Lastly, the concluding act of the sacred drama, in which the body of
the dead Maize Goddess was flayed and her skin worn, together with
all her sacred insignia, by a man who danced before the people in
this grim attire, seems to be best explained on the hypothesis that
it was intended to ensure that the divine death should be
immediately followed by the divine resurrection. If that was so, we
may infer with some degree of probability that the practice of
killing a human representative of a deity has commonly, perhaps
always, been regarded merely as a means of perpetuating the divine
energies in the fulness of youthful vigour, untainted by the
weakness and frailty of age, from which they must have suffered if
the deity had been allowed to die a natural death.
These Mexican rites suffice to prove that human sacrifices of the
sort I suppose to have prevailed at Aricia were, as a matter of
fact, regularly offered by a people whose level of culture was
probably not inferior, if indeed it was not distinctly superior, to
that occupied by the Italian races at the early period to which the
origin of the Arician priesthood must be referred.
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