pparently, were
held too sacred to be slain, except upon rare and solemn occasions, and
hence, as we have seen, may have arisen domestication and the pastoral
life which, with its religious rites, was the affair of the men. To
women, on the other hand, belonged agriculture; the cult of Mother Earth
and the vegetation-spirits seems to have been originally theirs. Later
the two cults would coalesce, but a hint of the time when certain rites
were practised only by women may be found in that dressing up of men in
female garments which appears not merely in the old Kalends customs but
in some modern survivals.[85]{43}

Apart from any special theory of the origin of sacrifice, we may note the
association at Christmas of physical feasting with religious rejoicing.
In this the modern European is the heir of an agelong tradition.
"Everywhere," says Robertson Smith, |179| "we find that a sacrifice
ordinarily involves a feast, and that a feast cannot be provided without
a sacrifice. For a feast is not complete without flesh, and in early
times the rule that all slaughter is sacrifice was not confined to the
Semites. The identity of religious occasions and festal seasons may
indeed be taken as the determining characteristic of the type of ancient
religion generally; when men meet their god they feast and are glad
together, and whenever they feast and are glad they desire that the god
should be of the party."{45} To the paganism that preceded Christianity
we must look for the origin of that Christmas feasting which has not
seldom been a matter of scandal for the severer type of churchman.

[Transcriber's Note: The marker for note {44} was not present in
the page scan]

A letter addressed in 601 by Pope Gregory the Great to Abbot Mellitus,
giving him instructions to be handed on to Augustine of Canterbury,
throws a vivid light on the process by which heathen sacrificial feasts
were turned into Christian festivals. "Because," the Pope says of the
Anglo-Saxons, "they are wont to slay many oxen in sacrifices to demons,
some solemnity should be put in the place of this, so that on the day of
the dedication of the churches, or the nativities of the holy martyrs
whose relics are placed there, they may make for themselves tabernacles
of branches of trees around those churches which have been changed from
heathen temples, and may celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting.
Nor let them now sacrifice animals to the Devil, but to