According to this theory, the domestic animals were early regarded as of the same kin or blood as the tribe; and the slaughter of an ox, a goat, or a sheep could only be permitted if it were done, like the slaughter of a king’s son, sacrificially and sacramentally. In my own opinion, this scarcely means more than that the sacred domestic animals were early accepted as substitutes for the human victim, and that they were eaten sacrificially and sacramentally as the human victim was also eaten. But I will waive this somewhat controversial point, and content myself with suggesting that the animal victim was habitually treated as in itself divine, and that its blood was treated in the same way as the blood of the original cannibal offering. At the same time, the sacrifice was usually offered at the altar of some older and, so to speak, more constant deity, while the blood of the victim was allowed to flow over the sacred stone. Certainly, both among the Arabs and the Hebrews, all slaughter of domestic animals appears to have been at one time sacrificial; and even when the slaughter ceased necessarily to involve a formal sacrifice, it was still thought necessary to slay the victim in the name of a god, and to pour out the blood in his honour on the ground. Even in the Græco-Roman world, the mass of butcher’s meat was “meat offered to idols.” We shall see hereafter that among existing savages the slaughter of domestic animals is still regarded as a sacred rite.
I believe also that as a rule the blood-offering is the earliest and commonest form of slaughter to the gods; and that the victim in the earlier stages was generally consumed by the communicants, as we know the cannibal victim to have been consumed among the Mexicans, and as we saw the theanthropic goat or kid was orgiastically devoured by the worshippers of Dionysus. It is a detail whether the sacred victim happened to be eaten raw or cooked; the one usage prevailed in the earlier and more orgiastic rites, the other in the milder and more civilised ceremonies. But in either case, the animal-god, like the human god, was eaten sacramentally by all his worshippers, who thus took into themselves his divine qualities. The practice of burning the victim, on the other hand, prevailed mainly, I think, among cremationists, like the Tyrians and Hellenes, though it undoubtedly extended also to many burying peoples, like the Hebrews and Egyptians. In most cases even of cremated victims, it would appear, a portion at least of the animal was saved from the fire and sacramentally eaten by the worshippers.
Once more, the victim itself was usually a particular kind of sacred animal. This sacredness of the chosen beast has some more important bearings than we have yet considered. For among various pastoral races, various domesticated animals possess in themselves positive sanctity. We know, for example, that cows are very holy in the greater part of India, and buffaloes in the Deccan. Among the African peoples of the pastoral tribes, the common food is milk and game; cattle are seldom slaughtered merely to eat, and always on exceptional or sacred occasions—the very occasions which elsewhere demand a human victim—such as the proclamation of a war, a religious festival, a wedding, or the funeral of a great chieftain. In such cases, the feast is public, all blood-relations having a natural right to attend. The cattle-kraal itself is extremely sacred. The herd and its members are treated by their masters with affectionate and almost brotherly regard.
A few further points must also be added. Among early races, to kill and eat wild animals, or to kill and eat enemies, who are not members of the tribe, is not accounted in any way wrong. But to kill a tribesman—to shed kindred blood—is deeply sinful; and so it is sinful to kill and eat the domestic herds. In old age, indeed, or when sick and feeble, you may kill and eat your blood-relation blamelessly; and so you may also kill and eat old or sickly cattle. But as a rule, you only eat them sacramentally and sacrificially, under the same circumstances where you would be justified in killing and eating a human victim. Thus, as a rule, each tribe has its own sacred beast, which is employed as a regular substitute for a man-god. Among the Arabs, this beast was a camel; among the Indian peoples, the bull or the buffalo; among shepherd races, it is the sheep or goat; among the Teutons, the horse; among many settled urban peoples, the pig; and with the Samoyeds and Os-tiaks, their one chattel, the reindeer.
Also, as a rule, the cow or other female animal was not usually sacrificed; she was kept for milk-yielding. It was the bull, the ram, the ox, the he-goat that was oftenest offered and eaten sacramentally. Mere utilitarian considerations would soon lead to this use, just as our own butchers kill ram lambs by choice, and spare the ewes for breeding. The custom, once introduced, would tend to become sacred; for whatever our divine ancestors did is itself divine, and should not be lightly or carelessly altered. Hence we can understand that supreme sanctity of the cow, which has made so many races refuse to sacrifice it, while they sacrifice and eat the bull or ox without let or scruple. Thus the Todas have never eaten the flesh of the female buffalo; but the male they eat once a year, sacramentally, all the adult men in the village joining in the ceremony of killing and roasting it.
