CRIMINAL FESTIVALS. 759 



ings, and massacres would be supposed by their adorers to be 

 pleasing ; in fact, the Tahitians believed that their god Oro was 

 very well satisfied when wars were bloody; and the Chibchas 

 said that no sacrifice was so dear to the gods as sacrifices of human 

 blood. For this reason many were killed among the most savage 

 peoples in honor of ancestors and the gods. These religious 

 crimes, too, were individual and collective — that is, the sacrifice 

 was sometimes performed by one man, sometimes by a family, and 

 sometimes by a whole tribe, according as a personal, a family, or 

 a tribal concern was to be commended to the gods. 



According to this view, we should be tempted to believe that 

 when crime began to be the object of legal repression and moral 

 repulsion, all these individual and collective crimes, festivals, 

 and human sacrifices would disappear. It is not so. By a curi- 

 ous contradiction, individual crime has disappeared sooner than 

 collective crime. The branding by the public opinion of peoples 

 who have become sufficiently civilized, of murder, theft, and can- 

 nibalism as offenses, may have prevented individuals from com- 

 mitting them, but did not prevent the whole people celebrating 

 the criminal festivals which their savage customs had engendered, 

 although they were contradictory of the changed condition of 

 public morality. In fact, we find among very civilized peoples 

 official festivals and ceremonies which are wholly worthy of the 

 most savage races. 



It is a general belief among primitive peoples that human 

 blood, possessing marvelous qualities, assures fertility to the 

 fields and stability to houses, and on that account a large number 

 of homicides are committed among such peoples : for each man 

 tries to assure the benefits of bloodshed to his own fields or to his 

 house. Among the civilized Aryans of India this barbarous cus- 

 tom existed no longer ; whoever killed a man to use his blood for 

 such a purpose would have been condemned as a murderer; but 

 the ancient usage still survived in public ceremonies. 



War is often made by primitive peoples for the purpose of 

 eating the enemy who is slain, for the enemy is then only a 

 special kind of game. With some peoples who have advanced a 

 little, and who have abolished their cannibalistic customs, we find 

 that human flesh is the essential dish in certain banquets cele- 

 brated in honor of victories. In Dahomey, after fortunate wars, 

 there were public festivals in which banquets of human flesh 

 were a sacred custom, although the Dahomeyans were not can- 

 nibals; and it was the king's function to eat the heart of an 

 enemy's chief slain in war. 



What is called juridical anthropophagy occasionally gives rise 

 to a peculiar species of criminal festivals. Among the Battas of 

 Sumatra, a numerous people, agricultural, peaceful, and law- 



