normally 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 248at 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, 249and 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 m忙va 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, 250a 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, 251the 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, 252the 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 253at 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. 254if 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 255echo 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 256the 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 257his 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 258triple 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. 259i 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 260here 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 261in 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 262seems 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 potni忙 and patr忙,—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 263god-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 264canoes 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 265take 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 266for 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 267sacrifice 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 268offering; 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 269into 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 vest忙. 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 pr忙tor, 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 270and 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 herm忙 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 271voluntarily 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?