thank-offerings; and so, by contrast with these
joyous festivals, the occasional sacrifices, which continue to be
offered in times of distress, tend to assume, more and more, the
character of sin-offerings or guilt-offerings.

We have, however, now to notice a consequence which ensues upon the
community's custom of not eating until after the first-fruits have
been offered to the god. Not only is a habit or custom hard to break,
simply because it is a habit; but, when the habit is the habit of a
whole community, the individual who presumes to violate it is visited
by the disapproval and the condemnation of the whole community. When
then the custom has established itself of abstaining from eating,
until the first-fruits have been offered to the god, any violation of
the custom is condemned by the community as a whole. The consequence
of this is that the fruit or the animal tends to be regarded by the
community as sacred to the god, and not to be meddled with until after
the first-fruits have been offered to him. The plant or animal becomes
sacred to the god because the community has offered it to him, and
intends to offer it to him, and does offer it to him annually. Now it
is not a necessary and inevitable consequence that an animal or plant,
which has come to be sacred, should become divine. But where we find
divine animals or animal gods--divine corn or corn-goddesses--we are
entitled to consider this as one way in which they may have come to be
regarded as divine, because sacred, and as deities, because divine.
When we find the divine plant or animal constituting the sacrifice,
and furnishing forth the sacrificial meal, there is a possibility that
it was in this way and by this process that the plant or animal came
to be, first, sacred, then divine, and finally the deity, to whom it
was offered. In many cases, certainly, this last stage was never
reached. And we may conjecture a reason why it was not reached.
Whether it could be reached would depend largely on the degree of
individuality, which the god, to whom the offering was made, had
reached. A god who possesses a proper, personal name, must have a long
history behind him, for a personal name is an epithet the meaning of
which comes in course of time to be forgotten. If its meaning has come
to be entirely forgotten, the god is thereby shown not only to have a
long history behind him but to have acquired a high degree of
individuality and personality, which will no