are supposed to differ in
placatory or expiatory virtue, and one or the other of them is held to
precede in order of time. The facts seem, however, not to warrant this
distinction. Everywhere the two sorts of offering have equal power to
please and placate the deity; the special prominence that may be given
to the one or the other is due to peculiar social conditions that do not
affect the essential nature of the rite.[1872] As to precedence of one
or the other in time the available data offer nothing definite beyond
the fact that choice between them is determined by the circumstances of
a community--the material of an offering is whatever (food or other
thing) seems natural and appropriate in a particular place and at a
particular time, and this may vary, of course, in the same community at
different stages of culture.

+1039+. Current theories of the origin and significance of sacrifice
divide themselves into two general groups, the one laying stress on the
idea of gift, the other on the idea of union with the deity. Both go
back ultimately to the same conception, the conviction, namely, that
man's best good can be secured only by the help of the supernatural
Powers; but they approach the subject from different points of view and
differ in their treatment of the rationale of the ritual.

+1040+. The conception of an offering as a gift to a deity is found in
very early times and is common in low tribes. In Greece the word for
"gift," as offering, occurs from Homer on, and in Latin is frequent, and
such a term is employed in Sanscrit. The common Hebrew term for
sacrifice (_min[h)]a_) has the same sense; it is used for both bloody
and unbloody offerings, though from the time of Ezekiel (sixth century
B.C.) onward it became a technical term for cereal offerings.[1873] The
details of savage custom are given by Tylor,[1874] who proposes as the
scheme of chronological development "gift, homage, abnegation." This
order, which is doubtless real, embodies and depends on growth in social
organization and in the consequent growth in depth and refinement of
religious feeling. The object of a gift is to procure favor and
protection; homage involves the recognition of the deity as overlord,
and, in the higher stages of thought, as worthy of reverence--always,
however, with the sense of dependence and the desire for benefits;
abnegation is the devotion of one's possessions and, ultimately, of
one's self; this idea sometimes assumes