Habituated to the later idea of sacrifice as an
offering made to a god for the purpose of conciliating his favour,
European observers are apt to interpret all religious slaughter in
this sense, and to suppose that wherever such slaughter takes place,
there must necessarily be a deity to whom the carnage is believed by
the slayers to be acceptable. Thus their preconceived ideas may
unconsciously colour and warp their descriptions of savage rites.
The same custom of killing the representative of a god, of which
strong traces appear in the Khond sacrifices, may perhaps be
detected in some of the other human sacrifices described above. Thus
the ashes of the slaughtered Marimo were scattered over the fields;
the blood of the Brahman lad was put on the crop and field; the
flesh of the slain Naga was stowed in the corn-bin; and the blood of
the Sioux girl was allowed to trickle on the seed. Again, the
identification of the victim with the corn, in other words, the view
that he is an embodiment or spirit of the corn, is brought out in
the pains which seem to be taken to secure a physical correspondence
between him and the natural object which he embodies or represents.
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