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The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s4: § 4. Communion and Sacrament in the Sacrifice

The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c27.s4

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§ 4. Communion and Sacrament in the Sacrifice

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While in the view of Sir J. Frazer the essence of early sacrifice is the magic art of perpetuating the life of the herds and of vegetation and even of man, the gift theory of sacrifice has also been declared⁴ to be merely derivative, on the ground that it is really a faded remnant of the sacrifice in which the worshippers eat together of the flesh and blood of the deity, thus renewing and strengthening the bonds between themselves on the one hand and the god on the other. That such a form of sacrifice existed is beyond all doubt attested for the Semites, but not for the Babylonians, and there are traces of it in Greek and in other religions.¹ It is not necessary to insist, as does S. Reinach, that the origin of such an offering is totemistic: it is perfectly possible without any such system at the base to explain it: O. Gruppe² treats this form of sacrifice as the oldest and most primitive of all, the effort to obtain directly and most effectively a share in the divine power felt in the world. But it is one thing to believe in the existence of the sacrifice in this form, and to prove that it is the only type of sacrifice, and unless this can be done the gift form of sacrifice must continue to stand as an independent form. The objection that the gift theory must be later than the communion and sacrament form of sacrifice, because the conception of private property is necessary for the making of gifts, is not worth the consideration which has been sometimes shown to it. It is obvious that, apart from all other considerations, it has from the first been possible to offer to a god material things without any precise conception of ownership having been attained.

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⁴ R. Smith, *Rel. of Semites*, p. 365; Reinach, *Cultes, Mythes et Religions*, i. 96; ii. 101.

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¹ Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 241 ff. A good example of the common meal as a means of producing harmony is given in Kauç. xii. 8, 9. The same Sūtra (xiii. 6) prescribes a magic rite, in which portions of the members of some animals, lion, tiger, he-goat, ram, bull, a warrior and a Brahman student are to be eaten, to attain the possession of certain qualities; there is, of course, no totemism in all this; Henry, *La magie dans l’ Inde antique*, pp. xxviii, 87, 95.

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² Cf. Murray’s theory (*Four Stages of Greek Religion*, p. 37), which holds that the victim is devoured not as divine, but merely to obtain its *mana*, the divinization arising later.

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Now in the conception of the sacramental communion there are clearly present two elements which need not necessarily be combined. It is possible for the communion to appear by itself alone: the worshippers are imagined to eat and with them the deity eats, so that the deity and his worshippers have thus a common bond in the food which they consume: of this the Homeric sacrifice³ clearly presents us with a good example, while another is given by the Latin festival on the Alban Mount.⁴ In the second place, however, there may be more than this: the victim may be in some way divine: the most developed idea will be found when the victim is imagined as actually being an embodiment of the god for the time being, but it may be that the victim is merely more or less affected by the divine spirit from the fact that the god comes to the place of offering, and therefore that the divine spirit affects the victim and the place of offering.⁵ Of the latter idea there is a clear hint in the Homeric ritual of sacrifice of an animal victim: the barley seems to have been laid on the altar, and then brought into contact with the victim to convey to the victim the divine spirit present in the altar, and this idea is confirmed by later evidence, such as the sacrifice at Athens known as the Bouphonia,⁶ and apparently the same idea is to be seen in the sprinkling of the *mola salsa* on the head of the victim in the Roman ritual and of melted butter in the Vedic rite.

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³ Cf. Lang, *The World of Homer*, p. 129, with Murray, *Greek Epic*³, pp. 61 ff.

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⁴ Cf. Warde Fowler, *Roman Festivals*, pp. 95 ff.

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⁵ Cf. the worship paid to the offering implements by the Vedic Indian, to their *ollae* by the Arval Brethren (Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 436, 489), to the bells of their cattle and milk pails by the Todas (Rivers, *Todas*, p. 453).

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⁶ Cf. Keith, *Taittirīya Saṁhitā*, i. pp. cvi–viii; Farnell, *Cults of the Greek States*, i. 56–8, 88–92; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 107 ff., 65, n. 3.

