In the _Odyssey_[69] Circe instructs Odysseus in the rites which he must perform when he goes to the ‘dank house of Hades.’ The fact that he has to be instructed in this matter suggests that it was not a normal procedure in his domestic life. The same may be said about the command of Circe in regard to Teiresias. Circe bids Odysseus, when he performs the Chthonian rite in Hades, to promise that on his return to Ithaca he will offer up in his home ‘a barren heifer’ and fill a pyre with treasures, and ‘sacrifice apart, to Teiresias alone, a black ram without blemish.’ The burning of a mock-pyre, and the sacrifice of a barren heifer, may be an Achaean rite. The motive is the placation of the dead, but the rite is quite different from that regular feeding of the dead which is so frequent in necromantic magic and in ancestor-worship.[70] The offering of a black ram to Teiresias is, however, somewhat different. It is Chthonian, but we connect it especially with the worship of ‘prophets.’ Teiresias was a prophet of the old Pelasgian religion. He belongs to a stage in the evolution of prophecy which is akin to necromancy and witchcraft and which preceded prophetic colleges, ‘magical secret societies,’[71] or divination by direct inspiration. This latter divination retained indeed traces of the older rites. Thus in the _Ion_ of Euripides[72] the pilgrims to Apollo at Delphi are required before consulting the oracle to sacrifice a πέλανος, a Chthonian offering of meal, honey, and oil. So in Vergil’s story of the visit of Aristaeus to the underworld, we find that Cyrene tells Aristaeus to offer, nine days after his return, a Chthonian sacrifice to an offended prophet, Orpheus: inferias Orphei Lethaea papavera mittes et _nigram mactabis ovem_ lucumque revises.[73] We do not therefore agree with H. Seebohm[74] when he says that the placation of Teiresias proves that offerings to the dead were regularly made by the Achaeans in their ordinary domestic life. RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF HOMICIDE