Indeed, I learn from another source that “the Samoyedes feed the wooden images of the dead”; while an instance from Erman helps further to confirm the same conclusion. According to that acute writer, among the Ostyaks {131}of Eastern Siberia there is found a most interesting custom, in which, says Dr. Tylor, “we see the transition from the image of the dead man to the actual idol.” When a man dies, they set up a rude wooden image of him in the yurt, which receives offerings at every meal and has honours paid to it, while the widow continually embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these images are buried at the end of three years or so: but sometimes “the image of a shaman (native sorcerer),” says Tylor, “is set up permanently, and remains as a saint for ever.” For “saint” I should say “god”; and we see the transformation at once completed. Indeed, Erman adds acutely about the greater gods of the Ostyaks: “That these latter also have a historical origin, that they were originally monuments of distinguished men, to which prescription and the interest of the Shamans gave by degrees an arbitrary meaning and importance, seems to me not liable to doubt.” With regard to the blood smeared upon such Siberian wooden idols, it must be remembered that bowls of blood are common offerings to the dead; and Dr. Robertson Smith himself, no friendly witness in this matter, has compared the blood-offerings to ghosts with those to deities. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, for example, the ghosts drink greedily of the sacrificial blood; and libations of gore form a special feature in Greek offerings to heroes. That blood was offered to the sacred stones we have already seen; and we noticed that there as here it was specially smeared upon the parts representing the mouth. Offerings of blood to gods, or pouring of blood on altars, are too common to demand particular notice; and we shall also recur to that part of the subject when we come to consider the important questions of sacrifice and sacrament. I will only add here that according to Maimonides the Sabians looked on blood as the nourishment of the gods; while the Hebrew Jahweh asks indignantly in the fiftieth {132}Psalm, “Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?”