|Normally {247}and originally, I believe, all gods grow spontaneously.
They evolve by degrees out of dead and deified ancestors or chieftains.
The household gods are the dead of the family; the greater gods are the
dead chiefs of the state or town or village. But upon this earlier and
spontaneous crop of gods there supervenes later an artificial crop,
deliberately manufactured. The importance of this later artificial class
is so great, especially in connexion with the gods of agriculture, and
with the habit of eating the god’s body as corn and drinking his blood
as wine, that it becomes necessary for us here to examine their nature
in due order. We shall find that some knowledge of them is needed
preliminary to the comprehension of the Christian system.
We saw that in West Africa the belief in another world is so
matter-of-fact and material that a chief who wishes to communicate with
his dead father kills a slave as a messenger, after first impressing
upon him the nature of the message he will have to deliver. If he
forgets anything, says Mr. Duff Macdonald, he kills a second and sends
him after “as a postscript.” A Khond desired to be avenged upon an
enemy; so he cut off the head of his mother, who cheerfully suggested
this domestic arrangement, in order that her ghost might haunt and
terrify the offender. Similar plenitude of belief in the actuality and
nearness of the Other World makes attendants, wives, and even friends of
a dead man, in many countries, volunteer to kill themselves {248}at his
funeral, in order that they may accompany their lord and master to the
nether realms. All these examples combine to show us two things: first,
that the other life is very real and close to the people who behave so;
and second, that no great unwillingness habitually exists to migration
from this life to the next, if occasion demands it.
Starting with such ideas, it is not surprising that many races should
have deliberately made for themselves gods by killing a man, and
especially a man of divine or kingly blood, the embodiment of a god, in
order that his spirit might perform some specific divine function. Nor
is it even remarkable that the victim selected for such a purpose should
voluntarily submit to death, often preceded by violent torture, so as
to attain in the end to a position of trust and importance as a tutelary
deity. We have only to remember the ease with which Mahommedan fanatics
will face death, expecting to enjoy the pleasures of Paradise, or the
fervour with which Christian believers used to embrace the crown of
martyrdom, in order to convince ourselves of the reality and profundity
of such a sentiment. The further back we go in time or culture,
the stronger does the sentiment in question become; _it is only the
civilised and sceptical thinker who hesitates to exchange the solid
comforts of this world for the shadowy and uncertain delights of the
next_.
The existence of such artificially-manufactured gods has been more or
less recognised for some time past, and attention has been called to one
or other class of them by Mr. Baring Gould and Mr. J. G. Frazer; but
I believe the present work will be the first in which their profound
importance and their place in the genesis of the higher religions has
been fully pointed out in systematic detail.
The best known instances of such deliberate godmaking are those which
refer to the foundation of cities, city walls, and houses. In such
cases, a human victim is often sacrificed in order that his blood may be
used as cement, {249}and his soul be built in to the very stones of the
fabric. Thereafter he becomes the tutelary deity or “fortune” of the
house or city. In many cases, the victim offers himself voluntarily for
the purpose; frequently he is of kingly or divine ancestry. As a sheep
before her shearers is dumb, so he opens not his mouth. In Polynesia,
where we usually stand nearest to the very core of religion, Ellis heard
that the central pillar of the temple at Mæva was planted upon the body
of a human victim. Among the Dyaks of Borneo, a slave girl was crushed
to death under the first post of a house. In October 1881, the king of
Ashanti put fifty girls to death that their blood might be mixed with
the “swish” or mud used in the repair of the royal buildings. Even
in Japan, a couple of centuries since, when a great wall was to be
built, “some wretched slave would offer himself as a foundation.”
Observe in this instance the important fact that the immolation was
purely voluntary. Mr. Tylor, it is true, treats most of these cases as
though the victim were intended to appease the earth-demons, which is
the natural interpretation for the elder school of thinkers to put upon
such ceremonies; but those who have read Mr. Frazer and Mr. Baring Gould
will know that the offering is really a piece of deliberate god-making.
Many of the original witnesses, indeed, correctly report this intention
on the part of the perpetrators; thus Mason was told by an eyewitness
that at the building of the new city of Tavoy in Tennasserim “a
criminal was put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon” or
rather deity. So in Siam, when a new city gate was being erected, says
Mr. Speth, officers seized the first four or eight people who passed,
and buried them under it “as guardian angels.” And in Roumania a
_stahic_ is defined as “the ghost of a person who has been immured
in the walls of a building in order to make it more solid.” The Irish
Banshee is doubtless of similar origin.
Other curious examples are reported from Africa. In Galam, {250}a boy
and girl used to be buried alive before the great gate of a city,
to make it impregnable; and I gather here that the sacrifice was
periodically renewed, as we shall see it to have been in many other
cases. In Great Bassam and Yarriba, similar sacrifices were usual at the
foundation of a house or village. Clearly the idea in these cases was to
supply the site with a tutelary deity, a god whose existence was bound
up with the place thus consecrated to him. He and the town henceforth
were one; he was its soul, and it was his body. Human victims are
said to have been buried “for spirit-watchers” under the gates of
Mandelay. So too, according to legend, here a tolerably safe guide, a
queen was drowned in a Burmese reservoir, to make the dyke safe; while
the choice for such a purpose of a royal victim shows clearly the
desirability of divine blood being present in the body of the future
deity. When Rajah Sala Byne was building the fort of Sialkot in
the Punjaub, the foundation gave way so often that he consulted a
soothsayer. The soothsayer advised that the blood of an only son should
be shed on the spot; and the only son of a widow was accordingly killed
there. I may add that the blood of “_an only-begotten son_” has
always been held to possess peculiar efficacy.