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Now in the Vedic ritual, as in the Roman, we find a considerable amount of evidence of the eating of the offering by the priests, after the god had partaken of it. The essential feature of the ordinary sacrifice is expressed in the solemn invocation of the Iḍā,¹ the sacrificial food derived from the cow, which is repeatedly conceived in cow form. She is invoked to come forward, and she is expressly called a cow, and, when the god has eaten, shares in her are consumed by the priests and by the sacrificer,² in so far as he is qualified by being a Brahman to partake of the food. The latter restriction is one which we can only prove for the later period of the Vedic ritual, but the position of the priest at the outset of the ritual is such as to render it most probable that the rule was always in full operation in the historical period. The same practice applied to all normal kinds of offering, the animal sacrifice and the Soma sacrifice included, though we find in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa³ that the king is excluded at the royal consecration from the use of Soma and given Surā instead.

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The same rule applies to the Gṛhya ritual: it is laid down that a man should eat nothing without making an offering of a portion of it, every meal when an animal is killed for a guest is, as in Homer, a sacrifice.⁴ A Snātaka, or Brahman student, after he has taken the final bath concluding the studentship, is allowed to eat remains of food offered to the gods and to the Manes: in the latter permission, as in the rule that the wife, who wishes offspring, should eat a portion of the food offered to the Fathers,⁵ we must doubtless see the idea of placing oneself in close touch with the Fathers. In an offering to Kṣetrapati,⁶ in which the god is represented by a bull, the remains of the food are duly eaten by the relatives, and in another offering, the Madhuparka, the Rudras, Ādityas, and the All-gods are first fed, then the sacrificer, and then a Brahman: if there is no Brahman available, then the food may either be thrown into water, or the whole may be consumed by the sacrificer. The practice is interesting: it is clear that in the domestic ritual the rule that the only person who may eat the food is the Brahman is not in force: the sacrificer, who is the householder himself—and who may of course be himself a Brahman, but need not be—and his relatives have the first claim: after that the food which by its contact with the divinity is clearly specially valuable is either given to Brahmans, or disposed of in an effectual way.

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The ritual in many cases preserves express statements of the relation of the sacrificer to the sacrifice: if he does not eat a portion of it, he is excluding himself from it,¹ the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa says; but at the same time it is clear that it is rather a serious business: the hot milk in the Dadhigharma offering is expressly asked not to injure the partaker of it.² In some cases the idea of community resulting from the sacrifice seems clearly marked: thus the newly married couple, after their first entry into the common home, share food together from an offering made by the husband;³ in the ceremony of the initiation of a pupil the teacher gives the pupil to eat of the offering which has just been made, saying, ‘May Agni place wisdom in thee’;⁴ the sacrificer partakes of the offering of butter, which he and the priest have together touched before the sacrifice of Soma, and thus embodies in himself the idea of fidelity which was created by the touching;⁵ the mother eats part of the food which is given with ceremonial rites to the infant as its first solid nutriment,⁶ a practice in which Oldenberg⁷ sees the idea of securing for her future children the strength given by the rite to the existing child, but which is far more simply explained as a mere ceremony of communion.

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Possibly here too may be added the case of the ass sacrifice of the Brahman student which has already been noted: it may be conceived that the victim is made efficacious for its special purpose by the bringing it near to the god by sacrifice.

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¹ TS. vii. 1. 6. 8; VS. iii. 27; ApĆS. vi. 3. 8; ĀÇS. i. 7. 7; 8. 1; ÇÇS. i. 10. 1; TB. iii. 5. 8. 1; 13. 1; Hillebrandt, *Neu- und Vollmondsopfer*, pp. 124 ff.; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 81, 82, who compare the Christian Mass.

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² In Babylon the worshipper did not eat, though the priests might do so; they, however, did not eat with the god; Farnell, *Greece and Babylon*, pp. 241, 242. For Rome see Warde Fowler, *Roman Ideas of Deity*, pp. 58, 59; *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 172 ff. The idea of communion was seriously restricted in the official religion as in Vedic religion. So also in Iran; cf. Herodotos, i. 132, where the flesh is not (as stated by Jackson, GIP. ii. 702) eaten by the priests, but used by the sacrificer as he pleases.

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³ vii. 26 f.

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⁴ ÇGS. ii. 14. 23; ii. 15; iv. 5. 10, 11, 12.

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⁵ GGS. iv. 3. 27; cf. ĀÇS. ii. 7. 17.

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⁶ HGS. ii. 9; Keith, JRAS. 1907, pp. 939 ff.

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¹ AB. vii. 26. 2; cf. TA. v. 8. 12.

