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sacrifice. W. Robertson Smith and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in their writings on sacrifice, represent what appears to be two fundamentally opposed views. The former placed overwhelming emphasis on the commensality of the sacrificial meal; the latter relegates this meal to a place of peripheral significance, and he argues that sacrifice (which, like Robertson Smith, he sees as central to religion) must be understood in terms of the relationship between man and something which lies right outside his society. Both scholars, in fact, include religious beliefs and their social concomitants in their analyses. Neither attempt to pass off sacrifice as magic : when a person sacrifices for rain it is not expected that the act will, of itself, magically precipitate a cloud-burst, since what is implied by a failure of the rains is that the relationship between God and his people has been disturbed, and this is made manifest by some disruption in the natural order of man’s relationship to man and to nature. But since a disturbance in a mystical relationship has occurred it has social consequences, and since sacrifice is concerned with the restoration of mystical relationships, it is concerned with the relationships between human beings as well. When, therefore, a sacrifice takes place, it does something to social relationships, in the sense that participants gather together for a specific purpose. A life, in animal or symbolic form, is offered as a surrogate for an individual or a group, but in either case it is the concern of the group of participants, for an individual has no more freedom to wantonly offer a surrogate life than he has to end his own in suicide or to withdraw his membership by departure. Life belongs to a social group. The symbolically charged commensal meal demonstrates the rights of control a group exercises over its life. Ultimately, however, since all life comes from God, He must be included in the covenanted restoration and revitalization of the unity between man and man. In this way the unity of the social group is made effective, for the bond thus established is conceptually indissoluble. See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, 1956; G. B. Gray, Sacrifice in the Old Testament, 1925; H. Hubert and M. Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (trans.) 1964; A. Loisy, Essai Historique sur le Sacrifice, 1920; W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 1927.