selves with him and becoming holy themselves. Thus through the ages we see the identity of the totem feast with the animal sacrifice, the theanthropic human sacrifice, and the Christian eucharist, and in all these solemn occasions we recognize the after-effects of that crime which so oppressed men but of which they must have been so proud. At bottom, however, the Christian communion is a new setting aside of the father, a repetition of the crime that must be expiated. We see how well justified is Frazer’s dictum that “the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity.”[1]
7
A process like the removal of the primal father by the band of brothers must have left ineradicable traces in the history of mankind and must have expressed itself the more frequently in numerous substitutive formations the less it itself was to be remembered.[2] I am avoiding the
- ↑ “Eating the God,” p. 51. . . . Nobody familiar with the literature on this subject will assume that the tracing back of the Christian communion to the totem feast is an idea of the author of this book.
- ↑ Ariel in “The Tempest”:
Full fathom five thy father lies:/Of his bones are coral made;/Those are pearls that were his eyes;/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange . . .
