Still, how can you eat your god if you also bury him as a corn-spirit to use him as seed? The Gonds supply us with the answer to that obvious difficulty. For, as we saw, they sprinkle the blood of the victim over the ploughed field or ripe crop, and then they sacramentally devour his body. Such a double use of the artificial god is frequently to be detected, indeed, through the vague words of our authorities. We see it in the Potraj ceremony, where the blood of the lamb is drunk by the officiating priest, while the remainder of the animal is buried beside the altar; we see it in the numerous cases where a portion of the victim is eaten sacramentally, and the rest burned and scattered over the fields, which it is supposed to fertilise. You eat your god in part, so as to imbibe his divinity; but you bury him in part, so as to secure at the same time his fertilising qualities for your corn or your vineyard.
I admit that all this is distinctly mystic; but mystery-mongering and strange reduplication of persons, with marvellous identifications and minute distinctions, have always formed much of the stock-in-trade of religion. If cults were all plain sailing throughout, what room for faith?—there would be less to engage the imagination of the votary.
And now let us return awhile to our Mexican instances.
At the annual feast of the great god Tezcatlipoca, which, like most similar festivals, fell about the same time as the Christian Easter, a young man was chosen to be the representative of the god for a twelvemonth. As in the case of almost all chosen victims, he had to be a person of unblemished body, and he was trained to behave like a god-king with becoming dignity. During his year of godship, he was lapped in luxury; and the actual reigning emperor took care that he should be splendidly attired, regarding him already as a present deity. He was attended by eight pages clad in the royal livery—which shows him to have been a king as well as a god; and wherever he went the people bowed down to him. Twenty days before the festival at which he was to be sacrificed, four noble maidens, bearing the names of four goddesses, were given him to be his brides. The final feast itself, like those of Dionysus, of Attis, and of Potraj, occupied five days—a coincidence between the two hemispheres which almost points to original identity of custom before the dispersion of the races. During these five days the real king remained in his palace—and this circumstance plainly shows that the victim belonged to the common class of substituted and temporary divine king-gods. The whole court, on the other hand, attended the victim. On the last day of the feast, the victim was ferried across the lake in a covered barge to a small temple in the form of a pyramid. On reaching the summit, he was seized and held down on a block of stone,—no doubt an altar of funereal origin,—while the priest cut open his breast with a stone knife, and plucked his heart out. This he offered to the god of the sun. The head was hung up among the skulls of previous victims, no doubt for oracular purposes, and as a permanent god; but the legs and arms were cooked and prepared for the table of the lords, who thus partook of the god sacramentally. His place was immediately filled by another young man, who for a year was treated with the same respect, and at the end of that time was similarly slaughtered.
I do not think I need point out the close resemblance of this ritual to that of the Khond Meriah, of the Potraj, and of the festivals of Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. But I would also call particular attention to the final destination of the skull, and its exact equivalence to the skull of the animal-god in India and elsewhere.
“The idea that the god thus slain in the person of his representative comes to life again immediately,” says Mr. Frazer, “was graphically represented in the Mexican ritual by skinning the slain man-god, and clothing in his skin a living man, who thus became the new representative of the godhead.” For example, at an annual festival in Mexico, a woman was sacrificed who represented Toci, the Mother of the Gods—a sort of yearly Mexican Cybele. She was dressed in the ornaments and bore the name of the goddess of whom she was believed to be an incarnation. After being feasted for several days, she was taken at midnight to the summit of a temple, and there beheaded. Her body was flayed, and one of the priests, clothing himself in the skin, became the representative of the goddess Toci. The skin of the woman’s thigh, however, was separately removed, and a young man who represented the god Cinteotl, the son of Toci, wrapt it round him like a mask. Ceremonies then followed, in which the two men, clad in the woman’s skin, enacted the parts of the god and goddess. In all this, there is much that seems to me reminiscent of Isis and Horus, of Cybele and Attis, of Semele and Dionysus, and of several other eastern rituals.