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² VS. xxxviii. 16.

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³ GGS. ii. 3. 18; MB. i. 3. 8; doubtless the same idea as in the Roman *confarreatio*.

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⁴ HGS. i. 4. 9.

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⁵ Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 362. It must be taken that Warde Fowler (*Religious Experience of the Roman People*, p. 181) is wrong in holding that the flesh which was eaten by the priests had lost its holiness, though in the case of Iran Herodotos (i. 132) gives the same impression.

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⁶ GGS. i. 27. 11.

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⁷ *Rel. des Veda*,² p. 333, n. 3.

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The same efficacy of the sacrifice is to be seen in cases where the offering produces its result by contact,⁸ not by ordinary eating. Thus in place of eating food together the husband and wife may rub each other’s hearts with the offering,⁹ and at the end of the three days of continence enjoined upon them the remains of the offerings are rubbed into the body of the bride.¹⁰ Similarly, if on the way to their home the car breaks, an offering is made, and the remains rubbed on the mended part.¹¹ The horses which are to engage in the race in the Vājapeya sniff the offering in order to gain swiftness;¹² the cows are driven so as to snuff the fragrance of the offering made in the fire;¹³ in the Soma sacrifice, the Vājapeya, the piling of the fire, and the Sautrāmaṇī alike occur cases in which the offering is used to rub the sacrificer to convey to him strength and healing.¹⁴ At the animal sacrifice by touching the victim the sacrificer is brought into contact with the sacrifice,¹ and when, in the case of an offering to Rudra, the cakes are hung up on a tree, the sacrificer should touch them and win healing power.²

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⁸ Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 76 ff.

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⁹ AGS. i. 8. 9.

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¹⁰ GGS. ii. 5. 6.

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¹¹ GGS. ii. 4. 3.

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¹² Weber, *Vājapeya*, pp. 28, 31.

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¹³ HGS. ii. 8. 10; cf. SVB. i. 8. 14; for man, KÇS. iv. 9. 11.

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¹⁴ ĀÇS. v. 19. 6; KÇS. xiv. 5. 24; xviii. 5. 9; xix. 4. 14; Weber, *Ind. Stud.* x. 351; xiii. 285.

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¹ TS. vi. 3. 8. 1, 2; ÇB. iii. 8. 1; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 67, n. 1.

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² ÇB. ii. 6. 2. 16.

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On the other hand, when the deities to whom the offerings are made are terrible, it is clearly natural that the offering should be regarded as not suitable for human consumption: in Greece the offerings to the dead and the chthonian divinities were not normally eaten. So in India, when rice cakes are offered to the Fathers, the sacrificer refrains from eating them: he merely smells them:³ it is normally not right to partake of an offering to Rudra;⁴ if an offering is made for one who seeks thus to find death, at the consecration one should only smell, not taste:⁵ in another case, the Dhadhigharma, or offering of hot sour milk, the remains of the sacrifice may be eaten by priests who have undergone the consecration, but not by others who are less well fortified for the risk:⁶ it is the native explanation,⁷ and it is reasonable enough to hold that the mere smelling is a compromise between the necessity of partaking as normally and the danger of the action. The terrible character of the offering is further indicated by other usages: when an offering is made to the Rakṣases, to Rudra, to the Fathers, or the Asuras, or when an imprecation is made,⁸ the sacrificer should touch water. When an offering is made to the Fathers,⁹ in one case, the sacrificer looks north, whereas the quarter of the Fathers is the south; when he offers to Rudra, he looks south, for Rudra’s place is in the north, and the offerer is constantly bidden not to turn round after an offering to Rudra, which is explicable only by the view that the dread god is on the scene in bodily presence. We may here also include the theory, already mentioned, of some theologians that the victim to Agni and Soma at the Agniṣṭoma should not be eaten: it may have seemed to some that the presence of the gods Agni and Soma made the victim too dangerous to permit of close contact. But the general rule was that it should be eaten as is in one case expressly stated.

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³ ÇB. xii. 5. 1. 12; ii. 4. 2. 24; 6. 1. 33; ApÇS. viii. 6. 3, 12; KÇS. iv. 1. 20; v. 9. 13.

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⁴ AGS. iv. 8. 31.

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⁵ KÇS. xxii. 6. 2.

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⁶ KÇS. x. 1. 26.

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⁷ TB. i. 3. 10. 7.

