21:2] in
which Zeus, though he makes a kind of external claim to be lord of the
feast, dare not claim that the bull is sacrificed to him. Zeus has a ram
to himself and stands apart, showing but a weak and shadowy figure
beside the original Holy One. We have immense masses of evidence about
the religion of Mithras, at one time the most serious rival of
Christianity, which sought its hope and its salvation in the blood of a
divine bull.

Now what is the origin of this conception of the sacred animal? It was
first discovered and explained with almost prophetic insight by Dr.
Robertson Smith.[21:3] The origin is what he calls a sacramental feast:
you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the divine animal in
order--here I diverge from Robertson Smith's language--to get into you
his _mana_, his vital power. The classical instance is the sacramental
eating of a camel by an Arab tribe, recorded in the works of St.
Nilus.[21:4] The camel was devoured on a particular day at the rising of
the morning star. He was cut to pieces alive, and every fragment of him
had to be consumed before the sun rose. If the life had once gone out
of the flesh and blood the sacrifice would have been spoilt; it was the
spirit, the vitality, of the camel that his tribesmen wanted. The only
serious error that later students have found in Robertson Smith's
statement is that he spoke too definitely of the sacrifice as affording
communion with the tribal god. There was no god there, only the raw
material out of which gods are made. You devoured the holy animal to get
its _mana_, its swiftness, its strength, its great endurance, just as
the savage now will eat his enemy's brain or heart or hands to get some
particular quality residing there. The imagination of the pre-Hellenic
tribes was evidently dominated above all things by the bull, though
there were other sacramental feasts too, combined with sundry horrible
rendings and drinkings of raw blood. It is strange to think that even
small things like kids and fawns and hares should have struck primitive
man as having some uncanny vitality which he longed for, or at least
some uncanny power over the weather or the crops. Yet to him it no doubt
appeared obvious. Frogs, for instance, could always bring rain by
croaking for it, and who can limit the powers and the knowledge of
birds?[22:1]

Here comes a difficulty. If the Olympian god was not there to start
with, how did he originate? We can understand--at lea