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Both inductively and deductively we seem rather led to conclude that totems might or might not be sacramentally eaten and that animals like men might be sacramentally eaten without any reference to totemism. Had the corn for their special totem 1 or (supposing the God Dionysos to have been a simple deification of the sacramental Soma or Haoma, as Agni was of the sacrificial fire) 2 to conclude that the first Soma-drinkers made their ritual beverage on the score that they were of the grape or any analogous totem.
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It is not plausible to suppose, for instance, that the eating of bread in a primitive eucharist implied that the partakers originally We should profit little by our knowledge of the manifold God-making powers of early man if we supposed that any given Saviour-cult could originate only in such a line or lines of descent and in point of fact the proposal to hark back to totemism seems to overlook the fact that a sacramental meal ostensibly can originate apart from totemism. 2 The first of these theories is in the nature of the case incapable of proof 3 and it is not necessary, for a rational comparison and appreciation of the historic cults, to establish it, any more than to assume that either derivation excludes the other. 1 There is, however, a much stronger case for the simpler theory that the belief in question originated on another line in the practice of sacrificing by way of sympathetic magic a victim who, as such, became a God, but was not supposed to rise again in his own person. There is an arguable case for the theory that the belief in a dying and re-arising Saviour-God, seen anciently in the cults of Adonis, Attis, Herakles, Osiris, and Dionysos, originated obscurely in the totem-sacraments of savages who ate a sacred animal in order to preserve their identity of species with it. Sacred Texts Bible Bible Critical Views Index Previous Next