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Marett uses her as his most telling argument against the inclusiveness of the concepts of Dr. Frazer and of MM. Hubert and Mauss. He says: "It is difficult to conceive of sympathy, and sympathy only, as the continuous, or even the originally efficient cause of the avoidance."
Marett asks, a "misapplication of the ideas of association by similarity and contiguity" amounting to the sympathetic taboos so carefully described by such writers on Magic as MM. Hubert and Mauss of L'Année Sociologique? Still another kind of taboos mentioned by Dr. Frazer but amplified by Mr.
+1047+. In one point, the death of the god, J. G. Frazer, while accepting Smith's theory in general, diverges from his view. Smith regards the death of the god as having been originally the sacrificial death of the divine totem animal, with which later the god was identified. This explanation is adopted and expanded by Hubert and Mauss.
The conception of sacrifice as bringing about a union of the divine and the human is reached in a different way from that of Smith by MM. Hubert and Mauss, and receives in their hands a peculiar coloring.
They thus arrive at the formula: "Sacrifice is a religious act which, by the consecration of a victim, modifies the state of the moral person who performs it, or of certain objects in which this person is interested." +1050+. The essay of MM. Hubert and Mauss is rather a description of the mode of procedure in Hindu sacrifice than an explanation of the source of its power.
So far as regards the variety of functions assigned by MM. Hubert and Mauss to sacrifice, they may all be explained as efforts to propitiate supernatural Powers; and the obligation on priests and worshipers to purify themselves by ablutions and otherwise arises from a sense of the sacredness of the sacrificial act, which is itself derived from the feeling that the sacredness of supernatural beings communicates itself to whatever is connected with them.
The Hindu sacrificial ritual is described by MM. Hubert and Mauss; the Hebrew procedure is given in the later sections of the Pentateuch. The Egyptian ritual also appears to have been elaborate, including much music.
Though the essay of MM. Hubert and Mauss formulates no definition of the ultimate efficient cause in sacrifice, passing remarks appear to indicate that they look on the offering as a gift to superhuman Powers, and that their object is to show under what conditions and circumstances it is to be presented. +1051+. Sacrifice as the expression of desire for union with the Infinite.
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