This essay was written for Professor Richard Davidson’s Old Testament course at Emmanuel College. At the end of the essay Frye wrote, “for bibliography see next essay,” the next essay being “The Fertility Cults.” In a letter to Helen Kemp, dated 1 January 1935, Frye reported, “I am doing some work in Old Testament for Davidson that should knock his eye out—connecting it with Frazer’s Golden Bough.” In addition to these two essays Frye may also be referring to “The Jewish Background of the New Testament,” which he wrote for Davidson as well and which draws on Frazer. In any case, both this and the following essay were written for Old Testament 2, which, like other courses at Emmanuel, ran for the entire academic year. Ordinarily, papers were submitted at the end of each term. During this time Frye, who had been appointed a reader in the English department at Victoria College, was teaching two courses, English lb and 2b. Because of his teaching load, he received permission to submit papers late.1 This dispensation, along with the note on the bibliography and the information in his letter to Helen Kemp, means that Frye almost certainly submitted “The Concept of Sacrifice” and “The Fertility Cults” at the end of the second term of his first year. Frye received an “A” for the paper, the typescript for which is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 13.
The fundamental problem of experience is the problem of the good life: how best self-development may be integrated with the social relationship. The religious attitude to this claims that by communion with God man achieves the highest possible synthesis of the separate and sometimes conflicting claims of the individual and the group; that in the perfect life the highest freedom coincides with absolute subjection to necessity. All human progress, as a dynamic religion conceives it, is bound up in the enunciation and actualization of this ideal. Christianity specifically claims that the enunciation commenced with the dawn of the reasoning faculty in the history of mankind, whenever that occurred, and became finally and fully stated by Jesus. The force which made this development possible was that of the Holy Spirit working in man, becoming articulate with the prophets, identical with Jesus, and associated with the tradition emanating from Jesus. This dogma formerly had to be stated in abstract theological terms, but since the rise of science, and in particular since the growth of the evolutionary concept ushered in by science, it is now possible to fill it out with the concrete verifications afforded by a scientific approach to it.
We at the present day see human history as a thin slice of organic biological development, a slow, long, painful ascent from beast or near beast to man. The Old Testament we see recording part of this process, tracing the growth of a race of people from savagery to civilization. Religion has, of course, developed with mankind; or, more accurately, it has developed mankind. In its earliest forms religion necessarily takes on many naive, crude, disgusting, and bestial forms, just as the general pattern of history does. That it is now a compulsion on the highest ideals of twentieth-century man is a truth not affected by scientific discoveries about its primitive forms, of course; which is an error a good many fall into even yet.
Religion is primarily concerned with establishing communion between man and God. Now it is evident that, while man is naturally a gregarious animal, the herd instinct is far more fundamental a one in the lower levels of culture. The horror of isolation for the savage, the absolute and irrevocable doom of anyone cut off from the protection of the tribe, is more immediately obvious than for us, with whom the social environment is infinitely more complex and tenuous. And if in our discovery of God we owe an especial debt to the Hebrews, that has much to do with the fact that the desert nomad has an even more ineradicable sense of communal obligation than any other type of primitive. It is this which makes the virtue of hospitality so prominent among desert tribes, and even their proverbial restlessness and love of war is to some extent at least an outcome of the feeling of the sharp discrimination of the tribe from anything possibly hostile to it. Consequently, religion at this stage is a social phenomenon. The whole moral aspect of religion is only implicit, not explicit, morality being relevant to a more individualized and differentiated social development. All religion in the primitive community can, therefore, be subsumed under the heading of sacrifice, the action in which man establishes communion with God insofar as he conceives him as immanent, and gives something to him insofar as he conceives him as transcendent.