A remarkable instance of the theanthropic sacrifice of such a sacred animal is given us in Nilus’s account of the ceremony performed by the Arabs of his time. A holy camel, chosen as a victim, was bound upon a rude cairn of piled-up stones. In this primitive altar we can hardly fail to recognise the grave of an early tribal chieftain. The leader of the band then led the worshippers thrice round the cairn in a solemn procession, chanting a solemn hymn as they went. As the last words of the hymn were sung, he fell upon the camel (like Potraj on the lamb), wounded it, and hastily drank of the blood that gushed out from it. Forthwith the whole company fell on the victim with their swords, hacked off pieces of the quivering flesh, and devoured them raw with such wild haste that between the rise of the day-star and that of the sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood, and entrails, was absolutely eaten. I need not point out the close resemblance of this savage rite to those of Potraj and of Dionysus. It is a point, however, to observe that here also the blood falls on the cairn or grave or altar. I may note that the annual sacrifice of the paschal lamb among the shepherd Hebrews is obviously a mere mitigation of this barbarous rite. In that case, as might be expected in a more civilised race, the victim is roasted whole: but it is similarly necessary that every part of it should be hastily eaten. Legend further informs us, in the instance of the Passover, that the lamb was a substitute for a human victim, and that the first-born were sanctified to Jahweh, instead of being sacrificed. Note also that the feast of the paschal lamb occupied the now familiar space of five days: the sacred animal was chosen on the tenth day of the month, and sacrificed on the fourteenth. The whole ceremonial is most illustrative and full of survivals.
Though it breaks for a moment the thread of my argument, I find it impossible not to mention here the curious parallel case of the judicial sacrifice among the Battas of Sumatra, which is the human analogue of the Arabian camel-sacrament. Only in this instance, as in so many others, sacrifice and punishment merge into one another. “With them the adulterer, the night-thief, and those who had treacherously attacked a town, a village, or a particular person, were condemned to be eaten by the people. They were tied to three posts; their legs and their arms were stretched out in the shape of a St. Andrew’s cross;and then, when a signal was given, the populace rushed upon the body and cut it into fragments with hatchets or with knives, or perhaps more simply with their nails and their teeth. The strips so torn off were devoured instantly, all raw and bloody; they were merely dipped into a cocoanut bowl containing a sauce prepared beforehand of lemon-juice and salt. In the case of adultery, the outraged husband had the right of choosing first what piece he liked best. The guests invited to the feast performed this work with so much ardour that they often tore and hurt each other.” I do not think we can read this account without being struck by its close analogy to many of our previous sacrifices, both of human corn-gods and of sacred animals. The criminal is here nothing more than the substitute for a holy human victim.
And now we must also remember that in most countries the gods were housemates of their worshippers, present at all times in every home, and partakers of every meal, side by side with the living. They lived in the house, as still in New Guinea. Libations to them were poured from every cup; food was offered to their ghosts or skulls or wooden images at every family gathering. The ordinary feasts were thus mere enlarged festal gatherings, at which a victim was sacrificially slain and sacramentally eaten; and the visitors believed they were eating the body and blood of the god to their own salvation. Greater sacrifices, like the hecatombs, or the heroic Indian horse-sacrifice, must have been relatively rare; but in all of them we see clear proof that the victim was regarded as a sacred animal, that is to say a god, in one of his embodiments.
Clear evidence of this equivalence is seen in the fact that the worshippers often clad themselves in the skin of the victim, as the Mexicans did in the skin of the annual god. Sometimes the hide is even used to deck the idol. In the Cyprian sacrifice of a sheep to the sheep-goddess Aphrodite, the celebrants wore the skin of the sheep; while the Assyrian Dagon-worshipper offered the fish-sacrifice to the fish-god, clad in a fish-skin. Of similar import is doubtless the ægis or goat-skin of Athena, envisaged as a goat-goddess, and the skins used in the Dionysiac mysteries. I do not hesitate to affiliate all these on a primitive usage like that of the Mexican cannibal sacrifice.
Having reached this point, we can see further that the case where a sacred animal, the representative of a human victim, is slaughtered before the altar of an older god is exactly equivalent to the other known case where a human victim is slaughtered before the foundation-stone of a town or village. In either case, there is a distinct renewal of the divine life; fresh blood, as it were, is instilled by the act into the ancient deity. All the other concomitants are precisely the same. Thus at the Theban sacrifice of a ram to the ram-god Amen, the worshippers bewailed the victim, as the women bewailed Adonis and Attis; and the image of Amen was finally draped in the skin of the victim, while its body was buried in a sacred coffin. At the Buphonia or sacramental ox-slaying in Athens, there was a regular trial after the victim was slain, everybody throwing the blame on one another, till at last the knife that inflicted the wound was found guilty of murder and cast into the sea. (This casting into the sea of a guilt-bearer for the community will meet us again when we come to consider the doctrine of the atonement.) So we saw that the Potraj fled after the performance of his sanguinary sacrifice; and so too the slayer of the Dionysus-calf at Tenedos fled for his life when the ceremony was completed. Indeed, we get many intermediate cases, like that of the goat dressed up as a girl which was offered theanthropically to Artemis Munychia, or that of the Dionysus-calf clad in buskins, whose mother-cow was treated as a woman in child-birth. To me, all these instances are obvious attempts to palm off, as it were, on the gods a sacred animal in place of a genuine human victim. They are little more than divine legal fictions, eked out, no doubt, by the fiction of kinship between the herd and its masters.