peculiar features, it is the more necessary to call attention to the important points in which it follows the same laws and lines as other countries; and if, as we have sought to show, totemism has at one time or other been universal throughout the world, then its outcome, namely, animal sacrifice, should be found in China as well as elsewhere. It is so found; it is the subject of one of the Confucian books, the Li Ki; and it is a large part of the state religion. The greatest of the sacrifices was, like several which we have already mentioned, annual (at the winter solstice).1

3

The victim was not only killed, but eaten: "the viands of the feast were composed of a calf."2 The practice of eating the flesh raw, as in the Saracen rite, seems once to have been known. "At the sacrifices in the time of the Lord of Yu. . . there were the offerings of blood, of raw flesh, and of sodden flesh." Even the reversion to this savage practice, which is seen in some of the "mysteries" of ancient Greece, appears also in China, for in times of public calamity animals are torn in pieces, as by the Baccha. And, to come back to the matter in hand, namely, the primitive custom which demanded that the whole clan should partake of the victim, "when there was a sacrifice at the Shê altar of a village, some one went to it from every house." 5 Again, by a post-Confucian custom, the Chinese pour wine (a very general substitute for blood) from a beaker on the straw image of Confucius, and then all present drink of it and taste the sacrificial victim in order to participate in the grace of Confucius."

In Thibet, in the time of Marco Polo, when a wether was offered on behalf of a child, the flesh was divided amongst the relatives. Finally, to conclude these illustrations of the primitive custom requiring all present to partake of the victim, in the Pelew Islands sickness is attributed to the wrath of a god, who is appeased by the sacrifice of a pig, goat, or turtle, which must be consumed by the invalid's relatives and by the god.8

1

In the last quotation, it will be noted that the victim is

1 Legge, The Li Ki, i. 416 (Sacred Books of the East).

2 Ibid. 417.

1

to be consumed by the god as well as by his worshippers, just as in Samoa the people feasted, as the Rev. G. Turner says, "with" as well as "before their god." But in the Yagna sacrifice the victim is eaten sacramentally, as a means of entering into communion with the god; and the Chinese view of sacrifice is the same. According to Professor Legge, "the general idea symbolised by the character Ki is an offering whereby communication and communion with spiritual beings is effected." 2 These are two different, though not necessarily inconsistent aspects of the sacrificial rite one is the eating with the god, the other the eating of the god. Both require examination and illustration. We will begin with the latter.

In the Saracen rite, with a description of which this chapter began, the whole of the victim, "body and bones, skin, blood, and entrails," was consumed by the worshippers. The same thing is perhaps implied by the words of Pausanias in what he says about the offerings to Apollo Parrhasios and to the Meilichioi. The Mongols also regarded it as sacrilege to leave any of the sacred victim unconsumed; and in Hawaii a terrible visitation was the penalty for not consuming the whole of the offering. The consumption of the bones, blood, skin, and entrails is evidently a practice which advancing civilisation could not but discard; and we find that the ancient Prussians had left it behind, but what they did not eat had to be disposed of somehow, and it was buried. In Samoa the custom was the same as in ancient Prussia: "whatever was over after the meal was buried at the beach "; 3 and so elsewhere in Polynesia: "they were careful to bury or throw into the sea whatever food was over after the festival." In Thibet, at the end of the rite already described, the bones of the animal were carried away in a coffer. Amongst the Jakuts, "the bones and other offal are burnt, and the sacrifice is complete." " The Tartars, who make their gods of a sheep-skin, eat the body of the sheep and burn the bones. In the Hindoo Súlagava sacrifice," the tail, hide, tendons, and hoof of the victim are to be thrown.

1 Samoa, 26.

3 Turner, Samoa, 57.

5 Bastian, Allerlei, i. 208.

2 Legge, op. cit. 201 (note).

4 Turner, Polynesia, 241.

6 Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 257.

into the fire."1 Amongst the Kaffirs, on occasion of the sacrifice of an ox to the Amachlosi, when the flesh has been eaten, "many tribes burn the bones of the victim."2 The Tscheremiss at the annual feast to their supreme god Juma, poured the blood of the victim in the fire: head, lungs, and heart were offered, the rest eaten, and the remnants, if any, were thrown into the fire.3 Our English word "bon-fire" = bone-fire points in the same direction. Finally, burning was the mode adopted by the Hebrews.*

