Though {334}it breaks for a moment the thread of my argument, I find it impossible not to mention here the curious parallel case of the judicial sacrifice among the Battas of Sumatra, which is the human analogue of the Arabian camel-sacrament. Only in this instance, as in so many others, sacrifice and punishment merge into one another. “With them the adulterer, the night-thief, and those who had treacherously attacked a town, a village, or a particular person, were condemned to be eaten by the people. They were tied to three posts; their legs and their arms were stretched out in the shape of a St. Andrew’s cross;and then, when a signal was given, the populace rushed upon the body and cut it into fragments with hatchets or with knives, or perhaps more simply with their nails and their teeth. The strips so torn off were devoured instantly, all raw and bloody; they were merely dipped into a cocoanut bowl containing a sauce prepared beforehand of lemon-juice and salt. In the case of adultery, the outraged husband had the right of choosing first what piece he liked best. The guests invited to the feast performed this work with so much ardour that they often tore and hurt each other.” I do not think we can read this account without being struck by its close analogy to many of our previous sacrifices, both of human corn-gods and of sacred animals. The criminal is here nothing more than the substitute for a holy human victim. And now we must also remember that in most countries the gods were housemates of their worshippers, present at all times in every home, and partakers of every meal, side by side with the living. They lived in the house, as still in New Guinea. Libations to them were poured from every cup; food was offered to their ghosts or skulls or wooden images at every family gathering. The ordinary feasts were thus mere enlarged festal gatherings, at which a victim was sacrificially slain and sacramentally eaten; and _the visitors believed they were eating the body and blood of the god to their own salvation_. Greater sacrifices, like the {335}hecatombs, or the heroic Indian horse-sacrifice, must have been relatively rare; but in all of them we see clear proof that the victim was regarded as a sacred animal, that is to say a god, in one of his embodiments. Clear evidence of this equivalence is seen in the fact that the worshippers often clad themselves in the skin of the victim, as the Mexicans did in the skin of the annual god. Sometimes the hide is even used to deck the idol. In the Cyprian sacrifice of a sheep to the sheep-goddess Aphrodite, the celebrants wore the skin of the sheep; while the Assyrian Dagon-worshipper offered the fish-sacrifice to the fish-god, clad in a fish-skin. Of similar import is doubtless the ægis or goat-skin of Athena, envisaged as a goat-goddess, and the skins used in the Dionysiac mysteries. I do not hesitate to affiliate all these on a primitive usage like that of the Mexican cannibal sacrifice.