[166] Moor and Roupell, quoted by Read and Dalton, op. cit. p. 7; also by Ling Roth, Great Benin, p. 71.
[167] Cæsar, De bello gallico, vi. 16.
[168] Snorri Sturluson, ‘Ynglingasaga,’ 25, in Heimskringla, i. 45 sqq.
[169] Macrobius, Saturnalia, i. 7.
[170] Suetonius, Nero, 36.
[171] Spartian, Vita Hadriani, 14. Aurelius Victor, De Cæsaribus, 14. Dio Cassius, Historia Romana, lxix. 11.
[172] Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Religion To-day, p. 208.
Men are sacrificed not only to preserve the lives of other men, but to help other men into existence. Barrenness is attributed to some god keeping back the children which would otherwise be born in the due course of nature. And in order to remove this obstacle a human being, generally a child, is sacrificed to serve, as it were, as a substitute. This I take to be the explanation of the practice of offering a human sacrifice with a view to promoting fecundity, a practice which has been particularly common in India.
In the history of ancient Mexico we read of Nezahualcoyotl, prince of the Tezcucans, who had been married some years without being blest with issue. “The priests represented that it was owing to his neglect of the gods of his country, and that his only remedy was to propitiate them by human sacrifice.”[173] In Hindu traditions and books a numerous offspring is promised to him who offers a man in sacrifice.[174] In Jainteapore, east of Sylhet, human sacrifices were made to the goddess Kali, in hopes of procuring progeny.[175] Speaking of the Mahadeo sandstone hills which, in the Sathpore range, overlook the Nerbudda to the south, Sir W. H. Sleeman states:—“When a woman is without children she makes votive offerings to all the gods who can, she thinks, assist her; and promises of still greater in case they should grant what she wants. Smaller promises being found of no avail, she at last promises her first-born, if a male, to the god of destruction, Mahadeo. If she gets a son she conceals from him her vows till he has attained the age of puberty; she then communicates it to him, and enjoins him to fulfil it.” From that moment he regards himself as devoted to the god, and, at the annual fair on the Mahadeo hills, throws himself from a perpendicular height of four or five hundred feet, and is dashed to pieces upon the rocks below.[176] In one of the tales of Somadeva an ascetic tells a woman that, if she killed her young son and offered him to the divinity, another son would certainly be born to her.[177] We meet with a similar idea in the story of king Somaka. For some time he did not succeed in getting a single son from any of his one hundred wives. Finally he got a single son; but he wanted more, and asked the family priest whether there was not a ceremony which could help him to a hundred sons. The family priest answered:—“O king! let me set on foot a sacrifice, and thou must sacrifice thy son, Jantu, in it. Then on no distant date, a century of handsome sons will be born to thee. When Jantu’s fat will be put into the fire as an offering to the gods, the mothers will take a smell of that smoke, and bring forth a number of sons, valorous and strong. And Jantu also will once more be born as a self-begotten son of thine, in that very mother; and on his back there will appear a mark of gold.” The son was sacrificed; the wives smelt the smell of the burnt-offering; all of them became with child; and when ten months had passed one hundred sons were born to Somaka, of whom Jantu was the eldest, being born of his former mother. But the family priest departed this life, and was grilled for a certain period in a terrible hell as a punishment for what he had done.[178]
[173] Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, p. 91.