There are pastoral tribes now in South Africa which live on the milk,
cheese and butter of their sheep, but only kill them as the last
necessity. In East Africa the cow is never killed, and if one falls ill,
it is put into a sort of infirmary and carefully tended. We all know the
divinity which hedges round the Hindu cow. The same compunction once
saved the labouring ox. When I was at Athens for the Archæological
Congress of 1905, Dr. R. C. Bosanquet, at that time head of the British
school, told me that he had observed among the peasants in Crete the
most intense reluctance to kill the ox of labour. In several places in
Ancient Greece all sorts of devices were resorted to in order that the
sacrificial knife might seem to kill the young bull accidentally, and
the knife—the guilty thing—was afterwards thrown into the sea. This last
custom is important; it marks the moment when the slaughter of domestic
animals, _even_ for sacrificial purposes, still caused a scruple. The
case stands thus: at first they were not killed at all; then, for a long
time, they were killed only for sacrifice. Then they were killed for
food, but far and wide relics of the original scruple may be detected as
in the common invocation of divine permission which every Moslem butcher
utters before killing an animal.
Animal and human sacrifices are one phenomenon of early manners, not
two. The people who sacrificed domestic animals to accompany their dead
generally, if not always, also sacrificed slaves for the same purpose,
and the sacrifice of fair maidens at the funerals of heroes was to give
them these as companions in another world.
I am not aware that Gift Sacrifice ever led to cannibalism nor, in its
primitive forms, did it lead to eating the flesh of the animal victim
which was buried or burnt with the body of the person whom it was
intended to honour. This is what was done by the dolmen-builders. The
earlier reindeer hunters had no domestic animals to sacrifice, and it is
unlikely that they sacrificed men. At all events, they were not
cannibals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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