In Europe itself, not a few traces survive of such foundation-gods, or
spirits of towns, town-walls, and houses. The Piets are said to have
bathed their foundation-stones in human blood, especially in building
their forts and castles. St. Columba himself, though nominally a
Christian, did not scruple thus to secure the safety of his monastery.
Columbkille said to his people, “‘It would be well for us that our
roots should pass into the earth here.’ And he said to them, ‘It is
permitted to you that some one of you go under the earth to consecrate
it.’” St. Oran volunteered to accept the task, and was ever after
honoured as the patron saint of the monastery. Here again it may be
noted that the offering was voluntary. As late as 1463, when the broken
dam of the Nogat had to be repaired, {251}the peasants, being advised
to throw in a living man, are said to have made a beggar drunk (in which
state he would of course be “full of the god”) and utilised him for
the purpose. In 1885, on the restoration of Hols-worthy church in Devon,
a skeleton with a mass of mortar plastered over the mouth was found
embedded in an angle of the building. To make the castle of Liebenstein
fast and impregnable, a child was bought for hard money of its mother,
and walled into the building. Again, when the church at Blex in
Oldenburg was being built, the authorities of the village crossed the
Weser, “bought a child from a poor mother at Bremerleke, and built
it alive into the foundations.” We shall see hereafter that “to
be brought with a price” is a variant, as it were, on the voluntary
offering; great stress is often laid when a victim is offered on this
particular fact, which is held to absolve the perpetrators from
the crime of god-murder. So, we shall see in the sequel, the divine
animal-victim, which is the god offered to himself, his animal
embodiment to his image or altar, must always consent to its own
sacrifice; if it refuse or show the slightest disinclination, it is no
good victim. Legend says that the child in the case of the Liebenstein
offering was beguiled with a cake, probably so as to make it a
consenting party, and was slowly walled up before the eyes of the
mother. All these details are full of incidental instructiveness and
importance. As late as 1865, according to Mr. Speth, some Christian
labourers, working at a-block-house at Duga, near Scutari, found two
young Christian children in the hands of Mahommedan Arnauts, who were
trying to bury them alive under the block-house.
It is about city walls, however, that we oftenest read such legendary
stories. Thus the wall of Copenhagen sank as fast as it was built; so
they took an innocent little girl, and set her at a table with toys and
eatables. Then, while she played and eat, twelve master masons closed
a vault over her. With clanging music, to drown the child’s cries,
{252}the wall was raised, and stood fast ever after. In Italy, once
more, the bridge of Arta fell in, time after time, till they walled in
the master builder’s wife; the last point being a significant detail,
whose meaning will come out still more clearly in the sequel. At Scutari
in Servia, once more, the fortress could only be satisfactorily built
after a human victim was walled into it; so the three brothers who
wrought at it decided to offer up the first of their wives who came to
the place to bring them food. (Compare the case of Jephtha’s daughter,
where the first living thing met by chance is to be sacrificed to
Jahweh.) So, too, in Welsh legend, Vortigern could not finish his tower
till the foundation-stone was wetted with “_the blood of a child born
of a mother without a father”--this episode of the virgin-born infant
being a common element in the generation of man-gods_, as Mr. Sidney
Hartland has abundantly proved for us.
In one case cited above, we saw a mitigation of the primitive custom,
in that a criminal was substituted for a person of royal blood or divine
origin--a form of substitution of which Mr. Frazer has supplied abundant
examples in other connexions. Still further mitigations are those
of building-in a person who has committed sacrilege or broken some
religious vow of chastity. In the museum at Algiers is a plaster cast
of the mould left by the body of one Geronimo, a Moorish Christian (and
therefore a recusant of Islam), who was built into a block of concrete
in the angle of the fort in the sixteenth century. Faithless nuns were
so immured in Europe during the middle ages; and Mr. Rider Haggard’s
statement that he saw in the museum at Mexico bodies similarly immured
by the Inquisition has roused so much Catholic wrath and denial that one
can hardly have any hesitation in accepting its substantial accuracy.
But in other cases, the substitution has gone further still; instead of
criminals, recusants, or heretics, we get an animal victim in place of
the human one. Mr. St. John saw a chicken sacrificed for a slave girl
{253}at a building among the Dyaks of Borneo. A lamb was walled-in
under the altar of a church in Denmark, to make it stand fast; or the
churchyard was hanselled by burying first a live horse, an obvious
parallel to the case of St Oran. When the parish church of Chumleigh in
Devonshire was taken down a few years ago, in a wall of the fifteenth
century was found a carved figure of Christ, crucified to a vine--a form
of substitution to which we shall find several equivalents later. In
modern Greece, says Dr. Tylor, to whom I owe many of these instances, a
relic of the idea survives in the belief that the first passer-by after
a foundation-stone is laid will die within the year; so the masons
compromise the matter by killing a cock or a black lamb on the
foundation-stone. This animal then becomes the spirit of the building.
