|WE {318}have now arrived at a point where we can more fully understand _those curious ideas of sacrifice and sacrament which lie at the root of so much that is essential in the Jewish, the Christian, and most other religions_. Mr. Galton tells us that to the Damaras, when he travelled among them, all meat was common property. No one killed an ox except as a sacrifice and on a festal occasion; and when the ox was killed, the whole community feasted upon it indiscriminately. This is but a single instance of a feeling almost universal among primitive pastoral people. Cattle and other domestic animals, being regarded as sacred, are rarely killed; and when they are killed, they are eaten at a feast as a social and practically religious rite--in short, sacramentally. I need not give instances of so well-known a principle; I will content myself with quoting what Dr. Robertson Smith says of a particular race: “Among the early Semites generally, no slaughter was legitimate except for sacrifice.” Barbaric herdsmen, indeed, can hardly conceive of men to whom flesh meat is a daily article of diet. Mr. Galton found the idea very strange to his Damaras. Primitive pastoral races keep their domestic animals mainly for the sake of the milk, or as beasts of burden, or for the wool and hair; they seldom kill one except for a feast, at which the gods are fellow-partakers. Indeed, it is probable, as the sequel will suggest, that domestic animals were originally kept as totems or ancestor-gods, and that the habit of eating {319}the meat of sheep, goats, and oxen has arisen mainly out of the substitution of such a divine animal-victim for the divine human-victim of earlier usage. Our butchers’ shops have their origin in mitigated sacrificial cannibalism. Sacrifice, regarded merely as offering to the gods, has thus, I believe, two distinct origins. Its earliest, simplest, and most natural form is that whose development we have already traced,--the placing of small articles of food and drink at the graves of ancestors or kings or revered fellow-tribesmen. That from a very early period men have believed the dead to eat and drink, whether as corpse, as mummy, as ghost of buried friend, or as ethereal spirit of cremated chieftain, we have already seen with sufficient frequency. About the origin of these simplest and most primitive sacrifices, I think, there can be little doubt. Savages offer at the graves of their dead precisely those ordinary articles of food which they consumed while living, without any distinction of kind; and they continue to offer them in the same naïve way when the ghost has progressed to the status of one of the great gods of the community.