Religions of Primitive Peoples

by Daniel G. Brinton

This was foreign to its original meaning. The sacrifice at first was a free-will offering, a pleasing and grateful recognition of the kindness of the deity. The first-fruits, the young kid, the earliest ear of corn to mature, were offered to the beneficent being who had sent them for the good of man. It was the willing acknowledgment we pay to a kind friend. The earliest species of sacrifice is in the nature of a thank-offering. They were of the class which has been termed “honorific,” and were little more than “meals offered to the deity.”[226]

I may illustrate it from a custom of the Papuans of New Guinea. They believe, being ancestral worshippers, that the good things of life are mainly owing to the continuing solicitude of their departed progenitors. Therefore, to testify their gratitude, once in several years they dig up the skulls of those deceased relations, paint them with chalk, decorate them with feathers and flowers, and placing them on a scaffold, offer to them food and trinkets.[227]

There is nothing of fear in this rite, and nothing fearful, for it is made the occasion of a merry festival.

Soon, however, in the development of the cult it was perceived that loss and affliction abounded and increased; the gods grew careless of their votaries, or angry with them. They must be pacified and propitiated. Hence arose the second form of sacrifices, those which are called “conciliatory” or “piacular.”[228] They were atoning in significance, mystic in their symbolism, expiatory in their aims. The gods were displeased at what man had done or had left undone, and they must be reconciled by humility and self-abnegation.

In this the primitive worshipper acted towards his deity just as he would toward an earthly superior whose displeasure he had incurred. There was no new sentiment or line of action introduced. The rite of sacrifice in any of its phases offers nothing apart from the general motives of mankind.

The most common reason for early sacrifice was to expiate breaches of the ceremonial law. Whether this occurred intentionally or not of purpose, it was deemed requisite to make amends by some painful act, to pacify the demonic power behind the law.

Naturally, the greater the self-denial displayed in the offering, the higher its merit and the more efficacious its character. The ancient Germans laid it down that in time of famine beasts should first be slain and offered to the gods. Did these bring no relief, then men must be slaughtered; and if still there was no aid from on high, then the chieftain of the tribe himself must mount the altar[229]; for the nobler and dearer the victim, the more pleased were the gods!

The same doctrine prevailed practically through most primitive religions, and was carried to a like extent. Painful mutilations of oneself, the lopping of a finger, scarification, driving thorns through the tongue or the flesh elsewhere, burning with hot coals, scourging, and supporting crushing weights: these are but a few of the many terrible sufferings which the individual inflicted on himself.

Thus steeled to pain in his own person, he knew no limit to its infliction on others. The tortures of captives or of slaves dedicated to the gods, common in American religions, formed part of the religious value of the ceremony. Not merely captives and slaves, but those of his own household and blood, his nearest and his dearest, must the true worshipper be prepared to surrender, were it his first-born son or the wife of his bosom. It was not heartlessness or cruelty which prompted him, but obedience to that law of the supernatural, which ever claims for itself supremacy over all laws and all passions of the natural man.