Sacrificial Sentence Examples

It was as if he'd tossed out a sacrificial lamb to a flock of vultures.

Another special characteristic of Israel's religion in Canaan was the considerable increase of sacrificial offerings.

The spirit of Vedic worship is pervaded by a devout belief in the efficacy of invocation and sacrificial offering.

In Armenia the Greek word agape has been used ever since the 4th century to indicate these sacrificial meals, which either began or ended with a eucharistic celebration.

Thus the Harranians had four sacrificial days in every month, and of these two at least were determined by the conjunction and opposition of the moon. ?

In front of this temple stood a sacrificial altar as long as the temple itself.

This view does not seem to be tenable, for the old sacrificial carousals lack two of the essential elements of the gilds, namely corporative solidarity or permanent association and the spirit of Christian brotherhood.

This is the dining and sacrificial dress of most Hindus.

The first of the three fires laid down is the garhapatya, or householder's fire, so called because, though not taken from his ordinary house-fire, but as a rule specially produced by friction, it serves for cooking the sacrificial food, and thus, as it were, represents the domestic fire.

The scorpion, attacking the genitals of the bull, is sent by Ahriman from the lower world to defeat the purpose of the sacrifice; the dog, springing towards the wound in the bull's side, was venerated by the Persians as the companion of Mithras; the serpent is the symbol of the earth being made fertile by drinking the blood of the sacrificial bull; the raven, towards which Mithras turns his face as if for direction, is the herald of the Sun-god, whose bust is near by, and who has ordered the sacrifice; various plants near the bull, and heads of wheat springing from his tail, symbolize the result of the sacrifice; the cypress is perhaps the tree of immortality.

Gamaliel devoted special attention to the regulation of the rite of prayer, which after the cessation of sacrificial worship had become all-important.

A more widely accepted theory derives gilds wholly or in part from the early Germanic or Scandinavian sacrificial banquets.

On special occasions a sacrificial meal of cooked food was set out for the heroes, of which they were solemnly invited to partake.

Temples that had been wellnigh deserted were already beginning to be frequented, rites long intermitted were being renewed, and the trade in fodder for sacrificial victims was reviving.

The description is particularly noteworthy for the sudden appearance of birds of prey, which attempted to carry off the victims of the sacrificial covenant.

The numerous niches, generally containing sacrificial (?) tables, 2 are often approached by window-like openings hewn out of one of the flat slabs by which they are enclosed.

The national museum, which occupies the east side of the national palace, is rich in Mexican antiquities, among which are the famous " calendar stone," supposed to be of Toltec origin, and the " sacrificial stone " found in the ruins of the great teocalli destroyed by Cortes.

This disposes of a theory that they are descendants of a white sacrificial breed introduced into Britain by the ancient Romans.

The island is visited periodically by a few Samoyedes; they formerly considered it sacred, and some of their sacrificial piles, consisting of drift-wood, deer's horns and the skulls of bears and deer, have been observed by travellers.

Some were named after exclusively Vedic deities; they formed the basis of the sacrificial calendar of the Brahmins; the old Indian names of the months were derived from them; their existence was pre-supposed in the entire structure of Hindu ritual and science.

The power of the priesthood began with the delegation by the king of his sacrificial duties to a ` president ' (purohita).

We find therefore no trace of a sacrificial priesthood, but each temple had one or more doorkeepers (sadin, hajib), whose office was usually hereditary in a certain family and who had the charge of the temple and its treasures.

The sanctuary thus became a seat of judgment, and here, too, compacts were sealed by oaths and sacrificial ceremonies.

A sacrificial priesthood will arise as the worship becomes more complex.

Thus the firstlings, first-fruits and vows are still the free gift of the individual which no human authority exacts, and which every householder presents and consumes with his circle in a sacrificial feast without priestly aid.

If, for example, on a certain occasion when the liver of a sacrificial animal was examined, certain events of a favourable character followed, the conclusion was drawn that the signs observed were favourable, and hence the recurrence of these signs on another occasion suggested a favourable answer to the question put to the priests.

