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]]