it raw and bleeding. [211]
M. Salomon Reinach shows how the memory of similar sacrifices in Greece
has been preserved in legend: [212] "Actaeon was really a great stag
sacrificed by women devotees, who called themselves the great hind
and the little hinds; he became the rash hunter who surprised Artemis
at her bath and was transformed into a stag and devoured by his own
dogs. The dogs are a euphemism; in the early legend they were the
human devotees of the sacred stag who tore him to pieces and devoured
him with their bare teeth. These feasts of raw flesh survived in the
secret religious cults of Greece long after uncooked food had ceased
to be consumed in ordinary life. Orpheus (_ophreus,_ the haughty),
who appears in art with the skin of a fox on his head, was originally
a sacred fox devoured by the women of the fox totem-clan; these women
call themselves Bassarides in the legend, and _bassareus_ is one
of the old names of the fox. Hippolytus in the fable is the son of
Theseus who repels the advances of Phaedra, his stepmother, and was
killed by his runaway horses because Theseus, deceived by Phaedra,
invoked the anger of a god upon him. But Hippolytus in Greek means
'one torn to pieces by horses.' Hippolytus is himself a horse whom the
worshippers of the horse, calling themselves horses and disguised as
such, tore to pieces and devoured." All such sacrifices in which the
flesh was taken from the living victim may thus perhaps be derived
from the common origin of totemism. The second point about the Khond
sacrifice is that it was communal; every householder desired a piece
of the flesh, and for those who could not be present at the sacrifice
relays of messengers were posted to carry it to them while it was
still fresh and might be supposed to retain the life. They did not
eat the strips of flesh, but each householder buried his piece in his
field, which they believed would thereby be fertilised and caused to
produce the grain which they would eat. The death of the victim was
considered essential to the life of the tribe, which would be renewed
and strengthened by it as in the case of the sacrifice of the domestic
animal. Lord Avebury gives in _The Origin of Civilisation_ [213] an
almost exact parallel to the Khond sacrifice in which the flesh of the
victim actually was eaten. This occurred among the Marimos, a tribe of
South Africa much resembling the Bechuanas. The ceremony was called
'the boiling of the corn.' A you