Evi

Now this custom (of eating the whole of the victim) requires explanation, not the custom of burning or burying what was not eaten, that is plainly the mode adopted by advancing civilisation for effecting the same end-whatever it was that the primitive worshipper accomplished by consuming the whole of the victim. But the custom of consuming everything, even bones, entrails, tendons, etc., could only have originated in a barbarous stage of society. dently, therefore, the belief also which led to the custom could only have originated in savagery. Therefore, again, it is to savage ideas that we must look for an explanation, not to conceptions which could only have been formed long after the custom. Of such savage ideas there are several which might well have given rise to the practice in question. It is, for instance, a belief amongst various savage hunters that if the bones of an animal are put together and carefully buried, the animal itself will hereafter revive. They accordingly take this precaution, partly in order to secure a supply of game in the future, and partly because they think that, if the animal is not thus buried, the surviving animals of the species resent the indignity, and desert the country or decline to be captured.5 But this custom and belief do not help us: they might account for the burying of the bones, but they do not account for burning the bones or for what really requires explanation, namely, the custom of consuming the bones, etc. Indeed, the two customs are, as we now see, fundamentally

1 Rajendralála Mitra, Indo-Aryans, i. 365.

2 Hartmann, Die Völker Afrikas, 224. 3 Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 157. * Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 239, referring to Lev. vii. 15 ff., xix. 6, xxii. 30.

5 For instances, see Frazer, Golden Bough, ch. iii. § 12.

inconsistent with one another: the one aims at destroying the bones, and is observed in the case of sacred animals; the other at preserving them, and is observed in the case of game.

Another savage parallel may be found in a belief already illustrated,1 namely, that the food of a divine king, such as the Mikado, or a superior chief, is fatal to his subjects or slaves. Much more, therefore, would the sacrificial animal of which a god had partaken be fatal, and great would be the need to save incautious, heedless persons from the danger of eating the remains which they might find lying about. Here we are approaching the true explanation; but, since we hope to show before the end of this chapter that the conception of the god's eating the victim only came relatively late, we cannot see in it the origin of the primitive custom in question, though we do see in it a powerful reinforcement thereof.

Again, it is a savage belief that you can injure a man not merely by means of his nail-parings, hair-clippings, and other things associated with him, but also by the refuse of his food. In Victoria, the natives believe that "if an enemy gets possession of anything that has belonged to them, even such things as bones of animals they have eaten, broken weapons, feathers, portions of dress, pieces of skin, or refuse of any kind, he can employ it as a charm to produce illness in the person to whom they belonged. They are therefore very careful to burn up all rubbish or uncleanness before leaving a camping-place ";" and "the practice of using a man's food to injure him is found in Polynesia generally, Tahiti, the Washington Islands, Fiji, Queensland, and amongst the Zulus and Kaffirs." 3 Now, this belief, coexisting as it does in Polynesia with the custom of burying the remnants of the sacrificial meal, cannot but strengthen the observance of that custom. But it is to be doubted whether it was the origin of the practice. The eagerness displayed by the Saracen worshippers to obtain a portion of the victim, and the dismay of Hakluyt's West Indians if they failed to get a piece, both show that originally, as in Peru, the victim was accounted

1

Supra, pp. 83, 84.

2

3 Folk-Lore, vi. 134, note 2.

Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 54.

"very sacred indeed"; and that the emotion which swayed the worshippers, and their motive for devouring the whole of the victim, was not fear lest the remnants should be used against them, still less anxiety about what might happen to incautious strangers, but desire on the part of each to obtain for himself as much as possible of something that was in the highest degree desirable. Now, that the sacrificial animal should be accounted "very sacred indeed" is intelligible enough, if it was (in the savage times when the whole victim was consumed) the totem animal and god of the clan making the sacrifice. As for the eagerness of the worshippers, it need not be doubted; but of the savage's motives for that eagerness we ought to try and form for ourselves some clear idea.

In the sacrificial rite itself, as an external act of worship, the essential feature is that the worshipper should partake of the offering; but it is only after a time that this central feature disengages itself from the repulsive accessories which were indeed inevitable concomitants of a savage feast, but were no part of the essence of the rite. We may therefore reasonably expect to find the rite on its inward side, i.e. as it presented itself to the worshipper, following a parallel line of development. That the idea of communication and communion with spiritual beings," which, as we have seen, is the Chinese conception of sacrifice, is the aspect of the rite which has persisted longest, we will take for granted. Whether it was present dimly, and obscured or overlaid by other associations, but still implicitly present to the consciousness of savage man, is a question which depends for its answer on what view we take of that identity in difference which exists between civilised and uncivilised man, and makes the whole world kin. We may regard selfishness and the baser desires as alone "natural" and as constituting the sole identity; or, by the same question-begging epithet, we may credit the savage with the "natural" affections as well. The question has always divided philosophers, not merely in Europe, but in China, where Seun sides with Hobbes, and Han-yu anticipated the view of Butler that good instincts as well as bad are natural. If, therefore, here we take our stand, without hesitation, but without argument, on the side of the latter, it