CHAPTER VIII.

On the origin and purport of sacrificial rites.

IN

N every quarter of the globe, Paganism, both ancient and modern, has never failed to inculcate the necessity of sacrificial rites. This universal accordance, which it is almost superfluous to attempt formally to prove, can only be satisfactorily accounted for on the principle of the common origination of all the mythological systems of the Gentiles: for the same argument, which has already been so frequently employed, may here again be used with equal advantage and propriety.

Throughout the whole world we find a notion prevalent, that the gods could only be appeased by bloody sacrifices. Now this idea is so thoroughly arbitrary, there being no obvious and necessary conuection in the way of cause and effect between slaughtering a man or a beast and the recovering of the divine favour by the slaughterer, that its very universality involves the necessity of concluding that all nations have borrowed it from some common source. It is in vain to say, that there is nothing so strange, but that an unrestrained superstition might have excogitated it. This solution does by no means meet the difficulty. If sacrifice had been in use only among the inhabitants of a single country, or among those of some few neighbouring Pag. Idol.

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countries who might reasonably be supposed to have much mutual intercourse; no fair objection could be made to the answer. But what we have to account for is the universality of the practice: and such a solution plainly does not account for such a circumstance; I mean, not merely the existence of sacrifice, but its universality. An apparently irrational notion, struck out by a wild fanatic in one country and forthwith adopted by his fellowcitizens (for such is the hypothesis requisite to the present solution), is yet found to be equally prevalent in all countries. Therefore, if we acquiesce in this solution, we are bound to believe, either that all nations, however remote from each other, borrowed from that of the original inventor; or that, by a most marvellous subversion of the whole system of calculating chances, a great number of fanatics, severally appearing in every country upon the face of the earth, without any mutual communication strangely hit upon the self-same arbitrary and inexplicable mode of propitiating the deity. It is difficult to say, which of the two suppositions is the most improbable. The solution therefore does not satisfactorily account for the fact of the universality. Nor can the fact, I will be bold to say, be satisfactorily accounted for, except by the supposition, that no one nation borrowed the rite from another nation, but that all alike received it from a common origin of most remote antiquity.

I. The propriety of such a supposition will be rendered yet more evident, when we recollect, that sacrificial rites have not only been universal in their reception; but likewise that they have been adopted in every nation, except one, long prior to the commencement of authentic history. There is no heathen people, that can specify the time when it was without sacrifice: all have equally had it from a period, which cannot be reached by their genuine records; and tradition alone can be brought forward by the Gentiles to account for its origin. Let us then attend to the testimony of tradition ; which in this instance is so remarkably uniform, that, even if it stood wholly unsupported by better evidence, it would still be eminently worthy of our notice.

1. We find then, by the general traditionary consent of pagan antiquity, that sacrificial rites, and the worship of the gods which ever involved sacrificial rites, are said to have commenced with that primeval character whom

the nations venerated as their great universal father; that character, who, CHAR. vii. under whatever name he was adored, is demonstrated by the circumstantial evidence of his legendary history to have been Adam considered as reappearing in the person of Noah.

Thus one of the eight mystic forms of the Indian Siva, a number which evidently alludes to the ogdoad conspicuous in both the two first families, is said to be the performer of a sacrifice.' Thus the Egyptian Thoth or Taut, who is the same as Buddha or Cadam, is described as the original inventor of sacrificial rites. Thus the Egyptian Osiris, who is clearly no other than the Greek Dionusus and the Indian Siva or Iswara, is celebrated as the person, who first instructed mankind in the worship of the gods; with which, as I have just observed, sacrifice was ever inseparably united.3 Thus the Etruscan Janus was thought by the Italians to have first taught them to build temples to the gods, and to have instituted the sacred rites with which they were adored. Thus the Argive Phoroneus, who was accounted the first of men and who is made coëval with the flood, is said to have firstbuilt a temple and an altar for sacrificial purposes to Juno. Thus the Chinese Fohi is represented as carefully breeding seven sorts of animals, the number according to which Noah was directed to take the clean animals into the Ark, for the purpose of sacrificing them to the supreme spirit of heaven and earth. Thus the Babylonian Xisuthrus, when he quitted the ark within which he had been preserved, is said to have built an altar and offered sacrifices to the gods. Thus both the Greek and the Scythic Deucalion is equally described, as building an altar, and as offering up sacrifices immediately after the deluge. Thus the British Hu, who with

8

Diod. Bibl. lib. i. p. 14.

