[ p. 151 ]
We have thus far considered the various Oihjects of Avorship, the possible causes of worship in man ’s nature, and the views man holds in regard to himself. Incidentally it has been necessary also to touch upon another subject which we must now consider more circumstantially, that of sacrifice, the objective link between man and the spiritual world. There have been various theories as to the origin of sacrifice but none is satisfactory, because, though all are correct in their interpretation of certain phenomena, all are deficient in that they are intended to make one interpretation cover all phenomena. But one might as well argue one origin of poetry as invent one origin of sacrifice. Poetry originates in lyrical feeling, passion, imagination, historical essay, the desire to say a thing worthily or lastingly. So sacrifice originates in various fears and desires, to get, to get rid of, to propitiate, to commune, to atone. It is in general the expression of a desire to square oneself with the (spiritual) powers that be, but as that is too general a notion to be of practical use, and all theories are too one-sided, it will be best to consider the data first and see as we peruse them.what reasonable application thereof can be made.
Before man has a clear conception of a spirit inhabiting a body, when he fears rather the power of the jungle than any demon in it, when he has no thought of a lump of metal being the home of a spirit but yet entreats it as a living whole, he makes, in this attitude of mind, first of all a gesture indicating his appreciation of the power. [ p. 152 ] If he is accustomed to prostrate himself before his chief, that is the gesture he employs; if merely to bow the head or stretch forth the arms, that is his gesture here. This first indication of religious dread or awe remains with him always even when he is highly civilized. In the Rig-Veda, the worshipper formally calls his god ’s attention to the fact that in sacrificing he is also “stretching out the hands,” not to receive but to supplicate, and is “kneeling” to the god. At a later date the Hindu prostrates himself before his god. In one form or another such a gesture is almost universal; it is not the result of social agreement as to the way of approaching divinity; it is not a mob-motion. It is a reflex in the individual of instinct (as a dog fawns) or social usage as applied to an extraneous object of respect; its intent is to show the man’s humility in the presence of a recognized power. So the Australian savage bows and kneels to the material object which he invokes to aid him. Further, the act which in social relations is apt to accompany such a gesture accompanies it here in many instances of savage procedure; that is, the savage offers something to the power, just as he offers a little something when he bows to his chief, or greets an awesome strange power in human shape. This offering is, so to speak, one with the gesture of prostration. In whatever shape it is made, as fruit or water or meat or rum, it reflects and carries out the idea of the prostration; it, too, is an embodied confession of humility, of dependence, of homage, of attempted cout ciliation. Thus, at the same time that the Australian, that lowest savage, who has been exploited as the prototype of communion-sacrifieers while he is also said, oddly enough, to be “without religion,” is busy on the one hand with magical acts of fruitfulness and gingerly eats his totem, on the other hand he is begging on bended knee some power of dust or finger or his knife (conceived as an animate [ p. 153 ] volitive being) to grow or injure or even to kill his foe; so that the fundamental attitude of the simplest giftsacrifice is exemplified in this pre-rehgious man, whose homage, comi n g before sacrifice, shows that there must be an error in that theory which explains all “honorific” sacrifice as secondary.
One of the many theories of sacrifice, that of Tylor and Lyall, who explain it as a gift, was unnecessarily complicated by the sub-theory that animal sacrifices came later than cereal offerings and by the belief that the manner of making a sacrifice, whether offered on or in the earth, is of real importance. As regards the latter point, the offering in earth, a pit, is generally made to lower pitspirits, earth-spirits,’ heroes, ghosts, divinities of the under-world; but even in Greece this rule does not always hold and in any case it merely adjusts the gift to the recipient’s domicile, as one naturally offers anything to water-spirits in water rather than on land. In the case of the lower spirits, however, the Greeks made a difference in the disposal of the food. Edible animals were offered to the upper gods and, except in a holocaust, the people would eat what the gods left; but to the earthy lower spirits were offered their special animals, pigs and dogs,[1] whose blood flowed into the earth, and their carcasses were burned. So blood (renewing life) was poured into a trench for ghostly heroes. As to the question of priority of animal and cereal sacrifice, savages offer both kinds at the same time and the earliest records speak of both. One form is probably as old as the other, circumstances of human diet probably being the decisive factor; for all gods eat what their worshippers eat. Cereals are contrasted by some scholars with bloody sacrifices as being [ p. 154 ] non-piacular; but the antithesis will not hold because milk and honey are piacular in the Vedic sacrifice and flesh also is often non-piacular, though it may be admitted that the piacular sacrifice is usually carried out with flesli- offerings. In general, however, Cain and Abel were contemporaries! Fruit or grain and flesh belong to the most primitive known types of savage sacrifice.
A good method of approach to the idea of sacrifice is by way of the Manes. The ghost, of course, is fed with what he likes and has ordinarily eaten. Then the Manes, who„ are exalted ghosts, are also fed with their accustomed food. Such a custom retains its hold and it is not probable that the offerings to the Manes changed at all for centuries in India, but rather that the jjreseut food of the Manes, which we know by the records is the same today as it was three thousand years ago, was even then, in character, what it had been for as many years before. The actual provision may have changed but not the kind of provision. Now this has always been a combination of cakes and flesh; each family ghost was given the kind of flesh he especially liked, as long as one could I’em ember what it was, and all the Manes were fed with sweet cakes because all Hindus like that kind of food. When flesh was given up as a daily diet it was still retained as acceptable to the Manes, because they had always been used to it. This union of cereal and flesh is one of the oldest forms of Hindu sacrifice and it is well to study it a little closer because it illuminates one of the theories of sacrifice already mentioned. To the observer, as to the participant of this tdeal, the dinner to the Manes is a common meal shared by all the family, dead and alive, with invited guests consisting of human neighbors and their Kanes. Now in a sense any communal meal is a ceremony of communion and this meal has been urged in evidence of the theory that all sacrifice is a communion service, as [ p. 155 ] when the totemist; by a blood-oftering and by eating the totem, communes with the spirit of the totem. But in reality there is no communion in this sense, no effort to unite oneself with a spiritual power from which the worshipper through the very act of communion draws spiritual strength. No more conununion than there is in a dinner party; communication, yes, and very likely a shrewd idea that the people invited to the party may subsequently remember the giver kindly. For the Shraddha feast as it is called (i.e., love-feast) is really the daily meal of the ghost. The day of the Manes is measured by the moon, that is, the whole half of the moon dark to us is light to them; it is their “day,” so that, as the Hindus take only one meal daily, the monthly Shraddha in human reckoning is to them only their daily dinner. Now the descendants see to it that the Manes get this dinner and especially that each new ghost “gets the meat he likes” as well as the cakes. The giver of the meal usually invites his friends and their ghosts and they all sit down to this quite ordinary meal and share it together, inviter, and human and ghostly invitees. This is virtually the case in China also, where the feast to the Manes is really a family dinner and sacrifices to the gods are made to feast them, but without ‘communion,’ though commensal.
