representations of the deities as mere animals. Nor, perhaps, is it impossible to conjecture how the change in art was made. It is a common ritual custom for the sacrificer to cover himself with the skin and head of the animal sacrificed. In Mexico we know that the Aztec priests wore the flayed skins of their human victims. Herodotus mentions that on the one awful day when a sheep was yearly sacrificed in Thebes, the statue of Zeus, as he calls him, was draped in the hide of the beast. In the same way certain Californian tribes which worship the buzzard sacrifice him, "himself to himself," once a year, and use his skin as a covering in the ritual.[1] Lucian gives an instance in his treatise De Deâ Syriâ (55): "When a man means to go on pilgrimage to Hierapolis, he sacrifices a sheep and eats of its flesh. He then kneels down and draws the head over his own head, praying at the same time to the god." Chaldean works of art often represent the priest in the skin of the god, sometimes in that of a fish.[2]
It is a conjecture not unworthy of consideration that the human gods with bestial heads are derived from the aspect of the celebrant clad in the pelt of the beast whom he sacrifices. In Egyptian art the heads of the gods are usually like masks, or flayed skins superimposed on the head of a man.[3] If it be asked why the celebrant thus disguises himself in the sacrifice, it is only possible to reply by guess-work. But the
- ↑ [Robinson, Life in California, pp. 241, 303;] Herodotus, ii. 42.
- ↑ Menant, Recherches, ii. 49. See a collection of cases in our Cupid and Psyche, pp. lviii., lix.
- ↑ The idea is Professor Robertson Smith's.
