Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/155

Rh SACRIFICE 137 offence against the gods may in certain cases be redeemed by a fine (e.g., Herod., ii., 65) or a sacrificial gift. This seems to be the original meaning of the Hebrew dshdm (trespass-offering), which was a kind f atonement made partly in money (-Lev. v. 15 sq.), but accompanied (at least in later times) by a sacrifice which differed from the sin-offering, inasmuch as the ritual did not involve any exceptional use of the blood. The ordinary sin-offerings in which the priests ate the flesh may be a compound of the dshdm and the properly piacular substitution of life for life. The two kinds of atonement are mixed up also in Micah vi. 6 sq., and ultimately all bloody sacrifices, especially the whole burHt-offering (which in early times was very rare but is prominent in the ritual of the second temple), are held to have an atoning efficacy (Lev. i. 4, xvii. 11). There is, however, another and mystical sense sometimes associated with the eating of sin-offerings, as we shall see presently. The most curious developments of piacular sacrifice take place in the worship of deities of totem type. Here the natural substitute for the death of a criminal of the tribe is an animal of the kind with which the worshippers and their god alike cyant kindred; an animal, that is, which must not be offered in a sacrificial feast, and which indeed it is impious to kill. Thus Hecate was invoked as a dog (Porph., De Abst., iii. 17), and dogs were her pia- cular sacrifices (Plut., Qu. Horn., iii.). And in like manner in Egypt the piacular sacrifice of the cow-goddess Isis- Hathor was a bull, and the sacrifice was accompanied by lamentations as at the funeral of a kinsman (Herod., ii. 39, 40). This lamentation at a piacular sacrifice is met with in other cases, e.g., at the Argean festival at Rome (Marquardt, Rom. Staatsverw., iii. 192), and is parallel to the marks of indignation which in various atoning rituals it is proper to display towards the priest who performs the sacrifice. At Tenedos, for example, the priest was attacked with stones who sacrificed to Bacchus a bull-calf, the affinity of which with man was indicated by the mother-cow being treated like a woman in childbed and the victim itself wearing the cothurnus. As the cothurnus was proper to Bacchus, who also was often addressed in worship and represented in images as a bull, the victim here is of the same race with the god (^El., H.N., xii. 34 ; Plut., Qu. Gr., xxxv.) as well as with the worshippers. In such rites a double meaning was suggested : the victim was an animal kindred to the sacrificers, so that his death was strictly speaking a murder, for which, in the Attic Diipolia, the sacrificial axe cast away by the priest was tried and condemned (Paus., i. 24, 4), but it was also a sacred animal sharing the nature of the god, who thus in a sense died for his people. The last point comes out clearly in the annual sacrifice at Thebes, where a ram was slain and the ram -god Amen clothed in his skin. The worshippers then bewailed the ram and buried him in a sacred coffin (Herod., ii. 42). Thus the piacular sacrifice in such cases is merged in the class of offerings which may be called sacramental or mystical. Mystical or Sacramental Sacrifices. That the mysteries of races like the Greeks and Egyptians are sprung from the same circle of ideas with the totem mysteries of savage tribes ha,s been suggested in MYTHOLOGY, vol. xvii. p. 151, with which the reader may compare Mr Lang's book on Custom and Myth ; and examples of sacramental sacrifices have been adduced in the same article (p. 150) and in MEXICO, vol. xvi. p. 212. In Mexico the worshippers ate sacramentally paste idols of the god, or slew and feasted on a human victim who was feigned to be a representative of the deity. The Mexican gods are unquestionably de- veloped out of totems, and these sacraments are on one line with the totem mysteries of the ruder Indian tribes in which once a year the sacred animal is eaten, body and blood. Now according to Julian (Orat., v. p. 175) the mystical sacrifices of the cities of the Roman empire were in like manner offered once or twice a year and consisted of such victims as the dog of Hecate, which might not be ordinarily eaten or used to furnish forth the tables of the gods. The general agreement with the American mysteries is therefore complete, and in many cases the resemblance extends to details which leave no doubt of the totem origin of the ritual. The mystic sacrifices seem always to have had an atoning efficacy ; their special feature is that the victim is not simply slain and burned or cast away but that the worshippers partake of the body and blood of the sacred animal, and that so his life passes as it were into their lives and knits them to the deity in living commu- nion. Thus in the orgiastic cult of the bull-Bacchus the worshippers tore the bull to pieces and devoured the raw flesh. These orgies- are connected on the one hand with older practices, in which the victim was human (Orpheus legend, Dionysus 'fipjo-TTjs), and on the other hand with the myth of the murder of the god by his kinsmen the Titans, who made a meal of his flesh (Clem. Al., Coh. ad Gentes, p. 12). Similar legends of fratricide occur in connexion with other orgies (the Corybantes ; see Clement, ut supra] ; and all these various elements can only be reduced to unity by referring their origin to those totem habits of thought in which the god has not yet been differentiated from the plurality of sacred animals and the tribesmen are of one kin with their totem, so that the sacrifice of a fellow- tribesman and the sacrifice of the totem animal are equally fratricides, and the death of the animal is the death of the mysterious protector of the totem kin. In the Diipolia at Athens we have seen that the slaughter of the sacred bull was viewed as a murder, but " the dead was raised again in the same sacrifice," as the mystic text had it : the skin was sewed up and stuffed and all tasted the sacrificial flesh, so that the life of the victim was renewed in the lives of those who ate of it 1 (Theophr., in Porph., De Abst., ii. 29 sq.). Mystic sacrifices of this sacramental type prevailed also among the heathen Semites, and are alluded to in Isa. Ixv. 4 sq., Ixvi. 3, 17 j Zech. ix. 7; Lev. xix. 26, <fcc., 2 from which passages we gather that the victim was eaten with the blood. This feature reappears elsewhere, as in the pia- cular swine-offerings of the Fratres Arvales at Rome, and possesses a special significance inasmuch as common blood means in antiquity a share in common life. In the Old Testament the heathen mysteries seem to appear as cere- monies of initiation by which a man was introduced into a new worship, i.e., primarily made of one blood with a new religious kinship, and they therefore come into promi- nence just at the time when in the 7th century B.C. political convulsions had shaken men's faith in their old gods and led them to seek on all sides for new and stronger pro- tectors. The Greek mysteries too create a close bond between the mystie, and the chief ethical significance of the Eleusinia was that they were open to all Hellenes and so represented a brotherhood wider than the political limits of individual states. But originally the initiation must have been introduction into a particular social community ; Theophrastus's legend of the origin of the Diipolia is ex- pressly connected with the adoption of the house of Sopa- trus into the position of Athenian citizens. From this point of view the sacramental rites of mystical sacrifice are a form of blood-covenant, and serve the same purpose 1 In the same way the Issedones honoured their parents by eating their dead bodies (Herod., iv. 26). The life was not allowed to go out of the family. 2 For details see W. R. Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, p. 309. XXI. 1 8