filled with the blood of the enemies of the gods.[1] The Aztecs regarded pulque or the wine of the country as bad, on account of the wild deeds which men did under its influence. But these wild deeds were believed to be the acts, not of the drunken man, but of the wine-god by whom he was possessed and inspired; and so seriously was this theory of inspiration held that if any one spoke ill of or insulted a tipsy man, he was liable to be punished for disrespect to the wine-god incarnate in his votary. Hence, says Sahagun, it was believed, not without ground, that the Indians intoxicated themselves on purpose to commit with impunity crimes for which they would certainly have been punished if they had committed them sober.[2] Thus it appears that on the primitive view intoxication or the inspiration produced by wine is exactly parallel to the inspiration produced by drinking the blood of animals.[3] The soul or life is in the blood, and wine is the blood of the vine. Hence whoever drinks the blood of an animal is inspired with the soul of the animal or of the god, who, as we have seen,[4] is often supposed to enter into the animal before it is slain; and whoever drinks wine drinks the blood, and so receives into himself the soul or spirit, of the god of the vine.
With regard to the second point, the fear of passing under blood or under a living person, we are told that some of the Australian blacks have a dread of passing under a leaning tree or even under the rails of a fence. The reason they give is that a woman may
- ↑ Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, c. 6. A myth apparently akin to this has been preserved in some native Egyptian writings. See Ad. Erman, Aegypten und aegyptisches Leben im Altertum, p. 364.
- ↑ Bernardino de Sahagun, Histoire générale des choses de la Nouvelle-Espagne, traduite par Jourdanet et Siméon (Paris, 1880), p. 46 sq.
- ↑ See above, p. 34 sq.
- ↑ P. 35.
