The final stage is that in which the use of dough or paste has become so firmly established in the sacramental meal, that it is no longer felt to be necessary to give them the shape of the deity, whether human or animal. Thus in the New World annually amongst the Mayas, consecrated wafers were broken, distributed, and preserved as a protection against misfortune for the year.1 In Peru, in August, four sheep were offered to four divinities, and "when this sacrifice was offered up, the priest had the sancu ['a pudding of coarsely ground maize'] on great plates of gold, and he sprinkled it with the blood of the sheep. . . . The high priest then said in a loud voice, so that all might hear: 'Take heed how you eat this sancu; for he who eats it in sin, and with a double will and heart, is seen by our father the Sun, who will punish him with grievous troubles. But he who with a single heart partakes of it, to him the Sun and the Thunder will show favour, and will grant children, and happy years and abundance, and all that he requires.' Then they all rose up to partake, first making a solemn vow, before eating the yahuar-sancu [‘yahuar, blood; sancu, pudding'], in which they promised never to murmur against the Creator, the Sun, or the Thunder; never to be traitors to their lord the Ynca, on pain of receiving condemnation and trouble. The priest of the Sun then took what he could hold on three fingers, put it into his mouth, and returned to his seat. In this order and in this manner of taking the oath all the tribes rose up, and thus all partook, down to the little children. . . . They took it with such care that no particle was allowed to fall to the ground, this being looked upon as a great sin." 2 Acosta's account is as follows:"The Mamaconas of the Sunne, which were a kind of Nunnes of the Sunne, made little loaves of the flower of Mays, died and mingled with the bloud of white sheepe, . . . then presently they commanded that all strangers should enter, . . and the Priests. . . gave to every one a morcell of these small loaves, saying vnto them that they gave these peeces to the end that they should be vnited and confederated with the Ynca; . . and all did receive and eate these peeces, thanking the Sunne infinitely for so great a favour which he had done Waitz, Anthropologie, iv. 330.

2 Markham, Rites and Laws of the Yncas, 27.

them. . . . And besides this communion (if it be lawfull to vse this word in so divelish a matter) . . . they did likewise send of these loaves to all their Guacas, sanctuaries, or idolls." 1 In the Old World the use of wafers or cakes not in human or animal shape has not left many traces. In Tartary they were used, as one eye-witness, Father Grueber, testifies: "This only do I affirm, that the devil so mimics the Catholic Church there, that although no European or Christian has ever been there, still in all essential things they agree so completely with the Roman Church as even to celebrate the sacrifice of the Host with bread and wine: with my own eyes have I seen it."2 As for the Aryan peoples, we find these consecrated cakes associated, amongst the ancient Prussians, with the rite which we have already quoted as a typical instance of the sacrificial meal. Whilst the flesh of the animal victim was cooking, rye-cakes were made and were baked, not in an oven, but by being continually tossed over the fire by the men standing round, who threw it and caught it. These consecrated wafers survive also in "Beltane cakes." These cakes are made on the evening before Beltane, May 1 (O. S.); in Ross-shire they are called tcharnican, i.e. "hand-cake," because they are made wholly in the hand (not on a board or table like common cakes), and are not to be put upon any table or dish; they must never be put from the hand 5-like the Peruvian sancu, to allow which to fall from the hand was a great sin.

3

On the other hand, the ritual appropriate to animal totems came in course of time to be applied sometimes to tree-totems. Thus the Esthonians once a year smeared their trees with blood." "Castrén tells us that the Ostiaks worshipped a larch-tree, to the branches of which they hung the skins of animals as offerings ";" and the Totonacs made a dough of first-fruits and the blood of infants, of which men and women partook every six months,8 much as the Peruvians mingled the blood of sheep with the sancu, and as the Hebrews were forbidden to offer the blood of sacrifice

with leavened bread.1 Another way in which the ritual of plant deities came to be affected by and assimilated to that of animal deities, was that when the plant deity ceased to be regarded as immanent in the plant species he did not at once come to be regarded as having human form: as a matter of fact, he is commonly conceived to have animal shape.2 The explanation of this, I suggest, is that at the time when vegetation-spirits were thus invested with animal forms, the only gods (other than plant totems) known to their worshippers were animal totems, and consequently the only shape which a plant deity could assume, different from the plant, was that of an animal-the only shape which totemgods at the time were known to have. When, then, vegetation spirits were supposed to appear as animals, it was fitting that those animals should be sacrificed to them; and in the Old World we find that a cereal deity like Demeter has an animal, the pig, sacred and sacrificed to her.

