THE RESCUE OF ANDROMEDA: ITS RELATION TO HUMAN SACRIFICES.
{66}
Popular as the story of the rescue of the devoted maiden is, and
appealing as it does to the imagination, it is not a little remarkable
that it appears to be indigenous only in the Old World. Legends of the
slaughter of a destructive monster are by no means so confined in
their range, where there is no specific human being to deliver; and
not infrequently they form part of the cosmogony of peoples alien in
race and occupying distant portions of the globe. Few of them exhibit
any details in common with those of the Perseus cycle. I have already
mentioned some, and to others I shall have occasion to refer
hereafter. The rest it would little avail us to analyse. Enough to
note that the thought underlying them all is that the monster slain is
preternatural and hostile to mankind. The suggestion has often been
made that these stories are traditions of the saurians which abounded
in geologic times. Of this, not a particle of evidence has been
adduced; and it is in itself so wildly improbable as hardly to deserve
notice. None of the giant reptiles of the secondary period were
contemporary with man. The process of evolution was still far short of
that consummation. And when man {67} appeared in the Quaternary, or
perhaps at an advanced stage of the Tertiary, period, the remains of
iguanodons and pterodactyles had long been peacefully fossilised
beyond his reach. It is true that he made war on the mammoth and the
woolly rhinoceros; but these could have furnished no hints for the
construction of the winged dragon or the _lindwurm_. We may indeed
reasonably ask what hints were needed beyond the existence of snakes
and birds or bats? The conscious weakness of humanity, the mystery of
serpentine motions, the magnifying, the combining and the distorting
powers of human imagination, amply account for the result. The hero
who is believed to have succeeded in vanquishing a monster thus
created, is regarded as somewhat more than man; he is frequently
worshipped as a god. This, however, we know, was comparatively late in
civilisation. There was a time when gods, in the sense of beings
distinct from and above man, though human in their passions, and more
or less human in their proper form, did not exist in the belief of
mankind. The worship of confessedly human ancestors, totemism, and
other and ruder superstitions preceded them. Science has not yet
determined the exact relations of ancestor-worship and totemism. But
it is at least certain that the dead were constantly held to assume
animal shape. Multitudes of the lower animals--even noxious and
repulsive creatures like snakes--were venerated as totems. Veneration
grows easily into worship; the totem-feast develops into what we
understand by a sacrifice. That many of the classical deities
themselves emerged into anthropomorphism from an earlier and less
advanced existence is probable from the tales which represented them
on various occasions and for various purposes “disguised in brutish
forms,” and from {68} the wolves, the horses, the swine, the dogs, the
mice and even the flies associated with them, or dedicated to them in
the ordinary offerings of the temples or in the more secret and solemn
cult of the Mysteries. Egypt, down to the latest moment of its
independence, in spite of the political vicissitudes of its long and
splendid history, and the consequent evolution of its manifold
religious faith, never got beyond its zoomorphic deities. The
crocodile and the goose, the ibis and the ram, the jackal, the cat and
the bull, decorated with divine names, received in their proper
bestial persons the adoration of their worshippers. To living gods
like these food was a daily necessity; and for such as were
carnivorous flesh, doubtless part of the daily sacrifices, must have
been provided. A savage nation on days of festival, or under stress of
some great impending calamity, would not hesitate to give human flesh.
If, by the concurrence of an advance in civilisation and a political
revolution, the worship of any such divinity were suppressed, he would
become in tradition a deadly monster; and the milder divinity who
succeeded to his place in popular regard would be credited with his
conquest and destruction.
The hypothesis I venture to put forward to explain the incident of the
Rescue of Andromeda is, that it is the record of some such religious
reformation. In dealing with the previous incidents I was able to show
that they were founded on beliefs, which, if we may not call them
primitive, at least go down very deep into savage life. Here it is
different. Considerable progress in civilisation must have been made
before such a reformation could have been effected, though it would
still be compatible with the continuance of a vast amount of wilful
and deliberate {69} cruelty constantly inflicted on human beings in
the service of the gods. The Church, that zealously propagated the
legend of Saint George, regarded the tortures inflicted on the hero as
highly improper for an orthodox knight, but quite suitable for a
heretic. Even the polished Greeks occasionally offered human
sacrifices--if we may trust some of the reports, with torments which
would have done no dishonour to the genius of Saint Dominic or the
most amiable of his “sons.” But the practice of presenting such
offerings to wild beasts in their capacity as gods had been abandoned;
and the story of the Slaughter of the Dragon would seem to be the mode
wherein tradition preserved the effect upon the collective mind, not
indeed of a specific event, so much as of the total result. Tradition
loves to be pictorial, dramatic. While its presentations are usually
wide of the actual series of occurrences, they often embody in
imaginative shape some genuine memory; and it is the task of the
historian or the scientific student to bid them render up the secrets
they enclose.
The traces of human sacrifice among the Egyptians are faint and
uncertain. Classical writers, indeed, alleged it; but they brought
forward hardly any tangible evidence, beyond the statement of
Plutarch--and that at second-hand--that the engraving on the seals of
the Sphragistai, whose business it was to seal the beasts intended for
the offerings, was a man bound and kneeling, with a knife at his
throat.[69.1] Nor is there reason to suppose that in any case men or
women were given during historical times to their sacred animals. We
must turn to a lower range of culture for such a custom. At Bonny, on
the West Coast of Africa, a virgin was bound to a stake on the
sea-shore at the first {70} low water of every spring-tide, and left
there as a sacrifice to the shark-god.[70.1] In the East Indies we
find many traditions of such practices. “It has been somewhere related
that the Rájá of Kupang, on the island of Timor, formerly sacrificed
a young virgin of royal descent to the Alligator, by throwing her into
the sea in order to be swallowed by that monster.”[70.2] Dr. Pleyte,
the friend and pupil of the late Professor Wilken, relates “how in
Boeroe at sunset, after the day’s work, the notables of the island
would gather round him [Professor Wilken] and go down to the cool
sea-shore, where he would sit on a rock in the midst of an improvised
assembly, and the old men would tell traditions of past glories in the
days when every year a maiden, chosen for her beauty, was led down to
the sea as a sacrifice to the crocodile-god for the prosperity of the
people.”[70.3] In the seventeenth century, Gautier Schouten, a medical
man in the service of the Dutch East India Company, heard a story on
the same island, which discloses a somewhat different motive for the
sacrifice. A holy crocodile, it runs, having fallen in love with one
of the daughters of the king of the island, who was very beautiful,
ravaged the coast every day, carrying off and devouring men, women,
and children. The inhabitants assembled in arms to surprise the brute
and to kill it. The crocodile was prepared for this, and cried out to
them in their own tongue that they should beware of insulting him, for
he was mighty enough to destroy them and all their island; and that he
would do so unless they delivered up to him the {71} king’s daughter;
but, on the other hand, if they did this he would become the protector
of the island and would load it with benefits. The islanders could not
resist these promises and threats. They led the princess to the beach,
and bound her to a pillar, whence the crocodile carried her off in due
course, and by her became the parent of all crocodiles; on which
account they are honoured as gods.[71.1] If Archdeacon Gray’s
information is to be trusted, the Shurii-Kia-Miau, one of the
aboriginal tribes of China, still offer human sacrifices to their
canine deity, though not exactly to a living dog. They possess a large
temple in which is an idol in the form of a dog. There they hold an
annual religious festival, when the wealthy members of the tribe
“entertain their poorer brethren at a banquet given in honour of one
who has agreed, for a sum of money paid to his family, to allow
himself to be offered as a sacrifice on the altar of the dog idol. At
the end of the banquet, the victim, having drunk wine freely, is put
to death before the idol.” And the people “believe that, were they to
neglect this rite, they would be visited with pestilence, famine, or
the sword.”[71.2] Among the South Sea Islanders, themselves cannibals,
human offerings were frequent. Their idols, it is true, were roughly
human in form; yet the divinities often took the shape of other
animals. Ellis relates that “birds resorting to the temple were said
to feed upon the bodies of the human sacrifices, and it was imagined
that {72} the god approached the temple in the birds, and thus
devoured the victims placed upon the altar. In some of the islands
‘man-eater’ was an epithet of the principal deities.” To the king, who
was a sacred being descended from the gods, and who often personated
the god, the eye, as the most precious part of the victim, the organ
or emblem of power, was presented. He feigned to eat it; the
simulation being, there can be little doubt, a relic of a former
period when he actually did eat the eye and probably other parts of
the body. Portions of some of the victims were also eaten by the
priests, who of course were also representatives of the gods.[72.1]
The legends of the Greeks and Romans afford us glimpses of a belief
like that of the Polynesians. How else may we interpret the stories,
reported by Plutarch, of Helena, a noble virgin of Lacedæmon, who, in
obedience to an oracle, was prepared for sacrifice, but was saved by
an eagle carrying away the sword and laying it upon a heifer; and of
Valeria Luperca, a maiden of Falerii to whom a similar adventure
happened--an adventure commemorated still by a yearly ceremony in the
days of Plutarch, or at least of Aristides, the author whom he
cites?[72.2] The tradition of Lycaon points in the same direction. He,
having offered an infant to Zeus, was changed into a wolf; and it was
believed that any one who imitated his example would share his fate,
though with the chance of regaining his own form if for ten years he
abstained from human flesh.[72.3]
{73}
Several of the foregoing examples exhibit the being to whom the
sacrifice is offered as a crocodile, or some analogous inhabitant of
the waters. Nor will it pass unnoticed that many of the tales of the
Rescue of Andromeda represent the dragon as inhabiting a spring or
lake, or keeping the waters and giving them only in exchange for the
victim. A shark- or crocodile-god has, it would seem, a natural
tendency to pass into a purely mythical being. Such is Ju-ju, an
object of worship in the delta of the Niger, to which a young girl is
commonly sacrificed in the way already described as customary at Bonny
in sacrificing to the shark-god.[73.1] To this origin we may probably
