It
was offering the first fruits of life.
Religions have always rolled on two pivots; observance and creed:
observance depends largely on climate; creed not at all. One could as
easily make a dogma accepted on the equator as the polar circle. It
would later be rejected equally at Batavia and in the Orkneys, while it
would be maintained _unguibus et rostro_ at Salamanca. That depends in
no way on the soil and the atmosphere, but solely on opinion, that
fickle queen of the world.
Certain libations of wine will be precept in a vine-growing country, and
it will not occur to a legislator's mind to institute in Norway sacred
mysteries which cannot be performed without wine.
It will be expressly ordered to burn incense in the parvis of a temple
where beasts are slaughtered in the Deity's honour, and for the priests'
supper. This butcher's shop called "temple" would be a place of
abominable infection if it were not continually purified: and without
the assistance of aromatics, the religion of the ancients would have
caused the plague. Even the interior of the temple was decked with
festoons of flowers in order to make the air sweeter.
No cow will be sacrificed in the burning land of the Indian peninsula;
because this animal which furnishes necessary milk is very rare in an
arid country, its flesh is dry, tough, contains very little nourishment,
and the Brahmins would live very badly.
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