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⁸ ÇGS. i. 10. 9; KÇS. i. 10. 14.

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⁹ ÇB. xiv. 2. 2. 35, 38.

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On the other hand, it was always possible to eat of even the offering to a dread god; thus in the case of the offering of an animal to the god Rudra,¹⁰ which is to be made in a part from which the village cannot be seen, we meet with the same phenomenon as has already been seen in two cases in which it is allowed to eat of an offering to the dead. It is expressly said that the sacrificer must not eat any part of the victim, that he must not let the wind of it blow upon him, that he must not take any part of it into the village, and that he must keep his folk away from the place of offering, all clear proofs of the presence of the god, but it is also stated that he may eat of it on an express injunction, and that then the eating will bring him great luck. It is an error to underestimate¹ the value of this evidence: it proves that the nature of the effect on the offering is to fill it with holy power, and that the eating of part of it conveys that holy power, which may be well worth having in some special cases,² though normally when Rudra is the god concerned men may not care to come too near to it. From this point of view also we can understand the true force of the fact that the blood of the victim was not partaken of by the priest and the sacrificer: in this Hillebrandt³ has seen a ground of distinction between the Indian and the Semitic theory of sacrifice, in which the blood is precisely the essential thing, which the worshippers desire to share, as is seen in the horrid Arabian rite reported by Nilus in which the worshippers eat the victim uncooked and take care to save all the blood, while in the Vedic view the blood is impure and given to the Rakṣases.⁴ It is not that the blood is impure: it is rather that it is particularly full of the divine power, doubtless as the seat of life of the animal, and the part into which the divine spirit can most easily enter, and thus is offered not to men but to spirits, often it is clear to the snakes⁵ as the representatives of the earth spirit, an idea which explains also the Greek theory of purification by blood: the person purified thus by the use of blood places himself in communion with the goddess of the earth.⁶

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¹⁰ AGS. iv. 8. 1 ff.; PGS. iii. 8. Hubert and Mauss (*Année sociol.* ii. 93) by combining with this account the very different one of HGS. ii. 8, 9; ApGS. xix. 13—xx. 19, conclude that the rite consists of bringing into the victim the divinity of Rudra and then banishing it from the village. But this is wholly illegitimate: the animal is not divine at all in AGS. or PGS., and is not banished in HGS. or ApGS. That the rite is known to the Rigveda is wholly unproved.

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¹ Oldenberg, *Rel. des Veda*², p. 337, n. 1.

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² As a sick man can eat the offering to the dead, and have swift death or recovery, AÇS. ii. 7. 17.

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³ *Thiere und Götter*, pp. 3, 4; Hopkins, *JAOS.* xvi. p. ccxxxix; Oldenberg, *op. cit.*, p. 360.

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⁴ The official Roman religion seems to have made little use of the blood (Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, p. 180) though the popular ritual recognized feasting on it (*ibid.*, p. 196). Greek religion was different in this regard. Cf. Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 79, n. 1.

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⁵ AGS. iv. 8. 28; Winternitz, *Sarpabali*, p. 41.

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⁶ Farnell, *Cults of the Greek States*, iv. 304; the use of blood for purification is hardly Roman; in the Lupercalia it is borrowed from Greece (Deubner, *Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft*, xiii. 481 ff.; *contra*, Cook, *Zeus*, i. 677).