Moreover, the performance of chants being almost entirely confined to the Soma-sacrifice, it is only a portion, though no doubt the most important portion, of the sacrificial ceremonial that enters into the subject matter of the Samaveda Brahmanas.

In the sacrificial system of sin-offerings (Jhattath and'asham) we have to do with sin as ceremonial violation and neglect (frequently involuntary), or violation of holiness in the old sense of the term or as personal uncleanness (touching a corpse, eating unclean food, sexual impurity, &c.).

Thus he explains the Yajna (sacrificial cult) as " the entertainment of the learned in proportion to their worth, the business of manufacture, the experiment and application of chemistry, physics and the arts of peace; the instruction of the people, the purification of the air, the nourishment of vegetables by the employment of the principles of meteorology, called Agni-Notri in Sanskrit."

But this theory is repudiated by the best authorities; indeed its extreme precariousness at once becomes evident when it is remembered that, now at least, it is usual for religious fasts to precede rather than to follow sacrificial and funeral feasts, if observed at all in connexion with these.

For the sacrificial system of H (= Law of Holiness) is less developed than that of P, and in particular shows no knowledge of the sinand trespass-offerings; the high priest is only Primus inter pares among his brethren, xxi.

The values behind a sacrificial asceticism or renunciation of the self can be found operating in diverse situations in Japan.

The same term is also used for the sacrificial ritual itself.

It has no suggestions of an advanced temple cult, extensive priesthood, or commitment to a sacrificial religion.

They would have been sacrificial lambs and found not guilty anyway, allowing the real culprits to claim vindication for the Yard 's actions.

Chances are, if you haven't found your sacrificial pair of pants at a resale shop, you've scoured your closet and have instead decided to donate your favorite, best fitting, most comfortable pair of denim blues to the cause.

When you think of cultures that practice sacrificial burials, China is one country that comes to mind.

Even today, sacrificial burials are still traditional.

The practice of sacrificial burials is not new to China's people.

Further exploration of this sacrificial burial in China revealed several charioteers lying on the ramps that led to the outside of the tombs, which faced north and south.

People aren't the only living beings used in sacrificial burials.

Other tombs have been found to have sacrificial animals in them.

To date, more than 5,000 sacrificial burial sites have been found and verified in China.

From Irish funerals to Egyptian sacrificial burials, you can find it here.

They composed several tunes, including Force of Darkness, Sacrificial Lamb, The Elite, and The Battle.

He connects the Christian ministry, not with the worship of the Temple, in which were priests and sacrificial ritual, but with that of the synagogue, which was a local institution providing spiritual edification by the reading and exposition of Scripture.'

This conception of the Sabbath, however, necessarily underwent an important modification when the local sanctuaries were abolished under the "Deuteronomic" reform, and those sacrificial rites and feasts which in Hosea's time formed the essence of every act of religion were limited to the central altar, which most men could visit only at rare intervals.

Among the Greeks and Romans likewise it was the liver that continued throughout all periods to play the chief role in divination through the sacrificial animal.

Compacts with a powerful foreign state, under whose aegis Israel was glad to shelter, involved covenants sealed by sacrificial rites in which the deity or deities of the foreign state were involved as well as Yahweh, the god of the weaker.

Both parts of the book ignore the Jewish sacrificial cult.

We see from I Kings xviii., 2 Kings x., that great Baal temples had two classes of ministers, kohanim and nebhiim, " priests " and " prophets," and as the former bear a name which primarily denotes a soothsayer, so the latter are also a kind of priests who do sacrificial service with a wild ritual of their own.

Nevertheless, the concentration of all ritual at a single point, and the practical exclusion of laymen from active participation in it - for the old sacrificial feast had now shrunk into entire insignificance in comparison with the stated priestly holocausts and atoning rites2 - lent powerful assistance to the growth of a new and higher type of personal religion, the religion which found its social expression not in material acts of oblation, but in the language of the Psalms. In the best times of the old kingdom the priests had shared the place of the prophets as the religious leaders of the nation; under the second Temple they represented the unprogressive traditional side of religion, and the leaders of thought were the psalmists and the scribes, who spoke much more directly to the piety of the nation.