We shall see reason to suspect, as we proceed, that every slaughtered
victim in every rite was at first a divine-human being; and that animal
victims are always substitutes, though supposed to be equally divine
with the man-god they personate. I will ask the reader to look out for
such cases as we proceed, and also to notice, even when I do not
call attention to them, the destination of the oracular head, and the
frequent accompaniment of “clanging music.”
Elsewhere we find other customs which help to explain these curious
survivals. The shadow is often identified with the soul; and in
Roumania, when a new building is to be erected, the masons endeavour
to catch the shadow of a passing stranger, and then lay the
foundation-stone upon it. Or the stranger is enticed by stealth to the
stone, when the mason secretly measures his body or his shadow, and
buries the measure thus taken under the foundation. Here we have a
survival of the idea that the victim must at least be not unwilling. It
is believed that the person thus measured will languish and die within
forty days; and we may be sure that originally the belief ran that
his soul became the god or guardian spirit of the edifice. {254}If the
Bulgarians cannot get a human shadow to wall in, they content themselves
with the shadow of the first animal that passes by. Here again we get
that form of divine chance in the pointing out of a victim which is seen
in the case of Jephtha’s daughter. Still milder substitutions occur in
the empty coffin walled into a church in Germany, or the rude images of
babies in swaddling-clothes similarly immured in Holland. The last trace
of the custom is found in England in the modern practice of putting
coins and newspapers under the foundation-stone. Here it would seem
as if the victim were regarded as a sacrifice to the Earth (a late and
derivative idea), and the coins were a money payment in lieu of the
human or animal offering. I owe many of the cases here instanced to
the careful research of my friend Mr. Clodd. But since this chapter was
written, all other treatises on the subject have been superseded by Mr.
Speth’s exhaustive and scholarly pamphlet on “Builder’s Rites
and Ceremonies,” a few examples from which I have intercalated in my
argument.
Other implications must be briefly treated. The best ghost or god for
this purpose seems to be a divine or kingly person; and in stages when
the meaning of the practice is still quite clear to the builders, the
dearly-be-loved son or wife of the king is often selected for the honour
of tutelary godship. Later this notion passes into the sacrifice of the
child or wife of the master mason; many legends or traditions contain
this more recent element. In Vortigern’s case, however, the child is
clearly a divine being, as we shall see to be true a little later on in
certain Semitic instances. To the last, the connexion of children with
such sacrifices is most marked; thus when in 1813 the ice on the Elbe
broke down one of the dams, an old peasant sneered at the efforts of the
Government engineer, saying to him, “You will never get the dyke to
hold unless you first sink an innocent child under the foundations.”
Here the very epithet “innocent” in itself reveals some last
{255}echo of godship. So too, in 1843, when a new bridge was to be built
at Halle in Germany, the people told the architects that the pier would
not stand unless a living child was immured under the foundations.
Schrader says that when the great railway bridge over the Ganges was
begun, every mother in Bengal trembled for her infant. The Slavonic
chiefs who founded Detinez sent out men to catch the first boy
they met and bury him in the foundation. Here once more we have the
sacred-chance victim. Briefly I would say there seems to be a preference
in all such cases for children, and especially for girls; of kingly
stock, if possible, but at least a near relation of the master builder.
Mr. Speth points out that horses’ heads were frequently fastened on
churches or other buildings, and suggests that they belong to animal
foundation-victims. This use of the skull is in strict accordance with
its usual oracular destination.
Some notable historical or mythical tales of town and village gods,
deliberately manufactured, may now be considered. We read in First Kings
that when Hiel the Bethelite built Jericho, “he laid the foundation
thereof in Abiram his first-born, and set up the gates thereof in his
youngest Segub.” Here we see evidently a princely master builder,
sacrificing his own two sons as guardian gods of his new city. Abundant
traces exist of such deliberate production of a Fortune for a town. And
it is also probable that the original sacrifice was repeated annually,
as if to keep up the constant stream of divine life, somewhat after the
fashion of the human gods we had to consider in the last chapter. Dido
appears to have been the Fortune or foundation-goddess of Carthage; she
is represented in the legend as the foundress-queen, and is said to have
lept into her divine pyre from the walls of her palace. But the annual
human sacrifice appears to have been performed at the same place; for
“It can hardly be doubted,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “that
{256}the spot at which legend placed the self-sacrifice of Dido to
her husband Sicharbas was that at which the later Carthaginian human
sacrifices were performed.” At Laodicea, again, an annual sacrifice
took place of a deer, in lieu of a maiden; and this sacrifice, we are
expressly told, was offered to the goddess of the city. Legend said
that the goddess was a maiden, who had been similarly sacrificed to
consecrate the foundation of the town, and was thenceforth worshipped as
its Fortune, like Dido at Carthage; “it was therefore the death of the
goddess herself,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “that was annually
renewed in the piacular rite.” (I do not admit the justice of the
epithet “piacular.”) Again, Malalas tells us that the 22d of May
was kept at Antioch as the anniversary of a maiden sacrificed at the
foundation of the city, and worshipped thereafter as the Tyche, or luck,
of the town. At Durna in Arabia an annual victim was similarly buried
under the stone which formed the altar.
