Unlike Semitic gods, Darumulun receives no sacrifice.  As we have said, he has no kin with ghosts, and their sacrifices could not be carried on into his cult, if Waitz-Gerland (vi. 811) are right in saying that the Australians have no ancestor-worship.  The Kurnai ghosts ’were believed to live upon plants,’[13] which are not offered to them.  Chill ghosts, unfed by men, would come to waning camp-fires and batten on the broken meats.  The Ngarego and Wolgal held, more handsomely, that Tharamulun (Darumulun) met the just departed spirit ’and conducted it to its future home beyond the sky.’[14] Ghosts might also accompany relics of the body, such as the dead hand, carried about by the family, who would wave the black fragment at the dreaded Aurora Borealis, crying, ‘Send it away!’ I am unacquainted with any sacrifices to ancestral ghosts among this people who cannot long remember their ancestors, consequently the practice has not been refracted on their supreme Master’s cult.  In the cult of Darumulun, and of other highest gods of lowest savages, nothing answers to the Hebrew technical priestly word for sacrifice, ’food of the deity.’[15] Nobody feeds Puluga, nobody fed Ahone.  We hear of no Fuegian sacrifices.  Mr. Robertson Smith says:  ’In all religions in which the gods have been developed out of totems [worshipped animals and other things regarded as akin to human stocks] the ritual act of laying food before the deity is perfectly intelligible.’  Pundjel, an Australian Supreme Being, is mixed up with animals in some myths, but it is not easy to see how such Supreme Beings as he could be ‘developed out of totems’!  I am not aware, again, that any Australian tribe feeds the animals who are its totems, so Darumulun could not, and did not inherit sacrifice through them.  Mr. Robertson Smith had a celebrated theory that cereal sacrifice is a tribute to a god, while sacrifice of a beast or man is an act of communion with the god.[16] Men and gods dined together.[17] ’The god himself was conceived of as a being of the same stock as his comrades.’  Beasts were also of the same stock, one beast, say a lobster, was of the same blood as a lobster kin, and its god.[18] Occasionally the sacred beast of the kin, usually not to be slain or tasted, is ’eaten as a kind of mystic sacrament a most dubious fact.’[19]

Now, there is, I believe, some evidence, lately collected if not published, which makes in favour of the eating of totems by Australians, at a certain very rare and solemn mystery.  It would not even surprise me (’from information received’) if a very deeply initiated person were occasionally slain, as the highest degree of initiation, on certain most unusual occasions.  This remains uncertain, but I have at present no evidence that, either by one road or another, either from ghost-feeding or totem-feeding, or feeding on totems, any Australian Supreme Being receives any sacrifice at all.  Much less, as among Pawnees and Semitic peoples (to judge from certain traces), is the Australian Supreme Being a cause of and partaker in human sacrifice.[20] The horrible idea of the Man who is the God, and is eaten in the God’s honour, occurs among polytheistic Aztecs, on a high level of material culture, not among Australians, Andamanese, Bushmen, or Fuegians.[21]