Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/436

 382 Reviews.

and enter the carcase where a sorcerer or wizard waited for him to destroy him ; and then, at a later stage of religious development or decay, when the priest was suffering hunger, he was induced quietly to dispose of the Atonement lamb by eating it himself (pp. 193, 195, 199), plainly cheating the devil. Thus it came to pass that the sacrifice originally a bait for the demon became the share of the priest. Moreover, the piacular offering was confused by the worshippers and by the priests with a sacrifice of burnt-offering (pp. 197-8). The lamb may have been also a firstborn, and as such it was also brought as a sacrifice. This custom of the offering of the firstborn is then explained as resting ultimately on ancient practices of cannibalism in which originally the firstborn human child was sacrificed, and that it was, later on, replaced by an animal, or otherwise redeemed. The proof for this supposed ancient cannibalism consists only in speculations by Dr. Frazer (p. 236), and references to European examples of such practices (p. 239), and these are far from convincing. The author himself also states explicitly, (p. 242), that " up to the present no trace of this form of substitution has been found in cuneiform." The reason for this absence of any trace in cuneiform, according to the author, is that, as the origin of cannibalism must be sought in scarcity of food (no longer a question of sacrifice), and the Babylonians lived in a fertile valley, they never suffered from hunger, and hence did not eat their firstborn, " and hence they had never been driven by famine to eat human flesh." Whence did they then derive the custom of offering the " firstborn," and the idea of sacrifice as redemption ? We are still, I believe, only at the beginning of a thorough collection of materials, and the time is not yet ripe for, nor to my mind has any one as yet hit upon, the true system of utilizing those materials in such a manner that they will disclose to us the inner working of the primitive mind and the inwardness of those conceptions which have been crystal- lized in religious rites and magical practices among the nations of antiquity. There were, no doubt, centres from which these practices and ceremonies radiated to the farthest ends of the world, and produced everywhere similar practices and customs which in a more or less modified form were adapted to local environ- ments and to changed mental attitudes. Has no borrowing been