Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/414

400 burnt-offering of the Greeks dwindled to burning for the gods only the bones and fat of the slaughtered ox, while the worshippers feasted themselves on the meat, an economic rite which takes mythic shape in the legend of the sly Prometheus giving Zeus the choice of the two parts of the sacrificed ox he had divided for gods and mortals, on the one side bones covered seemly with white fat, on the other the joints hidden under repulsive hide and entrails. With a different motive, not that of parsimony, but of keeping up in survival an ancient custom, the Zarathustrian religion performed by substitution the old Aryan sacrifice by fire. The Vedic sacrifice Agnishtoma required that animals should be slain, and their flesh partly committed to the gods by fire, partly eaten by sacrificers and priests. The Parsi ceremony Izeshne, formal successor of this bloody rite, requires no animal to be killed, but it suffices to place the hair of an ox in a vessel, and show it to the fire.

The offering of a part of the worshipper's own body is a most usual act, whether its intention is simply that of gift or tribute, or whether it is considered as a pars pro toto representing the whole man, either in danger and requiring to be ransomed, or destined to actual sacrifice for another and requiring to be redeemed. How a finger- joint may thus represent a whole body, is perfectly shown in the funeral sacrifices of the Nicobar islanders; they bury the dead man's property with him, and his wife has a finger-joint cut off (obviously a substitute for herself), and if she refuses even this, a deep notch is cut in a pillar of the house. We are now concerned, however, with the finger-offering, not as a sacrifice to the dead, but as addressed to other deities. This idea is apparently worked out in the Tongan custom of tutu-nima, the chopping off a portion of the little finger with a hatchet or sharp stone as a sacrifice to the gods, for the recovery of a sick relation of higher rank; Mariner saw