5 Clem. Alex. Strom. lib. i. p. 321. Hyg. Fab. 225, 274. The common reading in the last cited place is urma: but a comparison of the two fables clearly establishes the propriety

of Scheffer's correction, which substitutes aram. In Fab. 143 Hyginus similarly observes, that Phoroneus first instituted sacred rites to Juno.

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seven companions sailed in an ark over the interminable ocean, is eminently styled the sacrificer. And thus the Peruvian Manco-Copac is supposed to have first reclaimed mankind from a savage life and to have taught them the worship of his father the Sun.*

The altar, on which the primeval sacrifice was offered up, has been elevated to the sphere: and the legends, which are there attached to it, all tend to refer us to the same period for the origin of the rite. On the sphere itself we behold the fabulous centaur, the reputed son of Cronus but by Lycophron rightly identified with Cronus himself,' issuing from the ship Argo, and bearing on his lance a victim towards the altar for the purpose of sacrificing it and we are told, that on this same altar Jupiter offered an oblation, when going to the war of the Titans, or rather (as the scholiast on Aratus more accurately gives the tradition) when returning victorious from that war. The Titanic war however relates altogether to the deluge, and is the very same as the war of Typhon or the ocean against the hero-gods: consequently, the sacrifice of Jupiter on the altar is no other than the first post-diluvian sacrifice of Noah. Hence, in allusion to the flood, we are informed, that Night, whom the Orphic poet identifies with the infernal Venus or the great arkite mother, was the person that placed the altar among the constellations, in pity of the calamities inflicted upon men by the tempestuous ocean."

Thus universally do the pagans ascribe the origin of a rite, which far precedes the records of authentic profane history, to the age of the great father. But the great father is he, who was supposed to be manifested anew at the commencement of every similar mundane system. Now we know, that only two such systems have existed; which, from many points of resemblance between their respective commencements, have occasioned the philosophical fable of an endless succession of perfectly similar worlds.

Therefore the pagans, by ascribing the origin of sacrifice to the age of the GAP. VII. great transmigrating father, do in effect deduce it from the two primeval sacrifices, which were offered up, the one at the beginning of the antediluvian world, and the other at that of the postdiluvian.

Such being their traditional account of the origin of sacrifice, if it be well founded, all nations must obviously have borrowed the rite from a common source: and, since the very circumstance of the universality of sacrifice can only be accounted for in some such manner as the traditional account has specified; the presumption, even if we had no better evidence, would be, that the account itself, however perverted to serve the purposes of idolatry, is in the main founded on truth.

2. But we have better evidence, even the evidence of inspiration itself: for it will be found, that the genuine records of the only nation, whose historical documents reach as high as the commencement of sacrifice, give substantially the same account of its origin as the coincident traditions of the pagans.

We are informed by Moses, that, immediately after the deluge, Noah, the first man of the new world, the transmigrating great father of gentile theology, built an altar, and offered up a propitiatory sacrifice upon it: and we are further taught, that the wrath of God was appeased by it, and that he solemnly promised never more to bring upon the earth a flood of waters." From the action of Noah then the practice must have been derived to all his posterity through each of his three sons: and, when the dispersion from Babel took place, it would be carried as from a common centre to every quarter of the globe by the various leaders of those colonies which in time. became nations.

But even this is insufficient to account quite satisfactorily for its continued prevalence, though it decidedly establishes the truth of gentile tradition respecting the postdiluvian part of its origin. A strong belief of the obligation and necessity of sacrifice must have been already predominant in the minds of the Noetic family: otherwise it does not appear, why their descendants should have argued its general necessity from its particular pro

• Gen. viii. 20, 21, 22.