Northcote Whitridge Thomas and Edwin Hatch

“ Piacular Sacrifice.—Whereas the god receives a gift in the honorific sacrifice, he demands a life in the piacular. This, according to Westermarck, is the central idea of human sacrifice: the victim is substituted for the sacrifice, to deliver him from perils by disease, famine or, more indefinitely, from the Wrath of the god in general. The essential feature of the piaculum is that it is an expiation for wrong-doing, and the victim is often human. ”

“ From the communion sacrifice sprang the piaculum, which here becomes a subsidiary form and finds its full explanation in the ideas connected with the mystic union of god and worshippers. For the object of the piaculum is the re-establishment of the broken alliance, which was precisely that of the communion sacrifice. With the decline of totemism arose the need for human sacrifice—the only means of re-establishing the broken tie of kinship when the animal species was no longer akin to man.
This theory of Robertson Smith's has been attacked from two sides. ”

“ The sacrifice is in its origin a communion; god and worshippers have a bond of kinship between them; but it is liable to be interrupted or its strength diminished. Ceremonies of initiation are the means by which the alliance is established between the deity and the young man, when the latter enters upon the rights of manhood; and the supposed bond of kinship is thus regarded as an artificial union from the outset, so far as the individual is concerned, although Robertson Smith still maintains the theory of the fatherhood' of the god, where it is a question of the origin of the totem-kin. ”

“ It has been held that animal sacrifice is the primitive form and that the decay of toternism or lack of domestic animals has brought about the substitution of a human victim; but it has also been urged that in many cases animal victims are treated like human beings and must consequently have replaced them, that human beings are smeared with the blood of sacrifice, and must therefore have themselves been sacrificed before a milder régime allowed an animal to replace them. If tradition is any guide, human sacrifice seems in many important areas to be of secondary character ”

“ Communal Sacrifice.—In spite of the importance attached to the idea of the common meal by Robertson Smith, it is not a primitive rite of adoption. The custom of eating the body of the victim does not necessarily spring from any idea of communion with the god; it may also arise from a desire to incorporate the sanctity which has been imparted to it—an idea on a level with many other food customs (see Couvade) , and based on the idea that eating anything causes its qualities to pass into the eater. ”

“ Our knowledge of primitive forms of sacrifice is meagre; even were it more extensive, it would probably be impossible to determine the origin or origins of sacrifice; for no ritual has necessarily survived unchanged in form and meaning since its inception, and even permanence of form cannot be taken to imply a corresponding permanence of meaning for the worshippers. ”

“ The sacrificer may aim at causing a speedy death or a slow one. The corpse may be burnt, in part or as a whole; portions may be assigned to the priest, the sacriflcer and the gods; the skull, bones, &c., may receive special treatment; the fat or blood may be set aside, and they or the ashes may be singled out as the share of the god, to be offered upon the altar; the skin of the victim may be employed as a covering for the idol or material representative of the god, either permanently or till the next annual sacrifice. ”

“ On the whole, human sacrifice is far commoner among the semi-civilized and barbarous races than in still lower stages of culture. In Australia, however, where sacrifice of the ordinary type is unknown, the ritual killing of a child is practised in connexion with the initiation of a magician; it is therefore by no means axiomatic that animals were offered before human beings; the problem of priority is one to be solved for each area separately, but probably no solution is possible ”

“ The victim was the animal of a hostile totem-kin or an animal commonly offered to the god. The god was originally a stranger, taken into the kin by a rite of blood brotherhood, and this constitutes the dark point of the theory; for Robertson Smith regards the blood bond as relatively late; hence we do not see how the god became associated with the kin. (ii.) The piacular sacrifice arose from the need of atoning for bloodshed within the kinship group; properly speaking, the culprit himself should suffer: should he be unknown or beyond the reach of vengeance, a substitute had to be found. ”

“ Human representatives of the corn or vegetation spirits are killed; in these, as in other cases of the sacrifice of the man-god cited by Dr Frazer, the killing of the old god is at the same time the making of a new god. (d) Suicide is treated as a means of raising a human being to the rank of a god. (e) Gods may be sacrificed (in theriomorphic form) to themselves as a means of renewing the life of the god. (f) The method of creating a fetish (see Fetishism) on the Congo resembles deificatory sacrifice; but here there is no actual slaughter of a human being; magical means are alone relied upon. ”

“ But the Nazarite was equally bound to lay aside his holiness before mixing with common folk and returning to ordinary life; this he did by a sacrifice, which, with the offering of his hair upon the altar, freed him from his vow and reduced him to the same level of sanctity as ordinary men.
With regard to the scapegoat, it must be noted that we also meet with a more concrete idea of expulsion of evil (see Demonology, Exorcism) , which is present among the most primitive peoples, such as the Australians. ”

“ The unity of procedure consists in the fact that every sacrifice involves 'putting the divine in communication with the profane by an intermediary—the victim—which may be piacularor honorific, a messenger or a means of divination, a means of alimenting the eternal life of the species or a source of magical energy which the rite diffuses over objects in its neighbourhood. ”

“ The sacrifices of sacralization and desacralization mentioned above find their analogues in the Hindu scheme of the rite; sacralization and desacralization, sometimes performed by means of subsidiary sacrifices, are the essential elements of the preparation for sacrifice and the subsequent lustration. In the most developed forms, such as the offering of soma, they assumed a great importance; (1) the sacrificer had to pass from the world of man into a world of the gods; consequently he was separated from the common herd of mankind and purified ”

“ Even if the conception of the relative sanctity of gods and men remained unaltered, it by no means follows that in primitive times the same precautions were necessary in approaching the former as were demanded by the consciousness of later generations. ”

“ Our data are nowhere so full as for India; where they are comparatively abundant they refer either to a civilized or semi civilized people, or to an area, like West Africa, where the influence of Islam has introduced a disturbing element. Though the moralization of gods has only proceeded pari passu with the moralization of mankind, the deities of the more advanced nations are perhaps felt by them to be more terrible and more difficult of access than the divinities of lower races ”

“ In the former case the sacrifice is raised to a higher level; he enters into closer communion with the gods. In the latter either some material object, not necessarily animate, is deprived of a portion of its sanctity and made fit for human use, or the sacrifice himself loses a portion of his sanctity or impurity. In the sacrifice of sacralization the sanctity passes from the victim to the object ”

“ This was naturally found in the non-human member of the totem-kin—the totem animal; in a sense, therefore, the god died for his people. (iii.) In the mystical sacrifice the god is himself slain and eaten by his worshippers; In the Religion of the Semites (2nd ed., 1894) the theory was remodelled so as to overcome the difficulty pointed out above. The god, the victim and the human group are regarded as of the same kin; the animal (totem) is the earlier form of the god ”

“ The animals were decorated with wampum and strangled, and then the sins of the people were transferred to them; then the remains were burned and the ashes gathered up, taken through the village and sprinkled before every house. In Mexico human sacrifices were very common; the lowest estimate is 20,000 annually. ”

“ In their view, based on an analysis of Hebrew and Hindu forms of sacrifice, the unity of sacrifice consists in the immediate aim of the ritual, not in the ultimate end to be attained; for we rarely find a rite other than complexi and by the3same sacrifice more than one result may be soughtor attained. ”