in imprecations, divination, vows, and is
redemptive by the substitution of the victim for the offender; the soul
of the beast is sent to join its kin in heaven and maintain the
perpetuity of its race; all sacrifices produce either sacralization or
desacralization--both offerer and victim must be prepared (for the
victim is not, as Smith holds, sacred by nature, but is made sacred by
the sacrifice), and, the ceremony over, the person must be freed from
his sanctity (as in the removal of a taboo); all sacrifice is an act of
abnegation, but the abnegation is useful and egoistic, except in the
case of the sacrifice of a god.

+1050+. The essay of MM. Hubert and Mauss is rather a description of the
mode of procedure in Hindu sacrifice than an explanation of the source
of its power. A victim, it is said, sanctified by the act of sacrifice,
effects communication between the two worlds, but we are not told
wherein consists this sanctifying and harmonizing efficacy. The rituals
chosen for analysis are the product of many centuries of development and
embody the conceptions of theological reflection; it does not appear why
they should be preferred, as sources of information concerning the
essential nature of sacrifice, to the simple rites of undeveloped
communities. The authors of the essay, though they deny the possibility
of finding a single explicative principle chosen arbitrarily,
themselves announce a principle, which, however, amounts simply to the
statement that sacrifice is placatory. In thus ascribing the virtue of
the ceremony to the act itself it is possible that they may have been
influenced by the Brahmanic conception that sacrifice had power in
itself to control the gods and to secure all blessings for men; it was
credited by them with magical efficacy, and the efficacy depended on
performing the act with minutest accuracy in details--the slightest
error in a word might vitiate the whole proceeding.[1901] The developed
Hindu system thus embodied in learned form the magical idea that is
found in many early procedures, and in some other cults of civilized
communities. So far as regards the variety of functions assigned by MM.
Hubert and Mauss to sacrifice, they may all be explained as efforts to
propitiate supernatural Powers; and the obligation on priests and
worshipers to purify themselves by ablutions and otherwise arises from a
sense of the sacredness of the sacrificial act, which is itself derived
from the feelin