Whether the will of the gods is determined through the inspection of the liver of the sacrificial animal, through observing the action of oil bubbles in a basin of water or through the observation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, it is Shamash and Adad who, in the ritual connected with divination, are invariably invoked.

In the Armenian church of the 12th century the idea of a reiterated sacrificial death of Christ still seemed bizarre and barbarous.'

It was, save where animal sacrifices survived, the Christian sacrifice, par excellence, the counterpart for the converted of the sacrificial communions of paganism; and though charged with higher significance than these, it yet reposed on a like background of religious usage and beliefs.

It is their analogue, and to understand it we must understand them, not forgetting that Paul, as a Semite, and his hearers, as converted pagans, were imbued with the sacrificial ideas of the old world.

In Hinduism the various implements of sacrifice are similarly personified and worshipped, especially the sacrificial post to which the victim is bound, and which, under the name of vanaspall and svaru, is deified and invoked.

Lastly, a classical mode of consecrating persons, or winning or reinforcing their holiness or kinship with the god, is the sacrificial meal at which sacred animals or the god himself are eaten.

The synagogues which traced their origin to the time of Ezekiel, when the sacrificial cultus was impossible, extended this ideal yet further.

The prevalence of famine among the Swedes was attributed to the king's remissness in performing sacrificial functions; and on more than one occasion kings are said to have been put to death for this reason.

In the main body of the temple were held the sacrificial feasts.

Of animals, which were consumed at the sacrificial banquets, we hear chiefly of horses, but also of oxen and boars.

In general the chief sacrificial festivals seem to have taken place at fixed times in the year, one in early or mid-autumn, another at mid-winter and a third during the spring.

How far the older sacrificial rules resembled the levitical law we do not know, but in the canons of Sahak, C. 43 0, the priests already receive the levitical portions of the victims; and we find that animals are being sacrificed every Sunday, on the feast days which at first were few, in fulfilment of private vows, in expiation of the sins of the living, and still more of those of the dead.

The earliest Armenian rituals contain ample services for the conduct of an agape or love feast held in the church off sacrificial meat.

The old sacrificial hymns were probably obscene and certainly nonsensical, and the substitution for them of the psalms, and of lections of the prophets and New Testament, was an enormous gain.

We do not know precisely how the eucharistic rite was adjusted to these sacrificial meals; but, in the canons of Sahak, r Cor.

The Hyperboreans were thus the bearers of the sacrificial gifts to Apollo over land and sea, irrespective of their home, the name being given to Delphians, Thessalians, Athenians and Delians.

As the latter conveyed sacrificial gifts to Delos hidden in wheat-straw, so at the Thargelia a sheaf of corn was carried round in procession, concealing a symbol of the god (for other resemblances see Crusius's article).

The whole empire shared in the great sacrifice; every colony and every subject state sent a deputation and sacrificial animals.

On the great day of the feast there was a procession of the priests, the sacrificial assistants of every kind, the representatives of every part of the empire with their victims, of the cavalry, in short of the population of Attica and 1 So named from a note (1902) directed by Dr Don Louis Maria Drago, the Argentine minister of foreign affairs, to the Argentine diplomatic representative at Washington at the time of the difficulties of Venezuela incident to the collection of debts owed to foreigners by that country.

A triennial sacrificial tithe is inconceivable when it is remembered that the tithe is only an extension of the firstfruits.

The priests of the sanctuaries had of old a share in the sacrificial feasts,' and among those who are to share in the triennial tithe Deuteronomy includes the Levites, i.e.

As Malachi speaks in Deuteronomic phrase of the "whole tithe," the payment to the Levites (now subordinate ministers of the Temple) was perhaps still only triennial; and if even this was difficult to collect, we may be sure that the minor sacrificial tithe had very nearly disappeared.

