LIBATIONS. The practice of offering libations of blood, water, wine, and even of milk and beer, has been widespread. Libations of blood or of wine are referred to frequently in the Old Testament (cp. Ecclesiasticus 1. 15, where wine is clearly a surrogate for blood). They usually appear as a mere accessory to a fire offering, but there is good reason to suppose that the libation of blood is a common Semitic practice and is really older than fire-sacrifices. The libation of wine may be regarded as a surrogate for the primitive blood-offering. There is no certain reference to libations of water in the Old Testament, but in the practice of later Judaism water was poured out at the Feast of Tabernacles. " One of the most striking ceremonies of the Feast of Taber nacles was the libation of water which was made every morning during the seven days of the feast at the same time as the libation of wine accompanying the morning holocaust. The water was carried up from Siloam through the water-gate, and poured into a basin on the top of the altar at the S.W. corner, the wine being poured into another. The bringing of the water into the pre cincts was accompanied by trumpet-blasts and loud jubilation " (Encycl. Bibi., s.v. " Sacrifice "). In North Semitic ritual, however, the libation usually consisted of wine, which, even when it went with a fire-offering, was poured out on the ground. " The Greeks and Romans poured the sacrificial wine over the flesh, but the Hebrews treated it like the blood, pouring it out at the base of the altar " (Robertson Smith). That milk was a very ancient Semitic libation is indicated by its use in ritual both by the Arabs and by the Phoenicians. Among the Babylonians and Assyrians libations were offered to the gods and to the dead. A large votive tablet of Ur-Enlil (c. 3000 B.C.), unearthed at Nippur, for instance, shows the ruler in the act of offering a libation to Enlil. In a story of the descent of the goddess Ishtar to Arab), worshippers whose dead had gone like Ishtar to " the land of no return " are instructed to turn in prayer to Tammuz and to pour out libations of pure water and oil to him (Morris Jastrow, City.). In ancient Egypt libations of blood or of a liquid substitute for blood and of water are a common feature in ritual and religion (see further below). Among primitive folk, too, the pouring out of blood has great religious significance. Take the tribes of Central Australia for example. The men of the Emu (totem) trace their sacred images on ground saturated with blood. In some of the clans the young men open their veins and let streams of blood flow on to a sacred rock, evidently with the idea of revivifying the virtues of the rock and of reinforcing its efficacy (Emile Durkheim). What then Is the origin of the act of pouring out libations? As far as ancient Egypt is concerned, new light has been thrown on this question by Dr. A. M. Blackman and Professor G. Elliot
Smith. From a study of certain passages in the Egyptian texts inscribed in the subterranean chambers of the Sak kara Pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty, Dr. Blackman thinks the idea in the mind of the Egyptians is quite clear. " The corpse of the deceased is dry and shrivelled. To revivify it the vital fluids that have exuded from it [in the process of mummification] must be restored, for not till then will life return and the heart beat again. This, so the texts show us, was believed to be accomplished by offering libations to the accompaniment of incantations." In some passages the libations are said to be the actual fluids that have issued from the corpse. In others a different notion is intro duced. " It is not the deceased's own exudations that are to revive his shrunken frame but those of a divine body, the [god's fluid] that came from the corpse of Osiris himself, the juices that dissolved from his decaying flesh, which are communicated to the dead sacrament wise under the form of these libations." Professor Elliot Smith thinks that the Proto-Egyptians clearly believed in the validity of a general biological theory of the life giving properties of water. " Groping after some explanation of the natural phenomenon that the earth became fertile when water was applied to it, and that seed burst into life under the same influence, the early biologist formulated the natural and not wholly illogical idea that water was the repository of life-giving powers. Water was equally necessary for the production of life and for the maintenance of lite." These general biological theories were current at the time of the Sak kora Pyramid texts, and had possibly received specific application to man long before the idea of libations developed. The original object of the offering of ltba tions was to animate the statue of the deceased and so to enable him to continue the existence which had merely been interrupted by the incident of death. " In course of time, however, as definite gods gradually materialized and came to be represented by statues, they also had to be vitalized by offerings of water from time to time. Thus the pouring out of libations came to be an act of worship of the deity; and in this form it has persisted until our own time in many civilized countries." Later, water became also an essential feature in any act of ritual rebirth. Cp. MUMMIFICATION, and see W. Robertson Smith, R.S.; A. M. Blackman, " The Signific ance of Incense and Libations in Funerary and Temple Ritual " in the Zeitschrift fiir Agyptische Sprache and Altertunzskunde, Bd. 50, 1912; G. Elliott Smith, Dr.