The evil eye. An account of this ancient and wide spread superstition

no THE EVIL EYE chap.
by his successor after he had plucked the golden
and in our own familiar custom of " crying
bough ;
the neck," already referred to.
\ Mr. Frazer has worked out at considerable length
and with striking force, the belief which seems to lie
deep down in the heart of man, inherited from his
Ivery earliest ancestors, that not only was a human
I in
victim a fitting, but a necessary object for sacrifice,
whether to atone for past offences or to propitiate
Ifor future favours. The faith of Abraham was tested
a way evidently familiar, and not apparently
shocking or unreasonable according to the customs
of his day. The killing of a substitute for a god,^'^
may be observed in many of the human sacrificial
rites performed by savage or semi-savage people.
The view that the victim is also an embodiment of
the spirit of the deity to be slain, is shown by the
great pains taken "to secure a physical correspondence
between him and the natural object," whose
spirit or embodiment he is made to represent.
Thus the Mexicans killed young victims for the
young corn, and old ones for the ripe. The full
identification of the victim with the corn spirit or
deity is shown by the African custom of putting
him to death with spades and hoes, and by the
Mexican, of grinding him like corn between two
stones.
Stranger still, the same author shows plainly and
at crreat lens^th the custom of sacramental eatingf the
representative body of the slain god to be prevalent
as the survival of a cult long anterior to Christianity.
Not only did the Pawnee chief devour the heart
of the Sioux girl, slain as a sacrificial offering, but
i"8 Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. i. p. 391 ; vol. ii. p. 67 et seq.