Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/418

404 will wash away the other. For instances of the animal substituted for man in sacrifice the following may serve. Among the Khonds of Orissa, when Colonel Macpherson was engaged in putting down the sacrifice of human victims by the sect of the Earth-goddess, they at once began to discuss the plan of sacrificing cattle by way of substitutes. Now there is some reason to think that this same course of ceremonial change may account for the following sacrificial practice in the other Khond sect. It appears that those who worship the Light-god hold a festival in his honour, when they slaughter a buffalo in commemoration of the time when, as they say, the Earth-goddess was prevailing on men to offer human sacrifices to her, but the Light-god sent a tribe-deity who crushed the bloody-minded Earth-goddess under a mountain, and dragged a buffalo out of the jungle, saying, 'Liberate the man, and sacrifice the buffalo!' This legend, divested of its mythic garb, may really record a historical substitution of animal for human sacrifice. In Ceylon, the exorcist will demand the name of the demon possessing a demoniac, and the patient in frenzy answers, giving the demon's name, 'I am So-and-so, I demand a human sacrifice and will not go out without!' The victim is promised, the patient comes to from the fit, and a few weeks later the sacrifice is made, but instead of a man they offer a fowl. Classic examples of substitution of this sort may be found in the sacrifice of a doe for a virgin to Artemis in Laodicæa, a goat for a boy to Dionysos at Potniæ. There appears to be Semitic connexion here, as there clearly is in the story of the Æolians of Tenedos sacrificing to Melikertes (Melkarth) instead of a new-born child a new-born calf; shoeing it with buskins and tending the mother-cow as if a human mother.

One step more in the course of substitution leads the