Sacrifice.—Man once imagined forces superior to himself, who yet could be invoked and moved to and from any purpose. The divine world was produced in his own image, and he treated its gods as he liked to be treated by his inferiors. He believed that the way to placate the forces surrounding him was to win them over as men are won over, by making presents to them. This clearly continued among the Israelites until the eighth century B.C., but it is to be regarded as a stage succeeding a former condition of zoölatry and totemism, without notice of which its details can not be understood.
Most people sacrificed to their divinities plants, fruits, and herbs, and animals taken from their flocks. People who had no domestic animals offered those taken in the hunt. The Indians offered the maize from their fields and the animals of the chase, and threw into the fire or water tobacco, or other herbs which they used in the place of tobacco. Sometimes these objects were hung up in the air above their huts. The northern Algonquins tied living dogs to high rods, and let them expire. In a similar manner other Indians stuck up a deer, especially a white deer, on poles. The plains tribes gave the same elevation to the head or skin of an albino buffalo on mounds, not having poles convenient. The spotless red heifer of the Israelites may be compared with the spotless white animals of the chase.
The southern Indians always threw a small piece of the fattest of the meat into the fire when eating or before they began to eat. They commonly pulled their newly killed venison several times through the smoke of the fire—perhaps as a sacrifice, and perhaps to consume the life-spirit of the animal. They also burned a large piece and sometimes the whole carcass of the first buck they killed, either in the winter or the summer hunt. The Muskoki burn a piece of every deer they kill.
The Israelites offered daily sacrifice, in which a lamb (except the skin and entrails) was burned to ashes. In some of their sacrifices there was not only distinction between animals that were fit and unfit, but in the manner of treatment. Sometimes the victim was not to be touched, but should be entirely consumed by fire. In others the blood should be sprinkled around the altar and the fat and the entrails burned, the remainder of the body to be eaten by the priests. But it was a crime to eat flesh that had been offered in sacrifice to a false god—i.e., god of another people.
The offering of the first-fruits, and therefore of the first-born, to the divinity, was one of the oldest ideas of the Semites. Moloch and Jahveh were conceived as being the fire, devouring whatever was offered to it, so that to give to the fire was to give to the god. In time, a substitute was suggested; the first-born was replaced by an animal or a sum of money. This was called the "money of the lives."