In most of the legends, as they come down to us from civilised and
lettered antiquity, the true nature of this sanguinary foundation-rite
is overlaid and disguised by later rationalising guesses and I may
mention that Dr. Robertson Smith in particular habitually treats the
rationalising guesses as primitive, and the real old tradition of the
slaughtered virgin as a myth of explanation of “the later
Euhemeristic Syrians.” But after the examples we have already seen of
foundation-gods, I think I can hardly be doubted that this is to reverse
the true order; that a girl was really sacrificed for a tutelary deity
when a town was founded, and that the substitution of an animal victim
at the annual renewal was a later refinement. Mr. Speth quotes a case in
point of a popular tradition that a young girl had been built into the
castle of Nieder-Manderschied; and when the wall was opened in 1844, the
Euhemeristic workmen found a cavity enclosing a human skeleton. I would
suggest, again, that in the original legend of the foundation of Rome,
Romulus was represented as having built-in {257}his brother Remus as a
Fortune, or god, of the city, and that to this identification of Remus
with the city we ought to trace such phrases as _turba Remi_ for the
Roman people. The word _forum_ in its primitive signification means the
empty space left before a tomb--the _llan_ or _temenos_. Hence I would
suggest that the Roman Forum and other Latin _fora_ were really the
tomb-enclosures of the original foundation-victims. * So, too, the
English village green and “play-field” are probably the space
dedicated to the tribal or village god--a slain man-god; and they are
usually connected with the sacred stone and sacred tree. I trust this
point will become clearer as we proceed, and develop the whole theory of
the foundation god or goddess, the allied sacred stone and the tree or
trunk memorial.
* In the case of Rome, the Forum would represent the grave
of the later foundation-god of the compound Latin and Sabine
city.
For, if I am right, the entire primitive ritual of the foundation of a
village consisted in killing or burying alive or building into the wall
a human victim, as town or village god, and raising a stone and planting
a tree close by to commemorate him. At these two monuments the village
rites were thereafter performed. The stone and tree are thus found
in their usual conjunction; both coexist in the Indian village to the
present day, as in the Siberian woodland or the Slavonic forest. Thus,
at Rome, we have not only the legend of the death of Remus, a prince of
the blood-royal of Alba Longa, intimately connected with the building
of the wall of Roma Quadrata, but we have also the sacred fig-tree of
Romulus in the Forum, which was regarded as the embodiment of the city
life of the combined Rome, so that when it showed signs of withering,
consternation spread through the city; and hard by we have the sacred
stone or Palladium, guarded by the sacred Vestal Virgins who kept the
city hearth-fire, and still more closely bound up with the fortune of
that secondary Rome which had its home in the Forum. Are not these three
the {258}triple form of the foundation-god of that united Capitoline
and Palatine Rome? And may not the sacred cornel on the Palatine, again,
have been similarly the holy foundation-tree of that older Roma Ouadrata
which is more particularly associated with the name of Romulus? Of
this tree Plutarch tells us that when it appeared to a passer-by to be
drooping, he set up a hue and cry, which was soon responded to by people
on all sides rushing up with buckets of water to pour upon it, as if
they were hastening to put out a fire. Clearly, here again we have to
deal with an embodied Fortune.
We do not often get all three of these Fortunes combined--the human
victim, the stone, and the tree, with the annual offering which renews
its sanctity. But we find traces so often of one or other of the trio
that we are justified, I think, in connecting them together as parts of
a whole, whereof here one element survives, and there another. “Among
all primitive communities,” says Mr. Gomme, “when a village was
first established, a stone was set up. To this stone, the headman of
the village made an offering once a year.” To the present day, London
preserves her foundation-god in the shape of London Stone, now enclosed
in a railing or iron grill just opposite Cannon Street Station.
Now, London Stone was for ages considered as the representative and
embodiment of the entire community. Proclamations and other important
state businesses were announced from its top; and the defendant in
trials in the Lord Mayor’s court was summoned to attend from London
Stone, as though the stone itself spoke to the wrong-doer with the
united voice of the assembled citizens. The first Lord Mayor, indeed,
was Henry de Lundonstone, no doubt, as Mr. Loftie suggests, the
hereditary keeper of this urban fetish,--in short, the representative
of the village headman. I have written at greater length on the
implications of this interesting relic in an article on London Stone
in _Longman’s Magazine_, to which I would refer the reader for further
information. {259}I will only add here the curious episode of Jack Cade,
who, when he forced his way, under his assumed name of Mortimer, into
the city in 1450, first of all proceeded to this sacred relic, the
embodiment of palladium of ancient London, and having struck it with his
sword exclaimed, “Now is Mortimer lord of this city.”
A similar sacred stone exists to this day at Bovey Tracey in Devon, of
which Ormerod tells us that the mayor of Bovey used to ride round it
on the first day of his tenure of office, and strike it with a
stick,--which further explains Jack Cade’s proceeding. According
to the Totnes Times of May 13, 1882, the young men of the town were
compelled on the same day to kiss the magic stone and pledge allegiance
in upholding the ancient rights and privileges of Bovey. (I owe these
details to Mr. Lawrence Gomme’s Village Community.) I do not think we
can dissociate from these two cases the other sacred stones of Britain,
such as the King’s Stone at Kingston in Surrey, where several of
the West Saxon kings were crowned; nor the Scone Stone in the
coronation-chair at Westminster Abbey; nor the Stone of Clackmannan, and
the sacred stones already mentioned in a previous chapter on which the
heads of clans or of Irish septs succeeded to the chieftainship of
their respective families. These may in part have been ancestral and
sepulchral monuments: but it is probable that they also partook in part
of this artificial and factitious sanctity. Certainly in some cases that
sanctity was renewed by an animal sacrifice.