No one complains of the civil laws in Exodus or the sacrificial ritual in Leviticus, because they want the fire of Isaiah or the tenderness of Deuteronomy.

Then followed the theophany, and, as the text stands, the sacrificial meal (9-II).

But Brahmins by birth (not necessarily sacrificial priests, for they followed all sorts of occupations) were trying to oust the nobles from the highest grade.

When they were baffled, the Sadducees, to whose party the chief priests belonged, sought in vain to pose Him with a problem as to the resurrection of the dead; and after that a more honest scribe confessed the truth of His teaching as to the supremacy of love to God and man over all the sacrificial worship of the Temple, and was told in reply that he was not far from the kingdom of God.

Whatever its origin, the word Mass had by the time of the Reformation been long applied only to the Eucharist; and, though in itself a perfectly colourless term, and used as such during the earlier stages of the 16th century controversies concerning the Eucharist, it soon became identified with that sacrificial aspect of the sacrament of the altar which it was the chief object of the Reformers to overthrow.

There are also indications that the extensive texts dealing with divination through the liver of sacrificial animals, which represents a more popular origin than divination through the observations of the heavens, based as it is on the primitive view which regarded the liver as the seat of life and of the soul, were brought into connexion with astral divination.

Ceremonial and sacrificial observances of all kinds are held to be useless in themselves, but operative for good or ill indirectly by their effect upon the mental attitude of those who practise them.

To her the opening sacrifice was offered; to her at the sacrificial meal the first and last libations were poured.

Among the old Prussians they were invited to share an annual sacrificial 1 Fergusson, 65; Crooke ii.

But the prophetic teaching was obscured in part by the nationalism of the prophets themselves, who exalted Israel as at once God's instrument and the peculiar object of his love; and in part by the triumph of a legal-ritualistic sacrificial system.

In St Paul we find the beginnings of explanation, indeed of two explanations, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews the whole sacrificial system is found to culminate in Christ, of whom all priests and sacrifices are symbols, so that they are abolished with the coming of the great reality.

Sacrifice was believed to exert an influence on the deity which is quasiphysical, and in sacrificial feasts God and worshipper are in mysterious union.

At the Scandinavian sacrificial feasts a horn consecrated to Bragi was used as a drinkingcup by the guests, who then vowed to do some great deed which would be worthy of being immortalized in verse.

The official insignia of the flamen Dialis (of Jupiter), the highest of these priests, were the white cap (pileus, albogalerus), at the top of which was an olive branch and a woollen thread; the laena, a thick woollen toga praetexta woven by his wife; the sacrificial knife; and a rod to keep the people from him when on his way to offer sacrifice.

She wore long woollen robes; a veil and a kerchief for the head, her hair being plaited up with a purple band in a conical form (tutulus); and shoes made of the leather of sacrificed animals; like her husband, she carried the sacrificial knife.

As a descriptive title Leviticus, " the Levitical book," is not inappropriate to the contents of the book, which exhibits an elaborate system of sacrificial worship. In this connexion, however, the term " Levitical " is used in a perfectly general sense, since there is no reference in the book itself to the Levites themselves.

Thus the modern Hindu, though using civilized means for lighting his household fires, retains the savage " fire-drill " for obtaining fire by friction of wood when what he considers pure or sacred fire has to be produced for sacrificial purposes; while in Europe into modern times the same primitive process has been kept up in producing the sacred and magical " need-fire," which was lighted to deliver cattle from a murrain.

Such were those of the Ambarvalia, Robigalia, &c., which were essentially rustic festivals, lustrations of the fields, consisting in a procession round the spot to be purified, leading the sacrificial victims with prayers, hymns and ceremonies, in order to protect the young crops from evil influences.

Subsequently Jethro came to Moses (probably at Kadesh), a great sacrificial feast was held, and the priest instructed Moses in legislative procedure; Exod.

Although his favourite method was by word of mouth, yet signs were sometimes used; thus Calchas interpreted the flight of birds; burning offerings, sacrificial barley, the arrow of the god, dreams and the lot, all played their part in communicating the will of the gods.

