17. Animal sacrifices in Greece.
M. Salomon Reinach gives the following explanation of Greek myths in connection with the sacrificial meal: “The primitive sacrifice of the god, usually accompanied by the eating of the god in fellowship, was preserved in their religious rites, and when its meaning had been forgotten numerous legends were invented to account for it. In order to understand their origin it is necessary to remember that the primitive worshippers masqueraded as the god and took his name. As the object of the totem sacrifice is to make the participants like the god and confer his divinity on them, the faithful endeavoured to increase the resemblance by taking the name of the god and covering themselves with the skins of animals of his species. Thus the Athenian damsels celebrating the worship of the bear Artemis dressed themselves in bear-skins and called themselves bears; the Maenads who sacrificed the doe Penthea were clad in doe-skins. Even in the later rites the devotees of Bacchus called themselves Bacchantes. A whole series of legends can be interpreted as semi-rationalistic explanations of the sacrificial meal. Actaeon was really a great stag sacrificed by women devotees who called themselves the great hind and the little hinds; he became the rash hunter who surprised Artemis at her bath, and was transformed into a stag and devoured by his own dogs. The dogs are a euphemism; in the early legend they were the human devotees of the sacred stag who tore him to pieces and devoured him with their bare teeth. These feasts of raw flesh survived in the secret religious cults of Greece long after uncooked meat had ceased to be consumed in ordinary life. Orpheus (ophreus, the haughty), who appears in art with the skin of a fox on his head, was originally a sacred fox devoured by the women of the fox totem-clan; these women call themselves Bassarides in the legend, and bassareus is one of the old names of the fox. Zagreus is a son of Zeus and Persephone who transformed himself into a bull to escape from the Titans, excited against him by Hera; the Titans, worshippers of the divine bull, killed and ate him; Zagreus was invoked in his worship as the ‘good bull,’ and when Zagreus by the grace of Zeus was reborn as Dionysus, the young god carried on his forehead the horns which bore witness to his animal nature. Hippolytus in the fable is the son of Theseus who repels the advances of Phaedra, his stepmother, and was killed by his runaway horses because Theseus, deceived by Phaedra, invoked the anger of a god upon him. But Hippolytus in Greek means ‘One torn to pieces by horses.’ Hippolytus is himself a horse whom the worshippers of the horse, calling themselves horses and disguised as such, tore to pieces and devoured. Phaethon (The Shining One) is a son of Apollo, who demands leave to drive the chariot of the sun, drives it badly, nearly burns up the world, and finally falls and perishes in the sea. This legend is the product of an old rite at Rhodes, the island of the sun, where every year a white horse and a burning chariot were thrown into the sea to help the sun, fatigued by his labours.”[38]
18. The Passover.
M. Reinach points out that the Passover of the Israelites was in its origin a similar sacrifice. A lamb or kid, the first-fruit of the flocks, was eaten entire without the bones being broken, the blood smeared on the doorway being an offering to the god. The story connecting this sacrifice with the death of the first-born in Egypt was of later origin, devised to account for it when the real meaning had been forgotten.[39] The name Rachel[40] means a ewe, and it would appear that the children of Israel in the pastoral stage had the sheep for their totem deity and supposed themselves to be descended from it, as the Jāts consider themselves to be descended from Siva, probably in his form of Mahādeo, the deified bull. As held in Canaan, the festival may have been a relic of the former migratory life of the Israelites when they tended flocks and regarded the sheep, or goat, as their most important domestic animal. It may have been in memory of this wandering life that the festival was accompanied by the eating of unleavened bread, and the sacrifice was consumed with loins girded up and staffs in their hands, as if in readiness for a journey. The Banjāras retain in their marriage and other customs various reminiscences of their former migratory life, as shown in the article on that caste. The Gadarias of the Central Provinces worship a goddess called Dishai Devi, who is represented by a stone platform just outside the sheep-pen. She has thus probably developed from the deified sheep or goat, which itself was formerly worshipped. On the eighth day of the fasts in Chait and Kunwār the Gadarias offer the goddess a virgin she-goat. They wash the goat’s feet in water and rub turmeric on its feet and head. It is given rice to eat and brought before the goddess, and water is poured over its body; when the goat begins to shiver they think that the goddess has accepted the offering, and cut its throat with a sickle or knife. Then the animal is roasted whole and eaten in the veranda of the house, nothing being thrown away but the bones. Only men may join in this sacrifice, and not women.
19. Sanctity of domestic animals.
Thus it was a more or less general rule among several races that the domestic animals were deified and held sacred, and were slain only at a sacrifice. It followed that it was sinful to kill these animals on any other occasion. It has already been seen that the Arabs forbore to kill their worn-out camels for food except when driven to it by hunger as a last resort. “That it was once a capital offence to kill an ox, both in Attica and the Peloponnesus, is attested by Varro. So far as Athens is concerned, this statement seems to be drawn from the legend that was told in connection with the annual sacrifice at the Diipolia, where the victim was a bull and its death was followed by a solemn inquiry as to who was responsible for the act. In this trial everyone who had anything to do with the slaughter was called as a party; the maidens who drew water to sharpen the axe and knife threw the blame on the sharpeners, they put it on the man who handed the axe, he on the man who struck down the victim, and he again on the one who cut its throat, who finally fixed the responsibility on the knife, which was accordingly found guilty of murder and cast into the sea.”[41] “At Tenedos the priest who offered a bull-calf to Dionysus anthroporraistes was attacked with stones and had to flee for his life; and at Corinth, in the annual sacrifice of a goat to Hera Acraea, care was taken to shift the responsibility of the death off the shoulders of the community by employing hirelings as ministers. Even they did no more than hide the knife in such a way that the goat, scraping with its feet, procured its own death.”[42] “Agatharchides, describing the Troglodytes of East Africa, a primitive pastoral people in the polyandrous state of society, tells us that their whole sustenance was derived from their flocks and herds. When pasture abounded, after the rainy season, they lived on milk mingled with blood (drawn apparently, as in Arabia, from the living animal), and in the dry season they had recourse to the flesh of aged or weakly beasts. Further, ‘they gave the name of parent to no human being, but only to the ox and cow, the ram and ewe, from whom they had their nourishment.’ Among the Caffres the cattle kraal is sacred; women may not enter it, and to defile it is a capital offence.”[43] Among the Egyptians also cows were never killed.[44]