Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/153

Rh SACEIFICE 135 proposition that all religious and civil societies of antiquity have the family as their type, and that the type of sacri- fice is such a family meal as is found among the Romans. And this view would seem to be favoured by the frequent occurrence among ancient peoples of the conception that the deity is the father (progenitor and lord) of his worshippers, who in turn owe filial obedience to him and brotherly duty to one another. But in the present stage of research into the history of early society it is by no means legitimate to assume that the family, with a father at its head, is the original type of the circle of com- mensals. It is impossible to separate the idea of com- mensality from the fact so constantly observed in primitive nations, that each kindred has certain rules about for- bidden food which mark it off from all other kindreds. And in a very large proportion of cases kindred obliga- tions, religion, and laws of forbidden food combine to divide a child from his father's and unite him to his mother's kin, so that father and sons are not commensals. It is noteworthy that family meals are by no means so universal an institution as might be imagined a priori. At Sparta, for example, men took their regular meals not with their wives and children but in syssitia or pheiditia ; and a similar organization of nations in groups of com- mensals which are not family groups is found in other places (Crete, Carthage, &c.). The marked and funda- mental similarity between sacrificial worships in all parts of the globe makes it very difficult to doubt that they are all to be traced back to one type of society, common to primitive man as a whole. But the nearest approximation to a primitive type of society yet known is that based not on the family but on the system of totem stocks ; and as this system not only fulfils all the conditions for the formation of a sacrificial worship, but presents the con- ception of the god and his worshippers as a circle of commensals in its simplest and most intelligible form, it seems reasonable to look to it for additional light on the whole subject. In toteniism and in no other system laws of forbidden food have a direct religious interpretation and form the principal criterion by which the members of one stock and religion are marked off from all their neigh- bours. For the totem is usually an animal (less often a plant) ; the kindred is of the stock of its totem ; and to kill or eat the sacred animal is an impiety of the same kind with that of killing and eating a tribesman. To eat the totem of a strange stock, on the other hand, is legitimate, and for one totem group to feast on the carcase of a hostile totem is to express their social and religious particularism in the most effective and laudable way, to honour their own totem and to cast scorn on that of the enemy. The importance attached to the religious feast of those who have the same laws about food, and are there- fore habitual commensals, is more intelligible on this system than on any other. Though the subject has not been completely worked out, there is a good deal of evidence, both from social and from religious phenomena, that the civilized nations of antiquity once passed through the totem stage (see FAMILY and MYTHOLOGY) ; it is at least not doubtful that even in the historical period sacred animals and laws of forbidden food based on the sacredness of animals, in a way quite analo- gous to what is found in totemism, were known among all these nations. Among the Egyptians the whole organiza- tion of the local populations ran on totem lines, the different villages or districts being kept permanently apart by the fact that each had its own sacred animal or herb, and that one group worshipped what another ate. And the sacri- ficial feast on the carcase of a hostile totem persisted down to a late date, as we know from Plutarch (Is. et Osir., p. 380 ; comp. Alex. Polyh., ap. Eus., Prsep. Ev., Ix. p. 432 ; Diod. Sic., i. 89). Among the Semites there are many relics of totem religion; and, as regards the Greeks, so acute an observer as Herodotus could hardly have imagined that a great part of Hellenic religion was borrowed from Egypt if the visible features of the popular worship in the two countries had really belonged to entirely different types. To suppose that the numerous associations between particular deities and corresponding sacred animals which are found in Greece and other advanced countries are merely symbolical is a most unscientific assumption ; especi- ally as the symbolic interpretation could not fail to be introduced as a harmonizing expedient where, through the fusion of older deities under a common name (in connexion with the political union of kindreds), one god came to have several sacred animals. But originally even in Greece each kin had its own god or in later language its hero ; so in Attica the Crioeis have their hero Crius (Ram), the Butadse have Butas (Bullman), the JEgidae have ^Egeus (Goat), and the Cynidae Cynus (Dog). Such heroes are real totem ancestors ; Lycus, for example, had his statue in wolf form at the Lyceum. The feuds of clans are repre- sented as contests between rival totems : Lycus the wolf flees the country before ^Egeus the goat, and at Argos, where the wolf -god (Apollo Lycius) was introduced by Danaus, the struggle by which the sovereignty of "the Danaids was established was set forth in legend and picture as following on the victory of a wolf (representing Danaus) over a bull (representing the older sovereignty of Gelanor); see Paus., ii. 19, 3 sq. That Apollo's sacrifices were bulls and rams is therefore natural enough ; at the sanctuary of the wolf-Apollo at Sicyon indeed legend pre- served the memory of a time when flesh was actually set forth for the wolves, as totem-worshippers habitually set forth food for their sacred animals, though by a touch of the later rationalism which changed the wolf -god into Apollo the wolf -slayer (Lycoctonus) the flesh was said to have been poisoned by Apollo's direction in a way that even theological experts did not understand (Paus., ii. 9, 7). Such clear traces of the oldest form of sacrifice are neces- sarily rare, but the general facts that certain animals might not be sacrificed to certain gods, while on the other hand each deity demanded particular victims, which the ancients themselves explained in certain cases to be hostile animals, find their natural explanation in such a stage of religion as has just been characterized. The details are difficult to follow out, partly because most worships of which we know much were syncretistic, partly because the animals which the gods loved and protected were in later times often confused with the victims they desired, and partly because piacular and mystical sacrifices were on principle (as we shall see by and by) chosen from the class of victims that might not be used for the feasts of the gods. A single example, therefore, must here suffice to close this part of the subject. At Athens the goat might not be offered to the Athena on the Acropolis. Now according to legend Athena's worship was made Panathenaic by the ^Egidse or goat clan, and Athena herself was represented clad in the aegis or goat-skin, an attribute which denotes that she too was of the goat kin or rather had been taken into that kin when her worship was introduced among them. 1 Generally speaking, then, the original principle on which a sacrificial meal is chosen is that men may not eat what cannot be offered to their god (generalized in later syn- cretism to the rule that men may not eat things that can be offered to no god; Julian, Orat., v. p. 176 C.) ; and that, 1 The religious meaning of wearing the skin of an animal is identi- fication with the animal. Examples will appear below ; compare also the were- wolf superstitions (vol. xv. p. 90), where the same symbolism occurs. So too Pausanias (x. 31, 10) describes a representation of the bear-heroine Callisto reclining on a bear-skin couch.