ascribe the numerous Eastern tales of dragons and evil spirits taking
possession of rivers, lakes and tanks, and demanding sacrifices to
induce them to release the water. The Chinese annals of Khotan, a city
in Cashgar, have preserved a legend concerning a river that dried up,
to the injury of the inhabitants of the city. The king, having
consulted his ecclesiastical advisers, was informed that the
river-dragon had interrupted the current, and advised to mollify him
by a sacrifice. No sooner was the sacrifice offered than a lady came
(so we are told, if the translation be accurate) out of the waters,
though it is hard to know how she could do this when the river-bed was
dry. But whencesoever she may have come, she declared that her husband
had prematurely died, and that his demise had stopped the flow. And
she required of the monarch one of his grandees as a new husband, so
that the stream might resume its course. One of the nobles, named
Mieou, offered himself to supply the place of the late lamented
he-dragon. Mounted on a white steed, he rode into the river-bottom,
{74} and boldly advanced till he met the returning waters. Nor then
did he hesitate, but opening a passage amid them with his whip, he
entered and was seen no more. The horse in a short time reappeared, on
his back a drum of sandalwood and a letter assuring the king that
Mieou had been elevated to the rank of a god, and would thenceforth
watch over the prosperity of the realm. Meanwhile, the new deity
begged his majesty’s acceptance of the accompanying magical drum,
which, if suspended at the south-eastern gate of the city, would give
warning in case of any hostile attack. Since that time the people of
the city have had no cause to complain of deficiency in their
water-supply.[74.1] A somewhat different cause for the human sacrifice
is alleged in the following Hindu story. The Talao Lake was made by a
Bargújar rajah named Menh or Mehan. When it was finished the water
all became blood-red. The pandits, consulted by the rajah, declared
that the water had become impure, because the work had been done by
low-caste labourers; and the only way of purifying it was by
sacrificing the rajah’s son, Chattar-bhuj, with his wife, his horse,
and his servants, in the lake. With the consent of the principal
victim the foul water was drained off, and a room was built in the
floor of the lake for the reception of Chattar-bhuj and his household.
They accordingly entered it, provided with six months’ food. The room
was then closed, and a temple built over it. The result was
satisfactory, for when the pool was filled at the next rainy season
the water remained pure. “It is the universal belief that whenever the
lake overflows,” the rajah’s son “is seen by night riding down the
hill from the {75} highest point on a blue horse. Some say that two
torches are carried before him, and that his servants follow behind,
until all disappear into the lake. Others say that his appearance on
the blue horse precedes the fall of rain.”[75.1] Both these cases look
like legends which have grown up, in consequence of a change of
population or religion, to account for an ancient worship, and for a
divinity still believed to haunt the spot, and still regarded with
awe, though no longer the object of the special honours at one time
rendered to him.[75.2] In the latter story, as it reaches us, there is
no mention of a dragon or other supernatural being. It would seem,
however, to be implied in the sacrifice, as well as in the temple
erected by the rajah.
But, though this may be a true explanation of the story of the Talao
Lake, it will generally be agreed that the legend could not have
assumed its present form had not human sacrifices to water and
water-gods been familiar to the natives of India. The sacred books of
the Aryans prescribe human sacrifices on divers occasions to various
deities; and it is doubtful whether even yet British rule has entirely
extinguished them. Among the aboriginal tribes they have been put down
with extreme difficulty. All over India the folktales are full of
them; and many are the sagas relating to the consecration of tanks in
this way. I need only add two instances. “At Ahmadábád, by the
advice of a Brahman, a childless Ványa was induced to dig a tank to
appease the goddess Sítalá. The water refused to enter it without
the sacrifice of a man. As soon as the victim’s blood fell on the
ground the tank filled, and the {76} goddess came down from heaven to
rescue the victim. The Vadála lake in Bombay likewise refused to hold
water till the local spirit was appeased by the sacrifice of the
daughter of the village headman.”[76.1] Among the records of actual
sacrifices to water, the author of the treatise on the names of rivers
and mountains attributed to Plutarch cites Archelaus (a philosopher of
the fifth century before Christ, whose works have perished) for the
statement that virgins were nailed to wooden crosses and flung into
the Hydaspes, one of the five great rivers (tributaries of the Indus)
from which the Panjáb takes its name. These offerings were
accompanied by hymns addressed to a goddess called by the writer
Aphrodite--probably Párvatí, to whom in her character of Kálí
there is reason to suspect that human victims are still presented in
remote places.[76.2] As Párvatí, however, she is still, with her
husband Siva, the joint object of an instructive rite in the Kánagrá
district during some part of March and April. The girls of the village
procure two clay images, the one of Siva and the other of Párvatí,
which they marry together with full ceremonial. A feast follows; and
on the Sankránt of Baisákh (in April) “they all go together to the
riverside, throw the images into a deep pool, and weep over the place,
as though they were performing funeral obsequies. The boys of the
neighbourhood often annoy them by diving after the images, bringing
them up, and waving them about while the girls are crying over them.”
