But in fact the notion that the more ethereal elements of the sacrifice rise to heaven, the seat of the gods, in the savoury smoke that ascends from the sacrificial flame can in certain instances be shown to be connected with a later development of sacrifice. Among the Semites, for example, sacrifices were not originally burned. The god was not seated aloft, but was present at the place of sacrifice, inhabiting a sacred stone (a baetylium, beth-el, or “house of god”), which answered at once to the later idol and the later altar. That the god was thought by the heathen Semites to inhabit the sacred stone, or in other cases a sacred tree, is expressly recorded of several Arabian sanctuaries, and it cannot be doubted that this was the general view wherever there was a maṣṣēba (sacred cippus) or an ashera (sacred pole or tree). And in these cases the gift of the worshipper was not, in the more primitive cults, consumed by fire, but the sacred stone was daubed with oil or blood, libations of milk, of blood, or of wine were poured forth beside it, cereal gifts were presented by being simply laid on the sacred ground, and slaughtered victims were left there to be devoured by wild beasts (Sprenger, Leb. Moh., iii. 457), or even a human sacrifice was offered by burying the victim under the cippus. Sacrifices of this type are found not only throughout the Semitic field but in all parts of the world; they belong to the same category with the Hebrew showbread and the Roman lectisternia. In later times the food spread on the tables of the god is eaten by his ministers, the priests, to whom he is supposed to make over the enjoyment of the banquet; but this is a refinement on the original usage. In older times the gods themselves were held to partake of these gifts of food, just as the venerable dead were fed by the meat and drink placed or poured out upon their tombs. In the religions of savages both gods and the dead have very material needs, among which the need of nourishment has the first place; and just as we learn from the story of Periander and Melissa (Herod., v. 92) that among the Greeks of the 7th century b.c. it was a new idea that the dead could make no use of the gifts buried with them unless they were etherealized by fire, so also the fact that among the Greeks, especially in old times, sacrifices to water-gods were simply flung into the river or the sea, and sacrifices to underground gods were buried, indicates that it is a secondary idea that the gods were too ethereal to enjoy a sacrifice through any other sense than that of smell. Even the highest antique religions show by unmistakable signs that in their origin sacrifices were literally “the food of the gods.” In Israel the conception against which the author of Psalm 1. protests so strongly was never eliminated from the ancient technical language of the priestly ritual, in which the sacrifices are called לחם אלחים , “food of the deity” (Lev. xxi. 8, 17, 21); and among the Greeks we find not only such general expressions as that the gods “feast on hecatombs” (Il., ix. 531) but even that particular gods bear special surnames, such as “the goat-eater,” the “ram-eater,” “Dionysus the eater of raw (human) flesh” (αίγοϕάγος, κpιoφάyos, ώμηστης ).

A sacrifice, therefore, is primarily a meal offered to the deity. In some of the cases already noticed, and in the case of holocausts or whole burnt-offerings, the sacrificial gift is entirely made over to the god; but ordinarily the sacrifice is a feast of which gods and worshippers partake together. If all sacrifices are not convivial entertainments, at least the tendency is to give to all feasts, nay to all meals, a sacrificial character by inviting the gods to partake of them (Athenseus, v. 19). Thus the Roman family never rose from supper till a portion of the food had been laid on the burning hearth as an offering to the Lares (Serv., Ad Ae u ., i. 730; Ovid, Fast., ii. 633); and a similar practice was probably followed in early Greece. At all events the slaughter of an animal (which gave the meal a more luxurious and festal character, animal food being not in daily use with the mass of the agricultural populations of the Mediterranean lauds) seems to have been always sacrificial in early Greece, and even in later times St Paul assumes that the flesh sold in the shambles would often consist of ϵίδωλόθυτα . Among the Semites sacrifice and slaughter for food are still more clearly identified; the Hebrews use the same word for both, and the Arabian invocation of the name of Allah over every beast killed for food is but the relic of a sacrificial formula. The part of the gods in such sacrificial meals was often very small, the blood alone (Arabia), or the fat and the thighs (Il ., i. 460), or small parts of each joint (Od., xiv. 427), or the blood, the fat, and the kidneys (Lev. iii.). When the sacrifice was offered by a priest, he also naturally received a portion, which, properly speaking, belonged to the deity and was surrendered by him to his minister, as is brought out in the Hebrew ritual by the ceremonial act of waving it towards the altar (Lev. vii. 29 sq.). The thigh, which in Homeric sacrifice is burned on the altar, belongs in the Levitical ritual to the priest, who was naturally the first to profit by the growth of a conviction that the deity himself did not require to be fed by man’s food.

The conception of the sacrifice as a banquet in which gods and men share together may be traced also in the accessories of sacred ritual. Music, song, garlands, the sweet odour of incense, accompany sacrifice because they are suitable to an occasion of mirth and luxurious enjoyment. Wine, too, “which cheereth gods and men” (Judges ix. 13), was seldom lacking in the vine-growing countries; but the most notable case where the sacrificial feast has the use of an intoxicant (or narcotic) as its chief feature is the ancient soma sacrifice of the old Aryans, where the gods are honoured by bowls of the precious draught which heals the sick, inspires the poet, and makes the poor believe that he is rich.

