ABSTRACT
The Tikopia in pagan times had a communion feast, known as the ‘Sacred Food’ – a term which nowadays they apply as Christians to the Holy Communion. Male members of the clan assembled in their temple, led by their chief, and celebrated their yam harvest by each man eating ritually a cooked yam tuber straight from the oven. In the Catholic Mass, as is well known, the overt rite includes the offering of bread and wine at the altar, purification of them with incense, and consecration of them with appropriate invocations. Since the later Middle Ages in the Roman Catholic church, those of the congregation who are ritually entitled to do so then partake of the bread, the priest alone drinking the wine. Catholics believe, and by the rules of their church are bound to believe, that the Mass is not simply a memorial, not simply a symbol, but a divinely efficacious sacrament.