The custom is called _Ralí Ka melá_ or the Fair of Ralí, “the
_Ralí_ being a small painted earthen image of Siva or Párvatí”; and
its object is said to be to {77} secure good husbands.[77.1] “Until
the beginning of the present century,” says Mr. Crooke, “the custom of
offering a first-born child to the Ganges was common”; and he goes on
to suggest that “akin to this is the Gangá Játra, or murder of sick
relatives on the bank of the sacred river, of which a case occurred
quite recently at Calcutta.” However this may be, the natives are
still suspicious when a bridge is built. “The Narbadá, it was
believed, would never allow herself to be bridged until she carried
away part of the superstructure and caused the loss of lives as a
sacrifice.” And the rumours that a victim was required when the
Hooghly Bridge at Calcutta was built, and when the waterworks of
Benares were constructed, point to a wide prevalence of the
superstition that these and other great public works demand a human
sacrifice.[77.2]
On the western continent there lingers among the Zuñi, one of the
four stocks of Pueblo Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, a tradition
pointing to the prevalence at one time of human sacrifices to water.
Zuñi is built upon a knoll in a broad valley walled by picturesque
mesas or tablelands, of red and white sandstone. The waters of the
valley once rose in a flood and compelled the inhabitants to flee to a
mesa several hundred feet high for safety. And {78} still the waters
rose, threatening to submerge the mesa itself, until the priests
determined to sacrifice a youth and a maiden to propitiate them. The
two were dressed in their most beautiful clothes, adorned with many
necklaces of turquoise and other precious beads, and cast into the
flood. The offering stayed the calamity; and the victims, turned to
stone, are yet to be seen in a columnar rock broken near the top into
two parts, which are capped with head-like forms and called by the
people the father and mother rocks.[78.1]
Europe furnishes numerous remains of human sacrifice to water. At
Rome, during historical times, the Vestal Virgins threw from the
Sublician bridge into the Tiber, every year on the Ides of May, thirty
human effigies formed of rushes. We cannot doubt that at an earlier
period living men were hurled into the flood. This was the opinion
entertained by the Romans themselves, who held that it was Hercules
who first substituted images of straw.[78.2] A similar substitution is
practised in India by the Gonds in their offerings to Burha deo; and,
we are told, they find it answers the purpose;[78.3] as did the
Romans.
Human sacrifices to water were certainly not unknown among the ancient
Greeks. I need not cite more than two examples. Athenæus quotes
Anticlides, an Athenian writer, as recording that certain colonists of
Lesbos were directed {79} by an oracle to throw a virgin into the sea
as an offering to Poseidon. This was accordingly done; but Enalos, one
of the chiefs of the expedition, being in love with the maiden, leaped
after her to save her, and disappeared with her in the depths. The
colonists founded Methymna; and in later years when the town had grown
populous he was said to have shown himself to them again, swimming to
land on a great wave with a wondrous cup of gold in his hand, and to
have related that the lady was dwelling beneath the sea with the
Nereids, while he himself had become Master of the Horse to
Poseidon.[79.1] Such a legend as this could only have arisen where
sacrifices of the kind had been practised. In historical times the
Greeks performed the rites of Adonis, originally, it would seem, a
Semitic cult. Adonis, the beloved of Aphrodite, according to his
story, was slain by a boar. “His death was annually lamented with
bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to resemble
corpses, were carried out as to burial, and then thrown into the sea
or into springs; and in some places his revival was celebrated on the
following day.”[79.2] If not in Greece, at all events in Syria, whence
perhaps it was borrowed, the ceremony here described was doubtless
performed with a human being. Mr. Frazer, from whom I take the
foregoing description, has made a large collection of cases in which
an effigy is prepared and, after the performance of certain rites, is
slain and buried, or thrown into the water. We may put aside the
instances of burial, only noting them as evidence that the intention
is to put some living victim, represented by the effigy, to death. At
Altdorf and Weingarten, {80} villages of Swabia, a straw man is made
on Ash Wednesday and called the “Carnival Fool.” He is carried round
and then thrown with mournful music into the water.[80.1] At Balwe, in
Westphalia, on the contrary, the straw-man is thrown into the river
Hönne with shouts of joy on Shrove Tuesday. In both instances the
ceremony is called “burying the Carnival.”[80.2] In the Thuringian
villages of Oberhain and Maukenbach the children used to “carry out
Death” in the shape of a puppet of birchen twigs, on Mid-Lent Sunday,
and throw it into a pool.[80.3] “At Tabor, in Bohemia, the figure of
Death is carried out of the town and flung from a high rock into the
water, while” the following song is sung:
“Death swims on the water,
Summer will soon be here,
We have carried Death away for you,
We have brought the Summer.