Pilgrimage with the ancient Arabs was the fulfilment of a vow, which appears to have generally terminated - at least on the part of the well-to-do - in a sacrificial feast.

Mina, (2) to slay a victim at Mina and hold a sacrificial meal, part of the flesh being also dried and so preserved, or given to the poor, 3 (3) to be shaved and so terminate the ihram, (4) to make the third ifada, i.e.

The necessity for such sacrificial furniture has been felt in most religions, and consequently we find its use widespread among races and nations which have no mutual connexion.

Considerable obscurity exists as to their other functions, but they seem to have been charged with providing food for the visitors to the temples, with the care of certain offerings, and with the arrangement of the sacrificial banquets.

The chief festival among the Hova, and almost confined to them, was that of the New Year, at which time a kind of sacrificial killing of oxen took place, and a ceremonial bathing, from which the festival took its name of Fandroana (the Bath).

Under the republic they emerge into prominence under a pontifex maximus, who took over the king's duties as chief administrator of religious law, just as his chief sacrificial duties were taken by the rex sacrorum; his dwelling was the regia, " the house of the king."

While in a general way the reign of law and order in the movements of the heavenly bodies was recognized, and indeed must have exercised an influence at an early period in leading to the rise of a methodical divination that was certainly of a much higher order than the examination of an animal's liver, yet the importance that was laid upon the endless variations in the form of the phenomena and the equally numerous apparent deviations from what were regarded as normal conditions, prevented for a long time the rise of any serious study of astronomy beyond what was needed for the purely practical purposes that the priests as "inspectors" of the heavens (as they were also the "inspectors" of the sacrificial livers) had in mind.

Mannhardt, who by comparing numerous examples of similar customs among other European peoples arrived at the conclusion that the rite was of extreme antiquity and of dramatic rather than sacrificial character, and that its object was possibly to procure rain; (2) that of Wissowa, who refuses to date it farther back than the latter half of the 3rd century B.C., and sees in it the yearly representation of an original sacrifice of twentyseven captive Greeks (taking Argei as a Latin form of 'Ap-yE701) by drowning in the Tiber.

On the sacrificial use and import of frankincense and similar substances see Incense.

In the courtyard stood the sacrificial altar, which had statues on either side.

Another system uses a sacrificial anode tied to the rebar on either side of the patch repair.

Note the sacrificial anode also there to prevent corrosion.

The astral emanations from the sacrificial corpse provide the ectoplasmic means for visible manifestation.

The sacrificial material is then dissolved in a chemical etchant that does not attack the structural parts.

He was to be the sacrificial lamb, slain for the sins of the world.

Blood and breath being the two primary elements or souls of life, these consequently became the two great types of sacrificial offering.

Having regard to circles wherein sacrificial rites were observed, a slab of stone was a conspicuous object in that dread ceremonial.

Yes, that means sacrificial use of our time and money, but not sacrificial in a stupid way.

It is truly sacrificial and I am constantly amazed at their consistency and dependability.

It means sacrificial in a Spirit-filled, balanced way, like Jesus.

But if you accept Jesus as your personal savior, God will accept His sacrificial death on your behalf.

They would have been sacrificial lambs and found not guilty anyway, allowing the real culprits to claim vindication for the Yard's actions.

Priest and prophet, he sought to unify the national religious consciousness by preserving the sacrificial cult, discarding its abuses and vitalizing it ethically.

From this point of view it is most significant that in the older parts of the Hebrew Scriptures the new moon and the Sabbath are almost invariably mentioned together.6 Nor are other traces wanting of the connexion of sacrificial occasions - i.e.

Hepatoscopy in the Euphrates valley can be traced back to the 3rd millennium before our era, which may be taken as sufficient evidence for its survival from the period of primitive culture, while the supreme importance attached to signs read on the livers of sacrificial animals - usually a sheep - follows from the care with which omens derived from such inspection on occasions of historical significance were preserved as guides to later generations of priests.

Thus the most prominent subdivision of the older school, the Taittiriyas, in their Samhita, have treated the main portion of the ceremonial in this promiscuous fashion, and to add to the confusion they have, by way of supplement, put forth a so-called Taittiriya-brahmana, which, so far from being a real Brahmana, merely deals with some additional rites in the same confused mixture of sacrificial formulae and dogmatic explanations.

We may observe how even a very primitive people such as the Arunta of Australia behaves with the greatest solemnity at its ceremonies, and professes to be made "glad" and "strong" thereby; whilst of his countrymen, whom he would not trust to pray in private, Plato testifies that in the temples during the sacrificial prayers "they show an intense earnestness and with eager interest talk to the Gods and beseech them" (Laws, 887).

The Vesta of the state is in fact the king's hearth, standing in close proximity to the Regia, the king's palace; the Vestal Virgins, who have charge of the sacred fire, are the "king's daughters," and as such even in republican times were in the manus of the pontifex maximus, who was the successor of the king on the legal side of his religious duties, as the rex sacrorum was on the sacrificial side.

God 's love for his world led to his sacrificial giving in the person of Jesus.

Archaeologists believe there are many more sacrificial burial tombs and pits to be found in China.

We are justified in concluding, therefore, that among the Greeks and Romans likewise the examination of the liver was the basis of divination in the case of the sacrificial animal.

It is, however, to the Brahmanas and Sutras of the Yajurveda, dealing with the ritual of the real offering-priest, the Adhvaryu, that we have to turn for a connected view of the sacrificial procedure in all its material details.

The setting up, by a householder, of a set of three sacrificial fires of his own constitutes the first ceremony of the former class, the Agny-adhana (or (?) Agny-adheya).

No general survey of sacrificial ritual is possible here, but a.

In the east Syrian, the Armenian and the Georgian churches, respectively Nestorian, Monophysite and Greek Orthodox in their tenets, the agape was from the first a survival, under Christian and Jewish forms, of the old sacrificial systems of a pre-Christian age.

The question, however, still remains to be answered how people came to the belief or to the assumption that through the soul, or the seat of life of the sacrificial animal, the intention of the gods could be divined.

He became a Salian priest at the age of eight, and soon knew by heart all the forms and liturgical order of the official worship, and even the sacred music. In the earliest statue we have he is a youth offering incense; he is a priest at the sacrificial altar in the latest triumphal reliefs.

This spirit of do ut des will be found to go closely with the gift-theory of sacrifice, and to be especially characteristic of those religions of middle grade that are given over to sacrificial worship as conducted in temples and by means of organized priesthoods.

Moreover, under piaculum are confused purification, propitiations and expiations; Smith's contention that purifications, whose magical character he recognizes but interprets as late, are not sacrificial, is far from conclusive.

Saul and his attendant are invited by the seer-priest Samuel into the banqueting chamber (lishkah) where thirty persons partake of the sacrificial meal.

It is not to be supposed that either Amos or Isaiah would have countenanced the total suppression of all sacrificial observance.

This element of public confession for sin became more prominent in the days when synagogal worship developed, and prayer took the place of the sacrificial offerings which could only be offered in the Jerusalem temple.

Among the more interesting relics found were ivory figures of Egyptian or strongly Egyptianizing fabric. On an adjacent hill were the remains of what seems to have been in later times a temple of the Dictaean Zeus, and from the occurrence of rich deposits of Minoan vases and sacrificial remains at a lower level, the religious tradition represented by the later temple seems to go back to prehistoric times.

While the priests developed the sacrificial ritual, it was the prophets that represented the theocratic element of the national life - they devoted themselves to their task with noteworthy persistence and ability, and their efforts were crowned with success; but their virtue of singlemindedness carried with it the defect of narrowness - they despised all peoples and all countries but their own, and were intolerant of opinions, held by their fellow-citizens, that were not wholly in accordance with their own principles.

At the time of the reformation under Josiah, represented by Deuteronomy, the attempt was made to turn the family thank-offering of firstlings into a sacrificial rite performed by the priests in the Temple with the aid of the males of each household, who had to come up to Jerusalem but left the next morning to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread in their homes.

