How this strange custom originates we may guess from Mr. {325}Wyatt Gill’s description of a New Guinea funeral. “The women lacerated their faces and beat their breasts most affectingly,” he says; “and then, in the madness of their grief, pressed the matter out of the wounded thigh, and smeared it over their faces and persons, and even licked it up.” Of the Koiari corpses he says: “A fire is kept burning day and night at the head and feet for months. The entire skin is removed by means of the thumb and forefinger, and the juices plastered all over the face and body of the operator,--parent, husband, or wife of the deceased. The fire gradually desiccates the flesh, so that little more than the skeleton is left.” This naturally leads on to eating the dead, which indeed is practised elsewhere in New Guinea. But if men eat the bodies of their fathers, who are their family and household gods, they will also naturally eat the bodies of the artificial gods of cultivation, or of the temporary kings who die for the people. _By eating the body of a god, you absorb his divinity; he and you become one; he is in you and inspires you. This is the root-idea of sacramental practice; you eat your god by way of complete union; you subsume him in yourself; you and he are one being_. Still, how can you eat your god if you also bury him as a corn-spirit to use him as seed? The Gonds supply us with the answer to that obvious difficulty. For, as we saw, they sprinkle the blood of the victim over the ploughed field or ripe crop, and then they sacramentally devour his body. Such a double use of the artificial god is frequently to be detected, indeed, through the vague words of our authorities. We see it in the Potraj ceremony, where the blood of the lamb is drunk by the officiating priest, while the remainder of the animal is buried beside the altar; we see it in the numerous cases where a portion of the victim is eaten sacramentally, and the rest burned and scattered over the fields, which it is supposed to fertilise. You eat your god in part, so as to imbibe his divinity; but you bury {326}him in part, so as to secure at the same time his fertilising qualities for your corn or your vineyard. I admit that all this is distinctly mystic; but mystery-mongering and strange reduplication of persons, with marvellous identifications and minute distinctions, have always formed much of the stock-in-trade of religion. If cults were all plain sailing throughout, what room for faith?--there would be less to engage the imagination of the votary. And now let us return awhile to our Mexican instances.