And do thou, O holy Marketa
Give us a good year
For wheat and for rye.”[80.4]
Passing over a number of similar observances in German and Slavonic
lands, I need only mention the “Funeral of Kostroma” as celebrated in
Russia on Saint Peter’s day, the 29th June. “In the Murom district,
Kostroma was represented by a straw figure dressed in woman’s clothes
and flowers. This was laid in a trough and carried with songs to the
bank of a lake or river. Here the crowd divided into two sides, of
which the one attacked and the other defended the figure. At last the
assailants gained the day, stripped the figure of its dress and
ornaments, trod the straw of which it was made under foot, and flung
it into {81} the stream, while the defenders of the figure hid their
faces in their hands, and pretended to bewail the death of Kostroma.”
Elsewhere a maiden plays the part of Kostroma. She is treated with
reverence, carried to the brink of a stream and there bathed.[81.1] In
some Swabian villages, where the Carnival Fool is represented by a
living man, he is treated less gently, being at last thrown into the
water.[81.2]
All these customs are perfectly unambiguous. Whatever their
agricultural significance (and I see no reason to doubt that the sense
attached to them by Mannhardt and Frazer is accurate) they are
unquestionably relics of human sacrifice to water. The victim may have
been identified with the spirit of vegetation or with some more
concrete expression of the same idea, and the ceremonies themselves
may have been dramatic in character; but that is in no way
inconsistent with their being also sacrificial. Moreover, we have
other traces of the same kind of oblation, in the superstition so
widely prevalent in this island, as well as in Germany, of the
periodical victim demanded by a river or lake. On the banks of the
Saal in Thuringia, especially among the fisher-folk of Jena, it is
even yet believed that the Saal-nixe requires a sacrifice every year;
and the lake at Salzungen boils with rage unless it obtain its yearly
offering.[81.3] On the island of Rügen there is a vague tradition of
a lake which would rise and overwhelm the entire {82} country, unless
a maiden were offered to it every year. At Trampke in Pomerania a
peasant was once ploughing near the Lake of Madüe, when he heard a
voice out of the pool cry: “Now, come! Now is the time!” He looked
around him puzzled, and again the voice exclaimed in more imperious
tones: “Now, come! Now is the time!” Thereupon, mastered by an
uncontrollable impulse, he left the plough, rushed to the mere and
flung himself in. His farm-servant, who was spreading manure, ran to
his assistance and drew him out of the water; but an instant later he
plunged in again and was dragged by the water-maiden down to the
bottom.[82.1] Always before anybody is drowned in the Lahn near
Giessen there is heard--the millers and bleachers engaged on the river
are ready to vouch for it--between eleven and twelve o’clock in the
day a loud cry: “The time is here, the hour is here; where is the
man?” It is said that two lads were one evening by the Mümmling, not
far from Michelstadt, when a voice called from under the bridge: “The
hour is here, but not the man!” At that moment a man hurried down the
hill and was about to jump into the river. The lads caught him, held
him back, and spoke to him; but he answered never a word. They took
him to the inn and pressed some wine upon him. His head, however, sank
forward on the table; and he was dead. Among other German rivers which
demand an annual human victim are the Fulda and the Neckar.[82.2] The
Lorelei is a nixe of the Rhine, famous for the number of her slain.
Nor is she alone in her misdeeds; but the legends of sirens haunting
German rivers are too numerous and too well known to require
illustration. {83} An old spring at Friedberg used every year to
require an offering, and if it happened that no one fell in during the
year, it cried out: “Come down, come down!” and anybody who was in the
neighbourhood and heard the voice would be irresistibly drawn into the
fountain.[83.1] The Drome in Normandy, according to a local proverb,
has every year horse or man.[83.2] Peg Powler, Nanny Powler, Peg o’
Nell, and Jenny Greenteeth, are spirits that haunt various rivers and
pools in the north of England; and they are not less
bloodthirsty;[83.3] while in Scotland, the kelpie and his congeners
are familiar.
Among Europeans the superstition seems in this form to belong
especially to Teutonic peoples. In other parts of the world, however,
not a few examples are to be gleaned. The Indians of Guiana “firmly
believe in the reality of” certain “mermaids, or ‘water māmās,’ as
they are called in Dutch-creole; and where they are supposed to have
their caves or nests, there great danger awaits the traveller. Some
are related to be extremely beautiful and possessing long golden hair,
like the Lorelei, and whoever casts his eye on them is seized with
madness, jumps into the deep water, and never returns. Others are
hideous, snakes being twined about them, and with their long white
talons they drag boats under the surface and devour their occupants.
On the Orinoco and Amazon similar creatures are supposed to exist; but
these are capable of drawing their prey into their mouths at a
distance of a hundred yards. In order to avoid such a calamity, the
natives always blow a horn before entering a creek or lagoon in {84}
which one of these monsters may be living; if it happens to be there,
it will immediately answer the horn, and thus give warning to the
intruder.”[84.1] The people of Guiana having come under the influence
of the Dutch, may be supposed to have learned the superstition from
them; but this can hardly be thought of the natives of the banks of
the Orinoco and the Amazons. In like manner the belief in South Africa
that rivers call their victims, who cannot resist the fascination, may
be attributed to the Dutch colonists. Here again the ascription of
such an origin must be very doubtful, though it is perhaps right to
take note of the same intrusive Teutons. The Rev. James Macdonald, who
laboured for twelve years among various Bantu tribes, says that “to
the Bathlapin the crocodile is sacred, and by all it is revered, but
rather under the form of fear than affection”; and he regards the
superstition (which reigns even where there are no crocodiles) as “the
survival of an ancient recollection of the time when the ancestors of
the present Kaffirs dwelt on the margin of rivers infested by these
murderous brutes, and where they often saw their women drawn
underneath when going to the river to fetch water.”[84.2] There may be
some reason for this conjecture. It probably expresses, however, only
half the truth, since if the crocodile were revered, offerings would
naturally be made to it, as in fact we have seen to be the case in
other parts of Africa. In Senegal the water-spirits {85} appear in
crocodile form. A legend is told of a girl to whom the spirit
presented himself as a fair youth; but when she listened to his
overtures he turned into a horrible cayman.[85.1] The Bantu tribes are
believers also in a mysterious being called an “incanti” which often
inhabits rivers, and whose glance is fatal. “While we were living at
Duff,” says the writer just cited, “a man was found dead one morning
close by the river’s bank, not far from the mission. It was clearly a
case of suicide by poisoning, but our native neighbours regarded it as
a case of having seen an incanti, and no one would approach the spot
for months. The pools were bewitched, haunted, bedevilled.”[85.2] The
Zulus tell of a bloated, squatting, bearded monster dwelling in
rivers. It steals the clothing and ornaments of girls who come to
bathe, and is capable of swallowing men and beasts. Happily, however,
it is amenable to prayers.[85.3] Another “imaginary amphibious
creature, mostly abiding in the deep portions of the rivers,” is the
subject of Zulu superstition. It is universally believed that “aided
by some mysterious and evil influence, the nature of which no one can
define or explain, bad persons may enter into a league with” it, as
they can also with {86} wolves, baboons, and jackals.[86.1] On the
whole it is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to lay
much emphasis on the superstitions mentioned in the present paragraph,
since we lack the independent evidence which we have concerning the
Teutons and Slavs, of customs pointing to human sacrifices to water.
The ancient Mexicans, however, were innocent of Dutch influence. Yet,
if we may believe Sahagun, they had their water-monsters as malignant
as those of the Bantus. Among these monsters, and by no means the only
one, was the Ahuizotl, pictorially represented as a smooth, rat-like
animal with a long prehensile tail, accompanied by the sign for water.
The tail was believed to be furnished at its extremity with a hand,
wherewith it dragged down into the depths of the pool where it abode
any person who approached the banks. A few days afterwards, the body
was cast up again, and then found to be deprived of eyes, teeth, and
nails. No one dared to touch it, but the priests, who, when informed
of its presence, would fetch it “on a litter with great reverence and
bury it in one of the oratories called Ayauhcalco--literally house in,
or surrounded by, water. For it was said that the Tlalocs (or
rain-gods) had sent his soul to the terrestrial paradise. They adorned
the litter with mace-reeds, and it was preceded by musicians playing
on flutes.” The reasons assigned for such a death were that “either
the deceased had been very good, and therefore the rain-gods desired
his company in the terrestrial paradise; or he had perchance certain
precious stones in his possession. This would give offence to the
rain-gods, who do not wish that persons should {87} possess precious
stones, and for this reason they may have killed him in anger, but
nevertheless taken him to the terrestrial paradise.” His relatives
found consolation, not merely in the belief that he was with the gods
in paradise, but also that through him they themselves would become
rich and prosperous.[87.1] Here the sacred character of the corpse,
its place and manner of burial, and the superstitions concerning the
departed point with tolerable certainty to a religious offering; and
the conclusion is altogether in harmony with what we know of the
bloodthirsty Aztec rites.
