[1043]. Reconciliation through a communal meal. Meals in which the worshipers partook of the flesh of a sacred animal (in which sometimes the dead animal itself shared) have probably been celebrated from an immemorial antiquity. Examples of such customs among savages are given above.[1881] A familiar instance of a communal meal in civilized society is the Roman festival in which the shades of the ancestors of the clan were honored (the sacra gentilicia)—a solemn declaration of the unity of the clan-life.[1882] A more definite act of social communion with a deity seems to be recognizable in the repasts spread in connection with the Eleusinian mysteries, which appear, however, to have been merely a social attachment to the mysteries proper.[1883] In the feasts of the Mithraic initiates, in which mythological symbolism is prominent, a more spiritual element becomes visible: the participant absorbs something of the nature of the god—power to overcome evil, with hope of immortality.[1884]
[1044]. In the ancient records of these ceremonies there is no theory of the means by which man comes into friendly relations with the deity. The meal is an act of friendly intercourse—it doubtless involves the ancient belief that those who eat together thus absorb a common life and are bound together by a strong tie. In the earliest and simplest instances the feeling apparently is that the communion is between the human participants—the divine animal is honored as a brother; but, even when, as among the Ainu,[1885] he receives a part of the food, the tie that binds him to them rests on the fact of original kinship rather than on the communal eating. Later the view that the god was pleased and placated by the nourishment offered him assumed more definite form;[1886] but it is doubtful whether on such occasions man was regarded as the guest of the deity.[1887]
[1045]. However this may be, it is the effect of the food on the god that has been made by W. Robertson Smith the basis of an elaborate theory of sacrifice;[1888] his view is that the assimilation of the flesh and blood of the kindred divine animal strengthens the deity's sense of kinship with his worshipers, and thus, promoting a kindly feeling in him, leads him to pardon men's offenses and grant them his protection. Smith's argument is mainly devoted to illustrating the ancient conception of blood-kinship between gods, men, and beasts. He assumes that sacrifice is the offering of food to the deity (the blood of the animal, as the seat of life, coming naturally to be the most important part of the offering), the sacredness of the victim, and the idea of communion, and further that the victim is a totem—the existence of totemism in the Semitic area, he holds, though not susceptible of rigid proof, is made practically certain by the wide diffusion of the totemic conception elsewhere.[1889] As evidence that the effective thing in sacrifice is the sharing of sacred flesh and blood, he adduces a great number of offerings (such as the shedding one's own blood and the offering of one's hair) in which there is no death of a victim, and no idea of penal satisfaction of the deity. In the Israelite ritual he lays special stress on the common clan-sacrifice (the zebaḥ) in which a part of the victim is given to the god and a part is consumed by the worshiper; this he contrasts with offerings that are given wholly to the god, and, leaving aside piacula and holocausts, this distinction he makes correspond to that between animal and vegetable offerings, the latter, he holds, being originally not conciliatory. Thus, he concludes, the expiatory power lies in the sharing of animal flesh. Here the theory is confronted by the holocaust and the piaculum, expiatory sacrifices in which there is no communal eating. Smith meets this difficulty by suggesting that these two sorts of sacrifice belong to a relatively late period, when, in the progress of society, the original conception had become dim. As time went on, he says, the belief in kinship with animals grew fainter. Sacrificial meals became merely occasions of feasting, and at the same time the establishment of kingly government familiarized men with the idea of tribute—so sacrifice came to be regarded as a gift and the victim was wholly burnt (holocaust); the same result was reached when the feeling arose that the victim was too sacred to be eaten—it must be otherwise disposed of (piaculum). The piacula he refers to times of special distress, when recourse was had to the sacrifice of ancient sacred animals, old totems (Hebrew: "unclean" animals), supposed to have special potency.[1890] It is true that in the course of time certain old conceptions grew dim, but this does not set aside the fact that expiatory power was supposed to attach to animal sacrifices in which there was no communal eating; though some of these were late, they doubtless retained the old idea of the nature of the efficacy of sacrifice.
