[139] Erskine, Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific, p. 249.
[140] Wilkes, U.S. Exploring Expedition, iii. 97. Cf. Williams and Calvert, op. cit. p. 175.
[141] Wilkes, op. cit. iii. 97.
The Zuñi Indians have a tradition that the waters of their valley once rose in a flood and compelled the inhabitants to flee to a table-land several hundred feet high for safety; and when the waters still rose, threatening to submerge the table-land itself, the priest determined to sacrifice a youth and a maiden to propitiate them.[142] When Seleucus Nicator founded Antioch on the Orontes, the high priest sacrificed a virgin at a place between the town and the river,[143] presumably in order to prevent the town from being flooded by the river. When the converted Franks marched to Italy under their king, Theodebert, to fight against the Goths under Vitigis, and were on the point of crossing the Po, they sacrificed what children and wives of Goths they found, and threw their corpses into the river, according to Procopius, “as the first fruits of the war.”[144] At Rome, every year on the Ides of May, the Vestal Virgins threw from the Sublician bridge into the Tiber thirty human effigies formed of rushes; the Romans themselves were of opinion that at an earlier period living men had been hurled into the river, and that it was Hercules who first substituted images of straw.[145] In West Africa human sacrifices are often offered to rivers. Major Ellis states that at each town or considerable village upon the banks of the river Prah sacrifice is held on a day about the middle of October, to Prah. “As loss of life frequently occurs in this river, from persons attempting to cross it when flooded, from a sudden rise, or from those hundred minor accidents which must always occur in the neighbourhood of a deep and strong stream, the gods of the Prah are considered very malignant. The sacrifice is, in consequence, proportionate. The usual sacrifice in former times was two human adults, one male and one female. They … were decapitated on the bank of the river, and the stool and image of the god washed with their blood. The bodies were then cut into a number of pieces, which were distributed amongst the mangroves, or the sedge bordering the river, for the crocodiles to eat; crocodiles being sacred in Prah.”[146] According to M. le Comte de Cardi, all the river-side tribes of the Niger Delta used to propitiate the river deity by the sacrifice of a copper-coloured girl, procured from a tribe of Ibos inhabiting a country away in the hinterland of New Calabar, or in some places an Albino; and it seems that this custom is still practised in the British Protectorate.[147] The Ibos themselves were in the habit of throwing human beings into the river to be eaten by alligators or fishes, or to fasten them to trees or branches, close to the river, where they were left to perish by hunger.[148] In Eastern Central Africa, also, human sacrifices are offered to rivers.[149] And in the East Indies there are various traditions of such sacrifices being made to the divine crocodiles of the sea.[150]
[142] Stevenson, ‘A Chapter of Zuñi Mythology,’ in Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology, Chicago, p. 316.
[143] Malala, Chronographia, viii. 255 (200).
[144] Procopius, Bellum Gothicum, ii. 25.
[145] Ovid, Fasti, 621 sq. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanæ, i. 38. Hartland, Legend of Perseus, iii. 78.
[146] Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, p. 64 sq. Cf. Idem, Land of Fetish, p. 122.
[147] Comte de Cardi, ‘Ju-ju Laws and Customs in the Niger Delta,’ in Jour. Anthr. Inst. xxix. 54. Cf. Mockler-Ferryman, British Nigeria, p. 235.