as frequently as the gallows; those executed on the wheel were set
upon poles, the wheel horizontal, and their broken limbs intertwined
among the spokes. Originally they were thus put to death as oblations
to the sun-god, whose symbol was the wheel. Little by little the idea
of sacrifice in these executions disappeared. When Germans, Franks,
and Anglo-Saxons became Christian, human sacrifices ceased as a matter
of course, but as it was still necessary to put malefactors to death,
the same kind of death was adjudged to them as before Christianity was
professed. The gradual process whereby human sacrifices were changed
in the classic world is well known to us. At first every victim was a
freewill offering, and even a beast was obliged to appear so. To make
the ox seem to consent to its despatch, drops of oil or water were put
into its ears, that it might nod and shake its head. Prisoners taken in
war, then criminals, were substituted for persons voluntarily devoting
themselves to death to the honour of the gods. When it came to the
execution of criminals, the idea of sacrifice readily evaporated.
One remarkable fact remains to be noticed. In all religions the
sacrifice becomes identified with the god to whom it is offered, and
partakes of his powers.
Whether this be a mere confusion of ideas, or whether there is some
logical process at the bottom, we will not stop to consider, but it
remains a fact everywhere. The victim is always thought to become
invested with some of the attributes of the god.
Now a whole series of superstitions exists connected with men hung;
and an executioner till of late years derived a small revenue from the
sale of the cord, or other articles connected with the criminal who had
been hung, and these relics were preserved, not out of a morbid love
of horrors, but out of a real belief that they were beneficial, that
they brought with them protection against accidents and ailments. I
remember, not ten years ago, being shown by a woman, by no means in the
lowest walks of life, a small object in a frame. This she said was a
bit of the skin of a certain famous murderer, for which she had given a
guinea.
“And what on earth makes you preserve it?” I inquired.
“Oh!” replied the woman, “the house will never catch fire so long as
that is in it.”
The mutilation of bodies hung in chains was of frequent occurrence in
former times, on account of like beliefs. The hands and feet and hair
of the dead were cut off. The former were constantly taken by thieves
and burglars, who believed that the hand of the man hung would enable
him to open any lock, and enter any house with immunity.
The plunder of the gallows was sought in the first days of Christianity
in England by those who were still Pagans at heart, and desired to put
themselves under the protection of the old gallows god, Woden, but the
original meaning of this robbery of the dead soon faded away, and the
practice remained without explanation.
Our word gallows is compound. The old word is _galz_, and gallows means
the _low_ or mound of the gibbet, and we speak of the gallow-tree, or
the wood on the gibbet hill. When we remember that the gallows on which
Odin hung is called Ogre’s horse, it is interesting to note a popular
riddle asked children in Yorkshire. “What is the horse that is ridden
that never was foaled, and rid with a bridle that never had bit?” The
answer is--The Gallows. A German name for it is the raven’s stone, not
only, perhaps, because ravens come to it, but because the raven was the
sacred bird of Odin.
Now let us turn to the wheel.
On the Continent, in Germany and in France, breaking on the wheel was a
customary mode of execution. The victim was stretched on the wheel, and
with a bar of iron his limbs were broken, and then a blow was dealt him
across the breast. After that the wheel was set up on a tall pole, with
the dead man on it, and left to become the prey to the ravens.
This was a survival of human sacrifices to the sun-god, as hanging is a
survival of human sacrifices to the wind-god.
[Illustration: _Fig. 40._--THE SUN-GOD, AFTER GAIDOZ.]
With regard to the solar-wheel, a great deal of very interesting
information has been collected by M. Gaidoz.[40] He points out that in
the museums of France there are a good many monuments that represent
the sun-wheel along with the thunderbolt as the symbol of Jupiter, that
is to say, the old Gaulish solar-god identified with the Roman deity,
Jupiter. Gaulish warriors wore a wheel on their helmets--a wheel was a
favourite symbol as a personal ornament, or perhaps as an amulet. The
wheel-window in a Gothic minster derives from the solar-wheel.
[Illustration: _Fig. 41._--ALTAR TO THE SOLAR-GOD, NIMES.]