Passing with these illustrations away from sacrifices to water, and
from legends of water-monsters, we may note that another object with
which the sagas of dragons are connected is a hill, often shown as the
creature’s resting-place. He lies curled upon it, or around it, or
dwells in a cave or den. Thus the Lambton Worm lay coiled thrice about
the base of an oval hill on the northern bank of the Wear. I am not
aware what this oval hill may be; but some of the hills mentioned in
these stories are prehistoric barrows. Mr. Andrew Lang published some
years ago a story from Galloway of a snake that used to lie twined
round the tumulus at Dalry. “In colour it was snow-white, and the
thickest part of its body was as thick as three bags of meal. This
creature was a terror to all the neighbourhood, as it not only
destroyed cattle and men, but had an ugly habit of going at night to
the neighbouring churchyard, digging up coffins with its claws, and
devouring the newly dead.” The Lord of Galloway offered a reward for
its destruction. But one of his knights was swallowed up by the
serpent, horse and armour and all; and another was {88} deterred by
evil omens. The adventure was then undertaken, as at Deerhurst, by a
smith, who devised a suit of armour for himself covered with long
sharp spikes which could be drawn in or thrust out at the wearer’s
will. Scarcely was his armour completed when the smith’s young and
beautiful wife died, and was buried in the churchyard. The night after
the funeral the smith came upon the brute scraping the earth from the
newly-made grave, and attacked it vigorously. The snake swallowed him
whole; but as he slipped down its throat he suddenly shot out his
spikes, rolling about violently inside. This was more than the
creature had bargained for; and in a short time the smith by strenuous
efforts tore his way through his enemy’s carcase. There lay the
serpent quite dead, and for three days following the river Ken ran red
with its blood. “Here,” says Mr. Andrew Lang, “the story should
properly end; but a later and more romantic fancy has added that at
the very moment of victory the second knight arrived on the spot, and,
in a fury of disappointed ambition, attacked the smith, who of course
was as victorious in the second fight as he had been in the
first.”[88.1] With all deference to Mr. Lang’s great authority, I
venture to think that the second knight’s attack was part of the
original story, embodying as it seems to do the germ of the Impostor
incident so common in Rescue tales. Be this, however, as it may, the
point whereto I desire to direct attention is that the connection of
the snake with a prehistoric tumulus, and that of other dragons with
hills or mounds, both in this country and on the Continent, is
probably not without its significance. {89} There, if anywhere,
sacrifices would have been offered in early times; and their memory,
transformed by the popular imagination into the form of a dragon with
a propensity for human flesh, may have lingered for many a century
after their abolition. But to raise this beyond the value of a
conjecture careful inquiry and comparison of instances, for which I
have no opportunity at present, would be required. I may point out,
however, that the conjecture is countenanced by analogous legends of
dragons haunting other sacred spots. At Aarhuus in Denmark, for
instance, bodies placed overnight for the funeral solemnities in the
cathedral frequently disappeared by the morning. A dragon whose lair
was near the cathedral had eaten them. At length a strolling glazier
devised a coffin of mirrors, pierced by one hole just large enough to
thrust a sword through; and he caused himself to be laid within it in
the cathedral. Around the coffin stood four tapers, which he lighted
at midnight. When the prowling dragon beheld its reflection in the
mirrors it drew nigh, deeming the image to be its mate. The glazier
instantly thrust his sword through the hole of the coffin into his
enemy’s throat; but he himself perished in the floods of blood and
venom that spouted from the body of the dying monster. An ancient
image in the church is said to preserve the memory of the heroic act,
as at Mansfeld, Deerhurst, and elsewhere.[89.1]
It is hardly necessary for the completion of the argument to enumerate
any stories of rescue of human sacrifices to beings confessedly
worshipped as divine, or at least superhuman. Yet one or two specimens
may not be without interest. They cannot be numerous, because the
rescue {90} itself implies an insult to, and almost a denial of, the
divinity. Wherefore we must look for them only, or chiefly, among
races who practise a tolerant religion like the Buddhist, which
whithersoever its conquests extended, permitted the continuance of
offerings to the overshadowed and indigenous gods. We will begin with
Japan, where we have already found legends corresponding to that of
Andromeda. A young warrior wandering in the northern province one
evening lost his way in the mountains; and reaching at length a small
secluded shrine, where there was only just room for him to lie down,
he took shelter within it and soon fell fast asleep. About midnight he
was awakened by a noise. Peeping through the interstices of the timber
walls of his refuge, he espied a troop of cats engaged in a wild,
unnatural dance by the light of the moon, and yelling in fiendish
tones. As he kept perfectly still in his hiding-place and listened, he
could distinguish, incessantly repeated amid their shrieks, the words:
“Don’t tell Shippei Taro! Keep it secret! Don’t tell Shippei Taro!”
The midnight hour passed away, and with it the mysterious cats,
leaving him in peace for the rest of the night. In the morning he
found a path leading to a village. As he drew near he heard a sound of
weeping, and entering the nearest hut, he inquired what was the
matter. He was told that the mountain-spirit required the sacrifice of
a maiden every year, and the very next night was the appointed time.
