In many if not in most of these cases, deification of the victim was involved in the theory, the victim being customarily identified with the God. [63] It was so in certain special sacrifices in pre-Christian Mexico. [64] It was so in the human sacrifices of the Khonds of Orissa, which subsisted till about the middle of last century. [65] In the latter instance, of which we have precise record, the annual victims were taken from families devoted by purchase to the function, or were bought as children and brought up for the purpose. They were "bought with a price." When definitely allotted, the males were permitted absolute sexual liberty, being regarded as already virtually deified. The victim was finally slain "for the sins of the world," and was liturgically declared a God in the process. Such rites gradually dwindled in progressive communities from ritual murders into ritual mysteries or masquerades; even as human sacrifices in general, in most parts of the world, dwindled from bodies to parts of bodies, fingers, hair, foreskins; from human to animal victims; [66] from larger to smaller animals; from these to fowls; from real animals to baked or clay models, fruits, grains, sheafs of rushes, figures, paper or other symbols. It seems usually to have been humane kings or chiefs who imposed the improvement on priesthoods. And as with the victim, so with the sacramental meal which accompanied so many sacrifices. Cannibal sacraments were once, probably, universal: they have survived down till recent times in certain regions; but with advance in civilization they early and inevitably tend to become merely symbolic. In Mexico at the advent of Cortes, both the cannibal and the symbolic forms subsisted--the former under conventional limitations; the latter in the practice of eating a baked image which had been raised on a cross and there pierced, for sanctification. [67] This "Eating of the God" was very definitely a sacrament; but so were the cannibalistic sacraments which preceded it.