This paper concerns the origins, significance and social context of the theory of sacrifice embraced by Freud in Totem and Taboo. Freud attributed the theory to William Robertson Smith (1927 [1889]) but Ludwig Feuerbach, whose works Freud had intensively studied as a student, had outlined the major points of «Smith's» theory in 1862. Had Freud read Feuerbach's essay and if so, what was the significance of his «forgetting» it? We compare the main points in Feuerbach and Smith in relation to Freud's ideas. Accordingly, we consider various aspects of sacrifice and relate them to Freud's notions of orality, incorporation and identification, to ambivalence, to the relationship of «primitivism» and civilization in the social and cultural anthropology of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The centrality of «blood» in sacrifice is seen both as a contribution to and an expression of the cultural trends of vampirism in fiction, and the Protestant revivalism of the period.