Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/173

 Sacrifices to the Dead. ^ 165

traces of its blood, its throat being cut into a trench {ivrefxvera) and its body being burnt on an altar little raised above the ground iiaj(apa), not on a high altar (^cofiof). Libations of wine, which is representative of blood, are forbidden ; and, finally, either bloodless offerings or offerings of victims (such as human victims) whose blood it is repugnant to men to taste, are substituted for ordinary animal victims.

I believe, nevertheless, that the transition from the wish to be in communion with the dead, to the intense desire to avoid communion with them, which is illustrated by the change of usage as regards burial — the change from burial in the house to burial without the city walls — is no less vividly and truly illustrated by these changes in the usage of sacrifice. It is a change which has taken place in the history of our race, and the intense desire of the dead, as exemplified in the Inferno of the Odyssey, or modern vampire stories, to renew the blood covenant with the living, bears witness, since it is a fiction of the latter, to a still wakeful consciousness among us above ground of a once equally intense desire to renew our covenant with those beneath.

The causes which produced this revolution in the senti- ment of mankind towards the departed are inscrutable for us, and it is profane to conjecture that such little details of ancient custom as eating T7]yaviTai<; hot, and serving raki with them, can have survived through that turmoil ; but there was such a revolution. There was a time when men suddenly (as it seems to us) awoke to the consciousness that the dead whom they had cherished as their best friends were their deadliest enemies. Was the cause migration, and the necessity thereby entailed of burying the dead, not in the house which they loved to dwell in, but in places " where the foe and the stranger would tread o'er their head", and they would be justly indignant ? Was it the substitution of an age of high-living distrust for an age of acorns and confidence? And was this intense dread of