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It is true that, as has been pointed out by Oldenberg⁷ and others, the theory of the sacrifice as a communion with the deity, whether by the direct rite of eating with him, or as a sacrament through eating a victim, which has become impregnated in some degree with the deity, is not recognized as such in the formulae of the ritual: we simply find nothing of the view that the worshippers are eating together with the god in order to renew their relationship. The solitary prescription above mentioned regarding the victim to Agni and Soma does not hint at this view at all: it merely refers to the theory which is several times expressed in the Brāhmaṇas that man is the original victim,¹ and that other victims are substitutes. We might expect to find the theory recognized in the case of the Soma sacrifice, when Soma was identified with the moon, and the Brāhmaṇas² do tell us that Soma is killed when he is pressed for the Soma drink, and that what is drunk at the rite is the moon, but all this remains merely an expression of the fact that the moon decays and is supposed to be drunk up by the gods in heaven, and analogously by the gods on earth, the priests who have the knowledge of the mystery of the identity of the Soma plant and the moon. The conditions which might have developed a conception of the sacrifice as a communion of men both *inter se* and with the god, and as a sacrament through the feeding on a victim which is really an embodiment of the god, were present only in germ, and they do not seem to have generated the consciousness of the sacramental nature of the offering, although the effort to assimilate the victim to the god was always present and effective. The victim was preferably an animal which was a theriomorphic form of the god, bulls to Indra, goats to Pūṣan and to Agni, and so on; the sex was assimilated and the colour chosen with regard to the nature of the god.³ None the less we must admit that, whatever the reason, the Indians of the Vedic period, like the Romans, differed radically and vitally from the Semites who practised the sacramental sacrifice in the fact⁴ that, though the animal victim might be chosen for its close connexion with the deity and in the actual offering be filled with the divinity, they did not in their normal thought press this view to the conclusion that the offering really caused the death of the god. Further, though the Vedic Indian recognized that by eating the remains of the offering he was bringing himself into close communion with the divine power and that the victim was in some sense semi-divine, he did not feel that in the death of the victim there was perishing some person essentially of kin to him, and therefore to be lamented, as the performers of Greek sacrifices in several cases may have lamented the victim, or for whose death punishment was necessary, as suggested by the ritual of the Bouphonia. Even in animal sacrifice there is no trace of kinship with man, though we have the clearest evidence of the desire to deprecate the anger of the kin of the dead beast⁵ and the recognition of the fact that the victim will have power to confer richness in cattle as acceptable to the gods,⁶ and there is no trace in the ritual of disapproval of the slayer as suggested by Hubert and Mauss.⁷

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⁷ *Rel. des Veda*², p. 331, n. 2.

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¹ ÇB. vi. 2. 1. 2 ff.; i. 2. 3. 6; MS. iii. 10. 2; AB. ii. 8; Lévi, *La doctrine du sacrifice*, pp. 133 ff.

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² ÇB. iii. 3. 2. 6; Lévi, p. 170; Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 129 ff.

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³ Hillebrandt, *Thiere und Götter*; Stengel, *Opferbräuche der Griechen*, pp. 187 ff.; Cook, *Zeus*, i. 634.

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⁴ Keith, JRAS. 1907, pp. 940 ff.

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⁵ Hubert and Mauss, *Année sociol.* ii. 68, n. 3.

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⁶ TS. iii. 1. 4, 5; MS. i. 2. 1.

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⁷ *Op. cit.* 68, n. 4. The interpretation of AB. ii. 7. 10 is quite clearly not a general attack on the slayer, whose epithet *apāpa* refers to ritual accuracy.

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It is difficult also to ascertain what element of ecstatic enjoyment of the sense of union with the deity entered into the sacrificial ritual.⁸ The gods, we learn later, once appeared in bodily presence at the offering, but had ceased to do so, but this is not conclusive against the natural belief that the singers in their sacrifices believed themselves actually to behold the gods whom they invoked. We find prayers¹ for the eye of Agni to enable the worshipper to behold the demons and sorcerers, a plant has the power to make demons visible, the dicer sees the dancing Apsarases, and in the stress of battle we may safely assume that Indians who prayed to their gods had visions, as in medieval or modern days, in which they beheld the objects of their invocation lending them divine aid. Especially in the invocations of Indra, the Maruts, and the Açvins, all gods of especially concrete character, who are of present help in time of trouble, do we find indications which suggest that the priest believed that the gods would, if duly praised, reveal themselves to his longing vision.² Possibly too we may reckon here the prayers in the Āprī hymns which bid the divine doors open wide to admit the gods to the offering, and the conception of the path of the gods to the heaven may be due to this cause. The Fathers, we know, appeared to their worshippers, for we hear of Yātus who smuggle themselves in among them assuming their form.

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⁸ *Die Anfänge der Yogapraxis im alten Indien*, pp. 116 ff.

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¹ RV. x. 87. 12; AV. iv. 20; vii. 109. 3.

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² RV. iii. 52. 2; v. 30. 1; iv. 17. 16 ff.; vi. 29. 3; 32; viii. 100; x. 48, 49, 124 (Indra); v. 53 (Maruts); i. 118, 119 (Açvins).

