8. The sacrificial meal.
The original sacrifice was that in which the community of kinsmen ate together the flesh of their divine or totem animal-god and drank its blood. In early religion the tribal god was the ancestor and relative of the tribe. He protected and fostered the tribe in its public concerns, but took no special care of individuals; the only offences of which he took cognisance were those against the tribe as a whole, such as shedding a kinsman’s blood. At periodical intervals the tribe renewed their kinship with the god and each other by eating his flesh together at a sacrificial meal by which they acquired his divine attributes; and every tribesman was not only invited, but bound, to participate. “According to antique ideas those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation. Hence when we find that in ancient religions all the ordinary functions of worship are summed up in the sacrificial meal, and that the ordinary intercourse between gods and men has no other form, we are to remember that the act of eating and drinking together is the solemn and stated expression of the fact that all who share the meal are brethren, and that the duties of friendship and brotherhood are implicitly acknowledged in their common act.[24] The one thing directly expressed in the sacrificial meal is that the god and his worshippers are commensals, but every other point in their mutual relations is included in what this involves. Those who sit at meat together are united for all social effects; those who do not eat together are aliens to one another, without fellowship in religion and without reciprocal social duties. The extent to which this view prevailed among the ancient Semites, and still prevails among the Arabs, may be brought out most clearly by reference to the law of hospitality. Among the Arabs every stranger whom one meets in the desert is a natural enemy, and has no protection against violence except his own strong hand or the fear that his tribe will avenge him if his blood be spilt. But if I have eaten the smallest morsel of food with a man I have nothing further to fear from him; ‘there is salt between us,’ and he is bound not only to do me no harm, but to help and defend me as if I were his brother. So far was this principle carried by the old Arabs that Zaid-al-Khail, a famous warrior in the days of Muhammad, refused to slay a vagabond who carried off his camels, because the thief had surreptitiously drunk from his father’s milk-bowl before committing the theft.”[25] It is in this idea that the feeling of hospitality originally arose. Those who ate together the sacred food consisting of the body of the god were brothers, and bound to assist each other and do each other no harm; and the obligation extended in a modified form to all food partaken of together, more especially as with some races, as the ancient Romans and the Hindus, all the regular household meals are sacred; they may only be partaken of after purifying the body, and a portion of the food at each meal is offered to the gods. “There was a sworn alliance between the Lihyān and the Mostalic—they were wont to eat and drink together. This phrase of an Arab narrator supplies exactly what is wanted to define the significance of the sacrificial meal. The god and his worshippers are wont to eat and drink together, and by this token their fellowship is declared and sealed.”[26]
9. Primitive basis of kinship.
The primitive idea of kinship rested on this participation in the sacrificial meal, and not on blood-relationship. “In ancient times the fundamental obligations of kinship had nothing to do with degrees of relationship, but rested with absolute and identical force on every member of the clan. To know that a man’s life was sacred to me and that every blood-feud that touched him involved me also, it was not necessary for me to count cousinship with him by reckoning up to our common ancestor; it was enough that we belonged to the same clan and bore the same clan-name. What was my clan was determined by customary law, which was not the same in all stages of society; in the earliest Semitic communities a man was of his mother’s clan, in later times he belonged to the clan of his father. But the essential idea of kinship was independent of the particular form of the law. A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. The members of one kindred looked on themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh, and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering. This point of view is expressed in the Semitic tongues in many familiar forms of speech. In case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say, ‘The blood of M or N has been spilt,’ naming the man; they say, ‘Our blood has been spilt.’ In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims kinship is, ‘I am your bone and your flesh.’ Both in Hebrew and in Arabic ‘flesh’ is synonymous with ‘clan’ or kindred group.”[27] Similarly in India a Hindu speaks of any member of his subcaste or clan as his bhai or brother.
“Indeed, in a religion based on kinship, where the god and his worshippers are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and that of kinship are identical. The sanctity of a kinsman’s life and the sanctity of the godhead are not two things but one; for ultimately the only thing which is sacred is the common tribal life or the common blood which is identified with the life. Whatever being partakes in this life is holy, and its holiness may be described indifferently as participation in the divine life and nature, or as participation in the kindred blood.”[28]
10. The bond of food.
“At a later period the conception is found current that any food which two men partake of together, so that the same substance enters into their flesh and blood, is enough to establish some sacred unity of life between them; but in ancient times this significance seems to be always attached to participation in the flesh of a sacrosanct victim, and the solemn mystery of its death is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god. This cement is nothing less than the actual life of the sacred and kindred animal, which is conceived as residing in its flesh, but especially in its blood, and so, in the sacred meal, is actually distributed among all the participants, each of whom incorporated a particle of it with his own individual life.”[29]