Communion and gift: these are the primary concepts of sacrifice. It seems most logical, however, to adopt Robertson Smith’s hypothesis, that sacrifice begins in communion. The savage is a thoroughgoing materialist, and God is a purely material life-force sustaining the solidarity of the group and ensuring its continuance. For the nomad in particular the god is a tribal god, a patriarchal god, the essence of solidarity, the superkinsman. As this life-force is material, it must be manifested in some concrete living object, whether man, animal, or vegetable (or, of course, even a stone, which is thought to have some life in it because of some curious shape).2 The most materialistic way of establishing communion with such an object is to absorb its body into the worshipper’s body: in short, as Mr. Micawber would say, to eat it.3 Most primitives believe that by eating an animal one acquires the qualities of that animal. It is, of course, true that the savage feels himself surrounded by vague impersonal forces, some of which are without doubt hostile and malicious. The Old Testament contains many references to demons, though we are more apt to find an elaborated demonology in a period of later syncretism. There is the mysterious Lilith of Isaiah 34 [v. 14], the succuba or night-hag that will haunt the ruined Edom; there is Azazel or the demon of the waste, the Minotaur who devoured the scapegoats;4 there are terrifying and repulsive animals, like he-goats, ostriches, jackals, and hawks, that become theriomorphic demons. But these are evil spirits: it is the demon who is bribed with offers of food, who is cajoled and bamboozled with charms and spells. There the leading idea is that of separation, of warding off. This contrast is brought out very clearly in the Passover, in which the god is eaten at the paschal meal and the evil spirits warded off with the blood sprinkled over the door. The sign of the cross and the holy water serve the same apotropaic purpose in the Catholic Eucharist. This is, however, a purely negative and defensive reaction to a mysterious mana, and the primitive is more courageous than that. He wants to make some positive use of an energy obviously stronger than he to reinforce his own powers. To assume, as was done by E.B. Tylor, an early writer on this subject, that sacrifice begins in gift rather than communion, the gift being essentially a bribe, is to ignore this whole point.5 We have said that both ideas, of communion and of gift, are inherent in sacrifice. But logically this would only arise at a time when the god was conceived as a mysterious transcendent force which was only partly incarnate in the object sacrificed, and continued living after its death, so that the sacrifice could be both a meal of the god and a meal with the god. Such a conception seems to be a later development than the pure animism which thinks of the soul of the god as resident entirely within the body of the victim.
What is the most fitting object to sacrifice? With most primitives the logical victim would be the king—the man who holds together the tribe. He who is the incarnation of the solidarity of the group is necessarily its god. The tribe can last only as long as the divine force in the king which makes him king can last. Hence, the king is hedged about by taboos; he begets a son and transmits his virility to him. The fortunes of the tribe are bound up with him: if his virility wanes, then, by the most elementary principles of sympathetic magic, the energy of the tribe declines. So, as soon as the king begins to show signs of failing, he is killed, his flesh is eaten to permeate the tribe with his effluence, his blood and ashes, if the tribe be an agricultural one, sown over the land to ensure fertility. But the slaying of the divine king has left little if any trace on Hebrew culture: perhaps because their early nomadic life made the preservation of fertility a less insistent problem. The god is then conceived to be manifest in what sustains existence, that is, food. Hence, the staple food of the tribe contains or is intimately associated with the god of the tribe. With a hunting people, animals such as the boar or deer are apt to be, thus, canonized; with a pastoral people, sheep, cattle, or goats; with an agricultural people, corn, vines, or trees. This embodiment of the god in theriomorphic forms is a genuine cultural advance on cannibalism, and it entails an increase of conscious awareness of the outer world on the part of the primitive. The Hebrews begin with the dividing of a common object of food among the worshippers, with some of it restored to the god who embodied himself in it. The complete assimilation of the god-animal and the divine king ideas, in the social organization we know as totemism, may or may not have existed among the Israelites: Robertson Smith thinks so,6 later writers are not so sure.
