Her ritual was the ritual of the underworld abhorred of the Olympians. The eschara on which the holocaust to the underworld gods is burnt lies low upon the ground; the βωμός, the altar of the Olympians, rises higher and higher heavenwards. There is the like symbolism in the actual manner of the slaying of the victim. Eustathius[149], in commenting on the sacrifice of Chryses to Phoebus Apollo, when they ‘drew back the victims’ heads,’ says ‘according to the custom of the Greeks, for if they are sacrificing to those above they bend back the neck of the sacrificial animal so that it may look away towards the sky, but if to heroes or to the dead in general the victim is sacrificed looking downwards.’ Eustathius[150] again says of the prayer of Achilles, ‘by looking heavenwards he expresses vividly whither the prayer is directed, for Achilles is not praying to Zeus of the underworld, but to Zeus of the sky.’ The Christian of to-day, though he believes his God is everywhere, yet uplifts his hands to pray. For the like reason the victim for the dead was black and that for the Olympians frequently white; that for the dead sacrificed at the setting of the sun, that for the Ouranians at the dawn[151]. Upon certain holocausts, as has already been seen, the sun might not look. The ritual of the ἐναγισμοί is then of _purgation by placation of the spirits of the underworld_. The extreme need of primitive man for placation is from the stain of bloodshed; purgation from this stain is at first only obtained by the offering of the blood of the murderer himself, then by the blood of a surrogate victim applied to him. It is, I think, probable that at the back of many a mythological legend that seems to us to contain what we call ‘human sacrifice’ there lies, not the slaying of a victim for the pleasure of a Moloch-like god, but simply the appeasement of an angry ghost. So long as primitive man preserves the custom of the blood-feud, so long will he credit his dead kinsman with passions like his own. * * * * * In this connection it is interesting to note some further details of the ritual terminology of ἐναγισμοί as contrasted with that of the service of the Olympians. The sacrifice burnt that the Olympians may eat of it is θῦμα, the thing burned to smoke; the sacrificial victim slain to be eaten by the worshipper is ἱερεῖον; the victim slain for placation and purification is by correct authors called by another name, it is a σφάγιον, a thing slaughtered. The word explains itself: it is not the sacrifice burnt, not the sacred thing killed and carved for a meal, but simply the victim hacked and hewn to pieces. Such a victim was not even necessarily skinned. Of what use to carefully flay a thing doomed to utter destruction? In the _Electra_ of Euripides[152] the old man describes such a σφάγιον: ‘I saw upon the pyre with its black fleece A sheep the victim, and fresh blood outpoured.’