ndividual is to live, he must have food; if his race is to
persist, he must have children. To live and to cause to live, to eat
food and beget children, these were the primary wants of man in the
past, and they will be the primary wants of man in the future, so
long as the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and
beautify life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity
itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, were what
men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites
for the regulation of the seasons.... What he realizes first and foremost
is that at certain times the animals, and still more the plants,
which form his food, appear, at certain others they disappear. It is
these times that become the central points, the focusses of his interest,
and the dates of his religious festivals.[1]

[Footnote 1: Jane Harrison: _Ancient Art and Ritual_, p. 31.]

Sacrifice is only one way primitive man contrives of winning
the favor of the gods toward the satisfaction of his desires.
Another common method is prayer. In its crudest form
prayer is a direct petition from the individual to divinity for
the grant of a specific favor. The individual seeks a kindness
from a supernatural power whose motives are human, and
who may, therefore, be moved by human appeals; whose
power is superhuman and can therefore fulfill requests.
Prayer may become profoundly spiritualized, but in its primitive
form it is, like sacrifice, a certain way of getting things
done. They are both to primitive man largely what our
science is to us.

Both prayer and sacrifice arise in primitive man's need and
helplessness and terror before mysterious supernatural powers,
but they may rise, in the higher form of religion, to genuine
nobility, from this crass commerce with divinity, this religion
of bargaining and _quid pro quo_. Sacrifice may change from a
desperate reluctant offering made to please a jealous god, to a
thanksgiving and a jubilation, an overflowing of happiness,
gratitude, and good-will.

Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of
an attitude toward religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joy
and confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is
but a high festival for man. In Homer, sacrifice is but, as it were,
the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we
hear nothing of fasting, cleansing, and atonement. This we might
exp