The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India,...

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 Themis203 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 originally constituted the totem-clan was the eating of the totem-animal, and that this tie was perpetuated in the tribe by the communal eating of the domestic animal. The communal sacrifice of the domestic animal was, as already seen, typical of society in the tribal or pastoral stage. But one very important case, in addition to those given above and in the article on Kasai, remains for notice. The Id-ul-Zoha or Bakr-Id festival of the Muhammadans is such a rite. In pre-Islamic times this sacrifice was held at Mecca and all the Arab tribes went to Mecca to celebrate it.

The month in which the sacrifice was held was one of those of truce, when the feuds between the different clans were in abeyance so that they could meet at Mecca. Muhammad continued the sacrifice of the Id-ul-Zoha and it is this sacrifice which a good Muhammadan takes the pilgrimage to Mecca to perform. He must be at Mecca on the tenth day of the month of Z’ul Hijjah and perform the sacrifice there, and unless he does this there is no special merit in making the journey to Mecca. It is incumbent on every Muhammadan who can afford it to make the pilgrimage to Mecca or the Hajj once in his life and perform the sacrifice there; and though as a matter of fact only a very small minority of Muhammadans now carry out the rule, the pilgrimage and sacrifice may yet be looked upon as the central and principal rite of the Muhammadan religion. All Muhammadans who cannot go to Mecca nevertheless celebrate the sacrifice at home at the Indian festival of the Id-ul-Zoha and the Turkish and Egyptian Idu-Bairām. At the Id-ul-Zoha any one of four domestic animals, the camel, the cow, the sheep or the goat, may be sacrificed; and this rule makes it a connecting link between the two great Semitic sacrifices described in the article on Kasai, the camel sacrifice of the Arabs in pre-Islamic times and the Passover of the Jews. At the present time one-third of the flesh of the sacrificial animal should be given to the poor, one-third to relations, and the remainder to the sacrificer’s own family.204 Though it has now become a household sacrifice, the communal character thus still partly survives.