There are many motives in primitive sacrifice: communion, propitiation, bribery, feeding of the god, establishment of a blood bond, reinforcing the efficacy of a curse, obtaining of an oracle, transferring of a disease to an animal, preserving a newly built house, and so on: but all of these fall under the two fundamental categories of communion and gift, or an application of either idea. Probably sacrifice starts simply with man’s fondness for company and for a feast, the feast being the only occasion on which the idea of group cohesion becomes evident, through relaxation of activity. Refreshments are the mainstay of social activity, as such, in any level of civilization, and there is no reason to suppose that primitives at the very beginning of conscious life had any loftier spiritual attitude than, say, we evidence toward Thanksgiving. Even when the idea evolves of the critically important ritual feast with overtones of a larger significance, the meal is retained. It does not occur to the primitive that the god does not necessarily eat or drink. He leaves food for the god, who eats it up in the form of a jackal, vulture, or hyena. The Old Testament records an era in which the god was thought of smelling the food of the sacrifice with relish: perhaps the transfer from the appeal to the sense of taste to that of smell represents an access of spirituality. When the idea of an etherealized and transcendent god has fairly well set in, the offering is burned, being sent up to the deity in the form of smoke. When the ritual is brought indoors, the burnt offering becomes sublimated into the burning of incense. The Hebrews distinguished two forms of sacrifice: the zebah or communion sacrifice, and the ’olan or burnt offering gift. But there were several ways of establishing a communion with the god beside the communal meal. According to primitive physiology, power or energy is resident in the flesh in a more or less quiescent form, but the liquid or running parts, the blood and fat, represent the essential life. The fact that a tribe lives together means that it exists as a blood brotherhood. Hence, the god is bound to the tribe sometimes through the ritual of blood brotherhood. The god-animal is slain and the flesh eaten, but the blood and fat are reverently preserved, as in the Passover. The victim is usually slain on an altar, or some stone which will hold the blood: occasionally we find stones with holes bored in them to let the blood seep through, back to the earth mother, perhaps, or the spirit in the stone. This may be reason, too, for the curious little cup-shaped marks found in rocks, at Gezer, for example.7 The life, that is, the blood and fat, is reverently preserved when the victim is slain, wildly paradoxical as that may sound. Sometimes the idea of the blood brotherhood is completed by sprinkling some of the blood on the worshippers: in even more logical cases the worshippers drink the blood, a practice most notoriously associated with the Mithraic cult. The fat of a sacrificial victim is frequently rubbed on the king at his succession (originally, of course, the fat of his unfortunate predecessor) or on an adolescent undergoing the rite of admission to adulthood at puberty. Again, the blood brotherhood compact with the god might be made from the blood of the worshippers rather than by that of a victim, and of this practice the mutilations of the priests of the Baal mocked by Elijah [1 Kings 18:27] may be a reminiscence. But the distinction between the body and blood, one divided and broken and the other poured out, goes back to the mistiest regions of antiquity, though historically the libation of pouring blood is later than the offering of food.
It sounds like special pleading to me to call this rite at any stage purely magical. The ascription of a Benthamite self-interest philosophy to the savage may be natural enough to a Benthamite anthropologist, but does not make for catholicity. Surely the first datum of intelligent consciousness is the perception of some cosmic mana in the environment. The moment man becomes critically aware of the world, he is aware of a rhythmic recurrence of seasons and heavenly bodies, an organic living world independent of his will which augurs a larger control of forces than he himself has. The breaking of a taboo might disrupt the workings of an inconceivably huge and delicately adjusted machine. No matter how anthropomorphic a god may be, his power must be literally incalculable. All calamities, whether earthquakes, famine, storms, or war, are the result of an angry god. The feeling of helplessness, the sense of guilt, and the necessity to make amends, can hardly ever be totally absent from the concept of sacrifice. No doubt this is at first a matter of experience rather than remorse: in fact if it were not so the prophets would have never overthrown sacrifice, and we should be sacrificing yet. But the germ of religious development is there. Inequalities are present in the world. Consequently, mankind, according to the great hypothesis of Loisy which has been accepted by the majority of reputable scientists, reaches monotheism by a process of induction, rising from polydaemonism to polytheism, from polytheism to monolatry, and from monolatry to the dogma pronouncing God the Father Almighty.8 There appears to be no instinctive monotheism among primitives; the only thing that looks like it is the worshipper’s desire to flatter the god he is addressing by telling him that he is the greatest of all gods, which is the approach we call henotheism. In most of the Old Testament Yah-weh is subject to all the weaknesses of man: anger, forgetfulness, repentance, short-sightedness, sacrifice of means to the end, and so forth. He has apparently a purely arbitrary dislike of Cain and like of Abel; he is apt to overlook sin unless it is brought to his attention; he will, in order to carry out his aim, cause people to sin; he will be sorry for overhasty action and make amends. God the Father, of Christianity, is implicit in the very dawn of the moral sense, and Jesus’ conception owes not a little of its dignity and subtlety to the fact that it recaptures the freshness of an original religion not yet disillusioned by civilization. God is far more human and understandable in the J narrative9 than in Amos, who, though extolling nomadic virtues, is dealing with an overcivilized and decadent people. The fussy, scolding, irascible, benevolent deity who put his trespassing children out of his garden but makes coats of skin for them, who checks his bullying son Cain but forbids the others to take advantage of him, is nearer Jesus in spirit than the anachronistic God who creates the sun, moon, and stars chiefly to provide a calendar for Jewish ritualistic observance.10 This point is perhaps important in restoring a balance to our perspective of the psychological basis of atonement. We are too apt to think of the piaculative offering in terms of the unrelieved grimness we adopt today in giving money to foreign missions. The ordinary healthy human being cannot permanently think of himself as crushed and prostrate before a tyrant god. The naivety of some of the attempts recorded in the Old Testament to conceal a somewhat childlike sense of guilt and appease an angry but soft-hearted and indulgent Yahweh can be better appreciated by those who are not troubled with an écrasez l’infâme11 complex.
At first, no doubt, the sacrifice, being a special rite, was adopted on a special occasion. But for any idea of permanence to be retained, which, of course, was necessary to the basic postulate of the sacrificial act, the haphazard and occasional sacrifice had to be subordinated to a regular one. Something had to control it to make it repeated and recurrent. Now the whole religious aspect of the idea of entering into the god is basically an impulse to achieve a larger unity or balance in life, if on a subconscious level, and this attempt obviously carries with it the incipient perception of the fundamental rhythms of nature. The elaboration of a calendar is a very early and purely religious proceeding: the rhythm of the sun which forms the day, the rhythm of the moon which forms the month, the rhythm of the seasons which forms the year, are bound up with festivals and ceremonies. In particular the continually waxing and waning moon is thought to be a leading principle of growth and decay: man should, therefore, work when the moon is in rhythm and stop work when it is in repose: in other words, on its phases. Thus, the week grows out of the month, and the Sabbath, which originally was a full-moon festival, became the consecrated day. It has been conjectured by some that the alphabet, the symbolic structure of communication, owes its origin to a lunar calendar.12
It is, as we have said, the mode of life that determines the attitude to religion, as far as the primitive, whose thought is so strongly conditioned by his environment, is concerned. In considering the development of the Hebrew cultus we have to take account of the impact an agricultural religion, as practised by the Canaanite peasants, made upon the invading nomadic tribes from Kadesh and Sinai. Now for nomads the moon is the primary object of adoration, as their lives do not especially depend upon the ripening of crops: the sun-god and the storm-god are alike deities indifferent when they are not merely destructive and blighting. Hence, the lunar feasts constitute the starting point of nomadic sacrifice, which explains why the Sabbath was so deeply ingrained a custom.
