banquet of the flesh and blood of the men who are to die in this war,' &c.[1] There is remarkable definiteness in the Peruvian idea that the souls of human victims are transmitted to another life in divine as in funeral sacrifice; at one great ceremony, where children of each tribe were sacrificed to propitiate the gods, 'they strangled the children, first giving them to eat and drink, that they might not enter the presence of the Creator discontented and hungry.'[2] Similar ideas of spiritual sacrifice appear in other regions of the world. Thus in West Africa we read of the tree-fetish enjoying the spirit of the food-offering, but leaving its substance, and an account of the religion of the Gold Coast mentions how each great wong or deity has his house, and his priest and priestess to clean the room and give him daily bread kneaded with palm-oil, 'of which, as of all gifts of this kind, the wong eats the invisible soul.'[3] So, in India, the Limbus of Darjeeling make small offerings of grain, vegetables, and sugar-cane, and sacrifice cows, pigs, fowls, &c., on the declared principle 'the life breath to the gods, the flesh to ourselves.'[4] It seems likely that such meaning may largely explain the sacrificial practices of other religions. In conjunction with these accounts, the unequivocal meaning of funeral sacrifices, whereby offerings are conveyed spiritually into the possession of spirits of the dead, may perhaps justify us in inferring that similar ideas of spiritual transmission prevail extensively among the many nations whose sacrificial rites we know in fact, but cannot trace with certainty to their original significance.
Having thus examined the manner in which the operation of sacrifice is considered to take physical effect, whether indefinitely or definitely, and having distinguished its actual transmission as either substantial, essential, or spiritual,
- ↑ Sahagun, lib. vi. in Kingsborough, vol. v.
- ↑ 'Rites and Laws of Yncas,' tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, pp. 55, 58, 166. See ante, p. 385 (possible connexion of smoke with soul).
- ↑ Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 188, 196. Steinhauser, l.c. p. 136. See also Schlegel, 'Ewe-Sprache,' p. xv.; Magyar, 'Süd-Afrika,' p. 273.
- ↑ A. Campbell in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vii. p. 153.
