Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

138 Totemism, Sacrament and Sacrifice [ch.
drop a pin into a holy well, you are not making an offering. Such
an offering would be senseless; a well has no use for pins, nor a
tree for raiment. What you do is to establish connection, build
a sacramental bridge, a lightning-conductor. So Kylon 1
, by way
of safeguard, tied himself by a thread to the holy xoanon of
Athens, thereby establishing sacramental communion. Some-
times you need no bridge, you have only to lie open to spiritual
influences. Thus among the Algonkins in North America, a Fox
man in telling a missionary of his experiences in the sweat
lodge said :
Often one will cut oneself over the arms and legs, slitting oneself through
the skin. This is done to open up many passages that the manitou (the
Algonkin equivalent of mana) may get through. The manitou comes out
of its place of abode in the stone. It becomes raised by the heat of the fire
and proceeds out of the stone when the water is sprinkled on it. It comes
out in the steam, and in the steam it enters the body wherever it can find
entrance. It moves up and down and all over inside the body, driving out
everything that inflicts pain. Before the manitou returns to the stone, it
imparts some of its nature to the body. That is why one feels so well after
having been in the sweat lodge 2 .
Magic, sacrament and sacrifice are fundamentally all one ;
they
are all the handling of the sacred, the manipulation of mana, but
usage has differentiated the three terms. Magic is the more
general term. Sacrament is usually confined to cases where the
ceremonial contact is by eating ;
sacrifice has come to be associated
with the killing of an animal or the making over of any object by
a gift. Sacrament is concerned rather with the absorbing of
mana into oneself, magic deals rather with the using of that
mana for an outside end. Moreover sacrifice and sacrament
tend to go over to the public, ceremonial, recurrent contacts
effected collectively ; whereas individual, private, isolated efforts
after contact tend to be classed as magic.
It is sometimes felt that whereas the gift-theory of sacrifice
is simple, straight-forward, common-sensical, the medium, or
contact or communion theory is 'mystical,' and therefore to be
regarded with suspicion by the plain man. ' Mystical ' assuredly
it is in the sense that it deals with the unseen, unknown mana ;
K.T.X.
1 Plut. Vit. Sol. XII. eiiaipavras 5e rod edovs KpOKTjv k\(i3