Just as ritual texts contained dietary codes and strategies for nourishing humans and managing the consumption of food in a social setting, so the canon contained elaborate regulations on how to feed the spirit world through ritual sacrifice. We already touched on several areas where the feeding of spirits in sacrifice emerged as a preamble to or extension of cooking and dining procedures among humans. The complementary nature of both activities revealed itself in varying degrees of abstraction. At the level of the collective, there was the ritual feast or banquet that included thanksgiving offerings to ancestral and other spirits. At the level of the individual, ideas about nourishing life and cultivating the body drew on the assumption that diet could induce spirit powers to lodge themselves within the body of the adept. The parallels between human cuisine and the nourishment of the spirit world extended further. They applied to classifications of sacrificial foodstuffs, ideas about flavor and fragrance, the mechanics of preparing and presenting offerings – in short, the sensory stimulation of both humans and spirits.

Food was one among several sensory tools that offered a conduit for communication with the spirit realm. In the same way as a banquet or royal meal was to be accompanied by music and entertainment, food offerings to the spirits were rarely presented in isolation.