With these fairly obvious instances I would also connect certain other
statements which seem to me to have been hitherto misinterpreted. Thus
Mesha, king of Moab, when he is close beleaguered, burns his son as a
holocaust on the wall of the city. Is not this an offering to protect
the wall by the deliberate manufacture of an additional deity? For
straightway the besiegers seem to feel they are overpowered, and the
siege is raised. Observe {260}here once more that it is the king’s own
dearly-be-loved son who is chosen as victim. Again, at Amathus, human
sacrifices were offered to Jupiter Hospes “before the gates”; and
this Jupiter Hospes, as Ovid calls him, is the Amathusian Herakles or
Malika, whose name, preserved for us by Hesychius, identifies him at
once as a local deity similar to the Tyrian Melcarth. Was not this
again, therefore, the Fortune of the city? At Tyre itself, the sepulchre
of Herakles Melcarth was shown, where he was said to have been cremated.
For among cremating peoples it was natural to burn, not slaughter, the
yearly god-victim. At Tarsus, once more, there was an annual feast, at
which a very fair pyre was erected, and the local Herakles or Baal
was burned on it in effigy. We cannot doubt, I think, that this was a
mitigation of an earlier human holocaust. Indeed, Dr. Robertson Smith
says of this instance: “This annual commemoration of the death of the
god in fire must have its origin in an older rite, in which the victim
was not a mere effigy, but a theanthropic sacrifice, i.e., an actual man
or sacred animal, whose life, according to the antique conception now
familiar to us, was an embodiment of the divine-human life.” This is
very near my own view on the subject.
From these instances we may proceed, I think, to a more curious set,
whose implications seem to me to have been even more grievously mistaken
by later interpreters. I mean the case of children of kings or of ruling
families, sacrificed in time of war or peril as additional or auxiliary
deities. Thus Philo of Byblos says: “It was an ancient custom in a
crisis of great danger that the ruler of a city or nation should give
his beloved son to die for the whole people, as a ransom offered to the
avenging demons; and the children thus offered were slain with mystic
rites. So Cronus, whom the Phoenicians call Israel, being king of
the land, and having an only-begotten son called Jeoud (for in the
Phoenicians tongue Jeoud signifies only-begotten), dressed him in royal
robes and sacrificed him upon an altar {261}in a time of war, when the
country was in great danger from the enemy.” I do not think Philo is
right in his gloss or guess about “the avenging demons,” but otherwise
his story is interesting evidence. It helps us more or less directly
to connect the common Phoenician and Hebrew child-sacrifices with this
deliberate manufacture of artificial gods. I do not doubt, indeed, that
the children were partly sacrificed to pre-existent and well-defined
great gods; but I believe also that the practice first arose as one of
deliberate manufacture of gods, and retained to the end many traces of
its origin.
We know that in times of national calamity the Phoenicians used thus
to sacrifice their dearest to Baal. Phoenician history, we know from
Porphyry, is full of such sacrifices. When the Carthaginians were
defeated and besieged by Agathocles, they ascribed their disasters to
the anger of the god; for whereas in former times they used to sacrifice
to him their own children, they had latterly fallen (as we shall see
hereafter the Khonds did) into the habit of buying children and rearing
them as victims. So two hundred young people of the noblest families
were picked out for sacrifice; and these were accompanied by no less
than three hundred more, who volunteered to die for the fatherland. They
were sacrificed by being placed, one by one, on the sloping hands of
the brazen image, from which they rolled into a pit of fire. So too at
Jerusalem, in moments of great danger, children were sacrificed to some
Molech, whether Jahweh or another, by being placed in the fiery arms
of the image at the Tophet. I will admit that in these last cases we
approach very near to the mere piacular human sacrifice; but we shall
see, when we come to deal with gods of cultivation, and the doctrine
of the atonement, that it is difficult to draw a line between the
two; while the fact that a dearly-beloved or only-begotten son is the
victim--especially the son of a king of divine blood--links such cases
on directly to the more obvious instances of deliberate god-making.
Some such voluntary sacrifice {262}seems to me to be commemorated in
the beautiful imagery of the 53d of Isaiah. But there the language is
distinctly piacular.
That annual human sacrifices originated in deliberate god-making of this
sort is an inference which has already been almost arrived at by more
orthodox thinkers. “Among the Semites,” says Dr. Robertson Smith,
“the most current view of annual piacula seems to have been that they
commemorate a divine tragedy--the death of some god or goddess. The
origin of such myths is easily explained from the nature of the ritual.
Originally, the death of the god was nothing else than the death of
the theanthropic victim; but when this ceased to be understood, it was
thought that the piacular sacrifice represented an historical tragedy in
which the god was killed.” But we shall see hereafter that the idea of
expiation in sacrifice is quite a late and derivative one; it seems more
probable that the victim was at first a human god, for whom later an
animal victim was substituted. In the Athenian Thar-gelia, the victims
were human to the very end, though undoubtedly they were thought of as
bearing vicariously the sins of the people. We shall come across similar
intrusions of the idea of expiation in later chapters; that idea belongs
to a stage of thought when men considered it necessary to explain away
by some ethical reference the sanguinary element of primitive ritual.