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The offering produces also another sense of communion, in the divine ecstasy produced by the Soma drink. The Vedic poets have not the gift of imaginative description of a Euripides, and we find but little expression of the state of mind produced by imbibing the powerful potion. Still it is clear that those who drink can say, ‘We have found the light, we have become immortal,’ and that they truly feel the joy they asserted, even if they cannot claim, like the partaker of the sacred rite at Eleusis, ‘to have escaped evil and found what is better’. The classical expression of this ecstatic state is found in the hymn³ which tradition, in all probability with justice, holds to be the expression of Indra’s mind after he has drunk the Soma. The worlds are his plaything, he rises aloft in his joy, he speeds on the wings of the wind. Ecstasy, naturally enough, is specially the product of drinking the Soma, who is hailed as the kind friend and father, who grants length of days, for this boon is eagerly desired by the Vedic mystic, as it is by the later Yogin. But similar powers are ascribed by the Atharvaveda⁴ to the remains of the sacrificial offering, full of the divine power, and to the porridge (*odana*),⁵ which, eaten, gives the worshipper the feeling of attaining the heaven, and in the Agni worship there are fainter traces of the development of a more refined form of mystic speculative activity.

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³ RV. x. 119.

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⁴ xi. 7.

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⁵ iv. 34, 35; xi. 1. 25.

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Another aspect of sacrifice which has some affinity to a spell and a sacrament is that emphasized by Hubert and Mauss⁶ in their theory of the nature of sacrifice, based on the evidence in the main of the Old Testament and the Vedic ritual. Their attention has been attracted by the fact that a sacrifice produces a definite effect in the performer and the means which he employs: he is filled with a sacred spirit as is the victim which he offers, a fact of which we have already seen instances, and which cannot be for a moment called in question. The Dīkṣā or preliminary consecration, and the concluding bath, which provides a means of removing from man in some degree the excessive sanctity with which he has become endued in the process of offering, are significant proofs of this aspect of sacrifice. The sacrifice, many as are the uses which can be made of it, has an essential unity in that it aims at the establishment of communication between the sacred and the profane world by means of a victim, that is, a thing which is destroyed in the course of the ceremony. As opposed to Robertson Smith, the authors lay stress on the fact that the victim acquires its sacred character in the rite, and does not possess it normally *ab extra*, a fact which makes it well adapted for the accomplishment of the most varied ends: the current which runs through it can pass to the sky from the earth or *vice versa* equally well. The motive of this desire to enter into relations with the powers above is simple enough: man sees in them the source of life, and is anxious to attain as close contact with them as possible. But immediate contact would be fatal, and would unfit man for secular life, as is indeed the case with priests of too great sanctity like the unfortunate Flamen Dialis¹ or the Emperor of Japan: therefore he interposes an intermediary, who at the same time serves as a substitute for the sacrificer himself. This victim must be dispatched to the other world: its soul is liberated by death, with its own permission, for it becomes by the sacrifice a powerful being which no man would seek to irritate, and its body thereafter may be destroyed, whether by being consumed entirely by fire as in the Hebrew holocaust, or by being eaten by the priest or the worshippers, or again its skin or other portion may merely be brought into close contact with the worshipper. Incidentally the sacrifice accomplishes much more than its mere immediate aim: if the victim offered by the consecrated man serves to secure him his close relationship with the gods, it also sends the spirit of the victim to strengthen and multiply the species. All sacrifice is essentially social: it involves negation by the individual, but it strengthens the divine which is the ideal representative of the social unit, and thus indirectly benefits the individual himself. A further development of sacrifice in its ideal form is the conception of the sacrifice of the god himself, when the intermediary disappears *in toto*.

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⁶ *Année sociol.* ii. 29–138.

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¹ Warde Fowler, *Religious Experience of the Roman People*, pp. 34 ff.