Still more significant is the yearly festival of the god Totec, who was represented in like manner by a priest, clad in the skin of a human victim, and who received offerings of first-fruits and first-flowers, together with bunches of maize which had been kept for seed. Here we have the closest possible analogy to the case of the Meriah. The offering of first-fruits, made sometimes to the king, sometimes to the ancestral spirits, is here made to the human god of cultivation, who represents both in his own person.
Many other cannibal sacrifices are recorded in Mexico: in more than one of them it was customary for the priest to tear out the warm throbbing heart of the victim, and present it to the idol. Whether these sacrifices in each particular case were of the ordinary or of the mystic type it is not always quite easy to decide; probably the worshippers themselves did not accurately discriminate in every instance. But however that may be, we know at least this much: when human sacrifices had been rare, the priests reminded the kings that the gods “were starving with hunger”; war was then made on purpose to take prisoners, “because the gods had asked for something to eat,” and thousands of victims were thus slaughtered annually. The blood of the victims was separately offered; and I may add in this connexion that as a rule both ghosts and gods are rather thirsty than hungry. I take the explanation of this peculiar taste to be that blood and other liquids poured upon the ground of graves or at altar-stones soon sink in, and so seem to have been drunk or sucked up by the ghost or god; whereas meat and solid offerings are seen to be untouched by the deity to whom they are presented. A minor trait in this blood-loving habit of the gods is seen in the fact that the Mexicans also gave the god to drink fresh blood drawn from their own ears, and that the priests likewise drew blood from their legs, and daubed it on the temples. Similar mitigations of self-immolation are seen elsewhere in the Attis-priest drawing blood from his arms for Attis, in the Hebrew Baal-priests “cutting themselves for Baal,” and in the familiar Hebrew rite of circumcision. Blood is constantly drawn by survivors or worshippers as an act of homage to the dead or to deities.
I might multiply instances of human sacrifices of the mystic order elsewhere, but I prefer to pass on to the various mitigations which they tend to undergo in various communities. In its fullest form, I take it, the mystic sacrifice ought to be the self-immolation of a divine priest-king, a god and descendant of gods, himself to himself, on the altar of his own divine foundation-ancestor. But in most cases which we can trace, the sacrifice has already assumed the form of an immolation of a willing victim, a temporary king, of the divine stock only by adoption, though sometimes a son or brother of the actual monarch. Further modifications are that the victim becomes a captive taken in war (which indeed is implied in the very etymology of the Latin word victima), or a condemned criminal, or an imbecile, who can be more readily induced to undertake the fatal office. Of all of these we have seen hints at least in previous cases. Still more mitigated are the forms in which the victim is allowed to escape actual death by a subterfuge, and those in which an image or effigy is allowed to do duty for the living person. Of these intermediates we get a good instance in the case of the Bhagats, mentioned by Col. Dalton, who “annually make an image of a man in wood, put clothes and ornaments on it, and present it before the altar of a Mahadeo” (or rude stone phallic idol). “The person who officiates as priest on the occasion says, ‘O, Mahadeo, we sacrifice this man to you according to ancient customs. Give us rain in due season, and a plentiful harvest.’ Then, with one stroke of the axe, the head of the image is struck off, and the body is removed and buried.” This strange rite shows us a surviving but much mitigated form of the Khond Meriah practice.
As a rule, however, such bloodless representations do not please the gods; nor do they succeed in really liberating a ghost or corn-god. They are after all but feeble phantom sacrifices. Blood the gods want, and blood is given them. The most common substitute for the human victim-god is therefore the animal victim-god, of which we have already seen copious examples in the ox and kid of Dionysus, the pig of Attis, and many others. It seems probable that a large number of sacrifices, if not the majority of those in which domestic animals are slain, belong in the last resort to the same category. Thus, indeed, we can most easily explain the theory of the so-called “thean-thropic” victim,—the animal which stands for a man and a god,—as well as the point of view of sacrifice so ably elaborated by Dr. Robertson Smith.