Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/154

Rh 136 SACRIFICE conversely, acceptable offerings are the things which are eaten by predilection by that divine animal which in later times became the sacred symbol of the anthropomorphic god, or else victims are to be chosen which are sacred among a hostile tribe. The two principles may often co- incide. Fierce mountain tribes who live mainly by harry- ing their neighbours in the plain will be wolves, lions, bears, while their enemies will naturally worship bulls, sheep, goats, like the Troglodytes on the Red Sea, who " gave the name of parent to no human being but to the bull and the cow, the ram and the ewe, because from them they had their daily nourishment " (Strabo, xvi. 4) ; and thus in cases like that of Argos the ultimate shape of the ritual may throw important light on the character of the early population. When by conquest or otherwise two such originally hostile nations are fused the opposing animal symbols will ultimately be found in friendly asso- ciation : e.g., Artemis (in her various forms) is associated both with carnivora and with stags or domestic animals. The former is the original conception, as her sacrifices show. She is therefore, like the wolf-Apollo, originally the deity of a wild hunting tribe, or rather various carnivorous deities of such tribes have coalesced in her. Human Sacrifices. From these observations the tran- sition is easy to those human sacrifices which are not piacular. It is perfectly clear in many cases that such sacrifices are associated with cannibalism, a practice which always means eating the flesh of men of alien and hostile kin. The human wolves would no more eat a brother than they would eat a wolf ; but to eat an enemy is another ^natter. Naturally enough traces of cannibalism persist in religion after they have disappeared from ordinary life, and especially in the religion of carnivorous gods. 1 Thus it may be conjectured that the human sacrifices offered to the wolf -Zeus (Lycseus) in Arcadia were originally can- nibal feasts of a wolf tribe. The first participants in the rite were according to later legend changed into wolves (Lycaon and his sons) ; and in later times, as appears by comparing Plato (Rep., viii. 15) with Pausanias (viii. 2), at least one fragment of the human flesh was placed among the sacrificial portions derived from other victims, and the man who ate it was believed to become a were-wolf. All human sacrifices where the victim is a captive or other foreigner may be presumed to be derived from cannibal feasts ; but a quite different explanation is required for the cases, which are by far more numerous among people no longer mere savages, in which a father sacrifices his child or a tribe its fellow-tribesman. This case belongs to the head of piacular sacrifices. Piacular Sacrifice*. Among all primitive peoples there are certain offences against piety (especially bloodshed within the kin) which are regarded as properly inexpiable ; the offender must die or become an outlaw. Where the god of the kin appears as vindicator of this law he demands the life of the culprit; if the kinsmen refuse this they share the guilt. Thus the execution of a criminal assumes the character of a religious action. If now it appears in any way that the god is offended and refuses to help his people, it is concluded that a crime has been committed and not expiated. This neglect must be repaired, and, if the true culprit cannot be found or cannot be spared, the worshippers as a whole bear the guilt until they or the guilty man himself find a substitute. The idea of substitu- tion is widespread through all early religions, and is found in honorific as well as in piacular rites ; the Romans, for example, substituted models in wax or dough for victims 1 In the Roman empire human sacrifice was practised at not a few shrines down to the time of Hadrian ; for examples the reader may refer to Porphyry, DC Abstin., ii. 27, 54 sq., and to Clem. Alex., Coh. ad Gentes, p. 27. that could not be procured according to the ritual, or else feigned that a sheep was a stag (cernn-i'i orim) and the like. In all such cases the idea is that the substitute shall imitate as closely as is possible or convenient the victim whose place it supplies; and so in piacular ceremonies the god may indeed accept one life for another, or certain select lives to atone for the guilt of a whole community, but these lives ought to be of the guilty kin, just as in blood-revenge the death of any kinsman of the manslayer satisfies justice. Hence such rites as the Semitic sacrifices of children by their fathers (see MOLOCH), the sacrifice of Iphigeneia and similar cases among the Greeks, or the offering up of boys to the goddess Mania at Rome pro familiarium sospitate (Macrob., i. 7, 34). In the oldest Semitic cases it is only under extreme manifestations of divine wrath that such offerings are made (comp. Porph., De Abst., ii. 56), and so it was probably among other races also ; but under the. pressure of long-continued calamity, or other circumstances which made men doubtful of the steady favour of the gods, piacular offerings might easily become more frequent and ultimately assume a stated character, and be made at regular intervals by way of precaution without waiting for an actual outbreak of divine anger. Thus the Carthaginians, as Theophrastus relates, annually sprinkled their altars with "a tribesman's blood" (Porph., De Abst., ii. 28). But in advanced societies the tendency is to modify the horrors of the ritual either by accepting an effusion of blood without actually slaying the victim, e.g., in the flagellation of the Spartan lads at the altar of Artemis Orthia (Paus., iii. 16, 7 ; comp. Eurip., Ipli. Taw., 1470 sq. ; 1 Kings xviii. 28), or by a further extension of the doctrine of substitution ; the Romans, for example, substituted puppets for the human sacrifices to Mania, and cast rush dolls into the Tiber at the yearly atoning sacrifice on the Sublician bridge. More usually, however, the life of an animal is accepted by the god in place of a human life. This explanation of the origin of piacular animal sacrifices has often been disputed, mainly on dogmatic grounds and in connexion with the Hebrew sin-offerings ; but it is quite clearly brought out wherever we have an ancient account of the origin of such a rite (e.g., for the Hebrews, Gen. xxii. 13 ; the Phoenicians, Porph., De Abst., iv. 15; the Greeks and many others, ibid., ii. 54 sq. ; the Romans, Ovid, Fasti, vi. 162). Among the Egyptians the victim was marked with a seal bearing the image of a man bound, and kneeling with a sword at his throat (Plut., Is. et Os., chap, xxxi.) And often we find a ceremonial laying of the sin to be expiated on the head of the victim (Herod., ii. 39 ; Lev. iv. 4 compared with xiv. 21). In such piacular rites the god demands only the life of the victim, which is sometimes indicated by a special ritual with the blood (as among the Hebrews the blood of the sin-offering was applied to the horns of the altar, or to the mercy-seat within the vail), and there is no sacrificial meal. Thus among the Greeks the carcase of the victim was buried or cast into the sea, and among the Hebrews the most important sin-offerings were burnt not on the altar but outside the camp (city), as was also the case with the children sacrificed to "Moloch." Sometimes, however, the sacrifice is a holocaust on the altar (2 Kings iii. 27), or the flesh is consumed by the priests. The latter was the case with certain Roman piacula, and with those Hebrew sin-offerings in which the blood was not brought within the vail (Lev. vi. 25 sq.}. Here the sacrificial flesh is seemingly a gift accepted by the deity and assigned by him to the priests, so that the distinction between a honorific and a piacular sacrifice is partly obliterated. But this is not hard to understand ; for just as a blood- rite takes the place of blood-revenge in human justice, so an