Thus in two Greek towns, as we learn from Pausanias--at Potniæ and
Patræ,--an annual sacrifice existed which had once been the sacrifice
of a human victim; but this was later explained as an expiation of an
ancient crime for which satisfaction had to be made from generation to
generation. Indeed, as a rule, later ages looked upon the murder of a
god as obviously criminal, and therefore regarded the slaughter of
the victim, who replaced the god, as being an atonement for his death,
instead of regarding it as a deliberate release of his divine spirit.
I have dwelt here mainly on that particular form of artificial
{263}god-making which is concerned with the foundation of houses,
villages, cities, walls, and fortresses, because this is the commonest
and most striking case, outside agriculture, and because it is specially
connected with the world-wide institution of the village or city god.
But other types occur in abundance; and to them a few lines must now be
devoted.
When a ship was launched, it was a common practice to provide her with
a guardian spirit or god by making her roll over the body of a human
victim. The Norwegian vikings used to “redden their rollers” with
human blood. That is to say, when a warship was launched, human victims
were lashed to the round logs over which the galley was run down to the
sea, so that the stem was sprinkled with their spurting blood. Thus the
victim was incorporated, as it were, in the very planks of the vessel.
Captain Cook found the South Sea Islanders similarly christening
their war-canoes with blood. In 1784, says Mr. William Simpson, at the
launching of one of the Bey of Tripoli’s cruisers, “a black slave
was led forward and fastened at the prow of the vessel to influence
a happy reception in the ocean.” And Mr. Speth quotes a newspaper
account of the sacrifice of a sheep when the first caique for
“Constantinople at Olympia” was launched in the Bosphorus. In many
other cases, it is noted that a victim, human or animal, is slaughtered
at the launching of a ship. Our own ceremony of breaking a bottle of
wine over the bows is the last relic of this barbarous practice. Here
as elsewhere red wine does duty for blood, in virtue of its colour. I do
not doubt that the images of gods in the bow of a ship were originally
idols in which the spirits thus liberated might dwell, and that it was
to them the sailors prayed for assistance in storm or peril. The god was
bound up in the very fabric of the vessel. The modern figure-head still
represents these gods; figure-heads essentially similar to the domestic
idols occur on New Zealand and Polynesian war-canoes.
The {264}canoes of the Solomon Islanders, for example, “often have
as figure-head a carved representation of the upper half of a man,
who holds in his hands a human head.” This head, known as the
“canoe-god” or “charm,” “represents the life taken when the
canoe was first used.” A canoe of importance “required a life for
its inauguration,” says Dr. Codrington.
Another curious instance is to be found in the customs and beliefs
regarding river gods. Rivers, I have suggested, are often divine because
they spring near or are connected with the grave of a hero. But often
their divinity has been deliberately given them, and is annually renewed
by a god-making sacrifice: just as at the Jewish Passover an annual
animal-victim was slain, and his blood smeared on the lintels, as a
renewal of the foundation sacrifice. The best instance I have found of
this curious custom is one cited by Mr. Gomme from Major Ellis. Along
the banks of the Prah in West Africa there are many deities, all bearing
the common name of Prah, and all regarded as spirits of the river. At
each town or considerable village along the stream, a sacrifice is held
on a day about the middle of October. The usual sacrifice was two human
adults, one male and one female. The inhabitants of each village believe
in a separate spirit of the Prah, who resides in some part of the river
close to their own hamlet. Everywhere along the river the priests of
these gods officiate in groups of three, two male and one female, an
arrangement which is peculiar to the river gods. Here, unless I mistake,
we have an obvious case of deliberate god-making.
This savage instance, and others like it, which space precludes me from
detailing, suggest the conclusion that many river gods are of artificial
origin. The Wohhanda in Esthonia received offerings of little children,
whom we may fairly compare with the children immured in buildings or
offered to the Molech. Many other rivers spontaneously {265}take their
victim annually; thus the Devonshire rhyme goes,=
````River of Dart, river of Dart,
````Every year thou claimest a heart.=
The Spey also takes one life each year, and so do several British rivers
elsewhere. Originally, no doubt, the victim was deliberately chosen and
slain annually; but later on, as a mitigation of the custom, the river
itself seems to have selected its own spirit by divine chance, such as
we have already seen in action more than once in the earlier cases. In
other words, if a passer-by happened to be accidentally drowned, he was
accepted in place of a deliberate victim. * Hence the danger of rescuing
a man from drowning; you interfere with the course of divine selection,
and you will pay for it yourself by being the next victim. “When, in
the Solomon Islands, a man accidentally falls into a river, and a shark
attacks him, he is not allowed to escape. If he succeeds in eluding the
shark, his fellow-tribesmen throw him back to his doom, believing him
to be marked out for sacrifice to the god of the river.” Similarly, in
Britain itself, the Lancashire Ribble has a water-spirit called Peg o’
Nell, represented by a stone image, now headless, which stands at the
spring where the river rises in the grounds of Waddon. (Compare the
Adonis tomb and grove by the spring at Aphaca.) This Peg o’ Nell was
originally, according to tradition, a girl of the neighbourhood; but
she was done to death by incantations, and now demands every seven
years that a life should be quenched in the waters of the Ribble. When
“Peg’s night” came round at the close of the septennate, unless a
bird, a cat, or a dog was drowned in the river, it was sure to claim
its human victim. This name of Peg is evidently a corruption of some old
local Celtic or pre-Celtic word {266}for a nymph or water-spirit; for
there is another Peg in the Tees, known as Peg Powler; and children used
there to be warned against playing on the banks of the stream, for fear
Peg should drag them into the water. Such traces of a child-sacrifice
are extremely significant.