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Brilliant as is the presentation of this theory, it is difficult not to feel that it is open to the same objection as must be taken to the theory of religion presented by Durkheim² in his exposition of totemism as the earliest stage of religion. Religion with him also is essentially a social fact: the totem is the material object in which the conception of the unity of the primitive social group materializes itself. In both theories we have a tendency to find in primitive religion conceptions of too great elaboration and difficulty. Durkheim himself, however, does not abandon the gift theory in practice: he regards the gift as essential: the gods created by the collective mind of the group are the protectors and guardians of the group, but at the same time they require the gifts of the individuals to secure their existence and power. It is clear that much of Hubert and Mauss’s theory is borne out by facts, and the doctrine that in the sacrifice the victim becomes peculiarly holy is valuable and correct, accounting naturally as it does for many peculiarities of the sacrifice, and affording in all probability the best explanation of the origin and development of the doctrine of slaying a god. But the view that the sacrifice is primarily an offering to please the god seems to be borne out by every probability, and by the undoubted fact that the sacrifice was normally so understood throughout antiquity. In this regard it is impossible not to feel that the authors have allowed themselves to be influenced unduly by the theories of the Brāhmaṇas as to the nature of sacrifice, and have underestimated the purely speculative and learned character of these suggestions. The objection to the gift theory insisted upon by Jevons¹ which represents it as unworthy of the relation of god and man is open to the criticism that it sets too high a standard for the beginning of religion. Moreover, the gift theory of sacrifice has the advantage that it affords in conjunction with other simple conceptions a perfectly natural origin for the various forms of offering: the sacramental rite in its simplest form of eating with the god follows naturally from the primitive conception that a sharing the same food confers similarity of nature, assisted perhaps, as Jevons holds, by the joyous feast celebrated by the worshippers at the moment when they feel that by their offering they have deprecated the wrath of the god and secured his loving-kindness to themselves and their families. From this form of the sacramental meal, coupled with the principle of sanctity of the offering at the sacrifice, is easily deduced the view that the victim which is being offered is the god himself embodied for the time being in the victim: Jevons himself explains in a somewhat analogous way the conception of eating the god which found a place in the Mexican worship. But it would doubtless be a mistake to assume that the idea of the death of the god was always produced in this way only: we must take into account the life and death of nature and the harvest rites in which the spirit of the corn is assumed to die in the cutting of the corn, and to revive in the growth of the young corn in the spring, and in which the spirit of the corn, when the harvest is reaped, though outworn, is deemed to seek to avoid its doom by passing into some animal, bird, or man, and is killed in order that it may revive afresh in the spring. But this conception is not developed in Vedic ritual so far as it is recorded, nor has it any necessary connexion with sacrifice: moreover, it is at least probable that in many cases there has been confusion between the killing of evil spirits, wizards supposed to endanger the crop, and the slaying of corn spirits proper.¹ In Vedic religion at any rate the conception of grain as containing a spirit is hardly to be found: the one piece of evidence from the ceremony of the Varuṇapraghāsas² adduced by Hubert and Mauss³ is far from being convincing.

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² *Elementary Forms of the Religious Life* (1915). Contrast C. C. J. Webb, *Group Theories of Religion* (1916).

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¹ *Idea of God in Early Religions*, pp. 78 ff.

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¹ Westermarck, *Ceremonies and Beliefs connected with Agriculture ... in Morocco*, pp. 93 ff.; Keith, JRAS. 1916, p. 546.

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² ApÇS. viii. 5. 42; vi. 1 ff., 10 ff.

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³ *Op. cit.*, p. 111, n. 5.

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Jevons⁴ insists that all sacrifice involves essentially the idea of drawing near to the god and making an offering to secure his favour, a step adopted originally when the community felt that its god was alien from it through the misconduct of one of its members, and had to be propitiated by tokens of repentance. The offering brought need not be consumable; if it were, it might easily be eaten after acceptance by the worshippers in a festival of joy at the feeling of reunion with their god. At first offerings are only occasional, evoked by fear of the anger of the god, who, however, is recognized to be justly wrath and to be also merciful and willing to forgive his worshippers, but the habit of solemn feasting on these occasions is gradually adopted in respect of the harvest fruits, when, as in the case of the occasional offerings, the worshippers first sacrifice to the god, before they partake of the fruits of the earth. But, as the fruits are thus sacred, they come to be regarded as divine, and as divine they take the rank of deities, the spirits of vegetation, to whom he denies in their own right divine status. Sacrifice thus is from the first much more than a gift offering or covenant offering; it is also not a communion feast, though both the gift and the communion theory of sacrifice are natural ways of interpreting the rite, which are adopted by the worshippers. In his view the gift theory is essentially irreligious; from it no true religion could spring. This, however, appears a decidedly dubious assertion; it is by no means obvious that the presenting of gifts to a god in the hope of favour, without consciousness of sin or divine wrath, is not an essentially primitive form of sacrifice.

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⁴ *Idea of God in Early Religions*, pp. 60–107.

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