Note 42 — Chapter II · THE CENTRAL MYTH

Such rites gradually dwindled in progressive communities from ritual murders into ritual mysteries or masquerades; even as human sacrifices in general, in most parts of the world, dwindled from bodies to parts of bodies, fingers, hair, foreskins; from human to animal victims;42 from larger to smaller animals; from these to fowls; from real animals to baked or clay models, fruits, grains, sheafs of rushes, figures, paper or other symbols. It seems usually to have been humane kings or chiefs who imposed the improvement on priesthoods. And as with the victim, so with the sacramental meal which accompanied so many sacrifices. Cannibal sacraments were once, probably, universal: they have survived down till recent times in certain regions; but with advance in civilization they early and inevitably tend to become merely symbolic. In Mexico at the advent of Cortes, both the cannibal and the symbolic forms subsisted—the former under conventional limitations; the latter in the practice of eating a baked image which had been raised on a cross and there pierced, for sanctification.43 This “Eating of the God” was very definitely a sacrament; but so were the cannibalistic sacraments which preceded it.