* Here is an analogue in foundation sacrifices. A house was
being built at Hind Head while this book was in progress. A
workman fell from a beam and was killed. The other workmen
declared this was luck for the house and would ensure its
stability.
I cannot do more than suggest here in passing that we have in these
stories and practices the most probable origin of the common myth which
accounts for the existence of river gods or river nymphs by some episode
of a youth or maiden drowned there. Arethusa is the example that occurs
to everyone. Grossly Euhemeristic as it may sound to say so, I yet
believe that such myths of metamorphosis have their origin in the
deliberate manufacture of a water-deity by immolation in the stream;
and that the annual renewal of such a sacrifice was due in part to the
desire to keep alive the memory of the gods--to be sure they were there,
to make them “fresh and fresh,” if one may venture to say so--and
in part to the analogy of those very important artificial gods of
agriculture whose origin and meaning we have still to consider. I would
add that the commonness of sea-horses and river-horses in the mythology
of the world doubtless owes its origin partly to the natural idea of
“white horses” on the waves, but partly also to the deliberate
sacrifice of horses to the sea or rivers, which this notion suggested,
and which tended to intensify it. It is as though the worshipper wished
to keep up a continuous supply of such divine and ghostly steeds. At
Rhodes, for example, four horses were annually cast into the sea; and
I need hardly refer to the conventional horses of Poseidon and Neptune.
The Ugly Burn in Ross-shire is the abode of a water-horse; in the
remains of the Roman temple at Lydney, the god Nodens, who represents
the Severn, is shown in the mosaic pavement as drawn in a chariot
by four horses; and the Yore, near Middleham, is still infested by a
water-horse who annually claims at least one human victim. Elsewhere
other animals take the place of the horse. The Ostyaks {267}sacrifice to
the river Ob by casting in a live reindeer when fish are scanty.
I do not deny that in many of these cases two distinct ideas--the
earlier idea of the victim as future god, and the later idea of the
victim as prey or sacrifice--have got inextricably mixed up; but I
do think enough’ has been said to suggest the probability that many
river-gods are artificially produced, and that this is in large part the
origin of nymphs and kelpies. Legend, indeed, almost always represents
them so; it is only our mythologists, with their blind hatred of
Euhemerism, who fail to perceive the obvious implication. And that even
the accidental victim was often envisaged as a river-god, after his
death, we see clearly from the Bohemian custom of going to pray on the
river bank where a man has been drowned, and casting into the river a
loaf of new bread and a pair of wax candles, obvious offerings to his
spirit.
Many other classes of manufactured gods seem to me to exist, whose
existence I must here pass over almost in silence. Such are the gods
produced at the beginning of a war, by human or other sacrifice; gods
intended to aid the warriors in their coming enterprise by being set
free from fleshly bonds for that very purpose. Thus, according to
Phylarchus, a human sacrifice was at one time customary in Greece at
the beginning of hostilities; and we know that as late as the age of
Themistocles three captives were thus offered up before the battle of
Salamis. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a good legendary case in point,
because it is one of a virgin, a princess, the daughter of the leader,
and therefore a typical release of a divine or royal spirit. Here,
as usual, later philosophising represents the act as an expiation for
mortal guilt; but we may be sure the original story contained no such
ethical or piacular element. Among the early Hebrews, the summons to
a war seems similarly to have been made by sending round pieces of
the human victim; in later Hebrew usage, this rite declines into the
sacrifice of a burnt {268}offering; though we get an intermediate stage
when Saul sends round portions of a slaughtered ox, as the Levite in
Judges had sent round the severed limbs of his concubine to rouse the
Israelites. In Africa, a war is still opened with a solemn sacrifice,
human or otherwise; and Mr. H. O. Forbes gives a graphic account of the
similar ceremony which precedes an expedition in the island of Timor.
In conclusion, I will only say that a great many other obscure rites or
doubtful legends seem to me explicable by similar deliberate exercises
of god-making. How common such sacrifice was in agricultural relations
we shall see in the sequel; but I believe that even in other fields
of life future research will so explain many other customs. The
self-immolation of Codrus, of Sardanapa-lus, of P. Decius Mus, as of so
many other kings or heroes or gods or goddesses; the divine beings who
fling themselves from cliffs into the sea; M. Curtius devoting himself
in the gulf in the Forum; the tombs of the lovers whom Semiramis buried
alive; all these, I take it, have more or less similar implications.
Even such tales as that of T. Manlius Torquatus and his son must be
assimilated, I think, to the story of the king of Moab killing his son
on the wall, or to that of the Carthaginians offering up their children
to the offended deity; only, in later times, the tale was misinterpreted
and used to point the supposed moral of the stern and inflexible old
Roman discipline.