Let us now take up the African sacrifice. The West Coast Negro offers to his local gods yams, fruits, oil, and wine on ordinary occasions, such as in cases of pregnancy and marriage, and bloody sacrifice (human preferred) on state occasions. To the ghost, at the time a man dies, are given the same viands the ghost used to prefer when alive, such as fowls, mutton, rum, as well as tobacco; but slaves are sacrificed to it as well. Rum is scattered on the ground to the local spirit when one stops on a journey before the traveller himself drinks. Can this he anything save a propitiatory gesture made by [ p. 156 ] the individual, without reference to clan or totem? To propitiate water-spirits, that is, “to make them send fish,” the women of the village dance through it, scattering meal and oil and rum, as rum is east upon the waves when a man is drowned, but not, in this instance, to the (spirit of) water but to the drowned man’s ghost. So Greek heroes’ ghosts were similarly appeased. To the tutelary power of the African village is annually offered a deer, killed at the local “sacred tree,” to which are affixed the legs, the flesh being eaten by the chiefs and chief men. Another annual event is a feast for the dead, in which are laid upon the graves fowls, rum, eggs, and palm-wine, the feast being followed by a general village festival lasting seven days. Where there are greater gods, tribal and national deities, rich people sacrifice to them human victims; the poor, sheep and fowls. The ha,rvest festival also is celebrated with sacrifices of sheep and human beings. We may compare the daily sacrifice to household gods, in Greece and India, of fruit, honey, milk, and cakes, together with wine or the householder’s usual drink, as compared with great sacrifices of cattle and horses. The Hindu householder regularly offers a few drops of his own. drink to the little but important gods affecting his daily life. The distinction between private and public sacrifice is in Eome also a merely formal one of value and expense, a pig being the common sacrificial object, but pig, sheep, and bull forming the state sacrifice.
While, as has been explained, no sacrifice can be ckUed primitive in the sense that it reflects the psychosis of prehistorieal man, it may yet be urged that the simple content of Negro sacrifieb lies very much upon the surface of his thought and does not reflect any great mental wrestling with mysticism, as some scholars -would have us believe. And by that token, it is not naive but simply [ p. 157 ] historical and logical when one links up with the savage’s thought in its sacrificial expression the same expression in civilized life. The Negro has- his mysteries, those of nature and “love” and medieiue, for example, hnt his cult of mysteries is one thing and his matter-of-fact attitude toward ghosts and spirits is another. There is nothing more simple or primitive than the offering to the potentially malicious ghost or spirit or to the presumahly amiable tutelary deity. We may call the gifts the Negro makes “gifts” or “sacrifices of deprivation” (every gift is a deprivation) or “attempts at communion” (meaning, however, merely communication), but we may he sure that the savage no more speculates or questions the underlying motive than he does when he offers his chief a present. The “sacrifice of deprivation” is carried out in another way when the African savage in the “Orunda taboo” avoids all his life certain food and certain acts because his priest has imposed them upon him at his birth or in childhood; just as he “sacrifices” a finger. This is another matter altogether; it is not a real sacrifice at aU. Nevertheless, because it goes by the same name in some -modern treatises but because above all it is a first step to a great historical religious motive, ascetidsm, it must be examined a little more closely.
Abnegation, in the sense of denying oneself something or depriving oneself of something, may of course take the form of a gift, but there is a more primitive sehse in the savage’s usual abnegatory- attitude. He makes no gift at all; he performs his act of abnegation because he believes that’ the exercise of restraint strengthens his own power in what we are forced to think of as a spiritual way; his mana is strengthened, is the way he himself thinks of the matter; or, one may say, he thinks of it in terms of increased vitality. It is for this reason that teeth are pulled out and hair is plucked deliberately (this word is iinpor [ p. 158 ] taut) and other pain-producing acts are undergone, to stimulate power. We also recognize such acts, but as tests of courage rather than as promoters of spirit. But, like us, the savage utilizes this motive and makes it serve in the process of initiating a novice into the life of adult men. The savage notion is that a man has his mystic power enhanced; he becomes more full of mana (we should say more manly), more spiritual, in that he raises himself above material considerations, the claims of th^ body; he contemns the body to the end that his power (soul) may be strengthened, an ascetic ideal. It is not to test power (courage) but to strengthen it that the savage deliberately mutilates himself or deprives himself of certain things and renounces certain acts. To be sure, when the clan, very much concerned with seeing, that the youngster is duly strengthened in power, sit down and watch the process of mutilation in the rite of initiation and help therein by suggesting extra torture, it may be suspected that there is a certain enjoyment on the part of the spectators and helpers. Diverse motives prompt the ingenuity; it is not all desire to strengthen the victim’s mana, any more than the Sophomore is wholly altruistic in desiring to make the Freshman worthy of his new state;[2] but with this concession to human frailty it is true in the main that the whole initiation of the savage is to make him a changed, more spiritual (powerful) being and he is. actually said to “be born anew” as a result of this initiation (compare the expression “twiceborn” applied to. those who have been initiated into the Aryan order in India). The principle that pain strengthens is at the root of the matter; the body as well as the power is strengthened (the body because of the power’s increase) and the man born anew is thus better able to cope with other powers, magical, mysterious, [ p. 159 ] which he has to meet in life. It is not so much the Aeschylean doctrine of παθειν μαθειν (wisdom comes from suffering) as it is the Christian sanctification through sorrow which is adumbrated in these savage examples of abnegation and initiation. One might thus almost venture to call them sacrifices made to a spiritual power; yet to the savage they are at most made to his own spirit-power until, at a later period, when he no longer understands his own ritual, he too thinks of mutilations as sacrifices to spirits, which is often the case with more advanced savages, for example, the Amerinds.
