Note 239.1 — Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

We must, however, beware of concluding that because the victim was thus temporarily possessed with godhead and in this holy state devoured, he was therefore literally regarded as the full incarnation of the god, or that the worshipper consciously believed he was eating his own deity who died in the sacrifice. For religious consciousness by no means always draws the full logical corollaries of a religious act. The more mystic idea, that has played a great part in the religion of Europe, can only be detected or suspected, apart from written direct ancient testimony, where the animal is treated with reverence apart from and before his association with the altar, or is regarded as the habitual incarnation of the deity. The immolation and devouring of such a victim would be of the true sacramental type, which Robertson Smith believed was the aboriginal form of all sacrifice. But we have no clear example of it from the earliest period of genuine Hellenic religion, unless we force the evidence or exaggerate its meaning.239.1 We have only certain myths that we may doubtfully venture to interpret by means of this hypothesis. And these are no myths about animals, but about human victims devoured in sacrifice: the most significant is the story of the cannibalistic feast held by King Lykaon, who cooked his own son and offered the flesh to Zeus, a ritual of which some survival, whether mimetic or half-real, was witnessed by Pausanias himself on Mount Lykaon.239.2 This would point to sacramental cannibalism, if we assume that King Lykaon was the human incarnation of Zeus Lykaios and that his son was therefore a divine infant. But it is possible that the story enshrines the remembrance of the more ordinary clan-sacrifice of the life of a clansman to procure them communion with the clan-god by the common partaking of his flesh: the kinsman is offered rather than the animal, not so much that the sacrificers may eat their god, but that the god by consuming their most valued life may be more closely incorporate with them.