in hanging by his own
desire upon a tree. "I know I was hanged upon a tree shaken by the winds
for nine long nights. I was transfixed by a spear; I was moved to Odin,
myself to myself." And so on. The instances are endless. "I am the
oblation," says the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, (1) "I am the
sacrifice, I the ancestral offering." "In the truly orthodox conception
of sacrifice," says Elie Reclus, (2) "the consecrated offering, be it
man, woman or virgin, lamb or heifer, cock or dove, represents THE DEITY
HIMSELF.... Brahma is the 'imperishable sacrifice'; Indra, Soma, Hari
and the other gods, became incarnate in animals to the sole end that
they might be immolated. Perusha, the Universal Being, caused himself to
be slain by the Immortals, and from his substance were born the birds of
the air, wild and domestic animals, the offerings of butter and curds.
The world, declared the Rishis, is a series of sacrifices disclosing
other sacrifices. To stop them would be to suspend the life of Nature.
The god Siva, to whom the Tipperahs of Bengal are supposed to have
sacrificed as many as a thousand human victims a year, said to the
Brahamins: 'It is I that am the actual offering; it is I that you
butcher upon my altars.'"

(1) Ch. ix, v. 16.

(2) Primitive Folk, ch. vi.

It was in allusion to this doctrine that R. W. Emerson, paraphrasing the
Katha-Upanishad, wrote that immortal verse of his:--

If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I take, and pass, and turn again.

I say it is an astonishing thing to think and realize that this profound
and mystic doctrine of the eternal sacrifice of Himself, ordained by
the Great Spirit for the creation and salvation of the world--a doctrine
which has attracted and fascinated many of the great thinkers and nobler
minds of Europe, which has also inspired the religious teachings of
the Indian sages and to a less philosophical degree the writings of the
Christian Saints--should have been seized in its general outline and
essence by rude and primitive people before the dawn of history, and
embodied in their rites and ceremonials. What is the explanation of this
fact?

It is very puzzling. The whole subject is puzzling. The world-wide
adoption of similar creeds and rituals (and, we may add, legends and
fairy tales) among early peoples, and in far-sundered places and times
is so rema