But the sacrifice of mutilation or deprivation has another side, for which reason it was necessary above to emphasize the fact that in the mutilations described the act was done with deliberate purpose. The other side is represented by what is at first not deliberate but involuntary mutilation, such as occurs when one is sur-excite^ If a sudden death occurs in a family, if a miser discovers that his gold has been stolen, if a girl is upset about a love-affair, even the modem novel rightly pictures a distress not controlled by reason; the family shriek; the miser tears his hair; the girl rends her handkerchief. Few who have seen the grief of a serpent or dove deprived of its mate or of a cow robbed of its calf wiU doubt that even savages may feel genuine grief and that the. acts of the mourner may be real expressions of sorrow. Now before sacrifice is thought of, the savage mourner indulges in mutilations resulting in laceration, blood-letting, plucking of hair, cutting off of fingers, knocldng out of teeth, which, beginning as expressions of real emotion, become ritualized and as expressions of grief are no longer genuine but yet simulate sorrow with so much abandon that the actors actually injure themselves severely- and sometimes kill themselves merely through sur-excitation. This is an excellent example of [ p. 160 ] the effect of mob-emotion, in- consequence of 'which men pass out of control of themselves and become slaves of feeling, not of the grief which is simulated but slaves of the intoxication produced by the united hysterical condition of the mob, no one member of which may really care at all whether the man all are mourning with such self-destructive violence is dead or not. But again it is obvious that such injuries and lacerations as are inflicted on such an occasion can by no means be called sacrifices, until, what eventually happens, the ritual has become so stereotyped that it is performed without excitement, merely pro forma, when the savage naturally asks himself why he is plucking out hair and cutting himself. Then he finds an answer by assimilating these offerings to really sacrificial offerings and calls them sacrifices made to this or that spirit. Hair, for example, is offered to spirits and when a great chief dies, and all the people mourn with frenzy, they make offerings to his spirit, and the hair they pluck out and the blood they shed are reckoned also as offerings to him. But clearly this is a different thing from the hair offered in the ffindu ritual with the words said in behalf of a child from whose head it has been cut: “O spirit, take this hair and do not take his life.” In such a case, as has been explained, the hair is an offering of a vital power as substitute for the whole.
The attitude toward ghosts and Manes is after all the most probable attitude that is taken toward othei> spirits and gods in a great number of savage and civilized sacrifices. The meal pleases the god and strengthens man, and when the food itself is holy, man assimilates divine power. But in many cases there is no suggestion that the food is sacred and the whole intent of the sacrifice is simply to gratify spirits. So the early Chinese Classics say that gifts of grain and animals called sacrifices are given “to give pleasure to the gods,” and this is the case [ p. 161 ] even when the result aimed at is to keep away the spirits thus pleased. The evil spirit Famine, for ezample, is driven away in India by a gift of grain, which pleases it while it automatically destroys it. The Slav gives milTr to his tutelary snake-spirit to keep it pleased aad so render it benevolent, as does the Hiudu to snake and god both, and the Greek propitiated gods and averted malicious demons by the same means. While feeding a dead man’s ghost is not a sacrifice but rather a meal offered to a member of the family, yet the ghost when exalted to a diviner state receives it, offered with greater formality and respect, as a god receives a sacrifice and in both cases the do ut des motive is acknowledged. Moreover, gods, as in India, are not only family friends but actual relatives of the worshipper, not so much as the result of descent as because the clan-gods were felt to. be of the same blood and nature as the men of the clan: “Thou art our friend, our own, our relation,” says the Vedic poet to his god.