On further inquiry he learnt that the shrine he had just left was the
scene of the offering, and that it was customary to place the victim
in a cage in the immediate neighbourhood. Recalling the incidents of
the past night he next inquired who Shippei Taro was, and was told
that Shippei Taro was the name of the great dog belonging {91} to the
chief officer of the prince who lived not very far away. To this
personage accordingly he went, and asked for the loan of the dog for
the following night. After hearing his story the dog’s master
consented and handed over Shippei Taro to the stranger. To arrange
with the girl’s parents to keep her safely at home, and to put Shippei
Taro into the cage in her stead was the next business. Having
accomplished these things the youth betook himself to the shrine and
awaited what would happen. At midnight when the moon had risen over
the mountains the cats returned in full cry led by a gigantic black
tom-cat, in whom our adventurer without difficulty recognised the
dreaded mountain-spirit. The tom-cat approached the cage with hideous
shrieks of delight and danced around it. At length he opened it and
peered in, searching for his victim. In an instant Shippei Taro leaped
upon him and held him with his teeth, while the warrior with one
well-aimed blow put an end to the brute. Turning then on the other
cats, hound and man speedily put them to flight and destroyed not a
few. The rout was complete; and from that time no more human
sacrifices have been offered to the mountain-spirit.[91.1]
{92}
One of the aboriginal tribes of India, now Buddhist, has preserved a
somewhat similar instance of the abolition of these offerings. “The
early religion of Láhaul is still known under the name of _Lung pe
Chhoi_, that is, the religion of the valley. When it was flourishing
many bloody, and even human, sacrifices seem to have been regularly
offered up to certain _Chá_, that is, gods or evil spirits residing
in or near old pencil cedar-trees, rocks, caves, etc. This cruel
custom disappeared gradually after the doctrine of the Buddhists had
influenced for a time the minds of the people. There is a story which
I shall relate, as it seems to show that this was the case. Near the
village of Kailang a large dry pencil cedar-tree was standing till
last year, when we felled it for firewood: the story goes that before
this tree in ancient times a child of eight years old was annually
sacrificed to make the spirit who resided in it well disposed towards
the inhabitants of Kailang. The children seem to have been supplied in
turn by the different families of the village. It happened one year to
be a widow who had to give up an only child of the required age of
eight years. The day before her only one was to be taken from her, she
was crying loudly, when a travelling Láma from Tibet met her, and
asked the cause of her distress. Having heard her story, the Láma
said: ‘Well, I will go instead of your child.’ He did so, but did not
allow himself to be killed. ‘The spirit must kill me himself if he
wants human flesh,’ said he: so saying, he sat down before the tree
and waited for a long time, but as the demon made no attack on him he
became angry, took down from the tree the signs and effigies, and
threw them into the Bhága river, telling the people not to sacrifice
any more human beings, which advice was followed from that {93} time
forward. The demon fled and settled on the top of the Koko Pass, where
it still dwells under the name of _Kailang Chá_, or god of Kailang,
getting now only the annual sacrifice of a sheep supplied by the
shepherds.” The writer from whom I quote goes on to state that
(contrary to the principles of Buddhism) sheep and goats are yearly
killed near not a few villages in Láhaul, and offered up to the Chá,
and he hazards the opinion these animals have taken the place of
men.[93.1] I am not aware what evidence there may be for this
substitution beyond the foregoing tradition. At Manáli in Kúlú,
also in Northern India, is a temple of some antiquity to Manú Rikhi.
In front of it stands an altar of stone, supporting a pile of spruce
logs, which are replaced, three at a time, every three years. An
annual fair is held on the spot, at which a _keprá_ (literally, evil
form) or mask of Tundi is carried about. Tundi Bhút was a local
_dait_ or demon who conquered the _deotas_ or gods, and demanded one
of their sisters in marriage. Manú in turn vanquished him at Khoksar
in Lahul and compelled him to marry instead “the daughter of a Tháwi
or mason, named Túnar Sháchká, who appears in other stories as a
Rakhsháin.” The temple was erected to commemorate Manú’s success;
but the tale does not account for the spruce logs. To explain these it
is popularly said that Tundi devoured men and that Manú, having
conquered him, put the logs into his mouth and killed him.[93.2]
Whatever the real significance of the logs may be, it is probable that
we have here a legend of the suppression of human sacrifice. Other
stories of substitution have been mentioned in the {94} course of the
foregoing pages. And the legend of Abraham, which will occur to every
reader, points back to a period when the fathers of the Hebrew nation,
in common with the surrounding peoples, practised human sacrifices.
But with substitution, as distinguished from rescue, we are hardly
concerned.
Still less need we discuss the revolting subject of human sacrifice in
general. The stories I have cited (and they could easily be
multiplied) are intended to confirm the hypothesis that we have in the
incident of the Rescue of Andromeda a reminiscence of the abolition of
human sacrifices to deities in the shape of the lower animals. I have
shown that in certain stages of civilisation sacrifices of the kind
are practised, and that they are frequently offered to water-spirits
conceived in animal form. In offerings to water, and in traditions of
water-spirits, we have the product of savage animism. And it may, of
course, be that the monster sent to devour Andromeda, and that which
appears so often in the legend of Saint George, are to be regarded
simply as the personification of water, or of specific rivers and
pools, in their sinister aspect. Strictly speaking, however,
personification belongs to a higher plane of thought than that which
finds the spirit embodied as an actual living creature. Moreover, the
dragon is by no means invariably connected with water; and in
estimating the probability of this explanation we must not overlook
the tales which represent it as having its abode on a hill or mound,
or in a cave.