The most important nomadic sacrifice, however, is the Passover, which, though it suffered an eclipse of some centuries after the settlement in Canaan, gradually emerged as the central sacrifice upon which everything else converged. The nomads depend upon sheep and goats for their existence, and they think of the year as revolving, not around the seeding and harvesting of crops, but around the lambing and shearing of ewes. At the spring equinox, therefore, the firstling of a pastoral flock would be sacrificed to ensure increase throughout the year. For the firstling of the flock, in representing the advent of life and fertility, would according to primitive ideas be the incarnation of fertility, or the divine spirit of life. The lamb was, therefore, eaten in communion, probably with the moon, whose waxing and waning make it an obvious symbol of organic growth. This would explain why the Passover was held at night on full-moon day, though after the settlement in Canaan, when the family replaced the tribe as the social unit, it becomes a purely household feast. There was also a sheep-shearing festival in the agricultural period which probably goes back to nomadic times, although the nomads tore the wool off with their hands. It is easy to see that in nomadic times there would be comparatively little of the piaculative element in sacrifice. One thinks of these festivals as entirely unconnected with the terrified, cringing worship of the arbitrary and capricious god of the harvest, as comparatively free from the masochistic obscenities of an appeal to nature rather than to a protector of the tribe. One thinks of them as free and easy festivals in which the members of the tribe drew together with a warm sense of comradeship, secure in a mutual trust of the Yahweh who held them together. Our word hallelujah seems to be etymologically a synthesis of the ideas of the appearance of the new moon, the shout of joy raised to greet it, and the praise of Yahweh.
In the Canaanites the Hebrews found an agricultural peasantry and an agricultural religion. Now where the nomad leads a roaming life, the peasant is rooted in the soil; and where the nomad’s social unit is the unit of the tribe, the agricultural social unit is the family or household, so that Yahweh, the great tribal god of the Hebrews, found a formidable rival in the household god Baal. Again, where the nomadic god watches over the raising of sheep and goats, the agricultural god is invoked to provide a fertile soil and a good crop. These two aspects of Canaanite religion, the household god and the fertility cult, exerted a powerful disintegrating influence upon the worship of Yahweh, and the vivid and dramatic story of the conflict between these two deities is the pre-exilic history of Israel. Obviously the fertility cult represents the more communal side of religion, and the household worship the more localized side. Consequently, the former would be less important than the latter in pre-Hebraic Palestine, where social organization was so tenuous, and by the time the Hebrews arrived, worship had centred on Baal as a local spirit, the dying-god myth always having something exotic about it.
We have seen that the necessity for regulating sacrifice implies an observance of the procession of the heavenly bodies and the seasons. Of course, the agricultural year revolves around the seeding and harvesting of crops. To the primitive anything alive has a spirit; the crop, therefore, has a spirit, and the soil which produces it must have a spirit too. As the soil bears the crop, the crop-spirit exists to the soil-spirit in the relation of son or daughter to mother. And as the crop (the crop here is only used for a more specific illustration: the concept includes all deciduous vegetation) disappears in the autumn and reappears in the spring, in all agricultural primitive communities there arose the myth of the young god or goddess dying every year and reviving in the spring. In Syria the dying god’s name was Adonis (which means lord; the cognate form is Dan); in Babylonia it was Tammuz; in Phrygia Attis; in Egypt Osiris; in Attica Dionysus. Sometimes the vegetation spirit was a goddess, as with the Greek Kore or Persephone. And as the mother or earth spirit was thought of as bewailing the loss of her son or daughter, as Venus did of Adonis, Cybele of Attis, Isis of Osiris, Demeter of Kore, then according to sympathetic magic women were set to bewail the death as well. The wailing for Adonis is a stock literary allusion; and the weeping of the women for Tammuz, in the very gates of the Temple, brought a curt and contemptuous reference from Ezekiel [8:14]. Similarly, doubtless Baal, and certainly Dagon, go back to some such similar myth in prehistoric times, Baal being originally a god of fertility and Dagon always being a corn-god.
Now, again according to sympathetic magic, something which represents the spirit of the dying god has to be slain when the god dies. This would originally be, as we have seen, the divine king; later this fierce rule was sufficiently relaxed to allow the king to substitute a son, preferably a first-born son, or, still later, a captive, someone chosen by lot, or even a volunteer. Some think that the Old Testament records the change from child sacrifice to animal sacrifice, particularly in the story of the origin of the Passover [Exodus 12] and in the story of Abraham’s substituting a ram for Isaac on Mount Moriah [Genesis 22:13]. Certainly child sacrifice was prevalent among the Canaanites. The hideous and nightmarish orgies associated with the worship of Moloch are familiar to everyone, and skeletons have been found of children, sometimes cut in two and sometimes buried alive, in pre-Hebraic Palestine. The Hebrews, naturally, abhorred child sacrifice; but there are enough references to it in the Bible to show that it was deeply implanted in the peasant soul of the Canaanite, and transmitted to the Israelites. Not till the exile, if then, did the people get away from the idea that to sacrifice a child was the supreme, the exceptional sacrifice, to be used only as a last resort, but certain to be powerfully efficacious if used. The animal sacrifice they considered adequate ordinarily, but in the last analysis a makeshift, and they felt that in times of stress such as a siege, or as a result of an extraordinary crime, only the sacrifice of a child would answer. Thus, the King of Moab sacrificed his eldest son when his capital was besieged [2 Kings 3:27], and the practice is attacked as a contemporary scandal by Micah [6:7]. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter belongs, ostensibly, to this category of superlative bribe, being the fulfilment of a monstrous bargain with the god [Judges 11:34–40], such as was all too frequent in the ancient world (the Middle Ages were sufficiently advanced to confine such compacts to the devil); though the reference to the unfortunate girl as “bewailing her virginity” [Judges 11:37] suggests that she may have been sacrificed in the role of a Kore or an Iphigenia.
The Israelites were almost unique, however, in that they did not adopt the practice of the annual fertility sacrifice and seem to have reduced it to this haphazard and extraordinary status among the Canaanites. In other countries the advance of civilization caused the sacrifice festival gradually to soften down into some comparatively harmless clowning such as we find in the contemporary carnivals of Latin Europe. The Roman festival of the Saturnalia was of this nature, as was a parallel Sacaea festival at Babylon. When the Jews returned from Babylon, they brought this custom with them in the feast of Purim, myth attached, and worked it into the aetiological-historical form of Esther, a form very frequent in the Pentateuch. Esther and Mordecai are the Babylonian Ishtar and Marduk; Vashti and Haman are two Elamite gods. Frazer has thrown out the suggestion that Jesus may have been crucified in the role of Haman, or in that of the victim of the Roman Saturnalia, which was not the good-humoured carnival in the provinces that it was in Rome, or as a result of the coincidence of both, depending on what can be deduced from the calendar.13 If this is true, the symbolism of the crucifixion as the last act of the old world and the first of the new, the end of the pagan world and the commencement of the Christian, takes on an even more vivid and powerful significance.
A far more dangerous opponent to Yahwism was the cult of the household god. “Baal” is a general term meaning the presiding spirit, something like our “genius.” The baal of the household corresponded to the lares and penates of the Romans,14 and, with the growth of an Israelite peasantry, the tendency to a localized image worship was very strong. The main attribute of Baal was his authority as a corn-god; Hosea has to insist that the corn comes from Yahweh and not Baal [2:8]. The necessity for the Israelites to unite in a common bond against outside aggression gave Yahweh the victory over Baal. Among the Phoenicians the baals grew into eponymous ancestors of tribes or cities. Moloch means judge, Adonis, lord. The importance of this for sacrifice is the growth of a tendency to regard a building as an abode of a spirit, which resulted in a widespread custom of burying the body of a child or captive under the threshold, or, sometimes, under the gate of a city.
When Israelite civilization got fairly well under way, the only important sacrifices became the ritual or calendar sacrifices. There were many subordinate motives in sacrifice superseded by the development of the cultus, and we can hardly do more here than to record the fact that they existed. Sacrifices in the various forms of bribery were extremely varied. In war, the enemy and all his possessions were sacrificed to the tribal god in advance, and after a victory to destroy everything belonging to the enemy was only fair play. This is, of course, the reason for the bewildering ferocity ascribed to the Israelites in the wars of Joshua and Saul. Again, the criminal in primitive society was primarily a man who had broken a taboo, the moral code of early societies, so that his execution was considered as to some extent a sacrifice and was accompanied by the usual rituals. Sacrifice as the fulfilment of a vow was very frequent; in time of stress man is likely to offer his god anything in return for help. Some special sacrifices were, of course, piaculative, either intended to avert the wrath of the deity or express genuine contrition. Of course, the great weakness of gift-sacrifice is its assumption that the god needs and can use what his petitioner can use. Otherwise there is little point in offering food, clothing, weapons, or something containing a life-force which will supplement the god’s. The prophets pointed out that no god at all worthy of worship could possibly use anything of this, and thereupon the gift-sacrifice became an exploded superstition.
But if the Hebrews did not adopt the fertility sacrifices of the Canaanites officially, they borrowed many festivals from them. They learned to leave part of the crop (the abode of the corn spirit) unharvested. The harvest and vintage festivals now took the place of the nomadic Pass-over; and the materials of the communion meal became less flesh, blood, and fat and more bread, wine, and oil. The vintage festival was morally perhaps the most reprehensible of all; its Bacchanalian and orgiastic features, its exploiting of sacred prostitution, brought it under fire in the prophetic period, so that wine came to be forbidden in sacrifice. There were three harvest festivals: the feast of unleavened bread at the beginning, the feast of first-fruits at the height of the season, the later Pentecost, and the feast of ingathering or tabernacles at the end. All these feasts had legends which assigned a historical origin to them. The feast of unleavened bread absorbed the Passover for a time. When the postexilic cultus was firmly established, we have a feast of dedication, apparently originally a solstitial festival like our Christmas, the New Year festival, and the Day of Atonement which came to be more or less fused with the New Year, after the Hebrews moved the latter back from the feast of ingathering or booths. The New Year festival was originally accompanied by the blowing of horns, presumably to drive away evil spirits, as is done today in China, who may be supposed to be especially numerous on that day. The high ethical and piaculative tone of the contemporary Day of Atonement is, of course, a later development.
One very important result of sacrifice in the primitive world remains to be noted: unfortunately it is probably less true of the Hebrews than of other peoples. We have seen that sacrifice is the embryo of all religious development, which must mean that it contains approaches to all forms of the good. Plato divided the good into the just, the beautiful, and the true, which give us three systematic developments, morals, art, and science. We have dealt briefly with the moral and the scientific (i.e. magical) aspects of sacrifice; it remains to consider the artistic. Now art is concerned with presenting a selected unity of experience; the work of art is an entity in which each detail is significant and relevant to the whole. Therefore, art is the static individual expression of a religious impulse, or a criticism of religion; for religion is concerned with the achievement of this unity in life itself. Art, dealing as it does with the imposition of a pattern upon experience, is ultimately based upon patterns of the ultimate data of experience, space and time. Hence, the arts may be divided into the temporal arts based on rhythm, and the spatial or plastic arts based on symmetry or proportion.
The plastic arts begin in attempts to reproduce the image of the god, hoping to gain some power over him or from him by possessing his picture, which according to primitive thought is a part of him, just as his name is. Painting and sculpture are basically iconic arts, beginning in cave drawings and totem carvings. The Hebrews made little contribution here; Yahwism had no iconic tradition in the desert, and idolatry, though widespread, was never taken very seriously. Yahweh might be occasionally represented as a bull; theriomorphic images were common enough in the eighth century for Hosea to resent them [8:4–6], but for the most part images were merely little household statuettes, or such personal ornaments as earrings, amulets, and so forth, which probably had a common apotropaic origin.
Sympathetic magic, however, holds that the god can be compelled or approached, not only through possession of part of him, but by some act in rhythmic rapport with him. Hence, the sacrifice is usually accompanied by appropriate gestures and movements, which latter eventually develop into a procession around the sacrificial object to help impregnate it with the divine affluence. Only when we understand this impulse toward a rhythmic expression of worship can we grasp the extensive use of swinging as a sacrificial rite, such as we have today in the Catholic censer, or the Jewish practice of waving a sheaf in the air at Pentecost. From spasmodic and rudimentary gestures of sympathetic magic, such as leaping into the air to promote the growth of crops, there gradually develops the dance, which frequently consists in re-enacting the adventures of the god invoked. The dance is both musical and dramatic; musical originally because of the need for noise against the powers of darkness, and later because it is the most ultimately symbolic of all arts. The Chronicler’s sole cultural interest is in music, and it seems to have been the only art to which the Jews were much addicted. With the Greeks Orpheus was both the supreme musician and the supreme theologian. The Jews did not develop the drama out of the dance, but the Greeks did. The word tragedy means a goat-song, and was originally a goat sacrifice like the scapegoat offering to Azazel among the Hebrews [Leviticus 16:8]. The tragic drama is a spiritual sublimation of the inward essence of all sacrifice. For sacrifice, like all religion, is concerned with the reintegration of individual and social imperatives in God. In communion the worshipper projects his soul into the divine being of the sacrificial object, just as the spectator projects his soul into the tragic hero, who is, at any rate in Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, a figure of superhuman proportions. In the ritual slaying the worshipper is conscious of the communal solidarity of his religion, just as in the fall of the tragic hero into his environment the spectator experiences a catharsis or purgation of spirit in his self-abnegation. The development of comedy out of the festival or carnival is just as logical, but too intricate and irrelevant for further discussion. Music and drama are the two great religious arts, the communal performances of an ensemble for an audience, which in our own culture have been born from the womb of the Christian Church. The greatest works of art the human race has ever seen or is ever likely to see are the two colossal musical and dramatic structures of Bach—the B Minor Mass and the St. Matthew Passion. It can hardly be altogether an accident that the latter of these is the artistic presentation of the supreme sacrifice, and the former that of the supreme symbol of it.
With the coming of the prophets the literal and physical imagination of the primitive becomes impossible in an advancing society, and a more spiritual conception takes its place. Instead of the mere desire to placate an angry god, there comes the conception of contrition, humility, and atonement. Instead of a god demanding food and strength, there arises a God requiring complete spiritual surrender. Instead of the god of the tribe, there comes the Creator of the world. Instead of a communion designed to ensure a renewal of physical strength, there comes a communion leading to a spiritual rebirth, or salvation. Instead of seeking promises or succor for the adventures of the tribe, there comes a seeking after the redemption of the soul.
There are many subsidiary features of sacrifice in connection with the establishment of the postexilic cultus with which we hardly have space to deal; among them the very complicated question of the development of the priest from a sort of guide to a holy place to the sole possible communicant between God and his worshippers. In general, it may be said that the trend of religious thought goes through the prophets, that what is organically important and permanent about sacrifice was absorbed by them, and that the official Jerusalem religion was a conservative consolidation of traditions which were spiritually obsolescent. In particular, the typically ritualistic idea of transferring sins in a corporeal form to an animal, or the almost insensate orgy of commentary on the law, designed to make the tradition as complete—and, therefore, as dead— as possible, lacks so much of the fearlessness and subtlety of prophetic thought that we may well leave it for the curious scholar. What the prophets did, finally, was to establish that the sole reality of the religious life lay in the realm of the spirit. This left the way open for the inference that all physical acts in sacrifice have a value not inherent but symbolic of the real inner religion of the soul. Therefore, the literally physical religious act—the sacrifice—was replaced by the symbolically physical religious act—the sacrament.
It is, of course, a fundamental point of Christian theology that sacrifice broke down because it was useless: God does not require food or drink, and if we are to get any good out of the sacrifice of God, God will have to sacrifice himself. We are bound to a cycle of life and death; we can kill, but we cannot bring to life again; and any sacrifice founded on the idea of preserving life is impossible for us. Negatively, therefore, we reach Jesus as the supreme sacrifice by a process of breakdown and collapse of human effort. But we can also approach it positively. The change from the literal sacrifice to the symbolic sacrament is an inevitable stage in the development of mankind, but it can hardly take place if there is nothing for the sacrament to symbolize. The conception implicit in all sacrifice, of the paradox of the god who cannot die because he is eternal and the god who does die because he is incarnate, has to be worked out in history, not only in philosophy; in experience, not only in thought. With this conception our next essay will be chiefly concerned.