But if a god becomes angry, he may injure or destroy; in that case a gift to atone for sin is made. In its simplest form this is the attitude toward malicious spirits, proved to be malicious by the effect they produce. If our fathers had rheumatism they believed that a spirit vexed. them; if a savage bumps his head agaiost a tree, he apologizes to -the tree; it is a blow the tree has given for cause; he concludes that the cause is anger. “Surely,” he says, “I have offended, or the spirit would not ‘play me this trick”; or, if he has tried to propitiate and again receives a hurt he says : “Here is that malicious one again; I have not given him enough to quiet him.” The savage is not overcome with fear in the presence of such powers. He says: “0 you horrid one, here Is more for you, and please don’t do it again.” He prays [ p. 162 ] and gives; tte attitude is not magical[3] but religions. So he says of the ghost : “Let us give it food and not he haunted by it; take this food, ghost, and be content.” There is some fear but no great awe, more a feeling of annoyance and dread. Again, on entering an unknown district a Caucasian mountaineer, to propitiate in advance, piles up stones as an offering for the sin of possible intrusion, just as a millionaire builds a church to naake up for sms which in the innocence of his heart he may have committed : “I hope you will not be angry if I have done anything wrong; I have made my pile for you,” so thinks the Caucasian mountaineer. So, too, an African chief intending to invade a new country (i.e., intending to intrude and thereby to sin) offers hundreds of victims in advance to soothe the demons of the region he will invade. A man who builds a house offers the momiai sacrifice on the same principle. There may be unknown gods whose anger is to be averted; hence propitiatory sacrifices to “all gods” in India, that is, to gods not mentioned already by name; also homage to the Unknown god. Further, sons must suffer for a father’s sin, the individual for the tribe. The son is constructively guilty in having such a father; the individual, as member of the offending body. Hence in the Rig-Veda the son who is afflicted appeases a god for “sins my father may have committed,” on the principle that, if a man suffers, it is proof that a god is angry and if angry, then the reason must be that the man owes the god something, a debt unpaid, either an offering or a return to the god’s way, to keep in which is an .obligation which the man owes. So the ordinary Brahmanio idea of sin implies a debt (rina, cf. Lat. reus, in [ p. 163 ] debted). The sacrifice which pays the debt redeems the man. This sacrifice may be made through another. So a sacrifice of the first-born is redeemed by an animaT sacrifice (Exod. 12: 13). Now such redemptive sacrifices are not really gifts, though they have the form of gifts. In ancient times a man who Mlled another forfeited his life to the injured clan, but he might buy back (redeem) himself by a “gift” of cows,^ and so a man who has sinned against a god may make it up to the god and escape with his life on payment of another satisfactory victim. In the higher religions the god may supply the victim, or even become the victim, through which the debt is paid in order to satisfy the juridical sense. In the case of Buddhism, sin IS automatically laid up against a man by Karma and redemption consists in the divine being taking upon himself the suffering of the world which is the payment for sin. In Christianity, a divine power pays to satisfy another, the devil, as early Christians believed, or to satisfy God’s justice. The notion that payment for sin can thus be transferred is correlative to the notion that sin is an objective form of disease or evil of some sort and can be washed out or tied upon a scape-goat and transferred elsewhere. Disease is the substance of sin; thus the Vedic poet cries, “Oh, free me from my sin, my disease!” All disease is thought to be a transferable substance and when transferred it leaves the prior possessor free. Every peasant woman in India who is afflicted leaves a rag infected with her trouble on the road, hoping someone else will pick it up, for she has laid her sickness on it and when another takes it she herself becomes free of the sickness. The old Vedic Hindus “sent their evil,” [ p. 164 ] woes and sins, away to Trita, a remote god, who had the double advantage of living far off and being of a water nature, a purificatory power which might per se. dispose of the evil. "When Indra sinned, the first divine beings who offered to taie his sin upon themselves were the waters; they “consented to bear his shame.” That the victim is innocent, makes no difference.[4]
The debt of conformation to the divine way reaches its highest in the idea of the sacrifice of a pure heart. A man gives up certain parts of himself as an offering to please ^ a deity whose way demands such an offering; the man owes it to the divine power in return for what the power has done for him. The worshipper seeks to conform to a certain standard found in the deity’s own character. Hence various forms of abnegation and asceticism. But though, as already shown, abnegation and asceticism belong to savage cults, it would be unhistorical to derive CSiristiaa doctrine and procedure of this sort from the savage parallels, for they arise independently and naturally in various religions. Thus fasting is a savage practice preparatory to sacred rites (as in funerals) or intimate communication with spiritual powers; it purifies and spiritualizes in that it brin^ visions and hallucinations naturally judged of spiritual origin. Before dreaming of his totem-animal the young Indian must fast for days; before initiation almost all savages fast, to rid the body of evil, so that it is almost a medicinal act like purging, with which it is frequently conjoined. Likeness to divinity is sought also by imitative methods, masks, leaping, etc., and the sacrifice of a pure heart is at bottom just this mutation of the divine through ridding oneself [ p. 165 ] of evil. Aspiration after purity may then be a gift or it may not be. When one feels that one is suppressing evil desires as an offering to God, then it is reaUy a sacrifice, just as a fimger may be cut off and sacrificed; but when one suppresses evil desires because one thinks that one thereby will become more powerful or raore spiritual or will thus overcome the evil Karma which would otherwise cause him to be reborn as a beast, it is unsacrificial. And this is the judgment of an ancient Brahman, who centu,ries before the Christian era said, contrasting rites and ceremonies of sacrifice with a pure heart: “If one keep all the law and perform all the forty ceremonies and be not virtuous, he is less than he who observes no sacrifice or ceremony but is virtuous.” To the Brahman, as to the Buddhist of the old school, to be virtuous, to have a pure heart, was the sign of a well-regulated mind rather than a sacrifice or an imitation of a divine model, most of the gods having anything but pure minds. Man’s imitation of the divine was not of gods but of the AU-soul, and purity as virtue meant freedom from material taint, a freedom won by sacrifice but only in the sense of renouncement of lesser good in order to the attainment of the greatest; not a sacrifice made as such to a divine power to whom it would be an acceptable offering. On the other hand, in China, “the incense of good conduct” is a well known phrase, signifying that ethical conduct is an offering to the Lord or to the Honorable Paternal Spirits.
