and the divine Haoma of

the Parsis, nor on the drunken orgies of the worship of Dionysos in

ancient Greece, we find more exact Old World analogues of the ecstatic

medicaments used in the lower culture. Such are the decoctions of

thalassægle which Pliny speaks of as drunk to produce delirium and

visions; the drugs mentioned by Hesychius, whereby Hekate was evoked;

the mediæval witch-ointments which brought visionary beings into the

presence of the patient, transported him to the witches’ sabbath,

enabled him to turn into a beast.[1011] The survival of such practices

is most thorough among the Persian dervishes of our own day. These

mystics are not only opium-eaters, like so large a proportion of their

countrymen; they are hashish-smokers, and the effect of this drug is to

bring them into a state of exaltation passing into utter hallucination.

To a patient in this condition, says Dr. Polak, a little stone in the

road will seem a great block that he must stride over; a gutter becomes

a wide stream to his eyes, and he calls for a boat to ferry him across;

men’s voices sound like thunder in his ears; he fancies he has wings and

can rise from the ground. These ecstatic effects, in which miracle is

matter of hourly experience, are considered in Persia as high religious

developments; the visionaries and their rites are looked on as holy, and

they make converts.[1012]