Having reached this point, we can see further that the case where a sacred animal, the representative of a human victim, is slaughtered before the altar of an older god is exactly equivalent to the other known case where a human victim is slaughtered before the foundation-stone of a town or village. In either case, there is a distinct renewal of the divine life; fresh blood, as it were, is instilled by the act into the ancient deity. All the other concomitants are precisely the same. Thus at the Theban sacrifice of a ram to the ram-god Amen, the worshippers bewailed the victim, as the women bewailed Adonis and Attis; and the image of Amen was finally draped in the skin of the victim, while its body was buried in a sacred coffin. At the Buphonia or sacramental ox-slaying in Athens, there was a regular trial after the victim was slain, everybody throwing the blame on one another, till at last the knife that inflicted the wound was found guilty of murder and cast into the sea. (This casting into the sea of a guilt-bearer for the community will meet us again when we come to consider the doctrine of the atonement.) So we saw that the Potraj fled after the performance of his sanguinary sacrifice; and {336}so too the slayer of the Dionysus-calf at Tenedos fled for his life when the ceremony was completed. Indeed, we get many intermediate cases, like that of the goat dressed up as a girl which was offered theanthropically to Artemis Munychia, or that of the Dionysus-calf clad in buskins, whose mother-cow was treated as a woman in child-birth. To me, all these instances are obvious attempts to palm off, as it were, on the gods a sacred animal in place of a genuine human victim. They are little more than divine legal fictions, eked out, no doubt, by the fiction of kinship between the herd and its masters. As a whole, then, we may venture to say not perhaps that all, but that a great number of sacrifices, and certainly the best-known among historic nations, are slaughters of animal substitutes for human victims; and that the flesh is sacramentally consumed by the worshippers.