ical
priestly word for sacrifice, 'food of the deity.'[15] Nobody feeds Puluga,
nobody fed Ahone. We hear of no Fuegian sacrifices. Mr. Robertson Smith
says: 'In all religions in which the gods have been developed out of
totems [worshipped animals and other things regarded as akin to human
stocks] the ritual act of laying food before the deity is perfectly
intelligible.' Pundjel, an Australian Supreme Being, is mixed up with
animals in some myths, but it is not easy to see how such Supreme Beings
as he could be 'developed out of totems'! I am not aware, again, that any
Australian tribe feeds the animals who are its totems, so Darumulun could
not, and did not inherit sacrifice through them. Mr. Robertson Smith had
a celebrated theory that cereal sacrifice is a tribute to a god, while
sacrifice of a beast or man is an act of communion with the god.[16] Men
and gods dined together.[17] 'The god himself was conceived of as a being
of the same stock as his comrades.' Beasts were also of the same stock,
one beast, say a lobster, was of the same blood as a lobster kin, and its
god.[18] Occasionally the sacred beast of the kin, usually not to be slain
or tasted, is 'eaten as a kind of mystic sacrament a most dubious
fact.'[19]

Now, there is, I believe, some evidence, lately collected if not
published, which makes in favour of the eating of totems by Australians,
at a certain very rare and solemn mystery. It would not even surprise me
('from information received') if a very deeply initiated person were
occasionally slain, as the highest degree of initiation, on certain most
unusual occasions. This remains uncertain, but I have at present no
evidence that, either by one road or another, either from ghost-feeding or
totem-feeding, or feeding on totems, any Australian Supreme Being receives
any sacrifice at all. Much less, as among Pawnees and Semitic peoples (to
judge from certain traces), is the Australian Supreme Being a cause of and
partaker in human sacrifice.[20] The horrible idea of the Man who is the
God, and is eaten in the God's honour, occurs among polytheistic Aztecs,
on a high level of material culture, not among Australians, Andamanese,
Bushmen, or Fuegians.[21]

Thus, in religion, the Darumulun, or other Supreme Being of the lowest
known savages, men roaming wild, when originally met, on a continent
peopled by older kinds of animals than ours, was (as we regard purity) on
a higher plane by far than the gods of Gree