The same may be said about the world-wide practice of the Eucharist. No more effective method exists for impressing on the members of a body their community of life with each other, and causing them to forget their jangling self-interests, than to hold a feast in common. It is a method which has been honored in all ages as well as to-day. But when the flesh partaken of at the feast is that of the Totem--the guardian and presiding genius of the tribe--or perhaps of one of its chief food-animals--then clearly the feast takes on a holy and solemn character. It becomes a sacrament of unity--of the unity of all with the tribe, and with each other. Self-interests and self-consciousness are for the time submerged, and the common life asserts itself; but here again we see that a custom like this would not come into being as a deliberate rite UNTIL self-consciousness and the divisions consequent thereon had grown to be an obvious evil. The herd-animals (cows, sheep, and so forth) do not have Eucharists, simply because they are sensible enough to feed along the same pastures without quarrelling over the richest tufts of grass. When the flesh partaken of (either actually or symbolically) is not that of a divinized animal, but the flesh of a human-formed god--as in the mysteries of Dionysus or Osiris or Christ--then we are led to suspect (and of course this theory is widely held and supported) that the rites date from a very far-back period when a human being, as representative of the tribe, was actually slain, dismembered and partly devoured; though as time went on, the rite gradually became glossed over and mitigated into a love-communion through the sharing of bread and wine. It is curious anyhow that the dismemberment or division into fragments of the body of a god (as in the case of Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, Praj[a']pati and others) should be so frequent a tenet of the old religions, and so commonly associated with a love-feast of reconciliation and resurrection. It may be fairly interpreted as a symbol of Nature-dismemberment in Winter and resurrection in Spring; but we must also not forget that it may (and indeed must) have stood as an allegory of TRIBAL dismemberment and reconciliation--the tribe, conceived of as a divinity, having thus suffered and died through the inbreak of sin and the self-motive, and risen again into wholeness by the redemption of love and sacrifice. Whatever view the rank and file of the tribe may have taken of the matter, I think it is incontestable that the more thoughtful regarded these rites as full of mystic and spiritual meaning. It is of the nature, as I have said before, of these early symbols and ceremonies that they held so many meanings in solution; and it is this fact which gave them a poetic or creative quality, and their great hold upon the public mind.