Under the head of a “gift-sacrifice” is sometimes, brought by straining a point, such a “gift” as was made by Agamemnon when he sacrificed Iphigeneia, In reality, this was a form of placation made under duress to overcome divine anger, piacular rather than “a special forin of gift-sacrifice”; at bottom it was the payment of a debt, making up for an injury. According to one view of sacrifice as explained by the Brahmans, every sacrifice [ p. 166 ] is the paying of a debt, or rather, in giving a sacrifice everyone “buys himself off,” dtmancm mshkrmUe, redeems himself, pays his debt by proxy (Ait. Brah., 2, 3, 11).[5]
In marked contrast to the gift-sacrifice stands that of approach and communion.[6] In the theory of Eobertson Smith all sacrifices are derived from the communal meal, and an oblation or offering is a late religious product, while the piacnlum (without communion) is a perversion of it. This theory was based on Semitic totemism or what was understood to be such. The totem is a divinity, the blood-sacrifice (of a member of the totem-elan) expiates the offense of totem-killing and eating the victim renews power. In Australia, however, a more primitive form of totemism recognizes no divinity in the totem, only a clanspirit or power, and the ceremony of sacrifice (so-caUed) consists in scattering blood and dust and grain to increase the growth of the totem-species, while a little of the totem is eaten, which implies communion with the spirit, as “eating the god” in Africa and Mexico is a similar communion-rite. But it is difficult to see how such a rite has become anywhere (and it has not become so in Australia) a gift-sacrifice. That the meal is placatory is pure assumption. Of the Australian totem-meal Durkheim declares, “this is the foundation of sacrifice” in general, and to prove it argues that the blood and dust [ p. 167 ] scattered about are “as it were” au offering, because one might think of it as a means of aiding the clan-spirit and so it would he an offering and even “a veritable oblation” to the species-spirit, later imagined as such (outside of Australia!) and so construed as originally a gift One might, from the same material, argue that it is from the beginning a gift-sacrifice and so undermine the whole priority of the communion-idea. But no one can read the complete account of the Australian Intiehiuma ceremony with an unprejudiced mind and find in it any notion of gift to a spirit. It is simply a religious or magical bond of union expressed by eating the totem and a means of getting more totem to eat later on. If one says that when a Hindu farmer scatters grain in his farmyard to insure his cow’s having a calf he is making a gift to the cow (wMch does not eat the “offering”), then one might say that the Australian’s magic scattering of grain and dust and blood to ensure increased fertility is a gift, but not otherwise. Bather might one see therein a foreshadowing of Zoroaster’s great thought that God needs man’s assistance in the fight against evil and look on this savage of Australia as consciously helping the god; but this, too, would be an exaggeration. There is no god; there is hardly a spirit; it is the grain and the animal as animate species the savage wishes to have propagated. He makes no gift and helps no divine spirit in the ordinary acceptance of that term. The cult is, as Durkheim himself admits, “all for men.” Further, it is to be observed that the same Australian does actually, on other occasions, make gifts, of water and implements, to gnosts, so that in this case the idea of a gift to a spirit is as early as that of communing with the totem. No satisfactory explanation has yet been given to show how expiatory sacrifice arises from communion.
In the theory of certain French scholars (MM. Hubert [ p. 168 ] and Mauss), a victim in the earliest sacrifice is consecrated (i.e., is not per se sacred) and so becomes a medium of communication with the spiritual powers as a placatory offering, but it is at the same time, as intermediary, a means of communion. The victim’s flesb is eaten by the worshipper and offered to the gods, and the victim becomes redemptive tbrougb the notion that the victim takes the place of the sinner. This theory of sacrifice attempts to combine the theories of gift and communion, but it is clearly insufficient to serve as a general explanation of all sacrifice. The communal meal is not necessarily made of the body of a victim. One ought further to be careful to avoid a confusion between the idea of communion and that of communication. As has been said, the giver of a funeral feast in India does not desire to identify himself with the recipients of the meal, only to get together with the family dead in social intercourse. A meal as such does not necessarily connote communion though it may be commensal still less does every sacrifice of communication imply a piaculum or need of redemption. There is, as already explained, a (not uncommon) form of sacrifice, — for example, in Borneo,— where one slaughters a pig or some such animal and by it sends a message or inquiry to the Manes or gods; its spirit takes the message and its liver shows the answer. In India, before the great horse-sacrifice a goat is sacrificed, just to go up and tell the gods what a great sacrifice is coming. In Africa, a man or a number of men are slaughtered for the same purpose and, acting as messengers, carry up the king’s message. Often he thinks of a postscript and hurriedly kills another man to carry it. 'Such killin g is simply a means of communication; it would be absurd to call the rite a sacrifice of communion. The victim is a postman, like the locust the farmer of India lets [ p. 169 ] go to take a message to the locust-people, or, more exactly, like the bear the Ainu kills and sends to the bearpeople with a message. At the same time, when this message implies a question, the sacrifice becomes, through divination, an oracular rite. So the Maoris of the Hauhau sect used to cut otf the head of a fowl and interpret the answer sent back, by gods or ancestors, from the appearance of the dead body. In 1905, it was reported that they had substituted a European as the victim (as he was supposed to be more intimate with the gods) and “the gods speak to them [the Maoris] through the head.”[7] Traces of this practice are to be found in classical literature. Aeneid, 2, 547, says that a man is killed by another to give a message to a third (dead) man : Beferes ergo haec et nuntius ibis, Peliadae genitori. The message may do more than express good will and ask questions. It may attempt to conciliate; but it is not a form of communion.
In India, the messenger to the gods is himself a god (the Fire-god) and even the sacrificial animal may be interpreted as acting as a friend above and conveying a message. But in this form of intermediary the worshippers do not require such a voice; they proclaim in their own words what they would say directly to the gods who are supposed to hear (“give ear to me,” says the sacrificer) and understand. The sacrifice is, as it professes to be, a gift, until the whole sacrificial performance becomes a merely magical compulsive power, as it does in the second period of India’s religious development, in which only the form of petition is retained but the words have become a binding speU, forcing the gods to comply. Gods sometimes dismember themselves and so become [ p. 170 ] the universe, but this in primitive thought is not a sacrifice.[8]
The sacrificial victim, if not already holy, is always sanctified. In cases collected by Sir J. G. Frazer in his Golden Bough, a king is sometimes slain because he has grown weak. If now, argues this author, the clan-power rests in the chief, and if the chief is slain that his power may pass to another or to the clan, and if the myth of Osiris represents a king who is also a vegetation-spirit, and if the vegetation-spirit is eaten to absorb his powe’r, and “if it occurred to people to combine these two customs,” then we get an explanation of the origin of sacrifice, including the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
There are too many ifs in this theory. Killing the weak head of a clan is a practice known to wolves and advised by the Hindus for the same practical reason: “If a king cannot protect his people, he should be slain like a mad dog.” It does not imply a transfer of power.
A variation of tiie gift-theory of sacrifice is found in the rather labored view of E. Westermarck that gods are fed to keep them from starving, in order that, in turn, men may escape the evil which a dearth of gods would entail; ergo, in the end, sacrifice is apotropaic though apparently a gift-offering. Ingenious but unconviacmg; savages who give gifts betray no such arriere pensee. More worthy of regard is Lagrange’s suggestion that sacrifice desecrates rather than sanctifies food. The idea here is that the sacrificial animal, like first-fruits, is dangerous eating, since all animals are originally sacred, and the blood is given to the god to get rid of the animal’s potentially evil mana, since blood is its spiritual power.
[ p. 171 ]
Its dangerous quality is thus avoided, as when a priest first tastes a sacrifice for the same purpose, the priest being best able to cope with strange mana.[9] The motive here suggested is, however, not one certainly found, though it is in line with other savage thought.
Of the chief theories of sacrifice, that of gift leading to homage and renunciation appears insufficient to explain the sacrifice of union and communion, while that of conunxmion leading to honorific and piacular sacrifice cannot explain the piaeulum as a product and ignores the equal antiquity of the gift.[10] Historically then we must combine the results of both theories and admit that in different centres there were evolved here one and there another form of sacrifice and even that both might reasonably have sprung up together, as we actually have gift and communion together on the very low plane of Australian thought. So long as man regarded animals as superhuman or divine relatives they would Mil them as a dangerous act under any circumstances and yet would imagine that eating them was partaking of the clan-life. At the same time they would make placatory offerings to any power, ghostly or spiritual, both to ingratiate themselves and to atone for offenses. As blood again is an offering of life, it may be shed as a substitute for a sinner’s Mfe, for example, when one intrudes on a spirit by building, and [ p. 172 ] so a substituted victim redeems a siimer (the builder) when such a spirit is angrily seeMng revenge. As between victims offered as food and burnt entire it is natural that evil underground demons should not be asked to dine with one, as it is natural to invite agreeable acquaintances, like the kindly upper gods, to take part or all of the meal. Piacular sacrifices are burnt because one does not eat -willingly of what represents evil. All people, savages and civilized, have opined that spirits live on spirit-food, not the gross flesh but the soul of the flesh, and have made the material part their own share while leaving the essence or some part not desirable as h-oman food for the gods. In some cases all the food is given to the gods as an offering rather than a shared meal. The Africans explain evaporation of liquid offering on the theory that the spirits have drunk it.
It must not be forgotten that some of the most terrible sacrifices the world has seen are meant simply to exert “sympathetic^’ action on the part of the gods. As one pours out water that raiin may come, without thought of gods, so, after gods are thought of, one pours out water or blood that rain may come; but here the sympathetic imitation becomes a model for gods to act upon, though it is hard to say whether the priests and people of these ferocious rites think they compel (by magic) the gods, or whether they act on the supposition that the gods will follow the lead given them. Thus in the sacrifice for rain in Mexico, which is not primitive but arose in the eleventh century, troops of little children were offered to Tlaloc and made to weep on their way to be sacrificed, ‘Hhat more rain might fall.” To the fertility-goddess, victims representing maize were decapitated and their hearts east into hot springs, to produce rain clouds, yet ostensibly as offerings. The Aztecs probably did not think to compel their gods but only to persuade them; magic had [ p. 173 ] become religious. The end restilt is thtis a placatory sacrifice, quite distinct from the eating of the god or communion-sacrifice practiced by the Same people. Yet the Dravidians had exactly the same sacrifice as had the Aztecs, that is, they shed blood and simultaneously caused tears to be shed in order to force (no other word can be used, since the god is naturally malignant) the earthdeity to imitate man and pour floods of rain, while the Mishmis, who also revere a malignant spirit, simply try to propitiate him.
In higher forms of religion sundry modifications appear. Homage becomes a leading motive. The mirror and sword of early Japanese cult become divine forms. Thanksgiving sacrifices, perhaps not unknown to savages, become more pronounced. The Teutonic sacramental sacrifice, for example, was for expiation, for benefits to come, and for thanks.[11] A general expiatory sacrifice occurred at Upsala every nine years. To placate the gods in time of famine, human sacrifices were offei’ed, including even the king as a victim. Human sacrifices (not piacular) to the spirit of vegetation were offered only a few [ p. 174 ] centuries ago in Europe. Eefined human nature has refined religion. Zoroaster permitted no sacrifice at all to the Good Spirit and Ms personified qualities, the Pure Spirits, but lesser spirits still received offerings. Sacrifices to evil spirits may also have been made (they are mentioned by Plutarch but not admitted in the orthodox cult). Late Hindu religions sometimes denied the efficacy of all sacrifice (Vishnuism discarded animal sacrifice but retained cereal offerings).[12] In Greece, primitive sacrifice as a propitiatory gift is mentioned by Homer, who describes a rite consisting in drowning horses to placate a river (just us Xerxes propitiated the Hellespont with gold cups). The Homeric meal with the gods, though commensal, was in part a gift, to please and to propitiate, not to renew divine strength.[13] Greek bloodless oblations were pure gifts. A sacrifice of riddance of ghosts and evil spirits was taken over from the lower un-Aryan community (conquered by the Aryans) and perhaps from the same source came the seeds of. mysticism in the communion cemented by the Bouphonia, which were strengthened by foreign ideas of union with the god. These later were transferred with Greek gods to Home and in an idealized form presented as a system of philosophy, wMch did away with objective forms of religion. A strain of parallelism approaching mysticism may be seen in the Greek and Hindu desire to approximate the victim to the god, as w’hen a male and female, respectively, are offered to god and goddess, a teeming sow to the teeming earth- [ p. 175 ] mother, swift asses to the swift winds, etc. It is not a snffident objection to the gift-theory to ask why, if a gift was the object, the Greeks made such distinctions. So a chariot may well seem a fit gift to the snn-god, a fighting cock to the god of war, black animals to dark powers of the storm and -ander-worid.
Nowhere has the idea that a sacrifice is a feast for the gods been more plainly expressed than in the early literature of India. Sacrifices in general are intended, it is said, either to do good to the saerifioer or to do harm to his enemy (placative or denunciatory). The sacrificial feast is thus described: “All the gods come to the sacrificer’s house the day before he sacrifices; and it would be improper for him to eat before human (guests) have eaten, so it would be more improper for him to eat before the gods have eaten. For this reason one ought to fast before making a sacrifice. … If one must eat, let him eat of food that is not used in sacrifice; beans or fruit” Here the gods are dinner-guests of the saerificer, as are the Manes (see p. 155). This, however, does not impugn the sanctity of the food, which, being consecrate, is deeply imbupd with mystic power. Thus the- reason why a man washes his hands after sacrificing is given as follows: Men wash their hands after sacrifidng to remove the polluting stains, thereby washing away the sin of sacrifice, “for of old those who touched the bloody altar became sinful” (Shat Brah., 1, 2, 5, 23). Here pollution was interpreted as sinful; but it is evidently the pollution of spiritual power, the same idea as that which rules in mana and taboo and survives in the Jewish defilement of holiness. In the (human) sacrifices offered to Shiva it is said that “the sacrifice is Shiva,” that is, the consecrated victim actually becomes the god and is of course a “polluting” substance, divinely dangerous.
But all interpretation of sacrifice in India must distinguish [ p. 176 ] between the “god-offering” and the “self -offering.” The former is the simple offering to the gods as in the early texts, openly based on the principle dehi me daddmi te, “give to me, I give to thee”; the latter is the mystic sacrifice of the god and of the sacrificer in the sacrifice, a secondary stage belongmg to pre-Upanishad mysticism. Even the Hindu Brahmans made this (historical) distinction. The Brahmana of the Hundred Paths says that a god-offering is where one gives something to a god, “as a middle-caste man offers tribute to a king,” but the self-offering is the mystic sacrifice of self in the deified offering; “and the self-offerer alone gets great heavenly reward; the god-offerer gets only a small reward” (11, 2, 6, 13). Here the sacrificer’s sacrifice becomes his heavenly body.
Gifts, of course, are not confined to food. The Japanese give their gods honorific gifts and beads to play with. Dance and music eventually become forms of gift, as do dramatic entertainments in honor of spirits. A temple buUt for a god, a shrine endowed, flowers, works of art, the living sacrifice of temple-slaves, hierodoulai, and finally the living sacrifice of the heart, all may be construed as gifts. Morality and right living were substituted in higher religions for the sacrifice of flesh as more pleasing to the spiritual power. The series almost in full may be traced in our own religious antecedents. The Semites sacrificed a goat or lamb or bird to carry off sin; the Babylonian sacrificial slaughter was for divination; oblations were made for driving away evil spirits of sickness; repentance was expressed for unknown sin (proved by sickness). The Arabs made libations of water, oil, blood, etc., and sacrificed for the dead; vegetables, milk, animals, were common offerings; on the altar the blood fed the god. Later both Arab and Hebrew regarded the victim as tribute. The Hebrew prophets repudiated sacrifices [ p. 177 ] as a substitute for ethical behavior and religious values, but few opposed sacrifice otherwise, and later Jewish religion accepted as valid the sacrifices regularly performed, the daily burnt offering, the Sabbath, the new-moon, full-moon, and annual sacrifices on the full moon of the first and seventh months and for first-fruits, though some regular but occasional sacrifices were allowed to lapse (for example, the lustration sacrifice of a red cow, the inauguration sacrifice). Mohammeda n ism has rejected all sacrifice except as part of a popular festival and made atonement a matter of faith and repentance on man’s part and mercy on the part of Allah. In the Christian religion have been united various forms of sacrifice, that of gift, communion, atonement; candles to Maria, a church to God, oneself as “living sacrifice.” In abnegation and asceticism one both gives and through giving seeks closer union with God. In the eating of the “real body” of the Lord, one renews the did theory of union through absorbing the divine nature, as when the savage eats the sacred yam and the Mexican devoured the divine bread which represented grain’s divinity. Finally, in the belief that Christ’s death redeems from sin, man accepts the theory of vicarious atonement through blood shed for another.[14]
[ p. 178 ]
What is demanded in all religions is faith. “O Divine Faith, give ns faith,” says the Vedic poet Faith and atonement go together in the Christian religion inasmuch as one must believe that Christ’s sacrifice atoned for others’ sins; the acceptance of this doctrine is necessary to salvation in the Western Church, where salvation from the beginning was from sin. In the Eastern Church, salvation is not so much release from sin as from death; it was the bestowal of immortality which was granted by the resurrection. So the saving faith of the non-Christian Eastern churches, both Hindu and Buddhistic, is intellectually a belief that by throwiug oneself upon the mercy of the savior Cod one can come to him after death. The idea of forgiveness of sins is quite absent; rather, the loving devotion of the human adorer brings him into oneness with the deity, whose own infinite love for man has already atoned for the worshipper’s sin in that it has wiped out the balance against him, as in Buddhism; or the soul’s own repentance is sufiScient, when united with loving devotion, to obliterate all a man’s sins. For he purifies himself through love of his God; in becoming one with God, the infinitely pure, the soul itself becomes pure. With the Yogis, ascetic and mystic preparation for isolating oneself from the contamination of the world is ipso facto a cleansing process leading to ethical and spiritual purity. The sacrifice here, though on a higher plane, is that of the savage who imposes ascetic practices upon himself for the attainment of spiritual power, a form of abnegation for one’s own sake, not a sacrifidal offering to another. The idea of a savior is prominent in several religioim, notably Zoroastrianism, but this savior saves throng his teaching, not through sacrificing himself. This was the original idea in Buddhism, but the Mahayana, High Church, introduced Buddha as a divine Savior, who as Bodhisat sacrifices himself for mankind.
