If a true sacrament is yet to be discovered in Babylonian religion, it will probably be found in some document of the Tammuz ritual. For it is probable that Tammuz was identified with the corn as with other parts of vegetation, and that the mourning for him was accompanied with abstinence from bread. His resurrection ended the fast, and if in their joy the worshippers ceremoniously broke bread, they may have supposed they were eating the body of their risen lord. But such a reconstruction of the old Tammuz ritual rests at present only on the indirect evidence of the later records of Attis-Adonis cult and of the Tammuz-worship among the heathen Syrians of Harran in the tenth century of our era.[242.1] It belongs to the Babylonian conception of the sacrifice as a gift, that the animal was often regarded as a ransom for the man’s own life; that is to say, when sin had been committed, the deity might be placated by the gift of an agreeable victim, and be persuaded to accept it in place of the sinner whose life was properly forfeit. For instance, a sick man is always supposed to have sinned; and the priest who is performing an animal sacrifice in his behalf uses the prayer, “Take his present, take his ransom”;[242.2] and the formula of a sacrifice offered by way of exorcism is very explicit: “A male sheep, a female sheep, a living sheep, a dead {243} sheep shall die, but I shall live.”[243.1] Another inscription[243.2] throws further light on the ritual of the vicarious sacrifice: “To the high-priest may one cry out: the kid of substitution for the man, the kid for his soul he hath brought: place the head of the kid to the head of the man, place the neck of the kid to the neck of the man, place the breast of the kid to the breast of the man.” Whether this solemn manipulation was performed after or before the sacrifice, its object must have been to establish by contact a communion between the man and the victim, so that the kid might be his most efficacious representative. It thus became part of the higher ethical teaching of Babylon that “sacrifice brings life,” just as “prayer takes away sin,” a doctrine expressed in a fragmentary tablet that contains a text of striking spiritual import.[243.3] The type of sacrifice that may be called vicarious must have been an ancient as well as a later tradition in Greece; for the legends associated with many sacrifices clearly attest it, explaining certain animal victims as substitutes for a human life that was formerly demanded by the offended deity, the vicarious sacrifice usually carrying with it the ideas of sin and atonement.[243.4] The substitution might occasionally {244} be apologised for by a legal fiction, as, for instance, when in the ritual of the Brauronian Artemis the angry goddess demanded the life of a maiden, and the Athenian parent sacrificed a goat, “calling it his daughter.”[244.1]