Note 34 — Chapter II · THE CENTRAL MYTH

What is certain is that sacrifices of kings, which were at one stage of social evolution normal,34 inevitably tended to take other tribal or communal forms; and a multitude of rites preserved plain marks of the regal origin. Kings would inevitably pass off their original tragic burden; the community, bent on the safeguard of sacrifice, shifted it in turn.35 Sacrifice of some kind, it was felt, there must be, to avert divine wrath:36 that conviction lies at the base of the Christian as of the Jewish religion: it is fundamental to all primitive religion; and it is happily beyond our power to realize save symbolically the immeasurable human slaughter that the religious conviction has involved.