Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/151

Rh SACRIFICE 133 worshippers forming a natural unity, so that every man's birth or political and social status determines at once what god he is called upon to worship and may confidently look to for help. Religions of this sort, therefore, are mainly tribal or national, and the deity is regarded as a king, or, if there are several gods worshipped by the same circle, they are lords and ladies and are naturally to be honoured in the same way as earthly grandees. Thus among the Hebrews, Avhose early institutions afford a typical example of a national religion, the fundamental rule is that no one is to appear before Jehovah empty-handed (Exod. xxiii. 15), just as it would be indecent (and in the East is still indecent) to approach a king or great man without some present, however trifling. In like manner Homer teaches that gods and kings alike are persuaded by gifts. A special request will naturally be accompanied by a special gift proportioned to the occasion or by a vow to be fulfilled when the prayer is heard ; but apart from this the general goodwill whether of god or king falls to be acknowledged and secured by offerings renewed from time to time by way of tribute or homage. Thus in Hebrew the word minha means alike "gift," " tribute," and " sacrificial obla- tion," especially an oblation, of agricultural produce. For in a simple agricultural society payments in kind, whether to a divine or to a human lord, would naturally consisFf or the most part of the fruits of the soil ; and with this it agrees that not only in Canaan but among the Greeks there is evidence that cereal oblations had a great place in early ritual, though they afterwards became second in importance to animal sacrifices, which yielded a more luxurious sacrificial banquet, and also, as we shall see, derived a peculiar significance from the shedding of the victim's blood. In almost all nations we finH that the chief sacrificial feasts are associated with the harvest and the vintage, or, where pastoral life predominates, are re- gulated by the time at which the flocks bear their young (comp. PASSOVER) ; at these seasons tribute of firstfruits and firstlings is paid to the gods of the good things which they themselves have given to the inhabitants of their land. This conception of sacrifice may go with very various views of the nature of the gods and of religion. It may go with the idea that the god has need of the worshipper and his gifts just as the worshipper has need of the god and his help, and thus with a matter-of-fact business-like people like the Romans religion may become very much a sort of bargain struck with the gods. But, on the other hand, it is quite possible that sacrifices may continue to be offered by men who have ceased to believe that the deity has any need of what man can give, simply because such gifts are in ordinary life the natural expression of respect and homage and no fitter and more expressive way of giving utterance to the same feelings towards the gods has been devised. Thus the Hebrews continued to offer sacrifices to Jehovah long after they knew that " if He were hungry He would not tell man, for the world was His and the fulness thereof." But when this standpoint is reached sacrifice becomes a merely conventional way of expressing religious feeling; the ritual becomes a simple affair of tradition, which may, as in the Levitical legislation, be based on an express divine command ; and those who are not content with the authority of tradition as a sufficient proof that the gods love to be honoured in this way take refuge in some allegorical explanation of the ceremonial. In general, however, we find an extraordinary persistence of the notion that sacrifices do in some way afford a phy- sical satisfaction to the deity. If they do not feed him, he is at least gratified by their odour. Neither the Greek philosophers nor the Jewish rabbins ever quite got rid of this idea. But in fact the notion that the more ethereal elements of the sacrifice rise to heaven, the seat of the gods, in the savoury smoke that ascends from the sacrificial flame can in certain instances be shown to be connected with a later development of sacrifice. Among the Semites, for ex- ample, sacrifices were not originally burned. The god was not seated aloft, but was present at the place of sacri- fice, inhabiting a sacred stone (a baetylium, beth-el, or " house of god "), which answered at once to the later idol and the later altar. That the god was thought by the heathen Semites to inhabit the sacred stone, or in other cases a sacred tree, is expressly recorded of several Arabian sanctuaries, and it cannot be doubted that this was the general view wherever there was a masseba (sacred cippus) or an askera (sacred pole or tree). And in these cases the gift of the worshipper was not, in the more primitive cults, consumed by fire, but the sacred stone was daubed with oil or blood, libations of milk, of blood, or of wine were poured forth beside it, cereal gifts were presented by being simply laid on the sacred ground, and slaughtered victims were left there to be devoured by wild beasts (Sprenger, Leb. Moh., iii. 457), or even a human sacrifice was offered by burying the victim under the cippus. Sacrifices of this type are found not only throughout the Semitic field but in all parts of the world ; they belong to the same category with the Hebrew showbread and the Roman lectisternia. In later times the food spread on the tables of the god is eaten by his ministers, the priests, to whom he is supposed to make over the enjoyment of the banquet ; but this is a refinement on the original usage. In older times the gods themselves were held to partake of these gifts of food, just as the venerable dead were fed by the meat and drink placed or poured out upon their tombs. In the religions of savages both gods and the dead have very material needs, among which the need of nourishment has the first place ; and just as we learn from the story of Periander and Melissa (Herod., v. 92) that among the Greeks of the 7th century B.C. it was a new idea that the dead could make no use of the gifts buried with them unless they were etherealized by fire, so also the fact that among the Greeks, especially in old times, sacrifices to water-gods were simply flung into the river or the sea, and sacrifices to underground gods were buried, indicates that it is a secondary idea that the gods were too ethereal to enjoy a sacrifice through any other sense than that of smell. Even the highest antique religions show by unmistakable signs that in their origin sacrifices were literally " the food of the gods." In Israel the conception against which the author of Psalm 1. protests so strongly was never eliminated from the ancient technical language of the priestly ritual, in which the sacri- fices are called DTPS Dnp, " food of the deity " (Lev. xxi. 8, 17, 21); and among the Greeks we find not only such general expressions as that the gods " feast on hecatombs " (II., ix. 531) but even that particular gods bear special surnames, such as "the goat-eater," the "ram-eater," " Dionysus the eater of raw (human) flesh " (cu'yo<ayos, A sacrifice, therefore, is primarily a meal offered to the deity. In some of the cases already noticed, and in the case of holocausts or whole burnt-offerings, the sacrificial gift is entirely made over to the god ; but ordinarily the sacrifice is a feast of which gods and worshippers partake together. If all sacrifices are not convivial entertainments, at least the tendency is to give to all feasts, nay to all meals, a sacrificial character by inviting the gods to partake of them (Athenseus, v. 19). Thus the Roman family never rose from supper till a portion of the food had been laid on the burning hearth as an offering to the Lares (Serv., Ad^En., i. 730; Ovid, Fast., ii. 633); and a similar practice was probably followed in early Greece. 1 At all events 1 See the discussion in Buchholz, Homer. Realien, II. ii. 213 sq.