Another instructive example is given by Jevons which he takes from Bishop Caldwell’s “very careful observations in Tinnevelly[227].” He says: In Tinnevelly evil spirits have no regular priests; but when it becomes necessary, in consequence of some pressing need, to resort to the aid of these spirits, some one is chosen, or offers himself, to be the priest for the occasion, and is dressed up in the insignia of the spirit. As blood is the sacrifice to a god, so in the dance with which the evil spirits, like the tribal god, are worshipped, the dancer in an ecstasy draws his own blood and drinks that of the victim, a goat, say, and thus the spirit passes into him, and he has the power of prophecy. As the sacrifice of the sacred victims was a solemn mystery to be celebrated by night, and terminated before sunrise, so the worship of the evil spirits must be performed by night, and the general opinion is that night is the appropriate time for their worship[228]. Here we have another interesting parallel to the procedure of the priests of Baal, though, as the Canaanite worship had reached, in comparison, a higher stage, the parallel does not hold good in all particulars. But we have the pressing need of the Baal-worshippers, the sacrifice to the god, the dance round the altar, the dancers in an ecstasy drawing their own blood, and the spirit of prophecy passing into them[229]; the sacrifice takes place after sunset. They do not drink the blood of the sacrificial victim in order to become possessed by the god because this is effected by means of the ecstatic dance whereby they prophesy; and probably this points to an advance in religious conception; for the belief that union is effected by the ecstatic dance is certainly not so crass and materialistic as that which requires the essence of the deity to pass into his worshippers by drinking the blood of the sacrificial victim offered to him, and which is supposed to become identified with the god. In other respects the parallel is sufficiently striking. In each case it is clear that the ecstatic dance is an essential part of the ritual. The pressing needs which this type of sacrifice with its ecstatic dance are supposed to supply are various, but there is a curious and instructive similarity in most of the details of the ritual wherever it is practised, showing that the underlying ideas are generally the same in every case. Here is one more example. In his book on Serpent-worship in India Mr C. F. Oldham describes what he saw during the great sacrifice to _Kailang Nāg_, which was celebrated in the village of the Ravi, and which had for its object the obtaining of fine weather for the sowing,—this had been delayed owing to storms. _Kailang_, a demi-god, is supposed to control the weather. The writer says: