Many and various are the ideals which have gathered round the offering, as magic and religion have strangely blended. The sacred tree, whether among the Celts of the West or the Syrians of the East, is hung with rags of clothing, sometimes doubtless with the same motive which prompts similar gifts at the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, for the transference of diseases from the sick. The highest value was reached among the ancient Irish, as among the Semites, in the sacrifice of the first-born; and the long tale of human victims indicates man's passionate desire to secure in divers forms supernatural aid. They have been slain in crises of national danger by plague or war, in atonement for sin,[1] or in thanksgiving for victory. They have been immured in the foundations of houses or cities that their spirits might remain as guardians of the gates. They have been done to death in the seasons of the agricultural year that their lives might fertilise the soil and quicken the grain. They have been forced to yield their entrails to the diviner that the secrets of the future might be unveiled.
[1] The sacrifices of purification and atonement are briefly considered in Chapter VII.
Brahmanical speculation carried the ideas of sympathetic magic in association with sacrifice to their highest pitch. The Vedic hymns early formulated the idea of reciprocal { 143} obligation in the crudest terms: _Dehi me, dadāmi te_--"Give to me, I give to thee." But this simple relation was superseded in the priestly ceremonial by elaborate parallels between the daily order of the ritual and the daily order of the skies. The earthly sacrifices were the counterparts of those offered by celestial priests. The "Fathers" accomplished the rising of the sun; and when the heavenly process was imitated in the world below, the kindling of the sacred fire came to be regarded as the actual instrument for stimulating and maintaining the activities above. From a yet higher point of view the whole world had issued from the mysterious sacrifice of a cosmic Man (described in one of the latest hymns of the Rig-Veda), out of whose person the visible universe, the Veda, and the human race in four castes, had been created. In the Brahmanical theology his place was taken by Prajāpati, the "Lord of Creatures," who underwent repeated offering in every sacrifice. And just as the primeval sacrifice effected the generation of the world, so every fresh oblation was a miniature reproduction of the cosmic event. The Lord who had been dismembered must be reconstituted that he might offer himself anew; and thus sacrifice was blended with the course of Time and the period of the Year, and the perpetual dissolution and renewal of the life that animated the mighty frame of earth and heaven. In that upper world, moreover, the sacrificer, { 144} through mystical identification with Prajāpati, was enabled to prepare a new body for the celestial abode, and out of the altar-ground below to generate his future divine self in the world above.