Note 33.3 — Chapter II · THE PREHISTORIC PERIOD

The ritual at the altar in the early period with which we are at present dealing consisted of an oblation to the deity of an animal victim or an offering of fruits and cereals; the sacrifice might be accompanied with wine or might be wineless, a ‘sober’ sacrifice which was called νηφάλια, the latter being perhaps the more ancient tradition. We may interpret the earliest form of Hellenic animal-sacrifice as in some sense a simple tribal or family communion-meal with the deity, whereby the sense of comradeship and clan-feeling between man and God was strengthened and nourished. This is the view that Homer has inherited, and it endures throughout the later history of the ritual; and it expresses the general genial temper of Hellenic religion, a trait which Robertson Smith marked as characteristic of other religions of the same social type.33.3 Similarly the description given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias of the ancient ritual of Zeus Polieus on the Athenian Akropolis reveals to us a typical example of the civic communion feast.34.1 Such a sacrifice is merely a transference into the divine circle of the practice of the common feast of the tribesmen. But we can also discern a mystic element in the Homeric ritual text, which is evidently based on a tradition indefinitely older than the poems; the sacrificial victim, usually the ox, is first consecrated by being touched with the barley-stalks, which had been placed on the altar and which fill him by their contact with the altar’s divine spirit: then when he has been immolated and cut up, the sacrificers are specially said “to taste the entrails”34.2 invariably before the real sacred meal begins; as the entrails are the inner seat of the life which has been consecrated by the hallowing contact of the altar, we are justified in supposing that the object of this solemn act was to establish the real and corporeal communion of the worshipper with the divinity.34.2