But the rite of worship with which tree-worshippers usually approached their god, and placed themselves in communion with him and under his protection, was of a different kind. There were two ways in which early man sought to effect an external union between himself and the god he worshipped: by the sacrificial meal he incorporated the substance of the god into his own body; by blood-letting rites and the hair-offering, he, so to speak, incorporated himself with the god. Now, though the former method is not absolutely impossible for the tree-worshipper - for throughout Northern India the worshippers of the sacred ním tree chew its leaves in order to gain the protection of the deity against the death-pollution, and "the Kauphatas of Cutch get the cartilage of their ears slit and in the slit a ním stick is stuck," and thus the substance of the god is incorporated in the body of the devotee-still the practical inconveniences are so great, that it is the second method that is generally used; and Mr. Hartland, in the second volume of his Legend of Perseus, has demonstrated learnedly and conclusively not only that the union may be effected by the incorporation of any portion of the worshipper (blood, 2 For instances, see Frazer, G. B. ch. iii. § 10.

1 Ex. xxiii. 18.

3 Crooke, Folk-Lore of Northern India, 253.

hair, saliva) with the god, but that, according to primitive modes of thought (ie. thought guided by the association of ideas and not by reason), anything worn by or belonging to, or even merely handled by a man, is part and parcel of the man. Hence the widespread "practice of tying rags or leaving portions of clothing upon a sacred tree or bush "1 is a sacramental rite. "Our examination of the practices of throwing pins into wells, of tying rags on bushes and trees, of driving nails into trees and stocks, of throwing stones and sticks on cairns, and the analogous practices throughout the world, leads to the conclusion that they are to be interpreted as acts of ceremonial union with well, with tree, or stock, or cairn," ie. with the water-spirit, tree-spirit, etc. "My shirt or stocking, or a rag to represent it, placed upon a sacred bush, or thrust into a sacred well-my name written upon the walls of a temple-a stone or a pellet from my hand cast upon a sacred image or a sacred cairn-a remnant of my food cast into a sacred waterfall or bound upon a sacred tree, or a nail from my hand driven into the trunk of the tree-is thenceforth in continual contact with divinity; and the effluence of divinity, reaching and involving it, will reach and involve me. In this way I may become permanently united with the god." 3

The characteristic of the things chosen, all over the world, for thus placing the worshipper in communion with his god, is that they are things having no commercial value, rags, nail-parings, hair, stones, etc.,-they may be "offerings," if so we choose to term them, but they are not gifts. Still, occasionally, articles of value are included amongst them, and gifts of value are commonly made to the gods of civilised communities. In ancient Greece, where offerings were hung upon sacred trees, as is shown by the results of the excavations in Olympia and discoveries in Cyprus,5 the practice of making gifts of great value was well established even in Homeric times. But this was not the original practice anywhere, as Mr. Hartland has conclusively proved, and

4

1 Hartland, Perseus, ii. 200.

4 Helbig, Homerische Epos, 314.

* Od. iii. 273: πολλὰ δ ̓ ἀγάλματ' ἀνῆψεν (i.e. fastened to trees or altar), υφάσματά τε χρυσόν τε.

we have now to trace the origin of the idea and practice of making presents to the gods. To do so, we must return to our plant totems.

Our argument, to show that it is to totemism we owe the cultivation of plants as well as the domestication of animals, may be summed up thus far as follows: food-plants are adopted by savages as totems; that the savage ancestors of civilised races took cereals for their totems is a point of which we have not, and under the circumstances could not, expect to have, direct evidence; but we have proof that they treated cereal plants in the same way as savages treat their totem-plants, ie. they kept from one year to the next a bundle of plants, for the sake of the protection afforded by the immanent spirit, just as a branch of a sacred tree was kept for the same purpose; that the sheaf thus preserved would yield seeds and suggest sowing is clear, and it is certain that the sacred sheaf was used for that purpose. But if the cereal was a totem, then originally it must have been forbidden as food (except at the solemn annual sacramental meal), just as the animal totem was taboo, and just as in Africa the Plantain-family abstain from the plantain. How then did it come to be a staple article of food? In all probability in the same way as the animal totem: originally the animal totem was sacrificed and eaten only once a year; then, as flocks and herds multiplied, and the taste for fleshmeat developed, trivial pretexts for slaughtering victims were frequently found or invented, until at last the only traces to be found of the original taboo are, e.g., the ceremonial rite which, amongst Mohammedans, the butcher is expected to observe, or the small offering to the gods which, amongst the Hindoos of Manu's time, the consumer had to make before eating, or the Tartars' practice of not beginning a meal until they have first smeared the mouth of their god Nacygai with fat,1i.e. until the god has himself eaten of the meat.

Now, if cultivated plants were originally, like domestic animals, forbidden food, we should expect to find some traces of the original taboo in the case of cereals as we do in the case of flesh-meat; and such traces, I suggest, we find in the widespread reluctance to eat the new corn, etc., until some 1 1 Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 154.