The descent of the priest into the sacrificial foss symbolized the death of Attis, the withering of the vegetation of Mother Earth; his bath of blood and emergence the restoration of Attis, the rebirth of vegetation.

In artistic representations, Brahma usually appears as a bearded man of red colour with four heads crowned with a pointed, tiara-like head-dress, and four hands holding his sceptre, or a sacrificial spoon, a bundle of leaves representing the Veda, a bottle of water of the Ganges, and a string of beads or his bow Parivita.

The chief interest, however, attaching to the Brahmanas is doubtless their detailed description of the sacrificial system as practised in the later Vedic ages; and the information afforded by them in this respect should be all the more welcome to us, as the history of religious institutions knows of no other sacrificial ceremonial with the details of which we are acquainted to anything like the same extent.

An even more complete and minutely detailed view of the sacrificial system is no doubt obtained from the ceremonial manuals, the Kalpa-sutras; but it is just by the speculative discussions of the Brahmanasthe mystic significance and symbolical colouring with which they invest single rites - that we gain a real insight into the nature and gradual development of this truly stupendous system of ritual worship.

The building of this altar is spread over a whole year, during which period the sacrificer has to carry about the sacrificial fire in an earthen pan for at least some time each day, until it is finally deposited on the completed altar to serve as the offering-fire for the Soma oblations.

Sheep, rams, bullocks, fowls are given sacrificial salt to lick, and then sacrificed by the priest and deacon, who has the levitical portions of the victim as his perquisite.

The early Christian agape admitted of adaptation to the older funeral and sacrificial feasts, and was so adapted.

The Levites, who formerly ministered in the high places, now discharge the subordinate offices of gate-keepers and slaughterers of the sacrificial victims.

The ideas of expiation and atonement so prevalent in Ezekiel's scheme, which there find expression in the half-yearly sacrificial celebrations, are expressed in Lev.

The ritual books of our Pentateuch were not then in existence, and the sacrificial cult might be treated with contempt as not authoritative.

From this time forward the new moons, which till then had been at least as important as the Sabbath and were celebrated by sacrificial feasts as occasions of religious gladness, fall into insignificance, except in the conservative temple ritual.

The sacrificial ritual recognizes two kinds of srauta sacrifices, viz.

Of a far more complicated nature than these offerings are the Soma-sacrifices, which, besides the simpler ceremonies of this class, such as the Agnishtoma or "Praise of Agni," also include great state functions, such as the Rajasuya or consecration of a king, and the Asvamedha or horse-sacrifice, which, in addition to the sacrificial rites, have a considerable amount of extraneous, often highly interesting, ceremonial connected with them, which makes them seem to partake largely of the nature of public festivals.

The gradual elaboration of the sacrificial ceremonial, as the all-sufficient expression of religious devotion, and a constantly growing tendency towards theosophic and mystic speculation on the significance of every detail of the ritual, could not fail to create a demand for explanatory treatises of this kind, which, to enhance their practical utility, would naturally deal with the special texts and rites assigned in the ceremonial to the several classes of officiating priests.

At a subsequent period the demand for instruction in the sacrificial science called into existence a still more practical set of manuals, the so-called Kalpa-sutras, or ceremonial rules, detailing, in succinct aphorisms, the approved course of sacrificial procedure, without reference to the supposed origin or import of the several rites.

The principal other ceremonies of this class are the new and full moon offerings, the oblations made at the commencement of the three seasons, the offering of first-fruits, the animal sacrifice, and the Agnihotra, or daily morning and evening oblation of milk, which, however, is also included amongst the grihya, or domestic rites, as having to be performed daily on the domestic fire by the householder who keeps no regular set of sacrificial fires.

One of the fourteen sections of the Satapathabrahmana, the tenth, called Agni-rahasya or "the mystery of Agni (the god and altar)," is entirely devoted to this feature of the sacrificial symbolism.

Cynthia joined him with a tray of sacrificial pork chops awaiting controlled incineration.