[ p. 179 ]
The scientific attitude of Buddha and Plato, who both say the same thing, namely, that “desire of the corporeal” leads to rebirth and that “there is no means of release from evil except the attainment of the highest wisdom and virtue,”[15] seems to rule out all idea of sacrifice; yet in both religions the fundamental idea is that the struggle toward perfection is a sacrifice of the lower self for the sake of an ideal attainable only by the highest self. Brahmanism itself in exalted moments does not hesitate to interpret its whole sacrificial mythology allegorically: “O Indra, thou hast fought no battles” (the god is only an idea). In the Puranas, even heaven and heU are declared to be “only names for virtue and vice.” There w’ere always some to whom sacrifice was a material symbol rather than a religious need. Quite a modern touch is perceptible in the Vedic injunction to the student: “Thy study should be to thee as a sacrifice. See how sxm, moon, stars, and waters are ever moving. They are the divine toilers; do thou also, in imitation of these divine powers, work; thy toil shall be thy sacrifice.” Those who think that the old Hindus were devoted to idle contemplation should also remember what the Blessed One said: “I toil ever, who have no need to toil; let every man who follows me lov^e and imitate me and so on earth toil manfully and do his appointed work.” That is the sacrifice demanded of those who follow the religion of Krishna.
Though sacrifice is a form it embodies a profound historical truth, for without sacrifice nothing of value has been attained by man; but men today owe their greatest gain to the vicarious sacrifice of others in the past.
Pigs to Demeter, dogs to Hekate; rooters in earth and bayers of the moon (Hekate is an earth-goddess as well as an uncanny night-spirit and moon-goddess), fertile and ghostly, respectively. ↩︎
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 313. ↩︎
The religious attitude is adopted in the Australian’s prayer to manna, which he sings to as a sentient thing, charming it with his song, but at the same time praying to it to spread and multiply. Spencer and Gillen, Tribes of Central Australia, p. 186. ↩︎
A substitute is always as acceptable as the original victim. So Death is satisfied if he desires one victim and gets another, as sundry tales of India show. Substitute sacrifices can even be made of figures or cakes, or a bull is replaced by a goat. So our modem ritual substitutes a man of straw, or gives a ducking for a drowning. ↩︎
The blood of this sacrifice is for the evil spirits, who are thus appeased for the slight of having been omitted from the great sacrifice, an interesting survival of the belief that the devils must be placated. It is a moot point with the author of this Vedic treatise whether it is advisable for the sacrifieer also to pray to the evil spirits (ibid., 2, 7, 1), ↩︎
See Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (1894), and Tiele, Gifford Lectures (N. Y., 1897). Tide’s view that religion expresses man’s “yearning for the infinite” (already discussed, p. 95) includes the theory that sacrifice is founded on the yearning of man for communion with a kindred supernatural power, a view too vague to be useful and inapplicable to sacrifices of riddance. ↩︎
See the Journal of the Polynesian Society, Dee 1905, p. 172; and the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 26, p. 137, with the writer’s note, ibid. p. 416. ↩︎
The scattering of a dismembered god over the earth is another matter. This is a magical means of causing growth (life, as blood is life). The Khonds thus dismember a victim and scatter its remains over the ground for increase. This is why Attis, Osiris, etc., are dismembered; they are gods of productivity. ↩︎
M. J. Lagrange, Etudes sur les religions semitiques (Paris, 1905). Semitic totemism and the commensal meal are thus disposed of by M. Lagrange as first elements in sacrifice. ↩︎
The human victim offered by savages is usually not a member of the clan. The Khasis in sacrificing to the snake-dragon Thlen kill and eat a human being, but it is always a stranger. The Nagas avert divine wrath by killing strangers, enemies captured in battle. In Assam, victims offered to the gods are never natives of the clan. The communion-theory of all sacrifices implies a totemic victim, whereas most savages are not totemic and show no intent of communing, only of enjoying flesh-eating and feasting the spirits; their intent being to please the natural taste or deprecate the wrath of spirits. ↩︎
The euchaxistie or thanksgiving sacrifice expressed itself in civilized communities in offering first-fruits, etc, but originally the “offering” was a special eating on the part of those capable of running the danger of eating when the taboo was taken off. In savage life the pure thanksgiving offering is always suspicious, but it seems actually to ave been made on occasion of victory by some African tribes. Our Amerinds are credited with thanksgiving feasts, but, as already said, the examples are not always eonvineing. The Cherokees, for example, according to Catlin, had a “Green Corn Feast” prepared by seven families and a conjurer; none might eat the corn till national purification was made and the feast was, given; it is described as a feast of thanksgiving; but the same account speaks of these savages “asking assistance of God” and of the conjurer making a magic brew of seven deer slain by seven men and dancing around it seven times, while seven men watered a post for seven days; of a youth dedicated to the Good Spirit, when initiated into the tribe, and plunging into a stream for purification (baptism) and then avoiding women for seven days. There are too many sevens, replacing the normal Amerind holy four; one doubts whether the “ thanksgiving” was primitive. ↩︎
Popular Buddhism retained sacrifice to lesser gods and in its decadence (eight century A. D.) reverted to animal sacrifice and burnt offerings. ↩︎
Pace Parnell, who describes it as one in which; though Homer does not know it, the Homeric heroes “enter into mystic fellowship with their deity!” (Encyc. Relig., xL). The Homeric victim is not divine or even sacred, till sanctified on the altar, but according to Parnell “the holy spirit (of the altar) passes into it.” In the later Greek mysteries, communion (by eating) implies a real mystic fellowship. ↩︎
Contributions in churches are called gifts to God; a cburcb is dedicated to or given to God or “to the glory of God” (in Sandusky, Ohio, a tablet is inscribed “to the glory of God and Jay Cook” an unusual combination). Prayers for the dead are gifts to ghosts countenanced by the early Church, as toasts to the dead are survivals of offerings. When the eucbarisfe is a “sacrament of commemoration” merely, not the actual “Christ sacrificed,” the theory of physical union becomes refined into that of spiritual likeness. In Buddhism, which has ho formal sacrifice, dance, song, music, and garlands were offered to honor the dead Buddha as a form of homage. The theory of paiti-dana also permitted the belief that Buddha sacrificed himself for man and took on himself the burden of their sin. Outside of India, Baddhlsm permitted even burnt offerings and fresh-sacrifice to Buddha and the gift of “merit” from the living to the dead was common. ↩︎
Phaedo, 81 and 107; Buddha, passim. ↩︎