CHAPTER XV.—SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT.
WE have now arrived at a point where we can more fully understand those curious ideas of sacrifice and sacrament which lie at the root of so much that is essential in the Jewish, the Christian, and most other religions.
Mr. Galton tells us that to the Damaras, when he travelled among them, all meat was common property. No one killed an ox except as a sacrifice and on a festal occasion; and when the ox was killed, the whole community feasted upon it indiscriminately. This is but a single instance of a feeling almost universal among primitive pastoral people. Cattle and other domestic animals, being regarded as sacred, are rarely killed; and when they are killed, they are eaten at a feast as a social and practically religious rite—in short, sacramentally. I need not give instances of so well-known a principle; I will content myself with quoting what Dr. Robertson Smith says of a particular race: “Among the early Semites generally, no slaughter was legitimate except for sacrifice.”
Barbaric herdsmen, indeed, can hardly conceive of men to whom flesh meat is a daily article of diet. Mr. Galton found the idea very strange to his Damaras. Primitive pastoral races keep their domestic animals mainly for the sake of the milk, or as beasts of burden, or for the wool and hair; they seldom kill one except for a feast, at which the gods are fellow-partakers. Indeed, it is probable, as the sequel will suggest, that domestic animals were originally kept as totems or ancestor-gods, and that the habit of eating the meat of sheep, goats, and oxen has arisen mainly out of the substitution of such a divine animal-victim for the divine human-victim of earlier usage. Our butchers’ shops have their origin in mitigated sacrificial cannibalism.
Sacrifice, regarded merely as offering to the gods, has thus, I believe, two distinct origins. Its earliest, simplest, and most natural form is that whose development we have already traced,—the placing of small articles of food and drink at the graves of ancestors or kings or revered fellow-tribesmen. That from a very early period men have believed the dead to eat and drink, whether as corpse, as mummy, as ghost of buried friend, or as ethereal spirit of cremated chieftain, we have already seen with sufficient frequency. About the origin of these simplest and most primitive sacrifices, I think, there can be little doubt. Savages offer at the graves of their dead precisely those ordinary articles of food which they consumed while living, without any distinction of kind; and they continue to offer them in the same naïve way when the ghost has progressed to the status of one of the great gods of the community.
But there is another mode of sacrifice, superposed upon this, and gradually tending to be more or less identified with it, which yet, if I am right, had a quite different origin in the artificial production of gods about which I have written at considerable length in the last three chapters. The human or animal victim, thus slaughtered in order to make a new god or protecting spirit, came in time to be assimilated in thought to the older type of mere honorific offerings to the dead gods; and so gave rise to those mystic ideas of the god who is sacrificed, himself to himself, of which the sacrament of the Mass is the final and most mysterious outcome. Thus, the foundation-gods, originally killed in order to make a protecting spirit for a house or a tribal god for a city or village, came at last to be regarded as victims sacrificed to the Earth Goddess or to the Earth Demons; and thus, too, the Meriahs and other agricultural victims, originally killed in order to make a corn-god or a corn-spirit, came at last to be regarded as sacrifices to the Earth, or to some abstract Dionysus or Attis or Adonis. And since in the last case at least the god and the victim were still called by the same name and recognised as one, there grew up at last in many lands, and in both hemispheres, but especially in the Eastern Mediterranean basin, the mystic theory of the sacrifice of a god, himself to himself, in atonement or expiation, which forms the basis of the Christian Plan of Salvation. It is this secondary and derivative form of sacrifice, I believe, which is mainly considered in Professor Robertson Smith’s elaborate and extremely valuable analysis.
I have said that the secondary form of sacrifice, which for brevity’s sake I shall henceforth designate as the mystic, is found in most parts of the world and in both hemispheres. This naturally raises the question whether it has a single common origin, and antedates the dispersal of mankind through the hemispheres; or whether it has been independently evolved several times over in many lands by many races. For myself, I have no cut-and-dried answer to this abstruse question, nor do I regard it, indeed, as a really important one. On the one hand, there are many reasons for supposing that certain relatively high traits of thought or art were common property among mankind before the dispersion from the primitive centre, if a primitive centre ever existed. On the other hand, psychologists know well that the human mind acts with extraordinary similarity in given circumstances all the world over, and that identical stages of evolution seem to have been passed through independently by many races, in Egypt and Mexico, in China and Peru; so that we can find nothing inherently improbable in the idea that even these complex conceptions of mystic sacrifice have distinct origins in remote countries. What is certain is the fact that among the Aztecs, as among the Phrygians, the priest who sacrificed, the victim he slew, and the image or great god to whom he slew him, were all identified; the killer, the killed, and the being in whose honor the killing took place were all one single indivisible deity. Even such details as that the priest clothed himself in the skin of the victim are common to many lands; they may very well be either a heritage from remote ancestral humanity, or the separate product of the human mind, working along like grooves under identical conditions. In one word they may perhaps be necessary and inevitable corollaries from antecedent conceptions.
I must further premise that no religion as we now know it is by any means primitive. The most savage creeds we find among us have still hundreds of thousands of years behind them. The oldest religions whose records have descended to us, like those of Egypt and of Assyria, are still remote by hundreds of thousands of years from the prime original. Cultivation itself is a very ancient and immemorial art. Few savages, even among those who are commonly described as in the hunting stage, are wholly ignorant of some simple form of seed-sowing and tillage. The few who are now ignorant of those arts show some apparent signs of being rather degenerate than primitive peoples. My own belief or suspicion is that ideas derived from the set of practices in connexion with agriculture detailed in the last two chapters have deeply coloured the life and thought of almost the whole human race, including even those rudest tribes which now know little or nothing of agriculture. But I do not lay stress upon this half-formed conviction, to justify which would lead me too far afield. I shall be content with endeavouring to suggest how far they have coloured the ideas of the greater number of existing nations.
Early pastoral races seldom kill a beast except on great occasions. When they kill it, they devour it in common, all the tribe being invited to the festival. But they also eat it in fellowship with their gods; every great feast is essentially a Theoxenion, a Lectisternium, a banquet in which the deities participate with mortals. It is this sense of a common feast of gods and men which gave, no doubt, the first step towards the complex idea of the sacramental meal—an idea still further developed at a later stage by the addition of the concept that the worshipper eats and drinks the actual divinity.