[1046]. In Smith's theory there is confusion between the two ideas of communion and expiation or placation. All the facts adduced by him go to show only that the earliest form of animal sacrifice took the form of communal eating; and in such repasts, as in the savage feasts on the bodies of warriors and others, the prominent consideration seems to have been the assimilation of the qualities of the thing consumed—in this case a divine animal. There is not a word of proof of the view that the placation of the deity was due to his assimilation of kindred flesh and blood. Such a view is not expressed in any ancient document or tradition, and, on the other hand, placation by gifts of food (animal or vegetable) and other things appears in all accounts of early ritual. Even in the sacramental meals of later times, Eleusinian, Christian, and Mithraic, there is no trace of the theory under consideration. In the "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles" (ix f.) the conception of the eucharistic meal is simply symbolical. The origin of the Australian custom[1891] (in which the food brought in by a clan is not eaten till the old men have first tasted it) is obscure; but there is no hint that the food was supposed to be shared by a supernatural being.[1892] Piacula arose under the influence of a deep sense of individual relation to the deity, and sometimes in connection with voluntary associations in which a special sanctity was held to accrue to the initiates through the medium of a cult in which special sacrifices were prominent It was natural that peculiarly solemn or dreadful offerings should be made to the deity in times of great distress; the placating efficacy in such cases seems to have been due to the pleasure taken by the deity in the proof of devotion given by the worshipers. In general, the communal meal lost its early significance as time went on, and came at last to be celebrated merely as a traditional mark of respect to the deity, or as a social function; the belief in its efficacy, however (and sometimes belief in its magical power), survived into a relatively late period.
[1047]. In one point, the death of the god, J. G. Frazer, while accepting Smith's theory in general, diverges from his view. Smith regards the death of the god as having been originally the sacrificial death of the divine totem animal, with which later the god was identified. Frazer[1893] (here following Mannhardt[1894]) finds its origin in the death of the vegetation-spirit (the decay of vegetation), which was and is celebrated in many places in Europe, and furnishes an explanation of the myths of Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, Demeter and Proserpine, and Lityerses. This explanation is adopted and expanded by Hubert and Mauss.[1895] So far as the mere fact of the sacrifice of a divine being is concerned it might be accounted for by either of these theories; but the numerous points of connection between the deities in question and the ancient ideas concerning the death of vegetation make the view of Mannhardt and Frazer the more probable. The kernel of the original custom is not expiation but celebration or worship; the myths are dramatic developments of the simple old idea. Frazer suggests that the spirit or god, supposed to be enfeebled by age, was slain by the worshipers in order that a more vigorous successor might infuse new life into the world—an explanation that is possible but cannot be considered as established or as probable.[1896] However this may be, it was at a relatively late period that the conception of communion was introduced into ceremonies connected with the death of a deity. Originally the grain, identified with the god, was eaten in order to acquire his strength;[1897] such seems to be the purpose in the Mexican ceremonies in which paste images of the deity were eaten by all the people. With the growth of moral and spiritual conceptions of worship such communal eating came naturally to be connected with a sense of union of soul with the deity, as we find in the higher religions, but still without the feeling that reconciliation and unity were effected through the absorption, by god and man, of the same sacred food.
[1048]. In some forms of Christianity the sacramental eating is brought into connection with the atoning death of a divine person, but this latter conception came independently by a different line of thought. Its basis is the idea of redemption, which is an element in all sacrifice proper. And, as the death of the divine victim is held to rescue the worshiper from punishment for ill doing, the conclusion is natural that the former stands in the place of the latter. In the higher forms of thought such substitution could only be voluntary on the part of the victim. Traces of the self-sacrifice of a god have been sought in such myths as the stories of the self-immolation of Dido and Odin; but the form and origin of these myths are obscure[1898]—all that can be said of them in this connection is that they seem not to contain expiatory conceptions.[1899] The higher conception of a divine self-sacrifice is a late historical development under the influence of convictions of the moral majesty of God and the sinfulness of sin.
[1049]. Union with the divine through a sanctified victim. The conception of sacrifice as bringing about a union of the divine and the human is reached in a different way from that of Smith by MM. Hubert and Mauss, and receives in their hands a peculiar coloring.[1900] They hold that the numerous forms of sacrifice cannot be reduced to "the unity of a single arbitrarily chosen principle"; and in view of the paucity of accurate accounts of early ritual (in which they include the Greek and the Roman) they reject the "genealogical" (that is, the evolutionary) method, and devote themselves to an analysis of the two ancient rituals, the Hindu and the Hebrew, that are known in detail and with exactness. They thus arrive at the formula: "Sacrifice is a religious act which, by the consecration of a victim, modifies the state of the moral person who performs it, or of certain objects in which this person is interested." The procedure in sacrifice, they say, consists in establishing a communication between the sacred world and the profane world by the intermediation of a victim, that is, of a thing that is destroyed in the course of the ceremony; it thus serves a variety of purposes, and is dealt with in many ways: the flesh is offered to hostile spirits or to friendly deities, and is eaten in part by worshipers or by priests; the ceremony is employed in imprecations, divination, vows, and is redemptive by the substitution of the victim for the offender; the soul of the beast is sent to join its kin in heaven and maintain the perpetuity of its race; all sacrifices produce either sacralization or desacralization—both offerer and victim must be prepared (for the victim is not, as Smith holds, sacred by nature, but is made sacred by the sacrifice), and, the ceremony over, the person must be freed from his sanctity (as in the removal of a taboo); all sacrifice is an act of abnegation, but the abnegation is useful and egoistic, except in the case of the sacrifice of a god.
