In the sacrifice of the camel in Arabia the same procedure was followed; the camel was bound on an altar and the tribesmen cut the flesh from the body with their knives and swallowed it raw and bleeding.

[211] M.Salomon Reinach shows how the memory of similar sacrifices in Greece has been preserved in legend: [212] "Actaeon was really a great stag sacrificed by women devotees, who called themselves the great hind and the little hinds; he became the rash hunter who surprised Artemis at her bath and was transformed into a stag and devoured by his own dogs.

The dogs are a euphemism; in the early legend they were the human devotees of the sacred stag who tore him to pieces and devoured him with their bare teeth.

These feasts of raw flesh survived in the secret religious cults of Greece long after uncooked food had ceased to be consumed in ordinary life.

Orpheus (_ophreus,_ the haughty), who appears in art with the skin of a fox on his head, was originally a sacred fox devoured by the women of the fox totem-clan; these women call themselves Bassarides in the legend, and _bassareus_ is one of the old names of the fox.