The sacrificial meal, with the general features that have been described, may be regarded as common to all the so-called nature-religions of the civilized races of antiquity, —religions which had a predominantly joyous character, and in which the relations of man to the gods were not troubled by any habitual and oppressive sense of human guilt, because the divine standard of man’s duty corresponded broadly with the accepted standard of civil conduct, and therefore, though the god might be angry with his people for a time, or even irreconcilably wroth with individuals, the idea was hardly conceivable that he could be permanently alienated from the whole circle of his worshippers,—that is, from all who participated in a certain local (tribal or national) cult. But when this type of religion began to break down the sacrificial ritual underwent corresponding modifications. Thus we find a decline of faith in the old gods accompanied, not only by a growing neglect of the temples and their service, but also by a disposition to attenuate the gifts that were still offered, or to take every opportunity to cheat the gods out of part of their due,—a disposition of which Arabia before Mohammed affords a classical example. But, again, the decline of faith itself was not a mere product of indifference, but was partly due to a feeling that the traditional ritual involved too material a conception of the gods, and this cause, too, tended to produce modifications in sacrificial service. The Persians, for example (Herod., i. 132; Strabo, xv. p. 732), consecrated their sacrifices with liturgical prayers, but gave no part of the victim to the deity, who “desired nothing but the life (or soul) of the victim.” This, indeed, is the Roman formula of piacular as distinct from honorific offerings (Macrob., iii. 5, 1), and might be taken as implying that the Persians had ceased to look on sacrifices as gifts of homage; but such an explanation can hardly be extended to the parallel case of the Arab sacrifices, in which the share of the deity was the blood of the victim, which according to antique belief contained the life. For among the Arabs blood was a recognized article of food, and the polemic of Ps. 1. 13 is expressly directed against the idea that the deity “drinks the blood of goats.” And the details given in Strabo make it tolerably clear that Persian sacrifice is simply an example of the way in which the material gift offered to the deity is first attenuated and then allegorized away as the conception of the godhead becomes less crassly material. But on the other hand it is undoubtedly true that under certain conditions the notion of piacular sacrifice shows much greater vitality than that of sacrificial gifts of homage. When a national religion is not left to slow decay, but shares the catastrophe of the nation itself, as was the case with the religions of the small western Asiatic states in the period of Assyrian conquest, the old joyous confidence in the gods gives way to a sombre sense of divine wrath, and the acts by which this wrath can be conjured become much more important than the ordinary traditional gifts of homage. To this point we must return by and by.

It appears, then, that in the old national nature-religions the ordinary exercises of worship take the form of meals offered to the gods, and usually of banquets at which gods and worshippers sit down together, so that the natural bond of unity between the deity and his subjects or children is cemented by the bond of “bread and salt ”— salt is a standing feature in the sacrifices of many races (comp. Lev. ii. 13)—to which ancient and unsophisticated peoples attach so much importance. That the god is habitually willing to partake of the banquet offered to him is taken for granted; but, if anything has occurred to alienate his favour, he will show it by his conduct at the feast, by certain signs known to experts, that indicate his refusal of the offered gift. Hence the custom of inspecting the exta of the victim, watching the behaviour of the sacrificial flame, or otherwise seeking an omen which proves that the sacrifice is accepted, and so that the deity may be expected to favour the requests with which the gift is associated.

In the religions which we have been characterizing all the ordinary functions of worship are summed up in these sacrificial meals; the stated and normal intercourse between gods and men has no other form. God and worshippers make up together a society of commensals, and every other point in their reciprocal relations is included in what this involves. Now, with this we must take the no less certain fact that throughout the sphere of the purely sacrificial religions the circle of common worship is also the circle of social duty and reciprocal moral obligations. And thus the origin of sacrificial worship must be sought in a stage of society when the circle of commensals and the circle of persons united to each other by sacred social bonds were identical. But all social bonds are certainly developed out of the bond of kindred, and it will be generally admitted that all national religions are developments or combinations of the worship of particular kins. It would seem, therefore, that the world-wide prevalence of sacrificial worship points to a time when the kindred group and the group of commensals were identical, and when, conversely, people of different kins did not eat and drink together.

At first sight it might appear that this amounts to the proposition that all religious and civil societies of antiquity have the family as their type, and that the type of sacrifice is such a family meal as is found among the Romans. And this view would seem to be favoured by the frequent occurrence among ancient peoples of the conception that the deity is the father (progenitor and lord) of his worshippers, who in turn owe filial obedience to him and brotherly duty to one another. But in the present stage of research into the history of early society it is by no means legitimate to assume that the family, with a father at its head, is the original type of the circle of commensals. It is impossible to separate the idea of commensality from the fact so constantly observed in primitive nations, that each kindred has certain rules about forbidden food which mark it off from all other kindreds. And in a very large proportion of cases kindred obligations, religion, and laws of forbidden food combine to divide a child from his father’s and unite him to his mother’s kin, so that father and sons are not commensals. It is noteworthy that family meals are by no means so universal an institution as might be imagined a priori. At Sparta, for example, men took their regular meals not with their wives and children but in syssitia or pheiditia ·, and a similar organization of nations in groups of commensals which are not family groups is found in other places (Crete, Carthage, &c.). The marked and fundamental similarity between sacrificial worships in all parts of the globe makes it very difficult to doubt that they are all to be traced back to one type of society, common to primitive man as a whole. But the nearest approximation...