When Constantine led his legions against Maxentius, he professed to
have seen a sign in the heavens, and he believed it to be a token of
Christ’s assistance. What he really saw was a mock-sun. He adopted and
adapted the sign for his standards, and the _Labarum_ of Constantine
became a common Christian symbol. That there was policy in his conduct
we can hardly doubt; the symbol he set up gratified the Christians in
his army on one side, and the Gauls on the other. To the former it
was a sign compounded of the initial letters of Christ, to the latter
it was the token of the favour of their solar deity. An addition
Constantine certainly made to the six-rayed wheel, but it was not one
that materially affected its character.
Among the Sclavonic races in like manner the sun was worshipped, and
worshipped with symbols precisely the same.
[Illustration: _Fig. 42._--THE LABARUM.]
The solar god of the Sclaves was Swanto Wit or Swato Wit, _i.e._, Holy
Light. The sun was the chief god of the Sclaves, and as the cock crows
before sunrise and announces the coming day, the cock was regarded
as sacred to the god, and sacrificed to it. The worship of this god
consisted in circular dances, called _kolos_, and the dance was taken
to represent the revolution of the planets, the constellations, the
seasons about the sun. An old writer says of the dances of Swanto
Wit that they were celebrated annually on the feast of St. John the
Baptist, that is, on Midsummer Day. “Benches are placed in a circle,
and these are leaped over by those who take part in the rite. No
one is allowed to be present dressed in red. The entire month that
precedes St. John’s Day, the votaries are in an excited condition, and
in carrying on their dances they fall a prey to nervous terrors.”[41]
Another writer tells us that they swung about a fiery wheel in their
dances, a symbol of the solar disc.[42]
In the Bavarian highlands, where the mountain names are many of them of
Sclavonic origin, and testify to a Sclavonic race having occupied the
Alps, this is still customary. The midsummer dances, and the whirling
of fiery wheels, are still in vogue. It is the same elsewhere. A writer
on the customs of the Sclaves says: “They give each other a hand, and
form a circle, whence the name of the dance, kolo = a circle, or wheel.
They take three quick steps or leaps to the left, then a slow stride to
the right; but when men alone dance it, after the three quick steps,
they stand, and kick with the right leg into the middle of the circle.
When the dance is accompanied by singing, one portion of the circle
sings one strophe, and the other repeats it. The Sclave dance is most
wild; and the same is found among the Carinthians and the Croats.”[43]
In Dalmatia and Croatia, on St. Vitus’ Day the peasants dance, holding
burning pieces of fragrant wood in their hands.
In the reign of Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, the Abbot Fulrad
obtained the relics of St. Vitus, a boy-martyr, from Rome, and conveyed
them to St. Denis. When the Abbey of New Corbey was founded in Saxony,
Warin, the abbot, wrote to Hilduin of St. Denis, to entreat the gift of
these relics for his church. Accordingly, in 836, they were conveyed to
their new resting-place in Saxony. In 879, the monks of Corbey started
on a mission to the Sclaves in Rügen and Pomerania, carrying with
them a portion of the relics of St. Vitus. They erected a chapel in
Rügen, which they dedicated to the saint. The attempt failed; and when,
later, the Rugians were converted, the missionaries supposed that
the Swanto Wit, whom they found them worshipping, was this very St.
Vitus, in Sclave Swante Vit, whose relics had been laid in Rügen. When,
in 1124, Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, laboured for the conversion of the
Pomeranians, he took with him a figure of a cock and a silver arm that
contained bones of St. Vitus. The Pomeranians reverenced the cock as a
sacred being, and when Otto appeared before them, holding up the cock
and the silver arm, they prostrated themselves to the cock, and he was
gratified at having thus inveigled them into doing honour to the relics
of St. Vitus.
Saint Wenceslas, Prince of Bohemia, in 930 destroyed the temple of
Swanto Wit at Prague, and erected on its site a church to Swante Vit,
_i.e._, St. Vitus.
When Ancona was besieged by the Christian host under Waldemar I., a
prophecy circulated that the city would fall into their hands on St.
Vitus’ Day. So it did, and Waldemar at once destroyed the temple of
Swanto Wit in the city, and on its ruins erected a church to Swante Vit.
Thus it came to pass that in Sclavonic lands the _cultus_ of St. Vitus
usurped the worship of the sun-god. But to return to the dances. As we
have seen, the solar dances held in honour of Swanto Wit were held an
entire month. St. Vitus’ Day falls on June 15th, very near to Midsummer
Day, and as these dances continued in Christian times, and St. Vitus
had taken the place of the sun-god, they acquired his name; they were
called the dances of St. Vitus.
In 1370 an epidemic of chorœa broke out in Germany, especially along
the valley of the Rhine. Young people of both sexes were the victims;
they danced, jerked, and fell into hysterical convulsions. Those who
saw them were affected in like manner. The phenomenon so much resembled
the annual St. Vitus’ dances that the disorder thenceforth took as its
special designation, “St. Vitus’ Dance.”
Dancing in a circle was a piece of sacred ritual in honour of the
revolving wheel of the sun. In the Bavarian highlands at Midsummer a
fiery wheel is waved and rolled down the mountain sides. The same sort
of rite was anciently observed at the same time in England. A monk
of Winchelscombe, in the reign of Henry VI., gives an account of the
popular festivals in his time. He speaks of three sorts of amusements
that take place on the vigil of St. John the Baptist. One of these is
the whirling of a cart wheel. Another writer of the following century,
in his poem, “Regnum papisticum,” gives further details. He says that
the country people take an old wheel, surround it with straw, so as
completely to cover it, and carry it to a height. At nightfall they set
it on fire and roll it down; a monstrous sight, he adds, and one would
believe that the sun was rolling down out of heaven.
Exactly the same usage is, or was, common in Belgium. In a charter, by
which the Abbess of Epinal ceded a wood to the magistrates of that town
in 1505, she made provision that every year, as an acknowledgment, they
should furnish “The Wheel of Fortune, and the straw wherewith to cover
it.”
Pages might be crowded with illustrations. I must refer the curious
to the treatise of M. Gaidoz. Sufficient evidence has been collected
that the wheel was the sacred symbol of the sun among the Gauls, the
Teutons, and the Sclaves. We can, therefore, see how that an execution
on the wheel was in its original conception a sacrifice to the sun.
Long after this was forgotten the wheel remained, as has the gallows
with us, as the instrument for the execution of criminals. In Germany,
even in cases of decapitation, the person executed was placed on a
wheel and his head on a pole, when separated from the body. The last
instances of breaking on the wheel were in the first forty years of
this century. The fact of the use of the wheel as a means of execution
continuing so many hundreds of years after the worship of the sun-god
had ceased, and of the gallows with us, for the same purpose, is a very
curious and instructive illustration of the persistence of customs of
which the original significance is absolutely lost.
XII.
Holes.
In the village churchyard where as a boy I often played, is a tomb,
built up to the height of about five feet, with a slate slab let into
the south face, on which is an inscription. In this slab is a hole,
and it used to be said among the village boys that any one who looked
in through this hole and knocked at the slate would see the dead
man within open his eyes. Often have I and my brother peeped in and
knocked, but the experiment failed, because, when the eye was applied
to the hole, it excluded external light.
[Illustration: _Fig. 43._--HOLED TOMBSTONE, BURGHEAD.
(_From Mitchell’s “The Past and the Present.”_)]
The monument is still where it was, and is in the same condition.
Whether boys still knock and look in I do not know.[44]
Curiously enough, a somewhat similar practice exists at Burghead, about
nine miles from Elgin, which is described by Professor Mitchell in
his “Rhind Lectures,” 1880. He says: “There is a memorial slab built
into the wall of the burial-ground, called the Chapel Yard, at the
south-east corner; it is 35 inches high by 20 inches wide; close above
it, and also built into the wall, there is a hewn lintel-like stone,
37 inches long by 1½ inches thick. On the narrow exposed face of this
stone there is no sculpturing.
“The woodcut shows the position on the cradle stone (as it is called)
of a cup-like hollow, which is quite round 2¼ inches in depth. This
hollow has been produced by the children of Burghead, who are in the
habit of striking the spot with a beachstone (which is also represented
in the woodcut), and then quickly putting their ears to the place,
when the sound of a rocking cradle and the crying of a child are said
to be heard, as if coming from a cavern deep under ground. I am told
that during last century the stone was not visited by children, but by
women, who believed that they were to become mothers if they heard the
rocking of the cradle and the crying of the child after tapping on the
stone.”
What is certainly a curious coincidence is that the pre-historic rude
stone ossuaries, dolmens or cromlechs, have very frequently in like
manner a hole worked in them.
Trevethy cromlech, in the parish of St. Cleer, Cornwall, has a hole
perforating the capstone. The Maison des Fées at Grammont, in Hérault,
has a hole bored through the head or western supporter. Another,
now destroyed, was at Cahaignes, in Normandy. The covered avenue of
Conflans now transferred to the fosse of the Musée, St. Germain, has
not only the round hole bored in one upright, but also the stone that
closed this opening.[45]
Holes in like manner have been bored in the cromlechs of Avening and
Rodmarton. Those in Circassia, in Palestine, and in India, have also
holes. Colonel Meadows Taylor found that 1,100 dolmens out of 2,219 in
the Dekhan had these holes in them. Similar holes have been observed in
the dolmens of Sardinia.
[Illustration: _Fig. 44._--DOLMEN WITH HOLE AND PLUG, IN THE CAUCASUS
(_after Cartailhac_).]
[Illustration: _Fig. 45._--DOLMEN IN THE CRIMEA, WITH HOLE IN THE SIDE
(_after Cartailhac._)]
In a majority of cases these holes will not serve the purpose of giving
admission to the interior of the monument, though in some large enough.
These megalithic structures were ossuaries; often, no doubt, the dead
was laid in one as he had died; but in a great many cases, always where
the dead had fallen in battle at a distance from the family mausoleum,
his bones were cleaned of flesh and sinew before being brought to it.
The bones bear marks of the scraper that cleared them of flesh, and
they are not put together in correct position. In like manner the
Landgrave Ludwig, husband of St. Elizabeth, died at Otranto, in 1227;
his body was boiled to get the flesh off the bones, and then the bones
alone were conveyed to Germany, to be interred at Eisenach.
It has often been noticed that along with ordinary interments in
barrows, incineration has been practised. This was probably another
means of transporting the remains of those who had died at a distance
from the family or clan burial mound.
The holes in the dolmens[46] are in many cases too small to allow of
anyone crawling through to carry within the remains of the last member
of the family, who had succumbed and was to be placed in the dolmen.
Some other explanation must be sought.
[Illustration: _Fig. 46._--THE INNER INCOMPLETE CIRCLE, STONEHENGE,
_restored_.]
Now, it is remarkable that the circles of upright stones that enclose
cairns and stone graves or kistvaens are rarely complete. They have
been purposely made imperfect circles, with a gap or a stop in the
circle; and we may ask whether the interruption in the circle has some
meaning analogous to that of the hole in the stone chest.
Mr. Greenwell, in his “British Barrows,” says:--“The incompleteness of
these circles is so frequent a feature in their construction that it
cannot be accidental. They have, moreover, been left incomplete in some
cases in a way which most evidently shows a design in the operation;
as, for instance, where the circle is formed of a number of stones
standing apart from each other. The space between two of them has
frequently been carefully built up with one large or several smaller
stones. The effect of this is to break the continuity, or rather the
uniformity, of the circle, and so to make it imperfect. This very
remarkable feature in connection with the enclosing circles is also
found to occur in the case of other remains which belong to the same
period and people as the barrows. The sculptured markings engraved
upon rocks, and also upon stones forming the covers of urns or cists,
consist in the main of two types, cup-shaped hollows, and circles, more
or less in number, surrounding in most cases a central cup. In almost
every instance the circle is imperfect, its continuity being sometimes
broken by a duct leading out from the central cup; at other times by
the hollowed line of the circle stopping short when about to join at
each end. The connection of these sculptured stones, if so they may
be termed, with places of sepulture, brings them at once into close
relationship with the enclosing circles of barrows, and it is scarcely
possible to imagine but that the same idea, whatever that may have
been, is signified by the incomplete circle in both cases.”[47]
[Illustration: _Fig. 47._--CINERARY URN WITH HOLES IN THE SIDE, FROM
SALISBURY PLAIN.]
The great inner ring of trilithons at Stonehenge affects the horse-shoe
shape, and is, and always was, incomplete. The outer ring of trilithons
is too ruinous for us to be able to state what its original condition
was.
The horse-shoe, the incomplete ring, is still regarded as lucky, and a
protection against witches. The enchanter who raised spirits was wont
to draw a complete circle around him, and the demons raged outside this
circle, but could not pass within and hurt him who had conjured them
up. If he stepped outside the circle, or broke the continuity of the
ring, then the spirits entered and tore him to pieces.
This probably gives us a clue to the signification of the incomplete
circle. The complete circle confines a spirit within it, or protects
from the entrance of spirits; an interrupted circle allows spirits to
pass to and fro, gives ingress and egress.
The tomb is the house of the dead. He lives in it after some
mysterious, not clearly defined fashion. And as a bee-hive hut had its
door, so must the hut of the dead have its door. It would be a cruelty
to the dead to imprison him; and if the circle be complete, the dolmen
closed in on all sides, he could not come in and out at pleasure.
Precisely what the door is to the house, that the mouth is to man; it
is the door by which the spirit comes into and goes out of man. With
his first inspiration he becomes a living soul; with his last breath he
expires--gives up his soul.
The story is well known of the two shepherds who sat together one
summer’s day. One fell asleep, and whilst he slept the other saw a
bee issue from his lips and creep over a blade of grass that crossed
a tiny trickle of water, then fly away among flowers. After an hour
the bee returned again in the same way, and re-entered the sleeping
man’s mouth. Thereupon he awoke, and told his friend that in dream he
had crossed a magnificent bridge over a great river, and had visited
Paradise.
[Illustration: _Fig. 48._--CRANIAL DISC, WITH HOLE FOR SUSPENSION.]
[Illustration: _Fig. 49._--CRANIAL DISC, WITH TWO HOLES FOR SUSPENSION.]
In the Caucasus, among the Abazas, when a boy dies he is put into a
wooden coffin _with a hole in it_, and hung up in a tree. Bees are
supposed to fly in and out at the hole, and these are taken, no doubt,
to be souls visiting the boy, and the soul of the boy going in and out
along with them.
I remember some years ago when a person was dying and seemed to find
great difficulty in the parting of soul from body, that the nurse went
to the window and opened it, whereupon the dying person heaved a sigh,
and the spirit took its flight. On asking the reason of this opening of
the window, the nurse answered, “You would not have the soul go up the
chimney, would you?”
Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “The Gift of the Sea,” refers to this
belief:--
“The widow ...
Opened the door on the bitter shore
To let the soul go free.”
Again, it has often been noticed that holes have been knocked or bored
in funeral urns containing incinerated bones. These have been made
purposely, and must have had some signification. I have not myself
examined such urns on the spot where discovered; but I have little
hesitation in surmising that only such urns have been perforated as
have had their mouths covered with another vessel inverted, or with a
flat stone, and that the object of this perforation has been to make a
door of ingress or egress for the spirit of the dead; that, in fact,
it had the same purpose as the hole in the dolmen and the rupture of
continuity in the circle.
Of a number of the smaller sized urns or vessels found in the barrows
of Salisbury Plain, “a very large proportion are pierced on one side
with two holes, from half an inch to two inches apart. There are
exceptions with a large number of holes, but the rule is to have two
holes on one side only,” says Mr. Long, in his “Stonehenge and its
Barrows.” He proceeds to discuss their signification. The holes could
not have existed for suspension, and he adopts Sir C. Colt Hoare’s
supposition that the perforated urns were incense vessels. But calcined
bones have been found in some, and others probably served as caps to
the cinerary urns. Almost certainly the people of the barrows knew
nothing of incense, and the probability is that these two holes were
bored as doors of egress and ingress for the spirit that still tenanted
the bones.
Count d’Alviella says in his Hibbert Lectures for 1891, “Numbers of
savage peoples suppose that the soul continues to inhabit the body
after death, though from time to time it makes excursions into the
world of the living. It therefore requires a hole if it is to escape
from the enclosure. For this reason it is that, at the death of a
relative, the Hottentots, the Samoyeds, the Siamese, the Fijians,
and the Redskins, make a hole in the hut to allow the passage of
the deceased, but close it again immediately afterwards to prevent
its coming back. The Iroquois make a small hole in every tomb, and
expressly declare that it is to enable the soul to go out and come in
at its pleasure.”
There was another usage of the men of the megalithic monuments which
had, apparently, the same idea or conception of spirit as that which
induced them to make holes in their dolmens.
In 1873, when the French Association for the Advancement of Science
met in Congress at Lyons, Dr. Prunières produced an elliptical disc of
skull which had been found by him inside a human skull that had been
trepanned, and which came from a dolmen in Lozère. The disc had been
cut out of a human skull by some sharp instrument at an incline. At
first sight it appeared probable that this piece came from the skull in
which it was discovered, but on close examination it was found that it
would not fit the hole trepanned in the skull.