Frequent reiteration of sacrifices seems necessary, also, in order to
keep up the sanctity of images and sacred rites--to put, as it were,
a new soul into them. Thus, rivers needed a fresh river-god every year;
and recently in Ashantee it was discovered that a fetish would no longer
“work” unless human victims were abundantly immolated for it.
This is also perhaps the proper place to observe that just as the great
god Baal has been resolved by modern scholarship {269}into many local
Baalim, and just as the great god Adonis has been reduced by recent
research in each case to some particular Adon or lord out of many, so
each such separate deity, artificially manufactured, though called by
the common name of the Prah or the Tiber,’ yet retains to the last some
distinct identity. In fact, the great gods appear to be rather classes
than individuals. That there were many Nymphs and many Fauni, many
Silvani and many Martes, has long been known; it is beginning to be
clear that there were also many Saturns, many Jupiters, many Junones,
many Vestæ. Even in Greece it is more than probable that the
generalised names of the great gods were given in later ages to various
old sacred stones and holy sites of diverse origin: the real object of
worship was in each case the spontaneous or artificial god; the name was
but a general title applied in common, perhaps adjectivally, to several
such separate deities. In the Roman pantheon, this principle is now,
quite well established; in the Semitic it is probable; in most others,
the progress of modern research is gradually leading up to it. Even the
elemental gods themselves do not seem in their first origin to be really
singular; they grow, apparently, from generalised phrases, like our
“Heaven” and “Providence,” applied at first to the particular
deity of whom at the moment the speaker is thinking. The Zeus or Jupiter
varies with the locality. Thus, when the Latin prætor, at the outbreak
of the Latin war, defied the Roman Jupiter, we may be sure it was the
actual god there visible before him at whom he hurled his sacrilegious
challenge, not the ideal deity in the sky above his head. Indeed, we now
know that each village and each farm had a Jovis of its own, regarded as
essentially a god of wine, and specially worshipped at the wine-feast in
April, when the first cask was broached. This individuality of the gods
is an important point to bear in mind; for the tendency of language
is always to treat many similar deities as practically identical,
especially in late {270}and etherealised forms of religion. And
mythologists have made the most of this syncretic tendency.
A single concrete instance will help to make this general principle yet
clearer. Boundaries, I believe, were originally put under the charge
of local and artificial deities, by slaughtering a human victim at each
turning-point in the limits, and erecting a sacred stone on the spot
where he died to preserve his memory. Often, too, in accordance with the
common rule, a sacred tree seems to have been planted beside the sacred
stone monument. Each such victim became forthwith a boundary god, a
protecting and watching spirit, and was known thenceforth as a Hermes or
a Terminus. But there were many Hermæ and many Termini, not in Greece
and Italy alone, but throughout the world. Only much later did a
generalised god, Hermes or Terminus, arise from the union into a single
abstract concept of all these separate and individual deities. Once
more, the boundary god was renewed each year by a fresh victim. Our own
practice of “beating the bounds” appears to be the last expiring
relic of such annual sacrifices. The bounds are beaten, apparently, in
order to expel all foreign gods or hostile spirits; the boys who play a
large part in the ceremony are the representatives of the human victims.
They are whipped at each terminus stone, partly in order to make them
shed tears as a rain-charm (after the fashion with which Mr. Frazer has
made us familiar), but partly also because all artificially-made gods
are scourged or tortured before being put to death, for some reason
which I do not think we yet fully understand. The rationalising
gloss that the boys are whipped “in order to make them remember the
boundaries” is one of the usual shallow explanations so glibly offered
by the eighteenth century. The fact that the ceremony takes place at
sacred stones or “Gospel oaks” sufficiently proclaims its original
meaning.
The idea underlying Christian martyrdom, where the martyr
{271}voluntarily devotes himself or herself to death in order to
gain the crown and palm in heaven, is essentially similar to the
self-immolation of the artificial gods, and helps to explain the
nature of such self-sacrifice. For Christianity is only nominally a
monotheistic religion, and the saints and martyrs form in it practically
a secondary or minor rank of deities.
On the other hand, the point of view of the god-slayers cannot be more
graphically put than in the story which Mr. William Simpson relates of
Sir Richard Burton. Burton, it seems, was exploring a remote Mahommedan
region on the Indian frontier, and in order to do so with greater
freedom and ease had disguised himself as a fakir of Islam. So great
was his knowledge of Muslim devotions that the people soon began
to entertain a great respect for him as a most holy person. He was
congratulating himself upon the success of his disguise, and looking
forward to a considerable stay in the valley, when one night one of
the elders of the village came to him stealthily, and begged him, if he
valued his own safety, to go away. Burton asked whether the people did
not like him. The elder answered, yes; that was the root of the trouble.
They had conceived, in fact, the highest possible opinion of his
exceptional sanctity, and they thought it would be an excellent thing
for the village to possess the tomb of so holy a man. So they were
casting about now how they could best kill him. Whether this particular
story is true or not, it at least exhibits in very vivid colours the
state of mind of the ordinary god-slayer.
Dr. Tylor, Mr. Speth, and other writers on foundation sacrifices treat
them as springing from primitive animism. To me, they seem rather
to imply the exact opposite. For if everything has already a soul by
nature, why kill a man or criminal to supply it with one?