On the whole, then, at the stage we have at last reached, I will not attempt to distinguish in every case between the various superposed ideas in the sacrificial ceremony. Most sacrifices seem in the last resort to be substitutes for human-divine victims. Most seem to be sacramental, and most to be more or less distinctly piacular. I do not even know whether, in reconstructing afresh for others a series of rites the ideas of which have grown slowly clear to my own mind by consideration of numerous mixed examples, I have always placed each particular fact in its best and most effective position for illustration. The elements of the problem are so involved and so closely interosculating. For instance, I do not doubt that the great Phoenician and Carthaginian holocausts of human victims, which I was compelled at first to treat most inadequately, were mainly piacular in intention; nor do I doubt that the Greek hecatomb (or holocaust of a hundred oxen) was a mitigation or attenuation {357}of such gigantic human holocausts as these, or as those attributed to the British Druids. Asclepiades states expressly that every victim was originally regarded as a substitute for human sacrifice; and so, in the Elohistic account of the origin of burnt sacrifice, a ram is accepted as a substitute for the life of Isaac, the dearly-beloved son whom the chief or king, Abraham, intends to offer as a royal victim to his tribal god. Abraham says that the god himself will provide a victim; and the ram then, as it were, voluntarily offers itself. So at the great temple of Astarte at Eryx, where the victims were drawn from the sacred or divine herds kept at the sanctuary, the chosen beast was believed of its own accord to present itself at the altar. At the Dupolia in like manner a number of bulls were driven together round the holy table; and the bull was selected which voluntarily approached and eat of the sacred cakes; thereby not only showing himself to be a willing victim, but also doubly divine, first because he took the food intended for the god, and second because he swallowed the sacred corn, itself the duplicate body of the deity. (Compare, of course, the Hebrew shewbread.) I need not pursue this line of thought any further. _It must be obvious that many sacrifices at least are sacra-mentally-piacular god-slaying ceremonies, and that in most of them the god is slain, himself to himself, in human or animal form, as an expiation of crimes against his own majesty. Nor need I point out how this complex concept lies at the very root of Pauline theology_.