and Mnevis; they turn it out of the village, with magical ceremonies, and do not allow it to return within their precincts. In many other similar poojahs, the victim is a goat. Mr. Frazer has collected, here as elsewhere, a vast number of valuable and illustrative instances. As a rule, the man-god or divine animal selected as a scapegoat is not actually slaughtered, in the fullest form of the rite; he is driven away, or flung into the sea, or left to die of hunger and thirst. Sometimes, however, he is burned as a holocaust: sometimes he is stoned, and sometimes slaughtered. And in later and less perfect forms of piacular animal sacrifice, slaughter was the rule, save where burning had ousted it. Indeed, in many cases, it is difficult to disentangle the various elements of the complex problem. People had got accustomed to certain forms of sacrifice, and mixed them up indiscriminately, so that one and the same rite seems sometimes to be sacramental, sacrificial, and piacular, all at once. Thus Dr. Robertson Smith writes of ancient Egypt: “Bulls were offered on the altar, and part of the flesh eaten in a sacrificial feast; but the sacrifice was only permitted as a piaculum, was preceded by a solemn fast, and was accompanied by public lamentation, as at the death of a kinsman.” Compare the annual mourning for Adonis; and also the similar union of sacrifice, sacrament, and atonement in the Mass, which, at the great resurrection-festival of the Christian year, Easter, is equally preceded by a fast, and by the solemn mourning of Good Friday. Now, I do not pretend to discriminate accurately in these {356}very mixed cases between one element and another in the compound rite. Often enough, all the various traits of god-slaying, of sacrament, and of public expiation are evidently present. Usually, too, the victim is slain before the altar or sacred stone of some earlier and greater god, and its blood poured forth for him. Thus, in the Hebrew ritual both of the holocaust and the sin-offering, the victim is slain at the altar, “before Jahweh,” and the effusion of blood on the sacred slab has a special significance. In the Semitic held, as Dr. Robertson Smith observes (and I would add, in most others), “_the fundamental idea of sacrifice is not that of a sacred tribute, but of joint communion between the god and his worshippers, by joint participation in the living flesh and blood of a sacred victim_.” But the identity of god and victim is often quite clear; thus, as we saw before, the sheep-Aphrodite was worshipped in Cyprus with an annual mystic and piacular sacrifice of a sheep; and the worshippers themselves were clad in sheepskins, a rite whose significance is now abundantly evident to us.