ABSTRACT
The sacrificial meal was an appropriate expression of the antique ideal of religious life, not merely because it was a social act and an act in which the god and his worshippers were conceived as partaking together. The rudest nations have religious rules about food, based on the principle of kinship, viz. that a man may not eat the totem animal of his clan; and they generally have some rites of the nature of the sacrificial feast of kinsmen. The sacrificial feast, therefore, cannot be traced back to the domestic meal, but must be considered as having been from the first a public feast of clansmen. The fact is sufficient to remove the last doubt as to the proposition that all sacrifice was originally clan sacrifice by classing it among the acts which, in primitive society. Arabs of Nilus's time retained any clear ideas about the original significance of rules inherited by tradition from a more primitive state of society.
