[263] Festus, op. cit. ‘Ver sacrum,’ p. 379.
Among the Malays of the Malay Peninsula dough models of human beings, actually called “the substitutes,” are offered up to the spirits on the sacrificial trays; and in the same sense are the directions of magicians, that “if the spirit craves a human victim a cock may be substituted.”[264] We are told that, in Egypt, King Amosis ordered three waxen images to be burned in the temple of Heliopolis in lieu of the three men who in earlier times used to be sacrificed there.[265] The Romans offered dolls;[266] and in old Hindu families belonging to the sect of the Vámácháris a practice still obtains of sacrificing an effigy instead of a living man.[267] In India, Greece, and Rome, animals, also, were substituted for human victims.[268] Of a similar substitution there is probably a trace in the Biblical story of Isaac being exchanged for a ram, and in the paschal sacrifice.[269] On the Gold Coast the human victim who was formerly sacrificed to the god of the Prah is nowadays replaced by a bullock which is specially reserved and fattened for the purpose.[270]
[264] Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 72.
[265] Porphyry, op. cit. ii. 55.
[266] Leist, Græco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 272 sqq.
[267] Rájendralála Mitra, op. cit. ii. 109 sq.
[268] Leist, Græco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, p. 267 sqq. Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 38, n. 2. Pausanias, ix. 8. 2. For various modifications of human sacrifice in India, see Wilson, Works, ii. 267 sq.; Crooke, Popular Religion of Northern India, ii. 175 sq.
[270] Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, p. 66.
In other cases human sacrifices have been succeeded by practices involving the effusion of human blood without loss of life. We are told that, in Laconia, Lycurgus established the scourging of lads at the altar of Artemis Orthia, in place of the sacrifice of men, which had previously been offered to her;[271] and Euripides represents Athena as ordaining that, when the people celebrate the festival of Artemis the Taurian goddess, the priest, to compensate her for the sacrifice of Orestes, “must hold his knife to a human throat, and blood must flow to satisfy the sacred claims of the goddess, that she may have her honours.”[272] There are also many instances of bleeding or mutilation practised for the same purpose as human sacrifice, probably according to the principle of pars pro toto, though it is impossible to decide whether they really are survivals of an earlier sacrifice.