ital importance of the act of participation in the sacrifice.

80. The sacrifice of the domestic animal.

The Roman sacrifice of the Suovetaurilia was in no way peculiar,
similar rites being found in other Greek and Latin cities. Some
instances are recorded in the article on Kasai, and in _Themis_
[203] Miss Jane Harrison gives an account of a sacrifice at Magnesia
in which a bull, ram and he- and she-goats were sacrificed to the
gods and partaken of communally by the citizens. As already seen,
the act of participation in the sacrifice conferred the status of
citizenship. The domestic animals were not as a rule eaten, but their
milk was drunk, and they were used for transport, and clothes were
perhaps sometimes made from their hair and skins. Hence they were the
principal source of life of the tribe, as the totem had been of the
clan, and were venerated and deified. One common life was held to run
through all the members of the tribe and all the domestic animals of
the species which was its principal means of support. In the totem
or hunting stage the clan had necessarily been small, because a
large collection of persons could not subsist together by hunting
and the consumption of roots and fruits. When an additional means
of support was afforded by the domestication of an important animal,
a much larger number of persons could live together, and apparently
several clans became amalgamated into a tribe. The sanctity of the
domestic animals was much greater than that of the totem because they
lived with man and partook of his food, which was the strongest tie
of kinship; and since he still endowed them with self-consciousness
and volition, he thought they had come voluntarily to aid him in
sustaining life. Both on this account and for fear of injuring the
common life they were not usually killed. But it was necessary to
primitive man that the tie should take a concrete form and that he
should actually assimilate the life of the sacred animal by eating
its flesh, and this was accordingly done at a ceremonial sacrifice,
which was held annually, and often in the spring, the season of the
renewal and increase of life. Since this renewal of the communal life
was the concrete tie which bound the tribe together, any one who was
absent from it could no longer be a member of the tribe. The whole of
this rite and the intense importance attached to it are inexplicable
except on the supposition that the tie which had original