Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/393

 Rh treated of early religion from an anthropological stand-point.

So much for method, which is entirely that of the English schools. It is scarcely a year ago since I expressed a hope in these pages (Arch. Rev., iii) that Biblical Archæology would be treated by anthropological methods, and even as I wrote, Prof. Smith was applying those methods with signal mastery. I need not say how cordially I welcome Prof. Smith’s weighty contribution to Biblical Archæology, and if in the sequel I demur to some of his conclusions, it is on the understanding that in a field of such complexity and precarious footing the first and foremost thing is right method, and herein—let me emphasise the fact from the start—Prof. Smith has found salvation.

The subject of this first series is, as I have said, mainly the ritual of Semitic sacrifice and its meaning. Prof. Smith has a few preliminary lectures on the nature of the Semitic gods, in which he has an ingenious suggestion explaining the Baalim as divine lords of the manor, so to speak, and a still more ingenious application of the Jinn (the Genii of our youth and of the Arabian Nights) as “potential totems” of the waste places of the desert. But all this is only introduced to emphasise the conception of the Semitic gods being regarded as of the same kin as their worshippers, and so to lead on to Prof. Smith’s theory of Semitic sacrifice.

This is, briefly, that sacrifice is a common meal of the god and his worshippers, by which their community of blood (in a literal sense) should be reinforced from time to time. Prof. Smith shows that a similar conception governs the blood-bond made between two individuals. He gives instances where blood is used on the altar or sprinkled on the worshipper. He minimises the importance of vegetable offerings, and sees in them the quite late and advanced modes of approaching the god. Except, however, in the one instance given by Nilus, and referred to above, he fails