Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/557

 Corresp07tdence. 549

an interval, during wJdcJi the deity receives the invisible, and after whicJi the worshippers eat the visible, portion.^ (Cf. the ghostly meal, "tamani", leaving the visible food intact upon the grave, in Melanesia, Dr. Codrington, op. cit., p. 283.)

Whether the cathartic rite of " Sin Eating" has any es- sential connection with this tribal sacrament would seem to be a most interesting point, and would perhaps touch the question of the ethical element in savage religion ; but all that I would ask here is whether Mr. Hartland is justified in treating all the customs and rites he collects, as es- sentially related, and therefore as evidence for a common cause ; and whether the cause of some of these rites is not a far deeper and more significant one, than the idea which he suggests ?

Ritual celebrated among many peoples, by the kinsmen, at the death of a member of the kin, in survival or in situ, such as Mr. Hartland quotes, seems to me to demand a cause lying nearer to the principles of primitive tribal life, and to the primitive religious need of the individual tribes- man, than a device occasionally resorted to for increasing physical or mental acquirements. Moreover, is the usage restricted to the cases of powerful or respected members of the kindred? Since Mr. Hartland finds in this usage the origin of practices which are identical in every detail with the sacramental meals participated in by the spirits of dead kinsmen and their surviving kindred, these his argument must also claim to have explained. What would Professor Robertson Smith say to this theory of the origin of the primitive sacramental meal?

If the cases quoted by Mr. Hartland of the consumption

of the body of the kinsman are essentially related to the

rites he seeks to explain, is it not only as the accidental

condition which the universal ritual of the primitive tribal

sacrament sometimes assumes?

aXA,' aiTLa [xev ra Toiaura KoXelv Xiav aroTroV.

^ Callaway, op. at., p. ii.

G. M. GODDEN.