I must further premise that no religion as we now know it is by any means primitive. The most savage creeds we find among us have still hundreds of thousands of years behind them. The oldest religions whose records have descended to us, like those of Egypt and of Assyria, are still remote by hundreds of thousands of years from the prime original. Cultivation itself is a very ancient and immemorial art. Few savages, even among those who are commonly described as in the hunting stage, are wholly ignorant of some simple form of seed-sowing and tillage. The few who are now ignorant of those arts show some apparent signs of being rather degenerate than primitive peoples. My own belief or suspicion is that ideas derived from the set of practices in connexion with agriculture detailed in the last two chapters have deeply coloured the life and thought of almost the whole human race, including even those rudest tribes which now know little or nothing of agriculture. But I do not lay stress upon this half-formed conviction, to justify which would lead me too far afield. I shall be content with endeavouring to suggest how far they have coloured the ideas of the greater number of existing nations. Early pastoral races seldom kill a beast except on great occasions. When they kill it, they devour it in common, all the tribe being invited to the festival. But they also eat it in fellowship with their gods; every great feast is essentially a Theoxenion, a Lectisternium, a banquet in which the {322}deities participate with mortals. It is this sense of a common feast of gods and men which gave, no doubt, the first step towards the complex idea of the sacramental meal--an idea still further developed at a later stage by the addition of the concept that the worshipper eats and drinks the actual divinity. My own belief is that all sacrificial feasts of this godeating character most probably originated in actual cannibalism; and that later an animal victim was substituted for the human meat; but I do not insist on this point, nor attempt, strictly speaking, to prove it. It is hardly more than a deeply grounded suspicion. Nevertheless, I will begin for convenience’ sake with the cannibal class of sacrifice, and will come round in time to the familiar slaughter of sheep and oxen, which in many cases is known to have supplanted a human offering.