Yet a time comes when reasonable men find it hard
to understand how any one in his senses can suppose that by eating
bread or drinking wine he consumes the body or blood of a deity.
"When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus," says Cicero, "we use a
common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so
insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?"
LII. Killing the Divine Animal
1. Killing the Sacred Buzzard
IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that many communities which have
progressed so far as to subsist mainly by agriculture have been in
the habit of killing and eating their farinaceous deities either in
their proper form of corn, rice, and so forth, or in the borrowed
shapes of animals and men. It remains to show that hunting and
pastoral tribes, as well as agricultural peoples, have been in the
habit of killing the beings whom they worship. Among the worshipful
beings or gods, if indeed they deserve to be dignified by that name,
whom hunters and shepherds adore and kill are animals pure and
simple, not animals regarded as embodiments of other supernatural
beings.
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