[1050]. The essay of MM. Hubert and Mauss is rather a description of the mode of procedure in Hindu sacrifice than an explanation of the source of its power. A victim, it is said, sanctified by the act of sacrifice, effects communication between the two worlds, but we are not told wherein consists this sanctifying and harmonizing efficacy. The rituals chosen for analysis are the product of many centuries of development and embody the conceptions of theological reflection; it does not appear why they should be preferred, as sources of information concerning the essential nature of sacrifice, to the simple rites of undeveloped communities. The authors of the essay, though they deny the possibility of finding a single explicative principle chosen arbitrarily, themselves announce a principle, which, however, amounts simply to the statement that sacrifice is placatory. In thus ascribing the virtue of the ceremony to the act itself it is possible that they may have been influenced by the Brahmanic conception that sacrifice had power in itself to control the gods and to secure all blessings for men; it was credited by them with magical efficacy, and the efficacy depended on performing the act with minutest accuracy in details—the slightest error in a word might vitiate the whole proceeding.[1901] The developed Hindu system thus embodied in learned form the magical idea that is found in many early procedures, and in some other cults of civilized communities. So far as regards the variety of functions assigned by MM. Hubert and Mauss to sacrifice, they may all be explained as efforts to propitiate supernatural Powers; and the obligation on priests and worshipers to purify themselves by ablutions and otherwise arises from a sense of the sacredness of the sacrificial act, which is itself derived from the feeling that the sacredness of supernatural beings communicates itself to whatever is connected with them. The view that the victim is not in itself sacred is contradicted by all the phenomena of early religion. Though the essay of MM. Hubert and Mauss formulates no definition of the ultimate efficient cause in sacrifice, passing remarks appear to indicate that they look on the offering as a gift to superhuman Powers, and that their object is to show under what conditions and circumstances it is to be presented.
[1051]. Sacrifice as the expression of desire for union with the Infinite. Professor C. P. Tiele, dissatisfied with existing theories of the significance of sacrifice, contents himself with a general statement.[1902] After pointing out that the material of sacrifice in any community is derived from the food of the community, he passes in review briefly the theories of Tylor (gifts to deities), Spencer (veneration of deceased ancestors), and Robertson Smith; all these, though he thinks it would be presumptuous to condemn them hastily, he finds insufficient, most of them, he says, confining themselves to a single kind of offering, whereas every kind should be taken into account, gifts presented, objects and persons consecrated, victims slain with or without repasts, possessions and pleasures renounced, acts of fasting and abstinence, every kind of religious self-denial or self-sacrifice. The question being whether one and the same religious need is to be recognized in all the varieties, he finds the root of sacrificial observances in the yearning of the believer for abiding communion with the supernatural Power to which he feels himself akin, the longing of finite man to become one with the Infinity above him.
[1052]. Tiele here has in mind the highest form of the religious consciousness, which he carries back to the beginnings of religious thought. He is justified in so doing in so far as all later developments must be supposed to exist in germinal form at the outset of rational life; but such a conception tells us nothing of the historical origin of customs. The idea of the relation between the finite and the infinite is not recognizable in early thought; to trace the history of such an institution as sacrifice we desire to know in what sort of feeling it originated, and we may then follow its progress to its highest definition. All the details mentioned by Tiele are included under the head of gift except acts of abstinence and self-sacrifice, and these last belong properly not to what is technically known as "sacrifice," but to man's endeavor to bring himself into ethical harmony with an ethical deity. With equal right prayer and all moral conduct might here be included; Tiele thinks of "sacrifice" as embracing the whole religious life. In the earliest known cults the "yearning for union with the Infinite" takes the form of desire to enter into friendly relations with superhuman Powers by gifts, in order to derive benefit from them; when old forms have been outgrown the conviction arises that what is well-pleasing to God is the presentation of the whole self, as a "living sacrifice," in service in accordance with reason (Rom. xii, 1).